If you agree you’d probably love the season of the podcast “Blowback” on North Korea. You are right. I am just only scratching the surface.

I can’t recommend that podcast enough. Really great historical materialism wrapped in a very well produced podcast.

North Korea is not an aggressive country invading another country like Japan did. So, I really don’t see the comparison you’re trying to make. They are a victim of Japanese Imperialism followed by that being replaced with US imperialism after WW2. Primarily used to test the USSR after WW2. Something the US attempted to portray as a threat. Even though the USSR took the vast majority of casualties to defeat the Nazis and were in a mode of recovery similar to Europe at the time.

The restrictions on trade to Korea have failed in the same way they have failed with Cuba. Cuba is a better and more successful example of resistance to US imperialism. I would not say I am a fan of what NK and it’s isolation has become over time. But I would not pretend it is a result of anything less than a genocide performed on their population by US bombing campaigns. If you want to understand why NK is the way it is you need not look further than the genocide of its people followed by decades of trade restrictions and isolationist policies enforced by the west.

To pretend that any country’s people would not benefit from being able to participate freely in global trade is just wrong. Your talk of drug trade or otherwise is literally pointing to desperation of black markets because of their lack of ability to participate in other trade with most nations. You’re pointing to the effect and pretending it’s the cause.

If anything, the trade restrictions reinforce the isolationist policies and “lack of liberal ideas of freedom” that most people criticize North Korea for are entirely caused by the reinforcement of their isolation.

I am not an appologist for the rulers of North Korea. I would love to live in a world where I could critize their leadership apart from what I have explained above. But, I cannot, in good faith, pretend that North Korea is anything but the inevitable result of a post WW2 anti USSR western policy of the west. A policy that has outlived is usefulness.

North Korea was the “boogieman” that would get nukes and destroy the world. Well, they have nukes. They are not doing that. If anything, we have learned more in the last few decades that obtaining nukes is a means to ensure the US will not attempt regime change in your nation.

North Korea can and should be given the opportunity to trade freely with other nations and not be a victim of a fear mongering from a red scare era of US imperialism.

Well now it can be a SWERF and TERF paper.

A good deescalation would be an end to the trade restrictions the west imposes on North Korea. Cuba too while we are at it.

Would actually be a nice “fuck the US” thing for the rest of the west to do. Especially with these tarrifs. Cuba especially. Since it’s basically just been the US and Israel voting against ending the illegal trade embargo on Cuba for the last 40 something years.

Edit: Vote in the UN.

You could have expanded on what you meant and gave actual historical examples. I never said I wasn’t concerned with history. I said declaring “America was always fascist” is unhelpful to combating the rise in fascist policies today. Specific historical materialist analysis of American history and it’s different forms of fascism and class struggle would be helpful. But that’s not what you’re doing. Your talking to someone that agrees with you but are specifically avoiding talking about the subject of agreement in order to end every comment with an “iamsosmart” snarky one liner at the end.

Maybe you’re just a doomer that doesn’t want to actually learn. So you just point to a problem and then frustrate anyone that looks any further. Because that’s what I’m getting from this discussion.

Thanks mate.

You didn’t say anything!

I guess you’re just purposely ignoring the agreement I made with you to avoid my point. Seems like you don’t want a conversation but just to repeat your conclusion.

Fascism has an actual meaning. I think you’re confusing a bourgeois dictatorship for Fascism. Fascism is an ideology it isn’t an economic system or system of governance.

Saying something like “oh well technically we’ve always been fascist because the US was founded on genocide, slavery, etc” is not helpful in recognizing the change in ideology and the rise in fascist policies of our lifetimes.

We probably agree on a lot. But your comment was just snarky and unhelpful. Or maybe I just interpreted it poorly.

These artist with a massive platform do everything in their power to avoid addressing class conflict and instead fill that “edge” with small penis and fart jokes. Yes. I would say that is literally the definition of “center”.

Challenging the current president instead of addressing the structures that brought about fascism in America is absolutely a failure.

You can absolutely and should challenge the current president. But doing that in a time of fascist uprising WITHOUT pointing to the historical materialism that explains what brings these fascist to power. Yeah. It’s insufficient and a failure.

It is making liberals feel as if the next election can still fix things. Keeping them complacent in the mean time. Do I think that is their intention? No. They exist with a platform like this BECAUSE they do not push past that edge. The same reason that successful talking heads are successful because they’re world views align with ruling class narratives.

They make the edge feel like it’s being pushed. While they sit in the right side of a fence that every thinks is far to the right of them.

I don’t think they are making any strong statements. I think they are making liberals feel like “we are right” and I think they are making strong conservatives think “damn, South Park went woke”. The people not with a strong opinion either way or the other will conclude “well I guess that’s a debate right now”. When this is the time we need a strong shift away from the failures of both parties that have failed the American people in order to serve the wealthy and imperial interest.

This is a time for artist to make strong statements of anti genocide, anti fascist, anti Imperialist, anti capitalist interest.

South Park makes a strong anti Trump statement in a time when the population needs to hear more than that. It is a failure of what art should push. Deciding more to fill that void with “shock” value of tired sex/Satan/small penis jokes instead.

It is an out of touch Gen X opinion that still thinks the dream of their parents wasn’t a lie.

There is nothing that challenges the the structures. Only the individuals that power those structures. Only appealing to replace them.

It is art that avoids class conflict. Which is probably the point I’ve been trying to make this whole time.

Glad you asked. I’m a dues paying member of both PSL, SDA, and started working with a “Tech for Palestine” group I just joined after being fired from my job at Microsoft for working with the activist group “No Azure for Apartheid”.

This week I have my first get together with the SRA (socialist rifle association).

Maybe I’m a loser. Maybe I’m just trying to fill a void personally. But I definitely don’t wanna just sit back and watch.

If you’re a non American I would tell you what I’ve warned my comrades in Europe, Canada or otherwise. The US empire doesn’t fall without the rest of the west. You can grab your popcorn. But the interest of American Imperialism are aligned with your capitalist as well.

The working class (you) will be paying the cost of empire as it struggles to maintain itself. You are not simply an observer. They are coming for your social programs too. And they’re already scapegoating immigrants and Muslims to prepare you for it.

I think it does significantly more for the egos of the people that enjoy “pointing at the problem” but doing nothing about it.

Yeah and all the “40 babies in ovens” articles were not opinion articles because a dumb old man with ass cancer lied about it when he was president.

I think this being “opinion” is more telling of what our media decides to label as such.

Am I the only one just tired of South Park? Cool, they shit on Trump. Like, I don’t know what having him have sex with Satan does.

The dude is funding and facilitating death camps by diverting funds from disaster relief programs.

Our country is two years into directly funding and defending a genocidal state.

I can’t bring myself to care enough to watch what fart and sex jokes the “enlightened centrist” at South Park have to make about it.

I’m just a bitter humourousless old man now I guess.

Edit: good comment in hindsight. I do like hearing the responses. If you still want to respond please understand I am a depressed far left dude that just had a family reunion of liberals talk more about South Park and zero about Palestine. Just some context to my frustration.

It’s a great tinkering language. Which is a lot of what I do for personal projects no one else will ever see. I find it’s biggest strength is also it’s biggest weakness. It’s really easy to write that you assume you don’t have to care about under the hood stuff.

But something as simple as using a list instead of a set can turn a 2 minute script into a 2 hour script pretty quickly.

I remember when I first started using it I was working with building a list and then comparing elements of another list to see if it was contained.

My list was static in the comparison so I just did a “x in Y”.

Y was massive though.

If I was using any other language I would have thought about the data type more and obviously use a set/hash for O(1) lookup. But since I was new to python I didn’t even think about it because it didn’t seem to give a fuck about data types.

A simple set_a = set(list_a) was all I needed. I think python is so easy to pick up that no one even bothers to optimize what they are writing. So you get even worse performance than it should have.

Was a personal project. But absolutely. Half my job is trying to explain why something is taking so long when in reality I actually it’s already done I just don’t want to do nothing for the next few days.

Managers never really know. And other engineers don’t care. It’s all about balancing expectations.

I know people joke around about this a lot. But I was blown away by a recent switch to I did from using cv2 with python to using cv2 with C++.

I had literally hundreds of thousands of images to analyze for a dataset. My python script would have taken 12 hours.

I ported it to C++ and it literally destroyed it in 20 minutes.

I’m sure I was doing something that really wasn’t optimized well for python. I know somewhere in the backend it probably was using a completely different library with multi thread optimization. Or maybe turbojpg is just garbage in python. I’m still not even sure what the bottleneck was. I don’t know enough to really explain why.

But holy shit. I never had that much of a performance difference in such a simple task.

Was very impressed.

Because the brown shirts that run that facility likely just killed this person. We’re still at the stage where they have to make up a story.

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