Did you make that board? If so I like what you did with it.

it will have to be imposed on them from the outside.

I think historically this has been proven out to be the opposite after all the USSR fell.

The only real hope that this is a way is that the CCP:

1. CCP economically (and at one point militarily) is able to defend itself against global imperial capital
2. CCP brings about real communism, moving more towards MLM roots in terms of social and economic arrangements
3. CCP brings in the tanks.

I have doubts about the practicality and reality of each of these steps. Even if you believe that steps 1 and 2 are going to happen. Step 3 is the most tenuous of all. China is very much a mind your own business country. They CCP does not and will not care that the people of the imperial core are suffering. It's not their problem.

I think the real problem for Marxists is they get too stuck on the "scientific" parts, and assume that means "determinism". This leads them to advocate ripping off previous playbooks (What Is To Be Done posting) wholesale rather than understand what from each previous playbook would work for their specific situation. You cannot build even a nascent state capitalist state that is attempting to build socialism let alone communism through a set of replicable steps. When in reality Marx describes the interaction purely through base and superstructure. There is no "if this then that" of building communism, you have to move these structures into alignment and continually reinforce base and superstructure in the direction of communist development. What works in one society may not work in a different one, (See Sino Soviet Split) what works in one society in the past may never work again in the same society in the future.

It's a similar reason why typically our capitalist societies cannot make good software. Not only is there simply not a "single way", but most people have their own experiences from the negative problems they have suffered building software for previous companies. These experiences may reinforce practices that seem to be helpful, but were only helpful in the context of the previous company.

Meanwhile China has done great things for its people, but it has put itself into the same position as those in the imperial core. There are contradictions in the Chinese economy. In order for China to make good on socialism by 2050, it essentially needs to kill its guided capitalist prosperity engine. This is going to make a lot of people uneasy and upset and many of them are also people who are in the CCP. Chinese development has also made it become a treatler country in many respects, I think American Communists don't recognize that. I think in practice we're all just doing a prisoners dilemma with each other and ultimately ourselves.

A huge example of the difference between China and the USSR right now is food. The USSR had always been a seasonal agriculture country, because having Western style supermarkets that are both price stable and more-or-less unaffected by seasonal availability is based on a network of global trade that requires extraction by its very nature. If you cannot produce food half the year, and the people that can produce food the other half of the year are equals, you can maintain price stability of food through trade. But the reality is that the Global South where this stability is based in, are not equals. So the way price stability is maintained is through deprivation, extraction and manipulation of global markets. In a socialist global system we're back at third worldism, you have to convince people who have it good to sacrifice for those that don't in a place they've never been, for reasons that are extremely difficult to articulate. China is a rich country now and in this way has created this problem for itself and historically benevolent internationalism hasn't really been a cultural tendency. Culturally and politically to China trade is trade, no more no less.

They've given us all Stands, it's up to you to awaken them. I've already at 3 bowls of cereal with my brain spoon after the news dropped.

The problem is that it's not "real". Under capitalism your grief doesn't count for anything it might as well not exist, it's reasons might as well not exist. In as such a character who is experiencing grief without knowing why and only exists within the context of work is the most abstract presentation of humanistic grief under a capitalist system. Our relations are so alienated this feeling itself might as well be alien itself.

They're trying to make a point. It's a show to make the viewer feel smart for "getting it". They could have made a much better one if they took the concept seriously and weren't so small minded. Mark S is going thru it in the show. That's an obvious emotional element, but it's squandered.

Ah so Adams has Billions'd himself out of this huh.

find a way to initiate the whites-only rapture

Melanin is too heavy to be lifted by their Lord's Grace.

I spent the entire other post being triggered by the EEAO comparison and the placement of EEAO as higher than Barbie, and I need to write about Barbie specifically and why I think it's better.

So first off, I really had 0 expectations for this movie. Greta Gerwig hasn't been my favorite screenwriter/director. Beyond her rework of Little Women, I've seen Ladybird and Frances Ha. To me many Greta Gerwig movies are really about the ennui of being a "girl" from a "serious perspective". I do like the "I'm just a girl" style memes, and I can appreciate the emotional valence of the "I'm just a girl", but attempting to paint it with a "serious" brush is a bit off putting for me because ultimately it's not serious by definition because it's a gendered impulse. I had this huge problem with Ladybird because it's effectively a "my life a movie" movie for any woman whose ever been a teenager and did the incredibly lame thing of having a huge crush on a guy who thinks People's History of the US is a "deep book". In essence Greta Gerwig movies to me up until Barbie and outside of Little Women (which she was a good director for), have been about modernizing the essence of Jane Austen in a serious way but without the discernment of a Jane Austen style society. In essence the follies of Ladybird are follies but they are never actually contrasted against the "serious" portions of Ladybird. To put it more bluntly there's never a serious arc for Ladybird where someone tells her to pull up her pants and her follies are filmed from a play stupid games win stupid prizes perspective -- the writing and camera forces us to take her seriously and take her agency seriously as if she knows what she's doing even if she doesn't. Tones of this appear in Frances Ha, but Ladybird is a much better and more in your face example.

With this in mind, Barbie was a real fucking treat. Immediately I understood the setup. Barbie lives in a gendered society that's a corporate feminist matriarchy. It skewers corporate feminism essentially as a "top dog" style system where the in-gender is women instead of men. Barbies can do anything, Kens are defined through Barbies, and the tertiary characters are the LGBTQ and minority accessories that cosmopolitan women (e.g. Barbies their avatar) wear to show their virtue. I think Ken learning "patriarchy" as a turn of the century / mid century masculinity from Will Farrel as a caricature of a modern CEO was extremely well done. I think the tying of women in the real world to Kens and not Barbies was a great idea. I think reifying Barbie as a real world woman at the end where she has to contend not just with the gendered place in society as a Ken but with the specific forms of how society polices women as also really well done. Contrasting this with the political issue at Barbieland is great because Ken's aren't policed as much as women in the real world but the main point is that they are only seen as people through the dominant gender (Kens to Barbies, women to men). I think the movie could have been a little harder on Barbie in terms of the treatment of the LBGTQ and minority coded characters, but "i guess" there's limited run time. It's still disappointing that that conflict is introduced and resolved within the scope of like a 5-10 minute scene. Ultimately this has an extremely pleasant amount of depth for what should have been a "fun" and empty headed movie about a toy line.

The other thing that's extremely well done is the story structure. You can split out Barbie and Ken into their own movies and they work, but they're in the same movie! And it's possible because Barbie and Ken are both protagonists (Ken in practice is actually a deuteragonist), but the antagonists in the movie are the systems in Barbieland and the Real world. We know this because both Ken and Barbie have their own hero's (don't take hero literally I just don't wanna say monomyth for ease of understaanding) journey that intersects. The hero in the story is clearly Barbie who saves Barbieland, defeats the CEO of Matel and emanicpates the Kens. The villain is actually the CEO of Mattel, who not only attempts to capture Barbie/Ken in the real world but take over Barbieland by misleading Ken.

I really think that Greta Gerwig should stick with comedy or dramady because prior to this watching her movies was like watching Paul Giamatti in a serious role, and then he slips on a banana peel and you're not supposed to laugh at it, you're supposed to cry.

I disliked EEAO because its message is a hugbox that doesn't give realistic examples of healthy conflict resolution. The ironic dissonance between the action of the movie and the message don't mesh because the action is supposed to be showing familial/cultural strife and the message is about being kind due to unknown unknowns. However it doesn't actually resolve a significant dispute outside of a familial dynamic. As an immigrant I feel like this movie targeted me but the "lessons" I'm supposed to take home are completely trite compared to my real life interaction with cultural differences in my family. It's essentially a fantasy that pretends that your immigrant grandma will gleefully learn your American cultural boundaries after a difficult talk, something that my inter-generational immigrant family has no real experience with (and neither do many of my friends who are also immigrants and even more targeted by this movie because they're Asian).

Likewise outside a family dynamic this movie falls entirely flat, because despite all her flaws my grandmother is my family and I still have to take care of her. The American version of this is cutting your family out when they're annoying. Ironically the movie is also pick and choose about what properties of assimilation its characters take which feels very pidgeon holed in terms of its messaging. But beyond the family the movie doesn't really take a real stance on conflict resolution because of it's Looney Toons/Stephen Chow style approach. The martial arts are a metaphor for familial conflict, but by using that visual metaphor there is nowhere to escalate if the movie were to have a real villain rather than a metaphor for a teenager with a tantrum. I'm sorry in the real world you're not going to fight "hate" with "love" at the level of physical conflict.

It's really fun but I didn't like the ending, the kens should have all been put into labor camps

The whole meta-commentary is that top-dog style dominance is pointless and recreates the same disparity solely through binary means. Its literally an anti-corporate feminist message diffused through feminist humor. So much of the movie is based on this ex:

• Barbie-land is a corporate feminist gender swapped society from real life.
• The characters that are LGBTQ coded are literally sidelined the entire movie as side kicks.
• The Kens main complaint is that they are only recognized as people through Barbies.

The entire thing is based on the same axioms as "MORE WOMEN CIA TORTURERES" and "They say the next one (missile) will be sent by a woman." memes. The reason Greta Gerwig uses turn of the century mixed with mid century markers of masculinity is that so you don't get tied up in knots about Kens starting podcasts. Apparently people still get caught up on an ironic gender flip.

There's a tradition of the Soviet intelligensia being temporarily embarassed nobles, see big fans of Bulgakov.

Haha yeah. I remember the first one where it went from flat to skeuomorphic, that was OS/2 and System 6 to Windows 3 and System 7.

I just got a little fixated on the Dreamcast being representative of monoculture.

drug discovery

This is mainly hype. The process of creating AI has been useful for drug discovery, LLMs as people practically know them (e.g. ChatGBT) have not other than the same kind of sloppy labor corner cost cutting bullshit.

If you read a lot of the practical applications in the papers it's mostly publish or perish crap where they're gushing about how drug trials should be like going to cvs.com where you get a robot and you can ask it to explain something to you and it spits out the same thing reworded 4-5 times.

They're simply pushing consent protocols onto robots rather than nurses, which TBH should be an ethical violation.