Yeah because working outside and still doing all the domestic work is so much better than being confined to the house. Who needs feminism?

No doubt the Soviet Union was a huge step forward for women but this is just a dumb thing to say. Women doing unpaid household labour and emotional labour has always been the case.

Turns out the one I was thinking of was the critical stop sound and the error sound was less threatening. Learnt something new…

Well yeah, that’s common sense. I meant it rhetorically, guess I should have worded it better.

And here I thought the US and Europe alliance was over? Doesn’t matter when you’re bombing brown people I guess. All white countries are united with that. Like the Republicans who collaborated with the Democrats after the Civil War against the freed black people.

This is a good collection of book piracy sites and other stuff as well.

Messing around with your old WinXP/95 computer and then fixing that mess before your parents come home and scold you does wonders to one’s troubleshooting skills. People of this generation never got to hear that scary XP error sound, and it shows.

Why? It’s a terrible series, frankly.

Understandable. .world is generally Eurocentric or US-centric. I stay away from most political comms there for my own sanity.

Lucky you. I live in southern Sanghiland, Karnataka.

Dude, I know. I am an Indian too, and a socialist. Getty and Thurston definitely aren’t cold war propagandists. It was Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and more recently, Timothy Snyder who portray the famine as an intentional genocide done by evil Soviets. Getty and Thurston, especially Thurston was actually notorious for taking a more pro-Soviet stance. Wheatcroft and Davies did important work showing that the famine was caused by a combination of bad harvest and poor planning. As far as I am aware, the popular genocide/deliberate starvation line is not the historical consensus and has not been for some time after the opening of Soviet archives. Even liberal historians like Fitzpatrick and Krotkin debunk the many capitalist lies about the famine. People discussing it online generally have a very strange assortment of sources - from Snyder’s terrible book ‘Bloodlands’ to obsolete books like Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism’ which was written before the opening of Soviet archives. r/AskHistorians is a good source for finding both Marxist and liberal sources, and it generally avoids neoconservatives like Conquest.

I am from the South too but am Marathi.

Yep.

.world really isn’t very tolerant of certain views. They are very quick to dismiss people as Russian shills/bots for instance. I disagree with this instance’s views of China and the Russo-Ukraine war, and am not an ML (though I do kind of lean Leninist) and haven’t seen much bad faith name calling. It certainly is prevalent in leftist spaces (CIA bot, NAFO shill, etc) but this place is surprisingly decent.

Thurston and J Arch Getty have good books on Stalin. They’re both pretty well respected historians, so you can read stuff about the famine from their books. It’s not a pretty picture. Also, which part of India, if you don’t mind?

Grok is unexpectedly based. The Indian government has been trying to censor/ban Grok because it roasted a bunch of right wingers too, including the troll army of the ruling party, several ministers and even the Modi himself. Most people on Twitter aren’t as blunt because of the fear of doxxing, losing jobs, having your house razed, death threats, rape threats, defamation cases etc. and so self censorship prevails. But you can’t do all that to a bot. Grok even came in our news for this.

I don’t disagree lol

This is probably exploitative, considering the relaxation of labour laws in India. But only a year ago there were articles about graduates and PhDs going jobless and selling tea on the streets so maybe it’s better than that.

To be fair, a bunch of old scientific closed sourced applications run only on WinXP or 7. Maybe it’s aimed at those people. But I don’t know any that require 10 or 11 that don’t have alternatives…

I did notice the astounding lack of empathy in the original article. Not a word about the Yemen bombing! And then there’s this chat where he’s celebrating the fact the entire building collapsed to catch one guy meeting his girlfriend. Not a word of condemnation, not a hint that this is perhaps a bit inhumane, or the callous language used by these assholes, nothing! Just whining that they ‘made us look bad’ and he called the EU freeloaders. Libs look at literal dehumanisation and go ‘but he insulted the EU!’ It’s a pathological lack of empathy.

See, and when we criticise the West we’re the Russian trolls apparently…I feel sorry for American women and trans people but I really don’t give a shit if the US loses its place in the world. Good. No amount of condescending USAID ‘aid’ will atone for the deaths in Chile, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Korea, Guatemala, Angola, Vietnam, Bolivia, Laos, Libya, East Timor and god knows how many other places.

Tess of d’Urbervilles -Thomas Hardy, it’s still quite relevant in my country. Not perhaps the more extreme

(though that still happens in some places) but the overall tone the book takes with mocking religion, the double standards Tess faces, and above all, her internalised misogyny was something I really resonated with. To be fair, my parents were relatively liberal but people pick up subtle sexism in the household nevertheless. So I grew up with some internalised misogyny. I was never very religious either because sexism inherent in nearly all religions made me uncomfortable (though, of course, some people interpret their holy books differently and are welcome to do so - I am not criticising them). So I really liked the book and read it several times just before college, years ago.

Hardy is also a sensitive and deeply emotional writer. I think he really gets women because he has empathy. Most men I know who call themselves feminists take it to be a purely a matter of intellect and common sense, but they show the same curious lack of empathy men usually reserve for women. But Hardy is a feminist because he cares for women, and that makes all the difference. The only other man in literature who I can think of who actually understood women was Sahir Ludhianvi, the Urdu poet, and I like him too.

Some of Sahir Ludhianvi’s poetry too. When I was younger I didn’t have words for it but when I grew up I realised that I’ve always kind of been socialist, or at least anti-capitalist without realising it because his poetry and music were common in our house and my values were shaped by his humanism.

Jakarta Method is a good one!