I’ve not seen @[email protected] for a while. Hope everything’s okay.

Some great answers so far. Just wanted to add a response that attends to something you might hear from liberals.

Liberals often, idealistically, have a rosy picture of capitalism and a somewhat quaint and dreamy view of feudalism and whatever Rome and Greece were. When you point out a problem like slavery, which existed in all those periods, they say something like, ‘well that was unfortunate, yes, but it didn’t need to happen; capitalism can exist without it.’ This can be summarised as a claim that slavery wasn’t or isn’t historically necessary.

If that’s where your question is coming from (you might have heard something like that argument), the answer is that slavery was essential. It can’t just be deleted from the historical records. We know that it happened, that it was one part of the development of Rome, feudalism, and capitalism. Maybe in an alternative universe there was a path towards the conditions of today absent all the slavery. But that’s not the history we’re dealing with.

In this way, we can reject the liberal conception of a sanitary capitalism that is not stained by a history of slavery.

European power and wealth is built on racism. It can’t unhook from that without abandoning capitalism. God knows how bad things have to get before Europeans do something about that.

There must be a cartoon chimera that’s half donkey half elephant. That could work, too.

Is this something that people should disbelieve?

It’s a strange one, isn’t it. Lots of useful info on local governance in China but you really have to work to extract that from the narrative. The stuff on the 12345 system is interesting but you’re telling me that out of nearly 11 million messages, there was not enough evidence of positive stories to talk about and balance out the use of 12345 as a complaints line? Come off it. Maybe it was in there and I missed it as I skimmed much of it and tried only to read the factual parts as opposed to the evaluative parts. Still useful to read.

That’ll pave the way for selling to vultures who will then use the rating to gut the staff.

Historical Capitalism by Wallerstein is good and it’s short. Can’t really speak to Emmanuel but I believe the main work is the one on unequal exchange.

lean back and let communism fail on its own terms

Meanwhile …

Good observations. I tend to agree that these devices are a problem. It’s as you say, though. It’s the closed ecosystems that deny as much user creativity as possible and funnel attention through accepted channels.

Good to hear that your prof is supportive. That’s not the case everywhere.

Depends where you do a PhD. In the US, things can be more structured with compulsory courses than elsewhere. Otherwise, you may get the opportunity to enrol on a methods-type courses, etc. It may depend on what was covered on your Masters. It may also be a funding requirement, usually as part of a 1+3 deal, where the first year is something like an MSc or MA in methods and research. Wherever you are, your school/department/faculty will likely invite you to bespoke training sessions run by the academic staff. You’ll probably have to show engagement with CPD to ‘upgrade’ and/or complete, depending on the institution, for which you can attend a mixture of the above, plus conference attendance.

You’d always have your PhD research to blog about. You’ll want to think carefully about that. Some people make a kind of research repository out of a blog. Given how much you write online, you could get some benefit from that (it can look good as a kind of publication if it’s consistent enough). That might need to be attributed to your real name (to include it on your CV/public profile), for which you may not want to associate it to Lemmygrad or your SpaceDogs account. If it’s just for you and us, you can keep doing what you’re doing, taking care not to say too much about your project – you’ll be the only one answering your question, so it would be easier to dox yourself.

I wonder if there’s a way to re-frame what feedback is and how to approach it. Would be good to start looking at it in detail. Not all feedback is good but good feedback could really help. You might be making the same mistake between papers, which could be easily addressed and lift your grade.

There’s maybe a trick in knowing that just because someone writing feedback says XYZ, doesn’t mean they’re right. It gets easier to think, ‘you’re confident in telling me why I’m wrong but luckily I disagree’. At the same time, nothing is ever finished. There will always be room to find something to improve; and every person has their own perspective, so there will always be room to say that you ‘missed’ XYZ (whatever is of interest to them). In this sense, some feedback is written just because the marker/reviewer needs to say something.

Apparently, Marx couldn’t leave something for a month without thinking on his own that the whole thing needed revising. It can sometimes help to leave that time-distance so that the text no longer feels as if it’s ‘yours’. Then the criticism doesn’t cut so sharply (and speaking from experience, the tendency to immediately (sometimes too hastily) reject the feedback fades away).

Forcing yourself to do classical liberalism to own the commies.

Not sure what to think about Benz. He seems to go against the grain but almost everything he says or writes or summaries of his arguments can be read as coded support for US imperialism. It’s unclear who his messages are for. While they might lend support to anti-imperialists, there is enough in there for just a different kind of imperialist.

The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm utilized the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable …

And:

… “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 [because] “the US State Department was …” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” …

Is this an exposé on the US/CIA? Maybe. What critic doesn’t already suspect such behaviour? The claim can be read as an attempt to persuade users and potential users that TG is so secure even the CIA uses it.

Combine this with the following:

The US has championed free speech globally for decades …. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort …

Is this a double-bluff attempt to get anti-imperialists to reject TG because it has been used to undermine their governments? The claims appear to say something but the intent is unclear.

Finally:

The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” …

Another not-so-subtle hint that TG is secure enough to use for all of your anti-imperialist organising.

The alternative is that RT is picking this story up in this way to settle US nerves. Maybe Russia already has access to encrypted TG messages/metadata and has used it to root out US spies/saboteurs.

It’s a strange one but I don’t think Benz can be read as just stating ‘facts’. The other irony is that he is a free speech activist. Does he agree with the US pushing free speech, despite the CIA angle? Or does he think speech should be censored where it is used to undermine other/any government(s)?

Thanks
Genious ^{where does it} sit next _{to other text?}

This is exactly why I stopped using YT.

Even painters were able to paint over people to make it look like they weren’t really there.

This is a testBiggie Smalls passing any test

The test worksEdit

That’s the one. And that’s a good video. Scary. I wonder if they’ve had any follow ups since.

Hope you got home okay. Public transport is so mismanaged it’s criminal.

Similar thing happened in Australia. That was a while ago. Now you know what the checks and balances of liberal constitutions really mean.