It’s not illegal to call it cheese because it has an emulsifier in it, it’s illegal to call it cheese because it’s mostly water. That’s what the emulsifier is for; it allows the cheese to mix smoothly with the water. They would rather call it “American cheese product” than “mostly water with <50% cheddar” because no one would buy that when the 100% cheddar is sitting right next to it.

It’s an emulsification of water and a mix of cheddar cheeses with preservatives, stabilizers, and an emulsifier (obviously) added. It has some culinary applications but the real reason it’s made that way is it lets them get away with selling less cheese overall for the same price as a block of 100% cheddar of the same volume by marketing it as a different type of cheese (American) rather than what it actually is (watered down cheddar).

So they’re trying to stop him from calling a vote on a bill that would create a pathway to citizenship for foreign workers. It’s xenophobes resorting to force because they’re afraid they can’t win democratically. Makes sense given how conservative Japan is and how low voter turnout is among the youth.

Moralizing to drug addicts helps no one. All it does is make you feel better about yourself for a bit and make someone else feel worse when they’re already down and using to cope. Your attitude actually contributes to a culture that promotes unhealthy relationships with substances.

I don’t think Rossman is a leftist. He’s pro-consumer and sticks up for the little guy against big corporations, but he’s not anti-capitalist.

Base 1 is a tally system. The symbol can be anything as long as it’s discrete.

*W. Sisters now.

British food isn’t real, British food can’t hurt you.

They’re talking about the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group that regularly attempts to break Israel’s blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, and is intercepted by Israel every time. Israel tortures and humiliates the activists before sending most of them back to their respective home countries. The most recent one had the sister of Ireland’s president on it and the Israeli terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir recorded the abuse of the activists and posted the video on social media celebrating it and european countries still haven’t done anything about it.

I somehow doubt the owners of Anthropic are revolutionary socialists or even just pro-union.

I’m not saying that imperialist aggression didn’t / doesn’t contribute to the collapse of socialist states - it most certainly does - I’m saying campists tend to get tunnel vision and think that it’s the only reason they fail. Cuba has actually been quite successful at enduring in spite of imperialist aggression, and I think there’s a lot of benefit in asking what it is they are doing better than past socialist states. In my opinion the answer lies in the fact that their governmental structure is far more horizontal in comparison to other attempts at socialism such as the USSR, and that has resulted in policy that is far more responsive to the specific material needs of local communities within Cuba. Contrast the USSR in which the pseudoscientific beliefs of a central authority figure turned what could have been a brief and localized food shortage into a full-blown famine spanning the entire union.

With regard to China being state capitalist, I skimmed the essay you linked well enough to see that it does not address the anarchist critique of state “socialism,” namely that state ownership does not truly constitute collective ownership because the state is a hierarchical institution that centralizes decision-making power in such a way that the will of the people affected is often ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge the undeniable successes and advantages of central planning when compared to the neoliberal method of not planning at all beyond the fiscal quarter, but those are not the only options. I believe that horizontal planning is superior to both, and is the only way for an economy to be truly socialist in character. Examples of this being done can even be found in the revolutions that created the USSR and the PRC before they seized state power. It’s also not a discrete binary; there is a spectrum between totalitarian dictatorship and full horizontalism, and the projects which are most successful tend to veer towards the latter rather than the former.

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How does this make sense in response to a meme showing that I support Palestine? I know y’all love to use rule 1 to censor people for “bigotry” but at least put some effort into making it plausible.

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I’m responding to the meme which presents learning and critique as separate and mutually exclusive. In order to learn from something you have to critique it, and if you believe that China is not perfect then you know this and should agree with me.

There’s also another thing you’re doing that I see MLs do all the time, which is posit that Chinese socialism is uniquely suited to China and that it must be implemented differently in other places. While I do agree that this is the case, I often see MLs use this argument to excuse flaws in the implementation of socialism in China as necessary alterations required due to the particular conditions and historical circumstances in which it was created.

IMO there were many wrong turns and mistakes that China made in its socialist transition that have had lasting negative consequences, and though they can often be explained by China’s particular conditions and historical circumstances, that doesn’t excuse them.

Learning and critique are the same thing. If you look at China and go “this is perfect in every way and we should copy it,” then you aren’t actually learning anything at all. In my experience MLs don’t get angry with anarchists and others critical of China because they don’t learn from Chinese socialism, but because they don’t like the conclusions they’ve made.

It’s what the kids these days are calling “friend-slop,” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that most of the value comes from creating zany situations for your coop pals to get into and let hilarity ensue. It’s a bit like a lot of card games in that way, it’s simple because it mostly just has to get out of the players’ way and allow social interaction to happen.

They’re making an effort to make them illegal too.

Nice, more instructions to send to revolutionaries in Myanmar.