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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As Kropotkin wrote to Lenin in 1920

    It would seem that the soviets should have served precisely this function of creating an organisation from below. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the ‘party’, that’s is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centres), has already destroyed the influences and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organisation.




  • I was at a student project that just transitions to a being a normal job once you get your BSc, and there was one guy on our team who nobody knows how he got there, since there were objectively better students (in terms of grades and knowledge) who got rejected. He was beyond useless and always got other people to do his work for him.

    Anyways, the company I worked at offered internships for students, and the main criteria for getting accepted was your average grade. I was present to witness that guy going on a call with someone who determines who gets the internship to vouch for his friend. His friend had an average grade far under 8 (which is honestly embarassing at our uni), but this dude said how his friend is very motivated, wants to work, the grade problem is only there because those are some subjects he doesn’t care about, and he personally stands behind him that he’ll be a grear intern.

    Well it worked, that guy got the internship and other students who actually knew something got rejected because they didn’t have connections inside the company. I imagine that’s a story that gets repeated often. Higher mamagers don’t really know who’s doing what, so people who know how to confidently bullshit can talk themselves into and out of many situations and they often form connections with similar people.





  • PPS: also, if you just study a lot of STEM in college, your views on humanities may still be atrocious, like elonstans.

    This was very depressing to learn. I know a lot of software engineers, some of them PhD students, who are really smart and clever people, able to abstract concepts, form connections in thought, recall relevant information and make intelligent conclusions every day. And then they say things like masks don’t do anything during COVID, the vaccines don’t work, Russia is defending itself, the wokes are oppressing everyone and destroying everything etc. It’s almost impressive to see someone seemingly intelligent act like the lowest Trump supporter with certain topics like someone just flipped a switch.



  • This was partly explored in Erich Fromm’s work “Escape from Freedom” and “The Anatomy of Human Destruction”, but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

    Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it’s a symptom that something’s terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don’t display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.