One of the good things about being an American born and raised in Norway is that growing up, one day I’d be expected to celebrate a declaration overthrowing monarchical rule, and then the next day I’d be expected to celebrate a constitution entrenching monarchical rule — hell, even for a child, the contradiction on display there was readily apparent, right? So I’m proud to say that I’ve been a republican for as long as I can remember, although not always as actively and “intelligently” for lack of a better word, as I should’ve been… But I was a child, anyways.

Republicanism isn’t necessarily that fringe in modern Norway, however. In 2019 a whole 20% of Storting representatives were in favor of abolishing the monarchy, and I hope and expect that the number will only continue to grow.

This is such a fucking scam, Jesus Christ. No wonder my immediate response to this news was “That was a lot sooner than I expected!” — no, it’s still gonna be a long time yet before the Brits and Seps will actually concede their rule of Diego Garcia in any meaningful way. This agreement is as good as toilet paper.

I wonder when Lalit is gonna make a statement about this agreement.

I’ve used it a little. It often loads slowly for me, it seems like it’s inaccurate in some places or lacks detail in some places, but as a whole I like it. I think it’s a good project with a good future.

rogue puppet shows

I can fuck with that

Streaming or torrenting? Nah, the power it takes to keep those servers running and cooled is enormous.

Buying DVDs? Nah, the manufacture and distribution of those also has an enormous carbon footprint.

Getting the plaintext script from the Internet and making a local theater production out of it? Now THAT’S peak carbon neutrality!

It seems a rare opportunity, so yes, I would like to know from the horse’s mouth as it were.

What makes Luxembourg specifically the lower limit of area for a viable country? If it is that a country smaller than Luxembourg cannot feed its current population using only the resources of its land and territorial waters, then my point is that there are also countries way bigger than Luxembourg for which this is also the case – but you could not call these countries microstates or neocolonies with a straight face.

Does this mean that Norway is by your definition a neocolony?

I didn’t make any comments guessing it was Gibraltar, but honestly I had a suspicion it was Gibraltar. I would recommend that you look into urban agriculture, generally keep reading theory and reading local history and news and interacting with your local environment, and learning about regions similar to Gibraltar. Gibraltar may have virtually no industry now, but I wouldn’t be so sure that this will always be the case. A fun game you might want to try is to take something you know to be true, imagining that it’s somehow become the opposite, setting a time frame for this change, and then trying to imagine how this change came to be.

By the way, were you worried that mentioning you were from Gibraltar would trigger a discussion about the conflict surrounding Gibraltar’s status? I definitely have semi-informed things to say about that topic, but I don’t know if now’s the right time.

I once saw a documentary about food independence in the Bahamas, but it seems like this documentary is gone from YouTube now, and I don’t know where else I can find it. It brought up all sorts of techniques that Bahamians are using to grow their own food despite the negligible amount of arable land in the country. Other countries have dealt with a lack of arable land by simply building more land, but whether land reclamation is at all feasible in your country is not for me to say.

In any case, there should be two aims for the food and goods issue:

1. To become more self-reliant — even if a country grows only 20% of its own food, that’s still more independent than a country that grows only 10%, and 10% more than 5%, 5% more than 1%, 1% more than 0%. Even if full food independence is impossible, even a small increase is better than nothing.
2. To become less reliant on any one country or bloc — importing 80% of your food from, say, the USA, gives the USA a lot more influence over the country than importing only 20% of your food from the USA. Diversifying sources of imports protects the country from shocks to supply chains.

I think we can compare a country to the case of an individual person: you sell your labor power to the capitalist class to get a wage that you largely spend paying for food, utilities, housing, other goods and services, and this ends up only giving that money back to the capitalist class. So it’s a dependent relationship, you can’t provide yourself with all of life’s necessities. However, you can still find ways to become more independent, and you can find ways to get more of your necessities from other people in a way that doesn’t feed into (or feeds less into) this dependent relationship. Doing these things, you might still need to sell your labor power to the capitalist class in order to survive, and you might still give much of your earnings back to the capitalists, but you’ll at least have something to fall back on if you try to assert yourself and things don’t quite go your way.

So I might say that a focus for the left in your country should be organization across national lines. Wins for the socialists in the countries yours imports from is a win for your own country’s independence. In other words, don’t get too distracted by lines on a map, that you don’t look at the systems of dependence themselves, because these systems also impact many regions recognized as parts of larger countries.

RESULTS FOR TODAY’S BATTLE…

BOTH SIDES LOSE DUE TO A REALLY, REALLY OBVIOUS OVERSIGHT

Tell me about it!

No, it is a result of romanization: the dots over the ё are often dropped, and so it was historically considerably more common to romanize ё identically to е, this is also why it’s “Gorbachev” and generally not “Gorbachov” or “Gorbachyov”.

I already pointed this out in the original comment.

I’ve said it before, Israel Epstein is like the other Semen Hitler, when it comes to very respectable people who happen to have somewhat unfortunate names. Semen Hitler was kinda screwed over by people’s choice of romanization, though, he could just as easily have been called Semyon Gitler.

And Israel Epstein is also kinda like, yeah there’s a strong connotation of “apartheid regime and rich nonce”, but ultimately there are a lot of people with the forename Israel and the surname Epstein — such as the famous Hawaiian musician, and the fellow who co-discovered the first known oncogenic virus in humans alongside Yvonne Barr and Bert Achong.

I’m not going anywhere, I just think it’s funny that he was banned from Hexbear

The same Infrared Haz, dipshit spokesman of the “American Communist Party”, who was banned from Hexbear way back when?

Isn’t Haz that dipshit with the “American Communist Party”?

wow_mao isn’t someone I pay much attention to, but he was on The Deprogram not too long ago because a bunch of classified Pentagon documents were leaked in his Discord server last year, and my cousin likes wow_mao and we talked about him once. My impression is that wow_mao mostly just makes shitposts.

The only other time I’ve heard that phrase was in that wow_mao video “I CAN BE WAY MORE RACIST THAN YOU”, where it was uttered by some Anglo nationalist who also kept calling the other guy that term for people with Down’s syndrome with roots in 18th century racial pseudoscience