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It’s a guide/advice into hosting our attending parties, here are the first three:

Rebecca Gardner event planner, interior designer
When you accept an invitation, you have an obligation to bring something. You can be the most beautiful person at the party who brings glamour. You can be the person who brings an expensive wine. Or you can bring a sprinkle — which means you sprinkle joy or wit or personality to a party. You have to bring something.

Sarah Harrelson editor in chief of Cultured magazine
If you’re going to go, go. Do not plan to leave the party early. If you have to leave early, I say do not come. And don’t ask who else is coming. That is rude.

Alex Hitz chef, author
Bring a sense of humor. Bring positive energy. That anecdote of yours? Cut it by 98 percent, practice it in front of the mirror, and in six months you can bring it to the party.

People who bring stuff because they feel obligated being cheap shit or expensive crap. Thought comes from, well, thinking. People sometimes just want to share their company even under irregular circumstances, even with time limits. Practicing adjectives to come across as funny sounds pitiful as hell. What’s with these morons?

Huh. Must be a day that ends with y.

No one can really make an argument that  the Iranians don’t know about the unit. Iran’s intelligence doesn’t need a public webpage to know about U.S. forces operating in Israel. So the only ones who are kept in the dark are  the American people, who don’t have the luxury of an intelligence service (or a functional and informative news media) to tell them what’s going on. Americans who, poll after poll demonstrates, care deeply about what’s happening in Israel and their government’s role in it.

Propaganda isn’t for the enemies, it’s domestic. You keep Rome stable so you can fight your imperialistic wars in peace. It’s hard to fill your coffers under scrutiny.

I need no evidence, I’m quite confident I’ve seen them so wacky shit before.

Substantiate my claims? No, thank you.

Also who wants to bet this arsehole needs evidence for every damn thing Usia/Israel/Ukraine do, when they’ve done it a thousand times before and it’s better-documented than the colour of the sky.

No they ain’t. R/ecs lobotomties believe the dumbest horseshit anyone saw in a fever dream of it makes the commies look bad and the sky might well be green if raising their head indicates the commies have done a single good deed ever.

I’m certain I know what all these words mean but have no idea what you meant. Could you explain?

Meanwhile european cyclists: What the fuck are these pedestrians doing on the street? Can’t they see me riding erratically all over the pavement?

Literally anything is better than usian drivers but these arseholes get on my nerves sometimes.

I don’t believe either candidate is doing a bad job gutting the US on the inside, though as an outsider my perspective is limited.

On the diplomatic front, absolutely. During Trump’s term, most usian “allies” took the dumb shit he did as the temporary acts of some man-child. The corpse of Joe Biden is disproving the myth of the adults in charge in real time. He started a losing war in the Ukraine and now he’s practically overseeing a genocide. What’s more, he could’ve let Trump have sinophobia, but he chose to reveal that democrats could be just as sabre-rattling.

At this point anyone who isn’t as dignified as Obama is fine though. It’s all a race to the bottom with the bourgeois dictatorships and only an articulate, pretty face can mask that, and even that not for long.

At great cost I presume, this sort of thing can’t be cheap

I googled but I can’t figure out the heads or tails of these results.

What does “In 1982 Reagan called Menachem Begin and ceasefire was declared 15 minutes later” mean? I think it means Biden needs to provide more bombs to be dropped on Rafah.

That’s a smaller capacity than I expected with your praise, but the lack of significant deterioration is actually amazing. Thank you very much for your answer!

The growth was solid and stocks kept hitting record heights in 2008 as well. I’ll remind you that that fiasco only blew up after the banks for a piece of the action.

The wall’s too dignified for this one, chuck him down the pit.

Maybe it’s better in spanish

Could you define “insane battery life” for me? Also after two years how good is it compared to when you first got it?

I looked at only one comment, the highest actual comment on the first link. The cited books don’t lead me to believe this guy’s well-read at all, not only because of the weird format, but also they’re not the useful kind of citation that backs up central claims.

Parenti’s work speaks vaguely about “less inequality”, “public ownership of the means of production”, and “priority placed on human services”, but these statements say nothing about the real, systemic experiences of Soviet citizens, particularly industrial workers who were explicitly supposed formed the basis of Soviet society. Saying that there was “public ownership” of industry is a truism. It tells us nothing about what state ownership and management meant for ordinary Soviet industrial laborers in terms of wages, working hours, factory management, social mobility, and more broadly their participation in Soviet society. It’s a “socialist” history of the USSR with the working class’ real, material experiences written out.

I know this feels right to people who haven’t got a grasp on the fact that they live in a capitalist society. All manner of improvements can be made to the superstructure of a capitalist society, it won’t become equal. How do I know the USSR was socialist? For most of its existence it didn’t have a class of people with an overrepresented influence over its administration or the functioning of its society. Specific statistics and policies that indicate prosperity or democracy aren’t immaterial, but they are only ancillary.

Parenti spends no time engaging with the vast academic literature on Russian and Soviet workers and labor history. Most of these works are written by socialist scholars interested in examining the role of class and labor in Soviet society.

The poster has to know this ain’t true. Western historiography on the subject of the USSR and other worker states is notoriously devoid of first-hand accounts and documents. Grover Furr calls attention to this in many of his speeches and writings: a medieval historian who doesn’t have a good grasp of multiple languages used in the region they’re studying is rightly a laughingstock, yet how many historians of the USSR speak (or just read) russian? How many historians of seeseepee know mandarin?

… In none of these works is the Soviet state itself a producer or unfiltered transmitter of worker’s “class interests”, inasmuch as scholarship nowadays accepts the idea that such a diverse group - in terms of gender, background, geography, and profession - could have a coherent set of interests.

I’m not sure I’m reading this right, but I think the dimwit is proposing the proletariat doesn’t exist because intersectionality makes class interests too complicated, which would be as correct as the dodo population is numerous. We’re who we are here, we’ve at least skimmed Capital, we’re better than to believe added factors change the core of a system.

Parenti largely avoids engaging with the question of how “socialist” the USSR was in a substantive way. He skips description of what the USSR “was” for excuses about “why”. Certainly its leaders were convinced Marxists, and this set of beliefs pervaded every aspect of the USSR’s existence. …

And so on and so on. How someone could read Blackshirts and Reds and come away with the singular question “Why didn’t the author prove to my satisfaction that the USSR was communist?” is beyond me. I might be convinced they never read a word Parenti wrote considering their entire comment, it’s filled with stuff they may have gotten from reviews.

Tbf I also wouldn’t give 0.1% of my income to save that rash.

I’m glad to see so many nice people valiantly proposing misandry exists even if not to the same degree as misogyny.

Except of course OP is right, misandry isn’t real, for the same reason anti-white racism isn’t. Social inconvenience on a personal level does not add up to be comparable to actual bigotry, therefore some analogous concept doesn’t exist.

The Alternative Polka by Weird Al Yankovic

Between the schools of thought “best lies have a hint of truth” and “the big lie” this one definitely subscribes to the latter. Literally every sentence is the opposite of reality.

It’s not, but this is

The Director Of “Squid Game” Says It’s About Capitalism, But It’s Really More Like Communism

Same date, same read time

That’s how the western left operates though. Literally everyone thinks anyone to their left is either loonies or secret rightists.