I think this is a neat example, as these sort of businesses never seem to be mentioned when people are discussing socialism. It seems that everyone is still in a Victorian mindset, imagining top-hatted capitalists grinding the faces of the poor in vast steel mills and coal mines. There's certainly a case for having popular control over big important industries like these, as happens in a lot of European countries.

Full central control is a different matter entirely. Say you want to put together a gypsy jazz band in your hometime. Get a few guys in on it, ring that bar you know, sort something for Friday night, five bills a head on the door and split it four ways. Done. No one has ever explained to me how the Central Bureau of Cultural Affairs is supposed to calculate the prevailing demand for experimental jam bands in North Platte, Nebraska. Price signals have their uses, let's not forget.

I was already "pretty LF" when I started posting in that forum (which I miss terribly). It was a great source of information and critique with some really funny and well read posters. It went to shit when FYAD were given carte blanche to go in a fuck things up and it never really recovered. Some argue it was dead before that, but the Aus and UK threads were always great reading for whimsy or hard-hitting critique depending on the news cycle.

A friend of mine read LF because I recommended it as being funny and he wanted some info on US prisons (that thread was so fucking depressing, but it was amazing). He liked the humour and kept reading LF for a couple of years. A lot of stuff resonated with him to the point that when he finished his medicine degree he signed up for Doctors Without Borders and has been doing that for three years now. LF directly contributed to some good decisions by people by providing the often ignored gay Muslim Maoist/third-worldist perspective that is often ignored in mainstream forums.

A friend of mine read LF because I recommended it as being funny and he wanted some info on US prisons (that thread was so fucking depressing, but it was amazing). He liked the humour and kept reading LF for a couple of years. A lot of stuff resonated with him to the point that when he finished his medicine degree he signed up for Doctors Without Borders and has been doing that for three years now. LF directly contributed to some good decisions by people by providing the often ignored gay Muslim Maoist/third-worldist perspective that is often ignored in mainstream forums.

ahahahhaha thats amazing. we did it, y'all.

I've pretty much always been left wing. My biggest ideological struggle has been deciding whether or not it's best to characterize my beliefs as anarcho-syndicalist or nonrevolutionary socialist.

Don't get me wrong -- LF was an awesome forum in the beginning and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things I would never have seen otherwise. The effort-posts were absolutely phenomenal. The day-to-day commentary sucked, though, and got way worse after half the forum TOXX'ed themselves on the 2008 election. I learned a ton about the Congo Free State and Somalia and other things that American schools never teach, but when someone tried to argue that third world justice had prevailed in early 2009 and all U.S. soldiers were kicked out of Kyrgyzstan (and meanwhile I was reading from Kyrgyzstan as a soldier deploying to Afghanistan), I started to realize that a lot of people didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. The fact that they celebrated the death of a guy who literally died trying to render aid to Afghan truck drivers after an IED blast just further proved the point.

I swung way out to the left after I went to Uni. Again, I think a lot of that was just absorbing my environment. I went to a very liberal campus and started socializing more and making more friends, I ended up becoming more centrist on economic issues, a lot more for racial equality and affirmative action, more positive towards women's experiences, and learning more about religion and socializing witha broader spectrum of people sort of ruined positive atheism and antitheism for me (I kept on being a negative/weak atheist for some time afterward; I converted to Catholicism recently). I read LF a lot, and identified as something like an anarcho-communist for a while.

As an adult I've drifted more toward the center. In some ways the 2008 election caused me to lose respect for a lot of American liberals. A lot of the leftists I knew (including LF) were very pro-Obama, while genuine liberals like Kucinich (my own vote) got completely ignored. On top of that the identical-in-policy Clinton was completely trashed for "tearing the party apart". I don't know what that meant and I'm almost afraid to analyze it too much now, but it annoyed me a lot. I still consider myself a leftist but after that whole election I am not as passionate about it. I look at the people at Occupy Wallstreet or left-leaning people online with a lot more cynicism and I wish I didn't.

I still vote for leftist candidates (particularly on economic issues), and becoming a lot more religious means there is a lot more opportunity to get involved in charity work (which in turn helps redeem some of my faith in humanity to see the broad spectrum of people who get involved in helping others--left, right, libertarian, liberal, etc.). All I want is a compassionate society with some decent safety nets in place.

LF was a great catalyst for your personal political process because:
1) your views were scrutinized ruthlessly, whether you posted them or someone/something else was being made an example of;
2) there was a huge concentration of media being posted that showed the reality of capitalism, without the message being passed through any ideological filters;
3) effort posts;
4) namedropped authors or effort-introductions to concepts (there were multiple Reading Capital threads for instance).

LF was without a doubt the best subforum on SA and it was the reason I registered. It's silly to say that a subforum shaped your views, but it's true for many in this case. I don't recognize the attacks on it in this thread. For instance, the Obama thing: there were a lot of posters who were hoping he would become president simply for the ~* mAgic *~ of having a black president. His message and record were convincing. At the same time, the LF vanguard never stopped warning the masses that it was simply a case of one imperialist being replaced by another.

noavbazzer posted:
jesus christ

I smoked the odd joint with friends. I didn't like lager, I drank mild, like my granddad. More flavour. But they didn't sell Mild at the Labour Club rock night, so I'd nurse a pitcher of strongbow. They'd mark your hand at the door in permanent marker if you had ID, but the bar staff didn't check. We started to interpret poetry in school. I liked Philip Larkin, he was ambivalent about churches and disdainful of religion and hot on sex and that. Also William Blake. Back in those days, in Liverpool, going to the rock shows meant you were a "Goth". I ran with it. I smoked cloves and read weird books. I was going to be an English Teacher.

I went to university, I dropped out. I couldn't organise. I missed an entire semester's gender and rep lectures because I fucked up my timetable on the first day and nobody set me right. The lady at the dole asked me to drop out of "college" or they wouldn't pay me. I corrected her, "University." "College." "University". I dropped out. I was unemployed for a year, with some A levels and no work experience. I couldn't go to shows anymore. I just stayed at home, tossed off in front of the computer, and read as many books as came my way. Dawkins, Camus, Blake, Crowley, Lovecraft again, Illuminatus!, Bukowski. The "university bookstore", I guess, was a privately owned cooperative. It was left wing. "News from Nowhere," so I ended up reading Bakunin, Krotopkin, Marx, Engels also.

please stop making fun of my posts

Stalin decided the Comintern should instruct the communist parties that the social democrats were a bigger threat. Boy was he wrong! Fortunately, we don't have to deal with bullshit from the USSR fucking with the radical left like they did back then.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/

After Gaddafi's fall, the same militias which took him down have been raping, looting mosques, and killing black Libyans en masse...

Was anyone really foolish enough to predict otherwise? The ousting of Gaddafi is one of the most despicable charades I have ever seen; Gaddafi's Libya was a strong, secular, safe, and wealthy country, with the highest quality of life in all of Africa, free education, and free healthcare. There is absolutely zero evidence that Gaddafi's troops fired on unarmed protestors; fights did break out between the army and armed militias, but they are a far cry from simple protestors.

And the prison that was supposed to have been the site of a mass murder committed by Gaddafi soldiers?

The bones found on the scene belonged to animals. It, too, was a complete farce...

These armed terrorist gangs do not have the support of the Libyan people, and the only way they won the "civil war" was through the support of NATO.

There are rumors of a resurgent pro-Gaddafi movement to restore the Jamahiriya. Its success is doubtful with Gaddafi dead, but any attempt to overthrow this treasonous anarchic psuedo-state is welcomed by me at least....

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Brown Moses are you a Libyan or are you just very informed? I'm genuinely curious.

noavbazzer posted:
Think about what life means for a teenage girl in a tiny village in Hebei. Wouldn't assembling iPads for 12 hours a day actually seem a lot better?