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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • This is a LEGO advertisement, just so everyone is aware. I can’t find info on how the polling worked so it’s unclear how the job options were chosen. But, it doesn’t seem like the kids were allowed to input their own answers—rather there was a list of jobs and respondents were told to pick 3.

    There are plenty of reasons to object to the US/UK education systems so we dont need to rely on something intended to sell LEGO model rockets. Not to mention, being pessimistic is a choice and begets inaction. We can’t fall victim to nihilism lest we become nothing but annoying gadfly social critics, talking about how obviously right we are as the world ends to climate change and open combat between multinational corporations.

    Anyway, this advert is pretty clever. Creating a leading poll to convince parents they need to buy their kids legos to prevent the Chinese from taking over space managed to get them all sorts of free media coverage—not to mention random shares from people like us.



  • Consider if it’s worth having these conversations in the first place. Realize the best you can accomplish is to razz your conservative relatives a bit. If you think they can take it without it becoming a significant issue, the communist manifesto has brought more people around to socialism than anything else so start there. Don’t cite anything specific as that’ll just cause them to shutoff completely in most cases, play the rhetorical game foremost. If they act like they’re already super familiar with Marxism, ask them about their thoughts on historical materialism or maybe the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist economies—asking about specific core Marxist concepts is rhetorically useful since it’s impossible to learn about Marx and not have encountered these phrases, making it a good way to reveal their actual knowledge. Don’t take the debates too seriously and if people start to lose their cool consider just letting it go.