New bookshelf entry!

Good news everyone!

Some great news for the blog: I just published a new article, called "The Wages of Settlers is Srebrenica." It's linked in the sidebar, and you can read it starting here.

There is additional news! Before I go out to Nevada this spring, I'm going to be playing some music at an antiwar conference in Austin. It's being put together by the CPI, and it'll be happening March 12. I hope to see many of you there, and I hope the rest of you will eagerly check out the video that will come out of that conference. I'll be posting some of the stuff I'll be playing there in the coming days (as well as some little extras), so stay tuned!

Some news about the ads around here.

Apparently my previous ad service has been doing browser crypto mining without my knowledge. They paid next to nothing anyway, so I've fired them. For all none of you who'll miss the opportunity to get shitcoins pitched to you, I feel your pain.

I could just as easily not have ads at all; it would certainly make my life easier. But, as funny as this may sound, there's a certain legitimacy in advertising. Ads say a lot of dumb capitalist things, but they also say, in essence, that the advertiser believes in the medium it's advertising in. It's a declaration of solidarity of sorts. To a certain degree, a website that has a select few tasteful advertisements looks more established and legitimate than a website that does not.

After reviewing the advertising situation, I'm convinced that I will have no luck whatsoever selling ads through any established agency. First off, literally nobody is catering online ad sales to a communist market. That's just not a thing. If I sell ad space to any currently existing ad company, it'll be a wild mismatch of product and reader. I can't imagine any of my readership actually bought any of the shitcoins being hawked, and I certainly hope they didn't.

Notes from this wasteland

I am not actually dead, in fact.

I've been wrestling with inept financial institutions who can't figure out how to send me a replacement card. I have over $200 waiting for me from Patreon (thanks again, everyone, from the bottom of my heart), but I can't access it because whatever stupid financial organization doesn't feel like taking the five seconds to make sure they can get pennies every single time I buy something. And until they do, I have to ration the tiny amount of funds I have in cash, so I can afford the money to buy the increasingly-expensive gasoline that's critical to travelling to town.

Which means I don't travel to town. Which means I don't write updates to travelogues that I planned to write a month ago. I'm only here now to check my mail and, after failing to find a piece of financial-grade plastic inside it, castigating the company into resending one if they're interested at all in keeping my business. Having done that, it now costs nothing to hang out and post stuff.

And I've got stuff to post, boy howdy. I didn't finish the travelogue of the Denver trip, because I can't upload pics and format HTML for them offline. But I have content that will get gradually rolled out.

Announcing the creation of a new message board, Immortal Science.

Because of the recurring censorship of the Zuckerbourgeoisie, the need for message boards independent of Facebook has never been more apparent.

So I built some.

I was impressed by how easy it was. Ten years ago, setting up new message boards took me a week of custom coding, complaining from members that their favorite features weren't working as intended, cursing as new features I was trying to develop kept failing, and general soul-crushing drudgery. The stiff competition from Facebook has evidently forced message board hosts to up their game. I was able to find a good host with solid developer tools that lets me do just about anything, and get the new forums set up and looking the way I want it to look, in about a day.

So go make an account. If we all post theory there and just link it to Facebook, if we post links to the forum when we post memes on Facebook, we can protect our comrades from the whims of the zucc. Or, to quote a good band, it could be made into a monster if we all pull together as a team.

Merry Christmas! I got you some old music and a new bookshelf entry.

Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate! (And Happy Holidays to those of you who do not!) I hope it's spent in relative happiness around friends and/or family, and that it's a season of spiritual renewal for you.

I was given an idea for a new essay last weekend, and have spent all week writing and then marking it up for the internet. It's ready to go, and it's about our modern music subcultures, and I call it Millions of Red Bops.

In the course of finding relevant videos to deck the essay with, I found this little gem of footage of me covering two old Christmas songs from the Middle Ages. I didn't have anything else ready to go for a blog post, so it's there to the side. Audio quality isn't great, it was recorded in the early 2010s, but I kinda dig it. I chose to cover "The Seven Rejoices of Mary" and "Veni Veni Emmanuel" because those songs have some real meaning behind them. They aren't materialistic Christmas songs from the Boomer era, but were written and sung by people who believed and hoped earnestly in the teachings of their faith. There's a richness of spirit, an organicness to them that you just don't get from modern capitalist carols.

Announcing the Bookshelf!

If you look over on the sidebar, there's a new section called the Bookshelf. This is where all writings longer and/or more important to me than a standard blog post will go, whether essays or full-length books. I've written or partly written several of these while out in the field in Nevada, when ideas came to me in a cannabinoid haze and I had to write them down. In many cases I would drive to town with a burning question to look up that would absolutely not leave me alone until I did. This blog is here in large part because I came to the conclusion that self-publishing this work was the only way I could guarantee that it would ever see the light of day.

Those of you who know me in real life will know that the only thing of any value I own is my book collection. I couldn't have assembled it all with the meager wages I've earned, but I was lucky enough that my academic career caught the interest of the leftist professors in my undergraduate years the way it didn't catch the interest of my liberal professors in my graduate years. As they died or retired, they left me their professional history and political science collections, and on those subjects I have a tiny little library that outshines most. It is the most bourgeois thing I have owned or will ever own, but I've put it to the service of humanity. The books I didn't need or could find copies of online, I sold so that I could finance the agricultural collective in Nevada. But I couldn't part with most of it, and if I did, I know I could never replace it. This collection belongs to the working class; I am merely its custodian for now. But I consider myself lucky for all that; books have brought me delight my whole life, and continue to now.

Censorship? In MY Facebook? It's more likely than you think.

Facebook is preventing me from posting links to this blog. They are calling it spam. It's literally existed for two days, I posted it on my wall and in a total of one group, but yup. Spam.

I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone why this is happening, it should be obvious. I'm not even incredibly surprised that it's happening, just surprised that it's happening so fast. It is obviously not in the Zuckerbourgeoisie's interests to permit communists to organize online, but making the censorship too obvious would just lead to a massive exodus. Anyway, so long as we're posting our dank maymays on their site, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can still harvest data about us, still market ads to us, still have the power to censor us when we say something they just can't abide.

But if we move our posts off Facebook, as I just began to do, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can't do that anymore. If we move it to a site without Facebook logins and plugins, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can't even harvest our data about it. This makes Mark a very, very sad little creep. Which is why Facebook is deliberately confusing this site with spam, because it's a kernel of off-Facebook communist organization. Even just a kernel of that is impermissible, apparently. It's like anti-antifa, but for real. Antifa attempts to shut down any and all Nazi organizing, because it inevitably leads to genocide, which is clearly against most people's class interests. Facebook therefore attempts to shut down any and all communist organizing, because communist organizing leads to socialism, which is clearly against the Zuckerbourgeoisie's class interests.

Bloglaunch Day!

Hello all! My name, for the various and sundry purposes presented here, is Kent Chamberlain. Let me tell you about my life.

I was born into the middle class, with Republican-voting parents. My teenage rebellion made me a libertarian, until online liberals and socialists persuaded me that the unregulated market was a utopian fantasy, so I became a liberal in college. There I quickly realized that the liberals are the embodiment of every libertarian dystopia in practice, an unaccountable elite with money, and around the time Bernie launched his first campaign, I became a democrat socialist. But then after his first loss, I realized that democrat socialism can't change anything, because it's structurally wedded to the same shitlib monstrosities up top that make the world terrible to begin with. While hanging out in the Green Party for lack of a better option, I got radicalized in the "real commie hours" by some "watermelon" comrades there for just that purpose. It made sense; I was writing my history thesis, and Marxism-Leninism helped me make sense of some otherwise inexplicable historical facts.

But then as I delved further into this red new world, as I learned about the history of our heroes and the various revisionists who tried to stop them, I noticed that the revisionists all arose from the middle class, and advanced shitlib arguments in different times and places in an attempt to turn us aside from the class war. I then turned around to the modern day, and found much of my comrades doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same class reason. I confronted middle class identity politics everywhere I found it, both in the fascist chans and the bad-faith bad-haircut halls of Leftbook. I pissed off a lot of gender studies majors and a lot of "why the South should've won the Civil War" history majors.

I also came to the conclusion that the revolution in America would, by necessity, have to look a whole lot different than it looked in the Soviet Union.