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MarxMadness

@ MarxMadness @lemmygrad.ml

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3 yr. ago

  • Deleted

    "true" anon

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  • I don't view Fetterman as anywhere near that close to most folks here.

    As far as where to draw the line... a really important question I don't have a good answer to. I'm not sure anybody has a good, consistent answer. But I think implicit in the idea of building a mass movement is reaching outside of the circle of people who are basically all on the same page, because that circle is small.

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    "true" anon

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  • He's closer ideologically to your or me than probably 95% of the U.S., if not more. Criticism is fine, but when you're starting with a group that small you're not going to get anywhere if you're writing off even someone like him.

    There’s no time for people to be “new at this”

    You're not wrong -- we're really far from having an organized left capable of doing something -- but pointing this out doesn't change how people respond to new ideas.

  • Deleted

    "true" anon

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  • I think you can read it generously, as "think a little about how what you're saying and doing will be perceived by someone who may have their heart in the right place, but is pretty new to all this."

    For instance, calling someone a Nazi over something like this is not going to be received very well by most people.

  • The next time an anti-communist leftist tells you that China has billionaires, just show them this. The CPC knows what they are doing.

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  • The most succinct, easily defensible retort I have is "you can become a billionaire in China, but billionaires in China can't buy the government."

  • US Military aircraft crashes skyrocketed from 2020 to 2024, new data shows

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  • Vaxxed?

  • General Mike Flynn warns that after Venezuela: “Cuba is Next”

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  • The U.S. is currently making a show of blowing up random boats it claims are carrying drugs. I think it would blow up troop boats or shoot down troop planes.

    If it's at all feasible, I could see the U.S. attacking any boat that approaches Cuba and doesn't submit to a search.

  • General Mike Flynn warns that after Venezuela: “Cuba is Next”

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  • How would they get troops to Cuba?

  • China 2098 by Fan Wennan

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  • That print gives the founding date as 2068. Where were Russia, China, and Cuba 43 years before their revolutions?

  • Fell for it again.

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  • The 2020 primary was more complicated than that.

    Biden was dead in the water until the eve of Super Tuesday. Bernie had a strong lead coming out of the early states despite the best efforts of the media. Then you had Obama coordinate the centrist candidates to drop out and endorse Biden, and the media was happy to treat that as normal and good. And all that might not have been enough, but then Covid hit, Bernie suspended his campaign, and Biden told all his elderly supporters to go out and vote anyway.

    The media is a big factor, but it was not calling the shots in 2020. That was Obama more than any one person, and all the weirdness of the early pandemic was a huge X factor.

  • False Hope

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  • Another thing electoral movements can do is improve conditions enough to where change that previously wasn't possible becomes possible. Think of a mild reform like forcing police to use body-worn cameras. It certainly didn't solve all problems with policing in capitalist societies, but it did open up a lot of avenues for changing cop behavior and agitating for further improvements.

    More broadly, I think we have to be somewhat agnostic about what electoral movements can and cannot do. No one has ever brought socialism to a bourgeois democracy, or to an economy as developed as that of the modern imperial core. The closest examples to accomplishing that come from Latin America -- Chile under Allende, the pink tide early in the 21st century -- and were done through elections. There are no historical successes in anything close to the conditions of, say, the modern U.S. No one really knows what will or won't work.

  • The spirit of Biden lives on at the White House

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  • Democrats: Damn, someone responsible really should have put some serious measures in place to handle this situation. Why are you looking at me like that?

  • Ponder This

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  • Could have been someone else (not Trump) allowing an attempt on Trump's life, figuring:

    1. If they stop it early, they're heroes and Trump gets a boost. Could have planned to not let him get shots off and fucked up that part.
    2. If Trump actually dies, it's a tossup election at worst and Trump is more self-interested than ideologically conservative anyway.

    Possible, definitely not a sure thing.

  • Ponder This

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  • Close. The internet was never leftist -- as in opposing capitalism. It was at its best the ACLU wing of liberal, and at its worst the age of consent wing of libertarian.

    When social media exploded, the internet condensed to just a few aggregator platforms. You now had all this traffic and attention that could be more easily monetized than a million small websites and forums, and that's what happened. Your few companies that own these aggregator platforms now have an enormous financial interest in (1) keeping content palatable to advertisers and (2) keeping regulation and taxes at bay. They accomplish the second in part by cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point of becoming one of the many industries with a revolving door between their corporate governance and the parts of the actual government that deal with the industry.

    Of course any significant leftist communities on these platforms get snuffed out: big business and the American government hate the left. Your ACLU-type liberals get pushed right or out as the impetus to make money drives every decision, with their free speech language selectively co-opted to protect the right. Then your most right-wing party starts to become openly fascist around the time a fascist buys one of the major platforms and removes even the nominal guardrails against the most egregious fascists.

    Now we're here: with a few small non-fascist corners of the internet populated by a mix of leftists and liberals.

  • Does anyone have some good resources to debunk the "China is going to depopulate because of a demographic crisis" talking point?

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  • I'd ask:

    1. You really think a country of well over a billion people is going to do anything worth calling "depopulate" any time soon?
    2. Do you have any examples of this happening anywhere (especially in peacetime)?

    This has been a conversation for a few decades about Japan. They may have some issues with fewer young people having kids (and hard restrictions on immigration), but "depopulate" isn't on the table, and I'm not even sure it's at a crisis stage.

  • Not falling for anti-AES propaganda is easy. You just don't do it.

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  • *The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, but emphasis.

  • Just a reminder that a third of the 7th of October's victims were from the military. If that's the criteria, regardless of the scale of the murders, then Israel is a worse terrorist than Hamas

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  • There is nothing Hamas could have done on October 7 that would justify committing genocide against Palestine.

  • George Jackson on electoralism

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  • Every path to something better will be at least that complicated, likely more. Working around legal challenges is part of "playing the game well enough," and even a loss can radicalized people. How many people were radicalized by the coordinated dropout/endorsement to juice Biden's campaign in the 2020 primary? And that wasn't even some dubuous procedural issue, it was just libs being organized and hostile to the left.

  • George Jackson on electoralism

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  • My reading of this is that he was in favor of participating in elections, but to disrupt, not to win.

    I think this is overstated. If we participate without a credible chance to win -- just to disrupt -- we're not going to attract many people. That creates a risk of getting disconnected from the masses, as well as a risk of not adequately testing our ideas against reality. We've had plenty of miniscule, insular leftist campaigns that have achieved little -- what we need is something with at least the potential to become a mass movement.

    Leftist campaigns have to both run on platforms that would be genuinely disruptive and play the game well enough to have some real shot at winning.

  • "Impossible, the media owned by rich people told me there was no democracy in the USSR!!"

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  • Any reading you can recommend on this?