Maybe related to massive mail voting - just speculation haven’t seen breakdowns.

Forget about the nominally right wing media, look at how the NY Times have covered every threat to democracy, ever. From Hitler to the business plot to Trump.

You cannot arrive at a true communist state through violent revolution.

It’s possible that what you say is true but Marx himself in poverty of philosophy thought you couldn’t arrive without it.

I guess my overall point is that Marx was a man of his time with similar failings and sensibilities of men of his time - amongst other things he was homophobic, he was considering people in groups wholesale in a way that’s rather distasteful, and in a way that allowed later supposed followers to use these writings to fuck over whole populations.

I’m not sure why people are rising up to whitewash these things - they don’t negate the other insights anymore than Newton’s insane occult obsession negates calculus or the theory of gravity.

I mean while i agree with the premise of that argument this sounds a lot like ‘no true Scotsman’… which instances do you see as being in the true spirit then?

what

I’m not sure what you had trouble grasping - I explained the thought in detail in the paragraph following.

And if I quote him saying the same things about the peasant class

I don’t see how making the same horrible comments about another whole class of people counteracts the horrible comment about others.

“Your honour, and if I show that my client stole from other shops, not just the one he is being prosecuted for, wouldn’t you concede that that negates the theft from this shop?”

First I think what he wrote goes beyond them lacking the revolutionary potential and specifically being an active obstacle - I think the words were “significant counterrevolutionary force” and “more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues”.

But either way, to be honest I don’t see a functional difference between Marx’s beliefs and every implementation of the communist manifesto known to date.

That is, it doesn’t matter what he wrote or believed in his heart of hearts if it can be interpreted in such broad strokes as to allow the implementation of the dear leader mindset with his writings as a touchstone without fail.

And it doesn’t matter what he thought should be done with the lumpen elements if he thought of them as less than, disgusting, parasitical, and even objecting to the cause, (his writings certainly show disgust in my opinion) - true believers to the cause will see them (as they have) as obstacles and will do whatever needs to be done to remove them - as they have.

Well - here’s the thing with “lacking revolutionary potential” and a dear-leader mindset… anyone dear leader deems lacking is labeled lumpen and thrown to the furthest gulag or has their rights removed and confined.

Eg in Stalinist Russia certain groups like the Roma, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Koreans or homosexuals were labeled as such wholesale.

In modern times the Uighurs need reeducation etc.

But he did write quite extensively on Lumpenproletariat.

vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, intellectuals, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.

That is quite a few groups he considered subhuman, where half the ‘cleansing’ operations under communism have derived their theoretical excuses from.

Seems unlikely given that ascetic hermits around the world are known for living to a ripe old age.

Impossible, they know that’s electoral suicide

Indeed. Today’s nyt poll has trump ahead in some battleground states. No time for complacency.

Straw is terrible for defence but it might do for misdirection. Not in this instance though. That was pretty bad.

CIA was formed in 1947

Stalin’s reign ended in 1953

The Soviet Union fell in 1991

Given the text has no date of reference it could be referring to any year between 47 and 91 and I’m doubtful the cia was producing caloric comparisons during the very first years of it’s inception, so I’m also doubtful it refers to the Stalin years.

Given the above I thought I’ll check the date of the source document.

What do you know? The text is from a document dated 1983.

The meme is shit.

People that want to be able to yell “fire” in packed theatres without consequences and own nuclear weapons at home are truly the most oppressed ideology.

I don’t mind Ubuntu server, though you’re right you need to clean it up a bit by uninstalling snap and killing the login ad of managed k8s, the LTS versions have been quite consistently easy to deal with and stable, but then again so has Debian.

By making him sound like an insane conspiracy theorist instead? Nah. He could have given a plausible answer like “it wasn’t going far enough” which would have been sufficient.

I’m also the signal guy amongst my friends and family. There are dozens of us!

I think a possibility is a series of open source anvil or nixos scripts that you can run on most hardware with minimal changes, in an extendable architecture of some kind to add or remove functionality and they perhaps get maintained by the community or some structure of the kind of Linux distributions.

This could enable people with minimal skills set up and maintain a reasonably useful but secure environment just by changing a few variables.

How else do you convince bureaucrats and purse string holders that you are vital and need a bigger budget for next year?

You didn’t read the link then.