If this comment gets one upbear I will literally organize my workplace
FILIBUSTERED - DO NOT PASS GO; DO NOT SELL YOUR STOCKS IN ADVANCE OF KNOWN FUTURE MARKET EVENT
Biden tweeting out threats to Venezuela tonight, of all nights.
What a fucking ghoul.
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1308954305278468096
Liberals need foreign wars to distract from domestic issues just like conservatives.
Almost like they have no real answers to the domestic issues of the day and are either trying to keep the horrible status quo or make things even worse.
Distraction is such a minor part of the war machine, it's not even worth mentioning. The wars are the point.
I don't know where I heard this, but a Liberal Empire like America is a contradiction in terms and in order to function it needs an enemy. The USSR was perfect while it was around, and then there was some thought that the US could make global security or terrorism a couple of windmills to tilt at and to maintain the Empire - but nothing's worked. So, the hope is China or Venezuela or Iran or Russia or any nation-state can play the role and they're starting to get desperate in getting public buy-in.
The guy who wrote our draconian prison laws and was the second in command of the administration that built the concentration camps along the border is running with someone who fought against early parole so she could keep using prisoners as slave labor. They're claiming they'll champion human rights around the world. Fucking lol
It would be amazing if Biden wins the election, Trump appeals the results to the Supreme Court, to which they rule 5-4 in favor of Trump and hand him a second term. It would expose just how much of a sham American democracy really is.
Seeing people supporting the riots on social media is doing wonders for my dopamine levels
Someone's streaming from jail in Louisville, lol. Just streaming dudes in processing hanging out and shooting the shit.
JAIL IS NOT REAL
THE JAILS ARE FULL OF CRYPTO-MAOIST COMRADES WHO HATE COPS
true story
many modern psychiatric institutions are exactly this (in more liberal states)
schizophrenics, autistics, failed suicides, bipolars, etc. that are institutionalized are almost all leftists. I did not meet one chud. You get free food for life and don’t have to work. You’re surrounded by comrades.
Often I preferred my institutionalization to being on the outside. The nurses and patients really cared about me and liked me and I got to read books and be in the garden all day. I could also just do crazy things like scream LIBERATION and nobody would bat an eye and that’s a very cool feeling
jails are similar, but obviously more violent and dangerous. this is how the Maoist prison ministry thing works, multiple Maoist parties actually germinated in a cell - like CPI (Maoist)
(personal experience, outside of the US)
spoiler
neurodivergent people rock, yes of course the institutions are fundamentally oppressive but the people inside them are wonderful. The food sucks though
thanks, now i yearn to be dumped in a psychiatric ward for the rest of my life :comfy:
it’s like a negation of life in the imperial core and it was actually quite pleasant
again, everything in capitalism is a lie
shame im in the u.s
pretty sure any attempt to get into this mecca of leftist community living would just result in cops shooting me for posing a threat.
assuming the idea even held water in the u.s in the first place. i know basically nothing about u.s institutionalization
yup
mental health, rehabilitation, prison abolition are all extremely important superstructural contradictions to resolve in the broader liberatory struggle
people don’t magically become empathetic, it’s not just a matter of shallow economism as introductory Marxism pretends - it requires active cultural and interpersonal struggle
fight for it and never give up comrade :hammerandsickle:
Do you know if there's anything written about this phenomenon? This makes a ton of sense to me and I'd love to learn more if there's more to learn.
Personal experience and reading a bunch of left books - nothing specific comes to mind
oppressed people turn out to be very nice
Word, yeah, figured that was a long shot. Would make for some great reporting or research though.
Law is fake but jail is real.
Definitely full of potential comrades though.
The Whiskey Rebellion started off peaceful, no violence, just petitions and protests. And in an action that would echo across a couple centuries the protestors were completely ignored until they started tarring and feathering tax collectors and uprising and then the state massively crushed them. The founders hated the people, they thought the people were "a great beast." The founding fathers would give the current state a great big thumbs up on how it handles protests and a giant thumb down on tolerating freed black people.
Spirits were one of the few ways yeoman farmers were able to turn their grain into a store of value, and the state was insistent on getting their cut.
When you're a racist slave-owning rapist shit and you still make the top 3 presidents even from a left perspective.
Basically the first thing the "Founding Fathers" did was raise an army and march in to Pennsylvania to terrorize all the farmers in to paying whisky taxes so the "Founding Fathers" could pay off the war debt. It was bullshit from the word Go.
ah but you see, those farmers explicitly agreed to pay taxes to whomever told them they had to while pointing a gun at them when they all set about to farming on stolen land, so really its their own fault for drawing up the contract that way
I've heard in some instances they'll try and declare it a crime scene so they can exclude the press.
Which reminds me of the classic chud "stand in front of the camera" move when an arrest goes down. I thought these assholes were supposed to be proud of them "cleaning up the streets"? Something to hide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays'_Rebellion
This is a good Radio War Nerd interview on The Whiskey Rebellion if you want to know more.
I only have a cursory understanding of both but there is definitive overlap in terms the federal government trying to assert itself after the war, especially economically, and fucking over rural economies. Shay's came earlier before the constitution and the Whiskey rebellion came soon after its ratification so both were pretty formative for a federal government establishing itself.
There are some other good War Nerd episodes on early US financial history if you want more context.
The shape of our burning wreckage is the issue that affects every other issue.
It's not ready yet but I wanted to show off the graphic design for my attempt at a political compass alternative that understands the differences between socdems and actual left ideas.
I like your thinking, that makes a much better compass, but it doesn’t really account for who controls the government, or wether the control is direct. Where would you put Marxism-Leninism in compassion to say Anarcho-syndiclism. Also what about Feudalism with its hierarchical land ownership and taxation?
The way the test is set up, MLs will get the top left of the triangle and Syndies will get the bottom left. I have no idea where a neofeudalist would land, probably the right half of everything.
I'm not going to represent every dimension of political thought in a three-and-a-half axis system.
Actually, here's my first draft of the test's intro, talking about how tests like this are inherently reductive.
Real world policy is composed of endless independent decisions, yet political frameworks try to fit all of political thought into just a single left/right spectrum. If you're lucky you'll get a second axis, or maybe even eight of them. Doing this requires lumping some of the endless decisions together and adding them up into a single position. One person might care about black rights but not gay rights, another might care about gay rights but not black rights, and any political test (even this one) will declare those two individuals equivalent, even though the difference between those two test-takers may matter an awful lot to you if you are gay or black.
Some of this kludging together is inevitable - if we all had time to rattle off every one of our views to everyone we meet, we would not need political tests. But who decides what views get to be grouped together? Is the difference between left and right one of big versus small government? Social versus capital control of the economy? Minority rights versus nah? Inevitably, the groupings are determined by the biases of whoever wrote the test.
To attempt to address this, I have constructed this test using the three most common frameworks I've found people operating under, by actually talking to people with different political views and seeing what ideas they think are virtuous, which they think are viceful, and which they fail to understand entirely. It is, of course, still biased. But it attempts to at least show you three different biased views of the world.
But government isn’t a class in and of itself, a ML gov (in theory) controls the MOP on behalf of the worker, which is worth distinguishing from a nationalist, theocratic, monarchist etc government controlling the MOP.
The difference between ML and anarchist theories is the government controlling the MOP on behalf of the worker and the worker directly controlling the MOP.
Acknowledging different kinds of left theories lets me make the leftist framework a triangle so it's more interesting and exciting than the other two.
ya got make it even simpler. it's all got to be based around one thing. and lots of pretty colors. also, it has to apply to them as an individual, because that's all they care about.
the government mediates between the classes. it doesn't exist on a third axis independent of them.
lure political compass nerds into thinking about who owns the MOP.
make them choose whether bourgeoisie stealing land from serfs and turning them into wage slaves (primitive accumulation) is good
Having friends would be cool, except past like age 30 it's guaranteed we'll be too different to ever be, like, buds. I've got too many acquaintances and not enough bros
disappointed. anything im not, and honestly most of the things i am, feeling angry about? just an overwhelming sense of disappointment. like this should all be better than it is but never will be.
i guess thats a sad feeling, but i dont realy feel sad. its a sense of loss, but for something that never was.
Talked to my therapist abt how I feel lonely when I’m not productive and she suggested online dating. I told her I’ve tried it for years and have had very little success (and I can’t exactly meet people during covid), and she said “these things take time”. I mean yeah but I feel like shit and I can’t force anyone to be interested in me. Makes me feel unattractive and kinda useless ngl
For dudes online dating is alienating and depressing, for chicks it's an overwhelming firehose of unwanted cock pics. There's no winning, it's just terrible.
