having baphomet on the patch would have gone so hard and would have been 10x cooler though

The United States has always been a dictatorship. Was chattel slavery democratic? Was legal apartheid? Does mass incarceration a.k.a. a police state (i.e. the largest prison population in the whole world, most number of people in the carceral system/under state supervision, ) a free country make?

It has always just been several banks and business cartels wearing a trench-coat. They only protect the rights of exploiters without question. You get a vote that matters next to nothing, and then the guy you vote for can do whatever they want for a few years without any consequences. They vote to destroy democracy abroad and murder as many people as possible with bombs. Then if you try to hold them accountable, someone with almost identical politics, but they say mean stuff out loud will win instead.

You are already mistaken that you have any agency in the trolly problem. You also don’t even seem to understand what the choice was.

“ding don purity tests” like… not committing genocide… got it

edit: also wanted to point out that you served up two more thought-terminating cliches in your response… the democrats aren’t good, they are actually also doing bad things. They murdered something like half a million Palestinians— we all watched it happen— and then they told us, “who are you going to believe? me or your lying eyes?” … All of this was after they dramatically and intentionally created more childhood poverty in their own country. They aren’t “good” at all, they don’t want to be good. They want to serve their own faction of billionaires donors who have a vested interest in things not changing for the better at all.

Is this a bit? Nobody here is happy with Trump winning, but you are exemplifying the very reason the Democrats lost so badly. This sort of intellectual dishonesty and over reliance on thought terminating cliches makes everyone who gives a shit about the real world annoyed and off-put. This is the sort of bullshit that makes people happy to see the Democrats lose, regardless of who wins.

The truth is that Harris didn’t give a shit about winning. They would rather lose than do the right thing. The DNC doesn’t care about you or me, they actually have a tremendous amount of contempt for their voters. They would rather “win over” Republicans than do anything remotely helpful to working class people. They don’t want to bother lying that they are for universal healthcare. They don’t want to be in a position where they might have to expand access to abortion. They want to demand your vote in exchange for nothing. They probably won’t reverse anything Trump does in the next 4 years, because we saw for ourselves that they didn’t reverse most of his policies 4 years ago. Except for maybe the child tax credit, which increased childhood poverty by like 50%. The Democrats suck just as bad as Republicans because they are just representing another clique within the same class of billionaires, any “progressive” talk from them is and has always just been performative

At almost any point in the past year, the Biden admin could have ended this conflict overnight by withholding weapons. Kamala stating outright that an arms embargo was off the table, and also saying the worst tragedy in the past year was Oct 7th among other things, those all signal very much that she may as well have invaded Gaza herself.

Good thing I allegedly could pirate everything they make

I think the a major component of the blockade is that one they begin to capture or burn ships, the insurance rate goes way up. Once the ships become even slightly more costly the margins go down. Once it is even possibly unprofitable to use the straight, they will have effectively created a blockade.

One thing that will never seem to leave my head is that I had read that the current mountain tops of the Appalachians are actually the original valleys of the mountain range. The mountains were so old and large that the valleys of todays Appalachian’s were the footprint of what was once maybe the largest mountain range earth has seen

definitely aimed at you, but also edifying for anyone who might think the USA was solidly on the side of good during the war. The US entered the war in 41, but they refused Stalin’s repeated requests to open a second front against Germany. They went to north africa first and then italy, waiting until the German eastern front had nearly collapsed before landing in Normandy. The US was essentially racing against the red army, trying to prevent the soviet union from liberating the entirety of europe under the banner of liberation for humankind. Once the US reached Germany and peace began, the US almost immediately formed NATO and appointed Nazi war criminals into its upper ranks while putting nazi war ciminals in charge of west germany. The yankee government is bad and always has been. throughout all of its history it only has made good choices when it has been dragged kicking and screaming.

There is no moral or legal justification for what Israel is doing right now. And the Palestinian people have a legal and moral right to resist their occupation by whatever means they decide, according to the UN charter and international law. Israel has turned Gaza into an open air concentration camp. It is one of the most densely populated place on earth and half of its population are children. Israel has laid a complete siege to Gaza for 17 years, sniping civilians and paramedics from towers and bombing it every few years. It forcibly relocated people there and it controls nearly everything about Gaza, its water, food and electricity. The conditions that are there are Israel’s fault, and Israel is openly committing an ethnic cleansing with US support. Israel blames Hamas, but Israel literally funded Hamas and tried its best to dismantle every other political organization in the Palestinian resistance. A leaked cabal to the US even said that they prefer Hamas win’s so that they can level collective punishment on all of Gaza by labeling it a hostile state.

I always hear people in the US musing how they couldn’t imagine sitting idly by while the Holocaust happened in WW2, but now I hear those same people doing mental gymnastics to excuse some of the most horrible atrocities live on tv.

Curtis has made some creative narratives in his documentaries that provide a sometimes useful and interesting way to present a critical perspective of history, for liberals who are becoming more radical it can be refreshing and thought-provoking. But the moment Curtis speaks about the left and historical/current examples of socialist projects, it is clear that he has anticommunist boomer baby-brainrot. His analysis of the Soviet Union, China, or even more amorphous left social movements is facile and often factually wrong.

It is clear he feels he knows all about socialism, but has never done the reading. After I became radicalized and started reading and organizing, revisiting his works is painful and irritating. Ultimately, it serves some of the very problems he poses in his critique, where he rejects an alternative to the system as it exists and forms a narrative that offers no solutions and only concludes with, “oh, dear!” He has nothing to offer the left, or working class people and the world generally, because he uses all of his creative energy to ultimately undermine the liberation of mankind.

I have been looking into cryptpad, but I don’t know if it is really secure/private, but it appears to be a privacy-oriented, self-host able google doc alternative: https://cryptpad.org

When the US was founded it excluded about 94% of the people from within its borders from participating. Slavery existed on a mass scale throughout the world’s early, liberal (so-called) democracies, or often their economy was subsidized by slave labor abroad in their colonies. So if slavery didn’t exist within their immediate borders, it existed for the people their political & economic system subjugated. The idea that industrialization or “democracy” (not even sure how you are defining it, really) came into existence suddenly isn’t accurate, although there are revolutionary periods where social change came suddenly or breakthroughs in technology that occurred that reshaped social production. Those didn’t ever occur in a vacuum, and those discoveries were only able to affect the social system in so far as the social system was developed in such a way that they could be utilized… Often those big revolutionary changes in the social system were due to contradictions (compounding antagonistic relationships) within the social system itself becoming untenable. Trying to shoe-horn a somewhat obscure military “law” isn’t really going to explain how those changes occurred in a realistic way, because human society is much more complicated than that. You seem to want to reinvent the wheel here, you should try reading Marx, you might find it quite satisfying.

On your last point, the French Revolution was crushed ultimately, although the new social order retained changes that were beneficial to its new ruling class. But weapons themselves aren’t necessarily going to singularly shape the way in which social conflict resolves. Military technology is important to these developments, but ultimately a part of the larger social system that is always changing to either maintain itself or undergoing revolutionary change.

I think Mexico is the dark horse

It is so interesting because I was engaging with you in a good faith, laying out an argument about why this might be more straightforward then you are letting on. But you called my argument imaginary and then called the instance I am a part of a garbage heap? Who is being uncivil?

I don’t understand how this was an issue of “lack of nuance” or “black and white” thinking… Either the term is racist or it is not? … Is it disparaging a group of people based on racial/cultural/ethnic stereotypes? Yeah. Is it reinforcing and normalizing those stereotypes and upholding an ideal “normal” that is associated with being part of the dominant group? Yeah. Does it seem petty and pedantic? Racism generally does take on a petty and pedantic character… When you go out of your way to deny these things, you are only doing it in service of upholding racist norms. You don’t have to continue to defend it, you can acknowledge that it could cause a community harm and move on with your life by avoiding the harmful behavior. Changing the way you speak might seem annoying or like an imposition, but if you think that racism is harmful and want to challenge it by being anti-racist, ultimately people have to change the way they think, speak, and behave… but it is a good change. Embrace it.

there is no such thing as “brigading” in federation. it is just people commenting you don’t agree with