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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive
Friendly reminder that Tom Homan, a key figure within ICE, has been around since the Obama days and is only now seen as a problem by libs. He even got a medal given to him by Obama for 'his effectivness with deportations'.
Sport events really bring out something good out of people. During my 50 mile walk yesterday people on the sideline were so supportive. Complete strangers came up to me to pat me on the back, saying I can do this. People came running out of their homes to give me water or food. All because I decided to be an idiot and walk 50 miles.
The world would be such a nice place if we were like this all the time.
US soccer fans got a lesson in humility last night which is kinda funny because the entire football world was saying they only played some weaker sides until today, but a lot of them seemed confident to win. It's even funnier that it is Belgium who knocked them out as we had some issues with our local US ambassador in the past year.
As salty as I am about Iran's treatment during this world cup, watching Belgium kick Yankee ass was satisfying. If only because it proved that team Melli went down swinging and was a worthwhile opponent.
Have a great week, everyone! It's getting very hot in many parts of the world, so make sure you stay hydrated and out of the sun when you can. Make sure to apply sunscreen as well!
As always, communism will win.
Sorry for posting here a lot. But I was just thinking about it, it's so goddamn sad that Indonesia never had a revolution. I think it's even sadder that even after the new order fell thay the PKI still hasn't been unbanned and the left is still essentially prosecuted. Honestly, a communist Indonesia would've been beautiful
I've been reading The Jakarta Method. It's very sad that neither Sukarno nor the PKI could rise to meet the moment. Mao told them both explicitly to arm up and prepare for violence but they were over confident.
The lesson here is to be armed and willing to fight because the reactionaries will kill you.
I used to scoff at this idea, but I really think European liberals might be more racist than American liberals. American liberals have a special kind of ignorance simplistic world view, but my god, interacting with some European liberals and so many of them are just overtly racist
That's not a hot take at all. Europeans as a whole are lowkey probably more racist than Americans.
I don't know if the following is much of a thing in person or more an internet thing, but it reminds of some years back seeing some Europeans on reddit talking about the Romani people in a way that was extremely similar to how racist Yankees talk about black people, and upon pointing this out, I remember there being a sort of a "how dare you" reaction to the comparison being made. But that was a clue to me, I guess, of like, yeah they're not exactly squeaky clean over there. It may be the principal difference is just that US policies tend to be worse for the country's own people than (some parts of) "western" Europe are for theirs, but from things I hear, this is in decline.
and upon pointing this out, I remember there being a sort of a "how dare you" reaction to the comparison being made
You were lucky. The reaction i got upon pointing out the same thing was, and i quote:
"Well if the blacks in America are as bad as our [Roma] then it's no wonder they don't like them over there."
Except they used a slur instead.
Got rejected from a job I applied for in a field I've worked in for years, asked for feedback and was told I missed a piece of essential criteria which I had definitely covered twice in my application.
Immediately responded with the excerpts and am awaiting their excuses about why the two examples I gave were not good enough evidence.
The kicker is this is a gov adjacent role in the UK and we have the "Disability Confident" scheme that lets disabled candidates get a guaranteed interview when you hit all the essential criteria. I opted in for that as a disabled person and conveniently (and this happens a lot!! At least 3 other times to me) I apparently don't hit the essential criteria for a role I've done for like 7 years at a higher level than what I'm applying for, with examples that have gotten me jobs for roles at a higher level than the ones I'm applying for.
I love this period of economic stagnancy it's great fun 🫠
economic stagnancy
Seems more like economic free fall.
But also, my sympathies, that is rough.
I want to take this moment to explicitly thank the Jewish community for inspiring me to do the research that I do, even when it seems very tangential to the Shoah. In certain ways, it would have been easier for Jews to try to put their tragedies behind them (if such a thing be possible), but they have a long tradition of keeping memories alive through commemorations such as Tishʻa BʼAv, Pesach, Chanukkah and so on. While I have several other reasons for researching it, I truly doubt that I’d be here explaining Fascism’s history to others if no-one endeavored to keep the Shoah’s memory alive. So to the Jewish people for inspiring me through their sumud and commemorations, I just want to say ‘thanks’.
Recently, I read that the Jewish tradition of reading the Talmud and understanding the Talmud through Rabbi commentary was one of the reasons why the Jewish people had high literacy rates since the 1st century.
The Jewish community has such a commendable record of dedication to literature and preservation.
So thank you for your dedication and for continuing the tradition of your community comrade. And thank you for your research on Fascism.
I think i get so easily annoyed by people that it's physically impossible for me to doomscroll, because i hate like 90% of people making any form of short form content
It's so wierd being like "okay so I believe that all the problems are caused by capitalism but still you are horrible at managing your finances" to my family.
You shouldn't have to be "good at managing your finances" in an economically just world. You would have all your basic needs provided for at no cost. Money would only be used to buy things that you want but don't need. The worst you could do if you were "financially irresponsible" is squandering the money you get for spending on leisure and recreation, on things that don't fulfill you. No one could go broke because there would be no bills to pay. Oh, and gambling would be banned of course.
I love how the football world cup unified everybody in hating Argentina
It's also kinda sad because without Argentina it turns into a regular European Cup tournament again
We're entering the second heat wave but it won't be as bad as the previous of a week ago
If you apply for a UK visa they ask you if you ever committed a genocide like who will answer that with yes
Is it just me or is the USian solution to any sort of bodily/mental issue immediate medication? Like with pretty hard drugs. ADHD? Put 'em on adderall. Cough? Some syrup with a potent opioid in it. Either this is my straight-edgeness talking or the pharmaceutical industry trying to get the entire population hooked on the infinite number of addictive shit they make. Not that I am anti-medicine in any way, but you really should always know what you are putting in your body.
ADHD symptoms are well proven to be treatable in most cases by proper medication. They also help children with ADHD have their brain develop to be far closer to a neurotypical brain, causing a cessation in distressing ADHD symptoms in adulthood sometimes allowing them to be able to come off medication entirely.
ADHD medication, prescribed properly and titrated onto under guidance of a specialist doctor also is not addictive and easily weaned off of.
ADHD is a disability under capitalism, and even under socialism can cause massive issues and certainly can be disabling even under a fairer economic system. We will need to move to a much more accommodating system of work that might still only get an unmedicated person with ADHD up to like 80% as efficient over long stretches of time (short term analysis is pointless because most people with ADHD can completely outperform neurotypical people while a task is novel and interesting to them). It is a tiring neurotype to have as you desperately want constant stimulation and newness that is just impractical to provide in most cases. Not to mention its higher likelihood of co-occurence with Autism that also makes the person crave structure and routine as well as novelty in the right doses, which just throws a big spanner in the works for accommodating them.
Its not just usa but all the western capitalist nations. The goal is to maintain workers at the lowest cost. Drugs are cheap to produce. If they make workers slightly less effective by deadening their senses it just means they will not look in to the real causes of their suffering. There are no shortage of unmedicated workers to take up the jobs that require a clear mind. If they make people die sooner it means less old age pension payouts.
At this point I'm fairly convinced Platner was a psyop or something along those lines (not that I hold strongly to this opinion, since he isn't in my state and not worth the time to do much research and analysis).
My question is, what is an ML's place in this whole ordeal, or more generally when it comes to spectacularized electoralism? Speaking primarily of how we engage with (or sidestep) the discourse surrounding it, since obviously I don't think our finite energy should usually be spent actively participating in electoral politics.
I'm pretty unconvinced of the utility of the contrarian-leaning anti-electoralist stance in the discourse. It seems better at fostering a feeling of superiority towards libs than radicalizing them. Which is counterproductive to our usual understanding that electoralism's failures should be radicalizing events.
But a lot of people seemed to fall for the Platner thing. And I worry it risks shattering a lot of potential ideological pipelines. His problems seemed so obvious that it's hard not to outgroup anyone that defended him but at the same time I'm not sure that's productive. I dunno.
Overall I'm not satisfied with anti-electoralist discourse in general. It seems mostly reactive to and contained within manufactured discourse, unable to transcend it or really convince anyone of anything, in my experience. Personally I've moved more towards a passive optimism (in how I talk with libs, not internal beliefs), not shitting on people for feeling hopeful about Mamdani and the like, but trying to gently mention the limitations of elected individuals within capitalism. Doesn't really work for a (in my opinion) deliberate poison pill like Platner.
I think there are two essences within the pro-Platner left/libleft. One is an underlying imperial-colonial (sub)consciousness, where non-white people and people outside the imperial core are implicitly valued less. The other is an (in my opinion) unrefined and misdirected pragmatism that views him as a lesser evil and sees criticisms as attacks from the establishment. The former needs to be excised and eliminated without mercy. The latter is salvageable and needs to be engaged with, I think. Because when it comes down to it, revolutionaries very often have to utilize "evil" people, and we should be very careful giving up any advantages we can muster. There's a massive difference between tactically using them and investing time and energy into electing them into positions of power, of course.
And the two essences aren't distinct or discernible, so it's not like we can easily draw a line between people who supported a murdering rapist for "good" versus bad reasons.
To reiterate: I dunno. Every talking point pro or against gives me the feeling of getting played, getting trapped by the spectacle or manufactured discourse, rereading a scripted dialogue that's already been read a thousand times. But it's too late to just tell people to stop talking about it.
FWIW, and keeping in mind this is only my personal experience with transitioning from lib to ML, I distinctly remember someone online who helped move me further left after Bernie faceplanted and their MO went something like: Being gently understanding of why people are supporting Bernie, but also being plainly a communist and talking about communism in detail, trying to educate people further, explaining why they don't think Bernie is enough, etc.
I think there were some others I encountered who acted similarly to this too. In other words, there was no impression of condescension or superiority, but of being understanding of how someone would arrive at the position of supporting Bernie, while also being firmly not a soc dem.
The end result was that when Bernie failed, they were still there to pick up the pieces and explain what went wrong and why, with someone who was even more willing to listen to them now. In a way, I guess what I'm describing is what we talk about sometimes with regards to building relationships with people. These do not necessarily have to be close friendships. Even having a relationship of respect as acquaintances is worth something.
During an electoral campaign, true believers in the bougie electoral system can get swept up in the energy of the campaign and stave off doubt in order to push for a win. In the aftermath of a failed campaign, I think it is easier to get through to people, so long as they see you as someone who may be worth listening to.
Isn't this broadly Marx's original position on the organic spontaneous working class energy?
I.e. what you want and are fighting for is correct and just, but here are the limitations of doing it in the way you're trying to - you should do it this way instead because of x y z.
On the topic of electoralism, the ML position is simple: it is useful to engage tactically with electoralism, so long as it is done under the banner of an actual communist/socialist party. The real psyop is the DSA itself, as a pipeline into the Democratic party. The real psyop is "lesser evil-ism". As for Platner, i haven't really followed that situation because it was always deeply uninteresting and irrelevant in my opinion, but if the whole Nazi thing and having served as a murderer for hire for imperialism was not a deal breaker for the socdem/demsoc radlibs who supported him prior, why should this latest scandal be? That was far worse than him being a drunk rapist. The whole DSA project is fundamentally misconceived to begin with. The point of socialists engaging with electoralism is to build and expand the power base of their own independent party, not to attract votes to a neoliberal imperialist party. As it stands it's all just a different name for "Vote Democrat". Platner, Mamdani, all the same because the outcome is the same: leftists getting tricked into campaigning for Democrats. I thought the US left had learned their lesson after Bernie and the "Squad" betrayed them. Apparently not.
Have a good week everyone!
Remember, all work is progress, even if it doesn't accomplish much external. Failure is growth when we practice crit and self-crit. Just do your best and keep your eyes open and you will find the way for which you can contribute to the real movement in your life. Dialectical materialism shows that to understand something, we must engage with it. So to understand how to change the world, we must try to change it, together, in our place and time. Thankfully, we are not alone, and have a wealth of wisdom from past revolutionaries. Stay curious and read, and find ways to act.
I've been having a pretty good week. Not perfect, but nothing ever is. In an attempt to not go too in depth, I'll just say that I've manage to find someone I'm comfortable being vulnerable with. I didn't expect to, but I did, so I'm in quite a pleasant mood.
All I'm gonna say is that the residents of Clackton have the chance to do the funniest thing in the world and if they dont vote for supreme leader count binface I will tell Putin to nuke them
My mental health has been rebounding in general along with my physical health.
But the last two nights (last one and the night before) have netted barely any sleep in each of them.
I slept maybe 2 to 3 hours two nights ago (probably more like 2) and 1 to 2 hours last night.
It can really impact your mood when you're improving overall but then you suddenly don't sleep the full 8 hours two nights in a row.
It doesn't affect me that bad (but it's still pretty bad) during the first night of missed sleep.
But the second night of poor sleep is where it really seems to accumulate and get much worse.
My mood really does just drop like a stone when that happens, maybe even as the day continues depending on the circumstances.
I'll hang in there. I'm glad that I'm starting to trust myself more and more again. That's never happened before.
But it can really make you anxious sometimes when you hit what appears to be a roadblock on your way to recovery and a better life, you know?
Honestly there needs to be a term for "arguments abound due to poor writing."
I literally just woke up thinking about this so I'll come up with more examples soon, but the civil war questline in skyrim comes to mind first for me.
There's this opinion online that people will only argue about something if it's well written. For example, the political questions of Fallout New Vegas compared to "will you nuke this random town for 5 caps" in fallout 3 or basically the entire renegade route in the mass effect games.
But I think there's also the opposite. If something is poorly written it can also create arguments because the writers didn't both to expand anything.
So for Skyrim, I see people argue about it, and it basically revolves around the same like...3 points. Which is white-gold accord, one side is racist, and the thalmor having a file on ulfric.
All of this is basically surface level information. Playing through either questline doesn't really help either, as no new information is really given [there's also the issue of Bethesda being very purposeless game designers. So the imperials sending you to clear and entire fort full of bandits could be a sign of them not liking you, or lack of manpower, or incompetence, etc. Or it could be that the devs were lazy.] So, i think, there emerges this phantom wedge where the two factions and questlines are so similar, that any actual differences are amplified in discussion despite the fact that they don't really matter. I'll try to think of a reason why this happens, but that's the jist of what I'm thinking about since i saw another video about it pop up on my feed
World is more red than black today. Hopefully tomorrow, & the day after,
Boy do I love public transport. I spent my day riding the Brussels Subway today and it was so much fun.
So I was watching an ASMR video based on Helldivers 2 and as it goes on, I'm gradually going, "Wait a minute, this sounds like fascistic, imperialist stuff." Then it starts reminding me of Starship Troopers.
When it's done, I look up the game and sure enough, there are articles saying it's heavily influenced by Starship Troopers. I've never actually watched Starship Troopers or read the book, nor have I played Helldivers, but I guess I picked up enough in passing about it and the themes aren't exactly subtle.
The books were unironic fascist propaganda by a "libertarian" who idolized the military.
The movie was made by a guy who read the book, clocked it for what it was, and decided to make fun of its ideology instead.
Helldivers is a much less subtle mockery of the same ideas.
Oh, interesting.
I've been thinking about how did revolutionaries organize during bourgeois revolutions. Obviously they didn't adhere to any Leninist organization method, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had something similar to Democratic Centralism (democracy for the rich, of course). I might write a follow-up about this in the future.
A good place to start would probably be looking into the Guomindang and Tongmenghui under Sun Yat-Sen given the KMT adopted a leninist model and the Chinese Revival Society was a secretive organization that was constantly persecuted by the Qing
I think the major problems I am resolving (at various levels of progress or success but still very very early) are:
my anhedonia
OCD
core beliefs
C-PTSD and trauma (religious, familial, etc.)
financial independence
learning how to work well and consistently again
learning how to stim and regulate my nervous system and avoid dysregulation
getting my Master's degree
Maybe avoiding my stalker dad but I guess that isn't really the case
resolving my co-dependency issues with my siblings
learning self-trust after having been gaslit a lot
exercising and physical activity (and not getting trauma flashbacks or over-stimulation doing so)
DBT for Borderline Personality
ascertaining whether or not I do have an alter ego or persona (similar to a fursona)
resolving the spectrophobia and paranoia (so it doesn't rule my life, though I do realize that the NSA and FBI and police departments spying is a very real thing)
reversing my cyberchondria
Re-learning the Spanish language
Transitioning and starting HRT (soon!), maybe getting a uterus, idk
reducing my "screen-fatigue" so I can maybe stop getting over-stimulated
Learning to forget
And learning to resolve the tension between my justice sensitivity and when or where to forgive someone
Discovering who I am and what was fake
Realizing that every second is worth it
Thinking in the here and now
Reversing or concluding my dark anger
So, honestly I think i might have paedophobia. I don't hate children (in fact, id really like to be a mom theoretically), logically i get why they do things they do, but everytime I'm around a child or infant i get a nearly paralyzing level of fear. I dont really know why either