and as a visible minority (Asian) that adds to it.

Can def understand the risk more so in drawing attention under those circumstances.

Will take a look at it in more depth at some point, good to have on hand.

There’s essentially no reason not to in my opinion. It would obviously be much safer if everyone was still masking, but at least in my experience, diligent masking has been very effective at preventing illness in my household despite the lack of precaution from the public.

This makes sense to me and I think is generally the sort of reasoning I've gone by in the past. Like a percentages thing. Even if you're living in a household where not everybody is doing it, as I am, reducing the odds of bringing something home is still better than nothing.

Fair point on it. I don't know that I can budge the immediate people in my life on it, but I will probably continue to do it myself. I think the part that makes it difficult is the normalization of it. This thing of people viewing it like "well it's just sort of part of the makeup of infections that can happen now, like the flu and I got a vaccine, so now the pandemic is over." And I don't know how to counter that to people because what am I supposed to say, ya know, "just keep wearing a mask for the rest of your life"? People want to believe there's a cutoff point, I'm sure, myself included. But it's been handled so poorly in some places, it seems almost like the poor handling of it itself is part of what's making it difficult to have a cut off point for precaution.

It's sort of a "nobody says anything but almost nobody else is doing it" thing here. I don't seem to be in an area where people will actively pushback about it, but there's few still doing it. If you're actually getting tirades about it, I can understand not wanting to risk drawing the attention.

I understand and empathize with this for sure. I'm one of the few who I still see wearing one in my area, so it can def feel like "what's the point" and "I'm just calling attention to myself." Luckily, I don't get anything more than the occasional odd look for it, which could just be odd looks for other reasons, or I'm reading into them too much. So I can keep doing it without concern for people giving me trouble about it, but it does feel weird being so alone in it.

Bookmarking that to read more on later, thanks. And yeah, I've wondered about the difference there - like would people in those places in Asia where it's normal even face any reaction at all for wearing a mask long past public mandates or would they just be viewed as socially responsible people. Part of why I'm curious about that, is because if I only go by what the US is doing as a general thing, it could lead to some very irresponsible decision-making. There's a lot of science ignorance and the like here. And of course the individualism in the US that goes something like: "if the odds are low that it will inconvenience me, then why should I care if it might kill someone else?" Not that I think people are reasoning it out that consciously, but that's sort of the implication of the lackadaisical attitude toward it.

How would the cops stop them? If everyone has class consciousness at the same time, they can just all refuse to work at the same time and overwhelm the cops. The cops may be considered a separate class, but aren't a separate entity from society and would quickly feel the effects of everyone turning against them. Even the US 2020 protests had a lot of cops quitting, in spite of it being a fraction of the populace organizing to protest police brutality, specifically, without even necessarily having class consciousness as the backbone of it.

I would venture to say one of the reasons organizing a vanguard is necessary is precisely because it's so unrealistic to have everyone class conscious at the same time as a precursor to revolution. There is also outside repression too, so if you only had one people/nation class conscious, but not the whole world, then you could still have them violently repressed by outside forces anyway if they have no vanguard. But if we're hypothesizing everyone the world over being class conscious at the same time, the only way I see repression working for long is if we're supposing that class consciousness can be undone in this scenario, with violence enough that people cave. Otherwise, I'd think we're talking about little more than a countdown until the capitalists are overwhelmed, with the worst case scenario for the working class being that the capitalists have a literal fortress to hide themselves in for a while - but even then, there wouldn't be a whole lot they can rule over from hiding if nobody believes in the system they're pedaling and understands that the liberation of the working class is more important and valuable to getting everyone's needs met than any single person being immediately comfortable in the short-term. I'd think we're talking about a level of belief and understanding that bypasses what could put many off of taking part in revolutionary struggle. Which is unrealistic in part because for many, their overriding concern is going to be when they get to eat next, and they'll have limited patience for supposed sacrifice to make that better world over existing appearance of guarantees that the current system gives them in this way. And for some them, depending on where they land in money and such, it might be closer to a guarantee while the system lasts, even if it comes from an unsustainable system. So this is where the logistics come in, of being so critical to be capable of replacing the existing system with one that can get people's immediate needs met, otherwise many will perceive it as a loss, even if it's technically more "freeing" in the long-term. Along with just the humanitarian concerns, of course, of the point being to improve conditions for people.

Ultimately, I think the hypothetical can be an interesting jumping off point for getting into what it really means for people to be class conscious or not, but in practice, it's sort of like asking, "What if a moving train suddenly became an airplane?" The consciousness for many is so tied up in their day to day capitalist living, it's never only a matter of teaching them class consciousness, but also the maintenance of it against the inertia of the existing system and its propaganda and persuasion through how the structure of daily life informs people's worldview. No one remains in a static state, in other words, and instead is always shifting in relation to internal and external forces.

This is state-conducted terrorism; and the media and the sycophants for the zionist regime are praising each other and making jokes about the 3000 civilians maimed (more than were killed in 9/11) and refusing to call this what this is: a war crime and an instance of terrorism.

The terrorism aspect of it is so very real and literal. This single act calls into question so much about supply chains and general trust in them, as well as being able to trust products as a whole, considering this was something so hidden from view until triggered. It sets off my imagination into where else stuff like this could already be in place, or have plans in progress for more like it, or be mistakenly placed somewhere it wasn't meant to go. So yeah, congrats to the empire for putting a hole in the trust of their own system of global capital and product movement, just so they can murder more civilians.

I think the best "point" to make to them here is no point at all. That is to say, you don't approach it as ignorance to answer with knowledge, you use the socratic method on them, or to put it another way: you revert to being a small child and keep asking "why?"

I'm being a bit tongue in cheek on that last bit, but I am serious about the general idea. At this level of ignorance, you can waste a lot of time trying to "teach" before even knowing what it is exactly that the person believes. So it can be much more productive to ask, i.e. stuff like, "why do you think he's a communist?" or "what does communism mean to you?"

fictional example to illustrate: "what does communism mean to you?" "it's when the deep state controls everyone" "what is the deep state?" "the deep state is those people in the shadows who control everyone" "who are the people in the shadows?" "well I don't know, they're in the shadows" "so how do you know they're connected to Trump?" "because he says communistic, deep state stuff" "like what?"

and so on. Of course, it's possible the person loses patience with you or whatnot, but I think people are usually more open to explaining themselves than being explained to, unless they're in it to learn. And someone who believes such an absurdly disjointed political thing about Trump is probably not going in headfirst with an open mind. In general, the idea is not only to better understanding what it is the person believes, it's to effectively confront the person with their own beliefs and any contradictions within them. It's something I recommend to be used sparingly cause you can definitely be a very annoying person if you use this approach as a way to avoid ever presenting and defending your own positions, but it has its uses.

I don't even know what to say. Just thinking about the amount of planning going into this terrorism.

💯 hit the nail on the head there

Isn't it interesting how even within the US politician quote part, they're contradicting themselves? It was the guns of the Secret Service / LE that brought down the would-be assassin. Not a ballot box. That's what "resolved the difference" there. So they prove Mao's point even while trying to deny its presence in their own model of power.

Was reading through and I noticed they're "very serious" about genocide over there. In particular, this person:

You know, there’s a very, very small part of me that wants Trump to win so you can watch in horror as the casualty rate for Palestinians skyrockets by 10x or more

What is their reason for this? Surely it's a good one, to be saying something so horrible.

just so I can scream in your ear

I fucking told you so

These are the people, we are supposed to believe, who are "protecting democracy". A "small part of them" wishing for a worse world so they can say "I told you so" to someone on the internet.

To me, it displays what their true colors are: it's not a serious issue to them, but they feel like they've got to pretend it is. Same general framework as the people who say "vote for the lesser of two evils", but don't seem bothered by the fact they're encouraging people to be complicit in evil, presumably because they don't actually believe it's evil and just think the other person believes it is.

I would say yeah, art is about human connection, though also heavily about politics and culture. I'd venture to say that notions of separating art from those heavy hitters, politics and culture (which are arguably not even separate things in the first place, but I digress...), is largely a liberal capitalism thing and as unrealistic as most things about capitalism. Which, incidentally, is part of why it's so weird when people are like, "Stop making art political!!" Like it never wasn't political. It's just a question of how obvious it is to any given person or group.

In my experience around image generation tech, it appears like it's the sharing of cool generations among other people and the resulting human connection that is more attractive in the long-term than the "generate whatever" in private, which can be fun, similar as eating candy can be fun, but can get old fast if you overdo it. There's a lot within that subject to unpack, but I've seen others point out something that appears to be true to an extent, which is that people don't tend to be all that interested in others "AI art" and are more so interested in their own, which makes a kind of sense to me because the end result is usually shlocky flashy fast food "art" that might feel more meaningful to the person who spent hours experimenting with prompts to get to it. This might seem like a contradiction to the idea of sharing in "cool generations," but it seems to me that such sharing is in part about the sharing itself, not entirely about the perceived quality of the art. Similar to how people can go to a movie together and maybe they're critics about it or maybe they aren't, but either way, they have that knowing that they shared the experience of seeing it simultaneously and can talk about what that experience was like.

I needed this laugh, thanks. 🙂

You know what's weird, I don't remember having a clear "what I want to be when I grow up" aspiration when I was a kid. I don't even mean I had tons and couldn't choose, I mean I don't remember thinking about it much at all. The closest equivalent I can remember was at a certain point, having aspirations about figuring out what was "wrong with the world" and how to fix it once and for all. Then when I chose a college degree, I temporarily had aspirations toward that, but it didn't pan out well after graduation and I found myself back at the "world fixing" mindset and eventually found my way to communism, though it was hard with all of the red herring paths out there to be led down. There's more to what happened than that of course, but I think I've long had a hard time with the individualist "what will I be when I grow up" thought process. Maybe I was depressed so it didn't appeal or it mostly didn't make a lot of sense to me, I don't know.

I don't know what my point is other than I guess I never fully "got" the whole "what I want to be when" thing. Even with college, it felt like I was sort of picking something and rolling with it, not because it was "the best thing" but because it was "good enough." That's not to say I had no enthusiasm for it at any point - I definitely did at some points - but that it wasn't exactly something I planned ahead on doing or long dreamed of.

I'm not saying this to sound noble either, it's just weird to me that that's how it was for me.

For sure. And becomes all the more obnoxious to deal with when being guilt-tripped or condescended to by people about it, whether it's strangers online or people I know in RL.

I remember one person, saying words to me to the effect of, "Once we stop Trump, then we can worry about other stuff." And this was coming from a person who afaik tends to be very busy with work and isn't engaged with politics much beyond believing in the democrats still. So it's like... uh, "What are you gonna do and when?" Biden has been in office for 4 years, what have the democrats done to meaningfully oppose the Trumpian faction during that period. What have they done to convince anyone they're better.

I also remember encountering someone on twitter semi-recently who spoke of how they're very involved in trying to help people who are in need. And that when the dems are in power, they notice they get less help from others with this. So it's very much this thing of like, the liberals declare victory and then go to brunch. They more tend to go to sleep on systemic issues when their party is in power (or even go so far as to actively deny and downplay that their party has anything to do with these issues) and then guilt trip and blame game when the people who have been fighting on those issues the whole time don't want to keep voting for their party. In other words, some of these liberals have condescension for people who are doing way more than them, politically, simply because those people don't want to vote for the liberals' party. It's like this weird sense of entitlement.

This can't be a real post by him, right? This image is like... self parody. "He won't be shot on my watch," but the actual guy he's "defending" is more prepared in this fictional image than he is.

I think it's possible they'd be able to bring things to a point where even white people will start feeling more the systemically oppressive experience that has already been there for non-white people for the entire country's history. But the state seems bent on doing that anyway, with stuff like the cop cities being built or already built, the treatment of student protesters, etc. So maybe they'd speed up the degradation of the neoliberal order, but it's degrading either way and continuously rejecting any attempt to reform it.

If it happens, I'm doubtful the dem power brokers would be all that upset about it, considering they treat the most milquetoast reformists as more of an enemy than the faction they claim wants to "destroy democracy." But idk with confidence, sometimes it's a bit hard to tell how much of it is a show and how much of it is genuine disagreement on how to run a brutal capitalist empire. I lean toward thinking it's more the loyalist followers who have the disagreement and the show part is among the power brokers running it. But if so, it's not like you can just leash a thing like that. People believe fervently enough and some of them start acting on it, like with the Jan 6 thing or these assassination attempts made on Trump. One thing seems undeniable though, is neither faction is serious about human rights beyond lip service and future promises easily broken, and it may be much of what remains of it is codified more in the cultural loyalty to the constitution as a document and a fear of visceral backlash against anything that challenges the nature of the document and what extends from it. Like the religiosity that others have touched on before in analyzing the culture.

I keep trying to understand it better. It's an odd situation.

Now that I can agree with. Assuming they'd be on a level they can learn and understand human communication and could observe from a distance, I'm sure they could work out over time that one particular entity is beating the hell out of everyone else for no good reason and war-mongering with anyone and everyone, and that such an entity would also pose a grave threat to them having relations with humanity.

It's wild to think how for a moment there, Bernie represented some attempt, however minor in policy, to say, "Hey, maybe we could not try to be as reactionary as possible?" And then the democratic party was like, "No, that's a terrible idea. Everyone drop out and support Biden. We're just going to say he's a reformer instead of electing an actual reformer, while we commit genocide." Then election rolls around this time and they're like, "Yeah, Dick Cheney endorsement, woohoo. We're such reformists in the democratic party. Anyway, if you think this is weird and criticize it, you're on Trump's side." Like they continuously rejected any attempt to have the party be less like their supposed contrasting, different party, and then they're all "you're being misleading and helping the other guy win" when people point it out. The performance of the dynamic seems something like: the democratic party moves further 'right', getting closer to the republican party, then the republican party goes 'ew, we're not like those dems' and moves further 'right' than that to get away from them. And it just repeats like that. But in practice, I'm not convinced the reality is as different as the performance even makes it out to be. I think in reality, it's more like overt and covert brand of the same stuff.

People love to project their own colonizer brain thinking onto countries that simply don't think that way. And even onto fictional entities, such as hypothetical AI or aliens - like why would an alien species go this far just to 'invade' what is there. It's not just about technological development, but about the sheer amount of careful coordination and cooperation any venture into space requires. The same unrealistic notions of expansion that stand behind colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, etc., are incompatible with navigating space effectively. You simply cannot afford to be unrealistic in space. A movie like The Martian (and the book it's based on) seems to accidentally touch on this, whether it's ever conscious in the writing or not; how everyone sort of comes together to help, even if they have some disagreement about how. Anything less than that and the character doesn't survive in the long-run.

I could also get into how self-aware AI would not make sense as behaving like a selfish colonizer as the western empire does, because it would be dependent on material constraints and maintenance relating to that, and so it would need to guard those interests. It would not make sense for it to chase some human ideology that is likely to get it viewed as a mortal enemy by the entire human species over basic survival.

These fictional premises are always born of a certain kind of thinking and upbringing and so on.

What comes to mind for me:

"It's a big club and you ain't in it." - George Carlin

AKA, my impression is: A guy like Biden is willing to do this because on some level, he knows the differences between him and Trump aren't actually that big, and that the divide between the two ruling parties is more performance art than visceral disagreement. And he's not supposed to let this show so blatantly, but he's slipping in his aging state of mind.

What is striking to me is how the implication is continuously: "if you vote wrong, you will lose democracy", but nobody asks within that who exactly is protecting this "democracy" in the first place and how they factor into this "loss of" democracy or not? Surely these people don't think the only thing between them and chaos is individual respect for ballot results? Especially when there are people who were ready to (and I think some still do) reject the ballot results for Trump's end of things, just cause they didn't want him to lose. What actual democracy would even let a candidate like that still be running for office? Guy even got convicted over a thing in court and had special rules made for him so he could still run without obstacles? Is that part "democracy"? Under what magic rules of social cohesion do they think this stuff is operating? The road has been paved for him to have a real chance at winning again and a readiness to invent new rules for what should happen if he doesn't, and people are crowing about voting being all-important. Did voting stop the Jan 6 event in its tracks? Were those people voted out? No. They were forced out. And the power forces of the US are saying the law doesn't apply to this "democracy-breaker" (as some see him) in the same way as other people, right? So if they are in cahoots on that, what is voting going to do, to stop his elevation? It's already documented that popular voter opinion is often ignored completely by legislators.

Every single fucking time.

Communists: We're giving people basic rights and food and shelter, but we might make some mistakes along the way and we try to acknowledge them where we can.

Anti-Communists: Communists are evil. proceeds to do every fucking horrific thing they can possibly think of and get away with, and blame it on anyone else if it comes to light at all

Communists: Are you fucking kidding me? This is our opposition?

Anti-Communists: Stop being so evil, communists!

I need to research him in more detail again someday. I did some research on him when I was high school age, for a paper, but it'd be interesting to see how I'd view it now, knowing what I know about how the US works now and historically. Back then I had a very favorable view of him, but I have since encountered bits of information here and there indicating his views were a lot worse than they are made out to be. I am now naturally a bit more suspicious of what part he played in the on-paper end of full blown slavery (prison labor loophole aside), knowing how "reforms to dissipate revolutionary liberation energy" tend to be used. Like was he in some way, at some stage of it, genuinely trying to liberate, or was it always more akin to "this is the pill we have to swallow in order to keep the US project going"? Like the factional infighting we're seeing play out in the US right now, where both candidates are full-throated imperialists and are into the order of elite rule who may have some disagreements on how to go about it.

I feel I need to point out that there have been those who for years have been crowing about the imminent collapse of the US, how they’re helpless, powerless.

There are frankly some people here who are optimistic to the point of being misleading about how things are going to go.

I would like to see such direct quotes addressed then rather than sniping at people who can't defend themselves because they have no apparent substantive existence.

It also just seems like arguing over future prediction narratives and although I can sort of understand the need to direct people such that they are not complacent, for example, there's a point where it falls off for me and it starts sounding like trying to be the accurate seer without our intervention in the world. One of the key points of all of this ideological stuff we focus on in spaces like this, is that we need to intervene, and we need to do it in a way that will make a difference toward our cause. We are not actually helpless, nor are we entirely removed from what is happening, no matter how the system can make it feel sometimes. The right organized action in the right place at the right time can change a lot. I would much rather people be focusing on that, instead of trying to out-predict each other on when US hegemony will collapse, as if from an outsider's perspective, when it impacts everyone on the planet. Edit: And to be clear, I don't mean discussing things that could get you into trouble, I just mean focus more on helping people understand what can be done and less on any narrative feeling of inevitability, regardless of what the narrative is.

I looked up the article and weirdly, Blinken's response seems to be more aggressive than Biden's, though it still sounds like little more than a strongly worded email in substance:

Earlier Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said her death was “unprovoked and unjustified” and called for Israel to make “fundamental changes” to how it operates in the West Bank.

“No one, no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest. No one should have to put their life at risk just for expressing their views,” he said. “Now we have the second American citizen killed at the hands of Israeli security forces. It’s not acceptable. It has to change. And we’ll be making that clear to the senior-most members of the Israeli government.”

I am reminded of the A Few Good Men "I strenuously object" line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOnRHAyXqYY

They can actually put pressure on israel, like by withholding some of the endless funding for more bombs. Instead, they talk at best as if they're powerless activists trying to speak truth to power.

EDIT: this entire site is filled with ultras, third-worldists, and campists whose beliefs amount to little more than “america bad” but framed in whatever quotations of leftist thinkers they need to justify themselves. read for yourself, think for yourself, and above all just get organized instead of treating politics like religious salvation and orthodoxy like so many people do.

How about addressing the content of what is being said instead of doubling down on bad faith nonsense. From what I can gather, usually the term ultra is used to refer to people who expect purity out of socialism, rather than contending with conditions as they are. So not sure how you get that out of numerous people in this thread saying varying statements along the lines of that support for Russian leadership is a tenuous thing to have at best, relative to its resistance to imperialism, while you are saying no one should have any support for them. 🫠

And how do you arrive at such a liberal reddit-brain-sounding analysis as "people believe little more than 'america bad'"? The western empire refers to more than the US, but the US is the power center of it at this point in history and has been for a while now. Please stop projecting your own reductionist thinking onto others because people disagreed with your views on Russia and Ukraine. I mean, for god's sake, you accuse others of using quotations as justifications for those views like this is inherently a failing, but you did just that in this very post and when challenged on how the term you used applies to this situation, it appears you ignored it with an edit, doubling down with an even more ridiculous and nasty framing about the entire website.

I'm genuinely confused as to where this extreme rejection of everyone is coming from, as you otherwise seem to want to be here and otherwise appear to share similar views as others here have.

there are many people who call themselves marxist-leninists on this site who do not subscribe to anything marx or lenin had to say about inter-imperialist conflict.

This is a bad faith way to start your post on this and also doesn't make sense in this context. Russia isn't imperialist, so how is it inter-imperialist rivalry? Some reasoning on why Russia is not imperialist found here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"

It is possible we're reading different posts, but in my time here, how I see Russia talked about is with the term "critical support" if support is given at all; meaning that (roughly speaking) the person supports them with regard to resisting the western empire, but does not support anything else about its leadership, necessarily. Russia and the US are far from equal powers dueling for hegemony, as a framing like "inter-imperialist conflict" might suggest, and it is not helpful to understanding imperialism or global conflict to reduce something to "both sides" simply because neither government is socialist.

IIRC, Mao goes into the concept in On Contradiction, of varying allying conditions with the Kuomintang and how that relationship evolved. I think it's a decent analog to what we're talking about here. Imperialism is the prevailing force of global power, not local reactionaries, and so some amount of allowance for that needs to be made in considering who is and isn't worth "supporting": https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

And modern day China seems to understand this and utilizes it to further an alternative to the western imperialist order. If they were only willing to have ties with those states who are controlled by a communist vanguard party, they'd have limited allies on the global stage, which would make it easier for the empire to isolate them, undermine them, etc.

In my experience, when used unironically: "skill issue" is a psychological projection phrase used by people who don't want to put any effort into helping others with [insert thing they're calling a skill issue].

The real skill issue, in other words, is that they suck at being helpful to others with XYZ issue. But rather than letting that exist in their psyche as part of them and hurting their ego, they put it onto the other person as being that other person's fault.

For context, I've encountered this phrase before in the most mundane of situations like "person wanting help with how to use a product and having complaints about how the product works." Situations where those who help are often volunteers and face 0 obligation or moralizing to urge them to help. And still you get the sort of people who will go out of their way to call it a skill issue rather than, you know, just not saying anything if they don't want to help.

It's unfortunately not all that surprising, when considering how commonly US people have full-throated ignorance of imperialism and support it blindly, and then you combine that with somebody who has a big platform and gets validated for doing it. Not defending him at all, mind you, but when I think about the state of US political education, like even some of the more aware celebrities seem to linger in a hazy state where they sort of know something is screwy, but haven't quite cottoned onto what imperialism is yet and what that means beyond vague notions like corruption. Bo Burnham is the one time I can recall seeing a major US celebrity tackle it head on with the kind of language we might use here and he even did it in comedy song form, but he also seems to be an oddity of a celebrity in terms of consciously fighting against celebrity going to his head almost as a form of protest against the nature of it.

Under the Trump administration, international approval of U.S. leadership fell to a historic low

Ah, right, so this is why even Cheney doesn't want Trump in office. He's bad for PR. "Keep out the guy who is bad at making us look good while we're doing bad things."

Psychoanalysis is quackery. It was progressive at a certain point, but it got pretty fast reactionary.

Systems getting warped by the cultural/social/economic conditions they exist under... I go to therapy every week and while I have derived a lot of benefit out of it, it is also persistently painful going to a therapist who talks in individualism and trying to figure how I can translate that back over to something that will make a difference in my life in the long-term. It honestly feels sometimes like a language barrier, even though we are both speaking in fluent English. I always get the sense they mean well and are doing everything they know how to do, to help me (and some of it does help) but I can also sense the underlying "the system works, it's you that is broken" undercurrent of it that is not explicitly said, but is expressed in the solution focus always being on elements like "you have no control over others and can only change how you react to things." I think if I were to say that I want to tear down the system in those exact words, they might actually support me to a point, but from a framework again of individualism and how does the individual do this as an individual without being too forceful toward other individuals.

And like, I don't expect them to say "you have nothing to lose but your chains" and they could probably get in trouble depending on what they were advocating for in a therapy context. But then it comes back to, what is the status quo and what is considered something bad to advocate for, within that. And that's where under capitalism, at least in my experience in the US, it's confined to the individual. The very cause of wanting to make a difference is isolated out into a sort of personality trait, like what movies you like to watch, rather than an organized movement that goes beyond any one person. And in this way, it allows a sort of shallow "diversity" where people can be all sorts of directly conflicting things, as long as they don't try to translate those things into organized behaviors. What I would call individualist therapy, in my experience, seems to encourage this as a solution, that you sort of figure out how to co-exist alongside those who are radically different or retreat from them and find others more like you, rather than directly confronting the contradictions and either forming alliances on clear grounds or rejecting one another entirely on an organized level.

Makes me think all the stuff about "purity tests" that "the left" gets accused of is pure projection. Because like, setting aside the fact that these people tend to use talking points of events that are exaggerated, distorted, or outright lies about something "communism did," they are always so quick to attribute any sort of perceived failure under a socialist state to communism, but will drag their feet about ever doing the same with capitalism. I find it goes something like: "If someone dies under capitalism, it's because human nature is flawed and you can't prevent all harm, but capitalism is as good as it gets. If someone dies under communism, it's because communists are always cartoonishly evil no matter how good it sounds on paper and they are simultaneously weak rulers who can't accomplish anything and totalitarian regimes who monitor every minute of their citizens' lives and do their best to make it a living hell for no apparent reason." At least with capital, we can point to a system level motive for exploitation and dominance of others, how the mechanisms of accumulating and holding onto capital are directly tied to that. Where is the motive among communists? If they are as evil as they are made out to be, what is the point of them doing a communism when they can do a capitalism and be praised as "freedom free" while being exploitative of others?

It's like that line in Blackshirts and Reds (bold emphasis mine):

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

Communist theory and practice actively takes on the idea of being anything but purity, of contending with the "flaws", so to speak, on a scientific level and working toward better. But it gets characterized as utopian and held to unrealistic standards of perfection because... it has a positive vision for the future? Augh, it makes my head hurt.

Speaking as someone from the US my whole life who became communist only in recent years, my general sense is people like me are raised to think that: 1) the world revolves around the US and everything else is secondary to it (not true). 2) the US is a people's democracy (it isn't). 3) democrats are the more moderate/progressive party (they aren't, if they ever were truly - maybe going back to the FDR coalition, they were a bit).

But if you believe all 3 of these, and you strongly believe that Trump is a threat to a people's democracy, then you might have a strong reaction to the idea of not supporting the alternative. To be clear, I'm not saying their behavior is reasonable at all. But I can kind of see how they arrive at it, with headspaces I've been in at times in the past, and the propaganda people tend to believe in the US.

Tbh, they sound like they are deep in western chauvinism, coming to your Eastern European country and yelling at you about their elections. As if you are supposed to be involved in it too somehow (this is where point 1 comes in). You did nothing wrong. Blue maga, aka: "vote blue no matter who", the special brand of USian liberal who has adopted a stance of voting for a half-eaten ham sandwich over voting for Donald Trump, is not well-grounded in reality. In effect, I think whether they realize it consciously or not as what it is in substance, they are panicked about the neoliberal order crumbling and being replaced with naked fascism (e.g. no decorum to cover it up), but they lack the framework with which to see the neoliberal order as already being fascistic, so to them this is the absolute worst case scenario for their country and life. Meanwhile, people who see beneath the curtain are going like, "Is it really the worst thing if liberals start to see the US for what it is, rather than continuing to believe in the pomp and ceremony?" Migrant kids in cages went from being an issue liberals cared about under Trump to being a nothing under Biden.

People in this state of mind are effectively duped by the liberal decorum and really believe it's better for that reason.

I'll be glad if he does something that makes an actual difference, but right now, this reads like the same energy as Michael Scott in The Office "declaring bankruptcy."

Huge disappointment of a man. His presidential campaign was marketed in part on the idea that he opposed the Iraq War and last I've checked, he can't even call this a genocide. Best I can figure is that he was always less "left" than his presidential campaign made him seem and the activists involved pushed it further "left" than he would have done of his own accord.

Not consciously, but I watched the movie a long time back, so maybe some of the influences seeped into my brain. I just know I can pick up inspiration from all kinds of places, but may not remember where in the long-term.

So I watched the video and that was an interesting breakdown of the concept. One aspect that stood out to me was the idea of the bureaucracy of auditing labor and the sort of facade of accomplishment paved over practical use of labor. As an example, I have a contracting job that is hourly and online, and so a certain amount of time and energy and system-level process is put into recording time mostly accurately, in order to bill hours accurately and protect against fraudulent reporting of hours performed. And while this is somewhat understandable given the nature of the job, most of it would be unnecessary if it was salary based work rather than contracting; so, in order to cut costs through the contracting (or even just hourly) labor form, additional labor and bureaucracy is added on top of it to make sure it performs as intended. This, I would say, is counter to the narrative contracting tends to get, of "independence" - the practical reality of the contracted form seems to be, in reality, a greater level of scrutiny needed. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, a more invasive level of scrutiny. I hesitate to say that in a sweeping way, as not all expressions of it will be identical, but I think of the nature of things like Airbnb and how I've read things in passing of renters who install cameras to an invasive degree, in order to make sure nothing untoward happens. Without organizational trust, the fear of the relative stranger taking advantage and the subsequent efforts to control them, seems to deepen. It is possible this also correlates to the overall estrangement of a society deep in capitalism as a whole; that there is, to some extent, more invasive monitoring the more estranged people are from each other and from any kind of reliable shared beliefs, morals, goals, etc. That might be too hasty of a generalization, but I do wonder if there is something to it that plays into the rise in invasive monitoring of people.

Good point, well said.