Barx [none/use name]

Focus on organizing and socialism and let any friendships be natural. It’s not practical to completely separate one’s social life and political life.

Friendship doesn’t always stay that, though. Be careful and modest and never let it become a dating scene. Lefties will date but there is a huge difference between those who happen to date vs. an organization that allows or even promotes harassment, which is unfortunately very common. Similarly, nobody should be put in situations in a lefty organization where they are being sexualized or where there can be any perception of favoritism or discrimination. These should be places where one’s political contributions are what are valued.

If these things aren’t taken seriously then the org will eventually implode from not handling abusive situations appropriately and instead relying on however the current leadership team (usually defensively) responds to complaints. This is one of the worst and unfortunately common scenarios in political organizations and is a much greater threat to your organization (and people that want to work within it) than any feds or cops. The Best rule of thumb is to be humble and empathetic and plan for how you are going to handle situations with social fallout.

As a different example, you may also have people in your organization that do not get along and begin fighting. Sometimes it’s even pretty clear when one person is in the wrong and the other is not. But even then, the person that is in the wrong may weaponize anything they perceive to have caché in your organization. For example, race or gender or sexual orientation, etc. I’ve seen it happen many times. A harasser wraps themselves in an identity to deflect from their own behavior. So as an organization, you want to prepare for these scenarios because it is part of promoting comradely behavior and being a space where people actually want to be and work. And you need to develop strategies by which you will discriminate between true and false claims and reach reasonable conclusions to protect the members of your organization. Don’t worry about the image of the organization itself because if you act correctly in individual cases to protect the members of the org you can always explain what happened and why. In contrast, many lefties make the mistake of trying to protect the org over its members and this nearly always backfires.

Anyways this is how I recommend approaching the building of a space where commies can be friends. Keep the focus on organizing, education, and being a place where people can safely be. Plan for the worst so you can head it off before things get too far and so that you have tools to handle negative situations correctly.

Duterte was getting closer with China. Marcos represents a reversal, or maybe more accurately a return to complete submission to the United States.

Depending on what you mean by ‘fighting the system’ I think we’re saying roughly the same thing. Electoral politics is upon us right now though, and in truth is always there to be dealt with, so needs to be engaged with constantly.

I’m saying the exact opposite. Electoral politics is something to spend something like 1% of your political thoughts on unless you are personally running or supporting an electoral anti-capitalist campaign. It is a distraction that gives you the false impression that your lone vote or nagging people to vote for capitalist politicians is doing anything good, let alone worth spending any real time on. If you’re spending much of your political focus on this you’re just a dancing monkey for the ruling class. This includes local campaigns. If you deviate from this line you’ll actually be working against the oppressed and marginalized people around you and in other countries.

Make sure your representative knows your name and what you stand for.

A complete waste of time. You do not matter, politically, as an individual. The other people who have their ear have tens of thousands of dollars to drop on them. You think you’re going to compete with that by having the super smartest arguments and “a relationship” with this stooge that knows exactly who butters their bread? At most they will use you as a prop for their own ends. And if they are a capitalist politician, which is nearly all of them, you will be speaking to a brick wall that will never do what is necessary for justice.

From what I can see they mostly don’t get that much input from voters, so your voice is louder when you talk directly to them.

Bruh liberals are constantly organizing letter writing campaigns and calling offices and trying to get meetings with their reps. They are routinely ignored. Only organized actions with leverage ever do anything and again, it’s only within very limited confines of capitalist discourse.

In contrast, donors get to go to special events at the mansions of party insiders where they get to tell the candidate all about their latest Brown Child Exploder 3000 and how important it is that they don’t get in the way of its sales and hey here’s $30,000 from all of our executives that just happen to be donating to you as individual private citizens.

You do not register on their radar. You’re the goofball they make fun of to their sides later. At most they will use you as practice for how to handle people that want things they will never be provided with.

The electoral system can be changed, but as you say, it’ll take fighting for that.

In your mind, what does it mean to change the electoral system and how does it compare to what is necessary to undo the intrinsic violence and disposession of the capitalist system?

Fighting the system directly won’t gain much as it’s just that, a system.

Why not?

It’ll have to be a ‘hearts and minds’ job amongst the electorate to show people there is a better way and get them to vote for candidates who support that.

You do need to communicate with the public but feeding into the false notion that you’re just going to vote out capitalism will lead to almost immediate distrust because you will fail right away.

It can work, that’s ultimately how things have drifted to the right over time, people believe that’s the ‘better’ way.

You think people have drifted to the right because they were offered a better future by politicians that had personal relationships with random right wing constituents?

Bernie Bros were telling you Biden was senile in 2019 lmao

You’ll notice that this is a city council run by Democrats.

The dehumanization and abuse of the homeless is a bipartisan position. This is because it is a fundamental product of capitalism, where those most impoverished do not have any humane guaranteed place to live. Compounding this, business owners, through the process of becoming more interested in their own profits than in the well-being of their business’ community, treat those who live on the streets near their businesses as merely a threat to their incomes.

Those business owners are who actually control your city councils and your presidencies and your frocked-up supreme court. They also fund the party and PACs and PR firms that are telling you this highly non-strategic advice of “just support this party it’s the good guys and very smart”. This is an example of why they are in power and you are not - they control your actual political brain.

In reality, you should join us in fighting against the system itself, as it will never deliver what is necessary, and it will actually fight against it instead. This does not mean never engaging in electoral politics, but it does mean actually understanding it and putting energy into that which actually builds our cause and helps our neighbors.

And they’re all crackers

For additional context, the MK-84 is manufactured by General Dynamics and the JDAM systems they are usually retrofitted with are always manufactured by Boeing.

Both companies are weapons manufacturers for this genocide. Both are also unionized “good job” companies. It’s very important to not be knee-jerk pro-union, but to understand how one’s own participation in their country’s economy impacts everyone else. Say no to bomb manufacturers. If you work for a weapons manufacturer, change jobs as soon as you can. If you work somewhere that does business with Israel or weapons contractors, consider organizing your workplace against that (you may get fired but Palestine is more important).

Kurzweil is a “futurologist” crackpot that just makes shit up and is constantly wrong.

Hey that’s not fair.

They also do a lot of drunk driving

Of course! They’re part of the same one-two grift-sinophobia punch.

Liberals try to understand metaphors challenge

Fuck yeah let’s drive this sucker straight into a wall

Thank goodness at least one person around here reads theory.

Democracy is when you must always vote for Good Party regardless of how bad they actually are, lest the only other viable party, Bad Party, win instead.

Thank you for your participation, citizen. Please don’t ask any questions.

Liberals can’t do self-criticism. The fact that they’re arguing Biden’s promise is meaningless hasn’t occurred to them.

Democrats are not well-meaning.

Liberals are part of a political cult with the DNC and New York Crimes at the head. They have absorbed the dictates of their cult leaders such that they reflexively reject all criticism and compare it to wanting the worst thing conceivable (to them) to happen, i.e. Trump winning again.

They don’t have to think about the things you mention because their media bubble does not tell them to nor does it emphasize these things as bad or harmful. Their bubble says murdered Palestinians were killed in the passive voice and Israelis are killed by “terrorists”. Their bubble barely talked about Yemen at all during the Obama years and their responses to hearing about it are usually bewilderment and frustration that they don’t have a snappy comeback ready for “Obama killed a bunch of kids by starving an entire country”. The Crime Bill doesn’t mean anything to most liberals, they don’t even know that it is or what it did. It’s an amorphous blob that other people say is bad and rather than learn anything about it they just change the subject.

Liberals can be rescued from their cult but they have to get over the main hurdle they constructed at the behest of their masters: incredible arrogance and incuriositu. It can be challenging to knock them off their little pedestal constructed of Washington Post Op-Eds saying the Democratic primaries should be less democratic and all poor people deserve what they get. They have to be slapped with something and clearly a blatant genocide isn’t enough - they still turned to their masters and lapped up the false narratives. Their boy being senile is having a greater impact because while it runs against their years-long excuses given against the left pointing out the obvious, it reconfirms their practice of, “politics is a team sport horse race” that makes them feel oh so very smart. They don’t have to make a very big adjustment like caring about dead brown people.

Hey don’t forget the pile of subsidies for the US solar industry that mostly just go to stockholders and the C-suite.

I mean it is very funny.

America doesn’t have a fascist movement per se because their politics have been mainstreamed for decades, baby! And they have no left to crush. It’s pure fascistic liberalism all the way down and your federal political choices are either that or a more confused and braying form of that struggling to find a reactionary populist oppositional angle and failing (the reactionary angle is already in power you can’t meaningfully struggle against it). Which flavor of false consciousness would you like to spend months agonizing over, fellow liberal?