GnastyGnuts [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2020

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  • This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: Who was right?

    In Guatemala, was it Arbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

    Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the d’etente between the Soviets and Washington.

    Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

    That group was annihilated.

    • Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method

    Anarcho-libs / “Libertarian Leftists” love movements that maintained their moral purity by failing. As movements they’re relatively easy to defend. Because they never meaningfully took power, they’re never made to deal with the baggage of a real government that exists in a hostile capitalist world. Forever morally pristine and beautiful, in failure and death.








  • Democrats are a bottomless well of excuses. “We had a majority, but we re-created the two-party gridlock between ourselves!”

    Other classics:

    “We have a majority to extend the eviction moratorium, but not enough people showed up to votes!” (for liberals who don’t understand why this is a bad excuse, “we could have done it but we just fucked off from work that day” is an excuse that gets you fired in any other profession. And it’s not like the expiration of the eviction moratorium was a surprise or something, calendars exist and the date was known)

    “We have a majority to pass Biden’s agenda, but the parliamentarian won’t let us!” (this is a bad excuse because the parliamentarian can be unilaterally fired and hired at the whim of the senate majority leader, who was a democrat. And you can’t say “well it would be wrong to set that precedent”, because the republicans already did that shit under Bush)

    smuglord : “Do you understand how your own government works?”

    The only correct answer is “like shit. It works like shit.”





  • Wendy Hoopes voiced three separate roles on that show: Jane Lane (pictured), Quinn (Daria’s sister) and Daria’s mother Helen.

    I looked it up recently because I thought she might also be the voice for Poison Ivy in the Harley Quinn animated series (they have similar voices and cadences to my ear), but no, that’s Lake Bell.


  • You have only one outcome: the USA will move rightward.

    To the extent that voting matters in a fundamentally broken electoral system like ours, voting for the democrats is an affirmation of the choices they have made: affirmation of their choice to arm genocide in Gaza, affirmation of their choice to move right on immigration, affirmation of their choice to abandon death penalty abolition from their platform, etc.

    Why would they ever change course as a party if they still get the only thing they want from you either way? Lesser evil voting is a race to the bottom, and the longer people wait to correct the democrats’ course, the more painful it will be to endure a republican government in the meantime.

    The democrats will never stop this country from its rightward trajectory if they keep moving rightward with it because their base continually validates them.