When you start locking protesters up for a year, they’re going to start doing something worth getting locked up for a year.

Why does the US need to solve the issue?

I agree – the U.S. should stay out of the conflict by immediately ceasing all shipments of bombs and money to Israel.

With a policy as popular as abortion, a good radicalization tactic is asking people:

• What would you lie to the cops about?
• What would you get fired for?
• What would you get arrested for?

E.g., “would you lie to the cops to protect someone who had an abortion?”

A small population also makes it easier to successfully repress budding social movements.

Think it’s more that there’s too much evidence of killings, it’s gone on too long to deny, there are too many statements from Israelis at all levels to the effect of “yes we want to erase them,” and that there isn’t any plausible excuse anymore.

If you still think Democrats actually care about a potential mass deportation, ask yourself why Biden hasn’t simply pardoned all undocumented immigrants.

Immigration offenses are federal crimes, the president can pardon federal crimes, and you don’t actually have to be charged with anything or convicted to receive a pardon (see Nixon).

We’d had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.

Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001 (edit: and the original series Star Trek doesn’t have near the realism of 2001). The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking – they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.

Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.

Yeah, it might just be that people are too comfortable to entertain radical change. Millions sitting it out altogether instead of looking at a minor party would certainly fit with that. Looking into those Biden-to-staying-home people could be promising for the left.

“Ignore the problem, hope you get rich enough to keep ignoring the symptoms”

Biden wasn’t close to perfect. He wasn’t hard enough on Netanyahu, opting to express frustrations with him privately rather than through policy, because being pro-Israel is a popular view in the US.

Biden circumvented Congress and violated standing law to fund a genocide. The bare minimum was not aiding Israel in any way, and he did not even entertain that.

Setting aside that Israel’s ongoing genocide isn’t actually popular, say it was for the sake of argument. That still doesn’t mean you support it. You may have to actually do your job as a politician and shape public opinion on an important matter, or even do the right thing despite it potentially harming your career. Again, bare minimum stuff.

If you want to blame someone for making Trump a serious candidate, blame Democrats:

So to take [Jeb] Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.

“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:

Ted Cruz

Donald Trump

Ben Carson

We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428

I voted PSL, and I’m glad there are at least the embers of an open socialist movement, but I don’t think we should fool ourselves about how bad this showing was. We’re right to point out how Democrats should be having a reckoning and a total reassessment of strategy – that criticism should be applied to PSL, too.

The party put together a nationwide campaign and didn’t even get as much support as the Greens (also north of 600k). Why? What approach should be changed moving forward to improve? Because an honest look shows the approach we had this time around was a complete flop.

I think we should be constructive talking about this, but 100k votes in the context of being far outperformed by other minor parties, and the context of almost 20 million fewer people voting altogether… this wasn’t in any way a success.

Unfortunately, the most realistic read on the PSL campaign is that it was a significant failure. PSL got about 100k votes nationwide, compared to about 626k for RFK Jr. When you’re far outpaced by a guy who dropped out months ago, you have to call that what it is. And this was an election where maybe 20 million fewer people voted than four years ago – you can’t pull in any meaningful chunk of that?

I saw two relevant links there.

This one is an account of someone who helped someone else accuse a PSL member of misogyny and sexual misconduct. The author later accuses the PSL of trying to cover this up. The accusation appears to be:

She told me that she had just caught S* cheating the night before and was kicking him out. She detailed to me the past events, of him cheating on her with M*, of coercing her into unprotected sex, constantly leaving in the middle of the night to go “patrol M*’s house” but coming back drunk, etc.

Taking all of this at face value, it’s one accusation that rises to the level of something the PSL would want to investigate (one member coercing another into unprotected sex) and a mix of things I’m not sure an organization needs to investigate at all (cheating, being drunk at night).

I haven’t read the entire post, but I did read the text screenshots the author provided of conversations they had with the PSL. It looks like the PSL investigators kept asking for documentation relevant to the accusations (additional screenshots) that didn’t seem to be provided, and aren’t included in this tell-all post. If you start an investigation, ask for corroboration the accuser says exists, and they don’t provide it, I don’t think it’s a cover up if you close the investigation.

This is the second link, but it’s not working well enough for me to read it.

Presumably that comes from this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy

Haven’t read it myself, but from the summary it looks like he’s talking about Israel, not Jewish people. We’re all familiar with the difference.

You’re right that if the U.S. stopped sending weapons and money today, Israel would not literally collapse tomorrow. The point is that Israel cannot do its genocide and attack its neighbors without constant U.S. support. They’d be forced to the bargaining table within weeks. If Israel was too stubborn to bargain or its victims were uninterested in negotiations after watching a genocide right in front of them, Israel would lose on the battlefield.

The collapse wouldn’t happen literally overnight, but it’d be soon and inevitable.

Reminds me of part of a Mao speech (albeit from 1957):

In our country, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie comes under the category of contradictions among the people. By and large, the class struggle between the two is a class struggle within the ranks of the people, because the Chinese national bourgeoisie has a dual character. In the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, it had both a revolutionary and a conciliationist side to its character. In the period of the socialist revolution, exploitation of the working class for profit constitutes one side of the character of the national bourgeoisie, while its support of the Constitution and its willingness to accept socialist transformation constitute the other. The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods. However, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie will change into a contradiction between ourselves and the enemy if we do not handle it properly and do not follow the policy of uniting with, criticizing and educating the national bourgeoisie, or if the national bourgeoisie does not accept this policy of ours.

I see a lot of this echoed in Dengism and more generally the last ~40 years of Chinese economic policy. If the national bourgeoisie doesn’t seek to overthrow the government or take power over the state, it can make some money and serve its role of helping develop the country’s means of production. But if it gets out of line, it’s not running the show and will he held to account.

Did they even imprison him, or did they just tell him to tone it down and he followed the law because he lives in a country where billionaires aren’t above it? Was it just like an American judge ordering Trump or Musk to not tweet about this or that, except for the fact that there’s actually rule of law in China so Ma obeyed the court order?

I don’t actually remember the details.

I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.

Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).

the liberal mentality of everyone else just being a single West Wing style speech away from completely changing their mind

It’s the antithesis of materialism.