why would AOC need critical support? she isn’t on our side and her vision of “democracy” “economic rights” and “civil liberties” are as meaningless as when Biden or Blinken talk about “human rights” or “democracy.” she called a white supremacist a white supremacist and that’s cool and all, but she upholds the system that enables people like him
I remember when Biden won in 2020 a bunch of his sycophant politicos were essentially saying out loud that the lesson they had learned from 2016-2020 was that they can simply invent reality. They almost used those words. They looked at polling data about peoples perceptions of the economy before and after the 2016 elections, where people gave partisan answers (like republican affiliated people saying the economy was terrible and then the weeks after trumps inauguration they said that it was doing great-- but nothing had really changed) they saw that, and the capitulation of any Democratic Party left-wing (in both 2016 and 2020) and got completely absorbed in a sort of Hegelian idealism where they are able to dictate reality to whoever identifies with the democrats (or not with the republicans).
In a way, they were not wrong about how things had operated during the “end of history”, more or less, except for the fact that there are moments where 1) material conditions can deteriorate and the moment the US electorate is subject to worsening conditions their narrative can fail 2) alternative media, like what can proliferate on social media, can expose the complete disconnect between words and actions and move consciousness.
You can see the hubris, when turbo-libs talk about how the real problem is people “not understanding” or “not knowing” all of Biden’s “many accomplishments” or that these simple rubes don’t know that the economy is actually doing “great.” They have an incredibly powerful ability to control the way reality is presented for a ton of people, and that success was even on full display during the beginning of the SMO/Russia entering the Donbas & Ukraine. For a few weeks everyone had fucking Ukrainian flags out and everyone on tv was talking about Ukraine as a bastion of freedom and democracy, without knowing a fucking thing about Ukraine. I think back to 1999 to 2012 and I think a lot of the political class believed what they were saying about this policy or that policy. Because the window of debate was so narrow nearly at all times and nothing had a sense of urgency. Now they simply rage when the public adopts a belief that falls outside of what they are trying to construct. It was partly what they were seething about with the Facebook/russia-gate/fake news conspiracies that forced the tech bourgeoisie to adopt a more hard line on “acceptable” content and deployed state-sanctioned “debunkers” … this is also was what paved the way to banning TikTok-- it wouldn’t have been possible if the ruling class hadn’t identified this as their primary challenge.
Yeah, the reputation of CPUSA being full of feds is also a reflection of the extent to which the US state has repressed the organization. There are things I disagree with about the CPUSA’s politics and strategy, but state repression isn’t something that CPUSA members chose and it is unfair to most of its members. Sadly, I do think that it has still had a very real negative effect on the party and the way it has developed and who has remained. It is sad because it is a reflection of the tremendous impact the party once had.
It is and it isn’t. When you are in the work place, or for some other strategic/tactical/safety reasons, some members may not disclose their membership in some situations. But in general, when PSL organizers are organizing in the community or with other groups/community members we don’t typically hide our membership. In general, there is a feeling that the time is right to openly show who we are and what we stand for, to present ourselves in a forthright way to the people, and to encourage the masses of people to be unafraid of organizing and participating in politics, particularly revolutionary politics and anything that would expand their understanding of democratic participation beyond bourgeois politics/voting.
it is known, the second hamas charter accepts the 1967 borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter
pretty sure they can buy US weapons and tech through Israel that would otherwise be prohibited from getting. I also think that the whole support for a 2 state solution thing was an artifact of the six day war and a consensus of the UN mediated peace process that has been nearly every UN members “official” line (except for maybe Israel, Iran and a few others) since then, and is also the position held by Hamas
As long as the window doesn’t face north, I would just give it a shot and let it be. Unless you live in a very year-round-cold, or very dry place and your outdoor space is covered, you only have to worry about bringing it inside. If it is humid outside daily watering might not always be necessary. Sometimes being gone for a week or two your plants will hurt, but still survive…depending on the plant … you can also add material to hold water into the soil or something to wick water into the pot… . you can also try getting an automatic irrigation system if you are super worried… then you might only have to change the water in a bucket every so often… in general though I would just worry less and let it die or thrive on whatever you can do best without anxiety. Some plants are much hardier than the instructions will say. It might last a few years and you find that you will care for it.
A lot of people keep bonsai because it emphasizes mindfulness, practice, and being present with nature. Maybe you were telling your dad one thing and what he heard was another, that you were disconnected and anxious and this is something that could help root you. either way, I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth or take it personally. It’s a nice gift even if it didn’t have the intended effect. Unless your dad does passive aggressive stuff regularly it was a pretty sweet gesture at the least
Bonsai trees don’t need a lot of intricate daily care. just watering (not always daily) and occasional trimming (which is just up to your own preference tbh)… I wouldn’t assume bad intentions, it could actually be that he started to empathize with you and thought this would be something that help you grow/cope. It is a pretty low-stakes gift imo, and if it dies it isn’t a huge deal. Seems just as likely he was trying to be thoughtful, but insulted you instead. Maybe just try to keep it alive as long as you can and let your dad know that you felt slighted by the gift but want to know whether that was his intention
In their mind, there is no reason to test for anything if they aren’t going to do anything with the results. They won’t do anything because the CDC has already lost so much credibility any guidance they give will cause half of the population to do the opposite thing. If pundits and officials were honest with the public, they would just explain that the CDC has become a defunct entity, and that it has failed at its only purpose: public health. They can’t do anyt meaningful public health work without public trust or the will to wield any kind of authority (which they don’t have). They won’t say any of that, so instead any charitable reading by liberals seems inexplicable instead of malicious and irresponsible.
Don’t let this get to you, keep working to build a movement. I am sorry a lot of your friends are so unprincipled and have decided to act antagonistically toward you. it actually should be against their interests, but they live in an idealist bubble that is only maintained through policing the morality of other organizers through informal power structures and exclusion. These anarchist/chauvinists are in fact only a small minority even if they are very prevalent in inward-facing organizing circles, it is only a symptom of the defunct history & nature of the US left and the discontinuity in the US communist movement. However “very serious” these “organizers” are, they are not representative of the masses of people which is what we are looking to organize. Don’t worry about them. I think their influence in the movement for Palestinian liberation is being very exaggerated in this thread, a lot of it seems to focus on the PNW. Most parts of the country don’t have such a large anti-communist-left scene, and the student movement is a real mass movement that has incorporated so many different communities, most of this stuff becomes completely irrelevant day-to-day
idk, that’s one example, and even if I disagree I can see why someone might say that. that is something anarchists say about every organization because anarchists don’t “recruit” really. but I have more than a few direct counterexamples I have personally witnessed, so I would not say that encampments are primarily organized by anarchist groups. that is probably just something that varies from city to city
I guess this is the thread where hexbear learns that the student occupations are overwhelmingly organized by anarchist groups who don’t like the PSL
not what I have seen at all. it isn’t just being “overly sectarian” it is anticommunism-- literally fed shit. they risk a whole lot to pull this off and then use their statement to shit on communists
idk, I am not CodePink’s biggest fan or whatever, but when I clicked the link someone had quoted an article that made it seem like that wasn’t the case:
"There has been some controversy about a quote from me that appeared in the New York Times Dec. 2. The quotation implied that I was calling for the arrest of those people who destroyed property in downtown Seattle during the WTO protest. I want to make it clear that the quote was distorted, taken out of context, and not reflective my true feelings. I did not call for the arrest of anyone, though I did point out the irony that the police were attacking nonviolent protesters while ignoring those destroying property. Do I wish the people causing the damage had been arrested? No. Would I have helped to get them out of jail if they had been? Yes. And I certainly apologize if the statement attributed to me has caused any harm to the anarchist community in general. Do I approve of the tactics that this particular group of self-described anarchists used in Seattle Nov. 30? Definitely not. That, not the distorted quote, is the real issue here. There are certainly occasions in which the destruction of property furthers the cause of social justice and helps garner public support, but this was not one of them. The Boston Tea Party is an example of the destruction of property a shipment of tea. When the Zapatistas rose up in 1994, they destroyed army posts and other symbols of a repressive state. Members of the religious community in the United States have destroyed weapons of mass destruction to express their profound moral opposition to war. And forest activists have destroyed the engines of bulldozers to prevent the clear-cutting of old-growth forests. “The list of tactically thoughtful and politically principled property destruction goes on and on. What these acts have in common is that they were the result of a long process of working with and gaining the support of the affected community. This was not the case in Seattle.”
I could totally see the lying NYtimes taking what she said out of context and spinning it to try and cause division in the anti-war movement
biden has spent more time in service to the nation than most of us have been alive
You’re right, when Biden bravely stood up against the evils of desegregating schools I was just a twinkle in my father’s eye.
When Biden was passing the racist crime bill, building the most oppressive carceral system on the planet, I was just learning to ride a bike.
And when Biden bravely stood for the invasion of Iraq, I was but a young lad, learning to drive.
Clearly, with such service, I am the asshole for never wanting to vote for him as he purposely aids a genocide I get to watch in real time.
Yes, all over. Here is a long list of demonstrations both inside and outside the US
I think you should consider what you mean by the worth of the stock market as a whole. Do you mean value, or the money-price? Under bourgeois economics, there is no contradiction there because they believe that the medium of exchange creates new value in-itself. Even if it doesn’t make sense, that is the assumption 90% of economists are working under. Marxist economics would look at it differently… simply because the exchange-value of the overall stock market (reflected in its monetary prices) has grown outsized does not mean that it is reflective of its actual value. Exchange does not actually create value in-itself, value is created by socially-necissary-labor-time. Exchange-value is easily quantifiable, but it is not always reflective of the value embodied within an object itself. The exchange-value of the market reflected in price can be affected by fictitious capital and financial “innovations” that conceal growing levels of exploitation and usury.
Monetary supply is not the sole cause of inflation either, in fact inflation is often caused by an increase in prices itself. It sounds like maybe the contradiction that is bugging you is that the monetary supply has grown almost exponentially and this has caused inflation in assets, but only in the last few years has there been an increase in consumer prices that people commonly would describe as inflation. I think part of the disconnect that might be revealing is that part of the inflation we have experienced has been reflected disproportionately in the money-price of homes, but people who own homes have seen the increase in housing prices as “appreciation” of their home value and assets, not as inflation. So that is written off as an achievement for most individuals, while ignoring the social crisis it has caused for anyone who was born too late. Homes aren’t inherently worth more than they were 30 years ago, but the price of a home has grown much
Capital isn’t really allocated rationally under a capitalist system, outside of the logic of increasing profit. It is also best to remember that capital and profit, by their nature, are always expected to transfer wealth from workers to shareholders. Otherwise, they would be failing at their purpose. I think what you are rightly pointing out is that we are living in one of the greatest asset-bubbles of all time, and there are a number of reasons for this.
imo, I think a big one is “quantitative easing,” which was the “solution” to the financial crisis of 08. Once the state realized that they could print money infinitely while adopting a 0% interest rate (largely because of the petro-dollar) the federal reserve printed out trillions of dollars in stimulus that was confined largely to finance capital. This became a big draw to investors to pour even more capital into stocks and other assets as everything was growing because of large cash infusions. Stock buy-backs and fund-managers buying residential real estate with this additional cash grew the bubble even further, while additional piles of money went to increasingly speculative venture capital firms. Venture capital firms, flush with cash, began pouring money into “tech,” allowing for large companies to operate at a net-loss while adopting an increasingly financialized, or rent-seeking model. You see the consequences of this over time, people often refer to it as “enshittification” but the strategy is to use large “capital runways” to corner a particular part of the market (“disruption”) and then when they run out of cheap money either turn to the market based on its “potential” or create an even more expensive, often subscription based, model to continue to dictate the terms of the market.
The US tech industry is a vacuous industry, as many have pointed out, where tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of over-educated workers in the imperial core draw large salaries in unprofitable businesses set up for the distinct purpose of being bought by a larger competitor or venture firm. This also has a contradictory effect of taking other jobs, outside of software development and computer infrastructure, and lowering the pay of work that traditionally was able to support social reproduction… But US tech appears to be a giant rube-gold berg device to obfuscate and mystify the increasing exploitation and predatory rent-seeking behavior of US capital. The mystique of defining it as “tech” appears to be a superstructural development, where people are fed a vision of a better world through technological development, but where they have actually entered into an economic arrangement that seems to have more characteristics of peonage than a reproletarianization of the imperial core. I think this is what some people are trying to call “neo-feudalism” but idk if I would support the claim that this is a economic system that is distinct enough to break from what we would describe as capitalism/imperialism. (and I am not sure that that is what all proponents of “neofeudalism” are really getting at either).
anyway, this is my take on the asset bubble, but idk if I am an expert really, and I would love to be corrected and learn more
Good thing I allegedly could pirate everything they make 
Yeah, I think this just also misunderstands the definition (or popular definition) of a ceasefire as a stoppage of hostilities by both sides in a conflict. So it wouldn’t make sense for that to be the outcome of Israel being found guilty of genocide, as Palestinian resistance is legal under international law. I know Palestine isn’t a recognized party to the conflict, but the popular slogan for a ceasefire is being used here by imperialist narratives to make it seem like the ICJ ruled in Israel’s favor by not demanding one… whereas it isn’t clear that that would be the outcome (according to popular understanding of what a ceasefire means) if Israel were found guilty of the crime. The court asked Israel that they should stop committing a genocide, but instead the press is reporting that the court “stopped short of calling for a ceasefire” and to “prevent a genocide” instead of stopping their actions (even though the court literally did say that afaik)
isn’t this the same group that went to Cuba and snubbed Diaz-Canal, met with “dissidents” and then wrote a lengthy article about how Cuba was bad and won’t listen to other voices on “the left?”