Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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It’s concerning the amount of times I end up in a discussion on Nazism and the other person says ‘but they were left wing. They had socialist in their name’
“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is an american, for profit, outsourced genocide contractor.” If that doesn’t get them you say “My name is Zeus. Do you think I can’t shit lightning bolts? Anyone can name anything anything.”
So in the past week in The Netherlands at least 3 women were killed by a man but since the suspects were (most likely) Dutch, there is no massive outrage, no Dutch flags in football stadiums, whatever like there was some weeks ago when a refugee killed a girl. All of a sudden we don’t have a femicide problem anymore it seems.
One of my coworkers grew up in Soviet Latvia and yesterday she was talking about her school period and how it was kinda strict but at the same time gave opportunities to develop, and one of my other coworkers asked: ‘and if you didn’t listen? GuLaG? Haha’ and she looked at him like: no that’s not at all how it worked. The gulag wasn’t that much of a thing.
Hope everyone can keep up with the goals you’ve set out for yourselves, has a pleasant week, and stays safe in these troubled times.
As always, communism will win.
Thank you comrade. Have a pleasant week! o7
o7
One of our party members, Hanne Bosselaers, a doctor, has been illegally kidnapped from international waters by Israel
Got left in charge of making protest signs for the upcoming strike on the 14th in Brussels. Did it together with my other young colleagues. Most of us are communist or anarchist so I think the signs became a bit more radical than they wanted.
Calling our prime minister a genocidal fuck, lots of anti NATO signs, destroy billionaires, etc. It’s going to be fun handing them over to the old heads at work lmao.
Slay, Guevara
There is a real lesson here. “If you have to collaborate with libs at a protest be sure you are the one making the signs”
And it works, kinda. Because the NATO signs sparked some discussion with some other colleagues and I got to explain to them how NATO bad basically.
The last week of news has made me so angry. The UK going even more authoritarian on the right to protest, the treatment of the activists Israel illegally detained, the brownshirts of America waging war against civilians.
I wish I could do more but I am also really struggling to find a group in the UK with their shit together.
It has really been infuriating to witness and feel so powerless!
Got some new insights in the planned reform in our unemployment benefit system that will be implemented soon and it is shit. It is truly made by people who have no clue whatsoever of how it works. But in the end thousands of people will lose benefits and that’s what counts to them. Keeping us under their thumb.
What surprises me more is how little resistance it gets. Same with retirement funds reform. Like, wake up guys. This is affecting YOU. YOU are closer to unemployment than you think. And then it’s too late. YOUR retirement money is being taken away as we speak. YOU have to work longer. All the while billions will go to the defence industry annually.
The passiveness of it all is infuriating.
It’s sad, but the same thing happened in Brazil. What made the retirement reform win there was basically the lack of resistance of the organized left (since Dilma had been ousted and Lula was in prison), lack of politization of this matter by the same organized left, and the big politization on the right side of the politics (austerity and free market discourse was in a height).
I think the (actual) left needs to do a better job in doing agitprop work in social networks (including places like Lemmy), to improve politization in the matter, and then turning that politization into mobilization. It’s hard to move around when you feel that you are alone, and you feel that the minimal thing you still have (your job) can be taken from you.
The Beijing Military Museum:
Sometimes I feel like if I were to go to the media I could have them write such a devastating piece on the unions that they would not recover from it.
I would never but fuck me do they make working there miserable, hypocrite bunch of shits.
Probably doesn’t help that the unions aren’t explicitly anticapitalist
Is there even a difference between so called social liberalism and social democracy anymore? Seems like almost all socdem parties in Europe can call themselves social liberal as well
No. Different names, same bs.
In France, the prime minister has handed in his resignation something like 12 hours after nominating the new government.
There have now been four prime ministers (Attal, Barnier, Bayrou, Lecornu) since Macron refused to recognize the result of the parliamentary snap election he called in summer 2024. Macron has stayed true to his original motto since 2017, which is not to compromise on anything ever, even with potential allies.
Polls in France systematically disadvantage the main left-wing party LFI and its probable presidential candidate for 2027, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Even so, he is currently polling at 15%, indicating that the coming presidential election will very likely be a contest between the left and the far right.
Has it even been a month since the last one lmao Could you elaborate on the “systematic disadvantage”?
Back in 2022 before the first round the highest LFI got in the polls was 18.6%, and they got 21.95% in the actual election, so that’s an underestimate by at least 3%. First round was April 10th, and before April, most polls were giving LFI around 14-15%. Only one pollster (Cluster 17) had given LFI 16% once (so it seemed plausible that this was just an outlier on the high side of things). Have a look for yourself, and look at the numbers at the end of March: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_sondages_sur_l’élection_présidentielle_française_de_2022
Pollsters want to demoralize us. It would be foolish of us to believe them.
daily reminder that the nobel prize is selected by a committe appointed by the norwegian goverment.
In 2016 the Belgian government decided to lower the tax percentage on the employer side, meaning they are paying less taxes on the wages they pay, effectively making sure the state gets 8,6 billion euro less in tax revenue each year. Taxes that paid for welfare, retirement, healthcare, education, etc.
Now, nearly ten years later, the same figures that proposed the tax cuts are now making sure we get budget cuts in that same social security because we now have a deficit.
I think it is a clear example of how much the people at the top are planning ahead to fuck us over.
This is what I posted on October 7, 2023:
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2258613
At the time that I wrote that, I had no idea about the raid on the ‘State of Israel’ until evening, when a friend on the telephone told me about the incident. At the time, I naïvely believed that the worst that was likely to happen was the IOF bombarding Palestine for a few days as retaliation. As we all know, the full aftermath was even worse than that, to put it mildly.
Yet it is having this context in mind that this otherwise mundane thread feels so much differently than it could have: there I was, talking about the differences between two Torot with an almost youthful fascination, blissfully unaware of what was going on in the Levant and the atrocities that would plague the region for two years. I almost envy the simplicity that our lives had back then. I could easily talk about the mildly interesting features in Judaism or Jewish cultures without feeling like I was neglecting anybody.
♥️🫂
