MarxMadness [comrade/them]

Wonder what the real death/casualty count is, and how long they can keep it under wraps.

So you can milk him

Vagueposting? In this economy?

I could be a billionaire if someone gives me a billion dollars

It’s a really easy idea to drop in a conversation with libs and have them shrug and say “yeah, shit, I guess you’re right.”

Not a fan of this for a couple of reasons.

1. I have poor handwriting, especially if I’m trying to jot down a bunch of stuff for ~1 hour straight. Being able to read your notes later is pretty important.
2. Sometimes a lecture or discussion goes over a topic it initially covered 10 minutes earlier. Being able to go up the page and add another line on a word document makes notes far easier to follow than drawing arrows or filling in the margins on a real page.
3. A big part of education is learning how to learn – stuff like paying attention and self-discipline. Today, that includes learning how to manage your interactions with devices.
4. I can space out just fine without a computer anyway.

Spitballing here:

• If a variety of people with various degrees of leftist credibility all raise a similar idea, it at least shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
• How easy is it to fool someone who’s 17 or 18?
• “I was propagandized” is not an absolution from all personal responsibility, but when the vast majority of entertainment and cultural/political/religious leaders in the U.S. tell people joining the military is fine (or even noble), that carries some weight.
• Education is a huge part of building a political movement, and education implies your audience doesn’t have all the right answers to start.
• It’s really hard to think of revolutionary movements that did not have a lot of help from people who once worked for the enemy. Maybe Cuba?
• It’s really easy to think of examples of revolutionary movements that took revolutionary stances on how they treated even potential enemy turncoats. Mao: “Our policy towards prisoners captured from the Japanese, puppet or anti-Communist troops is to set them all free, except for those who have incurred the bitter hatred of the masses and must receive capital punishment and whose death sentence has been approved by the higher authorities.”
• There’s a contradiction between identifying structural problems and attributing them to the capitalist class, but also insisting on harsh treatment of low-level individual servants of the capitalist class.
• There’s a contradiction between leftist views on criminal justice generally and an insistence on harsh treatment of those same low-level servants of capitalism.
• Telling a bunch of guys with guns that they deserve to die and there’s nothing they can do to change that will get them to continue to fight. The way to get them to quit is to tell them there’s a way they can go home.
• The gap between the harshest rhetoric and actually trying to build a real-world movement reminds me of this line from Parenti: “They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.”

I “get” the genocide denial in that I understand the vast, decades-long propaganda effort that led to it.

But claiming Pahlavi was somehow chosen by Iranians? What? Monarchs don’t devise their claim from popular support, the last time his family was in control the populace revolted… even if you’re in the camp that the legitimate government must be overthrown, it’s a head scratcher.

Bullshit

Today it’s worth $0

Ha great point.

For minor personal computing, “eh it partially works OK” is extremely annoying, but maybe worth it if it’s dirt cheap. For anything more complex or important, that level of unreliability is an enormous net negative no matter how low the cost.

I’m closing the Delaware River to gabagool shipping

“Those poor repressed Chinese people don’t even know what Tank Man is”

http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/

I’m not an anarchist, but this is plainly wrong, and a poor response even if it applies to twitter anarchists. There’s plenty to say here about how anti-imperialists should view imperfect leaders in states being actively targeted by imperialists. Ham-handed leftist infighting misses the mark.

Democrats will scream “you killed people” at potential voters before turning around and voting for a candidate who promises to kill the exact same people. They’ll then wonder why a morally bankrupt party failed to successfully browbeat voters with a (piss poor) moral argument.

You don’t give a shit about Palestinians (or you’d be disgusted by voting for Harris), but at least recognize how bad of politics this is.

May have been part of internal deportations around WWII, and they’re being loose with the subject matter. Or maybe they’re from children who in fact committed violent crimes.

“Imprisoned” does not imply children were forced to do hard labor, and children have been forced to do hard labor in all sorts of contexts, so the concept isn’t outlandish. It does seem very likely that there’s some important context missing.

They care about the economy and being racist; this is just a contradiction in their belief system.

I’m not saying this should be reflexively opposed. I’m saying that if a movement is accepting help from some of the worst people in the world, that movement deserves a great deal of skepticism.

Who here is just pro-revolution independent of context? Violence is a tactic, not an end unto itself.

If your revolution is being propped up by fascist state that wants nothing more than to kill a bunch of your fellow citizens and steal your oil, there are some serious open questions about what your revolution seeks to achieve, and for whom.