Russell Brands “Revolution” was one of the first left wing books i read. I was trying to get off heroin at the time and, I guess just because he spoke so openly about his struggles with the drug and seemed to have come out of it alright, he was almost a kind of role model, at least in that respect. Once I got into Marxism it became clear to me that he was a grifter with no real answers, even when he was still on the left, and I haven’t thought of him for many years. The sad thing is how obvious his predatory behaviour seems in hindsight - all those uncomfortable women laughing at him in interviews so that they don’t lose their jobs, his rapey jokes, the obvious narcissism and getting off on crossing peoples boundaries. And that was the model presented to us back then for how to be successful with women - that kind of superficial gamey aggression. Nowdays with people like Tate it’s even more insane. Anyway I hope he gets his due.

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Isn’t there a problem with this reasoning that if the average VC could’ve left the jungle to go home to a social democracy in the wealthiest country in the world, some of them at least might’ve done that? I mean that’s basically why Marx’s idea that revolution would begin in the industrialised West never worked out. But there is also the problem, what is a Western revolutionary going to die for? Because a Vietnamese communist might figure, even if I die, at least we have a chance of winning the war and my comrades will be free. Historically slaves have submitted more often than they’ve rebelled, even when their situation is hopeless. Where there’s been organisation and a chance of success, - as with the servile wars in Ancient Rome for example - they have rebelled. What chance of success did communists have in the US?

Looks like former hero of the vibes based left Russell Brand is about to get me-too’d, interestingly some comedians on twitter have been saying it’s been well know for years that he is a rapist, and that his shift to the alt-right was a fucking long term strategy to survive it eventually coming out

David Bowie infamously made use of Nazi aesthetics, although I’m pretty he just intended it as a sort of commentary on pop culture celebrity worship, his actual politics were at least left-adjacent. Generally speaking though I think a lot of mainstream rock music has been a celebration of white capitalist culture masquerading as subversion, so there is inevitably a lot of dodgy politics in there.

I mean people even lie to themselves. A lot of temporarily embarrassed millionaires out there. Lots of ‘middle class’ people struggling to afford food as well.

I don’t think sex tourism is necessarily the major component, at least not always. Certainly not in Vietnam where every town, most of which Westerners never go to, have brothels. There is also a big trade in sex trafficking in China for example, where poor Vietnamese women (usually children) will be sold to rich Chinese men. Western sex tourism is a relatively small aspect of the wider problem.
I guess my basic assumption in regard to sex work and drug use is that they are going to happen regardless of attempts to prohibit them, there is plenty of evidence for that, and so they need to be controlled and afforded the best protections possible, which is only possible through legalisation. It’s about harm minimisation rather than perfection.

I trialled taking dexies for a few months and they made me unbearably horny, anxious, and my concentration got worse. Obviously for anyone there will a period of adjustment, but my understanding is that for people with adhd and that respond well to the drug, they really respond well, and they feel ‘normal’ and more calm and levelled out than they would without taking them. Having said that, I’ve met people who take these drugs and claim they feel ‘normal’ despite the fact that they really do seem quite obviously high.

Wow this dude would be really dangerous if he had an audience, it’s lucky he’s just some nobody on twitter

I agree with most of your points and in regards to drug use, I did mean that we should be pro legalisation rather than pro drugs as such. Cartel violence is a product of prohibition, the DEA are known to co-operate with cartels and US intelligence clearly have some significant degree of involvement in the drug trade. Legalisation wouldn’t mean freely distributing fentanyl, it would just mean supplying addicts with a restricted daily amount of their chosen drug and providing rehabilitation. Where it’s been done the evidence shows that it works, and within the West at least there’s no need to fear such a policy would be getting ahead of the people.

There is certainly room to criticise AES states on social policy. Vietnam still criminalises prostitution, for example, despite sex work being extremely common, and thereby denies sex workers the protections legality would give them. Likewise the argument is often made that China’s drug policies should be excused because of the Opium wars, when at its worst China still had a lower percentage of opiate addicts than many Western countries do today.

Do you have your own theory on how/ why 9/11 happened?

For arguments sake, let’s say Marxist theory can be neutral in its implications for these kinds of social questions. The more we can all be on the same page as to how we answer them, the more effective we will be. I’m saying that even if a Western communist is socially conservative in their personal views, it makes strategic sense for them, and all of us, to endorse and pursue a socially liberal communism. Given these questions are secondary to our primary aims anyway, it shouldn’t be difficult to make the compromise.

Within the West there aren’t any serious attempts to link social conservatism to communism that I’m aware of, outside of online grifts like “maga-communism”, although the use of the term ‘tankie’ has been remarkably successful in linking serious communists to these grifters. Outside the West there are conservative communist movements though, the Russian National Bolsheviks for example.
But in a more general sense; there are, for example, Maoists who are strongly opposed to drug use, Trotskyists opposed to trans rights, etc., - even Marxists-Leninists turning up to rallies with placards of Stalin is arguably giving out the wrong image. We also have the historical legacy of social conservatism in many AES states, and perhaps we need to more actively combat that. I know I’ve talked to sex workers before who have the impression that communists are opposed to them. In any case it seems like liberalism is a kind of back door through which we could be gaining support in the West, instilling the idea that we are the ones who will give you a society that is truly humanist and free. It would be much easier to attract converts in this way than, say, deprogramming poor working class westerners into understanding that they have a relative affluence stemming from third world exploitation.

Some conspiracies, like JFK, are extremely plausible. 9/11 is not one of them. Any event is going to have a bunch of weird anomalies and coincidences. Was the BBC supposed to be in on this conspiracy or something?

I thought there was basically no-one in that section of the pentagon when it was hit, it was undergoing renovations or something. And you don’t need a missile to destroy documents

There should have been a massive project to install air filtration devices everywhere. I saw a study posted on here that showed basic off the shelf units were effective. It would’ve cost less than all the subsidies that were handed out to businesses. It could’ve made tracking viable as a means to ending the pandemic. Everything was bet on the success of the pharma industry, which made them a lot of money but also turned out to be totally insufficient.

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