From the outside, it sometimes genuinely seems better for the world if Americans’ living standards dropped significantly instead of improving so that they are more willing to struggle against their government. When people are doing well enough, they are willing to fight wars in Iraq over 20cents a gallon. If they were doing worse, they would be materially incentivized and forced by their circumstances to maybe reconsider the whole arrangement.

Sounds heartless, but its pretty easy to imagine billions being much better off if the measly 300 million in America just got their standards dropped by half (caveat, this requires thr bourgeois to maintain levels of wealth, otherwise they will be seen as also hurt by something and the American people will just support another genocide to get their cheap shit back)

My comment sounds a bit more snarky than I intended. I am very disappointed in many things, but Im not American so was genuinely wondering if DSA marxists still support him, are supporting him due to democratic centralism (DSA doesn’t do that, right?), or were trying to win out as a faction now opposed to Mamdani’s failures.

But your ‘the US is ripe for revolution but elections can build class consciousness’ argument is still missing a ton of steps, parts that I’ve yet to find on any publication from DSA, how one gets from social democratic concessions won through elections to people fighting for ownership of the reins of the political economy. I think that gap is scary and difficult, and that theres a hope which bridges it in people’s minds. But that hope has been historically misplaced many times.

The people that are now questioning ‘what is socialism, then’ due to these lukewarm policies are not meaningfully closer to class consciousness because they’re still asking that question entirely within the framework of imperially allowed ideologies, namely, the winning of concessions for value directly stolen. Muddling class conscious building work with social democratic policies does not seem effective to me. How do they get from Mamdani to learning about what it means to be exploited and how ending exploitation means not just getting benefits but controlling the production and distribution at the outset? Is that something DSA can focus on now, or is a bigger election the focus instead? Is there meaningful enough opposition available to electoralists to ever make that shift? Are DSA marxists relying on pure debate to end up at the reins of the party or is there some material incentive seen which will force that within the party, other than the general force towards socialism that history provides?

But these are concessions so doing little to develop anything which should be considered socialism, no? Im not opposed to concessions, of course, but they are often strategically inept to fight for.

Well, as long as he understand centrism as I do–Stalin, located squarely between Deng and Mao–then I’m ok with this, though find it a bit underdeveloped.

Where are our DSA comrades? Any word of regret or did this fit the strategy? And has he genuinely improved thing in new York (but that would only be concessions, not worthy of being called a step towards socialism)

I guess this gets to a deeper problem: foods developed somewhere which are adopted elsewhere despite the shifted material basis for the food. Hummus in the Mediterranean was developed where sesame seed oil was cheap and easy, but when it other areas it becomes more luxurious. Maybe when we do this process, the natural adaptation should be more prominent and given a new name? Just spitballing here. But i get where you’re coming from. Where i live its fairly cheap and easy to bulk up on

Don’t bother with Tahini?? Seems like that’s a necessary condition for hummus lol

Again, you’re simplifying something in such a pessimistic way. Iran and Russia are in very different situations. Russia is correct to ignore the attempts at stalling-negotiations because they are in a position of military victory and strength. If the US was attacking Russia directly with its own might, this would be different. Iran is not in a militarily dominant position, instead one of strategic positioning to cause its attacker pain. Completely different strategies and tactics are needed.

Ridiculous simplification. There is so obviously a middle ground which Iran needs. Where enough funds are made to maintain internal stability and defense capabilities but enemy economic conditions continue to deteriorate. ‘Zero sum’ is a terrible summation of that situation. Iran allowing 1/4 the flow, for example, but profiting enough to quell the rising internal economic problems, still means capitalist nations around the globe will be struggling to maintain conditions.

A point of leverage isn’t binary, especially not in this case. American capitalists are going to push to end the war even if Iran allows 80% flow once the material impact of these restrictions is actually calculated into businesses. A 20% drop in oil through hormuz (compared to 2023) is already enough to cause a recession.

Your pessimism is unfounded in this case.

list of flexible phrases (with some other options to explore in the permutations):

-known instance (swept-under-the-rug instance, unverified instance)

-military (paramilitary, police, civilian)

-GPS jamming (EMP, communications jamming)

-played a role (did, caused, was behind, happened close to)

-downing (exploding, grounding, disappearing)

-civilian plane (terrorist-linked plane, unknown plane, plane claimed to be civilain by [insert enemy country])

-in US airspace (in the world, over this specific mountain range, in civilian airspace)

I like the combination:

‘It’s the first unverified instance where paramilitary EMP happened close to an exploding terrorist-linked plane above the Mississippi River’

or the simple removal of most of it, which the writers hope you imagine when you read it:

‘It’s the first instance where US GPS jamming happened close to a non-combatant plane’

Crawling is a new phenomenon that is super fun and amazing. Everyone tried to make it sound scary, but damn it, it’s just fun and nice. We removed all the dangerous stuff, now it’s just slightly dirty things we try to have him avoid. So I’m able to let him just crawl and explore without issue. I think for some parents , this is hard only because they refuse to change their house.

Im not demanding perfect victims, I’m demanding revolutionaries. If you’ve been talking about random Palestinians as individuals, I couldn’t care less about that. Sure, they can be whatever. I’m talking about victims as organized resistance, that should be correct or corrected. The individuals should be then corrected by those structures where possible and necessary

Then no, I think you’re just wrong. A victim who misunderstands their oppression should be critiqued for such for both moral and strategic reasons. They should be helped to understand it better to better resist and overthrow their oppressors. The only exception is when their misunderstanding presents no contradiction with the strategy of liberation. But I think here it is reasonable to think thats not the case. Either their oppression is supported by structure of the vast majority of Jewish institutions and thus their liberation requires a significant change in that structure, or it doesn’t and they can win by focusing only on Israeli zionists. And I think the latter is a much worse analysis.

How do you square allowing Palestinians to have a less nuanced view (implied by you directly) on the situation? It seems you’re sneaking in some infantilizing view of Palestinians here. I think that Palestinians can completely understand the system which oppresses them, which includes the direct support of the vast majority of Jewish institutions, organizations, and cultural identity across the world. Westerners aren’t capable of understanding this better because of distance or such.

I don’t think I can really find the perfect answer here, but I’m skeptical whenever someone makes it seem like westerners should just be better at understanding it holistically or something. That’s ridiculous. If the split you insinuate does exist, then either we westerners know better and should inform the Palestinians (big doubts), or we should learn that they are correct and figure out how to act with thay knowledge, while protecting any and all supporting their liberation regardless of religion or race. I clearly lean towards the latter, and am sensitive to how dangerous that rhetoric can sound (is close to conflating Judaism with all individual jews and with zionisn). But I think there is some sublation possible here, and I am not the expert to find it, unfortunately.

Damn hope he got a lot of compensation for ruining his life. It’s gonna be hard to get a job and be safe after this

Worse the capitalists themselves are the high priests. These shitt economists are the low priests

Oh just saw your other post, thanks for the clarification.

I deleted my annoyed post

Thats interesting to just drop. Without divulging, is there a reason I should not listen or is this just personal? You can at least give that, or someone here is gonna assume allegations, which you might not be making

I guess I mean like: a drone is useful for a war like Russia-Ukraine for reasons that wouldn’t be really relevant for defense of leftists. I feel like I’ll be fed-posting if I go too much deeper in my descriptions, but just the scenarios that communists are preparing for defense aren’t much similar to the scenarios where drones are now dominating. But that might be a paradigm shift thats just not yet clear in every case…

Realistically, can this tactic work at 3-D printing levels in homes? Sounds to me a bit idealistic to think that communists could effectively utilize home 3-D printing in such a way. But I havent thought too much about it. I guess not any less realistic than mass individually produced guns

Couldn’t get the audio to work (that happens more often on tankietube for me?) But what an interesting person. I saw nothing specifically indicating they are a communist, but idk how you can come to all those conclusions and not be a communist to some extent.