at the same time as ever more nuclear brinksmanship against Russia at the expense of who knows how many hundred thousands people on and between both ‘sides’ of the shitshow in Ukraine. THIS is the “damage control” candidate in the US?

lmfao I’m voting PSL fuck all of these people. Democrats going around congress twice to shovel as many guns and bombs as they can hoping Israel finishes off Gaza before the elections, Trump only being different in that he’s open about the same; Palestinians have said both candidates and parties are the same for them, and they’ve been the same for us.

• “lesser evilism” and voting for the Democrats
• thinking liberal bourgeois ‘democracy’ is a solution against fascism
  (as if fascism is a person and can be “voted out,” as if all of the things Democrats are supposed to “save us from” wrt Trump aren’t still happening with no resistance, as if the Democrats aren’t outflanking the Republicans on the right of issues like immigration, and as if they aren’t just as genocidal and barely even bothering to play empty-rhetoric games to pretend otherwise, and as if both parties aren’t part of, financed by, and working for the capitalist class and petty bourgeois who historically back fascism anyway, when economic crises create threats against their system and status for which fascism is the system’s immune response against the rise of socialism. “first they came for the communists…”)

well except all the Nazis in Germany that were brought directly back into:

• Official posts within the federal government and its ministerial cabinets
• into the upper judiciary and magistrates
• into local governance
• elevated and hired into immense wealth in industry and finance, or just kept where they already were in industry and finance
• hired into forming the Nazi core of the West German intelligence and secret police agencies (which would become today’s German agencies) under the protective auspices of the OSS/CIA; who made extensive use of their networks of executioners and collaborators to prop up US-backed dictatorships and cartels and use as anti-communist stay-behind guerilla terrorists by the CIA and NATO (and brought into the CIA and FBI themselves, and into MI6 and Mossad)
• into German academia and universities as faculty and professors,
• to write western history books at the behest and with support of the US Army and OSS/CIA to sanitize themselves
• all those hired into NATO and into the EU
• into positions of power in West Germany (and all the NATO countries, helping in and helped by Gladio violently purging the communists) in such saturation and such impunity that it caused the formation of left wing militant groups that would assassinate and kidnap them.

but other than all of that though!

(And that’s not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the “Victims of Communism Foundation” which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet “Captive Nations Lobby” headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)

it’s notable how you “your side” is allowed to be a wide system of dispassionate material interests and power structures involved in seeking to overcome contradictions against its interests in callous yet rational competition; while the “other side” is a single cartoon comic book villain singlehandedly doing ‘all the bad things’ on an irrational whim for reasons of ‘vanity and cruelty’ I guess. And its people and their interests and opinions from the rural poor to the college liberal to the oligarch capitalist to the Prime Minister are only relevant to pity or otherwise also one-dimensionally criticize. I hope you analyze the ways in which you are conditioned toward orientalism and myopic essentializing that serves your own “side’s” imperialism by not recognizing and erasing the realities of other nations as just as complex and multifaceted as yours.

You’re carrying a colonial outlook to distill such a huge and diverse country with a massive population of its 150 different ethnic/national people groups and 20+ autonomous republics and all its various economic interests and players and political trends and history as in Russia to an idealist child’s comic book picture of one man’s “megalomania”. As the west not-so-coincidentally concocts this exact image for every country it tries to overthrow or attack, distilling them to ‘one crazy irrational madman dictator who only knows force’ and erasing the material existence and interests of the nation and its constituent classes and peoples and the history and context from which these things all arose as they exist. Which is very convenient then for “your side” to make it into whatever it wants.

Do you know what the Duma’s structure and role is, its party and factional makeup is and has been, what their members’ stances has been on topics like Ukraine since 2014, and what actions Putin has taken in accordance or against what they’ve been pushing for? Do you think its existence is just for show? You’ll be surprised on some points and maybe dig deeper. To really have true understanding of a country you’d have to also dig into the historical, social, political, and economic realities, trends, and topics in the country — and the contradictions, struggles, and syntheses between them over the years; and go past just 2014 to root these trends in their relevant circumstances experiences, struggles, transition periods, etc. from which they all arrived in their present form, on both a structural and people level. Optimally bolstered by some culture studies and language.

But learning about the RF’s federal governmental structure, and the Duma, and then the differences between the statements and actions of the Duma vs the Russian President’s statements and actions since 2014 is a starting point to start chipping away at this cartoon caricature notion you have, which is not rooted in reality. For any country on the planet. And you know this about your own country, but don’t extend the same humanity and respect toward other countries. It’s a very US American thing. Maybe if you don’t have the language skills you can also machine translate some stuff that they say themselves in their statements and speeches and congresses rather than dubbed 8 second snippets followed by 10 minutes of punditry on CNN too. And that’s just politics — history and economy is important too. And never forget about the people on the ground. In who they actually are, not who you’ve decided they are, or your media has told you they are.

to this day I still occasionally mutter “it never ends, this shit…”

honorable mention to New Marijuana Study Confirms Everyone Knows You’re High And You Will Be Stoned Forever

because when this was originally uploaded on their website it would play a slightly different version every time you opened the page. So you’d laugh and show your friends, so then even if your (allegedly) stoner ass hadn’t gotten tripped out the first time, while they’re watching it and laughing you’d start sweating.

Second honorable mention to “Is The Government Spying on Schizophrenics Enough?” But I’m honestly still not sure that one’s totally okay, even if I still laugh every single time I watch it. I’m not that type of mentally ill but have had people close to me who struggle enough with it and the very nature of the disorder is such that even though I laugh I’ve always at the same time felt it treads very much on the line.

Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport

And a ‘from-16-years-back’ broadside at the US approaching November:

‘No Values Voters’ Search For Most Evil Candidate

1. That’s not what entryism is. Entryism isn’t “voting democrat candidates who support xyz in primaries.” Entryism is infiltrating an organization’s membership with communists(or what have you), with the intent to change the basic proportional makeup of its membership ranks, and so change its interior political composition, and so its exterior action.

2. Entryism is explicitly and categorically denounced by every serious ML as having proven historically and politically ineffective at best, and actively counterproductive and opportunist at worst and most common by far; and has been in explicit terms criticized as such for a century. Saying “Surely you’ve heard of entryism?” to Marxists is like saying “Surely you’ve heard of filling masks with lavender to keep away the miasma?” to an epidemiologist.

3. The point mentioned in #2 is by a factor of 100 extra true for an organization like the democratic party, which is (just like the Republican party) a monstrous behemoth of leagues of multi-generational dynastic establishment careerist ghouls, thieves, racketeers, and murderers from multi-billionaire elite university family empires; whose entire operations are financed, advised, organized, and run by and for the richest imperialists in the world, with uncountable streams of both open channel money and dark money from private billionaires, banks, industrial monopolies (fossil fuels, pharma, agribusiness, etc.), arms dealers, conglomerate Super PACS, shady Think-tanks and “NGOs,” and the Israel lobby. Obama’s cabinet was hand-picked by Citigroup. Biden has appointed all the most heinous neocons and war criminals he could find, even bringing back convicted massacrists like Elliot Abrams; and hiring the most corrupt people he could find, such as a Chevron lawyer who defended the destruction of the Amazon and poisoning of Indigenous people to head his Environmental executive. All while outflanking the Republicans on the right of many issues including immigration.

**

The Democrats actively benefit just like the Republicans from hyper-restricted 2-corporate-party system, proven by them, currently as we speak, sending out leagues of dark-money Super-PAC-financed lawyers to every state they can to try to purge 3rd parties off the ballots; actively killing democracy. This is their goal and interest, because it is the goal and interest of their donors. They have no interest in a different or better world and never will. Even someone as milquetoast as Bernie ran into endless smears and obstruction and undermining and got nowhere and has capitulated more and more to the right wing by hitching his boat to this circus. The liberal darlings “the squad” have each capitulated or even become active careerists and attack-dogs for the establishment imperialists against alternatives and progressives, barring Ilhan Omar who has faced endless shit and isolation even from the rest of that coward group of “progressive” dems, to say nothing of the establishment that actually runs the show with their army of equally-careerist factory-stamped liberal interns at their beck and call, pipelined from upscale colleges with PoliSci degrees to do whatever bidding they want.

The Democrats are not going to change for anyone but their donors and have proven it for decades; and they are structurally incapable of being budged internally toward anything remotely resembling democracy or socialism. Entryism to the democratic party is beyond a dead end. It would It would be more effective and principled to vote third party and continually elevate a working class party (Like the PSL) and visibly starve the democrats of votes for their failures and betrayals and making it known that is the reason; which would force a political reorientation of the democrats if they ever want power again. This necessary reorientation is impossible within the Democratic party structures, so the ruling class would have to figure out to desperately float a reformist “labor party” or “progressive party” to capture people being funneled to the PSL socialists, and this reformist party would receive an influx of the less-far-right careerist liberals from the Democrats fleeing to the new party “like rats from a sinking ship;” while the Republicans and remaining establishment Democrats proper inevitably join together in a coalition like David Lloyd George’s Conservative-Liberal coalition, or like Macron’s doing with the fascists in France. It’s not even much of a leap for them compared to the existent state of things — they’ve already been converging for decades and most of us have already come to feel the effects of it.

And this way by elevating the PSL, a real working class party who have a broader picture for revolutionary change than limiting to parliamentary dog-and-pony shows against the richest most evil people on the planet, you’re actually helping the ground-up elevation of meaningful on-the-ground working class politics which speak to the 35-50% who are so disillusioned and disenfranchised by the lies and corruption and bloodthirst of the corporate-imperialist duopoly-of-exploiters that they don’t even vote — and activating them into actual meaningful political movement-building and action with a revolutionary long-term perspective, while forcing the establishment’s hand to intercede how it can, highlighting the contradictions and failures of the system. Instead of finding new ways to capitulate to it (which are actually the same ways people have been capitulating to it for a century).

Claudia and Karina of PSL are the only decent choice I see right now. Stein and West are also better than either duopolists policy-wise and between them I’d probably prefer Stein as she seems to have more political experience and acumen (though I’d probably like West better as a person and compatriot). But for my vote it’s PSL.

The problem I see is that not only will we never ‘get a 3rd choice’ if nobody votes for existing 3rd choices due to fear over the duopoly entrenchment, but also the duopoly has had and will continue to have zero reason to ever stop becoming more and more fascist and ignoring all of the rest of us, because they can comfortably say ‘they’re going to vote for us anyway because we’re not [other person/party]’ and wouldn’t even be wrong. Dems can just keep flying to the right while talking about how bad Republicans are and pretending Fascism is a person and can be “voted out;” rather than it being a historical trend, which both parties are converging into the apex of. A trend which arises regardless of the party in power, when the natural economic downturns and crises of capitalism produce hardship and push the ‘aspiring capitalist’ ‘small business owner’ petty bourgeois toward precarity-and-fall into the increasingly-destitute working class. So then the most reactionary portion of this traditionally upper-caste group, humiliated by the ‘indignity’ against what they are accustomed and feel they ‘deserve,’ become radicalized. They get set against internal minorities and external ‘threats’ (scapegoated to divide society into vertical segments rather than by its horizontal class relations, thus preventing working people from uniting against the common ruling class enemy) and against the communists; who during the same capitalist crises also grow their ranks among the exploited working classes in all nations and too become radicalized and fed up by the ever-worsening state of things.

It is a trend of the big capitalists actively supporting, and the capitalist politicians half-supporting-half-willingly-capitulating to, a movement of the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire’ upper-caste petty-bourgeois radicals seeking to violently reassert and deepen the pre-existing capitalist social relations and societal divisions, along the lines of a mythologized vision of the “proper natural order of things,” vote or no vote. The poem started “first they came for the communists…” Because the communists are the ones who, also radicalized by the worsening conditions on the other end, instead set out to OVERTHROW and abolish the existing social relations and divisions, which means the big capitalists and the upper-caste petty bourgeois forever lose out on their previous status and claim to positions of power over the masses. They’re the only meaningful opposition and alternative, hence the adage “socialism or barbarism.” And the adage “fascism is capitalism in decay.”

If we accept the Democrats’ dangerously ahistorical notion of what fascism is, and allow that to cow all of us to the left of Thatcher into voting for the Democrats without fail, where they never risk losing votes even for prosecuting the most-televised genocide in history and becoming increasingly just as fascist as Republicans over the last decades; then the Democrats objectively have no reason to try to even pretend catering to or pandering to the center-left liberals and socialists. There’s no need for a political reorientation to recapture votes that were never lost or risked being lost in the first place. This is why the duopoly serves the ruling class so well, and why it seems to emerge so regularly. But it has had ruptures and reorientations before, even in the US, due to various strata losing faith or no longer having their interests served by the parties to which they were previously constituent. The Federalist Party doesn’t exist anymore. The Whig party was formed by conservative elements that abandoned the emerging Democrat party, forming coalitions with various third parties, then itself ruptured and split. In order to stay in power, politicians were forced to reorient due to the changing material conditions and expressed interests of the voter base (which is today FAR more expansive and wielded by more actual working people [see: any] than it had been during those early reorientations).

Another historical example I found was in the British parliamentary situation around WWI when I got to chapter 9 rereading “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Lenin. The duopoly then was the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party with Labour being a minor but growing third party – but various material and political realities activating support for Labour led to “a number of Liberals… deserting to the Labour party like rats from a sinking ship.” And in the Liberal party’s ever-rightward slide and their ultimate allegiance being to the ruling class and their capitalist (and imperialist) system, the liberal bourgeoisie, under the leadership of Liberal politician David Lloyd George, formed a Liberal-Conservative coalition together “abandoning the historical system of “two parties” (of exploiters), which has been hallowed by centuries of experience and has been extremely advantageous to the exploiters, and [considering] it necessary for these two parties to join forces against the Labour Party.”

In the USA 35-50% of eligible people don’t even vote. If that isn’t proof of complete loss of faith in the duopoly, as well as prime fertile ground for activating disenfranchised people through doing the work ourselves to uplift real working class parties like the PSL into the national consciousness, who concretely advocate for empowering the least empowered, I don’t know what is. This is how you force a political reorientation in the electoral system from the bottom up and lay bare the duopoly’s true interests; and more importantly, from there continue movement-building among masses of now-politcally-engaged working people organizing for real work to improve our lot; like forming worker and tenants unions, pushing to end the forever wars, to nationalize the more-vacant-houses-than-homeless that exist while people freeze on the streets, and in general confront the impediments to changing society and the world for the better, things which BOTH duopoly parties stand in the way of. Worse, even — both duopoly parties are active agents in all of its worsening for the benefit and profit of the big capitalist donors they work for.

Even the relatively small movements of “Undecided electors” and Michigan Arab voters demanding better of Democrats, as well as the Democrats’ dark-money Super PACs sending teams of high-paid lawyers to purge small 3rd parties from the ballot (“Democratic Party” my ass lol, I’d write in 3rd party out of spite at that point) shows that withholding votes or voting elsewhere is an impactful course of action. They are scared of exactly this, that being “better than the other guy” is not good enough. Why not show them they are right to be scared? It’s not like under Biden and his cop VP who’s now running for President things stopped spiraling into fascist hell domestically and abroad. Cop City is happening under democrat president and local governance, where they are tearing up Atlanta’s only nature grounds to build a fascist police academy (on the plot of an old slave prison) to crush worker protests. The cops murdered a protestor and initiated the largest RICO case ever (originally created to fight organized crime), against these protestors to punish all of them together and even people who were organizing bail funds.

To say nothing of women’s right to choose, book burnings, anti-LGBTQ acts all still happening under democrats. Abortion rights and LGBTQ civil protections could have been passed and codified when Obama’s Democrat regime had both houses of Congress. Biden could’ve been forcefully pressuring the expansion of the court (after Obama gave away a seat in capitulation no less) but instead cowers from “politicizing the court” as if that ship isn’t sailed and past the horizon. They don’t do this stuff, because they don’t actually care about any of us. They care about appealing to their donors, monopolizing our votes, and selling us shit. Abortion rights being under threat is actually great for them, because they can drum up fear and anger about the Republicans. LGBTQ people’s rights being attacked is great for them, because they can weep crocodile tears and shake their fists about how evil Republicans are and “if only we get voted in this time we’ll solve it!!!” while doing little to nothing to fight it but occasional unenforceable half measures and symbolic gestures of “support”. This is all happening and increasing anyway, because fascism isn’t a person, or even a party. It’s a trend which grows out of capitalist crisis as a class movement. And Democrats and Republicans are both among and represent the same class which supports fascism, historically and now. And they’re doing everything they can to demonstrate that fact to all of us.

To my mind our votes are supposed to be earned, not taken for granted, and unless we put them toward who actually earns them through deed and not just two-faced empty word, and withhold them from those who don’t, none of the ruling class has to even pretend to remember or care about that fact.

I didn’t see the community and was already primed to say no half measures! abolish cars! and instead have functioning public transport (and if elon musk sabotages it like he did with california high speed rail he gets launched into the mars on his own garbage shuttle). Then there can also be housing layouts that aren’t atomizing and reactionary social-engineering projects to facilitate white flight and capital extraction from cities like the hellscape that is the suburbs; where people are conditioned to give money to the chemical/chemical-weapons companies who invented the concept of “lawn weed” and to fossil fuel industries to pollutively wastefully mow and always forever re-mow their sterile mediocre lawns so theyre ‘too busy [with pointless busywork] to be a communist’

Hot take here, but I’m pretty sure women who are being oppressed and having their social rights restricted by the Taliban are still able to enjoy more rights than women who have been blown up and murdered by anglo bombs.

Also, this is in Yemen, wtf you on about the Taliban for? You lost get over it smh. Do you not have enough genocides to support or something?

Just the thought… Hang on… I got something in my eye

Counterpoint: Harris doesn’t need to be a monster such that it is a dereliction of democratic duty to not speak about it constantly.

Post-script to that counterpoint: You don’t need to railroad people talking about Copmala Handcuffs being a flamethrower unto human life and liberty her entire career into trying to convince people it’s worth helping and hoping she gets a new fuel tank handed to her.

He’s at his best when he’s borderline surreal. Remember when he accused Ted Cruz’ dad of killing JFK? lmfaoo

Both of these candidates deserve the Hague. But the Netherlands better arm up first! (That bill passed the Senate 75-19, with 30 democrats and 45 republicans in support. Never not a terrible country. Vote Communist and join the PSL)

collapse is less of an event, and more of a protracted decay and crumbling away of its structural integrity, out of which the existing contradictions which had been always simmering below the surface become increasingly sharp at points and times and ruptures along the fault lines begin to appear at increasing rates

Democrats outflanking the Republicans on the right over immigration has been a wild one. Though it’s been happening for years, they usually weren’t so proud and open about it. Obama himself was infamously known as the “Deporter-in-Chief,” and Biden not only didn’t put a stop to the concentration camps the democrats and liberals feigned outrage over with Trump, but also deregulated them and sent people to unknown fates, as well as allowing for and advertising the private subcontracting of these concentration camps, and pretending that was progress. Very normal country, with parties that are definitely not just two hands of the same sociopathic capitalist class.

These immigrants and refugees are people who are, I will add, fleeing from countries that the west under both parties have spent a century terrorizing, destroying, destabilizing, starving, and exploiting (same story with the European refugee crises, the refugees are blamed and demonized when they are all fleeing from the chaos and suffering and destruction caused and continuously caused by western imperialism — a bipartisan and usually NATO-spearheaded affair — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.)

The democrats and republicans have fundamentally different world views

Correction: the democrats and republicans have fundamentally different standards of decorum and of how close they can be to the stench of the consequences of their highly similar world views without turning away.

fallacy is when real thing I don’t like

The article talks a lot about about USian individual consumption rates but trying to ctrl+F ‘find in page’ shows zero hits for “Military”. Considering the US military is the largest single consumer of hydrocarbons and single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world (more than the total emissions of 100 countries combined), as a globalized imperial behemoth with no compare today or in history; seems an important thing to leave out. But likely a legacy of the Department of “Defense” lobbying heavily to exclude militaries from international metrics and protocols, and laundering their own reports. I don’t doubt they’ve continued to do this for other major studies used as primary sources in climate articles.

It is interesting to me how this pushing the blame from the military and corporations onto the “higher-income consumers” who have high footprint as individuals, seems very indicative of the ways liberalism’s incapability to handle capitalism’s contradictions inevitably inflames the fascist political base of petty-bourgeois. Hence the reactionary rhetoric which comes out in dialectical response from exactly this article’s conclusions: how the government and [bourgeois] “environmentalists” are ‘targeting the middle class.’ and ‘declaring war on the middle class’ etc. Leaving the multinationals and imperial military untouched.

The “middle-class,” of course, being a fake class — an income bracket wearing groucho glasses and calling itself a class so it can act as a wedge to to obscure the dualistic and antagonistic class relations in capitalist society between the PROPERTIED and UNPROPERTIED, and the contradictions and conflicts therein. The “middle class” is like the myth of ‘upward mobility under capitalism’ distilled into a propaganda phrase. It is false consciousness personified as the propertyless middle-management overseer-and-pain-sponge standing between the capitalist (who the state works for) and the broad masses of the low-bracket or no-bracket workers.

This is obviously complicated by imperial and colonial relations, but none of that changes the focus on “high-income consumers” and their individual actions being a liberal half-truth obscuring the real causes of multinational industry overgrowth and side-stepping the need to demilitarize the US and NATO (Which is itself the US empire and its vassals, all wearing groucho glasses).