pronouns: she/her
Among Senate Democrats, Durbin and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine are tied for the lead in this ignominious category with eight yes votes apiece.
every time Tim Kaine comes up, i get another glimpse into how thoroughly the DNC threw the 2016 election
maybe so. i’m pretty open about being a communist, which does do a bit of filtering with who would be willing to take a book recommendation from me. i think that we are in a historical moment where there is a lot to gain from being bolder about what we believe, but it’s always good to have a variety of tactics.
for sure. the fall of the soviet union really convinced a lot of them that they would never need to worry about labor rising up in an organized fashion ever again. we must make good use of the amazing opportunity that they have provided us with.
i read those excerpts, and while the recounting of recent history and the ways that disagrees with dem’s marketing is good, i think there is too much brushing over a critical analysis of the past.
Even if they were only doing so to prevent the commies from making the US look bad, the democratic party was once the party of abundance for the white working class.
this is exactly what i’m talking about. the dems were not ever that. they were using racism as a wedge issue to break a working class movement that was an increasingly credible threat to the capitalist system. we can clearly see the institutional role of they play in the passage and congressional veto override (supported by about half of congressional democrats) of the Taft-Hartley act barely more than a decade after the NLRA.
as for my recommended starter book to move a lib toward the left, that really depends on where on that trajectory they are. if they aren’t scared by the word socialism, i’d go for Socialist Reconstruction, published by the PSL. it makes a very compelling case for abandoning the democratic party by presenting policies that would actually fix the problems in our society that the dems would never even mention, much less advocate for.
from here:
My answer was that the Democrats aren’t who we think they are. Once, perhaps, they were the wide-awake guardians of blue-collar prosperity, but today they understand themselves differently.
maybe the book itself treats this subject better, but i think it’s really important to not spread ahistorical myths about our capitalist parties. the democrats today are doing what they (and the republicans) have done for their entire history, namely to systematically destroy any actual left-wing movement, whether that’s by force or half hearted reforms that get circumvented or progressively weakened.
juche necromancy game where as you play, it becomes increasingly clear that “killing” and “resurrecting” people is you doing completely normal personnel management so that they can take a regular ass vacation or have a bit of time out of the media spotlight.
I agree. But if Democrats want to win and actually remain in office (these 4 year cycles are killing me) they need to actually campaign and implement on bold initiatives.
It was way too depressing to get a glimmer of hope in electing Biden in 2020 to only return back to Trump the following election cycle. Democrats need to show they’re aligned with the values and needs of their base.
And that will mean campaigning on the scary “sOciAliSt” initiatives that they’ve been shying away from up until now. No more catering to the center/right. No more being beholden to AIPAC. No more feckless acceptance of letting conservatives rule the fucking game. We need Democratic pit-bulls to bring people out on Election Day.
yes, the democrats could win big if they stopped being democrats, but they literally have billions of dollars of incentive to not do that.
we gotta do a better job talking to people about the DNC’s actual politics and goals.
any reasonable regulatory environment would treat that as a claim of medical efficacy that they should be required to prove with solid medical studies, but instead they can just put whatever in those bottles and no one even checks if there’s lead in there.
they’ll never do vetting. that would be anti-democratic authoritarianism.
this course by Rashid Khalidi, an Palestinian academic who has focused his work on the history of Palestine, is a great introduction to the history of colonizing Palestine: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpc6eFEd8ot8aZ-1u3RXJmlyrzbDpsxH
can’t really comment on his personality, but he was far from a consistent ally of the bolsheviks. given the precarity of the soviet state in the early days, their decision to deal harshly with rebellions from former allies is very understandable.
yeah, i hadn’t ever heard of that one either. a brief look at wikipedia puts it in 1929-31, so before china was actually communist and immediately preceding the imperial occupation of china by japan, who was also at least partially responsible for it’s short existence. that’s a period i need to study up on as well, but it’ll be a while before i can prioritize reading a book about it.
the Korean one is really funny. assassinating an anarchist leader to make their movement fall apart would be considered too on the nose in a work of fiction. i know the russian and spanish civil war ones are conveniently leaving out a lot of details that make the soviet actions a lot more reasonable.
this was a very logical move by her. the sanctions were still very new (started by Obama in 2015-16), and Trump seemed very bribe-able right then. it would have been a dereliction of her duty to the people of Venezuela to not give it a shot. if it had worked, it would have prevented a lot of pain for Venezuelans, and likely much less of the social instability that Maduro is getting blamed for.
also, archive link
I also really understand why communists (and even a lot of non-ML leftists) say things like that. We are up against an empire that regularly imprisons and tortures whoever stands up against it, even (and sometimes especially) people who are US citizens. The desire to have an outside force save you from the hard fight ahead is very human and none of us should feel bad for having it sometimes.
But the reality of the situation we are in is that no one is coming to help us anytime soon. Whether or not it would be prudent or justified for China to directly intervene in the domestic US struggle, they have clearly chosen not to, and there isn’t another power that realistically could intervene. We have to plan to do this ourselves. The good thing is that we, as the proletariat, have the power to win if we can organize effectively.
That said, I very much understand people who feel they need to leave. At the end of everything, we each have only one life, and you need to live it the best way that you can. Many of my friends are trans (as am I), and many of them have talked about moving out of the US. If that’s what it takes to have a life worth living, I wish them the very best. And I know they will be doing the work where ever they end up. Just because it isn’t here, doesn’t mean they are giving up on their politics.
it’s fucking wild to see people in the imperial core (as The Lorax here has in their bio) criticize China for not standing up enough against the empire. that’s literally our job in the imperial core!
i really need everyone to internalize that “free speech zones”, like most of the oppressive shit that Trump has been doing, is not a brand new thing. i remember these were very strictly implemented against the anti-war demonstrations during the W years (which i think is where the meme started).
you need to remember that the Kennedys are catholic. this explains a great deal about the entire family, the least of which is how many of them there are.
probably referring to Aravindan Balakrishnan. it’s a really fucked up story, so i won’t even attempt to summarize it. i try not to think of some people as inherently evil, but this guy really tests that conviction.