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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • I agree with a lot of your analysis, but I think a lot of these conclusions are highly contingent on historical circumstance. For example, I think Trump is a lot more unpopular than the current narrative regarding Trump. The Dems do not want to be so wrong about Trump’s chance of winning as they were in 2016. A dynamic that could play out in this election is that many of the groups you identified (and were right to do so) feel so threatened by a Trump presidency (in part because of Dems successful and good organizing against him) causes those groups to unite and keep him out of office. This could lead to a split between the pragmatic republican movement concerned with maintaining the status quo, and the pro-Trump MAGA militants who are not as homogenous of a group as may first appear.

    But feel free to “neener neener” about it if I end up being wrong in a few hours. My point is, things change, a disparate group of different interests can unite into an unbreakable bloc, and vice versa, in a traumatizingly short amount of time if recent years can be a teacher





  • I understand how politics works, and I can understand some of the many complications and consequences involved, but words have meaning, and meaning conveys truth.

    So if you want to represent the nuanced, complex (one sided) world of real politik, then that is certainly a good exercise. “in my power” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, especially since she’s committed to, let’s say, bend the truth quite a bit with this sentence.

    But skepticism alone isn’t analysis. I think by saying this she is trying to lure over “Uncommitted” conscientious objectors who are on the fence and may withhold their vote. But by not speaking strongly enough, she will never reach the vast majority of those people. This assurance feels empty to me. She’s not an ardent supporter of Palestinians, but who can see the future? Events are rapid and things change, "We exist in a context, all that.

    But there are disadvantages to people only taking political action by way of their votes, and maybe this is one of them.

    I hope she wins. But if she doesn’t the dems will blame those same voters, along with Greens (which, whatever) and any other third party voters instead of coming to grips with their many many failings over the last 8 - 10 years.













  • I love this so much.

    I didn’t really have the time or energy to go into the supporting logic, for as you’ve just demonstrated its a very involved argument that involves a lot of oft ignored history of the period after the crushing defeat of the German working class uprising (1923, '24) but before the Nazis took power in the wake of the Reichstag fire ('33, '34). Which honestly I’m not great on anyway, I appreciate your insight, slight factual correction that just makes the point even more urgently, and any book recommendations!

    So while we are providing clarification and context to the uninitiated, I dug out Trotsky’s definition of fascism from 1932 since we are being so adamant about properly defining it:

    At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie [the small business owners basically MAGAs], and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat [working poor who are so exploited and disillusioned they defy their own class interests]; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. […] And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. […] When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed […] but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.

    In my opinion, wrt building coalition between liberals and communists, there tends to be a real failure by all parties, Marxist communists and liberals alike, to orient the alienated individual within the class or ideological milieu. Liberals can really only see the alienated individual; whereas commies, who claim to be materialists, can view the class/ideological superstructure, or sometimes reluctantly the individual, but almost never both at the same time. Mfs never read/don’t understand Theses on Feuerbach and it shows.

    Which is to say liberalism and communism can’t really be allies, but individual liberals, who we might call progressives, more concerned with rights and human emancipation than preserving private property, can be won over to the demands of class struggle, especially as the conditions of struggle introduce sharp contradictions into their lives and the lives of the people around them. At this point the demands of their class outweigh the explanations furnished by their ideology and alliances can be forged between members of the fractured liberal or social democratic workers, and the communist/socialists who (hopefully) have prepared the field of struggle for the intensifying conflict.

    Tldr: noone has a monopoly on being insufferable and maybe we could try not demonizing each other for like 15 seconds and see each other as rational people doing our best, reacting to rapidly changing conditions, that will result in pretty serious lose/lose final consequences for libs and commies alike if we can’t resist the actual fascists together.

    But now I’ve been led away from the topic of the post article, proving that we are doomed to become what we most strongly condemn.


  • there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance. Communists, even at the height and horror of Stalinist purges, were never fascist. Fascism is something different, and the urge to conflate the two just makes you seem dangerously uneducated on the subject. No, worse than that, because misunderstanding and miscommunicating the nature of fascism is actually a boon to the fascists! It is in essence no different than when Stalin intentionally mischaracterized social democracy as being “the moderate wing of fascism” and worse than actual Nazism in order to give himself political cover in the lead up to Molotov-Ribbentrop.

    So when you deceive yourself and others about the nature of fascism, you are aiding the fascists. So like don’t do that.

    But this still has nothing to do with the article or post, talk about living rent-free



  • The political class…how incredibly short sighted. Yes of course you should be furious at the political class, but you should be more angry at the ruling class of capitalists that control the political class. Shell oil invented climate science, they predicted all of this back in the late 70s, and then they knowingly covered it up. They invented climate science and then they invented climate change denial.

    The ruling capitalist class can’t change course, and they can’t run society any longer. The profit motive is no way to organize society, that should be abundantly clear to anyone with eyes. Yes the political class who covered for companies committing environmental destruction should pay, as well as the ineffectual political class who played nice and told you to vote all these years so they could fundraise off of these issues.

    There needs to be a new political class composed of us, the working class, who can combat these careerists and grifters directly by seizing control of the factories and forging a new rational system that can meet peoples needs and launch human society into the future, not keep it mired in the old incentives and systems that destroy it.

    We can’t vote our way out of this, by no possible metric is it possible. We need new forms of democracy and political engagement. For decades they told us if you recycled you could fix this. They were lying. Noone is coming to save us we have to save ourselves, but together as one. Please.