his switch to militant anticommunism is a consequence of his petty bourgeois background and not his ‘extremism’
Some people are also habitual contrarians, or have a penchant for taking up unpopular causes. Any initially unpopular political movement will attract some of these folks in its early stages. Figuring out how to educate them out of this mindset or sideline them gets important as the movement grows.
Could have been someone else (not Trump) allowing an attempt on Trump’s life, figuring:
Possible, definitely not a sure thing.
Close. The internet was never leftist – as in opposing capitalism. It was at its best the ACLU wing of liberal, and at its worst the age of consent wing of libertarian.
When social media exploded, the internet condensed to just a few aggregator platforms. You now had all this traffic and attention that could be more easily monetized than a million small websites and forums, and that’s what happened. Your few companies that own these aggregator platforms now have an enormous financial interest in (1) keeping content palatable to advertisers and (2) keeping regulation and taxes at bay. They accomplish the second in part by cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point of becoming one of the many industries with a revolving door between their corporate governance and the parts of the actual government that deal with the industry.
Of course any significant leftist communities on these platforms get snuffed out: big business and the American government hate the left. Your ACLU-type liberals get pushed right or out as the impetus to make money drives every decision, with their free speech language selectively co-opted to protect the right. Then your most right-wing party starts to become openly fascist around the time a fascist buys one of the major platforms and removes even the nominal guardrails against the most egregious fascists.
Now we’re here: with a few small non-fascist corners of the internet populated by a mix of leftists and liberals.
There is nothing Hamas could have done on October 7 that would justify committing genocide against Palestine.
Compare how much legacy media coverage this gets vs. Bob Vylan
Who cares if the arguments resemble one another? The underlying situations are what determine if the argument makes any sense.
“I was afraid for my life” is a fine argument for firing back if someone pulls a gun and starts shooting at you. It’s ridiculous when it comes from a cop who opens fire on a kid with something in his hands.
if ukranians want to stay independent russia should respect that
The parts of Ukraine Russia controls right now were trying to break away from Ukraine before the war. And again, Russia is not trying to conquer Ukraine – the goal is to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
nobody can strip their right to resistance and the over 60k dead Palestinians responsibility lay exclusively on Israel
Palestinians and Ukranians both have a right to resist attackers. I’m saying it’s sensible for Palestinians to do so (because their attacker has stated their intent to exterminate them, so it’s either fight or die), but not sensible for Ukrainians to do so (because their attacker just wants them not to join NATO, and because there is no realistic hope of the war turning around).
As for who’s responsible for the deaths: Ukraine’s government almost immediately sold out their people when they (on the advice of Boris Johnson) backed out of ceasefire agreement they had tentatively agreed to in the opening weeks of the war. By choosing to use their people to fight a proxy war for NATO when there was an easy out on the table, they are partly responsible for the deaths of their people.
Israel say that there is no Palestinians and all the land is our , Russia say that Ukrainians are just Russians that Ukraine was simply part of Russia .
It cannot be overstated how completely different these situations are. Israel is trying to exterminate Palestinians. Russia does not want Ukraine to be part of a hostile, nuclear-armed military pact. Palestinians are fighting because otherwise Israel will kill them. Ukrainians are fighting because their coup government is having its strings pulled by NATO.
I think Russia could have with economic pressure alone stop Ukraine from joining NATO
They tried since 2014, and Ukraine still wouldn’t give it up (or keep their domestic fascist groups from attacking Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine). It turns out Ukraine and NATO weren’t even negotiating in good faith, as Angela Merkel admitted about the Minsk II agreement.
There is the type who say palestinians should resist… They say if hamas never attacked
If anyone says this, they don’t mean it, because it’s completely contradictory. They’re lying to you.
I would like ukranians to stop dying but not by giving up part of their land
There’s no future resolution to this war that leaves Ukraine with more land than they have today. Continuing the war just means it will end with less Ukranian land and less Ukranians.
It’s unlike Palestine because Russia is not fighting a war of extermination and is not trying to drive residents from their homes. The people in the parts of pre-war Ukraine that Russia now controls aren’t being massacred or evicted; they are predominantly Russian speakers who had (to be charitable to Ukraine) legitimate grievances with the Ukranian government after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014.
From the Ukrainian perspective, there is actually a benefit to a peace on Russia’s terms: Ukraine keeps more of its land and its people stop dying. There’s nothing to be gained by continuing the war because it isn’t going to turn around. This is again unlike Palestine, where peace on Israeli terms would involve at minimum the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and where western public support for Israel has collapsed.
They think Palestinians should be driven from their homes or exterminated. They don’t care how many Palestinians die, so why would they make that argument? I’ve never heard a zionist say that.
If you care how many Ukranians die, you’d want the war to end sooner rather than later. The peace terms aren’t getting any better, so all their government is doing is getting more of their people killed.
[Resources are] finite, as is our capacity to replenish them.
You think this is propaganda?
Arming Ukraine just prolongs a war that’s clearly lost. That costs more lives than it saves.
What’s more important than the nuances of appropriations is the fact that Biden could have stopped giving weapons to a state committing genocide, but didn’t.
Everything else he did or didn’t do with respect to the situation is comparatively minor.
Why wouldn’t they be low after supplying Ukraine and now Israel for so long? They’re finite, as is our capacity to replenish them. There’s been plenty of reporting on the limits of our ability to do so.
Skepticism is warranted, but it could easily be true.
A major problem in the U.S. left is the habit of endlessly rehashing inter-leftist arguments that are not only from wildly different political contexts, but are also well over 100 years old.
Reading history is good. Reading theory is good. But this stuff isn’t scripture and can’t tell you how Zohran or someone will play out. We have to go figure that out ourselves. There’s a reason every successful leftist movement prominently involved its leaders writing new theory and guidance for their own specific circumstances.
“Purposefully” is debatable, but whether intentional or by happenstance, damn it really is odd that so many descendants of Nazis are all over my imperial core countries that backed tons of fascist coups over the past 75 years.
His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,”
This is such an obviously loaded question. If he were asked “when did you stop beating your wife,” would we hem and haw over the semantics of his answer, or would we recognize the question is bullshit and look at the guy’s more substantive statements on whatever issue we want to know about?
He’s said Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians, that they have to follow international law, that Palestinians deserve equal rights, and he’s defended the slogan “globalize the intifada.” If you think he’s some closet zionist, you’re overthinking it.
The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.
Can’t argue with any of this. It’s also notable how despite being a mayoral race, this is a big election – NYC has a larger population than all but about a dozen states.
There are three types of conspiracy theories:
rumors of a massacre in the Square would be easy to dispel if foreign journalists were allowed to stay and film. but protests were an embarrassment to China, and China sweeps embarrassments under the rug.
We don’t know how many people U.S. police kill every year, and you could fill volumes with all the other horrible stuff our government does that only leaks out decades later. Governments being shy about publicizing embarrassments is a government thing, not a Chinese thing.
The specifics of the incident are murky overwhelmingly due to one reason: the western world decided to mythologize it. The vast majority of western discussion on it now falls into two camps: right-wingers who deliberately spread the most lurid campfire stores imaginable (10,000 deaths! Tanks ground people into paste!), and liberals who lazily repeat inaccuracies and falsehoods that are occasionally more plausible (e.g., the legacy media doing this in the Columbia Journalism Review article). Some academics and leftists will try to sort through all this garbage, but they are the distinct minority.
Democrats: Damn, someone responsible really should have put some serious measures in place to handle this situation. Why are you looking at me like that?