I’m trying really hard not to paint them with an overly broad brush and am open to nuance on it, but if this is the kind of shit they can pull at the leadership level, then I don’t see much hope for them as an org. It comes across to me like the majority leadership views it as a vehicle for accruing dem votes that is meant to actually block anything further than that, rather than anything resembling a revolutionary org.

Well the first time the US launched nukes, wasn’t it the only nuclear-capable country? And that was before anyone had expectations about it or defenses in mind for it. The world is a lot different now in that way. If we look at how the US is doing in direct combat, it doesn’t look good, from everything I’ve read/seen recently. I don’t see why the US military’s capability to unleash hell with nukes would be dramatically different; they’d be facing obliteration level counter military efforts, if they can even get their nukes to launch in a competent manner in the first place. Not to mention how much the US is dependent on trade, so nuking large parts of the world could tear apart the bread and circuses in short order.

I mean, I’m not saying “view it as insignificant and don’t take it seriously,” but like, I’m skeptical of how their on paper doctrine type stuff would actually translate to reality.

Virtually any situation ever could be worse. That doesn’t mean it makes sense to support something horrific just cause it’s possible it could be worse if you don’t. That kind of mindset will have you throwing your full support behind literal genocide, instead of putting your foot down.

And quite frankly, if you are incapable of putting your foot down for something like genocide, that implies you don’t view it as a problem in the first place and are only concern trolling when it comes to harm reduction.

I don’t understand how you come to the conclusion that such a read of it is disingenuous. It’s a publication called Business Insider from the western empire, an empire that has a history of war profiteering and putting short term thinking over long term. I could see a point that it’s foolish to think nobody in the western empire is trying to think strategically in the long term, but I would figure those are more the people in think tanks and backrooms, not writing pieces for a publication that sound like a pitch to investors.

If there is a part of the article you think especially demonstrates sincere long term thinking, feel free to quote it and I will look at it. Calling a read of this that syncs right up with the chronic observable tendencies of the western empire “disingenuous” is odd to me, to say the least. Reductive, maybe, but disingenuous?

Bronk said that “it’s so much cheaper and easier” to invest now in the capabilities to deter Russia than it is “to actually invest in the forces capable of fighting an extended war for six months, a year, two years.”

This is the important part, isn’t it. “Invest more money, but don’t worry about the long term, just hand over the cash, the short term is what matters here.”

Ask him if he’d find it badass if a group of people targeted your family, enslaved them, humiliated them, maimed or murdered anyone in your family who opposed them, created entire media apparatus to convince anyone beyond them and your family that your family is a bunch of savages who need domination in order to “civilize” you, recruited members from your family who were desperate for a way out to work against your family and for them in order to further embed the control over you, slowly eliminate your family to replace them with outsiders and/or force your family to adopt the group’s language and culture through threat of violence. And to top it off, do this over the course of entire generations of your family and take credit for anything your family produced as the product of the group’s “great men” geniuses.

“Bully returns home, tells mom it was traumatizing when victim fought back.”

I’ll try to remember to if I can find it. Web searching has indeed become a pain. I tried to do some just now, but didn’t have much luck. Through a link in one article, I came upon one source that is vaguely related to what we’re talking about, but not really on the point of specifically combining product and community. It’s also sort of a shallow summary and may be stuff you’ve already heard of: https://www.businessinsider.com/birth-of-consumer-culture-2013-2

These quotes from it specifically stand out to me:

“We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture,” wrote Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

Bernays shattered the taboo against women smoking by persuading a group of debutantes to light up at a parade — an event he leaked to the media ahead of time with the phrase “Torches Of Freedom” — thereby linking smoking with challenging male authority.

But, this isn’t really the specificity of intent I thought I had found something on before. Maybe I confused someone extrapolating intent from outcomes in the past, or it’s just out there in the mass of the internet somewhere and is hard to find.

Wouldn’t the Catholic Church be closer to a corporation in that sense? With all the churches they own and the land those churches take up. Granted, even within that framing, the pope is arguably still more celebrity than CEO, if only because there is such contention with the Catholic Church and trying to make any sort of decisions that have broad impact on Catholic practice risks another schism.

Ya know, I don’t think this is that far off from the truth, though naturally there are degrees to product worship and dependency on it among USians. I do think it makes a kind of sense if you consider how many in the US (in varying degrees) are void of a sense of identity or social responsibility and drift in nihilism. I mean, people are to some extent encouraged to form their identity around what products they’re into. And on a national level, what else have USians got? Jingoism? Pride for being a colonizer and imperialism in a barbaric legacy? Some people in the US do have religion, but with varying levels of taking it seriously.

I myself have had times where I get very into a product (such as a video game) and the surrounding “community” (though the word “community” in this kind of usage is sort of silly with how loosely affiliated and discordant it tends to be). I’m lacking sources on it right now that I can recall, but I feel like I read once that this was intentional in some way, the conjoining of “product” and “community.”

But either way (intentional or no) you can observe it with ease online, where it’s virtually inevitable to run into zealots for a given product who will defend it so viciously, you’d think it was their firstborn on trial.

Feels like he’s trying to be the confident guy to counter Trump’s confidence, but because he’s a genocidal piece of shit who can barely string a sentence together at this point, he just ends up sounding like a guy who needs to go to bed.

Right on!

Sorry, that was me being a bit cute and showoffy with referencing it that way. 😅 汉字 translates to “Chinese character”, so I was using the Chinese for it to say I went through the course with Pinyin visible (the Romanization system for Chinese) and with only Chinese characters (Pinyin hidden).

Just as revolution is built, imperialism&colonialism turned inward is also built. As imperialism and colonialism are themselves built. That the conditions develop toward making such a thing more favorable or unfavorable to being built does not make it inevitable.

Cop City in the US is an example of this. They’re trying to build a police force that will no doubt be used against the citizens, given everything we know about how US police operate.

So I would say, look for what the fascists are trying to build in France. What organizations do they have, who are they targeting for recruitment (such as weaponizing the youth), what physical force are they building or maintaining. I know the conditions won’t be identical to the US, but things still have to be built by someone. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, as Mao said.

What I’m kind of trying to get at here is to look at: 1) how can they reach the point of obtaining that power and 2) what can they do with it, materially.

And in the same way, what can be done to organize against it and build an alternative.

Hope that makes sense.

Chinese from HelloChinese app is my main one that I consider important, that I want to eventually reach fluency on. But I am also at a point with learning through the app alone where I’m past the “leaps and bounds” phase, I’ve completed the course both with Pinyin visible and with only 汉字, and so a lot of it is just steadily continuing to learn through the stories and “immersive lessons”, and trying to eke out gains in comprehension and memorization and such.

So in order to handle that freshness wearing off, I also mix in learning other languages here and there. The main source of that has been Japanese and Korean through YuSpeak. I also spent some time learning the Cyrillic alphabet; I recommend the app “3 hour Cyrillic by ‘Russian Made Easy’” for this, it’s both free and it puts the letters in context of words they’d be used in. Then I’ve made some effort to learn the Arabic alphabet too, but haven’t really found an app that clicks well for doing so.

I wanted to get back into French, cause that was my original main attempt at learning a second language before I got into Chinese, but again, haven’t found an app that clicks well for it. I originally was learning French through Duolingo but quit it a while back when they pushed the “health system” that penalizes mistakes. Then I tried to get into it through Busuu, both in the past and more recently, but their course design is annoyingly inconsistent at this point, in both content and the length of a lesson.

I mostly left, but ended up back for a sub or two - mainly a thing of there not really being an equivalent to the given sub elsewhere. I try to avoid the larger subs though, I tend to find only misery and pain there. And even my attention on the small ones dwindles over time, they are not immune to the same crowd that frequents the larger ones, and I get little out of them.

Thank you very much if you read it all. It took a very long for me to write it all and I am proud, that I did it without DeepL!

Great job!

I can say, I live in the US and I notice this too. Though I don’t think it’s as obvious to me because I’m from the US and live here, so it’s harder for me to separate out what is people being US-centric and what is not (including from myself). I do know that in learning about communism and imperialism and such things, I did grow some in nuance. For example, prior to being communist in views, I had become atheist and had a sort of generalized view that I don’t believe in any religion or gods. Now my views about it is more like that I don’t believe in any specific god, or gods, but I am careful about how I think about religion as a whole, especially religions of colonized peoples that I don’t understand. I don’t want to be a Bill Maher style atheist who uses it as a bludgeon to act morally superior to the rest of the world.

I have also tried to adopt a view like “if I don’t know about this other culture, I won’t try to speak for it”. So sometimes I make a point to emphasize my views are based around the US cultural context. It’s a strange thing, but I get the sense that because of how the empire news bubble works, many of us in the US, unless we go out of our way to find information outside the bubble or travel abroad sufficiently, end up with a very cartoonishly simplified view of the world outside the US. To some extent, I think this simplified view is a continuation of the civil/savage mythology that was used for colonialism long ago. The general picture seems to go something like: “The US (and anyone it considers an ally) is exemplary ‘civil society’ even if it has flaws because everybody has flaws and history is rife with exploitation, and anyone who the US considers suspect or an enemy is savage and backwards and every flaw they have isn’t ‘normal history’, it’s a direct result of them being a terrible, sick place run by terrible, sick people.” The double standard is wild and the implication in it that history is just people exploiting others and a country like the US happens to be a strong entity in that equation, is so nonsensical and bizarre.

I think there’s very much a “you don’t know how good you have it” abuser nature to it. Where the empire news machine has to insist to people that everywhere else is somehow way worse than the US is and way worse than it could ever be, and if it’s even slightly better, it must be because it’s an ally of the US and is following a similar trajectory. No space is allowed in that for people to think the US could be a hellhole, for lack of a better word, because that would mean the whole image of western superiority is a whole lot of nonsense (which it is, but if the US people actually thought that as a whole, they might turn on its governance a lot more easily).

I had to look up the newspaper name cause I was wondering if I was being bamboozled by satire. How long I wonder until the headline becomes “Is God Hamas?” followed by “Shall we bomb the Heavens?”

Not sure this is the rhetoric you think it is. Sounds like you’re saying that in order to keep Trump out, you would vote for… an inanimate object, if you had to. Which in effect, starts sounding like you’d vote for someone/something that has no chance to win. Not unlike the 3rd party candidates the “vote blue no matter who” people say “leftists” are wasting their votes on. So it’s like… you’re looping around to implying Biden is a crap candidate and is going to lose, but you’re going to vote for him anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense at that point to go for someone who isn’t a terrible person, if they’re going to lose anyway?

Yeah, sick as it is, it makes psychological sense that they’d want to legitimize their occupation by DARVO’ing it. Otherwise, they have to admit to themselves they are barbaric occupiers and while some % of any population might be willing to stomach that, I think it’s safe to say people generally want to view themselves as “good”.