You could replace USA with many third world countries and the facts would still match. Exceptionalism also applies in the negative.
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2025
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0·3 months ago“Tyrants”. I suppose the rapist president Thomas Jefferson can’t be included because he was “democratically” elected.
The whole premise of this thing seems like it was cooked up by an intelligence agency after reading Edward Said’s “Orientalism”. Like those books by “journalists” claiming that Gaddafi had harems with thousands of women.
For Chinese, HelloChinese is pretty good.
16·3 months agoIt’s a really bad look for folks still insisting that Ukraine is the correct side to associate defending it and criticising Russia with minimising this one. “What about the white people?” At least pretend to be consistent.
But here are some dead civilians in Ukraine to satisfy your urge to secure the future of white children or whatever: https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/geopolitics/burned-alive-how-the-2014-odessa-massacre-became-a-turning-point-for-ukraine/
It didn’t work in Venezuela with a barely 20 year old Bolivarian Revolution (it wasn’t regime change, PSUV is still in power, their policies didn’t even change much), but people out there really believed it would work with the 70 year old Islamic Revolution rooted in a more-than-a-thousand year old traditions? The proper comparable regime changes in recent years would be Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan, all of which took months to years of open war. The officials knew this from the start, but MSM should stop normalising this notion of regime change because it’s either not going to happen or going to be an extremely long and costly process.
Third paragraph: Anyways, we as New Yorkers don’t really have to fear any retaliation from Iran, so no worries, you can go back to brunch after you express your dissent on social media.
I also read it that way on a first pass because I missed the “Iranian” in “Iranian New Yorkers”. He’s probably referring to the likely surge in hate crimes against Iranians that’s bound to happen, and that he’ll (allegedly) work to prevent it.
Illegal war of aggression
He said the words. He also didn’t fumble around doing a both-sidesy condemnation of Iran. As far as I’m aware, that’s already the best comment on a US war for a elected US politician this Century.
I’m at a point I’m actually saying “death to americans” instead. I think every single US-passport-holder should be expelled from every self-respecting country at the minimum. I’m sorry for the few good ones, but it’s a fair price to pay to get rid of any operatives and infiltrators. I’m also glad Israelis got attacked during Carnival.
Hopefully you will reply rather than sneak away with a smug look on your face like your kind usually does.
So it’s clear – they must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
That remains the primary aim of the United Kingdom and our allies – including the US.
[…] As part of our commitments to the security of our allies in the Middle East we have a range of defensive capabilities in the region – which we’ve recently taken steps to strengthen.
Our forces are active and British planes are in the sky today as part of coordinated regional defensive operations to protect our people, our interests, and our allies - as Britain has done before, in line with international law.
We’ve stepped up protections for British bases and personnel to their highest level.
They should refrain from further strikes, give up their weapons programmes, and cease the appalling violence and repression against the Iranian people – who deserve the right to determine their own future, in line with our longstanding position.
Emphasis mine. Despite saying “we didnae do it and we wouldnae done it”, this is quite clearly stating that they’re militarily helping their ally, the US, with regards to their goals, which include changing Iranian internal policy and governance altogether. Or am I mistaken somehow? Please correct me.
Insert here the pun about “big sad” and SADI’m generally a social anxious person myself, though I’d advise to “do as I say and not as I do” because my main coping mechanism is comical amounts of alcohol lol. There’s some pretty good social anxiety medication out there, but it’s important to use them as a tool and not as a crutch. Social anxiety can be managed through psychological and physical techniques, so over-relying on external chemicals can end up making it worse due to lack of training.
For my more advisable coping mechanisms, I tend to rehearse interactions well in advance and plan when I am doing “social” carefully. If socialising happens during the specific socialising timeframe I’m ready for, it works out better. Another really important skill is being able to say “no” to things that fall outside of what you’re comfortable with. If anybody asks me to do “social” without prior notice, they’ll probably get a “no I’m busy” unless I’m in a good enough mood. The language of disability can sometimes be useful too, you can say you’re “not feeling well” or “sick” or whatever and people won’t bother you that much. If it’s bad enough for the DSM, it’s bad enough for you as an individual to feel no shame over it.
For the low-level stuff, find small habits that get you some breathing room. I don’t like most fidget toys because they look like children stuff, so I usually carry a lighter that I can feel with my hands as a subtle way to ground myself. You can also go drink water or to the bathroom (those two work well together lol) whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed, which is also good for your health anyway. If you have any close friends in your organisation you can tell them about it and ask them to provide social cover if you just need to get up and go on a walk randomly. Though I’d advise actually not getting too intimate in politics because it’s a risky proposition. Also, as a smoker, I advise you to not start smoking either tobacco or cannabis. The first might relieve your social anxiety but it’ll obviously ruin your health, while the latter is less destructive but will actually make you more anxious in the long run.
You lost me at calling dark souls beautiful haha. Ngl, even dark souls 3 looks kinda trash for the time it released. You know how you remember shitty graphics better than they were because you played it as a kid? DS1 looks like how i remember PS2 graphics lmao.
Not going to argue because it’s subjective and all, but I replay Dark Souls 1 at least once a year, so it’s definitely not just memory. I don’t find it pretty because of the graphical fidelity, which granted is on the low end for a PS3 game but mostly for the framing and good use of vistas. For example, Anor Londo’s models are fairly low poly and the textures are simple, but I appreciate how the game forces you to look at it through flattering angles.
DS3 doesn’t really do much like that due to the level structure (except for Anor Londo again lol), and DS2 is just kinda fugly, but I don’t really like either of those games.
It’s an annoying skill to develop, so no judgement. I’m autistic, so I usually spend ridiculous amounts of time rehearsing and practising. Feel free to elaborate if you think I misunderstood your point.
I love how liberals write “prosecute them through the justice system” with a hundred times more energy than I’d have when calling for every single Forbes 400 billionaire to be quartered on live television and have their severed heads dragged through the mud and shown off all through Wall Street until the flesh finally decomposes enough to stop stinking up the place. These Democrats have no bite, no wonder they’re such pushovers. “Hard Ball”.
I don’t want to deceive the people, it’s the ruling class I want to cheat.
In that case, there’s not much stopping a party, besides the laws and the state and such. It’s often a bad idea simply because it can give great excuses for stronger repression, but it really depends on the situation. The Bolsheviks for instance did armed bank robberies. Any self-respecting party must have its clandestine wing, it’s just not as crucial and shareable as the main party tasks of building worker power structures.
Regarding the rest of what you wrote, I didn’t quite understand it, but good out-and-about militants are naturally going to be known in their communities for good militancy. Whether they openly declare to be party members or not depends a lot on security and clandestine action, but you’re right in that receiving support from workers is a must. It’ll just happen naturally if the partywork is good.
Trying to learn how to program in Rust for the upteenth time. It’s frankly not even that hard, I just never get to do much with it, since projects are either so unimportant that they can be in Python, or so critical that I need to use something I’m actually sort of an expert in, like C.
Unfortunately, both of Losurdo’s works are several hours long each. I’m very curious about La Sinistra Assente, is this an article or a full book?
It’s a full book, but the preface reads like its own short essay. Sadly I can only find it online in either Portuguese or Spanish (it’s probably out there in Italian too but my Italian is non-existent). Not sure if machine translation works well, but worth a try.
https://www.marxists.org/portugues/losurdo/2015/05/28.htm
https://www.elviejotopo.com/topoexpress/la-izquierda-ausente/
As a sidenote, it’s really annoying how little of Losurdo’s work is freely available online or translated to English. His absence is too conveniently occupied by infrared folks and even Dugin.
It was a not-so-subtle reference to how King Louis XVI was referred to as Citoyen Louis Capet, with a surname being a indicator of loss of status, after being arrested and sent to the guillotine. It’s a call for the whole Windsor monarchy to be abolished by execution. That includes Charles.
Nice work! I’m bad at complimenting, but let me make clear I appreciate the effort.
That out of the way, you asked for feedback, not praise. Keep in mind some of my feedback is based on my own experience of learning, which is probably very different from native-English-speakers in the Imperial Core, which are probably the intended target.
The Feedback
Seems to me that this is too heavy on the “Marxism” side and too light on the “Leninism”. There’s a lot of really good texts on theory and developing a Marxist understanding of the world, but very little regarding party work and praxis.
Foundations of Leninism is a certified chonker but it’s pulling all the weight there in the Leninism section (which should rightfully be the biggest), whereas WitbD is a really messy read without context and frankly Roderic Day’s text is extremely lacking by portraying Lenin, in his words, as “a world-class observer and theoretician” rather than a dedicated party builder. I’d replace that one with something else that focuses on Lenin’s practice instead of his analytical abilities. Lenin’s too often reduced to just “writer of the Imperialism book”, and I think this inclusion here does his theory a disservice. It’s also so short that even Existential Comics twitter thread would be a decent drop-in replacement, but there’s probably some better short biography out there.
On that note, I actually think a biographical summary is the wrong start here, as Leninism is not the study of Lenin the human. It’d be more useful to add “Where to Begin?” as it serves as a fine preamble to WitbD, and really drives home the necessity of (some form of) a Party Newspaper, something that is ignored by many MLs today. Even then, readers might come out without even knowing the names of key concepts such as “Democratic Centralism” as the old texts use different names.
I’m not sure what would be good inclusions here. Huey’s “The Correct Handling of a Revolution”, maybe? I see that in the advanced study guide you have included texts from Liu Shaoqi, which I haven’t read so can’t opine much, but maybe one of those could be included here? Besides that the best I can offer is Mao’s “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” and “On the Correct Handling” as shorter texts exemplifying Leninism.
I think this section is critical enough that making it bigger wouldn’t amount to bloat. Specially since a lot of leftists fall into the orthodox Marxist trap of knowing a lot, except for the knowledge of how to actually do something. There’s also a genuine lack of post-Third-International texts in English on the topic, so compiling them would be rather useful.
On that note, on cultural hegemony. I’m quite biased due to heavily disagreeing with him lately, but I’d just scrap Jones Manoel there and replace him with something from his actual sources. His video essays naturally end up being very verbose while saying very little, which is fine for daily youtube videos but not for theory learning. And this is not even close to being his best video essay, so I don’t understand why it got picked up so hard by the Anglosphere. I’d go with Losurdo’s “Flight From History” or even “Western Marxism” if length is not an issue. “La Sinistra Assente” (“The Absent Left”) would actually be perfect here, but I only realised now by trying to find the English name that it has only been translated to Spanish and Portuguese, but never English.
Now the minor nitpicks.
Section 4’s checkpoint question on “level of development” makes little sense today without an understanding of imperialism and/or combined and uneven development, which is a section that would only be read afterwards. In those texts (and in general) Marx wrote about industrialising European countries which followed primitive accumulation, but today for most countries the trajectory is different due to the uneven development of imperialism.
In section 2, I’d swap the order of Biographical Sketch and Three Sources, as they deal with the same subject and the latter is much shorter and summarised. Three Sources serves as a neat introduction, but if one read and understood the entirety of Biographical Sketch beforehand it won’t add much.
I feel like Part I of Capital Vol. I should be in either this or the advanced guide. It’s self-contained enough to be read by itself, lays out the fundamentals really well and I don’t think Inferno does a good enough job of summarising it considering the reader is already going through other complex texts through these guides.
Section 5’s first checkpoint question opens the can of worms of “Socialism in One Country” that I think would be counterproductive given the texts in question are only from before the Soviet Revolution.
I actually sat down to read redsails’s MER in order to give credence to my kneejerk rejection of it, but it surprised me by getting me to agree with most its claims. From the way I’ve seen people talk about it, I always assumed it was some typical first-world defeatist essay about how even the most lumpen of proletariat in the imperial core is metaphysically counter-revolutionary due to some supposed personal benefit from imperialism and settlerism. Instead it’s a pretty fair critique of the elitism of “free thinking rebels” who see themselves above the “brainwashed masses”. It’s right there in the title, damn it! I think the checkpoint question about it could be more leading in pointing away from first-world defeatism, but in reality I really just wanted to comment on how you really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover lol.
And lastly, it feels odd that the Social-Liberation section has nothing from the BPP.
And now to make this a big complaint sandwich: Nice work! I’m sorry, I’m just a complainy person!
There’s something poetic about a Windsor being called by his citizen name while being arrested. I hope the entire family of “royal” nonces get a proper Citizen Louis Capet treatment.
To depose a power it is required to have a competitive alternative power structure. When third world leaders are deposed, it’s usually by the military, and they usually have either broad popular support or internacional financial support (or ambivalence). Sadly no such alternative structure exists at any level of the US.
“The people” never rise up for themselves without such structures, and movements that underestimate the importance of alternative power (like CHAZ) are doomed.