amemorablename

I'm glad to hear that, thank you for being thoughtful. 🙏

If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together for something better, it’s no mystery why there hasn’t been any traction.

Taking this personally and blaming a handful of people you briefly interacted with on the internet for the failures of communism in the US rather than taking into account the violent and pervasive worldwide campaign of anti-communism over decades makes you sound like a liberal who, however well-intentioned you may or may not be, has yet to make meaningful progress on unlearning the elitism that has been socialized into you from day one and has yet to begin internalizing the gravity of how violent these matters have been, historically, toward anyone who opposes imperialism, much less tries to organize a socialist state.

If you read this through that same socialized lens of people being ranked on a ladder of quality, you will probably think this is me "dunking on you" or "putting you down" or "trying to one up you". But it's not meant to be any of those things. I like to think of these things, as relating it to the framework of scientific socialism, as striving for "effective compassion." The end goal is a decolonized world where the working class is empowered and free, the ultimate end goal is communism. But the steps to get there require a combination of theory and practice along the way, to understand what is required in context and develop toward change that is effective toward these compassionate goals that side with the colonized, the marginalized, the working class.

This also requires a certain amount of learning from each other. No one person has all of the answers and if you don't already have the humility to consider what others are saying on the face of it without reaching for these sweeping proclamations about the entirety of an instance and the entirety of "leftist" efforts in the US, you need to develop some. We can't afford people viewing contestment of theory and practice as a game of personal attacks and wholesale dismissal with only minimal consideration. Unfortunately, many of us online are accustomed to getting a heaping helping of disdain, if not accusations of being a foreign agent, simply for taking a patient and diplomatic anti-imperialist stance.

Ultimately, when it comes to things like "being an ally," this isn't a secret club that requires a secret handshake. It's pretty transparent about what the ideological expectations are. Vague statements of organizing and caring about the same things make you, if honest in intention, a person who cares, but does not automatically mean you are ideologically aligned. This is something that I once had to learn when I was deep in liberal thinking still. Caring what happens to your fellow human beings is great. Doing something about it is even better. But populism alone is not marxist-leninist, nor anti-imperialist.

If you are already some of these things and I am misunderstanding, you are welcome to correct me on that. But if you are, it is all the more reason to take seriously the discussion of these things in the context of their mechanics, and try to look past whether people are nice to you in how they convey them.

You appear to be presenting some sort of dichotomy that is based on your interpretation of an amalgamation of positions you have read and does not relate to any specific take, so I'm not sure what to say on it.

There are people who are supporting PSL or other such efforts, for example. That is already one way it goes that contradicts your dichotomy, where it's not as simple as "vote for nobody" or "vote blue no matter who". Supporting an effort like PSL can be useful for educating and organizing, without having behind it the belief that a PSL candidate will win the presidency against all of the inertia, funding, celebrity, and third-party-blocking they are up against. Similar to how some of the energy behind Bernie's campaigns had value for educating and organizing in spite of him not succeeding.

You don't seem to be someone who thinks you're using binary thinking. "Vote blue no matter who" folks often seem to be talking of strategy and compromises. But what kind of compromises? What kind of strategy? What are you gaining from going up to the democrat party and effectively saying, "Look, I'm going to vote for you no matter what, as long as you aren't the other ones." That tells them they don't need to do anything differently, they don't need to listen to you, they don't need to care one lick what you have to say. They can continue doing their genocides and their billionaire-supporting acts and you'll vote for them anyway because the wrong other one might get in if you don't. What are you accomplishing? When has power ever listened more when you apply zero accountability to them and just say "you're not as bad as the other one, so I guess you"?

To me, it ends up sounding like some of you have effectively given up. Like you don't believe there's ground to be gained here and you're just trying to stave off collapse. Because if you truly believing the country is like a rolling bus headed for a cliff, are you thinking about how to do anything that will turn things around for the most marginalized, disenfranchised, colonized peoples? Or is the only thing you've got, "This bus driver will drive it off the cliff at 1mph rather than 2mph?"

What is your idea for turning this around? "Not total collapse right away vs. total collapse right away" isn't a solution (if it were even a believable description of democrat vs republican and that's a stretch to begin with).

Obama was president for 8 years, was he not? Did he fill the supreme court to guard it from such things? As I recall, he made milquetoast compromises on it. Now we have Biden in office, one of the architects of the crime bill known for mass incarceration, one of the architects of the student loan bill that made it harder to get debt forgiven, among other problems, and there are people calling him "progressive" because of his administration doing some minor tweaks while he funds a genocide. How much worse does the democrat party have to be before it is clear to you they are not meaningful opposition to fascism and, in fact, work in lockstep with it much of the time.

I find it strange that you pull out words like "petulance" when we are talking about a party that funds genocide. Are you honestly telling me you think it is childish and feet dragging to resist supporting a party that is complicit in such things? That you think you are mature to throw a Palestinian kid in front of a bus in a vain attempt to save your niece and sister's reproductive rights? Which are already in shambles? When are you going to get that what we're up against is not defeated by voting once every 2-4 years for whoever they say is the worse one this time.

Why do you assume I have nothing to lose, that I am "willing" to lose things? Do you think my individual will had anything to do with Roe V. Wade getting overturned? Am I a supreme court justice? No. Did I choose who gets appointed as one? No. No matter who I vote for now, or voted for in the past, I was never consulted on that decision. In fact, the near total ignoring of the people's will on that matter was demonstrated handily when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated and ultimately confirmed in spite of the SA allegation and subsequent protest during his nomination.

The first step is admitting that the US isn't a democracy to begin with and never has been. At its most democratic, it is "democracy for the rich with some labor unions that aren't completely powerless as negotiating entities for subsets of workers but nevertheless have little to do with what the ruling parties of the country do."

If you go back in time to the original language, you get that language coupled with genocide and slavery. As time goes on, it doesn't get a lot better. Civil rights paved the way for liberals to act like "we've got democracy now because people have the right to vote", but ignores mass incarceration and its disenfranchisement, it ignores the electoral college, it ignores voter suppression, it ignores gerrymandering, it ignores lobbying, it ignores how little regular people have anything to do with what people are candidates to vote on in the first place. What is democratic about that system, for a person who can afford to drop thousands on buying politicians? Sure, something. What is democratic about that system, for a person who is working two jobs to make ends meet and getting eaten alive on means testing and debt? What is democratic about that system, for a person who gets racially profiled and thrown in jail over false accusations, if not gunned down in the street over absolutely nothing other than the whims of police?

Feels fitting that the US military would prepare for a zombie outbreak, considering that most of its enemies are in some part fictions it conjures up in order to justify attacking.

The hellish forced attempts at immersion from people being told over and over as writers to "show, don't tell" - I won't indulge in a rant about it here, as it's off-topic anyway, but that adage and the resulting prose drives me up the wall.

If true—and it's sure not hard to believe it is given the endless fucked up stuff western colonialism and imperialism has done over centuries—all I can say is, they make ghouls look like casper.

The kind of people who believe the US is a democracy, yet simultaneously believe they are being ruled by varying degrees of evil and that the only time the people should get consulted is once every 2-4 years, at which point they should panic and take all of the responsibility for what was done by other people during the time they were sleepwalking through politics.

That is a part I've been mulling over lately, the extent to which people are expected to take responsibility for so many things the system, as violently enforced, says they have almost no control over, while also being told to fuck off if they want anything specific from the system that differs from what the elites want.

It makes no sense. Regular people are either responsible or they aren't, they have power or they don't. And the evidence shows that the policy-making has little to do with what regular people in the US want. So why do people keep getting taken for a ride with the idea they're in control if only they'd vote the correct way once every 2-4 years. People have got to admit the reality to themselves and stop expending so much energy for a facade.

"And do not quote me."

At this point, Brynjolfsson points out that, “You’re on camera,” to which Schmidt responds:

"Yeah, that’s right. But you see my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done."

I almost wanted to say the US is a clown car of a country, but that would be insulting to clowns.

I feel that. It's especially awful to me how much of the US, there is no alternative and you're essentially being forced to do a dangerous high-risk activity on a regular basis just to get to and from places for basic survival (that is, if you can afford a car and are capable of driving and so on - and if you can't, you may be dependent on someone else doing that dangerous high-risk activity). The amount of cumulative stress from that, not even getting into the number of injuries and deaths, has gotta add up to a lot.

And the whole concept of driving as the main means of getting around is so backwards and ineffectual that the richest people bypass it and use private planes instead. All the traffic, the accommodating different directions people are coming from, lights, stop signs, turnoffs, you end up with so much starting and stopping, it's wasteful for gas use, wastes time, and isn't even freeing like it gets portrayed as because you're highly limited by the roads and their traffic patterns and design. And don't get me started on how so many road designs have no consistency at all and vary widely from moment to moment, because forbid any of it makes any sense and was planned ahead on.

So it sounds like the spirit of what this person is saying is, if somebody bad were to use the phrase "don't do genocide", then we should go consult people being genocided and ask them if it's okay to say "don't do genocide" because it's not really clear if it's the right thing to say, since somebody bad used it. 🫠