chesmotorcycle

So I'm supposed to "research" your views...by reading through this thread...which is what I did.

Yeah, we had tried for years to get when it was just us. But with a kid it's that much harder.

Sniff sniff sniff...hey, uh, got any weed?

And I would add that there's especially little value in studying the far right if our goal is to understand what they want.

Sartre put it best:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

So I should join the MIC if I want to be able to retire? Got it. /s

I've read most of your comments, and I get a really strange feeling from them. Almost like "I'm not going to bother reading Kruschev myself, but you all are WRONG because you've never read him".

As an ML community, we're committed to historical materialism (you can see an excellent overview of it from Marx here: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/h/i.htm#historical-materialism). What I take from that is we have can have a deeper understanding of history than "mere" historians, who still typically lack any understanding of class or political economy.

And we especially don't need to read all the "Great Men" who "made things happen". We know that history is a process of class struggle, and understand its outcomes as such

I would guess most USians already don't have pensions. The majority have 401ks, which are tied to the stock and bond markets. Some don't even have those, and have to scrape by on Social Security, which was only ever intended to be a supplement to pensions.

I hope your week is significantly better than mine is starting out to be. Got Covid after avoiding it all this time. :(

This is my understanding as well. However revolutionary these governments once were, many if not all have been undermined by neoliberalism. Granted, of course it's plausible that the US would try to exploit any discontent in its favor. But whether or not that's the case here is still unclear.

I know Libya and Syria were obvious color revolutions, but plenty of the uprising in the Arab Spring was legit, no? Tunisia, Bahrain, even the harshly suppressed and limited version in Saudi Arabia?

I also have trouble believing the US could have pulled off the scale of the uprising in Egypt. As much as 25% of the country was out protesting on Mubarak's final day.

Not to mention that the State Department and even Obama himself were openly supporting Mubarak until it became clear it was untenable to continue. Only then, as Chomsky pointed out is the pattern of the US, did they flip the script and say they supported the demands of the democratic movement all along.

Dare to hope, but also dare to question being led astray by such hope.

True, but I prefer Mao's version: dare to struggle, dare to win.

The US is still threatening Iran over its pending retaliation for "Israel" killing Haniyeh. The Biden regime might favor a ceasefire, but they can't abandon the zionist project either.

Damn, that bad huh? So who are these "young people" leading the protests in places other than Kenya? Petty boog? Color revolutionaries?