Nuttula [comrade/them]
You bullshit your way into the idea of a 150 million person “labor aristocracy,” obscuring class divisions during what is probably the most intense period of class differentiation in US history: the period after the postwar boom where living standards for the US working class is declining, while the capitalists hoard wealth in historic quantities.
Your argument here is not an answer both things are true from a Marxist perspective.
There is a labor aristocracy in the west compared to the rest of the world, while simultaneously it doesn’t mean the person lining up to get their food stamps are part of the PMC or aren’t exploited workers. Yes America is a heavily class divided country, but on a relative analysis America is also the imperial core profiting heavily from it. Nobody is “obscuring” anything by pointing out exactly who and where the imperial core is. At the same time nobody(at least nobody arguing in good faith) is “blaming” the American worker for simply being born there and benefiting from it. Yet it seems pointing this out is an incredible offense…
In general Americans do enjoy benefits from imperialism and this is a very important part to understanding their material interests, Sanders voters want healthcare but you aren’t going to convince them we should be building hospitals in Africa first, Sanders himself is a disgraced imperialist and that is the farthest left you got for over 50 years or whatever, the most you’ll get is some non-answer like "we can do both(just don’t ask with what money and who is going there). In general the American “left” just wants to redistribute the share of the spoils of imperialism, which to them is just reduced to something something big corporations and billionaires blah blah. There is no understanding that the majority of these profits come from direct foreign operations or rely heavily upon it.
You on the other hand, hold American workers responsible for the crimes of their ruling class in a way that 1) is bullshit, not grounded in conditions or consciousness as they actually exist, and 2) isn’t going to win anyone to your position. So I can see how you might struggle to build a connection.
The thing is people on this community don’t always want to hear the hard truths about what a revolution means, I am not American so my view is certainly biased, however from a global perspective we shouldn’t blame ourselves or our ideology for the results of the absolute destructive mentality of capitalism. The harsh response to his point of view is proof of this. Everyone here memes about revolution and change and death to Amerikka and all that but the moment someone seriously defends civil war or balkanization regardless of the consequences then he is being petty or cruel.
Alas just arguing that there will be innocents who suffer is a meaningless construct, who is innocent, from what perspective and based on what metric? A revolution is an explicit statement of the end justify the means and if you don’t accept this premise then you are not realy ready to fight for it, or any sort of meaningful change realy. You’ll always be at the mercy of the fascists who threaten you with killing innocent children or woman or worse, “Capitalism/America is too big to fail”.
Ultimately if there is Balkanization or anything like it will be because at every single step of the way, both the American population and the capitalist ruling class have taken steps(sometimes very wrong steps) towards it. It is not the socialists/communists fault for realizing this and planning for this and ultimately unironically supporting it.
Our task is to use the opportunity towards our own goals not to be a nanny of the fascist capitalist state trying to stop it from destroying itself. Our duty is to the masses and ensuring we can make the least amount of people suffer while working towards our goal. If at some point you replace the goal with just being scared of the consequences then you already lost.
Being anti-vaxx has nothing to do with the necessary precautions needed with regards to a COVID vaccine. We are witnessing companies stocks going up just because of announced trial results(Pfizer a few days ago).
Usually science and the scientific method should be respected but the usual procedures that make science works and be trustworthy may not apply here. We are struggling to make people even give a shit about people who died or got infected with complications do you think the public will be outraged when we find out “oops the vaccine we rushed to the market wasn’t actually as effective as we claimed”? Hardly people will be desperate for the next rushed to the market miraculous vaccine by some other BS company.
And the consequences? Nobody will get fired or go to jail over a failed drug, at most the line will go back down a bit before going back up again the next week after everyone forgets what happened.
This is a racist dog whistle. It stems from the early 2000’s version of sinophobia where everything that came from China was supposedly cheap garbage. The only way these racists found how to deal with the fact everything you found on Walmart was “Made in China” was to have that response “oh it is cheap plastic low quality garbage anyway”.
You still see people try to apply that logic today, e.g see how Musk’s fans try to deflect the fact China will soon have better Chinese made EVs like the XPeng P7 trying to claim it is “stolen tech” or somehow lower quality.
And then you see remnants of that applied to other stuff. Chinese trains are somehow “not built to last” just like that cheap plastic crap you bought on Walmart 20 years ago. These claims are obviously baseless the Chinese high speed train technology is decades old now and was based on tech transfers and joint ventures from many foreign companies. Even recently a joint venture with Bombardier won a contract to build thousands of high speed train cars.
If these people are really expecting to make a point about short term infrastructure projects then you should question them on why is that even a bad thing if it were true anyway. People will benefit from these projects today whether it needs to be renovated 50 years from now or not is irrelevant the fact is either way it creates jobs, improves the economy and people benefit. Why is it bad to have people working these jobs? Is it better to have 1 billion people sitting on cubicles working spreadsheets for 10h a day instead?
Those who idealize perfectly built infrastructure projects made to last centuries are missing the point. The US road network from WW2 era is completely obsolete and in need of repairs for decades now.
Golden eye was good because of nostalgia. If they kept making them it would be no different then generic garbage shooter aka COD and shit.
Also between Splinter Cell(the first few were great) and MGS 2-3 do you realy need a subpar movie to game adaptation in that genre anymore?
Useless question. There wont be a free vaccine, and if it did it doesn’t matter because others wont take it themselves. The US is permanently fucked no matter what and there is no way out of this crisis(before the “natural end” i.e 70-80% of the population infected) that doesn’t involve severe government action, and you know that isn’t coming either.
Might as well ask what I would do if I had Bezos money. If you can afford to be quarantined at home you should and the vaccine is irrelevant. This vaccine is only 95% effective, but isolation combined with mask use is 100% effective.
If you can’t afford to quarantine than each person should make their own personal decision. In this case I’d probably take it.
People saying that you should trust the vaccine because money is on the line are completely detached to the past 6-8 months of history. Nobody will be held responsible if these vaccines fail, no company will lose money because they can make it all back through the stock market. And the stock market certainly gives no shits about the deaths so far, it certainly will not give a shit about a failed vaccine or any number of deaths, not in the US certainly not the combined number world wide.
You’d think the “market” cares about the economy getting back on track, except everyone knows the real economy is meaningless except for TV pundits and mainstream “economists”. The actual corporations and investors couldn’t care less because everyone now knows it doesn’t matter how bad it gets the US government will always bail them out.
I don’t think this theory is completely accurate. When talking about “people voting for Biden” you can’t just forget and ignore the way the primaries happened. Bernie flopped but he also put tens of thousands on his rallies and had a significant volunteer movement. It wasn’t a campaign about modestly trying to convince people at all but constantly tell others what the source of the problems are from a sucdem perspective. Hack even for a moment Warren had some momentum and looked like a strong candidate and in some ways she was as obnoxious as Bernie.
Then we can even look back at 2016. Neither Hillary or Trump’s campaigns were modest at all. Indeed you’ll find Trump supporters were always extremely loud and obnoxious about their beliefs. Hillary? “Well why are you NOT going to vote for the first woman president in history it is her turn your know I’m with her!”(repeat 10x a day to random strangers).
There is definitely some truth to the idea that libs want(ed) normalcy back, but this isn’t ground breaking theory. Indeed this is exactly what we already knew about Biden from day 1. He was supposed to be Obama 2.0, to rally the guaranteed minority vote away from Bernie and use the eventual Obama support to just say “hey here is your chance to go back to 2015 and pretend the last 4 years didn’t happen.”
I think the reasons why actual socialists are unlikely to have electoral sucess is due to electorialism itself. We don’t have cable news networks and the ability to bombard millions and millions with propaganda every day in any western country. The reasons why the revolution is hard if not impossible are not just simply down to “people want normalcy” because that is very much not true.
Republicans built the Trump movement entirely around the idea America isn’t normal anymore and there is no returning to normal MAGA is about rebuilding not turning the clocks back to 2006 or 1985. Liberals do want to turn the clock back to 2015 but that is due to Trump’s image. In social economic terms again look at the Bernie campaign, a large number of people already understand the 2010’s is an economic nightmare and want none of it back again.
Justin is pretty good I learned via his videos as a teenager over 10 years ago now and he is still at it. His tutorials are great I can’t recommend him enough .
In general it is funny to see how it all progressed you can find so much quality stuff now on the internet for free.
Not worth it when for every Lewis Hamilton there is a Verstappen who is a massive reactionary racist ableist motherfucker of a manchild. Just imagining F1 10 years from now when that fucker is winning multiple WDC is beyond depressing. That and a race in Saudi Arabia. And I thought it was hard for F1 to get even more reactionary and imperialist.
He regularly uses ableist terms on the radio, recently there was a controversy over him calling another driver a mongol***. Even got the poor Mongolian government to issue a statement but nothing came of AFAIK. I think in Brazil he wanted to brawl with Ocon, he was forced to apologize and so some community service or something IIRC. As I said Verstappen is a manchild, literaly your random guy on COD calling you slurs.
Of course chuds thinks he is like Schumacher(e.g like the famous incident with Coulthard) but he is just a millennial with extremely bad mouth at best and a massive reactionary troll at worse. To be clear F1 drivers all bitch on the radio, but it is also clear Verstappen is going to continue to get away with stuff and always getting only a slap on the wrist. He is exactly the demographic Liberty Media wants to grow… Jos Verstappen is an absolute shitter too(history of assault and abuse) so maybe he is just following the family tradition.