Chapter One

Burning stuff felt good.

Throwback to when he was touting the “plan” to push Biden left.

It’s a massive self-report that Vaushites will accuse you of doing no real-world organising because it’s 100% projection; if you ask them whatever happened to pushing Biden left, where you can learn about Vaush’s strategy to do this, and how his followers went about achieving this plan, they inevitably get infuriated by the questions.

These people, who will accuse you of ableism if you tell them to read theory, are very comfortable demanding that you account for how much real-world organising you’ve done without a single consideration for the fact that theory is much more accessible than irl organising is for most people with disability.

I know what you’re saying here but the king is absolutely a part of the Australian government and this is cheap equivocation on behalf of the Australian prime minister who should know very well that Australia is a not a republic.

You can’t be the head of state for a constitutional monarchy and claim that the monarch isn’t a part of the government.

Not a government decision?

Help me understand where I’m getting confused here.

Yeah but if this happened under Trump they would have signed this motion pressing down harder on their pens and Trump would have said something mean and/or ridiculous on TV, so we can’t get distracted by this because we need to vote for 99.999% Hitler instead of 100% Hitler, okay?

I don’t think this can be measured in a vacuum.

Let’s explore some different cases as a thought experiment:

A country achieves communism. I don’t think this is possible tbh but let’s go with it.

We can expect to see the “proles” consuming more than they would otherwise as they’d have all the products of their labour.

Let’s presume that people are people and that they aren’t going to suddenly develop much more class consciousness and a spirit of internationalism. Obviously I think that a communist society would go a long way towards this but let’s ignore that for argument’s sake.

Unequal exchange would mean that the communist society would be taking advantage of this arrangement, perhaps more than they would be able to otherwise.

But if this is the situation, we also have no bourgeoisie who do rampant exploitation of the third world. We have no more corporations. We have no more bourgeois democracy inflicting imperialism upon the world.

Perhaps consumption drops a whole lot purely by virtue of the fact that people would rather work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. Perhaps in freeing up the products of labour and what would otherwise be capital and surplus value under the previous system, people are able to manufacture and acquire products designed for repairing with replaceable parts rather than for planned obsolescence. Perhaps people would be able to be more conscious consumers, opting for the things that have a lower environmental and social impact rather than working two jobs as part of a single-parent nuclear(ish) family and only being able to choose the simplest and most readily available options rather than carefully considering what they would genuinely prefer. Perhaps lots of people devote their time to things like gardening and producing food themselves because they only need to work 15 hours a week in their factory job to cover the rest of their needs.

It’s hard to estimate what it would look like exactly, especially in an unbiased way, but even in a conservative estimate I’d say that it would be a net-benefit for the third world as the degree of exploitation and the worst excesses of consumption would be largely curbed, not to mention all of the excesses of capitalism and imperialism being eliminated (from that society anyway).

So let’s look at a genuinely SocDem society next:

Imperialism is dead in the water. Capitalism is hemmed in. Billionaires are reduced to having no more than, say $10 million in net worth. If corporations still exist they are brought to heel and they are held accountable for their inevitable excesses.

Honestly in this society I would expect the net benefit to the third world to be worse than the example above but it would still be much better than what we have today.

Next is to consider things as they are today:

Increased wages are going to lead to increased consumption. But things like earlier retirement and better healthcare, education, environmental and workplace safety etc. are going to reduce the impacts on the third world - healthcare, especially stuff that is way downstream, has a big footprint. Workplace and public health and safety makes things better for everyone. Carving out chunks of profit to go towards better conditions generally means less money for wars and less money going towards imperialism, not always but more so than not. Workers having unions and solidarity means that there’s more chance of things like general strikes, which can achieve good outcomes for the third world.

I think under this scenario we could expect to see a net benefit that is significantly reduced compared to a SocDem hypothetical scenario. It might even come out as a wash, if you really want to make a conservative estimate.

Idk this argument seems overly simplistic and very undialectical honestly. It’s a bit like the reactionaries who complain about veganism or measures that benefit the environment and they charge vegans with being responsible for the deaths of animals due to industrialised agriculture or they concern-troll over the carbon footprint of a proposed expansion to rail transport.

I mean, yeah, there’s definitely an environmental footprint that gets incurred when you manufacture a car seatbelt and that’s fine. But if 100,000 seatbelts prevent one single person from becoming a permanent wheelchair user then the comparative environmental footprint is vastly in favour of making those 100,000 seatbelts because the environmental footprint incurred by the necessary medical and accessibility interventions from one preventable case of someone ending up as a permanent wheelchair user are far greater.

This is not an argument in favour of eugenics or to lay the blame for the social and environmental impacts of being disabled at the feet of the individual though. I’m just trying to highlight that we should not fall victim to an overly reductionist assessment of things in a very static way or otherwise we end up with well-intentioned measures that can have ramifications that are far worse than what we prevent.

Likewise we should not oppose fighting for better working conditions in the first world out of concern that any improvements here are simply going to make things worse in the third world because it’s not nearly as simple an arrangement as one where improvements here necessarily make things worse over there in equal measure.

Waiting on the CIA to issue me with a stinger so I can go and pose with it out the front of Killiechassie for a photo op

So the Democrat strategy of “I’ve already moved my stuff here so I might as well keep this spot” isn’t viable?? Who could have seen that coming?

Biden’s campaign is in tatters.

The Reichsadler theory

Quick questions for them:

What has Biden actually done to protect trans people through legislation?

Do they believe that international law needs to be upheld?

Do they think that it’s okay to be complicit in genocide?

Interesting that it comes up on a Bernie tweet but not a Hillary tweet, eh? Almost as if AOC knows which side her bread is buttered on.

A little breakdown of a song that was directly inspired by Two of Hearts

Mastochism

There’s something poetic in how all of their efforts are apparently blowing up in their faces right now.

If they devoted their energy to pushing Biden left instead or to turning against Biden early on in order to demand a better candidate, this wouldn’t have happened.

Instead they pushed the line that Biden is our only option and I’d guess that a good proportion of reluctant Biden voters who were chastised into backing him a second time are gonna be rapidly losing their already dubious conviction to back Biden, but also it seems like suddenly there’s a rift amongst the diehard Dem camp where one side is still rallying behind Biden while the other has lost their faith in Biden being a viable candidate.

Aside from it being a state of chaos under heaven there’s gotta be some bitter irony in that second camp, having spent so much time scolding other people into voting for Biden who are now the ones that are about to get scolded by the diehard Biden camp for not supporting Biden hard enough.

A part of me hopes this is a major inflection point amongst the US progressive cohort and that we’re gonna see a large splinter group that finally wakes up and realises how toxic their vote-shaming strategy is and how chasing the DNC rather than expecting the DNC to appeal to the voterbase is a fundamentally broken strategy. I know that progressives are terrible at keeping score but surely there’s a golden opportunity for agitation by reminding this newly disaffected cohort that the DNC destroyed their chances at beating Trump the first time around by bringing Bernie to heel and running Hillary instead and now they’re doing the exact same thing by pushing Biden at any cost rather than finding someone who has broader appeal and popular support, or even just someone who can finish a sentence coherently.

Strange to think that the key message that the DNC has been pushing—that we must put up with anything in order to defeat Trump—might be the very thing that turns people away from the democrats because they have lost faith in the DNC and its lame duck nominee.

There’s a reason why nobody will let Elizabeth Warren cook. Here’s the result from the last time people let her:

I remember when Biden campaigned on the promise of addressing COVID by following the science.

Instead he got rid of mask mandates and there is serious discussions about banning masking in US states, biobot is no longer recording COVID data, and COVID is surging in the US.

But we all just need to trust that he’s going to tell the truth this time around. There’s an old saying in Tennessee…

Do I smell another recall?
Somebody reset the timer!

What they’re selling:
Dark Brandon

What you’re getting:
Dim Biden