Don’t forget the material basis for these shifts! While The Discourse of “practical” truangulating centrists tends to show this rightward path, it is because (1) they were already fundamentally reactionary, they tend to just use this logic as an excuse for why they tolerate far-right positions, and (2) the right is supported by the ruling class to address some of the “problems” it creates, like a marginalized underclass that wants enough income to feed their children, housing, and safety from violence.

The shift right is not driven simply by debate or ideology, but by the arenas where degradation in material conditions due to capitalism meet the ruling class’ need to deflect blame to the marginalized (who they can reap larger profits from) to placate the less marginalized. Racism, nationalism, and extermination campaigns are created and maintained for the interests of capital, with the common people being pushed and prodded to fall in line with repeating the (usually ad hoc) new or recycled scapegoats and underclassrs. Wouldn’t want you to point blame in the right direction!

This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude

They’re not depicted as rude, they’re depicted as an know-it-all eager compromiser that ends up working for the forces of reaction because they have no real principles or red lines.

close-minded

That is generally the attitude of “centrists” and people that go out of the way to congratulate themselves on “being practical” by triamgulating. If they were open to actual principles they eould no longer be triangulating on them, and triangulating is their primary commitment.

genocide supporter

Like virtually every Democratic member of Congress and both of their presidential candidates? Anyone tolerating that is indeed complicit. It does not require any mental gymnastics to acknowledge this.

posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China

No!!! I almost passed out when I read that. You’re telling me there are good aspects of a designated enemy of empire!? Impossible.

Open-minded btw.

sometimes pro-Russia propaganda

Not another designated enemy!!! I almost died when I read this.

and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.

Is this supposed to imply something bad about them?

Car sales on the RF are up something like 50% over last year and last year had relatively normal numbers.

The RF’s central bankers keep trying to tank their economy but it isn’t working because of all the direct investment required to offset sanctions. They are maxing out debt costs, basically, trying the neoliberal “fighting inflation” strategy that does the exact opposite most of the time. It makes them precarious economically despite how well they’re doing but for a very different reason than “sanctions are working”. If they kicked out their neoliberals it would be smooth sailing.

This sounds like a scheme for capital to charge prison rates for a crappy hotel.

These are institutions, not your friends. They are not making an oopsie, they knowingly downplayed genocide because it disagreed with their political commitments, the ideology they enforce through hiring and firing practices and editorial oversight. They had staff members making noise about this on day 1 and rather than accept this they hounded them out.

Here they are telling their staff not to sign solidarity petitions That article, which is also itself full of Zionist false tropes re: what is antisemitism, cites other examples that I recommend reviewing. These include The Guardian firing a cartoonist because they depicted Netanyahu operating on hinself in the shape of Gaza. And firing a columnist for retweeting pro-resistance accounts on Twitter and (correctly) claiming Israel bombed a hospital. This was back when the media figured it just needed its usual apparatus of nisibformation and downplaying to give Israel deniability for some short-lived crimes.

You can also find a member of The Guardian defending Israel’s actions here https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-gaza-bbc-journalists-accuse-broadcaster-of-bias. As is common for liberal Zionists that happen to be Jewish, they attempt to leverage a false sense of victimization to justify Israel’s crimes and make this about “antisemitism” that they personally exoerience, which 99% of the time is just criticism of Israel. The real goal of these media putsches is to get their Israel-critical colleagues fired, providing their employer with an “acceptable” excuse.

There is also one or more first hand account of how this dynsmic worked at The Guardian specifically on the issue of genociding Gaza: https://novaramedia.com/2024/03/12/how-the-guardians-editor-in-chief-caved-to-pro-israel-pressure/

Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.

You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.

Will do!

Right you accuse those that correct you of being paid Chinese agents. This is correctly understood as a racist response.

Hey look the person that refuses to read and makes racist comments is calling others fake lefties.

Typical sinophobe response

America has already used all of the tools of fascism before, often to greater extremes. Lebensraum found its inspiration in Manifest Destiny, for example.

Expect to see things you have seen before, but now with clearer eyes. When Dems want to double their police forces and tighten preparedness of the national guard instead of maintaining or increasing social spending, recognize that the boots they are lacing are intended for your necks.

While I don’t want to reveal my academic background, I can say that in my work Chinese papers were just as good as if not better than those of other counteies. And to me seemed to be less focused on creating academic cliques.

I think Dems need to send another geriatric Clinton there to tell them their families deserve to die, it seems to be a winning strategy.

It will be strikingly similar to the last 4 years but the partisan narratives will simply flip in various ways, as will those of allied media. The bad things that the Trump admin did in his first term that became suddenly tolerable, ir even “good” under Biden? They will be back to being good again. Dem politicians will be back to calling themselves “the resistance” despite losing another layup because they could not do more than campaign on “at least we aren’t them” while presiding over a genocide and economic decline for the average person, both with intentional policies. Remember that they are all PR and cynicism and are lying to you about what they will do, as they are not beholden to a disorganized public in any way.

To be clear, bad things will be happening. It is only reasonable to feel some despair for them, but if you can allow that to motivate you to substantive action you can escape merely being a witness to suffering and can begin to work materially against it. Much of that suffering was going to happen anyways or a different form of suffering may have happened under a Harris regime. It’s not like Democrats did much with their power, they tend to pretend they have no party discipline or power even when thry have the presidency and Congress, so they allowed the major shifts at state levels to occur largely unheeded and served a right wing agenda at the national level. So it is important yo ask the question of what action you can take that does not depend on expecting Democrats to save you. They won’t. What we need are other organizations, ones that organize independently of ans often in opposition to the Democrats, Dems who otherwise suck up all political energy demanding improvements to people’s lives and turn it into more cops and wars.

So, the two ingredients to effective organizations are political education and organization building. The former is just an organized form of reading and teaching, and it is essential because we have all internalized false ideas of how politics functions. They are taught to us by the ruling interests that keep us disempowered *because * this keep them in power. The latter is about growing and improving an organization so that it can have greater and greater leverage and develop strategies for gaining and wielding power (and power is not things like letter writing campaigns to already-elected ghouls, it is making demands that must be met or else).

You can enjoin this kind of project in many ways. You don’t need to jump deeply into a hardcore organization straightaway; it can be useful to join one that is only oushing yourself moderately at first. Maybe a mutual aid organization or a single issue or single community group. The important thing is that it is of the left and therefore not of thr Democratic party. You can also engage in your own political education independently if you’d like, which can keep the pressure down when you are first starting out with irl left work.

And of course please do rely on whatever community you already may have, including here. I am happy to chat here or via DMs if you’d like and can answer basically any question you might have. I’m also happy to recommend readings that you may find useful or helpful.

Also, a reminder that community can start with just one other person, you don’t need to personally create a large organization overnight.

The left inherently recuperates through political education, but cannot do much about the society of the spectacle without winning revolution, as it does not have cultural hegemony. Debordists would traditionally go on mindfulness field trips and such, which is fun, but not really building power.

The left needs to build: it needs more and members. This means political education and doing organizing work, with everyone levelling up skills, planning and executing actions, recruiting, studying, and running education programs for the recruited. And all of this means nothing without the context of an organization, so join one that looks good and revisit your decision every few years as you develop politically yourself.

At this point you are basically uncomprehensible because you aren’t using the quote feature and your thoughts are disorganized, providing insufficient context for what point you are trying to make. Plus, I am getting very repetitive because the fundamental problem here is an intransigent combination of arrogance and ignorance - your defensiveness despite clearly knowing virtually nothing abiyt this topic and relying on deflection and invention to resist correction. A curious person would at least go read a bit to see if the things I’m referring to have grounding and develop their own education this way. Unfortunately you are against your own education on this topic and that is not something I can fix on your behalf. The lack of self-reflection to even make yourself comprehensible is an example of this, it has escalated to the point of communication itself being nearly impossible.

If you are at some point interested in a good faith discussion where you acknowledge what you do and do not know and what you will spend time learning, let me know.

If Israel has a working class, it is one of settlers, IDF soldiers, etc. Those are not the “good guys”.

There is a longstanding and incorrect view of Western leftists in the capacity of the Israeli working class to build their power and address the injustices. That class has no capacity to do so whatsoever. They are fully bought-off by the ethnocentric project, both materially and psychologically. This is not very different from how other settler colonist “working classes” did the same. If anything, it is an important lesson that the working class is not a moral quantity, it is a group defined by its relation to production, and only through political education can it gain agency for positive change.

Mandela’s imprisonment was a big deal in the west, despite governments labeling him as a terrorist, his story galvanized significant international support.

Oh, you mean a primary operative of the ANC that pushed hard to start their guerilla efforts? lmao

Cute that you accuse me of fairy tales while you’re the one spouting all the messaging about a clearly losing party that could only win if only the air planes went away.

I haven’t said that, actually. You have confused yourself again.

I’m afraid complexity is real, though.

Complexity is real, but this topic is not. You are just incurious and, like other liberals, decide to whitewash that ignorance as a recognition of (unstated, unidentifiable) complexity. A cop-out, basically. Notice that you have basically nothing to say about the alleged complexity. Nothing that actually challenges anything I’ve said.

Humans are a mess, and do things for all manner of reasons, despite our faiths trying to oversimplify everything into some imaginary god or single philosophy of materialism.

Okay bro just one more toke bro. You are so confused, I don’t even know where to begin. When did we begin discussing materialism or philosophy? Buddy, we are stuck at the basics of things like not lying and remembering what we are talking about and how you should read before sharing opinions.

You may have addressed it, but you’re simply nonsensical.

I don’t know what you’re referring to and I don’t care to try to figure out out. Be clearer in your thoughts and words or use the quote feature.

Nitpicking pointless details. Fine, all fighters for the North Vietnamese were not the sole cause for victory.

I didn’t say anything like that either lmao. You seem to have no idea what is happening most of the time, it’s like you don’t even read what I said.

It takes two sides to end a war, a side has to accept its defeat. The US only accepted its defeat due to domestic factors, there were plenty of war hawks keen to keep going.

I’ve already addressed this. I will wait for you to respond to what I said instead of endlessly repeating yourself.

No, I am not the one looking at a sole cause. I acknowledged the efficacy of the guerilla campaign. The one looking at sole causes is you, pointing to that guerilla campaign. I am saying it alone is not enough, more factors were necessary.

Same as before, I don’t know what you’re referring to and don’t care to go and figure it out. Use the quote feature or organize your thoughts.

Uh huh, shift all the blame to cover for yourself, very convenient. It’s pretty clear to see a political agenda instead of an honest intellectual conversation though.

I am having a very honest conversation, but it is in no way intellectual. We are, as I said, stuck at very basic things like, “is it okay to lie?” and, “do I need to actually go and try to learn things before having and sharing my half-baked opinions?” and, “maybe what will help is a series of confused generalizations about faith and god and philosophy of materialism with no relation to what anyone else is talking about”. We could only ever have an intellectual conversation if you were in any way interested in an intellectual topic. To be perfectly frank, this topic does not require much in the way of an intellectual discussion, it is mostly about establishing basic facts of which you are entirely ignorant and obstinately refuse to engage with our educate yourself about, but you do seem to think that I am at fault for not accepting your nonsense fabrications you offer as substitute.

Your whole thrust is in defense of hamas.

I’m not certain that I’ve even mentioned Hamas in this conversation. I certainly wouldn’t reduce the Palestinian resistance to only Hamas. I think you are just projecting your own lightweight understanding of the topic onto me.

Mine is not in support of Israel’s genocide, though, just in an accurate understanding of what’s going on, no matter who it reflects poorly upon.

But you have no understanding of what is going on. Nearly everything is clearly a revelation to you. There is rarely anything concrete or specific in what you say and when there is it is usually wrong or misleading. When I provide concrete specifics you just make things up to be contrarian and rescue your prior fibbing. You are acting in the exact opposite way that you are currently claiming.

The real propagandist here is pretty clearly you, you are attempting to positively participate in an ongoing military conflict, and help one of the two sides. I understand, but don’t throw stones when the real agent is yourself.

Agent? What? I of course stand with the Palestinian resistance, this is obvious and I in no way hide it. And propaganda is just an attempt to convince others of political positions through argument and presentation. We all engage in it. But mine is accurate, informed, and just.

Unfortunately you have decided that the important thing here is your ego and not, say, the Palestinians themselves. God forbid you learn anything about them.