SpookyBogMonster

Karl Marx was alive during the civil war. We know what he and his fellow communists thought about it. In fact, some of his fellow Communists were Forty-Eighters: German Radicals who were exiled after the failed revolutions of 1848, many of whom fought in the civil war. One of them was August Willich, an ardent Communist who thought Marx of all people was too conservative. A “Tankie” of his day. The German Communists, like Willich, who fought in the American Civil War believed that the war against slavery, and in the side of the Union, was a Social Revolution against the reactionary landed gentry of the south. Many Forty-Eighters settled in Southwest, Ohio. If you go to the rapidly gentrifying Cincinnati neighborhood of Over The Rhine, it’s called that because it was originally made up of forty-eighter German immigrants, who became active participants in the underground railroad, and helped set up social programs to educate freed slaves, and provide them with housing and such. So the only person lacking critical thinking here is you OP. You’ve made up a guy in your head, to get mad at.

Poob has it for you

Bucee’s sucks shit, no doubt But I’m weary of this liberal notion that red States have nothing to offer the world. What the hell does it mean to “have actual cultural attractions”? Do red States not have culture? Does Louisana not have a culture? Does the Black Belt, throughout the South not have a distinct culture? Does New Mexico, or Texas not have significant Hispanic population that heavily influence their respective cultures? How about South Dakota’s heavy indigenous population? Or Oklahoma? How about Appalachia? Whiteness in America is, admittedly, not unlike the Borg, wherein all cultural artifacts and language of the many white ethic groups which immigrated here, were assimilated. They gave up the lifeways of their homelands in exchange for a kind of security, and thus for their great grandchildren to be run over by a Ford F250 in a Bucee’s parking lot. But that doesn’t mean these places are without rich, deep, and important cultures. The United States is a prisonhouse of nations. Oklahoma, alone, is where we shoved a significant portion of this continents indigenous people. The fact that they’re state government is lorded over by the most unhinged gringos America has to offer doesn’t make it a place worth ignoring or giving up on. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Any additional questions? Yeah, what in the ever living fuck are you talking about? This AI listicle-ass comment is genuinely illegible to me. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say

Delete this shitty fucking post. Dems put up a garbage candidate, and they lost the easiest race imaginable, for a second time. The Democratic Party actively courted right wing voters. The left obviously didn't want that, and the right was never going to vote for you anyway. You lost. Get over it. Start doing something actually useful instead of *removed* and whining. Anyone with any institutional fealty to the Democratic Party should be so embarrased, they never show their face in public again. But instead, they just punch left, and smugly act like their own failures were someone else's fault. Anyway, I'm off to go do real activism in my local community, with organizations that actually give a shit about me and my neighbors.

I grouped them insofar as we stole them from Mexico ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Please learn a different ethical framework. Utilitarianism isn't the only one

"The DPRK is a more normal country than tabloids, in the country that bombed it to dust, suggest" is hardly what I'd call "having a boner" for it.

Wow, the stock Windows Vista wallpaper!

Pretty sure this is fetish content...

England, of all nations, has become the good guy

Let's not get too crazy here. TERF Island can still sink into the fucking sea, as far as I'm concerned

There are a couple different ways we could look at this.

Institutionally, there has been a general trend towards diffusion of power. Kim Il Sung was President, which like in the US, meant he was head of state, head of government, and commander in chief of the armed forces. After his death, those positions were split between multiple people.

From Wikipedia:

The functions and powers previously belonging to the president were divided between numerous officials:

The premier of North Korea;

the chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly, chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly;

and the head of the military, the chairman of the National Defence Commission (replaced by State Affairs Commission of North Korea) and supreme commander of the Korean People's Army.

These positions are currently held by Pak Thae-song, Choe Ryong-hae, and Kim Jong Un respectively.

[Reformatted for better legibility on Lemmy]

On the other hand, I would definitely consider the personality cult around the Kims to be a troublesome aspect of the DPRK's political culture, and I don't think there's really any way around that.

The reason it developed historically, however, is worth exploring. Prior to the Korean war, the Fatherland Front which made up the Revolution post WW2, was incredibly vibrant, with lots of parties and social cleavages outside of the Workers party being represented. After the Korean war, however, election results show a major rallying around the Workers Party, and the sidelining of other parties and organizations in the Fatherland Front.

The Korean war never truly ended, the US bombed the Korean peninsula so much that pilots complained there were no more targets, and people took to living in caves. So it's understandable why, despite ostensible attempts at diffusing power, that it's managed to centralize regardless. There's a historic desire for stability in the face of incredible adversity.

If we want to get really in the weeds about political economy, the DPRK's economic base is made up primarily of extractive industries, like mining, because the Korean peninsula's bread basket is in the south, and countries with primarily extractive industries tend to develop noted centralized power structures, compared to countries with more diverse productive industries.

So a Socialist country like Cuba, which has a more agricultural economy, allowed it to develop a more diverse economy, and thus it has a healthier political culture, by contrast.

All of that said, whatever qualms of critiques of the DPRK I may have, they had a Socialist Revolution, and have kept it going, which is more than I can say as a Socialist in the US.

And I think, if we care about the people of the Korean peninsula, we should want a formal end to the Korean war, a dismantling of the DMZ, an end to the US military presence and sanctions, and an internationally mediated set of talks between north and south, about what their future together might look like.

Those things would, I suspect, go a long way in helping establishing a healthier political culture in the DPRK, as well as dignified material benefits to its people, free from arbitrary restrictions

The government already has access to every phone number in existence

They used to publish them in big books, even

Log off and come suck my gock, fuckwad lmao

So... How does it taste?

I don't really want to argue with a fellow leftist here while there are liberals attacking us all over the place

Me, an ML, defending my anarchist comrades from the liberals o7

Idk, Vance has always been distant from the rest of the administration, and simply put he has no rizz. Utterly sauceless. There's nothing fun or whimsical about him that MAGA chuds can project a parasocial relationship onto. Plus, his wife isn't white, which is already a big problem for large swaths of the Trump base. I just don't think he has it in him to hold the MAGA coalition together

Slavery didn't end because the slaves revolted. It ended because white people fought to abolish it.

Holy revisionist history!!

White abolitionists absolutely played a role in ending chattel slavery in the United States, not the least of which were John Brown, the 48ers, and others who were doing what they did for the goal of Abolition primarily.

The vast majority of northern politicians, generals, and soldiers, were engaged in the Civil war to preserve the Union, first and foremost. Abolition was a distant secondary concern for most of them.

Furthermore, Slaves weren't just sitting on their asses waiting to be freed by the benevolence of white people, they were agents of history all on their own. W.E.B. DuBois argued in Black Reconstruction in America that an underdiscussed turning point in the Civil War was when slaves engaged in one of the largest general strikes in American history. A strike which crippled the southern economy and thus its ability to sustain the war.

So yes, Slavery did end in very large part because the slaves revolted.

At least take me out to coffee first...

Somalia is a failed state, not a project built around anarchist organizing principles

How can a territory with borders containing hundreds of thousands of individuals hide?

Real Wakanda EZLN

Pestilence, even

There wasn't a single American slave revolt that contributed substantially to the end of slavery.

Except I literally gave you an example of one...The massive general strike of slaves which crippled the southern economy

Fellow white transfem here, I definitely agree that there's a time and place for unaffected people to advocate for a minority. That said, if I'm being charitable to OP, there are absolutely times when minorities get talked over in ways that really suck. I once attended a listening circle/support group that came together as a piece of transphobic legislation was likely to pass in my state. I went, expecting a good mix of trans folks and allies, and that we'd be coming together to vent our frustrations and figure out a way forward. But what I got instead was a room full of mostly cis people, talking over the trans people in the room, and being all sad and morose, like the bill in question was already a foregone conclusion. Like the trans people in the room were a lost cause to mourn, rather than worth helping. And that... Sucked! That bill didn't pass, but it wasn't because any of the cis people in that room did anything to help.

There are people in DSA with that person’s opinion.

Then how are they considered to be democratic at all? I thought that was a requirement for DSA… Of you asked the vast majority of DSA members today, they would say that the “Democratic” part of the name refers to the internal processes of debate and mass democracy that the orh practices internally, rather than, say, a commitment to a reformist path to Socialism. First of all, how is running a political candidate based on popularity strategically flawed? That’s literally the definition of being politically strategic. Popularity can be important, but the key criticism here is tailing an individual. AOC’s relationship with DSA is complicated, and for many in the organization, that communicated relationship means that going all in on an AOC presidential bid would be putting the cart before the horse as it were. If she were to win, there is neither the movement infrastructure, nor a significant or coherent enough Socialist bloc in Congress yet, for her to get much of anything done. Further, given her previous votes for selling “Defensive weapons” to Israel, many on the DSA left believe, and I think rightfully, that when the institutional inertial of the military industrial complex inevitably drags the US into a conflict in some far flung corner of the world, that she won’t have the backing, nor the personal fortitude to stand up to something like that. I think such a thing would tear the whole Socialist project in this country apart, frankly. Secondly, AOC is perfectly capable of leading and educating the masses; I think a failed AOC run could be instructive, in ways similar to Bernie’s two runs. The Bernie campaigns failed, but they were successes insomuch as they brought back Socialism into the American political consciences, brought people into DSA in droves, and radicalized those new DSA members away from their former liberalism. Perhaps a failed AOC presidential bid could do something similar at a larger scale. But I think that’s the extent of such a thing’s utility. I think those in the org who are diehards for an AOC presidency (namely Groundwork caucus) aren’t thinking as far ahead as they ought to. moreso than any delusional MLs lurking in the DSA without participating beyond complaining about every single candidate who actually runs… Red Star, the ML caucus, has 3 seats on the org’s National Political Committee, and occupies one of the national co-chair seats. Far from “Lurking” and “Complaining” in lieu of participating, they’re a very active and influential wing of the organization.

No there aren’t Yes there are. Liberation condemns Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s continued retreat from socialist politics and rejects any effort to present her as the future presidential standard-bearer for DSA, or for the broader socialist movement. -Liberation Caucus

Don’t talk down to me. You made up a guy to get mad at. There is no human being on earth who holds the position you claim “Tankies” hold. Delete this post.

I look 10 years younger, after having been on Estrogen for a couple years. This guy’s attempts to look younger have culminated in him getting on some Picture of Dorian Gray shit

And then there’s Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia

I’m trans, and I had a cis woman I know dismiss something I was frustrated about, as me just being hormonal. It was weird to be talked down to like I was a teenage girl, and frankly, I’d have expected a cis woman to know better, but I guess not. Misogyny is fucking crazy 🙃

So, for the record, the passage I quoted is not necessarily representative of my personal opinion. The person I responded to wrongly asserted that no one in DSA holds the position that AOC’s political engagement has, to one extent or another, been opportunistic. I simply set about showing how that is not true, and that there are people in the org who very much do feel that way. AOC hasn’t “retreated” from socialist politics. She’s had to adapt and be pragmatic since getting elected to serve in federal office, unlike anyone in that so-called “liberation caucus”. They sound like a bunch of backseat drivers to me DSA has an internal system of caucuses, which are largely ideologically based, and act as political parties within the organization. There’s Socialist Majority which is the big reformist caucus. Reform and Revolution is the Trotskyist caucus. Red Star is Marxist-Leninist, Libertarian Socialist Caucus is Anarchist, etc. Liberation are the Maoist caucus, and so they largely reject electoral engagements with politics, preferring to organize the internally colonized sections of the American working class through labor and tenant organizing, and the like. They don’t think taking congressional seats, even if DSA were to win all of them, would make socialism happen. But the reason I chose to quote them in particular, is because they represent what is probably the left-most position in DSA, regarding AOC. While much of the “DSA left” (left here being relative. Even the rightmost caucuses are to the left of mainstream American politics) holds a similar position, opposing an AOC presidential run, or otherwise being skeptical of her, they would likely frame it differently. Reed Star, for instance, would frame their AOC criticism, less as overt opportunism, and more as being strategically flawed, as the org tailing an individual for her popularity, rather than putting forward a candidate with the intent to lead and educate/radicalize the masses.

AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it’s being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.

Non Non Biyori is my default before-bed show, for when I’m not watching anything else in particular. It’s a cute little slice of life anime about a group of girls who live in the middle of nowhere, rural Japan.