The senate is weird. It’s possible to lose seats even if your party gets more votes overall. 6 years ago was the Trump midterm so democrats did well. This meant a disproportionate number of senators up for reelection this year were either vulnerable democrats or safe republicans. So overall losing only 3 seats is not bad in that context.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying here if you think this relates at all to what I wrote.
I disagree but regardless, we aren’t necessarily discussing a violent revolution that immediately and instantly destroys capitalism and the state. Frankly, that is a distant possibility at this point and I’m not really convinced it’s a good strategy even if it was possible.
But it’s undeniable that direct action, mutual aid, and horizontal organizing can be an effective counter to growing authoritarianism. There are countless examples from history and recent times.
My hope is that as we begin to build these structures at local scales, we learn more about the best practices to create these types of organizations, and the ones that work will grow in size and influence, displacing violent, hierarchical structures. A sort of evolutionary rather than revolutionary process, but still arriving at the same end eventually.
Politicians can’t and won’t save us. We have to save ourselves.
It absolutely has but you don’t necessarily hear about the atrocities that weren’t.
Well I certainly agree that left-wing extremism is a thing, including among a variety of leftist ideologies.
My issue is that I don’t think tankies should be considered leftists at all. They are admittedly hard to place on the spectrum because their ideas grew out of leftism, meaning many of their ideals, language, and issues of focus are shared with the left. So to a casual observer they may appear to be leftists. But once these ideas have been completely twisted and transformed to defend and strengthen existing oppressive social structures, they share a lot more in practice with the political right than the left. A wolf is still a wolf even if it wears a sheep hide. And trading a king for a chairman doesn’t make you left-wing if the chairman has most of the same powers and no structures for ordinary people to wield collective power.
Left and right have always been about human freedom and autonomy opposed to the oppression of monarchy and similar institutions, but people have become confused because parties tend to shift to the right the more power they gain. Today people seem to view left and right more as competing sports teams than the broad ideological schools of thought they are. Tankies do not fit with leftist thought and should not be considered any form of leftist, regardless of how extreme they may be.
This is a very complicated issue. It’s absolutely true that there has been decades to centuries of forest mismanagement in the western US, which, combined with extreme heat and drought from climate change, has led to increased wildfire severity.
Logging potentially could help manage the forest in a better way, but only if it’s done correctly. Unfortunately, I have little faith this will be done. The thinning that’s needed should be focused on smaller trees and shrubs while leaving larger trees to grow—large, well spaced trees are actually extremely fire resistant. It’s usually dense stands of smaller trees that create intense wildfires.
The issue arises in that these smaller fuels are not particularly valuable to harvest, and the larger trees are where the money is. For-profit companies will always lobby for taking more larger trees which can actually make things worse by opening space for smaller plants to grow.
So overall the devil is in the details here. Especially as the forest service shifts to a more pro-industry leadership under Trump I doubt they will too careful to follow the science over profits.
Yeah. If anything the situation has become worse since that time. I was banned from the entire instance for a frank if somewhat critical discussion of Chinese history, even as I was trying to avoid contemporary politics because I knew that would get me in trouble.
Anything other than fawning praise of the Chinese government is labeled racism and results in a ban.
But I did read it lol
In Fig. 2, we present a layout of ideological subreddits, capturing the distinct positioning of tankies within the broader ideological spectrum. Their positioning, further to the left than subreddits like r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism, underscores their unique placement on the periphery of the far-left cluster, emphasising their extreme nature.
Removed by mod
What do you mean?
I see your point but when basic human rights of a minority group are threatened, there is a moral imperative to organize to protect them, regardless of their popularity. There’s really no way around it. I think a framing that includes trans rights as only one aspect of a larger struggle for human freedom and dignity is the best strategy. Because there will need to be some discussion of trans rights if fascists continue to attack them. The alternative is to abandon a part of our community to violent oppression, which to me is unthinkable.
Describing tankies as further left than other leftists speaks to a poor definition or understanding of the left-right spectrum. There’s no way that apologia for brutal authoritarian dictatorships should be considered a left-wing idea.
Pretty sure BC, VA, and CO are not going along with that.
It’s not even foreigners necessarily. There are millions of people who were born in the US that speak a non-English language as their primary language. In fact many of these communities have been here longer than English speakers have been, including native people and the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of territory the US annexed from Mexico, which includes the entire southwest region.
No. I think it’s a pretty shitty thing to do unless you had a reason to feel unsafe, which I personally never have.
I think democrats would, for the most part. Perhaps less enthusiastically, but since they hate Trump, I think it would not be a major issue.
The question is, how would low-information unaffiliated voters respond to having a socialist in the ballot? This is a difficult question to answer. Traditionally socialism is a bad word in US politics, albeit less so with younger voters.
Personally I don’t really buy the “Bernie would have won” stuff but there’s really only one way to find out.
It’s such a broad body of work that it’s hard to list all of the issues I have it it. I guess the biggest issue is just that Marx’s writings were an early attempt at describing a more rigorous case for social reform before more scientific theories of social change and economics were developed. So while his ideas were groundbreaking and innovative at the time they were written, not all of them have held up or are relevant to today’s world. And yet I don’t see many Marxists who have been willing to seriously dissect his ideas and take the useful ideas while discarding the bad or irrelevant ones. And in fact, those few who are willing to take a more critical stance are often ostracized and deemed “revisionists” which strikes me as a frankly absurd accusation. If you are not revising your theories then they are no longer theories but mere dogma, and that seems to be the state of mainstream Marxism today.
Less than 50% of those who voted. And I doubt even all of those wanted Trump’s agenda, many either didn’t understand or didn’t believe he would do some of the things he says.
So I disagree that the country as a whole wanted this. Obviously most did not.