As the other commenter said, it depends on where you are. But I would say, overall yes. Nobody really wants to talk about how bad it is/shaping up to be. The people preparing for serious defensive action are all dark, and everybody else is somewhere between denial, anger, or depression.
There are a lot of spinning plates in the air, and they seem to be all falling down at around the same time. A small example of this is the 20,000 new ICE agents that the administration has order to be quickly hired. Back during the campaign, they had Trump loyalists at his rallies sign up to "work for the Nation". That's almost certainly the pool that they will be hiring undertrained, and armed Trump lackeys from. That means within the next 2.5 months, Proud Boys, Boogooloo Boys, Patriot Prayer, Patriot Front, J6 insurrectionists, and many other actual Nazis will have badges, guns, and a mandate from the federal government to round up immigrants, dissenters, disabled, and anybody else they deem to be "undesirable". And that's just ONE of the plates spinning in the air.
That's because the DFL took advantage of a VERY brief Trifecta in the state government to pass legal weed, and now they've had to spend years waring through Republican jiggery pokery in order to even get an official management body to oversee licenses and regulation.
If are thinking about coming to the U.S. this summer for vacation, please do not. Things are bad here. Worse than the news is letting on, even. PLEASE don't come here. Things are only going to get worse this summer.
Yes, but you assume they know literally anything about the academic system at all. They think anybody who works at a university is an "elite", and is therefore somehow being treated better than them.
No, they're not. They're all a lot more rural. I don't think many people consider Northfield because it's out of the way and off the freeway (and surrounded by nothing), which is one of the reasons I think it is the way it is hahaha
The cities are cool, and like any major metropolitan area, every neighborhood has its own vibe. Duluth is a REALLY cool city, and totally worth a look. But I ended up in this small, off the freeway, city called Northfield. It's really nice. There are plenty of jobs, lots of services, the rent is okay, and there are two liberal arts colleges here, which means that this tends to be a really progressive area
The Black Panther Party were cool, but the PSL is a bad example, imo. They've had... issues. Really icky issues that kind of mar the whole organization. I did meet some cool former PSLers back in my DSA-LSC days, though.
I think it's personally a stretch to call Xin Jinping a Marxist, even if that's how he identifies. It kind of seems like China's just doing a capitalism, but with more steps. I don't know enough about Vietnam and Cuba, but it's my understanding that Vietnam has been slowly moving in the same state capitalist direction that China did
All of the examples I listed should meet your definition of success, right?
You said:
The nature of society has not fundamentally changed in a century, so there's no reason to think that methods of organization need to drastically change as well.
I said:
You don’t actually believe that basically nothing has changed since before the industrial revolution, do you? That seems intentionally obtuse.
How is that a straw man? It's literally what you said.
I mean, it's both. Hungary was the upper cut and Czech was the right hook. But regardless, if you don't have a blind allegiance to just any state calling itself socialist, then you probably aren't a Tankie, right?
You're not an anti-anarchist, and I'm not an anti-Marxist. Isn't that just enough? Spending all of your time planning for what the potential future socioeconomic system might look like isn't something that really scratches any itch that I have anymore. I'm far more concerned with what can be done right now.
Signal can only be hacked in meatspace. It's totally end to end encrypted.