davel [he/him] @ davel @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Which Ukrainians?

• The oligarchs?
• The Banderites?
• The eastern & southern Ukrainians, who, after the Maidan coup, declared independence from an unelected government, and were subsequently terrorized by the Banderites for nearly a decade, with tacit and overt support from the Ukrainian and US governments?
• The men being pulled off the streets and pushed to the front lines against their will?

Previously. Previously.

When you have to go back 93 years to the Great Depression to find an example, you’ve made my point.

FDR did what he did to save capitalism from the threat of socialist revolution, and politicians have spent the last three generations clawing back the concessions he had made to socialist & labor agitators. They also purged socialists from labor unions, and they purged and even assassinated communists, to avoid any such thing happening again.

Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour:

The New Deal, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, saved capitalism. It was put in place because socialists were a strong and serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the breakdown of capitalism—something I expect we will again witness in our lifetimes—there was a possibility of a socialist revolution. They did not want to lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a friend in 1930, said there was “no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.” In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said, “Hand over some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution.” And they complied. That is how the government created fifteen million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and public works projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the masses moved them to pity. They did this because they were scared.

I just think its swell that leftist is now cisgender heternormative and white.

If you’d developed class consciousness, you’d understand why neither party enacts progressive policies despite their popularity. Previously:

The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

I will gladly be a communist liberal.

It is impossible to be a communist/anarchist/socialist/leftist liberal, because communism/anarchism/socialism/leftism are diametrically opposed to liberalism.

Classic BlueAnon Russiagate conspiracy theory.

• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA "Cooked The Intelligence" To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away

They did not all re-win their primaries. See Bernie Sanders, Cory Bush, and Jamal Bowman. And you can’t win a primary when the DNC undemocratically cancels it, as it did last year.

📺 Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed

Democrats would rather lose to a Republican, to a conservative, to a fascist, to Trump, than address the material conditions of the American people.

I think I have a hind-brain heywaitaminute gland that catches me before making this mistake.

Archiveorg isn’t a paywall bypass. Archivetoday is:
http://archive.today/2025.04.21-012339/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/politics/hegseth-yemen-attack-second-signal-chat.html

Maybe someone should create a relationship advice community, because !asklemmy@lemmy.ml isn’t supposed to be that. It’s supposed to be an r/AskReddit clone.

I’ve never run into one myself. ProleWiki/Lemmygrad user Wisconcom was before my time.

A self-proclaimed Hoxhaist (although he would later start calling himself a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, anti-revisionist, or a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist... and eventually claimed he was never a Hoxhaist as Hoxhaism “does not exist”) […]

This is probably better asked at !asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml, where people may have informed opinions. Asking it here will likely get you mostly uninformed & misinformed opinions.

I’ve never come across anyone who calls themselves a “Stalinist.” Maybe that’s what some horseshoe theorists call Marxist-Leninists.

Please read community rules before posting, and please post Lemmy support questions to !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml next time.

The problem isn’t that we’re shooting centimillionaire celebrities and billionaires into space, the problem is re-entry.

Relatedly, Citations Needed podcast: The Siren Song of Rallying Around a 'Common Enemy' to Promote Progressive Causes

"Senate Weighs Investing $120 Billion in Science to Counter China," trumpeted The New York Times in 2021. "A New Economic Patriotism Can Help Unite Our Divided Congress," argued Newsweek in 2023. "US cedes ground to China with ‘self-inflicted wound’ of USAid shutdown, analysts say," cautioned The Guardian in 2025.

In recent years, we’ve been exposed to the latest version of a centuries-old geopolitical message: We all have a common enemy, and we all need to unite to fight it by making our own country stronger. That enemy—most commonly China—is threatening to outpace, if it isn’t already outpacing, the US in infrastructural investment, educational programs, technological development, and elsewhere, and we need to devote millions, billions, even trillions of dollars to restoring the vitality of our institutions in order to reverse this trend.

But why must defeating an "enemy" be the justification for policy that has the potential to benefit the public? Why should we just accept the premise that there must be an "enemy" to compete against and defeat? Why can’t policy be enacted for the sole purpose of improving people’s lives? And how does this messaging about the threat of a looming adversary serve the ruling class?

On this episode, we detail the timeworn trope of the common enemy as a "unifying" device, looking at how increasingly so-called progressives are appealing to feel-good sentiments of unity and to the genuine needs for sound infrastructure, robust social safety nets, corporate regulation, and functional institutions in order to sell the idea that there is, and always will be, a shadowy bad guy that must be vanquished.

Our guest is historian, professor and author Greg Grandin.

Protip: Don’t announce to the world what domain(s) you intend to buy, because then someone might get to it first.

Ever notice how Sirhan Sirhan and Duran Duran are never seen in the same place? 🤔