This thread has made me realize that while I was watching the hearings on it purely for comedy aspect, there were actually people out there being like, “Yeah that makes sense.”

Love it when the government takes away our stuff. Please, take away more of our stuff. Love me that security theater.

If you don’t like the app, just don’t use it. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with data security and everything to do with other social media companies lobbying to eliminate a competitor, using anti-China sentiment and fear-mongering as a justification. It’s all about the money.

No can do. If I was going to do that, then I would’ve never left behind the things my parents tried to get me to believe, and I’d be a religious conservative. Why cope by pretending Kamala’s a Marxist when I could cope by pretending I’m going to live forever in eternal happiness after I die?

I chose to walk the path of truth and it’s often harsh and unpleasant but it’s the path I’ve chosen.

No, that’s just cope.

That’s like saying, “It’s fine to say that you just hate the government of Nazi Germany, but if that’s the only nation state you hate, it means you’re racist against Germans.” What?

I hate every apartheid state with equal intensity, however, since South Africa ended their system of apartheid, that just leaves Israel. I suppose if Israel’s system of apartheid was ended first and South Africa’s remained, it would mean I was racist against white people or something. Funny how who I’m “racist” towards is entirely dependant on who’s doing apartheid.

Sure. I hope you’re also against Palestinian nationalism then.

“If you’re opposed to minority rule, then I hope you’re also opposed to majority rule.” What? Simply give everyone in the region equal voting rights, as is their right as human beings, and the resulting state would be a Palestinian one.

Pretending doesn’t make it true.

If someone called him a Ricardian professor of economics and someone else was like, “Lol that’s not a thing” I’d say that the first person was more right than the second, with the same disclaimers I said in my comment.

Again, I think the whole issue is silly. Kamala is not her father. And I don’t see being a Marxist as being a bad thing. Considering how much the term gets slung around in US politics to people it doesn’t apply to at all, like Kamala Harris or Obama, I think it’s kind of silly to push back against it when it’s being used with someone who could credibly be called a Marxist. Especially when the much more clear and relevant line is that her father is irrelevant.

I hadn’t looked into it til now but that’s fair. A shame.

Absolutely every country has different factions and inner workings, but in countries where there is a supreme authority, those are by and large null and void.

That’s not true. Even in dictatorships, the person at the top still has people who they need to keep happy in order to stay in power. Nobody gets to or stays at the top on their own, what happens is that they’re supported in that position by whatever interests they represent. If someone comes to power in a military coup, for instance, they have to keep the military happy or they’ll get replaced.

More to the point, it’s not just about who gets blame or credit for stuff, it’s about understanding the mechanics of a system, and the history, and the various material factors and interests that go into decision making.

Whether a country is democratic or not doesn’t really have anything to do with it. Every country, including non-democratic ones, has different factions and inner workings.

We cannot blame a single president for the same

Is this a typo? You just said that Trump was responsible for pulling out of the Iran deal, which is true, and which he had the power to do unilaterally.

What do you mean “that’s not a thing?” I don’t believe he’s ever explicitly called himself a Marxist but he has cited Marx as an influence on his works, as a professor of economics.

One of Harris’s most notable contributions to economics is his 1978 monograph Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution, which is a critique of orthodox economic theories that provides an alternative, synthesizing the work of David Ricardo, Kalecki, Marx, Roy Harrod, and others. Harris employs mathematical modeling to explore the relationship between the accumulation of capital and income inequality, economic growth, economic instability, and other phenomena, arguing that typical theories fail to adequately consider power, class, and historical context.

It seems basically true that he’s a Marxist professor of economics. It’s just not really relevant to Kamala since she’s an entirely different person.

Trump ripped up the agreement***

That’s true, but also let me just say this.

Whenever the US does something bad, you can’t just blame it on the whole US, you have to look at the specific people responsible for it, right? But what about when another country, like Iran, for example, does something bad? Do we say, “Oh well obviously you can’t blame Iran in general for it?” Very rarely. Often, people go so far as to not only paint an entire government negatively off a bad action, but to paint and entire culture and people that way, going back even to previous, unrelated governments that governed previous generations, completely different structures doing completely different things. Post-9/11, you saw people painting the entire Muslim world as warlike religious fanatics, even going back to Mideval times. People sometimes fail to make a distinction between the USSR and modern Russia. And likewise in China, I’ve seen people before trying to argue that China is inherently domineering based on ancient history.

When we’re taught history in school, all of our country’s decisions are taught with the full context and perspective, we’re taught what people were concerned about and why they did it and who were the ones who actually did it, and the conclusion for bad stuff is that it was an unfortunate necessity, or a mistake, or the product of a few bad apples in an otherwise positive project.

You are right, of course, that it was Trump who pulled out of the deal. But I think it’s important to understand that that nuance is only really seen from the inside, that from the perspective of Iran, for example, it’s just the US being fickle, and that if we expect the world to be understanding of that sort of nuance to our government’s actions, it’s important to apply the same sort of nuance any time we look at the actions of other countries.

I’m gonna have to admit to stealing that line from Dimension 20

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I only brought up Jim Crow in response to the claim that the the state will protect people and that there are ways to appeal the state of it doesn’t. The point being that having legal protections on paper is not always enough to keep people safe.

The “fascist enablers” don’t have consciences you can appeal to, because what drives them is money, and they are specifically selected for their willingness to serve capital and cause harm to innocent people. The system selects for sociopaths.

You analysis takes absolutely zero account of the systems or material conditions that exist which compel people to act in certain ways. Germany had an unemployment rate of 30% in 1932, but in your mind, it seems like the communists were only fighting because they wanted to and the capitalists were just reacting to that.

Had everyone on the left coordinated on mass nonviolent actions, like mass strikes for example, the capitalists would still have turned to the fascists in order to preserve their money and power. Violence or nonviolence doesn’t matter, what matters is whether their positions are threatened. You either never do anything to gain power in hopes of being able to beg your enemies for mercy, or you do whatever it takes to win so you don’t have to rely on that. The in between stuff where you pull your punches and try to disrupt things without defending yourself is the surest way to get yourself killed.

Because he’s rich and powerful and laws are just threats made by the ruling class, which he’s a part of. The law is primarily a tool of class warfare and as such is only enforced consistently and in full force against the working class. Very occasionally, one rich person pisses off enough other rich people to be subject to it, but you have to be extremely bad at the game for that to happen. The more rich people are subjected to the law, the easier it is to be subjected to the law yourself if you’re rich, so generally you’re better off looking the other way while they do illegal shit so that you can get away with your own illegal shit. Plus they have the resources to fight you, so it means picking a costly battle.

Yeah, and those same mechanisms existed in the Jim Crow South but that didn’t stop the Klan from lynching people and getting away with it.

Maybe if we just don’t fight the Nazis, they won’t be able to justify violence against us 🤡

Yeah let’s just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities because if we don’t they might stage an attack and the “atmosphere of violence” we’ve created by trying to keep people safe will allow them to blame it on us and seize power. The solution is to just allow them to seize power directly through force, without resistance.

This is nonsense. Nazis don’t need a justification to use force against you, they can literally just lie and make shit up, like they did with the Reichstag Fire. It doesn’t matter if it’s true because it’s directed at the weakest and most vulnerable and stigmatized populations, who have the least capacity to fight back and the fewest platforms to counter their narratives, and once they’re done with them they work their way up. They will create terror on the streets and then use the fact that the streets are full of terror to seize power. People are going to try to defend themselves when attacked whether you think they should or not, so the only question is whether that resistance is strong enough to actually work.

I’ve seen too many examples throughout history of people trying to use nonviolence and do things the right way and just getting slaughtered because the other side simply does not care to be a pacifist. The world is clearly a better place because people employed violence in WWII to stop the Nazis. And street fighting in the 30’s was one of the ways that the Nazis secured their power in the first place.

Nonviolent methods are tools that are useful to have in your toolbox, and in many situations, they are more practical in achieving your ends. But there are cases were violence is more practical, even necessary, and one shouldn’t shy away from it when it’s needed. You gotta have your head in the game, the stakes are too high. A diversity of tactics is best.

The logic that violence is oppressive so it should be renounced in all cases in order to reduce oppression is idealist. You have to look at the actual evidence and material situation to evaluate what effects violence will have in a given situation.

Punching Nazis is cool and good. Just try not to get arrested for it because it’ll take you out of the action longer than it will them.

*You’re