If these are two of the most powerful men on Earth, it’s surely time to jump on the next SpaceX rocket to Mars.

That is a weird way to spell “get out the guillotines”

There is actually a huge thing to consider with any kind of authoritarian system ideologically: Basically without fail, they will have a “rules for thee, not for me” dynamic behind the scenes. Make abortion illegal? It will still be possible to skirt the rules for the powerful, and pervert the right to control your own body as a woman into the privilege of powerful people - mostly men - to decide if they allow a pregnancy to continue.

Authoritarianism lives, psychologically, from having the people on top, the ones “worthy” in the eyes of ideology, being able to bend or fully circumvent the rules. Even today, this is clearly visible in how rich people, and even more so rich organisations, are treated differently in front of a court, where proper consequences seem to be an exception instead of the rule. This also shows in more fundamental, everyday mechanics of society, think of how the violence monopoly of the state more often than not rests on the tacit acceptance of excessive police violence. Where often, cops and paramilitaries in police roles within states are developing a self-image and identity, along the lines of “to protect society from itself and its horrendous violence, I must become a violent badass” - consciously or unconsciously enjoying the violence and control they can enact, or turning their heads when their colleagues do it, and reserving for themselves and their in-group the privilege to do so.

So, having someone like Trump, a clear narcissistic rapist, being both openly against abortion rights in his political platform while personally holding the belief of abortions being allowed, is no real contradiction at all. He can rest assured that if in power, he would have the privilege to force both consensual mistresses and victims of his assaults to have abortions anyway.

Exactly, it’s not like Trump himself is a fundamental Christian with misguided but deeply held convictions. He is a narcissist that wants adoration, power and to be in a special position where you can dodge consequences.

Yeah, that was clearly just the group having fun, sounds like it might have been some kind of in-joke. Stuff like keygen music and adding extra fun stuff to your cracks has always been part of the culture. For the most part, while I’m not saying there is zero risk, but as long as it’s from verified groups with good reputation, your pirated software will be safe to use - also part of the culture.

I ran an instance for a while out of curiosity a few years back - building the database seemed to work fine and appeared like a good idea, had a lot of fun to see the connections with other servers and my crawler filling holes of unknown spaces. But I think the search algorithm itself was (most likely is) not sophisticated enough, it just did not give relevant results often enough, and it was extremely vulnerable to very simple SEO tactics to push trash to the top.

Polls are shit and only snapshots of an overall vibe-like probability - but this is still a very, very good sign.

I hope the people that were adamant about claiming that criticising Biden and urging him to drop out was in some way “bot”-behaviour or traitorous, or just claimed by tankie accelerationists, or whatever, realise that it was more often than not really based on concern of Biden not being able to win. The energy that suddenly got unleashed in this election campaign in just a few days and these new polls clearly show, that there was something to the concerns we had with Biden.

Not saying you were stupid or something for having the perspective you had, there were arguments to be had after all, incumbency bonus and the risk of having a new candidate so close to the election were things to be considered. But from what I witnessed, the discourse got really toxic at times and from at least some people. No, not everyone that wanted to replace Biden was a useful idiot or someone acting in bad faith. There were clear reasons, and in this case, things are very much starting to look like they were valid and good reasons, too. Enthusiasm is really fucking important in election campaigns, and Biden was a black hole sucking any enthusiasm out of any potential campaign.

Of course, there’s still work to be had ahead. But things are looking a lot better right now, and maybe another Trump presidency, this time with his fascist cronies being prepared fto properly enact fundamental changes for the worse, can be avoided yet. I’m still fairly pessimistic for the future, and would advise anyone to organise along radical leftist lines (IWW, SRA and local mutual help groups look to me like some of the best organisations at the moment in the US, speaking as a European outsider who may not have the full picture) and connect in networks that are prepared to react to the repression and chaos still on the horizon, but getting a few more years to do that organising while the global crises continue to march on is worth a lot.

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you

Relatively speaking to the American quality of discourse, that’s almost a Marxist dialectical analysis.

Marx and Engels were very clear, that the transition from value-exchange, i.e. money, has to happen as soon as possible, because otherwise, the system will begin to reproduce capitalist dynamics. So, as shopping malls, yes, very much opposed. As distribution/leisure centers? Sure, whatever the dynamics of the new materialist situation will favour/need.

A brave and true republican boy, who got corrupted away from his family by the antifa deep state complex, he would have been such a great person, if only his parents had homeschooled him without interference from the communist atheists, and were allowed to hit him more as a child 😢

Posted this elsewhere but will join into the discussion under this meme as well:

So, this is 100% speculative rambling at this point, but as a gut feeling on my part that can be proven wrong: I get the feeling it might have been someone from a Republican family, possibly shitty family psychology-wise, registered as Republican for his families sake but got f’d up by the pressure within his personal relationships and the state of the world, who radicalised himself on the internet.

Didn’t know that article, but I did make the connections myself when I was re-reading the whole revelation stuff for fun a while back, it is quite funny

Seriously, if I were Christian - and I have read enough of the Bible and christian philosophers that I could be if I wasn’t a pretty convinced atheist - I’d genuinely think the evangelicals and a figure like Trump had to be the symbolical Antichrist with how they act and think

Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, accelerationism is a bit of ideological nonsense to me, I think capitalism is doing fine on its own to reach the ultimate conclusion of its dynamics. I’m admittedly not as optimistic when it comes to positive change through electoralism, to me, it is much more about postponing negative change. But it is a tool in the toolkit - as you identify as an anarcho-syndicalist, one example would be how the Spanish anarchists participated in elections to explicitly get the huge amount of political prisoners freed in the preludes to the Spanish Civil War, a conscious decision where they, as an organised group, pressured the republican forces to give in to their demands. That’s also an example of where not voting can be a valid tactic - if you actually have a large, organised group of people that is able to use it as a means to pressure concrete government actions.

Granted, I am too disillusioned to be an anarchist. I worked within anarchist groups in the past and my personal experience has been, that they are maybe a bit too idealistic and loyal to principles instead of practicality. Finding consensus, in my experience, led to a whole slew of psychological dynamics within the discussions. Stuff like people feeling pressured to give up their own position, later regretting it, charismatic “leaders” de-facto still taking over discussions, and it being very vulnerable to inducing gridlock on purpose by bad-faith actors. Also, the idea of changing the minds of a vast amount of the population, instead of being willing to take power if necessary, is something I encountered a lot, and I simply don’t agree with, especially in light of how the present and future look.

That all being said, in my experience anarchists are at least more open to study and learn with a proper, reflective mind, while many MLs I met treat their own position as a holy, unshakable truth, which in my opinion, goes against everything the Marxist project has been about. They unironically talk about scientific Marxism, while treating it as a religion, it can be quite tiring in my opinion.

No matter what side we are on when it comes to how we see ourselves - good luck to you too, and most of all, good luck to all proletarians worldwide. We are all gonna need it in the decades to come.

Have you ever owned a dog? Their shits can be quite different in their nastiness from day to day. Your definition of fascism seems also to be lacking and reductive, thinking an out-of-their-time neolib like Biden puts out the same kind of repression on the working class as someone like Trump (Or Franco, Pinochet, Mussolini, Hitler) and the outlines in Project 2025 will.

Things will only get worse over the next few decades, we are currently still in a phase where the privileges of welfare state capitalism break away globally, leading to proper proletarisation of the population in the advanced capitalist, imperialist nations. That induces reactionary movements politically, and every year we can buy ourselves to organise and spread class consciousness before the violent repression is turned up to 11 is valuable.

Add the climate catastrophe on the top of capitalist decay, and things will get really, really ugly in the coming decades. If the communist movement isn’t properly organised as soon as possible, there is no guarantee that can be transformed into ultimately an opportunity for change.

Communism isn’t about identity and moral superiority. It is about making strategic decisions that enable the ultimate revolution of the working class to do away with capitalism, that includes tactical, cynical decisions at times. Some communists tried to do the whole “never voting on principle” or “only voting for the perfect fringe candidate” bit already, so we know how that turns out - sectarianism removed from class, and underestimating the enemy. Think of how some communists thought if Hitler got elected, Germany would finally have a revolution - turns out, no, it just led to the last bit of the mask of humanity to fall off capital and them being killed in the most brutal fashion. That mask of humanity may be a lie and indeed just a mask, but it has real effects, and the inhumanity can always get worse.

The big project in these times of reactionary drift globally is to build as much organised proletarian power as is possible - catch and organise those that fall from the middle class, learn how to use guns and fly drones, learn how to coordinate as a movement, learn how to support each other in day-to-day life, gain some class consciousness. While those that lack consciousness and still hold dreams of escaping their proletarisation within capitalism enable fascism, as long as they can cling to the ideological dream of the wealth of the past without realising the very system that enabled the old wealth already had the crises of today within it.

Thinking its the same to organise all that under a senile proto-fascist like Biden compared to a full-blown fascist like Trump and his allies is genuinely foolish. It reads like an utopian socialist dream about moral fortitude and self-serving identity instead of trying everything that can materially advance the working class and its consciousness.

Nice burn, even brought in the “libertarian”, at least be consistent, if I am a Zizekian heretic, I’m not an individualist libertarian who’s afraid of authority, I am of course a liberal anticommunist reactionary who won’t acknowledge the achievements of “really existing socialism”. You strike me as someone who would have written a hit piece on Marx for profiting from British imperialism and his capitalist buddy Engels, citing the letter and his drinking habits to make clear that he is an immature mind, then join some utopian socialist fringe group.

Yeah, look, I did read the article, and the article, unlike the person who might very well have done that in their work, did not do that. All I see is the same flipping of materialist analysis into an ideological dogma, that becomes ahistoric, trying to repeat instead of following material developments towards communism. From a quick look at your links, there’s even a lot I agree with, especially in criticising the French intellectuals. It still reads like a polemic removed from reality, that values its own farts more than understanding and working towards change, but it has value. And the article you linked in the beginning does nothing, but try to opportunistically recruit people away from one ideologue (which Zizek can definitiely be called) to another idealist “team” that tries to redirect proletarian material interests and analysis. You seem to think it’s a contest of who can quote “great people” the best and who can be the most orthodox, which treats it all like a religion instead of a material movement to change the world and mode of production.

In the end, I fear, we will be on other sides of the river, each seeing “their idealist perversions” across from “our materialist analysis”, but I at least won’t cross the river for your side any time soon.

If you think that sounds like “Žižekian nonsense”, then you obviously don’t understand what Žižek argues, because he clearly doesn’t say anything silly like “human ideology” (or “Žižekianism”, for that matter). The article you posted also does wonders completely breaking down Žižek as an abonimable human being - while not truly engaging with his ideas. It is pretty worthless, takes things deliberately out of context, and, after rigorously defining him as a persona non grata, invests no proper effort to do what actual communists like Marx and Lenin did - acknowledge that even enemies like that can give contributions to understanding, and things to learn from and work at doing so.

Does he sometimes spew bullshit? Absolutely. Does he believe in “human ideology” or spout anticommunism on a worse level than The Black Book of Communism, as the article wants to imply? Only if you deliberately misread and misinterpret him.

True, thank you for pointing that point out, because this actually does show an important angle of messaging ahead. What makes the article itself cope in my opinion, is its misleading headline and overall presentation. It’s tabloid-level of presenting the message, your interpretation is actually a lot better.

It’s a single focus group of specifically undecided Latino voters. Only more standardised and statistically significant polling will give a better estimation. Could there be an unexpected, seemingly paradoxical effect? Maybe, shit is complicated, yo. Politics are a chaotic system at times. I personally doubt it, but, hey, we will see.

But this article in particular? To be blunt: It is cope.