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I was at a party once and Bernie was there and he said to me that a woman could never be president. This is a real thing that happened.
I saw Bernie Sanders at a grocery store in Brooklyn yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
What makes this pasta even better, is that the hand thing is something they've actually accused him of.
A couple months I went into Vermont to visit my sister. While I was there I got roped into watching my niece in a hair salon while my sister got her hair done. So I'm sitting in the salon lobby, bored as fuck, watching my niece and who walks in but Bernie fucking Sanders. At first I was kinda nervous and freaked out, I'd just kinda glance at him every now and then, trying not to freak him out. But then my fucking niece starts crying and fidgeting and shit and won't shut up. So I'm trying to keep my niece quiet and not bother Bernie, when oops, too late, he gets up and walks over to us. He just smiled and stroked her hair, and asked me what was wrong. I said I didn't know. Then he looked at me with those penetrating beady eyes and simply said in his deep Brooklyn accent, "she seems like she's hungry." Then he lifted up his shirt and breastfed my niece right there in the salon lobby. True story.
Never forgot the guy making calls for Bernie will he was in the hospital bed. He'll be avenged one day.
-7DeadlyFetishes
When our time comes we will make no excuses for the terror...in Minecraft
And by terror, we mean :vote: ing for a succdem lib like AOC or something.....
Oh good, we would hate to have to start cracking down on the moderators
even when I'm all alone, masturbating and degrading myself, covered in honey? :soviet-bashful:
no, no, it doesn't count if he's covered in honey. did you even read your own handbook?
your own handbook! that you wrote!
there's a 'covered in honey' exception. you can always inspect for portions of flesh not covered in honey that would nullify it (three square inches on an average 5'10" man), but this is your rule. follow it.
Shit, just please don't tell my shift supervisor, I don't want to be put on cleanup duty again
How dare you accuse us of revisionism! An act which is in and of itself revisionism!
Is it because you don't consider exchanging technocratic jargon before sex erotic foreplay?
true but what makes warren supporters that different? a lot of people genuinely just saw her as a female bernie sanders, idk why everybody thinks her base is all that bougie and not working class like the rest of us.
While I absolutely agree that Warren should go to hell, seeing this only reinforces my hatred for Bernie rather than making him more endearing. This poor senior, probably on death's door, supported the sheepdog who backstabbed them and every other Bernie supporter in desperate need of single-payer healthcare and an NHS, by getting behind Biden. I will never forgive Bernie for sucking all the fucking political energy out of easily 95% of the US left when he left the scene and handed their goodwill over to the rest of the fucking Democrat demons. This poor bastard in the image here probably died having seen Bernie bend the knee to Biden.
Every DSA member who hasn't completely disavowed Sanders and the Dem-entryists by now deserves a punch in the face and should be considered a fucking traitor to the working class. Every Harringtonite opportunist and careerist is every bit as much of a fucking snake as Sanders and Warren. Yes I fucking said it, Sanders is a snake for taking it in the ass from the Democrats for thirty goddamn years, and pretending like he was still our ally after selling out to Clinton, if not after selling out to the military-industrial complex in his own state much much earlier.
Our momentum is pretty much gone, Dems are going to use the scare last week to manufacture consent for using the full force of the state against us (making last year's police brutality look like child's play), and I have run out of patience. We could be forced underground this decade because we allowed these fucking losers to lead the working class. Y'all wonder why I shit on DSA leadership so damn much (and to a lesser extent, SAlt and other revisionist orgs who pander to DSA instead of correcting them ruthlessly). This is fucking why. "Succdems killed Rosa" isn't just a thoughtless truism, it's a meme for a fucking reason.
We are looking at a scenario that combines elements of post-9/11 hysteria with both Red Scares. So-called "socialists" and police "abolitionists" are using terms like "sedition" and "treason" unironically. If you're in the US, every liberal you know is about to go insane again like they did 19 years ago and they're going to treat us like we're crazy (if not outright dangerous). When (not if, when) BLM-adjacent riots inevitably break out again this summer, liberals who were nominally on our side last year are going to shit their pants and explicitly permit the state to completely fucking devour what little we've successfully built since Occupy with the surveillance tools they started building during the Bush years and just like back then they'll think nothing is wrong when socialists and communists start going to jail and get completely ostracised from their communities on the basis of being "just as bad as the fascists". I want to fucking die just thinking about the wave of reaction that's coming.
Every DSA member who hasn’t completely disavowed Sanders and the Dem-entryists by now deserves a punch in the face and should be considered a fucking traitor to the working class.
lol
I was incredibly pissed when I wrote this, and continue to be constantly angry. Maybe it's not deserved if you're a deluded uncritical follower of the Harringtonite leadership but you're definitely part of the fucking problem. I will never know peace again because of these Harringtonite losers.
Well I'm glad you've got someone to blame, but thats small solace by the look of it.
I had to leave SAlt behind because of these motherfuckers. They ruined Kshama's politics. They actively tricked people into believing voting for Democrats was ever fucking acceptable.
You know some people genuinely do believe it's acceptable, and you treating them as mindless rubes isn't going to get you anything but a coronary.
They're not mindless but they are rubes subject to false consciousness, or being actively misled by shitty leaders who should know better. The task of Marxists is to convince workers they've been getting conned their entire fucking life and it is such an uphill battle that I don't know if I'm going to make it past this decade.
rubes subject to false consciousness, or being actively misled by shitty leaders who should know better.
Yeah maybe maybe not. It's certainly a theoretical model that purports to explain it.
The point of Marxist theory isn't just to understand the world but to change it. I am actually trying to change people's minds and want people to get organized so that we can actually fucking fight back for once in our miserable lives. I can't fucking take life under capitalism anymore and the revolutionary task is the main thing keeping me from killing myself.
I guess, but change peoples minds involves treating them and yourself as fallible people, not a prophet to correct them and lead them out of darkness. Their reasons for thinking what they think aren't necessarily any worse than yours are.
As far as not making past this decade; try to relax. It also might help to shift from a personal morality model of politics (the people who disagree with me are evil and or dumb) to a more contingent model (the interaction of personality and exterior stimulus will inform a persons political views)
I was a liberal until 2017. I fucking know what it's like to be a rube, to suffer all sorts of different delusions. I would have easily sold out the left before then the way I fear my liberal family is going to sell me out for being a communist, or make me playact being a normal liberal in public which is fucking torture over extended periods. Seeing my mom watch MSNBC on an almost daily basis is a constant stressor and she wonders why I have hypertension now. They don't see what I see and I can't even object to something Jake Tapper or whichever liberal ghoul is feeding my mom talking points without coming off as obnoxious.
When I realized that a lot of the things that I previously believed were wrong despite how certain I was of them, it also made me realize that the current things I believe might be wrong, despite how certain I am of them.
So uh, try to keep that in mind and don't let a framework poison your views of humanity!
it also made me realize that the current things I believe might be wrong, despite how certain I am of them.
I would not have gotten this far if I didn't also believe this. As events give us more empirical historical data to work with my position can still change. My stance on the PRC, while still intensely critical, has softened a bit over the past year because of covid.
As events give us more empirical historical data
Yeah see I don't know about that, even notions of 'empiricism' seem to be on shakier foundations than I thought they were.
This is of course why I converted to Troskyism on the basis of bird flight patterns.
Even Marxists use a dialectical approach to study new historical events and draw conclusions. I used the term "empirical data" in order to reinforce the scientific nature of this process rather than to tether it to a strictly empiricist approach.
Am I correct to assume you're not a Marxist? You sure as hell don't sound like one.
Sure, but this is just a methodological choice; one you can make if you like, but not one you are compelled to make by some outside objective standard. To choose a dialectical approach or on essentially comes down to personal whim, and failing to choose so doesn't make one irrational or anti-socialist.
No, I hew closer toward instrumentalism.
I have a math/econ background (i.e. basically no philosophy/metaphysics) and barely even understand dialectics other than that dialectical materialism has much stronger explanatory power than the mostly bullshit models used in neoclassical economics that I have to pretend are acceptable for a living if I don't want to be homeless.
My adoption of Marxism as the basis of my worldview came from a pragmatic "instrumentalist" initial position. If something comes along claiming to beat it when applied to the task of fighting back against my own immiseration without increasing other undeserving people's misery, I remain skeptical knowing what I now know about the complete failure of postmodernism and eclecticism to actually fucking deal with the problems facing the working-class. Ditching Marxism in the '80s has been an unmitigated disaster for the left. We shouldn't have to reinvent the fucking wheel when we have a solid foundation to work from, even if latter 20th-century revisionists built crap on top of it.
Oh neat, I'm a math professor. The thing is "explanatory power" isn't some nice and neat metric like an L2-norm that everyone can compute themselves and come to the same answer if they do it correctly. When it comes to things like Marxism, it's a much more subjective measure, and I say this not to be critical but to show you examples of how these things seem to work. The Mormon missionaries that have been having a go at me for the past year and half also report incredibly strong feelings of subjective explanatory power, which I have no reason to believe aren't genuine.
So, assuming neither framework has been objectively been shown to be true in some correspondence framework (which they haven't), if I'm looking for belonging, acceptance, and the feeling that I understand the laws that govern history, why would I choose Marxism as opposed to Mormonism?
Marxism in the US has also failed to bring about the revolution it purports to; you can blame that on competing leftist currents from sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but counterfactual hypotheticals aren't really evidence.
Marxism in the US failed for most of its history not just because of subjective factors like competing leftist currents and shitty revisionist leadership but also because of objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed by the ruling class here. The counterfactuals aren't just hypotheticals Marxists pull out of their ass, they're modeled based on other cases that were more successful or which failed for different reasons.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth. The Bolshevik revolution in its early stages is still the universally-agreed-upon gold standard, deviation from which is considered a sign of weakness among Marxists. Maybe some Maoists might argue the Chinese revolution is an improvement, but I'm not a Maoist. Anarchists and utopians have never succeeded on any scale even comparable to the early Soviet Union. Social democrats are a joke even compared to the anarchists, and it was precisely the rejection of social democracy which allowed Lenin and co. to succeed at all.
objective obstacles like getting ruthlessly and violently suppressed
These obstacles are only 'objective' if you presuppose some model of their behavior; there are many documented examples in history where violent repression fuels further dissent as opposed to squashing it, so the sort of linear "sufficient repression = successful subversion" doesn't seem to work.
Marxism as a family of tendencies is by far the most successful group of tendencies when it comes to making revolution happen anywhere on Earth.
Has anyone actually tested this though? Like statistically? I'm not trying to Nate Bronze this, but you've got plenty of successful non-communist revolutions to point to, and plenty of unsuccessful Marxist ones, all of which have all sorts of confounding factors to muddle up the whole picture that I've never been convinced that "yep, it's definitely the Marxism that does it" .
I should probably make a note that terms like "subjective/objective" and "revolution" have specific meanings in Marxism.
The subjective factor is a catch-all for factors endogenous to the working class, e.g. the state of worker consciousness, and the state of their leadership. Objective conditions are exogenous and independent from the perspective working class, including truly exogenous features like geography but also elements that would be endogenous from a God's eye perspective like the economy and the behavior of the enemy ruling class, which are in fact modeled in detail in cornerstone Marxist texts like Capital and State and Revolution. We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
In a Marxist context, "revolution" is shorthand for a political and social revolution wherein the working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can't be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression. By this standard the only revolutions that count as actual revolutions are socialist or communist revolutions, and liberal people's revolutions like the French revolution (maybe the American one, if we're being charitable, though a better comparison might be something like the Civil War that ended slavery) are incomplete revolutions, and CIA color revolutions are counter-revolutions.
We make assumptions about what to expect from our oppressors based on what their material class interests are (profit maximization, capital accumulation, the use of the state as a weapon to protect private property) and factor that into our analysis.
Yeah, you're admirably attempting to model the behavior of a very complex system, but like I said at the beginning, there needs to be a level of humility in doing so. If the model gives you an outlook of the world that essentially saps your will to live, then the focus on that particular model needs to be tempered for your own sake. Otherwise it takes on the character of some Lovecraftian truth, at which point, what good is it? You aren't responsible for the dynamics of the system, and you as an individual cannot change the dynamics of the system. You can work as an individual toward strengthening the power of systems agents (classes in Marxism), but letting the class scale analysis percolate down into how you treat and act to individuals is a recipe for an entirely different kind of alienation altogether.
working class gains or attempts to gain total control of the state and begins the process of changing the main mode of production away from one based on class hierarchy and towards one which is less exploitative and unequal (except to the previous rulers, who can’t be trusted) with the ultimate aim of dissolving the class hierarchy altogether and ending oppression
These metrics aren't any more solid. You can substitute "purported aim" for "ultimate aim" to make it something more tangible, but those aren't the same thing, and it further renders a revolution unclassifiable until some unspecified date in the future when it fizzles out it open capitalism (like the USSR) or achieves abolition of the class hierarchy and the ending of oppression (no where yet). You can state that someplace like China was closer to this ideal, but then we're back to the original problem; we're not in some well metric space where distance is meaningfully defined. The USSR was you can say that the USSR was much closer to this ideal than say the US at a certain point in time, but what good is that now that they're further away? This is a bit like taking the limit as x -> 1E10 and substituting that for x -> infinity.
I love talking to Mormons. It’s the worst when they try to just stick to the script and fast track you into baptist. Ain’t gonna be that easy boys!
I've had some sets try that actually, and they told me if I committed to a date then I'd receive a special witness and believe. I said sure, lets give it a go. Date comes up, they ask the baptismal interview questions, I vomit out a load of epistemology, and they say, "on second thought, lets keep working". We've been at it for over year now.
Sometimes they swap out, some have gone home (I always send them off with a book like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or The Brothers Karamazov based on their personalities) and others get transferred around the region. Longest I've had a single one is about 5 months. The official transfer schedule is every 6 weeks, but some get assigned to the same region for more than 1 transfer.
Even if you convince everyone of the truth of Marxism, a small reminder is that all militaries in the world are controlled by ruling classes, this includes all nuclear weapons. Also, people lived under feudalism for a thousand years, while capitalism is still just 200 years old and far more dynamic than feudalism. Not trying to doompill you, but trying to make you realize that the solution isnt simply "convincing people". Although that is a major step, there are many more steps that are even harder.
Also, people lived under feudalism for a thousand years, while capitalism is still just 200 years old and far more dynamic than feudalism.
Thoughts like this fuel my despair. When I was a liberal the thought of traveling back in time and getting stuck in medieval Europe sounded like my idea of hell on Earth. Now that I'm a Marxist I actually get to experience that feeling every waking moment of my life.
There's no Harrington people left in leadership and there hasn't been for years. The anger they're feeling is ridiculously unplaced.
I did not know that. I still despise the current liberal/social-democratic DSA leadership for the reasons I laid out but will note that they aren't technically Harringtonites.
Completely original. This is 100% serious. I might have gone slightly overboard in a couple places.
Nah you're actually underselling how traitorous, opportunist and self-interested SocDems are.
look at it this way:
if nobody's trying to kill you, you're probably not really doing the right thing.
Honestly I wonder if the only way to wake up my lib family members is to just let myself get killed by a cop. That'd be much faster than the slow torturous process of waiting for conditions to get even worse in ways that any of us could easily predict now using economics and dialectics.
"he must have been doing something wrong. we failed our boy so badly."
"a few bad apples shouldn't spoil the bunch"
"lol that never happened. who?"
-your lib family, after you get murdered by police
libs never were and will never be allies.
and saying the right words does not make you a comrade. doing the right things when it counts does.
or wanting to do the right things but being foiled at every step and feeling kinda shitty about it. let's be real; most of us are millenials and zoomers who aren't willing to murder our parents.
or wanting to do the right things but being foiled at every step
At a certain point this stops being useful. This is a recipe for demoralization and despair if not executed properly, if it doesn't lead to accumulating additional meaningful power for the working class.
foiled at every
it means you're occupying the things that woul foil others. it means you're creating collective wil. it means you're not telling the revolution to shut the fuck up and keep their heads down and just be a part of things, which is so frustratingly the default. it means you're at least a story, at least an education in what didn't work, and very likely a person who will be available when something does come along, however demoralized you might be.
it means you’re not telling the revolution to shut the fuck up and keep their heads down and just be a part of things
This is what Bernie did when he endorsed Clinton and Biden. This is what he did by opposing calls to defund the police.
i was never defending sanders. he's a rat and he proved that when he endorsed biden.
i was saying 'talk is shit because liberals lie.'
I would argue Bernie ceased to be useful by around March 2016 if his entryist experiment was even necessary at all (I would argue it wasn't, since the Jesse Jackson campaign is still within living memory). We wasted at least four fucking years on this shit.
Bernie did a lot of townhalls and streaming in those 4 years covering the plights of everyday americans. His primary performance was not how I'd hoped things would go down, but he still helped radicalize a lot of typically non-political people in that build up to 2020.
Bernie could have done all that and not reinforced false hope in reforming, taking over, or splitting the Democratic Party. These townhalls could have been useful if it were in service of directing workers away from the Democrats and towards the beginning of an independent working-class party. But he didn't, and people are now awake, demoralized, hopeless, and fucking miserable, rather than awake and ready to fucking fight the ruling class for their rights. Shitty leadership is almost as bad as no leadership. Raising working-class consciousness is only the first step, and Bernie did fuck all to sustain any momentum after bowing out in 2020, even taking a reactionary position against the demand to defund the police when BLM came roaring back. He left the DSA to fucking do that for him, and their leaders are just as worthless as he is.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
Was the senate flipped because or in spite of Bernie/left wing/universal healthcare? I think that it the tactical question one might answer. However I would've liked to not see that support, but on the other hand if Biden would've won without Bernie is questionable. Which makes me think that it might be Bernie who influenced the capitol hill LARP.
However revolutionary fervor instead of appeasement would've been nice.
Post hog or fuck off.
EDIT: nvm mods took out the trash. Get wrecked.
Oh so you want me to get pissed off about class conflict before I go to work huh? Well give me more
Wow, genuinely forgot all the "she doesn't owe you anything" discourse.
Time to relive 2020 again and again until I die.
to this day I still hear snake jazz whenever I see her snake-face
Michael Brooks self care Mandela time!
https://youtu.be/m48ue6qZaOo
I've been looking at this for too long I don't get it. Is the guy in the purple shirt supposed to be the Warren impersonator in the 4th pic?
So the 3rd and 4th panels aren't actually connected it's just Warren being a lib? I think I understand now
The context was the Warren video was posted after Super Tuesday when she dropped out and didn't endorse Bernie. This guy was featured in a campaign ad from that time. The context is Bernie's fighting for people, but Warren refusing to endorse Bernie after placing 3rd in her home state meant she was fighting for her own career.
