yeah I organized in "big tent" spaces for over 5 years and saw this happen over and over again. I am lucky to live in a place with enough ML's to organize with but I don't think most cities in the US have that option. I have had many good comrades attacked by people from "left" tendencies I won't name due to rules around sectarianism. this includes death threats, doxxing attempts, character assassinations/rumor mongering, and more. some reasons for the attacks: suggesting that a coalition have a rule around not doing drugs/alcohol during organizing meetings; not wanting an org to join a coalition because they were actively being boycotted by over a dozen Palestinian orgs for zionism; not wanting a known abuser to be allowed to constantly derail organizing work; and more totally benign and reasonable requests.

and literally every time after these coalitions push out the MLs, within a few months the whole project has fallen apart and never accomplished anything. absolute wrecker shit and always from the same types of people who adhere to the same "left" tendencies, despite being different people in different groups every time. it's almost like certain "left" tendencies are actually historically anti-communists who exist entirely to sheepdog revolutionary energy into a pit which destroys all progress and growth of class consciousness. not a conversation most people are ready to have

https://neurosciencenews.com/long-covid-spike-protein-brain-28156/

Key facts

• Spike protein persists in brain tissues and skull bone marrow for years post-infection.

• mRNA vaccines reduce spike protein accumulation in the brain by 50%.

• Chronic spike protein presence may accelerate brain aging and increase stroke risk.

Does he tweet or does he tell an intern to log in to his account and tell the world it is a pile of filth

https://www.techradar.com/health-fitness/smartwatches/elevated-levels-of-forever-chemicals-found-in-smartwatch-bands-heres-what-you-need-to-know

Taking months is how they avoid losing so many soldiers on their side, modern war is all about attrition

What's more convenient than that?

I watched a documentary recently which featured some trans people in Oaxaca, Mexico called Muxe, which is a third gender in Zapotec culture. they mention how many openly Muxe are in one town there, and I did the math which came out to about 3.5% of the town's population. This is around more than double the percentage of trans people in the US, which leads me to believe that there are a lot more trans people than we, or even they, know. Femicide and (trans)misogyny are still rampant down there which is surely a deterrent for people to transition, but still they have a lot more openly trans people where they have a historic precedent that being trans fits into the sociocultural framework.

Makes me wonder how many people would be trans in a fully communist society

They are hardly leftists

Rafiki is a really good Kenyan movie about LGBTQ people

I feel like any major enemy of empire's strategy is to play a game of chicken. They want to stave off the full force of their enemy's might as long as possible in order to build up their productive forces, military, intelligence apparatus, soft power, and so on, so that they can be in the best position to survive the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, while these larger nations focus on these primarily domestic strategies, the empire is going all on in their strategy of picking off all the B-listers who by and large want to side with the anti-West bloc but without immense support for a long period they wouldn't be able to feasibly get to a point where they can really defend themselves from the empire, which they will have to do as soon as they stray away from the empire's desires for their nation.

It is a really challenging situation to be in of course because if you initiate a confrontation before you are ready, the empire could easily destroy your entire nation and turn it into a proxy. It makes sense to play the long game and stave off the US as long as you can, because while they are distracted with continuing the pillaging of the world, China is rapidly advancing technologically. I imagine in about 10 years when China's military is objectively unstoppable, they have fusion breakthrough to throw on top of their already entirely green energy nation, they have a robot workforce eliminating a lot of menial labor and redirecting humans into being better educated and doing more specialized work (creating even faster scientific and social progress), and whatever other breakthroughs that could drastically shift the balance of power, China will be in a position to do more without the US being able to stop them or hurt anyone more than they already do. Of course during the next 10 years the empire will also be waning and China will be expanding into that vacuum piece by piece, it is a slow process that takes place at the speed of humanity's material circumstances unfolding; China can't accelerate that process of change any more than they are.

I largely agree with the comments by StalinistSteve in that thread.

I didn't read the article mentioned but I'll respond to the bit you shared.

When modern Leninists claim the secret of their parties’ road to success is ‘democratic centralism’, it tends to mean an overly bureaucratized group that puts heavy workloads on individual members to make them more ‘disciplined’, and a lack of actual democracy in favor of a more militarized party structure. Factions are forbidden, ideological centralism (rather than programmatic centralism) is imposed from above, and groups aim to build an ‘elite’ cadre that tails existing mass struggles, hoping to bank in on them to recruit members

While this may be what happens in certain western orgs, I would argue that it is because they are not utilizing dialectical materialist analysis to guide their organizational strategy and so it ultimately devolves into this type of formation. Factions should be forbidden, ideological unity is essential. The idea that a demcent org would be tailing the masses by virtue of being demcent is vapid. Organizations are tailists because they don't use dialectical materialism, therefore have an inaccurate analysis of the situation at hand, and thus can not have their politics in command because their politics are undeveloped. The democracy in demcent only works for people who actually know what the hell is going on. When people join orgs for the first time, they are totally devoid of class consciousness while completely inundated with capitalist programming. Some part of them wants to do something to help make the world a better place but spontaneous and sincere desire is not a replacement for study. Just because someone joins an org doesn't mean they should be able to vote, and in many cases these types of undeveloped people will completely derail organizations if they are allowed to have a say in things before they undergo any rigorous deprogramming and education process. Once they go through and can demonstrate that they understand the principles underlying the project, they can become cadre and participate in steering the org, but that process usually takes years. In China it is at least two years, most US orgs have a year long program, which is probably too short in my opinion but americans are lazy, impatient, and economically incentivized to quit organizing so for most of them it is in fact too long.

these organizations essentially form front groups that hide affiliation to any kind of communist goals and aim to mobilize students around the latest liberal social justice issues and work in alliance with NGOs to throw rallies of mostly symbolic value. Through these activities, the cadre (or inner group) of the Leninist organization hopes to recruit parts of the liberal activist community in order to grow their base of support and garner more influence in these social movements.

They really think the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and Party For Socialism and Liberation are hiding their communist goals? They are openly socialist organizations which have openly socialist platforms. PSL has a huge media arm now with a lot of followers and they are producing explicitly socialist media. They, FRSO more so but both truly, do not have good grasps of dialectical materialism nor proper implementation of demcent so they are not what I would call good organizations, but I wouldn't say they are hiding their intent. Being a part of front orgs, coalitions ,etc is...a strategy I guess but not typically a good one in my opinion.

The reality is that in a settler-colonial nation like the US, all this "left unity" nonsense is devoid of material analysis. You can not have unity with people who are essentially feds, who parrot US state department lines against anti-US nations, who reject the premise of the ongoing colonial project in the US, who are happy to be in coalitions with literal fascists, zionists, and conservative white people but will fight tooth and nail to make sure the "authoritarians" don't have any influence over organizing strategy. FRSO has openly reactionary positions, this isn't because of democratic centralism, it is because they are run by reactionaries. Their recent article denying settler-colonialism's ongoing existence says it all plainly. They are settlers who believe Indigenous nations don't exist anymore (aside from the "Chicano nation" which erases hundreds of existing Indigenous nations) and they essentially push the idea that non-white people need to get over the daily abuses of racism they have to deal with from white peers and work with those same abusers because they are "both workers." This flawed analysis is because they don't have a basic grasp of Marxism and are just repeating ideas they have read elsewhere and trying to apply them to an entirely different place and time. There is no way to have unity with people like this if you are a sincere Marxist who is working to organize for the liberation of the most marginalized and oppressed people.

PSL I have more hope for despite their blatant flaws, but FRSO is going nowhere and is not a serious organization in my personal opinion.

Look towards organizations like People's Programs for an example of how a demcent org can lead the masses. They heavily lean on the work of Jalil Muntaqim, We Are Our Own Liberators which outlines how to build decolonization programs and integrate with the masses to build dual power, right now. This is the only work worth doing in my opinion, and when the empire shakes and crumbles, average people will know that the people doing this work are the ones to trust and seek out. The masses aren't looking the people showing up to every protest trying to recruit members and pass out signs, or the ones trying to get you in a reading group or a lecture, but the ones who have been in the trenches with them, supporting their survival, and speaking openly and honestly about the need for a socialist future led primarily by Black and Indigenous people.

tl:dr settlers being bad at communism isn't because democratic centralism or dialectical materialism is incorrect or not applicable in the modern context, but because settlers are LARPing leftism while consciously or unconsciously self-sabotaging by refusing to de-worm their treat addled brains and listen to colonized people

You can take a ton of bags in trains pretty affordably. I would sell pretty much everything except what I could bring that way and just take Amtrak, if I didn't have a car I wanted to bring with me.

they are content creators posing as journalists

PYM statement on Syria:

Show

Looks like Blinken

Just wondering how the relationship with EZLN will go. Iirc even AMLO was continuing the fuckery down there

They just hate Assad and I think are saying it to gloat to the people who were expressing hope Assad wouldn't fall and were ultimately wrong that Assad would potentially hold out. None of which seemed to think Assad was good, just that this would obviously be a terrible and violent escalation beyond anything bad Assad has done by many orders of magnitude.

Definitely in the news mega

Been more disgusted with the lionizing of HTS and al-Jolani tbh

I think it is pretty clear that Syria had no leadership and rejected outside help. I do hope it is a sobering lesson for all of the nations on the US naughty list that they must be ready to withstand this type of coordination of asymmetrical warfare. Not sure how much this would tarnish Russia's relationship though, their consistency with support far overshadows this one time when the supported country's leadership bowed out without trying.