If Vonnegut can help to push more Americans towards socialism, I think that's a fantastic and worthy legacy for my favorite author.

I think his writing has all the socialist frameworks and values throughout the text, and there's no way he didn't push people towards socialism.

For instance, this is my favourite Vonnegut quote, from Breakfast of Champions. (For context, Karabekian is an abstract painter and Keedsler is a novelist. Both are wealthy, bougie and are minor characters.)

"You know what truth is?" said Karabekian. "It's some crazy thing my neighbour believes. If I want to make friends with him I ask him what he believes. He tells me and I say 'Yeah yeah - ain't that the truth?' "

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, that it had a beginning, middle and end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more engaged and mystified by the idiot decisions of my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: they were doing their best to live like people invented in storybooks. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making Americans such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: it can be done.

Adapting to chaos there in the cocktail lounge, I had Bonnie McMahon, who was exactly as important as anybody else in the universe, bring more yeast extract to Beatrice Keedsler and Karabekian.

I don't think there's any way to not be a socialist if you start from the position that everyone is exactly as important as everyone else and you follow that thought to its natural conclusion.

IDK I think they have a point and we should hear them out

He also increased annual fossil fuel subsidies from $550 000 000 a year to $1 500 000 000 after taking over from the right-wing BC Liberals

Oh and he lawfared a climate activist (Anjali Appadurai) to prevent her from running as his replacement, after she has a hugely successful membership drive, registering a ton of new members to the party.

Brace noise

That mod is actually pretty based tbf. They relentlessly go long form against the libs in several Canadian subs on all sorts of topics up to and including Ukraine and Xinjiang.

Edit: this is them in the Xinjiang thread for example

Who

Those replies are bleak

Canadians don't really do that

That's probably the most helpful simple-language interpretation I've heard, and it satisfies my feeling that a lot of these idealist aspects of nationalism, others, rebirth, defense all feel downstream to the more material concerns of violently protecting capital.

Furthermore, it explains the continuity with liberalism - liberalism is what you get when overt violence is not required to protect capital.

:sankara-salute: thanks for helping me with my brainworms comrade!

I mean that's basically why she won, so many Canadians don't have politics at all, and just wanted identitarian representation so they can feel like good libs

I feel like the problem with trying to unite all these thread (the Eco approach) is that they don't all apply in some of the most important cases. Like you don't need scapegoating all the time, a lot of right-wing paramilitary death squads don't need a mythology, they just suit up to kill leftists for capital, often for material reward.

Contrast this with a racist, homophobic or transphobic movement that doesn't use violence against leftists directly but will use terrorism (state or otherwise) against targeted, othered groups.

Are both of these fascism? I'm more inclined to call the first fascism, as in theory social-reactionary violence is possible and we have seen it in left governments before.

I did too.

FWIW I don't think the communications guy blew up the party, it was that Paul stuck by him. Paul blew up the party, Lascaris might have as well but would at least have forced some good and needed conversations.

This is unrelated, but Dmitri Lascaris delivered a really powerful polemical point in a debate a few years ago that I have never heard anyone else since, so I wanted to share it:

In response to a lib he was debating identifying a moderate:

"We have to stop talking about persons defending the status quo as moderate. If you have a status quo that is leading you towards extinction, that's extremism. The people who are the true moderates in this race are those who calling upon this country and this party to take the steps necessary to deal with a fundamentally flawed economic system that is leading us down the path of climate crisis."

Try to focus on the positives of Trots - they are often more seriously dedicated to reading theory, they have had actual electoral success putting actual socialists in office in the US, etc.

If you really believe in left unity, give Trots a chance, a lot of them are good leftists and as interested in leaving historical beefs in the past as you are.

Happy New Year you filthy animals

Just walked past a T-shirt store and they had Mao shirts right next to the Che ones on display where even am I

.9 Pigs can also be led and bred

:is-this: Is this manmade horrors beyond comprehension?

The fat one balances out the two skinny ones

:virgil-sad:

Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline

The debt book is the best book I've read in years, the pipeline book is the only one that comes close but it's still not as good