I'd call BE an eclectic Marxist tbh.

He definitely holds his fair share of ultra positions but he's not actually an ultra; he mentioned that he considered Stalin to be 50/50 good/bad and Mao to be 70/30. An ultra wouldn't say anything like that (despite my objections that those names at the least need to be swapped around; not to start a struggle session but Stalin made a lot of choices that were either under duress or the best of a bad set of options while Mao made some major fuckups all by himself, although I think both figures need higher ratings tbh.)

One thing that wasn't mentioned in that post is that BE denied the fact that BA415 faced any credible threat because he wasn't at risk of being killed after being doxed.

For one thing, I believe it was France that had its demographic data used to aid in identifying the people who were put into concentration camps and/or exterminated; just because your personal information is safe today under the current regime is no assurance that your personal information won't be used against you tomorrow under different circumstances.

Another thing is that this is just completely false. It's not a stretch to imagine that he might have been swatted and that during the swatting he could have gotten killed, either through typical Yankee cop negligence or by something more malicious and planned.

Last of all, being doxed can pose a significant threat to your safety and wellbeing without credible threats to your life. Just because nobody is coming around to your address to put a bullet in your head doesn't mean that they aren't ordering a barrage of pizzas at all times of the night, that people can't threaten, intimidate, or harass you, that they can't interfere with your job, that they can't get you fired, evicted, or brought up on false charges etc.

I'd love to get BE to respond on stream to a question about why he keeps his identity and residence away from public knowledge because he'd immediately give half a dozen reasons why this is the case without needing a moment to think about it. It would really undermine this shitty hot take of his.

Buy a genuine Palestinian kufiya and wear it to show solidarity with Palestinians while enraging any nearby Zionists.

This is the point where, if I was an organiser in the UK, I would start pushing really hard for raising awareness about how the watermelon is symbolic of support for Palestine and I'd start organising watermelon-based protests, including the strategic deployment of watermelons left at the entrances to Zionist organisations.

If they want to push demonstrations for Palestine underground, so be it. Getting arrested as a prisoner of conscience in the UK isn't going to serve the interests of Palestinians.

But imagine how fragile and absurd the Zionists would look if they tried to suppress the celebration of watermelons and public watermelon eating events or if people started getting brought up on terrorism charges for "accidentally" leaving a shopping bag with a watermelon on the steps of buildings.

Not only would judges be virtually forced to throw out any charges laid against people for this stuff but it would be an absolute media coup to have big Zionist organisations playing victim by cowering in terror at a watermelon left on their steps.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That's really rough.

I'm sorry but I really can't think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

I'm really white so I don't have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It's an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.

It's no self-help book and it won't be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you're experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.

I'd recommend adding nettle to your diet to help with the arthritis.

You can drink it as a tea and it's quite nice but tbh I think you get better mileage from using dried nettle leaves as a substitute for dried parsley and/or as an addition to where you would use spinach. It's very nutritious too.

Basically, if you're going to make something like spinach and ricotta lasagna then you can add a heaping pile of dried nettle leaves (anywhere from a tablespoon to a handful) and you won't even notice it.

I think you need to be a little cautious about incorporating it into your diet early on because too much can cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets but once you've adjusted to it then you can go hard on it.

Nettles have been a subsistence food and peasant food for centuries, if not millennia. It's prole af.

Lol this ain't reddit, you don't need to couch requests for sources like that. I'm not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There's this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

So American-centric you'd think there's barely any other country besides the US

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There's so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It's idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It's absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson's was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson's exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the "white liberal" (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they'll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I'll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don't trust them, I don't like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided

I, too, do not have a smartphone or an internet connection 😔

¡Venceremos!

Agreed.

It's stuff like this that makes me realise how much better a head of state Thomas Sankara was than I'll ever be though. Homie refused to use airconditioning in his office because it was considered a luxury in Burkina Faso.

I believe Suslov was another revolutionary figure who eschewed the privileges that he had access to on the grounds that if it was good enough for the masses then it's good enough for him.

NAFO and its consequences have been a disaster for the online discourse.

Imagine having the confidence to make ahistorical claims that are this outrageous. Either you're duped or you're an op.

Which probably doesn’t track well with my posts as I tend to ramble a lot but I’m going to try and cut back on that as much as possible. I would hate for anyone to get bored or frustrated reading my posts.

Unless it serves your interests or your own purposes not to, ramble away.

It's entirely up to the readers of your posts to determine whether or not they choose to read your posts and how they decide to go about that (e.g. reading closely, skimming, skipping to the parts that interest them etc.) Let the reader figure out what they want to get from your post and to seek that out themselves. Don't concern yourself with their needs because this is an exercise in reinforcing and enriching your own learnings. You aren't writing a paper or a book, so your concern for the reader shouldn't really be a high priority imo.

Im sure most of you know who Antonio Gramsci but he was discussed in class

Just be aware that Gramsci is used in the service of many purposes and his materialism is often downplayed or even erased from how his theory is interpreted or applied.

This is in large part a product of the fact that he was never able to really produce a body of work that is coherent and which nailed down his positions due to the circumstances of his imprisonment.

What this means is that I'd urge you to approach people's takes and applications of Gramsci with a healthy skepticism unless they are Gramsci scholars.

Out of interest, it's worth noting that the chief prosecutor for Mussolini said of Gramsci during his trial "We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years."

My professor answered this in the pluralist perspective there’s production bourgeoisie vs some other type of bourgeoisie that I couldn’t quite catch but that hardly matters.

Potentially "rent-seeking bourgeoisie", which is more relevant to liberalism but this is the group of bourgeoisie who are extractive rather than productive in the economy; landlords, speculators, financiers and investors etc.

To illustrate the point, imagine what the consequences would be if every member of the bourgeoisie made their money by being a landlord or an investment banker; the economy would collapse in a week.

My professor made sure to mention that in the Soviet Union, contrary to popular beliefs, it had factions and worked more like pluralists and he made this remark in regards to the criticism that pluralists cannot explain authoritarian regimes. He didn’t talk about the USSR with any contempt, and I feel like that’s important to mention.

This is promising!

Next, of course, was postmodernism

I'm an ex-postmodernist/poststructuralist. While there are useful tools in the poststructuralist toolkit, these days I am extremely skeptical of the overall utility of this intellectual movement.

If you want a crucial perspective on poststructuralism from an insider, the articles of Gabriel Rockhill are excellent and many his lectures hosted on his YouTube channel The Critical Theory workshop are also great. I can provide links if you need but I'm being lazy rn.

It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.

It's hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won't rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.

Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?

It's going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.

But I'm rambling.

Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.

There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.

Errr why should we? Because jungle and imaginary yankee toughs? I'm not sold on this analogy.

I mean, your interpretation is as valid as mine. But I think you haven't done my words justice in your summary of the points that I made to support my interpretation. You've either responded before reading my whole comment or you've spent too much time on Reddit.

Predator reads more like Wells' "War of the worlds" - turning the situation upside down on the colonizers. Suddenly they're the ones being hunted for sport by uncaring invader with absurd levels of technological superiority (while still acting as if it's fair and square).

An analogy is such because it's not a 1:1 representation and it never will be. If it were meant to be a perfect representation of the Vietnam war then it would be a biopic or a documentary. There's no inviolable rule that you can't invert parts of your allegory and clearly this was done to make a Hollywood blockbuster action-scifi film.

The predator wasn't a coloniser imo. There's less in the movie to support the idea that the predator was colonising the jungle than there is for the Vietnam war allegory. A foreigner in a different land doesn't amount to colonisation.

I was trying to find the quote from someone who was involved in production who said that if it were a few years earlier then Predator would have been set in Vietnam when I came across this opinion piece which makes a better case for the film being a Vietnam War allegory (while explaining the predator's high tech) than I did.

Didn't nafo already use the "I'm doing my part" bit from the movie, completely serious and missing the satire?

Maybe I'm blessed because I haven't been exposed to nearly anything from the NAFO chuds but I'd absolutely believe this from a group of people who are rapidly circling the ideological drain hole that is fascism.

If we consider the Predator movie, at least the first one, to be an allegory for the Vietnam war because it featured jungle warfare and commando bros facing off against an enemy that is virtually invisible, implacable, utterly alien and incomprehensible, and entirely determined to hunt down and kill the invaders (often in torturous ways) while the commando bros are pretty much helpless against the predator as they get picked off one by one...

Then they've kinda missed the entire message underlying the movie.

If they think "better equipment = we're like the predator" then they're failing to grasp the fact that the true terror in the film doesn't come from better technology but from an enemy which can blend seamlessly into the environment, which could be anywhere at any time, and is completely unstoppable. The technology is just window-dressing because if it were about a regiment of small Vietnamese people armed with AK-47s it wouldn't be much of a spectacle and it wouldn't play into macho power fantasies.

So, if the story is a metaphor about an enemy which is comparatively poorly armed using their skills and the terrain to their advantage, defeating what is assumed to be the best of the best, then why are they using it to brag about having better equipment again?

Next they're going to use Starship Troopers in completely the wrong way as a metaphor for the war in the Ukraine, aren't they?

[Rules-based order intensifies]