Can you expand on the monetary policy part with Biden cutting interest rates?
Oh nevermind you did in another thread. ty anyway!
I've been here since the offboarding from r/cth and when this was called chapo.chat. I was @Zodiark.
Probably just the occassional insight, leftist safe space, and good vibes all around. A general permissiveness and acceptance, even anonymized, to be who you wish to be. I did like to comment and post, but this space was a genuine thought refuge when 10/7 happened.
Europe, especially the imperial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were and are a community of vampires, ghouls, jackals, demons, serial killers, and thieves.
The most telling part of the conflict was that despite Austria-Hungary initiating the conflict, Germany took most of the "blame" and was maid to payout reparations and had its colonies and industrial sectors and provinces swallowed up by the other European powers.
The causes stated by Lenin, in Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism were:
Imperial expansion & imperial competition - a need to acquire new markets, materials, colonies, and growth. These empires were driven by monopolies and capital accumulation/centralization created existential rivalries among the European powers. Especially between Germany and Great Britain. These two powers considered themselves existential enemies since Germany had quickly industrialized and become on par with British industry in a short time, creating fierce competition in the market. These competitions justified and necessitated the need for new territories, raw materials, etc.
I can't remember much about Lenin's understanding of how finance capital's contribution to WW1, just that it was fuel to the fire of the overwhelming tinder that the need for new markets and resources made.
WWI as viewed by Lenin was an inevitability of crisis that capitalism produces. There needed to be periodic wars or catastrophic events that opened up new markets and populations open for domination, labor and resource extraction, and dominance of capital. I think the last great event like this was the dissolution of the USSR and the shock and awe policies that plagued Russia in the 90s that saw its industrial sectors siphoned and sold off.
WW1 is shocking in its cataclysmic damage and depraved indifference to the huge loss of life, but such a conflict was all but inevitable given that these were conflicts that capital needed to accomplish to break through to acquire new wealth and profits. The modes of imperialism that Europe had practiced were on this trajectory.
Ultimately the war weakened European powers, set itself up for WW2, and let the US readapt and manage the way these powers extract wealth and capital from its former colonial subjects and other states in the developing world.
Something by Rosa Luxemburg:
The Imperialism of all countries knows no “understanding,” it knows only one right – capital’s profits: it knows only one language – the sword: it knows only one method – violence. And if it is now talking in all countries, in yours as well ours, about the “League of Nations,” “disarmament,” “rights of small nations,” “self-determination of the peoples,” it is merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of the proletariat.
The situation appears to be an attempt to redirect the narrative away from Israeli football fans being provocative. The counternarrative being presented is that these incidents are indicators that Europeans, the Dutch, and the residential Arab & Muslim populations of Europe are hostile to Jewish people.
Promoting the notion of Zionism that Jewish people are inherently unsafe in Europe, and that any current "bigotry" is not really European but an import of MENA immigrants, and ultimately the price of tolerance by these liberal democracies.
There's plenty of video evidence denying the narrative there, but that doesn't let the press stop them.
https://x.com/WVanwagenen/status/1855366838437150767
YNet says Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir are waiting for the hostages to die. The issue of the hostages in Gaza will be solved 'naturally and tragically.'
They will then use these deaths as further pretext to permanently occupy and establish Jewish settlements in Gaza, YNet says.
Netanyahu's cabinet has always wanted the hostages dead after the plan to kill them all with helicopters before they reached Gaza on 7 October was not entirely successful.
I think NoFap is a reaction to porn addiction. In that sense, NoFap appears to be about abandoning the simulation of emotional, romantic, and sexual intimacy and its hijacking of the pleasure centers of the brain and mind's self-deception of having romantic intimacy via said media.
I don't know much of it, but it just seems that people in the modern era struggle with respect for women/men/people outside their sexual dominions, romantic prospects, self-respect, rediscovery of the self, emotional growth, and maturity and find bizarre communities like this in their journey via self-help.
Look at me now, I'm unalienated from myself and from others! but by identifying and compartmentalizing sex/porn addiction as the cause.
r/shitliberalssay, r/trueanon, and r/thedeprogram already have this sort of content. I can understand the derision for this slop, but turning Hexbear into r/communism where only serious assessment of reality through Marxism is allowed also baffling given the name of this site and the site culture.
wild scratched liberals oozing bloodlust.
I think at the very least, I'd have expected them to pushback against the bigoted rhetoric from becoming normalized within their own dominion of culture, but seeing as they just normalized a genocide because not doing so would make them become uncomfortable again (another term of Trump) it was a moot point.
It wasn't a ramble, I appreciated the perspective. What you were referencing about liberalism being a death cult is on point.
I know people are kind of enjoying schadenfreude here, but it is alarming how many liberals are just going mask off in their tantrum against ethnic minorities in the US, and just brazenly expressing not only depraved indifference to Palestine/Gaza but active contempt and hatred of them and their sympathizers which liberals blame for losing the election. Their coping mechanisms are devolving into *maybe we shouldn't protect trans people, immigrants, BIPOC. PEP is also clearly the right choice."
I felt like our secret shared hope was that liberals would somehow rediscover their affection for organizing, protesting, canvassing for causes, but AOC encapsulated it in her video about #resistance being ceremonial and performative bullshit.
Life is going to get worse, and I'd be fooling myself to declare that the difference between a Harris defeat from a victory is the normalization of reactionary politics. It just stings differently because in 2016 there was a vague hope, given Sanders' campaign and reinvigoration of socialism/leftism, that life did not have to be that way.
There was a youtube link in my recommendations about the beginning of the disintegration of Israel, by Ilan Pappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgkbhEzwd-8
How plausible is his argument? He seems rather certain.
I don't know, that thread looks like ignorance being replaced by knowledge and context; it looks like deprograming of past propaganda despite any detractors using the old messaging, cliches, slogans, and talking points. The discussion there genuinely seems to be earnest and unindulgent of Zionism and its talking points, with corrective information and argument dispelling the impressions people once had about Israel and Zionism.
I think this marks a turning point where people no longer regard Israel as sacred, and are beginning to see - and entirely due to Israel's own open, brazen, and genocidal actions and rhetoric following October 7th 2023 - Israel as what it is as defined by its own actions, and not its impression.
Isn't that the state though? The state is the avatar, the apparatus, the tool and apparatus of the dominant political class of a given polity. It doesn't necessarily need to be a government position, agency, or NGO/NPO connected thereof.
I think it was when they were covering the DNC? It was fairly recent. I cna't recall the exact episode, but one of those DNC coverage episodes.
Brace talks about it briefly; he just says that Americans are exhausted from actually engaging in politics and that's just not where they were. He was dryly describing a situation rather than lamenting it or admonishing Americans for their apathy and resignation.
A nostalgia for the year 2014:
I disagree. It isn't effective propaganda but a quick slogan to dismiss criticism. If its not Russian disinformation, it'd be "conservative propaganda" or performative and ceremonial politics like it was during the Obama administration. The heart of the sentiment is indifference and annoyance.
In other words, "don't make me think about politics". Brace Belden mentioned this in a True anon episode a month ago, and a recent post on the_dredge_tank linked a redditor who echoed the same sentiment (despite working in politics and having a PhD thereof).
A sentiment articulated in that Red Sails article about propaganda, or how Morris Berman - an academic who describes the US - says that the "wool isn't over American eyes, but they are the eyes"; which means American culture makes Americans inherently delusional and prone to refute any challenge to it. Americans have been under such cultural hypnosis likely as long as the post-independence period from Britain.
These generations of Americans want to believe in their idealized version of it to the detriment of everyone else, including themselves, because they themselves have it pretty good. Their material conditions do not prompt them to question the American civic religion.
Militarised citizenry
Isn't that just the police now. I think they're classified as civil servants too, not professional soldiers.
