Greenleaf

It would be so cool if the CPC had like, affiliate membership. Not that you could vote or anything, just that they let you be an affiliate member if you’re a commie. You get a little card that says you’re a CPC member, I’d do that in a heartbeat.

I think the genocide in Palestine is hurting them more than they realized. And Ukraine - that’s become pretty unpopular but Biden keeps pushing forward.

But I think inflation has really been what’s hurting him the most. I hear about it a lot from apolitical folks I know IRL and they weren’t mentioning it a year ago. Biden’s little cheerleaders on Reddit can talk all day about how the rate of inflation might be going down, but damn near everyone knows they’re paying a lot more for things while their income hasn’t kept up.

The US has been telegraphing this so much, might as well rename the country to AT&T. I can’t figure out why they’d do this other than to be like “SEE?! I’M NOT OWNED! I’M NOT OWNED! I’M TOTALLY ABOUT TO DESTROY THESE GUYS YOU’LL SEE!!”

I have to wonder if the strategy here is for the Zionist Entity to intentionally put themselves into an existential threat in order to “force” the US to respond with sufficient force. Like, the Israelis have to suspect a war with Hezbollah in itself won’t necessarily draw the US in to fully commit. But if Hezbollah is so successful that it appears the Zionist Entity could collapse? They probably think if it gets to that point the US military will fully commit with thousands of troops, aircraft carriers, etc.

It’s not completely irrational either, if that’s their plan. I mean, that’s precisely how I would expect Biden or Trump to react. Biden especially, there is nothing he will not sacrifice for the Zionist cause, it seems.

Then again, it seems to me the Axis of Dependence (Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine) all seem to have this sense of self-importance, that the US will do whatever it must to preserve them as allies. And I really think that’s not something any of them should bank on.

That’s literally what the Macy’s (TM) Thanksgiving Day Parade is. Just a string of advertisements.

Is “I really want it to be real” a reason?

This is a real phenomenon I have witnessed IRL, I am fascinated by the psychology behind it.

My working theory is called “The Mark Corrigan Theory”, named after the character on Peep Show. That character doesn’t even really seem to want to be married per se. But he does want to appear like a normal person who is definitely not some lonely weirdo (because he IS a lonely weirdo). Marriage confers a certain social status on guys. And not only does divorce rip that away, but these guys haven’t been on a date in 15-20 years and they have no idea how it all works and they aren’t in their prime anymore so that’s scary af to them. Louis CK sucks but his bit about divorce is spot on: getting divorced is like being in a time machine. Except it’s a really shitty time machine because however much time has passed, that’s how long you were actually in the machine.

I tend to think of it like a Lennon/McCartney thing. They were better together than either of them separately. Like Lennon, Marx is clearly the more talented one. But he needed McCartney to sand off his edges. The best director in the world still needs a talented editor, and without it the movie will be shit.

Does this have any impact on the potential for the EFF to do well in the next election?

I am an American and I am literally begging to whatever deity might be out there to humble this country.

Full disclosure: I loved the book, and I wish someone would write something similar for 2024 for life in a place like Dhaka.

I had a different take on it. Yes, it does read like he’s giving a “report” on the situation because that is kinda what he was doing. He had only been in Manchester for like 2 years when he wrote it but he spent a lot of time personally checking stuff out. He was doing what we would call today investigative journalism. Just because you are somewhat distant from the subject doesn’t mean you don’t care or see yourself as “better”, you’re just trying to appear as objective as possible. His goal was to describe the conditions workers had to live in at the time, which not really different from our times, the middle and upper classes were sheltered from. If someone today wrote a book about the conditions migrant workers have to endure, I would not necessarily be critical if it doesn’t include a bunch of theory or if the author’s not pouring their emotions into it because that’s not the point of the book.

Regarding the “all these city kids are a bunch of drunks now”… I get what you are saying but I think the point he was trying to make was that it was capitalism that was turning the kids into “removed”. In those same chapters those same kids are working like 12-16 hour days from age 5. Any kid with that kind of life, it’s not surprising that you might turn to booze and prostitution when you’re 13. It’s cause and effect. Engels doesn’t explicitly say this but I think the connection is heavily implied by him. Like, it’s an objectively a very bad thing if you have kids involved in that. Engels isn’t blaming “the city” in general, he’s describing what life is like for the proletariat, and the cause of all the suffering is capitalism.

It’s not a work of theory, it really is just a “report”. That said if your not digging it, if you ever plan on reading the first volume of Capital, Marx recaps a lot of what Engels says in that book anyway, so I don’t think it’s a required read by itself or anything.

It’s only like 10 feet up in the air, even if you’re afraid of heights ripping that down shouldn’t be difficult.