zifnab25

This is, like, a quarter of the episodes.

Some shithead in the House who gets elected just to Tweet Kropotkin and get pressured into voting Yes instead of Present on the latest Warcrime Bill before crying about it does not represent historical progress geopolitically or in any other sense.

There's definitely something to be said for a woman who runs and wins on a platform of strong unions and functional public services and a popular green energy revolution relative to the corporate flake she replaced. That she came in spitting fire and got flattened almost immediately by the Pelosi / NYC machine speaks more to the scope and force of opposition than it does about the quality of candidate that got shoved into the political sausage machine.

But the fact that she and a variety of other left-insurgent candidates were able to pop their heads up into Congress rather than being condemned to the political outskirts represents a real shift in the underlying composition of the electorate in those districts. She's a symptom, not a panacea.

you are smoking crack if you think they aren't significantly involved in the maintenance of imperialism.

If the roof of the House Chamber caved in tomorrow and flattened half of the 118th US Legislature, I do not believe the functions of empire within the US would suffer significantly.

The individual House Reps exist to maintain a flow of commerce out of the periphery and into their respective districts, with the expectation that doing so maintains domestic support for Empire. But no single individual involved in the process can do more to shape it than a single soldier on a battlefield can decide whether or not two countries continue to be at war. The US House is a collection of Middlemen who can, at best, improve or degrade the efficiency of the imperial machinery.

Were the whole Squad to go balls-to-the-wall obstructionist and take steaming shits on the Speaker's desk every time a vote for more war funding or police expansion or whatever came up, I do not think they could collectively be as effective at derailing the mission of the state as a couple of Ron Paul types who divert a few million dollars into their back pockets as a condition for letting a bill out of a subcommittee, then spend the next six months whining about military overspending on ash trays.

But neither Ron nor AOC can defang the federal behemoth, because that's not a power House Reps really have. All they can do is chip away at the edges by being annoying and hope the whole thing caves in eventually. And that's not big sexy revolutionary stuff. Its mostly just corrupt shits sucking excess cum out of the Pentagon's balls for 60 years, until its own weight brings it down.

mans laughter

I mean... eh? There's definitely a large community of people who just kinda post a lot about Leftism and then Fed-jacket anyone caught doing actual organizing. There's folks who try to do electoralism and completely fail at it, then fish around for this direct action stuff and come up empty, then just get burned out and go terminally online (I say, staring directly into a mirror).

There's a certain Waiting For Godot thing going on with lots of self-proclaimed Leftists, where we just kinda sit around and debate as the world passes by, and we try to figure out if we're actually getting any closer to Leftism without really doing anything (or grasping what it is that we can do). There's a lot of fantasizing and wish-casting about what a Revolution might look like, without any serious effort being applied. And there's a lot of real honest to fucking god revolutionary struggle taking place completely outside our sensory range, such that we're consumed by despair.

So... I sympathize with this sentiment, at least somewhat. There's definitely a certain "Second Coming"-esque attitude towards the idea of Revolution, because its only described to us in the moment of its apotheosis. You get to read about 1917 as a thing that happens all of a sudden, rather than a culmination of half a century of building pressure blowing the lid off in an unexpected place. You get to read about the fucking First Coming as a thing that happens one day in a manger, rather than the cumulative pressure of centuries of Roman imperialism in the Levant.

I don't think the guy's strictly wrong. He's just phrased it like an asshole.

Your failure to appreciate the fundamental historical value of the Spanish Inquisition really just illustrates your own deeply held anti-Semitic beliefs.

Thomas Friedman's world in shambles.

Women have been developing their own device.

Why put both Green New Deal and climate change on there?

Listen, I spent $10 on a sticker pack and that's what came in the pack so that's what goes on the truck.

Health care in Cuba routinely surpasses anything you can get on the US Gulf Coast. The country's biomedical industry is world class and one of its primary exports is trained medical staffers.

There are a lot of things that Cuba lacks in terms of industrial infrastructure. They can't make primary steel or disposable plastics. They don't have access to chip fabricators or cheap electricity. But when it comes to health care, they've maxed that shit out and then some. Even American foreign policy makers recognizes as much and routinely try to lure over Cuban medical professionals every chance they get.

he will have no issue finding private healthcare contractors to serve him at his home

He'll have the cream of the crap, to be sure.

But, again, look at how guys like Steve Jobs and Herman Cain - people who died of preventable / treatable illnesses because they surrounded themselves with quacks and stuffed their brains with bullshit.

This is a service that even the moderately rich (millionaires) can afford

If health care was all I cared about, I would rather be a middle class schlub in Cuba or Spain than a millionaire in the UK right now.

Retvrn to Tradition

He has a mountain of cash, but he can't do a coronation without riding over potholes stuffed with sand.

It's not enough to simply have the money to buy things when you live in a place where things aren't.