Chana

Well I used a weasel word qualifier of "usually" because there are exceptions of course. There is no internal standard or political education program in DSA so it really depends on what composes a given local chapter and who their leadership currently are. It ranges from jokers that never win anything and don't even file for candidacy in time (because they forgot, because life is hard, because Todd was supposed to do it but then he got sick) all the way up to a Mamdani who has been a force for years and has a coalition backing him, not just NY DSA, who are very electorally invested and do have competent people (but overly suffer from electoralism brain and therefore liberalism).

PS you'd hate a lot of NY DSA if you had conversations with them about basically anything regarding imperialism or unions having petty bourgeois limitations or how much to avoid criticizing Iron Dome AOC. Most of them would get themselves banned from this site for chauvinism.

Haha nice

Since he's calling this Dems' "9/11" we should assume this is just an islamophobic reference to it.

It's a truly exhausting strategy. It takes so much work and for very little payoff. And often (usually?) it just makes everyone involved mad at each other and burned out, even worse off than before.

There are ways to make "foment a split" work if your goal is to enrich a particular group and then peel them off of a dead-end org to instead do good work. To me this only makes sense if that group basically already exists but is stuck being useless.

Some commie factions in DSA are basically doing this, knowingly or not, and with unclear success. All DSA factions are basically premised on exhausting their opposing factions as much as possible by being a (often fairly insufferable) advocate for their positions. Obviously the libs are the most guilty of this, they tolerate genocide and tokenize etc etc, but this sets the battleground up: keep opposing these libs within that group and tiring them out or go to another org where you don't have to deal with them, at least internally. If you do the former, you are a hair's breadtg from an entryist + split position, as you are not going to convince the libs, generally speaking, but you may eventually get them to force a split on some key issue, and when your faction is large enough to either take over the org or leave and form a new one.

Entryism is basically this same thing only less authentic because you don't even think of yourselves as truly part of the org, and instead try to join and take over as fundamentally external.

Nice! I don't know if I personally need it yet so don't do any work just for me, ha! But parent might want it!

I'm sure! Deleting or editing any post must go through the API. Just need whatever authentication/authorization mechanism is needed, which for Lemmy (I believe) is a JWT.

I'm sure the API supports it. If there isn't a tool already, someone should make one. For infosec purposes, think of these two things to balanve expectations:

1. Deleting history to prevent leaking any level of personal info is good, as is rotating accounts, because it limits exposure and makes it harder for someone else to "connect the dots".

2. You should assume that anything you post to a website is permanently archived somewhere. If a public website like this one, a person could simply archive hexbear once a day with little effort. Federated instances basically do this in real time. Basically every stateful website uses a database and users have no control over what happens to the data in it - we just hope that admins are careful.

Yes or become more abstract about it, accepting the many faults to try and recover a consistent thread tying it all together. Many modern sects are basically variants on these kinds of attempts trying to square scripture and modern culture and society. There are also many people in that quasi-Christian space between being a hardcore believer and an atheist with Christian biases, especially liberals in the imperial core. Like folks that go to a Unitarian church and identify as Christian and think Jesus did some of that stuff and pray to him but done think about it too much because church is a place for community more than being a cloistering nerd.

The Democratic Party cannot be taken over. It is not a democratic institution. You could have 70% of elected Democrats agreeing with you and being variations on Mamdani and "party leadership" wouod still be outside your hands and they would still be working against you and there would be nothing you could do to advance your position in the party. It is a private, bourgeois institutional governed by ita donors and those donors' supplicants.

More practically, what you could hope for is entryism and then a split. That is the basic claimed premise by DemSocs in DSA who argue for running as Dems. Unsurprisingly, this is a Trotskyist tactic and basically never works. But trying and failing in a very public way may still be a boon for radicalization and growing our ranks.

But only with discipline (or luck)! The Dems will try to coopt everything appealing about DemSocs without stepping on the toes of donors. And that cooption begins with Mamdani himself, who will be constantly pressured to soften his stances and be more lib. DSA has zero discipline whatsoever, so with someone like Mamdani one would have to depend on luck, i.e. just this one guy being principled. This is the DSA way and it is why they eat shit in 90% of their electoralism, they back candidates with no vetting and usually provide no support. But maybe they got lucky with this one guy.

It's a good bit, I admit.

I do want to note that in the Gospels and really basically everything remotely intended to portray "eye witness" events of regarding Jesus (still stories that copy heavily from one another, hardly multiple accounts), the main message is, over and over again, "Jesus is special, you must believe in him over everything else". Reading these texts, the message is not, "love each other and live in community", it is, "eschew all else if that is what it takes to believe in me, even if that means being kind to your enemies". Just about every parable is just iterations on the theme of, "Jesus is special, he does miracles, you need to believe over all else". The Gospels are written with the exoectation that this would all be wrapped up during their lifetimes, as in Jesus was coming back on Thursday so you better start believing and stop focusing on worldly things.

Which is to say, the figure of Jesus is not exactly socialist, as socialists focus on the material, on community, of creating a better world through the destruction of capitalism. The figure of Jesus is more like a hippie that says, "screw all of that, join my cult, nothing else matters".

Anyways do with this what you will. The "Jesus was socialist" angle is still decent agitprop because most self-proclaimed Christians haven't read The Gospels. Very few people are really engaging with the figure or reading critically, they just learn parables in isolation and a local religious figure tells them what to believe about it.

What do you think Marx meant by this?

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.