ThereRisesARedStar

Wasn't that one of Stalin's rare L's though? Social democrats can move in either direction, some of them shot rosa, some of them fought nazis and joined in the post ww2 socialist coalition governments and were integrated with the communists. (Czechoslovakia comes to mind) How many hexbears started out as social democrats during Bernie 2016?

The presidential runs aren't an attempt to gain power by being elected to office. They are a propaganda campaign to spread a socialist platform. The campaign process itself is an opportunity to have tens or hundreds of thousands of conversations about our socialist platform. The amount of votes in the election are an interesting metric, but not a key objective.

This still seems like a waste of time? Why not do something that can allow for conversations and also might have utility outside of allowing for conversations?

The DSA isn't, and I don't think they ever will be.

Is PSL actually demcent though? Is it true that up to 40 percent of the delegates are picked by the central committee? https://archive.org/details/party-for-socialism-and-liberation-psl-constitution-2022/page/6/mode/2up

How can you engage in demcent when the highest body can pick 40 percent of the delegates? That sounds like a recipe for bureaucratic ossification?

This is actually absurd. The PSL has been organizing in the struggle for Palestinian liberation for decades. They were organizing demonstrations on October 8th while the DSA was still condemning Hamas. They've organized like 5 mass protests on Washington. I don't know what your local scene looks like, but if you're weighing the relative importance of the PSL and the DSA in the national struggle for Palestinian liberation, it's the PSL and it's not even close.

All I can speak to is my local conditions, and my local conditions are we have two PSL folks who think passing out PSL stickers at protests is worthwhile but going to planning meetings isn't. We're trying to get folks to think more strategically, about what they're trying to accomplish and how to meet those goals, and it feels like PSL is just interested in shallowly engaging for recruitment.

I guess I haven't been particularly impressed by PSL from the outside? It seems like they put a lot of effort into presidential runs and that doesn't seem like a very good use of time?

At the local level, DSA folks are active in local Palestinian stuff, we see PSL folks at actions but we don't see them integrating as much into the logistics or trying to elevate the struggle. We see them agitating and mobilizing but not doing a good job organizing, and maybe that is because they keep it entirely internal but I'd expect to see more local PSL folks integrated by now if that was happening.

You're Marxist Leninists, yet you do not organize under the principles of democratic centralism.

??? Has red star said they aren't demcent?

Why not? Do you intend to somehow transform the DSA into a democratic centralist organization? Do you really believe that the liberals, social democrats, and democratic socialists that comprise most of the DSA would just go along with that? You can't expect to just take the existing membership of the DSA and magically convert them into a committed Marxist Leninist cadre.

I don't think you can magically make them MLs, but over the last few years DSA has moved significantly left, it can absolutely be made into a non-cringe org

As it stands, the DSA are not principled anti-imperialists, as evidenced by their failure to take a principled stance in support of Palestinian resistance in the wake of Al-Aqsa Flood, or their anti-communist stances on Cuba and AES. This isn't a "past" issue, it's ongoing. How do you address that? Why is it the "correct" strategy to attempt entryism into the DSA instead of joining a real, existing Marxist Leninist party?

I think the natural momentum of DSA is toward it being a more reliably anti-imperialist org, and I think it is worthwhile to add to it.

But on a more practical level, if in my local area there are more DSA folks engaged in pro-Palestinian actions than there even are PSL folks total, why would I join PSL? What practical advantages are gained by moving the pro-Palestine folks out of DSA?

Nope! just sharing it around.

Not that I can tell, what did you think of the article?

There are some marxist-leninists who argue for joining

https://redstarcaucus.org/tag/zenith/

https://redstarcaucus.org/dsa-as-a-placeholder/

So yes, join- either your local is good and you can hop on the bandwagon or you get experience making near-miss-left into left.

This is assuming you aren't in LA or NYC

Got a crush on a good friend, asked them out, they gave a "maybe" sort of answer which I generally take as a "no" but they talked a lot about comphet, how they're uncertain how much that is making their feelings unclear, and not knowing how normal it is to have little crushes on friends so I've kinda been waffling about whether to squash my feelings about them or wait a little.

I probably just should, shouldn't I?

TIL about the MKUltra connection to what happened to her

I mean it also trains men to view women as things

Is this a time to go into the discussion about how twinkness and capital W Whiteness are intertwined

I just mask everywhere because I dont want to worry about getting covid and getting long covid

Sorry, what I'm saying is that tanks are less able to engage in attrition if they are constantly requiring a lot of constant work on them and guzzle more fuel as they move, including as they move from engagement to maintenance and back and forth. And requiring bridge layers and such makes logistics harder, further limiting the use of the vehicles.