emizeko

the USA deployed backpack nuclear weapons in Europe for decades as part of a stay-behind operation in the style of Operation Gladio

The Littlest Boy | Foreign Policy

in 2016 before the Xinjiang disinformation campaign, western media was praising France for their new program of sending muslims to "deradicalization centers": https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-to-open-first-of-12-deradicalization-centers-for-at-risk-youths/2016/09/14/d596d7fe-7a78-11e6-8064-c1ddc8a724bb_story.html [archive]

it was a big failure by the fall of 2017: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/france-jihad-deradicalization-macron/540699/

another article on it: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/france-fights-terror-with-re-education-camps-plan-7wg9vrrgd

boycotts are a useful tool in concert with an organized political movement (like BDS or a union of striking workers) but can be ultimately counterproductive on their own:

In short, a strong belief that ethical consumption will lead to ethical practices is not warranted – purchasing as voting is a weak feedback mechanism at best and there are other actors who are able to influence the system. The danger, however, comes in believing that this mechanism can make substantial political change. Ethical consumption gives the individual the illusion of contributing to progress; of “doing their part” by making purchasing decisions. This illusion can detract, and probably has detracted, from trying to put forward an avowedly political agenda that seeks to mobilise people collectively to make the changes they support. Instead, it individualises ethics, it individualises politics and it reaffirms us as consumers rather than citizens – it is a part of the profit-maximising, pathologically-externalising neoliberal market system that has caused many of the problems ethical consumerism seeks to alleviate, rather than being an alternative.

from The revolution will not be bought: Ethical consumption is seductive but dangerous to the values ethical consumers seek to promote

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Libby Watson said it best:

Carlson, making his trademark “watching two dogs in full 69 at a distance” face,

There's an interesting one [detail] that we saw very recently in a secret report from the State Department. I want to tell you about this one so you can reflect on it. That secret report made this point: That Grenada is different than Cuba and Nicaragua, and the Grenada revolution is, in one sense, “even worse,” using their language “than the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, because the people of Grenada and the leadership of Grenada speak English, and therefore can communicate directly with the people of the United States.”

I can see from your applause, sisters and brothers, that you agree with the report, but I want to tell you what that same report also said. It said: “That [this] also makes us [Grenada] very dangerous. The people of Grenada and the leadership of Grenada are predominantly black.” They said that “95% of our [Grenada’s] population is black.” and they have correct statistics. And if we have 95% of predominantly African origin of our country, then “we can have a dangerous appeal to 30,000,000 black people in the United States.”

—Maurice Bishop Speaks, 29m30s

[on a blind date] You listen to a lot of NPR? That's cool, I hear the tiny desk concert things are pretty good. What do I listen to? Well there's this thing called Cum Town and today I caught an extended segment where an adolescent Ben Shapiro gets his prepubescent testicles crushed inside the ass of child sex predator Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World and that's the backstory to why Ben Shapiro's voice is so shrill in the voiceovers for those Nissan car commercials. Wait, why are you leaving? I thought this was going well?

The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

from https://redsails.org/tankies/

My great grandfather had the monopoly of eggs in all of China and my grandmother was super rich living in a mansion when the cultural revolution happened and communism took everything away.

r/neoliberal was created by and is astroturfed by a fossil fuel think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute, as part of their "Neoliberal Project"

PPI has been around since 1989 and views itself as Bill Clinton's "idea mill" aka think tank. Why I call them a fossil fuel think tank is detailed here. They oppose climate action, defend fracking, and receive donations from Exxon Mobil.

it's safe to say that their upvotes are farmed, and their organic support is mostly bourgeois economists and political science majors and interns who hope to work for PPI or a similar think tank one day. It's basically a Neera Tanden farm.

The creator of r/neoliberal, Colin Mortimer, is the Director of the Center for New Liberalism at PPI, which seeks to "develop a salient identity around the center-left values that have increasingly come under fire in this age of populism."

Never be surprised when an r/neoliberal poster seems "out of touch" as that is likely part of their job description.

What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]

This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

democracy is not possible under capitalism due to the outsized power of the ownership class over the means of production

Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why: | Halim Alrah