Arming Ukraine just prolongs a war that's clearly lost. That costs more lives than it saves.
MarxMadness
joined 2 years ago
What's more important than the nuances of appropriations is the fact that Biden could have stopped giving weapons to a state committing genocide, but didn't.
Everything else he did or didn't do with respect to the situation is comparatively minor.
Why wouldn't they be low after supplying Ukraine and now Israel for so long? They're finite, as is our capacity to replenish them. There's been plenty of reporting on the limits of our ability to do so.
Skepticism is warranted, but it could easily be true.
This is a good counterpoint -- there's a real career risk here, which is part of what makes it such a meaningful statement -- but Kaepernick was in a very different employment situation. For him, taking substandard offers (whatever non-NFL pro league was active at the time) wasn't worth it because of injury risk. So he had only 32 possible employers (realistically, fewer had QB needs) and they actively collude all the time. Extremely easy to get blackballed in that environment.
Bob Vylan will lose money off this, but they can find smaller venues to play and doing so can't jeopardize their career the same way a knee injury in the USFL could for Kaepernick. It's not a career ender.
A major problem in the U.S. left is the habit of endlessly rehashing inter-leftist arguments that are not only from wildly different political contexts, but are also well over 100 years old.
- It's hard to imagine a topic with less immediate relevance to working people today.
- Late-tsarist Russia (or interwar Germany) was so different than the U.S. in 2025 that you can draw exactly zero clean lessons from it. Every interesting takeaway must be couched in so many caveats that it loses most of its value.
- 99% of people who engage in these discussions have at best an undergraduate level knowledge of what Russia was like before the USSR and during the transition to the latter. Nearly everyone is working from a patchy understanding of the facts.
- Nonsense in the form of "I didn't like the historical XYZ group, and today's ABC group is basically the XYZs all over again, so I can tell you with certainty what bad things today's ABC group will do in the future" is inescapable.
- This is point 1 again, but can you imagine how out of touch you look getting into this stuff with some baby leftist who's being radicalized by, say, the health insurance industry?
Reading history is good. Reading theory is good. But this stuff isn't scripture and can't tell you how Zohran or someone will play out. We have to go figure that out ourselves. There's a reason every successful leftist movement prominently involved its leaders writing new theory and guidance for their own specific circumstances.
"Purposefully" is debatable, but whether intentional or by happenstance, damn it really is odd that so many descendants of Nazis are all over my imperial core countries that backed tons of fascist coups over the past 75 years.
His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,”
This is such an obviously loaded question. If he were asked "when did you stop beating your wife," would we hem and haw over the semantics of his answer, or would we recognize the question is bullshit and look at the guy's more substantive statements on whatever issue we want to know about?
He's said Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians, that they have to follow international law, that Palestinians deserve equal rights, and he's defended the slogan "globalize the intifada." If you think he's some closet zionist, you're overthinking it.
The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.
Can't argue with any of this. It's also notable how despite being a mayoral race, this is a big election -- NYC has a larger population than all but about a dozen states.
There are three types of conspiracy theories:
- Lizard people live in the hollow earth and mind control world leaders
- The CIA admitted it on the Congressional record 40 years ago
- The Enemy of the State zone, where it's plausible but unconfirmed
This is a good take. The best response here is "I need to see a credible source before I believe this," not "this is a bad source so there is absolutely no way this can be true."
Propaganda isn't necessarily false just because it is being curated and published with the intent to support a narrative. The best propaganda (really the only good propaganda) is true.
Take, for example, his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war. He repeats this throughout the book, giving the impression that fascism was created not to defend capital against socialism, but rather as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat. This is not the analysis of the communist movement historically.
I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference in these two views, and I think you could argue each position convincingly without dramatically changing what you take away from the discussion.
Fascism is often defined as turning the super-exploitative mechanisms of imperialism inwards on the metropole. Nazi Germany famously incorporated practices of both British imperialism (concentration camps) and American imperialism (the concept of manifest destiny/lebenstraum, the exterminationist treatment of natives). Imperialism, being the "highest stage of capitalism," can be reasonably compared to fascism, sometimes described as capitalism in (late-stage) decay. The Nazi party may have gained a lot of power early by latching on to anticommunism, but antisemitism was also one of their early policies, and they of course did not limit their violence to only communists. Similarly, the resistance to fascism (while driven primarily by communists) incorporated many other political groups in various popular fronts.
You think this is propaganda?