Juvenile behaviour, probably from the US, a country without universal healthcare. Demsocs have been worthwhile tactical allies in many social reforms all over the world, even if our strategies don’t align. Mamdani is at best another example of this, and at worse another coopting of the movement name. He’s not even a big demsoc name, at least criticise (actual demsoc) Jeremy Corbyn or (socal-liberal fake) Bernie Sanders for good examples of modern demsoc failures.

Besides, factually, social-liberal theory is theory. It’s just incorrect theory, as evidenced by Allende’s charred corpse.

Yeah, the cookie. It has no milk or eggs and it’s a reasonably cheap snack for starter vegans still adapting their diet.

Do I keep eating soup broth or yogurt?

Probably, yeah. I think there are some light low-fat yogurts out there, but I personally don’t have any experience with that.

Strongly disagree with both the sentiment and the effect of the post.

First off, the benefits for US citizens to go kill and die in foreign countries is marginal at best. They get to have a somewhat stable job for a couple years, get broken down and rebuilt by military ideology and then thrown back into civilian life, maybe with some missing limbs or psychological damage. After that they get healthcare sometimes and fake appreciation on the telly. The poster seems to have forgotten the second half of Parenti’s argument, “they’re sending our kids to die to line the pockets of the rich”. The rich don’t go to war, they send your unemployed son to war, and as reward he gets a cheap tin badge or an obituary, and you’ll be told that that’s good.

Secondly, whatever cruel behaviour exhibited by US soldiers is not simply a byproduct of inherent individual traits of the soldier, but are systemic. Every bit of kindness and sense needs to be systematically excised from the mind of the soldier as soon as he enters the training grounds because the US military in itself needs to be as cruel and bloodthirsty as possible. This does not absolve individual war criminals, but to understand it as part of a system of crime older than that soldier, that will outlive him long after he’s overextended his usefulness.

So as a sentiment, I think treating US soldiers as beneficiaries of war – rather than (lesser) victims of a broader economic system that treats the Reserve Army of Labour as just the Reserve Army – is misguided and inaccurate.

But with regards to effectiveness, one has to keep in mind that Parenti (et al) weren’t just saying things to seem morally correct and on the right side of history. They were actively engaging with the public opinion in order to fight back against those wars. There’s a tactic to the communication of showing that, not only the war is immoral and incorrect, but whatever benefits you think you’ll get from it are a lie. You will die, your son will die, and it’ll have been for nothing. Wars bring no benefit to the US working class. Without nuance, the counternarrative presented by the poster actually embelishes US wars and make them look justified from a selfish position. It’s incredibly counterproductive.

It takes an enormous amount of courage to actively resist drafts and the war effort from inside the war machine. You’ll be gaslit, slandered, attacked, arrested and maybe even murdered. And instead of joining you, some smartpants will just reproduce what amounts to war propaganda dressed in red/black and abstain from the struggle.

The vegan argument over eggs (and milk etc) is not over the egg’s rights (they’re usually unfertilized anyway), but over cruel conditions over the chicken producing that egg, or more radical positions over whether humans have the right to explore animals in general. I’m not vegan, and though I support vegans I strongly advise against going vegan while sick or mixing up your motivations for massive dietary changes. For instance, Oreo is technically vegan and a common dietary bridge for starting vegans, but your ulcer will get infinitely worse if you make that a usual snack in your life. Vodka is technically vegan…

Until you get better, focus on eating healthy food, not necessarily “moral” food. Its going to be a lot harder to become vegan if you end up needing to surgically remove a portion of your stomach walls.

I could go for fish meat, like shrimp.

Avoid crustaceans, but for entirely different reasons. They’re really dangerous for inflammations, including ulcers. When I say fish, I mean fish, either boiled in a stew or oven-cooked.

That’s not immoral, right?

Probably is immoral from a vegan perspective, but I’m not adivising you to go vegan, only to take care of your health. I think going completely vegan while sick would be a terrible idea, but you do you.

Some meats, like fish, are fairly low on fats, but you should avoid fatty foods in general. That includes peanut butter and the like, and fried stuff. Anything that’s heavy to digest. Also try to eat lots of fruit if you can (but remove the skin on apples and such), and fruit juices in bad days where your stomach can’t handle solid food.

Also, avoid milk and derivatives like the plague.

It’s really funny that “dark woke” Azov Something did a really thrash video giving horribly thrash dating advice while complaining that “the Left” failed “young men” (by not indulging their reactionary need to prove themselves as men through pick up artistry), when three years ago Shaun already did an actually quite good video giving advice for young men, including dating advice but also a lot of general self-growth advice. It’s like the embodiment of left-aesthetic reactionaries in video form, absolutely refusing to feel uncomfortable with their own internalised misogyny, pampering their male egos, and thinking they’re cured of all it just by declaring themselves “dark woke” or some other inane shit. He even opens the “advice” section pretending it isn’t solely dedicated to heterosexual men, like non-het non-male dynamics are just drop-in replacements. In Portuguese we even have a word for this kind of redwashed pick up artist, “Esquerdomacho” (lefto-male? “Sexism” in Portuguese is “machismo” so the word has that connotation too).

It’s gross, and the attached 91-page lefto-PUA manual is extra gross, but also funny in how bizarre it is. I feel every paragraph is huge screenshot-worthy “WTF”. Like “first dates only from Monday to Thursday”? My guy, what do you think is the point of weekends for employed people? Dreadful stuff.

(I’m going to use the word “African American” a lot because these organisations use it, even though I find “Black Americans” a more correct term.)

Obviously no such thing as true emancipation of some without full emancipation of all and all that, but you probably want more meaningful answers than slogans.

Black Nationalism movements had to struggle with this question before, with middling results. Nation of Islam itself used to promote the formation of a sovereign African-American nation-state somewhere in the South, and Malcolm X’s views developed from separation to nationalism as he split from them. The so-called “New Black Panther Party” (not to be confused with the now-called “Black Lion Party”) is one of the few organisations that proposes such a thing.

Racial separation has many issues as a central proposition from a theoretical standpoint. First off, going by Stalin’s definition of a “nation”, racial groups in the USA as it stands today lack the key aspect of common territory, and so are in shaky ground as a “nation”. While creating such a territory as an after-fact might sound like it corrects the issue, it actually makes the settler contradiction quite clear.

Suppose the NBPP manages to somehow acquire and defend some territory in Louisiana. Not all African Americans live in that region, it’s not common territory to anybody but the (black) people who live there. So now you have to develop a system in which black people from the whole of the (possibly quite hostile) USA can migrate there, but even then, these “foreign” African Americans will not have the same historical connection to that specific region. No matter how much legislation is passed and proclamations are made, it’ll take a reasonably long time for these “foreign” African Americans to integrate, and in reality they’ll be immigrants in everything but name. Besides that, many African Americans for many reasons might not be able to – or might not want to – immigrate, and for those people this new state presents no solution to the systemic racism in the (possibly quite hostile) USA. In effect, it proposes that the only salvation for African Americans is to flee their homes, their lands, their neighbourhoods, their history, to some isolated Garden of Eden. It invalidates African Americans outside this new state, similarly to what Israel does to non-Israeli jews, and gives an excuse for persecution abroad.

Now, this state doesn’t exist inside the USA political system. It’s gonna need its own army, its own diplomatic organisation, its own intelligence agencies and so on. If the relationship with the USA is adversarial, they’ll be forced into concessions or risk being invaded. It does not solve racial conflict, it merely simplifies it to the stage of state diplomacy and dislocates the people from the equation.

Obviously this deals mainly with black people in the US, who don’t have specific “legal” historical claims to its territory like other groups like Chicanos, Indigenous people and such, but it shouldn’t matter. By not having control of their lands, they’ve all been dispersed all throughout the USA and abroad. Achieving nominal independence might be a temporary benefit, but so long as the original US is still allowed to exist and to exert its own racism within its borders, it’ll do all it can to control this new country. And they’ll probably have an easier time using it as a pressure valve.

This is why Black Nationalism rejects the idealistic notion of a Black nation-state as the solution to racism, but the key word here is “solution”. Separatism can be a tool, which may be used in the struggle for broader political goals. The Land Back movement commonly ends up in just petit bourgeois land transfer, but it has also provided some experiences of popular self-government and wealth redistribution to more radical organisations (Nick Estes talks a lot about his). If the NBPP was primarily socialist like the old BPP and came to the conclusion that separation was the correct tactic for the emancipation of black workers, that’d be interesting. However, they in principle focus on cultural/racial separation first, and a lot of their non-Marxist positions follow from that. It’s why they do militias first, free breakfast programs second, and barely any union work.

Since you mention the UK, separatism there is also mostly more successful as a tactic than a strategy. There’s massive rejection to Westminster’s fixation with austerity in general – and New Labour in specific – in Scotland, and it’s growing in Wales and NI. They also have an advantage over the US due to the common territory issue. The SNP and Plaid Cymru notably lost votes to Labour during the Corbyn years (though he really fumbled in Scotland with Brexit), and regained their popularity now with Sir Kid Starver. The Alba Party is a good case study for failing by trying to use Nationalism and Independence, but having no clear coherent proposals that require that independence in the first place. NI is a whole can of worms.

That’s all to say, secession in the USA could be an useful tactic for “unpermitted” policy but is a bad strategy, and Lenin himself probably has some text about that. AFAIK it’s unlikely as I don’t know of any regions with strong enough political movements outside the permissible spectrum, so some fringe progressive groups get shock headlines about calling for independence and nothing else, and thrash meaningless online polls sometimes get huge margins, but it’s not going to actually happen unless they seek something that’s impossible while staying in the US and have the local support for it. Despite all the fear-mongering, the USA is not nearly geographically polarised enough. There’s no “Yellow State” that is dominated by a local party that can’t possibly the win National Elections like in Scotland. A “PSL Independent Illinois” would be an interesting development, I guess.

Nah, too few paragraphs. I reckon they were was just overeager to participate and maybe a bit too happy to find a forum that supports their “identity” as a “Stalinist”, whatever that means in their mind. It was two day ban anyway, so hopefully they learn and adapt to the culture of actual discussion forums.

Don’t think it’s only a capitalism thing, but I guess capitalism causes so much psychic damage both due to how individualised the burden of existing is and how you constantly have to deal with completely unnecessary nonsense. Also drugs are commodities, so they fit very naturally into “fixing yourself” in capitalism compared to other economic systems, despite all laws. My smoking buddies are usually either political activists or homeless people, and it makes sense as those are two sets of people who engage with the irrationality of the shape of society on a day to day basis.

I think I reached a new level of depression, cigarettes and alcohol are doing absolutely nothing. Silver lining is that it’ll be easier to quit, I guess.

There should be a sovereign and popular-democratic Haiti. I think we all here agree that Marxism-Leninism is the best path to that, but that’s up to the Haitian people and spamming all threads about random countries with comments like this is not productive conversation. What are you even trying to achieve here? What even is your conception of what a “Marxist-Leninist Haiti” would look like? Do either the PPD or VA fit your definition?

It’s already depressing enough that there’s so little attention on the current Haitian struggle on leftist spaces, you don’t need to make it worse with empty declarations. I know I’m being rude, but this is a serious matter, and if you can’t even answer those questions you should restrain yourself.

Carnival is over, now the Brazilian year of 2026 is finally allowed to begin. Under socialism, January will be fully deleted.

Got stuck without internet access for a almost a whole week, came back and Trump is still threatening Iran like an apartment cat staring at a bird outside. Seems there were no decades this week.

The US and Iran have been doing this dance of negotiated symbolic strikes and retaliations for at least 10 years now. It’s a testament to Iran’s security that they have never considered those strikes an existential threat until now. They could let the US walk away with some domestic PR victory while securing their diplomatic goals like they’ve done every time. The fact that they’re not doing that indicates that it no longer seems like a safe bet, and I think it’s fair to assume the very recent example of Maduro being kidnapped mid-negotiation is a really bad look for the US foreign delegation.

They likely are hours or days from being able to assemble a nuclear bomb and nobody knows where their enriched uranium is.

Those two claims are dubious, there’s lots of satellite imagery of the facilities for both enrichment and stockpiling, and there’s no evidence that they’re actually that close to nuclear warheads, which aren’t even a red line in their negotiations.

That color revolution did almost no damage

It caused the death of some 3000 people according to Iran’s official lists and forced them to turn off the internet in many large cities across the country. I wouldn’t call that almost no damage.

Edit:

Image of the enrichment sites, in case anyone wants them for whatever reason.

Usual stuff is lots of conjecture over some boyband singers being in secret relationships with each other, and apparently some guy named G-Dragon is very controversial. Definitely not my special interest and most of it doesn’t stick with me, but it’s endearing to listen to somebody you like talking about their hobbies.

— 🇺🇸/🇮🇷 Iranian Member of Parliament, Mahmoud Nabavian:

'Before the negotiations, Trump contacted Iran through a regional country, conveying a message saying ‘let us strike two locations in Iran—and you can respond symbolically’

Iran rejected this offer, and replied that any attack would lead to a response in which at least 3000 to 4000 American soldiers would be killed. Furthermore, we would strike every single major company in the region that is U.S.-owned or has ties to America.’

@Middle_East_Spectator (on telegram)

Ironically, I think Iran would be much more willing to negotiate this into symbolic strikes if not for the kidnapping of Maduro. It makes sense to be so much more willing to escalate now if they see the US as an actual threat.

Dating in 2026 is a balancing act between knowing enough about the K-pop scene to understand the info dumps, but not knowing too much so that the other person can have the joy of explaining it to you.

I’d keep it, maybe just change the plaque. It’s a bit disappointing how tiny the actual statue is, even T-posing Jesus looks more impressive so I think some smart architect could easily improve it. Make it cool like The Motherland Calls or the African Renaissance Monument.

I’m starting to think Trump’s main strategic goal is to personally give me anxiety by always making it seem like we’ll finally get to see XXI century weaponry live-tested against aircraft carriers, but never following through.

Anyways, some OSINT chatter has been indicating materiel transfers directly from China to Iran, so China seems to be holding to their word on mutual defense. Some Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles have been launched at Ukraine today and CENTCOM deployment remains at full readiness. But eh, nothing ever happens.