Thanks Mohammed and thanks to your friend. I want to tell him I’m so sorry that the American left has so far failed in our mission to organize the people. Although both our political parties support Israel, polls show that most Americans want to stop. From underneath our government the hearts of the people are with you.

And I want to ask him: What do you think about political organizations within Gaza? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on Hamas, the PFLP, the various PLO groups; armed struggle and mass struggle. What is working, what is not? What is popular, what is unpopular? Are most people politically engaged or is it too hard because of Israel’s attacks?

deleted by creator

It rings true since it’s based on a smidge of material analysis, and the superficial similarity with leftists steals our momentum (dragging us back at the moment, but attempting to hitch a ride when there’s another Bernie type wave). Protofascist IMO. Vance correctly identifies that there is a bourgeoisie that controls the USA, and that ordinary people should instinctually oppose this, but he draws the lines of the classes such that the “elite” contains people like journalists and nurses, and the “real Americans” includes himself and ski-doo dealership owners and such. This is not new rhetoric, but Vance is actually doing a little analysis so it works well.

For instance, he says that the reason illegal immigration exists is because all the business owners - many of them Democrats - profit from illegal immigration. The low wages paid for under-the-table work push down the wages paid to citizens. That’s true! It’s convincing, it’s material. But Vance goes on to say that the way to stop this phenomenon is not for workers to band together to force business owners to pay them high wages no matter the supply of labor, or even just to make immigration (functionally) legal again so immigrant labor isn’t so cheap, but to keep immigration (functionally) illegal but just make the border even more deadly.

interesting read. my takes

• as always, heartwarming to see that the republican party recognizes that much of their platforms are tremendously unpopular (at least with “moderates”): covid denial, cutting social security, opposing student loan forgiveness, opposing abortion, ties with alex jones / etc all specifically called out as problems with Vance
• they’re awfully worried about JD’s tucker carlson-like Strasserism. He says he supports unions, especially US domestic manufacturing, because they will make the nuclear family stronger or whatever, and opposes globalization. I think this might be compatible with like, Teamsters type right-unionism of the type we’ve seen recently, and certainly JD thinks a realignment will happen and is pushing to get it. But I’m not really sure why Trump’s team in particular would be worried about this - I thought his whole thing was representing domestic and industrial capital, in opposition to international/finance/tech capital from the Dems and traditional Republicans. Maybe the Trump business base is content with its current path
• I find his right-wing class struggle language very scary

on one hand styrene is not that horrible of a chemical, it’s the monomer of polystyrene (Styrofoam) and it polymerizes into Styrofoam pretty fast if you leave it alone

on the other hand jeez that is a lot of styrene. It’s crazy how much plastic we make. The last Ohio spill was vinyl chloride which I assume is the PVC monomer

is inventory info already public? in addition to salting (cool af), maybe a journalist could just happen to publish a “we spent $x on bearcats” piece during your tenure

reminding everyone that the disengage rule was made before blocking worked. Be generous with your comm and user blocks, life is short.

if you’re from Mars

no clue, never had one. I’ve had some friends who did logistics(?) work that seemed to be mostly emails. One that worked at wind turbine company, her job seemed to be mostly emailing vendor fairs to make sure that they could set up a booth there. No idea what her job title was.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (book not essay) presumably has some examples since it’s the source of this line of thought. I haven’t read it

I can speak to scrum master, I was one for a while. On a programming team you have a bunch of devs who ideally wouldn’t do any work and management (a project manager?, a “product” guy, etc) who wants to get as much work as possible out of the devs. The scrum master is supposed to help them reach a compromise: a limited amount of work, with a reasonable amount of flexibility in when it’s done, but on a wider scale it is legible and predictable to management so that they can make business plans. To this end the scrum master runs planning meetings and helps break development work down into sensible tasks, the length/difficulty of which can be roughly estimated. If you don’t have a scrum master, management is constantly making impossible requests, asking the team to do 180 degree turns, etc., and also it’s really hard to estimate software progress so basically nothing gets done on schedule and everyone is mad all the time. In effect it’s a limited-mandate negotiation job on behalf of the developers.

In my opinion this is not an email job, but maybe at large companies with more opaque management it is. /u/chickentendrils is spot-on about why it exists.

none of those words are in Das Kapital

you should post the link we haven’t read it

do spaces like that exist? maybe some corners of tumblr. I think this is a common experience for young boys having their first crushes.

Grown feminist men are supposed to have figured out how to relate to women as other people so they’re not paralyzed by trying to talk to them. Even without explicit theory you learn not to put women on pedestals. Posting this kind of stuff would look like softboi performative harmlessness (usually a lie), and it would be weird to try and combine that with an open expression of desire anyway. If you are a left-of-center man who’s attracted to women, the cultural norm is to shut up about it because the misogynists are saying gross shit in locker rooms and you don’t want to do that. There’s not really space for healthy/nonthreatening desire yet.

Grown anti-feminist men are supposed to have learned a specific script of heterosexuality (PUA, etc) to follow, where they are in control of the interaction and set the terms of it. For these men, open expression of harmlessness or being disarmed by a woman’s gaze or whatever makes you a cuck and is therefore verboten.

deleted by creator

so fucking depressing. setting yourself on fire to ask people to call their senators. we desperately need a mass movement. normal people can’t see a way out and it’s crushing anyone with a conscience

IIRC, China has been doing a lot of stuff with low-flying drones over the water. Very hard to see on radar, reported as "UFO"s in the South China Sea.

A dense cloud of drones is silly though that’s not the point of drones

either altogether fake image or the site was very quickly fixed. meme version not in the archive sites. this is the link being passed around https://myrotvorets.center/criminal/hoslov-rodyon-tymofeevych/

when the Weather Underground visited the Viet Minh

know where I can read about it? google results are fucked by the weather report people

He said the lawsuit has cost him about $400,000. “My retirement is set back five years

125k yearly Disney spend

80k yearly retirement savings

someone help me balance my budget

deleted by creator