To answer the question - somewhere between a developmentally disabled dog, and an actual, literal rock.

american sees something american happening americanly in america: what are we a bunch of ASIANS?

These people fucking disgust me.

Wer hat uns verraten?

Next time, how about listening before the damage is done?

Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

This makes it better

There’s no such thing as “postpotterism”. We’re never recovering from the damage from the mold lady’s book.

“immoral science” gave me a good long chuckle

“If only you knew how bad things really are.” - Chan, 4

As the saying goes, everything makes sense if you’re a moron.

When the guns and knives and coils of rope come out, the NYT deserves the same unceremonious, unselective, homogeneous catch-all “liberation” that the DHS and the GOP should get.

I don’t have a term for this - maybe “hyperpessimistic-sadistic optimism” or something similar - but the only upside I see is that the fact that these doomsday events will happen, and the mass die-offs will follow, makes it easier to sell a Perpetual War of Systematic Extermination of the Bourgeois on the survivors.

We will, unfortunately, inherit a mostly dead Earth, but when we do, the workers who remain will finally understand that it is actually more moral to kill the owner class by the million than it is to let them live.

True economy understanders know that the point of keeping the gold bars is to dunk on Elijah’s stupid old ass. Also, they look cool in the bathtub in your room in Novac.

Imperial nostalgia for the British Empire?! In the big '25?!!? Where does Kid Starver even find these fucking fossilized corpses?

How did you end up here

I’m going to start reading this today, thank you.

I should mention - I’m a union man. Years long member of an “apolitical” one. They protect the workers on the floor well enough, and the only thing people ever talk about are salaries, working conditions, retirement, how to file labor complaints, that kind of stuff. It’s quite nice, but it doesn’t offer a lot of room for agitation, or education, or much of anything else. I tried.

But maybe… Hmm. Maybe the local here is better than the local I left behind. And maybe Foster addresses that. I should investigate. And read. Thanks for the rec!!!

Thank you!!!

Hey, y’all, how do you feel about the Three Body Problem? Am I the only one who read it as a damn-near-love-letter to modern Socialism with Chinese Characteristics?

Fucking Bluesky, man. It’s like a liberal resonance cascade, it just keeps feeding into itself and getting more stupid.

TLDR: Ask Salvador Allende. Oh, wait, you can’t. You could ask Miguel Diaz-Canel instead, but he’ll probably tell you that it doesn’t work that way.

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie isn’t homogeneous. No political system is. There’s factions, there’s push and pull, there are adaptations to reality, and there are failures to do so. And like any other political system, it’ll only rally and act in lockstep if there’s a threat to the whole. A threat to every faction at once, usually through a threat to the whole system itself. In the case of the DotB, socialism/communism/worker rule is that threat.

In a nutshell. The reason that reformism doesn’t work is because, no matter what flavor of DotB you have, the entire purpose of the system is to keep wealth flowing to the top. Parliamentarism, presidentialism, junta, monarchy, electoral technocracy, what have you, doesn’t matter. Capitalist government exists for the purpose of keeping the relations of capital. Trying to use a tool of capitalism enforcement and maintenance, refined to the nth degree by capitalism, is trying to sail a lighthouse, or to teach a dog to sing. It literally can’t do the thing you want it to do. Attempting to twist it into a tool of the DotP would break it - I say would because, before you can even break it, it will slice your hand open.

When we say capitalism is entrenched, the DotB is both the biggest shovel and the best trench. The entire incentive system in modern governance makes it so that most people working in it have a vested interest in it doing what it’s doing. Both by (more commonly in the past) bribing the technical operators of bureaucracy, and by (always) placing beneficiaries of the system in decision making positions. Trying to get a DotB to cooperate with a socialist project leads to every level of governance has its interests threatened. And that’s on top of the bourgeoisie itself being threatened. And so the system will fight for its own survival, both at the systemic level (unjust laws, lawfare, opposition mechanics) and at the individual level (people simply not doing what the DotP project would want them to do).

Infiltration from the government from the top doesn’t work because individuals within the system have every incentive to keep the apparatus as is. Infiltration from the bottom (mostly) doesn’t work because the state apparatus prunes itself of elements that don’t fit the incentive system, or neutralizes those elements when it can’t prune them.

When it comes to DotB government infiltration, it either happens at almost every level at the same time, or it doesn’t work. History teaches us that toppling the government as a structure (aka revolution) is easier, and has a better success rate, than trying to win multiple elections at several levels plus replacing bureaucrats plus coopting enforcers and military branches all at the same time. Naturally, this is an oversimplification - doing any of those things is good. I’m open to examples to the contrary, but the point is, doing those things only leads to actual long term success if the leverage gained is used to topple the government. If socialists just sit on one or two victories inside the apparatus, or try to leverage those into more power within the apparatus, they get pushed out or neutered sooner or later, and the position is lost.

Any and all corrections by comrades are welcome. I’m not that well read.

Banger read. I’ll point out that this is one of those that is more current now than when it was written. It’s not exactly “prescient”, it’s the contradictions having sharpened (and the DotB having learned from their previous trysts with fascism and improved their fascist formula) makes this more pervasively true now than before. Or something.

Here’s a question to my fellows here: how do we get ahead of the fascists, on the ground level, at leveraging the contradictions? How do we, as agitators, at an individual level, bring the people in our lives who are pissed at the system into our tent before they do?