Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]

Thanks! I didn’t want to come off as needlessly antagonistic toward a comrade and it’s hard to tell tone from text. I think we should always be actively rooting out the liberal in our head. And as it’s the hegemonic ideology it can be buried deep inside. Engaging in struggle helps, but I’ll be the first to tell you I’m nowhere as engaged as I should be. So that liberalism can creep up in insidious ways. Especially for those in the imperial core. I’m assuming you are, as I am, but I may be off base.

I think this quote from Assata Shakur is good to keep in mind when thinking about liberals.

As far as i’m concerned, “liberal” is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

Edit: my phone’s giving me so many problems. I wanted to respond directly to a comment @Venat@hexbear.net made.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but my thought is that liberals were never going to rediscover their affection for organizing. Sorry if I’m coming across as too cynical and harsh, but liberalism is a death cult. It’s a philosophical dead end and it’s true believers are too comfortable in the empire to do anything that’s not posturing, symbolic, and ultimately meaningless. Americans needs to divorce themselves from the Democrats and see them as a bourgeoise parties that don’t express their interests. I think the die hard liberals do have their interests represented by bourgeois parties and so they were always a lost cause. Working class people who are either checked out of the process, or only go with the dems out of fear of Trump need to be reached with a political message they can actually see and believe in. Bernie was that for people at a time, but he’s useless now.

Sorry for the rambling. I think my main point is that liberals were never going to organize and we actually shouldn’t wait or want them to. I have no faith in them nor expectations. When they do organize it just absorbs movements back under their fold. The working class itself needs to be the ones organizing. We shouldn’t rely on, or expect, or want, liberals to do the tasks of the working class. Working class movements and institutions have to be the ones taking the active role in history

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It’s disappointing. As more and more moments of truth come out, as WW3 breaks our and/or the empire is in obvious terminal declin,e there’ll be western leftists (even here sadly) who will make some heel turn and support the empire. It’ll be justified by who knows what, about the tough choice of needing to save what little “democracy” America represents even if they don’t “fully support it”. The same predictable cycle on higher and higher levels.

If that happens to me then please hunt me down and shoot me

Al Jazeera has a section focused on battleground states and different paths of victory for each

https://www.aljazeera.com/us-election-2024/results/

King today would be casting his vote for the Greg Stillson of yesterday

I would love to talk about this stuff with anyone who is interested. I’ve learned some (linear) production theory along the lines of Sraffa, Pasinetti, Ian Wright etc - essentially representing production relations as a network. If you feel comfortable with some Linear Algebra you can start there. And I have been working on a way to model this production network, but I sometimes spin my wheels and get stuck on tangents. I am thinking of a model along the lines of what Ian Wright has worked on, and either doing a macro model (modeling the explicit emergent relations) or micro model (model the micro interactions and letting the macro structure emerge). Wright has papers for both types of models. The later would be more along the lines of complexity science. The former is closer to diff eqs, and would be easier for applying ideas of control theory to. I think.

There are a series of papers from Political Economists from the new school arguing about whether to start models from the individual interactions, vs the emergent macro conditions (which is more in line with classical political economy).

Later one could add financial networks, etc. to such a model.

But if you’re familiar with linear algebra, diff eqs, and control theory, then you may find the authors above interesting. If anyone wants to brainstorm let me know. I think this stuff is interesting and would love to know more, but I also have to work to pay bills lol

Very cool, I got to see it years ago (and at that time I didn’t know his original gravesite was elsewhere, wish I would have seen that too). There were a couple of letters that people had left from all over the world. It was touching.

Europeans. Why are you this way?

A little off topic, but I remember when Arecibo collapsed and my astro friends didn’t seem that worried as “they’ll just build it back”. I wasn’t even fully China-pilled back then, but I knew that from where the largest (full dish) radio telescope was and from where all the astro academic papers we were citing were from that the US was cooked.

Sometimes you get heavy bombardment

Gliese 710

Nemesis eat your heart out

I like to read the comments on those articles, I shouldn’t because it damages my brain. But I’m fascinated by how deranged they are. Ever since I was young I’ve been fascinated and horrified by how right wing and conspiracy-minded pretty much all comment sections are. Like in the FT article you have manty people calling Merkel a communist, boring. But I got a chuckle when one was challenged and they respond by literally saying that Germany’s not far off from having the means of production owned by a classless society, and that’s the problem.

While I can’t speak for liberal policy makers and higher-ups, the average liberal voter is so supportive of civility politics and “free speech” that it’s going to get them killed. A protest I was at recently had neo-confererate counter protestors and a progressive lib I spoke to at the protest said that while they didn’t like the neo-confererates, they had as much right to be out there as we did, and we have to respect their freedom of speech.

So yeah, the frustration is real.

Liberals voters are fucking idealists and they don’t understand power. When they lose they’ll be so confused because they followed all the rules! They think politics has refs or something. Most won’t even care too much, they’ll keep shifting further and further right as the empire decays.

I don’t think the argument would be that the opinions that people form, or want to form, always come from a conscious understanding of imperialism. The author would likely say that Westerners want to believe, and do believe, the rest of the world is bad, dangerous, unfree, undemocratic, totalitarian, etc. to make them better about their own lives - even if, or because they are, facing difficulties themselves.

The article mentions China and the supposed genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as an example. The phrase may as well be gibberish to Westerners. They don’t know, nor want to know, anything about the topic.

You are right, they aren’t doing any critical thinking. They are simply repeating nonsensical lines and absurdities, and they don’t want to think about it.

They don’t understand imperialism on a conscious level. But they want to believe that even if they can’t pay their bills, and their own life in the West has its hardships, and their state could be doing more, that at least other places are worse. And they want to feel superior to the rest of the world, so they believe any atrocity propaganda they stumble across to fuel their coping mechanism. But it doesn’t require an understanding of imperialism on their part. If they think about it at all, I’d guess they would attribute the superiority of the West to white supremacy, “democratic values”, etc.

As said in Masses, Elites, and Rebels

Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits

Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent.

Any viable example, any existing proof that there is a better way of living must be destroyed at all costs

Edit: And as others mentioned. If something, like a publicly owned economy, stands in the way of profits it must be destroyed