InappropriateEmote

I fully agree that this country is fucking cooked, but let's be accurate with the numbers here.

70% of Republican voters is only like 8% of the total US population, not 50%. See @trabpukcip@hexbear.net's comment here. I'm taking his word for it on the number of registered republicans and the total population is 342 million. 27 million is about 7.9% of 342 million.

So that 70% of Republican voters is a good bit less than even a tenth of the country, not half.

I wasn't even talking about Venezuela, I was referring to the trend around here to shutdown any critique of the the most optimistic stance as "doomer ultraleftists" so your comment isn't actually addressing anything I said.

The tactic is one of retreat and loss, but the strategy might still be sound

There is a difference between "the strategy may be sound," which I wholeheartedly agree with, and "the strategy IS sound, period," which is naive but even that is still different than "the strategy IS sound, that is for sure the strategy that they're using, and if you don't see it that way you're a doomer ultraleftist who needs to stfu," which is what I see way too often around here, and what my comment was actually referring to.

Coming on here and saying "Venezuela has ceded all political and economic power to the US and is basically a vassal now run by compradors" is not the type of open minded and thoughtful question you are purporting. You are straight up making things up

I'm making things up? lol, not only did I not say any of that, I'm not even talking about Venezuela. I am talking about the entire trend of screeching "doooooooooomer!" every time someone is justifiably worried about something that happened or has any concern about a choice made by a member of the resistance. It's not just about Venezuela, it happened with the ceasefire, it happens literally anytime anyone questions the most optimistic possible interpretation of how the struggle against imperialism and the Great Satan is unfolding. There is a cohort of commenters here, you included apparently, constantly using the smug emoji and insulting comrades as "ultras" (without even knowing what that means), whenever someone disagrees with the Iranian/Venezuelan/X-anti-Imperialist-group's leadership can do no wrong and always makes the right moves mode of "analysis."

providing no sources for the claims while acting like everyone else providing actual reasoning and sources for their perspectives are just towing the line.

What "claims" do you want me to source? Just do a search of the news comm for the term "ultra" and sort by new. Go look at any interaction you've had with InexplicableLunch or how about this one with @Leegh@hexbear.net vs others in the Rose-colored-glasses "dissent is doomer" brigade. I commented then as well, one of the many times I was exasperated by the insulting language and behavior so inappropriately used against comrades making valid points, but one of the few times I spoke up about it.

As far as Venezuela, I don't know all the details and I never claimed otherwise. But what I do see, including from everything I've read here (from "doomers" and the panglossian posse alike) is that under Maduro there was hard opposition to the US and imperialism. Now since the fascist's kidnapping of Maduro, Venezuela is opening up in significant ways which is deeply concerning to me, meanwhile Delcy Rodriguez is tweeting her sympathies and well wishes to all the fascists at the Correspondent's Dinner. On the surface all of this looks very bad, and if you want to make a materialist argument that it's not, and it's all part of the anti-imperialist plan then fine, do that. If you do, it's hard to make out when every other sentence is filled with this petty jeering at the "doomers" who are in general if not in every specific case, making much more rational and genuinely materialist arguments.

As a lurker who still finds some value in this newsmega (but seemingly less so all the time) I want to thank you for being one of the few people here willing to consistently stand up to the non-materialist panglossian wave of "analysis" that has swamped this forum. There is so much irony in how the few people saying "ok, let's look at this from a material perspective" are constantly being accused of being anti-materialist by a set of loud commenters who dominate the conversation with this absurd happy-go-lucky "our guys are always right, are incapable of making any mistakes, we are always winning, and if you disagree you're a doomer!" garbage. It is ironic that this supposed "doomerism" is always being referred to in this McCarthyist way, like it's this great threat looming over hexbear that needs to be eradicated, when 95% of the time it's nothing more than someone saying "wait a sec, are we maybe being too dismissive of the possibility that X event might have actually been bad for the resistance?" which is a healthy and necessary perspective to have even if it ultimately turns out to be incorrect. The real problem isn't that it's "doomer" it's that it's a counter to the narrative that they want to believe in and push everyone else to as well.

Do you think the Iranian leadership is always correct and have never made mistakes?

There are a number of loud commenters here who do think exactly that. And anyone who questions the wisdom of some of the choices made by the IRGC is just a "doomer ultraleftist." They think the only analysis that has any legitimacy is analysis that assumes it as a foregone conclusion that Iran knows with omniscient power what the best course of action is. If you disagree, you're just a fool western armchair general, and you have to be over there literally fighting if you want to have any ground to disagree. Nearly everything they say about "doomers" could be said just as reasonably about them, but applied to their non-materialist rose colored glasses regarding their belief that anti-imperialist states are incapable of mistakes or bad tactical decisions.

I almost exclusively lurk rather than comment, but I don't know why much of the rest of the newsmega seems to go along with it so easily. It's a shame because on several broader issues, I tend to agree with them more than the one or two bold commenters here who are willing to put up with their petty name-calling and try to engage with them and argue against their Panglossian commentary. The constant "you're just a doomer" and "you have no valid concerns or thoughts because you are just a lib/ultraleftist westerner" is beyond off-putting and it makes it harder for me to take the rest of their analysis seriously. For all their complaints of how much "doomerism" there supposedly is here, it's their own pettiness that really drags down the quality of discussion and analysis in the newsmega. It's all the more ironic when someone posts a comment they they don't like (which is anything slightly critical of any of the choices Iran has made) and they pull out the "what, you think you know any better you weak minded westerner?" line, because it's practically certain that there are elements within the Iranian leadership structure that have similar concerns and probably disagreed with a number of the decisions that were ultimately made.

There is plenty more I could say, but I feel like what's the point when a top level comment getting scores of upvotes is equating a number of people here with literal Zionists just because they have discussed fears that Iran's agreement to the ceasefire may have been miscalculation.

edit: swapped out a common but potentially ableist word for an alternative.

Well said. To add to that, as for domestication specifically, many aphids are litetally domesticated by ants. But we would never say that those aphids are not found in the wilderness.

Agriculture and domestication are practices undertaken by certain ant species and colonies. These ants use agricultural methods and are known as one of the few animal groups, along with Homo sapiens, to have achieved the level of eusociality necessary to practice agriculture. It is estimated that ants began this practice at least 50 million years ago. The domestication of plant, fungus, and animal species by ants is well documented.

Exactly this. Not only did it essentially wipe out entire populations and even drastically alter the course of civilizations (repeatedly), it has not "disappeared." It is still endemic in mammalian (mostly rodent+flea) populations in some areas including in the US. Every year there are people who get infected with it. I think it's an average of like 7 people per year in the US, but as usual, countries more heavily exploited by the US and its vassals get it worse. Hundreds of cases per year in DRC for example. It's hasn't "disappeared," this antivaxxer nitwit just doesn't know about it because modern medicine has made it treatable and precluded its ability to spread as it did in previous centuries.

That has got to be one of the most blatant, egregious examples of "every accusation a confession" that I've seen in a long time. Or maybe not that long, because we get doozies on the daily, but still jaw dropping to me, somehow.

This has come up before, and I don't know why it keeps getting downplayed. It wasn't just one rogue member going off on their own. It was a sizeable faction of the group that followed one of the top leaders who organized the trip, who (along with many others) went to speak with the pro-US opposition instead of the planned meeting with Diaz-Canel in a very blatant snub.

https://redstarcaucus.org/cuban-links/

Throughout the trip, members of the delegation from the Reform & Revolution Caucus (R&R) and the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) criticized the Cuban government both to our Cuban hosts and other DSA members, and skipped out on multiple delegation events. Most shamefully, both Maria (representing R&R) and Renée (representing SMC, and a member of the current NPC) skipped out on meeting with President Díaz-Canel, who spent more than 2 hours in a frank discussion specifically addressing the critiques these very same DSA members brought up to their Cuban hosts earlier on the trip

This behavior from the R&R and SMC delegates is anti-democratic, disorganizing, and chauvinistic. For a resident of the imperial core to go to a socialist state that has survived a U.S. blockade for multiple generations and critique its achievements as incomplete is the height of chauvinism. To reject the democratically-decided purpose of the delegation – which was to support Cuba against the U.S. blockade – and instead insert their individual political goals of making connections with opposition groups and advocate for Cuban government reform is anti-democratic. If the delegates from R&R and SMC wanted to make connections with government opposition groups and advocate for liberalization they should have applied to other delegations instead of the socialist one. Or they could have stayed at home; many other applicants who were aligned with the delegation's goals were not able to attend due to limited seats on the delegation.

Not an insignificant number of other DSA members throughout the org at the time were defending the actions of the snubbers, going so far as citing Cuba's "authoritarianism" as usual. Hell, even here on hexbear there was a long-standing regular poster who got permabanned (or perhaps temp-banned but chose never to return?) for insisting these actions were either not a big deal or were the correct thing to do. This gross betrayal goes a lot further and deeper than a single rogue member.

edit: https://hexbear.net/post/2330099

I was going to comment directly to the post with my own answers, but you seem to have written exactly what I was going to say.

So I'll just add that I think it is a conspiracy itself that so many kooky conspiracy theories are boosted and amplified as a means to discredit all conspiracy theories. Doing this allows people who are understandably ignorant of the history and context (aka "normies') the ability to say "oh, that's just a conspiracy theory" to immediately shut down any consideration that the thing they're being presented with is true. The person who says "I don't believe in conspiracy theories" gets to look like the smart rational person even though all they did was spout a thought-terminating cliche, because so many "conspiracy theories" that are intentionally cultivated and amplified get massive amounts of attention, from Q-anon shit, to UFOs, to bigfoot (sorry SFS you rock, but those are silly), to just about anything Alex Jones and his listeners talk about, really are just kooky noise. Conspiracy theories as a concept is an op to discredit real whistleblowers and anyone who believes them.

Posts about it are removed for being fake/doctored/ai-hallucination, rightfully so.