I have a hypothesis that people react differently to the cold calculus of Politically Necessary Genocide when it's their loved ones who are being offered up for sacrifice. But I suppose we'll see.

I agree. There is no option to reduce harm. Just don't lie to yourself and everyone else about how your expression of self-interest is actually about helping everyone else.

"We need Harris in office so that it's easier to organize to help Palestinians!"

The degree of narcissism that it takes to say this self-serving bullshit while a genocide is unfolding exclusively because your precious nation exists...

The US is the Fourth Reich and the two flavors of politics are Nazi and Nazi in Flower Headband.

Browsing /r/all because I'm never gonna die so wasting my life doesn't matter. Anyway I see a post titled 'Leading scholar Dr.snyder on the subject of eastern European nationalism debunks myths and lies spread by Russia about Ukraine.'

"Hmm. No, wait... it can't be."

The sound I made cannot be replicated

People need to understand class interest beyond "worker good, Capitalist bad, workers come together and sing kumbaya really hard until Communism happens."

If it were that simple, we would be living in Communism right. It's not that simple. A couple of examples: steel worker union wants the price of steel to be as high as possible so union members are compensated well. Union of... idk, pipe builders want steel to be as cheap as possible for obvious reasons. Despite both groups consisting exclusively of proles, they have contradictory interests.

Another example that's been highlighted by recent DSA actions: class reproduction. Academic "Marxists" generally lose all radicalism because they've secured a position where they can write for a living instead of doing one of the million jobs that no one wants to do. This applies perhaps even more strongly to paid positions within "Socialist" organizations. Why did Maria of the DSA behave with such profound chauvinism on the Cuba trip? Because she sees a path out of working for a living. Everything she did established credibility in the eyes of the people who hire Democratic Party staffers.

And the single most important example in the world today: Americans. A nation ostensibly composed of the working class like any other, yet all but the most vulnerable of its population are so profoundly bribed with the superprofits of the actual global working class that their interests have been thoroughly aligned with the status quo. They constitute a parasitic class on the world stage. Why do the most useless counter-revolutionary tendencies (LeftCommunism, Council Communism, Trotskyism, Neokautskyism) come exclusively from the West? Because the population does not, for the most part, experience revolutionary conditions. They don't need to do a revolution because they will be fine no matter what.

And this isn't some wild, new, 21st century theory. No less than Marx, Engels, and Lenin all described the parasitic nature of British "workers" and their attempt to secure well-being on the backs of the global proletariat: “...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.”

This is a result of trying to turn "Leftism" into a social club. None of this matters to any of these strivers.

As people are accurately diagnosing Israeli society as demonic and without redemptive qualities, and as they rightly wish harm on this settler, I can't help but think about how mad people here got when I said I don't care about the suffering of Americans.

Can someone explain the difference? Because it seems to me it's the classic cop/soldier distinction you see among RadLibs: they can imagine themselves being harassed and harmed by cops (in which case it's ACAB city) but are far more likely to be or know soldiers than suffer harm at their hands, so suddenly a situation that merited slogans and denunciations seconds ago deserves nuance.

People--again, rightly--point out that there are no innocent Israelis and that settlers are inherently combatants. Why doesn't this apply to the far more more murderous United States? Its foundation is even more explicitly genocidal, it has killed orders of magnitude more people, and all of its atrocities receive widespread support.

So why is the treatment so different? Is it because Israelis are faceless nobodies on the other side of the Earth, and you and everyone you care about are Americans? Is it because your state has been unimaginably more successful at its campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, so unlike Israelis, you don't have to think about the fact that you're a settler and thus create ideological justifications for your existence?

To be clear: I'm not saying that people here don't hate the US. People here hate the US, but they hate Israelis. Why are Israelis painted as monsters complicit in their government's actions while Americans are poor little victims whomst bear no responsibility for the most murderous state on Earth?

If this doesn't apply to you: great! The next time someone tearfully says that no one should listen to me because I'm a big old meanie head toward history's most perfect angels, Americans, please join me in thinking about how much everyone hates Israelis both individually and collectively (and again: they should! This is not a defense of Israelis) and roll your eyes.

"Ten degrees to the left of center in the best of times; ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally."

Edit: to be clear, I'm talking about Euro-Americans. The material base of American society is the exploitation of everyone on Earth for the benefit of Europeans. The bottom strata of American society are almost entirely racialized, and non-white people generally experience drastically different circumstances than the parasitic European majority.

Why would you call the news begging for help?

They enjoy killing civilians because they view all Palestinians as subhumans and threats.

Big fan of your work, my favorite part is when you say that Communism is impossible but that you still expect the abolition of class. Enormous brain.