If you look around the world at the Orbans, the Bolsanaros, the Le Penns, the AfD, etc., you will find that polarization and the rising far right is global. First past the post is not a good thing, but the causes are far deeper.

A past global trend was how the center left parties (Democrats in the US, 2nd International Socialist parties in most of the rest of the world) discredited themselves, abandoning their core constituencies and pushing neoliberal economic policies (in the US, free trade, dismantling welfare, the banking deregulation behind 2008). I think that’s the proximate cause in the rise of the global far right.

The cause of that trend is the inability of regulated capitalism to both provide for everyone AND provide the necessary ever increasing rate of profit.

While there have been stirrings of possible left reformist parties (Sanders, Corbyn, Lula, etc) even those that make it into state power are ineffective at creating a new, stable, political economy.

Meanwhile climate change is haunting the globe and the clock is ticking.

My impression of the Russian communist party is that they’ve become more a nationalist party than anything promoting class struggle.

I avoid them if I can. If the store wants me to work for them, they can pay me. If they don’t have any available human checkers, I will pay myself by accidentally not charging some of the items. I have left stores and attempt to tell store managers why.

If we had a sane economic system where jobless folks still got their needs met, I’d be all for automation. But we don’t. So every time we allow the corporations to profit with less human workers, we are fucking over our fellow humans.

"One of the employees at Spirit AeroSystems, which reportedly manufactured the door plug that blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight over Portland, Oregon, allegedly told company officials about an “excessive amount of defects,” according to the federal complaint and corresponding internal corporate documents reviewed by us.

According to the court documents, the employee told a colleague that “he believed it was just a matter of time until a major defect escaped to a customer."

https://jacobin.com/2024/01/alaska-airlines-boeing-parts-malfunction-workers-spirit-aerosystems

George Lucas certainly did. The Vietnam War was part of the inspiration for Star Wars.

Since 2000, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths is 21:1 (NYT). Rockets? The name evokes weapons from Lockheed or Boeing, but Hamas and Islamic Jihad make them in garages and basement tunnels while Israel has the most hitech interceptors available. It’s still comparatively slingshots to F-16s.

Hamas was created in 1987, and has benefited from disproportionate treatment from the Israelis, who used Hamas to divide the Palestinian resistance. When Israel blows ckekd the negotiation tactics of the secular Palestinian resistance, what else were Palestinians to do? Palestinians in Gaza tried mass civil disobedience I’m 2018 with the Walk of Return, but Israel used live rounds and nearly 300 were killed and thousands wounded. How else were the Palestinians to seek freedom?

Always has been. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots

You paid money for something and then you find you can’t use it again. You seriously think that isn’t fucked up?

Fascists gonna fasc

There have been many spans of time when Democrats had enough control of government to push through what they profress. They don’t use those opportunities.

Not arguing that the two parties are the same. They are better than the Republicans by far, but the Democrats are still not our friends. They either need to be destroyed or changed.

Since Eugene McCarthy, to the Rainbow Coalition, and then the campaigns of Kuccinch and then Bernie working inside has not worked. Of course, neither has working outside.

I doubt you’ve even seen them. Even the protests organized by Palestinians welcome Jewish Voices for Peace who have signs that say, “Never Again Means for Everyone”. And Jewish Voices for Peace organize a lot of protest themselves. Antifa peeps show up to make sure Nazis don’t infiltrate.

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While voting is a necessary but insufficient way to combat fascism, 96% of voting Ukrainians choosing to not support fascism is a good indicator that fascism is NOT on the agenda in Ukraine. A fascist coup by that 2% supporting fascism would be opposed by the vast majority of Ukraine.

You completely ignore that fact with your hardon for attacking the identity of persons chosen by the Ukrainians.

Edit to explain: I made no argument on what Zelinsky as a Jew or the Muslim cabinet member would be politically, which would be identity politics. This statement of fact (Zelinsky is Jewish) was relevant to the political preferences of the Ukrainian people. Fascists don’t choose Jews and Muslims to represent them.

Zelinsky is a pretty terrible neoliberal, and I’m not actually a fan. But I am a fan a national self determination. So was Lenin.

Yeah, it’s a problem. A threatened country integrated a fascist militia into its army. Yes, and that’s bad.

But the country as a whole does not like Nazis at all, and doesn’t vote for them.

“In the 2019 Ukrainian elections, the far-right nationalist electoral alliance, including Svoboda, National Corps, Right Sector, Azov Battalion, OUN, and Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, under-performed expectations. In the presidential election, its candidate Ruslan Koshulynskyi received 1.6% of the vote, and in the parliamentary election, it was reduced to a single seat and saw its national vote fall to 2.15%, half of its result from 2014 and one-quarter of its result from 2012.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics_in_Ukraine

The country has a Jewish president and a Muslim cabinet minister. Sound like a Nazi country to you?

Before the Zionist movement, Palestine was ruled first by the Ottomans and then the British. Prior to Zionism, the land held Christians (the latest bombardment destroyed the 3rd oldest Christian Church in the world), Muslims, and Jews. In fact the early Palestinian national movement considered Jewish Palestinians to be Palestinian and their demands them full rights in a secular state of Palestine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Jews

Genetics, if that matters, shows that the pre-zionist natives of Palestine are closely related to European (Sepahrdic and Ashkenazi) Jews. Basically some people left centuries ago, but some people stayed.

Now since 1948 those that left want to kick out those that stayed, or kill them if they don’t leave.

From the unionized weed store down the block. They’re open until midnight.

Targeting a journalist, not opposition Hezbollah.

It’s terrible I can only upvote you once.

I would have said, “settler colonial state”. What that state is doing to the Palestinians will, in the lense of history, be seen as equivalent to what the United States did to the indigenous peoples.

“Infestation” is too close to fascist antisemitic tropes and while criticism of Israel is NOT automatically antisemitic, it can be.

What happens to good cops: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/12/09/blue-wall-police-misconduct-whistleblower-retaliation/8836387002/