Barx [none/use name]

That is very uncharacteristic of the United States. Their usual response would be to escalate even more because they smell weakness in any country sharing a concern with them.

And now you’ve flip flopped back to the first claim lmai

The war will end with a ceasefire or the end of Ukraine - plus a bunch more dead Ukrainians.

Every time a person says, “no ceasefire! No negotiations!” they are declaring that they are either:

1. So detached from reality that they think Ukraine is going to win. This is understandable because of the PR campaigns to convince you that Russia is a paper tiger, but you only need to dig slightly deeper than surface-level bullshitting to realize how absurd this is.

2. You hate Ukraine and want as many Ukrainians to die as possible.

I assume you’re in camp 1.

It is worth noting that the ones who chose to return had the unfortunate circumstance of not having transferable skills and ended up working low paying jobs compared to what they had at home. Most of the people who had transferable skills have good paying jobs and are living comfortably.

Yup, I am not claiming it is the root issue, just that I think it’s one of the reasons for their struggles, based on the examples given by the article, and because I can relate.

You initially attributed all of it to not having transferable skills lol.

Instead of changing up your story, you could just admit you’re projecting.

Yes

Unsanctioned weapons of mass destruction!? Surely this means a preemptive strike from the US is incoming.

Cats like pulling things down off of other things. It entertains them.

Hell yeah

Bruh there were no innocent Nazis this is a form of Holocaust denial

Par for the course from the country that reintegrated its Nazis.

This is essentially every project funded through a “defense” agency.

Focus on organizing and socialism and let any friendships be natural. It’s not practical to completely separate one’s social life and political life.

Friendship doesn’t always stay that, though. Be careful and modest and never let it become a dating scene. Lefties will date but there is a huge difference between those who happen to date vs. an organization that allows or even promotes harassment, which is unfortunately very common. Similarly, nobody should be put in situations in a lefty organization where they are being sexualized or where there can be any perception of favoritism or discrimination. These should be places where one’s political contributions are what are valued.

If these things aren’t taken seriously then the org will eventually implode from not handling abusive situations appropriately and instead relying on however the current leadership team (usually defensively) responds to complaints. This is one of the worst and unfortunately common scenarios in political organizations and is a much greater threat to your organization (and people that want to work within it) than any feds or cops. The Best rule of thumb is to be humble and empathetic and plan for how you are going to handle situations with social fallout.

As a different example, you may also have people in your organization that do not get along and begin fighting. Sometimes it’s even pretty clear when one person is in the wrong and the other is not. But even then, the person that is in the wrong may weaponize anything they perceive to have caché in your organization. For example, race or gender or sexual orientation, etc. I’ve seen it happen many times. A harasser wraps themselves in an identity to deflect from their own behavior. So as an organization, you want to prepare for these scenarios because it is part of promoting comradely behavior and being a space where people actually want to be and work. And you need to develop strategies by which you will discriminate between true and false claims and reach reasonable conclusions to protect the members of your organization. Don’t worry about the image of the organization itself because if you act correctly in individual cases to protect the members of the org you can always explain what happened and why. In contrast, many lefties make the mistake of trying to protect the org over its members and this nearly always backfires.

Anyways this is how I recommend approaching the building of a space where commies can be friends. Keep the focus on organizing, education, and being a place where people can safely be. Plan for the worst so you can head it off before things get too far and so that you have tools to handle negative situations correctly.

Allumer des feux

Bumping for visibility

“Why does Alan want me to ‘prevaricatingly touch base about the brown water situation?’”

It was Big Pencil all along

The last point is the important one. If you’re regularly seeing these in your house that means they’ve found a food source: your house is infested with another insect they’re keeping at bay.

Marxism defines “the economy” as a social relation that ties to all others and the capitalist social relation in particular as the dominant economic order that produces and maintains both the most relevant oppressor and oppressed classes and the other relations. Marx and Engels wrote quite a lot about various ways (sometimes speculatively and sometimes out-of-date) in which capitalism produced and maintains certain communities relationships, the very core of social organization, the family, the individual).

So it’s exactly the opposite. Rather than a vulgar economism, the core of Marxism is to define the economic as a social relation rather than what capitalists try to teach us it is: some kind of default natural state of being separate from all those other things. And as a social relation, Marxism via dialectical materialism teaches us that it has dual natures that involve causitive material forces on one hand and our ability to socially organize against this system on the other.

There has never been a real separation between Marxist organizing and the addressing of “non-economic” (they are still inextricable from economic) marginalizations and liberation struggles. The most knowledgeable and effective Marxist movements were at the forefront of liberation movements, in fact, and fully incorporated them into their wider analysis. Marxist feminism, Marxist anti-racism and abolitionism, Marxist anti-chauvinism and anti-vulgar class consciousness (e.g. imperialist trade unions), Marxist analysis of the family, the community, the city, the state, Marxist analysis of immigration, Marxist analysis of homosexuality and then the wider spectrum of sexuality, Marxist analysis of gender identity and its wider spectrum, Marxist analysis of ableism and the construction of normative spaces, etc etc.

It is notable that every successful communist revolution has been highly progressive in its pursuit of varies simultaneous liberations. Specifically, they were all tied very closely to national liberation struggles and the liberation of (and heavy inclusion and support of) women. These are both topics with broad mass impacts, both were and are fights against broad forms of oppression tied to capitalism.

More honest headline: Dell created intolerable working conditions so that they could engage in constructive dismissal and avoid paying for unemployment for their massive layoffs.

The real lesson is that tolerance is far too broad of a term to simply be a good thing on its own. There are things that are good to tolerate and things that are not good to tolerate. I don’t tolerate child abusers, genocide apologists, or cops. And that makes me cool.