the mission that Trump is undertaking.

What, is he going to Mission Impossible style break into Iran? I think he’d need a stunt double for that at the very least.

(I’m assuming Hegseth means “mission that US military members are being ordered to carry out” but it sounds so goofy the phrasing, like it’s Trump taking on risk personally)

I hope any “negotiations” would include denazification of Ukraine. Otherwise, it’s just kicking the can down the road. Like making a ceasefire with israel.

What is this referencing? I’m guessing some kind of deviationist tendency, but not sure what.

I hope this is a sign that the US’s soft power influence is truly in the shitter and not going to make a comeback.

Yep, good points. And if we look at successful communist revolutions in history, it was never like, “They got along swell with the ruling classes and then they did a peaceful of transfer of power after defeating the rulers in public debate.” It’s always, “They got in varying degrees of trouble with the law; often had to go underground to build and survive; some faced exile, imprisonment, or worse; and they succeeded not through better ideas in the abstract but through better practice: theory and organizing as a coupled dynamic, willingness to take power seriously, and making use of every advantage they could get from evolving conditions.”

In a word, the ones who seek to liberate from an exploitative power structure are always, in a sense, fugitives; if not in the beginning, they become that as their power and influence grows among the masses. It is not that they seek to be fugitives, not that they seek to violate the law, but that by opposing the exploitative system, a series of confrontations becomes inevitable, due to the unwillingness of the existing system to allow an alternative that unseats them from power. Those who seek to be only compatible and “change the system from within” are allowed more freedom of movement precisely because the exploiting classes know they can dilute and flatten some reformists on the inside with relative ease. What they can’t do with ease is manage the ones who refuse to comply, who insist there is a better alternative than what we have that is proven to be better in practice, and that the exploiting classes are only in it for themselves and are refusing a better life for millions for this selfish reason.

The rehabilitation of Stalin’s image is less about the rehabilitation of Stalin as a historical individual and more about defending and upholding Marxism.

Exactly.

Put it this way: If we as communists cannot defend practicing communists, then what business do we have being communists? Of course this does not mean we should dogmatically and religiously defend anyone who claims to be communist. But, broadly speaking, if all we can do is defend communism in the abstract, then we might as well go join a pacifist commune and cover our ears about what’s going on in the world.

And if our starting point for what’s “valid” to defend is what the imperialists, the colonizers, and the capitalists have said is valid to defend, then we’re left with no meaningful practicing communism to defend in the first place!

It’s absurd to look at a system that is exploiting you and go, “I’ll only criticize what they say is okay to criticize and only support who they say is okay to support.” It’s the stuff of newbie “leftists” who are dipping a foot in, who still believe in the system and what it taught them. They’re mad, but they haven’t yet come to terms with the idea that they’ve been lied to about a lot. In this sense, rehabilitation isn’t even the right word. It’s shoveling the lies out of the way so that people can see clearly. It’s challenging slander.

Likely developed that way because of settler interests (US and Canada) and slavery (US). From what I understand, some of (not all) the police force in the US historically developed out of “slave patrols” (I think to do with catching runaway slaves and such). Then you have the fact that in both the US and Canada, LE would need to have been pretty violent to be as genocidal toward the indigenous as they were / are. And to this day, typically the worst stories you hear with US cops is them murdering black people; probably because indigenous nations are on reservations, you don’t hear so much about them getting gunned down. Though I remember reading about Canada, them having problems with cops being horrible to indigenous people in modern day.

And in the US, some cops are in literal gangs.

So anyway yeah, there’s the capitalist layer of things and then there’s other factors that make some places worse too.

The colonizers are so desperate to silence critics of their genocidal practices. Sick shit.

The thought I had reading this is, israel really operates like a corporation. It’s such a corporate thing to do to spend more on PR when facing criticism instead of changing behavior/policy.

Maybe Britain will send Mr. Bean to investigate.

It makes a kind of sense to me because a lot of news about Trump since the first time he started running is vacuous click-chasing. From what I’ve read, Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 even employed a “pied piper” strategy with Trump, intentionally elevating far-right elements of the Republican party with the belief that they would be unpalatable to the general public and so easier to beat: https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

And since then, a lot of news about him is “he said whaaaaaa?” Rather than being substantive criticism of his policy; his policy is trash, but the mainstream publications can’t properly criticize his policy without also criticizing the kind of policy they normally support, so there’s a lot of superficial criticism. It can get tiring to hear about the next word salad thing he said, which may or may not be a complete lie in the first place.

Thank you, I appreciate it. Also, I would like to say that I do appreciate your effort to bring attention to Cuba’s refining of oil. I hope we can soon live in a world with a Cuba that is as energy-independent as possible and free from siege. ❤️

VladimirLimeMint, the whole reason I defended that other person is in the spirit of stopping bickering and reinforcing solidarity. I did not defend them because I have anything against you or Cuba, but because I don’t think it’s healthy for us to get in the habit of making threads to call out another user that we had an interaction with we weren’t happy about.

This is a pretty niche place. As far as I’m aware, hexbear is too. If there is a conflict, it’s small enough that we should be able to address it person to person. If we turn it into callouts, that can, over time, cause one-off disagreements to form into cliques and prolonged backbiting.

Please do not accuse me of being dishonest if you’re not bringing receipts on the how / in what way. That is not going to build solidarity with anyone. If I were intentionally dishonest and you offer no reason why, there is nothing for others to look at to spot it. If I were unintentionally dishonest and you offer no reason why, there is nothing for me to learn from to act differently. If the character of my words and actions does not look dishonest in any obvious way and you claim it is with no reason why, it can end up resulting in making you look dishonest.

I encourage you to be strategic in engaging with perceived dishonesty and also give others a chance to learn and change. Something I have learned from engaging with people who are dishonest but aren’t necessarily obvious about it at the offset: sometimes if you resist the urge to condemn immediately and question in a friendly manner, someone will show you and others precisely who they are and remove all doubt. But without that, an immediate accusation may end up looking unfair and may in fact be unjustified if the person was only miscommunicating rather than of ill intent. Note: I do not always have the patience for this myself. I can preach it, but I will fully admit it is not always easy to do in the heat of the moment. However, I will emphasize it can be very useful strategically. You might be surprised sometimes what people will reveal about themselves just from simple questions. For example, in the situation being discussed with the other user, a questioning approach might look like: “What is causing you to doubt this source?” Trying to suss out through questioning if there is an intentional bias against sources that portray AES states in a good light, or if it is general skepticism that may be a bit tone deaf. With this approach, the goal is to avoid questions or statements that will put a person on the defensive, but rather see what their thought process is - at least until they have revealed something that is considered indefensible among a space like ours.

Who is being dishonest in this situation?

If you’re referring to the other thread: 1) I do not read that person as being dismissive. They said they hope it isn’t fake and went on to voice their support for Cuba. 2) Being skeptical is not the same as being dismissive.

Please don’t take it personally if someone doesn’t immediately trust what they see. “No investigation, no right to speak” is not about skepticism, it’s more like: when you try to find the truth, develop an idea, but you refuse to go and investigate the material in order to do so; like you insist on putting speculative ideation first over what is observable and became unable to address concrete concerns as a result.

It’s not embarrassing to be skeptical and in fact not taking everything posted on the internet at face value is a generally healthy practice. We have had times on here when people took one source or another at face value and it turned out they were being led astray. Not everybody is up to date on what sources are trustworthy from which entity and it’s not always obvious what to look for as signs of distortion.

Personally, I’m assuming teleSUR is trustworthy based on what I’ve seen about it here, but if I didn’t hang out here, not only would I likely not know what teleSUR is, I would have no idea who to ask as to whether it is trustworthy. Point being, investigation is not always something that is easy to do as an individual.

Anyway, I hope this makes a difference for Cuba going forward. From everything I understand, they really need this kind of breakthrough.

“to a hammer, everything looks like a nail” but literally

“I am doing something with Iran, right now, that other Nations, or Presidents, wanted to do long ago, but didn’t because their administrations were more cunning than belligerent. I, the most belligerent man, more belligerent than any you’ve ever seen, am going to huff and puff and blow Iran down.”

It does make the “Great Satan” moniker seem more appropriate, doesn’t it. Or at least, that was about the thought I had when I read it.

Interesting context. I’m very curious now what the exact translation is. Machine translation that I get says:

The president recently gathered the government. I have not seen such a sad and so alarming meeting for a long time. He had to hear from you, from representatives of the party of power, why we are again falling into the financial and industrial crisis. But I never heard a clear answer to this question. And we have repeatedly warned you: with this course, the economy will inevitably fail. The first quarter is marked by an obvious fall. And no serious specialist today does not believe that at least symbolic growth will be achieved at least at the end of the year. Everyone states stagflation and recession. If you do not urgently take the necessary financial and economic measures, if you do not adjust the course in principle, then in the autumn we can expect what happened in February 1917.

We have no right to repeat it! Therefore, it is necessary to take into account historical experience and make long-term urgent decisions.

Like this part in particular, I wonder what it’s like in Russian, in context:

We have no right to repeat it!

Because in English, that could have multiple meanings. It could mean things like: “it is illegal to repeat it”, “it is a failing on our part to repeat it”/“it is wrong of us to allow ourselves to reach a point where we would have to repeat it”, “it is wrong of us to repeat it”. The last one would be the most revolution-adverse as a matter of fundamentally opposing revolution even if necessary, but is that actually the meaning?

I tried prompting an LLM about it, which I’m aware is not to be taken at face value, but as perhaps a corroborative piece of information. Noting that I did not state my view on it, only asked for its interpretation of that line in the context of the previous paragraph, and that I first asked it to translate that part of the speech, which it did with similar results to Google Translate. The interpretation from it:

the best interpretation is that the speaker is making an urgent, almost desperate appeal to the conscience of the decision-makers. They are arguing that the stakes are so high, and the historical lesson so clear, that failing to act decisively would be a grave and inexcusable dereliction of duty, a moral crime against the nation they are meant to serve. It’s a powerful attempt to shame or compel the authorities into action by framing their choice in stark, historical, and ethical terms.

This more or less syncs up with how I’m inclined to take it in context. That he’s not trying to say “revolution bad”, but rather, “it would be shameful if the Russian people have to repeat it because you do such a poor job of ruling.”

If anyone who is bilingual in Russian and English can weigh in though, that would be nice.

Yeah, I think what you’re touching on is basically the difference between expertise and loyalty. A prole revolution does need people who are loyal to the cause in the highest positions of power, but if you base power only on loyalty, you will have a bunch of people who are very loyal about not knowing what to do. You need a healthy intersection of loyalty and expertise, and the further out someone gets from the levers of power, the less strict you can be about loyalty, as long as they’re providing expertise. But no matter how close someone is to power, if you only prioritize loyalty, you get nothing more than sycophants.

Pure loyalty focus is the stuff of cults; their main thing is fealty to the leader. “Will you do this thing I order you to do, no matter how ridiculous or horrible it is?” That’s pure loyalty focus.