Depends on how a person interprets it. Some will just get doomer and want to give up. Some may end up floating in adventurism or ultraleft extremes. Some may even divert to fascism, if all they wanted was slightly better working conditions for themself. A principled, organized vanguard party is critical for giving people something grounding to rally around and such a party is not going to be only voting (though it may do some voting as part of its organizing strategy). The worst problem is when the organized vehicle is only voting and actively discourages people from doing anything else. Even AES state vanguard parties that have dominant power are not going to be only voting, they’re going to be doing other kinds of organizing too, such as in organizing local community and tending to its needs.

So I would say part of the problem with the “vote” mindset is it’s not just that it will fail to oust the dominant political force from power, it’s also only a small part of exercising power. The voting part, in an actually democratic peoples setup, gauges what people most want and elevates those who most represent a given community/region/etc - represent in their consistent deeds, not just in platitudes and promises. It is a tallying of process of what’s already there. In faux “democratic” capitalist systems, voting is a marketing campaign of manipulation, selling a product based on empty platitudes and false promises, sold by a would-be representative whose claims to representation usually amount to little more than knocking on some doors or belonging to a certain class or caste categorization.

People need to understand this about political power. Voting on a product now and then does not get them any closer to an organized system of community and representation that can get needs met, much less challenge the hegemony of capital. The strongest forces of liberation are not those who have a “great man theory” once-in-a-millennia leader, but those whose organization is unshakeable and whose resources are strong enough to overcome the imperialist forces that will inevitably try to break them. Point being, there’s no magic “find the right representative” button to shape society in your image, you still need organization and you still need resources to call upon. The only reason it can look like that for the capitalists is because their representatives tap right into the capitalist organization and resource infrastructure.

I do think the most absurd take on aliens is the one in movies where they want to dominate or destroy us and like others in this thread pointed out, it’s a projection of colonialism to think they’d be like that.

The most materially grounded take is probably something like that aliens would have various material constraints to be concerned with and so they would probably want to open up communication, if possible (if they could figure out how to communicate with us in our language), in order to work out what kind of resources we have and how, if at all, those resources can be used by them. And the likelihood is it leaning mutual-benefit exchange of info and resources (sorta like how China operates) because for any humanoid species to get to the point where it can travel vast distances in space, it would need to have cooperation down to a tee. Space does not have the room for error for a bunch of selfish conquerors to be mucking about in it.

Surveillance doesn’t seem out of the question, in order to figure out how to communicate with us and to study us from a scientific standpoint. But this angle seems like it’d lean more toward a species of alien that is not humanoid and is different enough from us, there may be no communicating between the two species, even if both wanted to. And at that point, it’s sort of irrelevant if aliens are real, since we’d have no way to confirm it anyway. It’s also just an angle that, much like religion can be, is potentially a bit egotistical, in thinking that we are more important in the universe than we probably are in reality; a species different enough from us may not even register us as existing in the first place.

Bees I get, but Ants I don’t understand that one. I’ve long thought of them as a decent analogy for settlers, considering they seem to spread endlessly with no regard for what is already there and they take something akin to slaves: https://blog.entomologist.net/do-ants-hold-other-insects-as-slaves.html

White people being genocided for being white is basically a logistical impossibility. White isn’t an ethnicity and it only exists via a system that upholds it as superior as contrasted against others. And if whiteness as a concept collapses, what we’d be left with is a bunch of different european ethnicities, with varying levels of animosity toward them in various places in the world, depending on how complicit they are/were in the west’s historical atrocities, whether they are colonizers and don’t respect indigenous sovereignty, etc.

thanks :)

We can call it FORK as in Fascism, Organized Racism, and KKKolonization

“What is socialism?”

“You just triggered my trap card. Allow me to explai-”

“Sorry folks, we’re out of time, see you next show!”

Hilarious. I’m pretty confident that if by some next to impossible occurrence, the current Catholic Church got an actual Marxist Pope, there would be a schism, multiple assassination attempts, and western countries banding together saying the Catholic Church has been compromised and can’t be trusted. And the only way I can imagine it being possible is if some crypto Marxist worked his way up the ranks and only revealed his true views once he became Pope. The best we can probably hope for is Popes who lean into the “care about others” rhetoric, but through the lens of charity.

I assume what this is going for is the thing about capitalism and financial crises and bubbles and so on. Though my mind is going also to a more literal interpretation: Considering he’s already working class, if you imagine it like the capitalist class is what causes Kevin to trip and then they rob him while he’s scrambling to deal with the mess that they caused and the mess they made of his hard work, that also kinda fits.

What does “tankie” mean to you?

Well… I don’t mean it in any charitable way toward the CIA as an organization. They are one of the most brutal organizations in recorded history, if we consider the consequences for millions. If I understand right, this is one of those documents that was originally internal and classified, and only released decades later. So I guess part of the question here comes down to, how afraid were they of acknowledging internally what communism is really like. What portion of them were people who more or less got it, but were elitists anyway because they shared the interests of the capitalist class, and what portion were people who bought the US narrative of being “for the people” and “defenders of democracy.”

Depends on the meaning they are using in the last line; it may not be contradictory. In the communist meaning, it’s not out of line to say a socialist state is a kind of dictatorship, as long as you are saying it’s one that is collectively exercised by the working class (e.g. “dictatorship of the proletariat”, meaning that the capitalist class is suppressed and not allowed to hold political power). It’s when people say communist efforts are a sole individual being dictator for their own benefit that they’re wrong and it makes sense that internally, the CIA would want to be clear on this distinction because their goal is to be effective, not lie to themselves about the nature of who they’re trying to seize power from. At this point in history, they may have eaten the onion more so, I don’t know, but in that time at least, they had to have had some clarity going on to be as effective as they were with all the coups and everything.

There are USian liberals and conservatives alike who love to go for the “maturity” argument, but “maturity” ends up just being a stand-in for “a cynical view of humanity” and “a dogged persistent belief that mass suffering is an inevitable attribute of the human condition and tweaks around the edges are the only way to accomplish anything.”

That’s clever. 😄

The snopes article I linked in another post has some stuff on that part as well:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/07/29/kkk-mount-rushmore/

Here the history got murky. The meme claims that Grant ordered the Army to not protect Native Americans as bounty hunters collected money for each Native American killed. As mentioned above, documentation exists of the Army standing back and letting miners and settlers move into the territory. Whether the Army actively allowed independent bounty hunters to operate was another story.

While there were indeed accounts of bounties being offered for Native Americans killed, who was paying these bounties and their timing raised questions from historians. We first encountered this claim in a 2002 issue of Cabinet Magazine, a New York-based publication that stated after Grant ordered the Army to not stop prospectors from entering Black Hills, “Bounty hunters began collecting as much as $300 per Native American killed.”

Deloria argued it was likely that neither the federal government nor the territorial government based in Yankton, South Dakota, was paying bounties. George Harwood Phillips, a retired professor of history at the University of Colorado, wrote in a paper for the South Dakota Historical Society:

… by 1870 the rush was on in earnest. The first settlers went to Dakota hoping to make their fortunes. They wanted to plat town sites, to organize governments, to build railroads, and to promote immigration. They felt that the presence of the Indians halted progress — and they hated and feared them. To many, the solution was to kill the Indians and dissolve the Indian Bureau. Settlers paid bounties for Indian scalps, fed them poisoned bread, and organized Indian hunting parties.

Settlers were indeed behind payments to bounty hunters for Native American deaths. But Deloria argued that timing was important to the context. At the beginning of the Dakota rush, when settlers tried to make their fortunes, he said, “You could perhaps make the claim … that the Army stood by and watched, or approved, as bounty hunters chased down Indians.” But after the military campaigns of 1877, when the western Lakotas were in bad shape, would have been an easier time for most bounty hunters, Deloria argued: “You’d have to be a pretty brave bounty hunter to head into the Black Hills region looking to kill Indians in the years between 1874 and 1877.”

This is supported by Taliaferro in “Great White Fathers,” who documented an instance after the battles of 1877 of a county placing bounties on Native Americans, as miners began staking claims to search for gold across the Black Hills and remnants of the Lakota resisted them:

The commissioners of newly formed Lawrence County put a bounty of $250 ‘for the body of each and every Indian, killed or captured, dead or alive.’ Setting its own bounty of $50, Deadwood [a town in the county] rationalized that ‘killing Indians was conducive to the health of the community.’

Martinez, who was not aware of cases of civilians being paid bounties by the federal government to kill Native Americans, said, “At the federal level, there really was no reason to pay soldiers bounties for killing Indians. That was their job.” And during the 1870s the Lakota were considered “hostile” if they didn’t comply with the Army, and in those cases soldiers were ordered to treat them as enemies in the field.

In summary, we learned that bounty hunters were paid by settlers to kill Native Americans in the earlier part of the decade before military campaigns began, as well as after they concluded. We found little evidence to back the claim implied in the meme that they were paid or actively supported by the government or the Army at the height of tensions from 1874 to 1877, a period when the Army was tacitly allowing miners to come into the territory.

Like with the other claim, it seems the spirit of it is more or less correct, but the details are wrong.

Edit: So I guess a more accurate way to put that particular aspect of Rushmore’s history would be, instead of “it was funded in part by the KKK,” one could say “the project was spearheaded by an avid supporter of the KKK.” Or even just “a white supremacist.”

I did some searching, here’s what I can find on it from a snopes writeup:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/07/29/kkk-mount-rushmore/

The man behind the mount, Borglum, had an old relationship with the KKK, preceding his time as the designer and sculptor of Mount Rushmore. In 1914, the United Daughters of the Confederacy — an organization known today for stopping the removal of Confederate monuments — approached him to create a “shrine to the South” on Georgia’s Stone Mountain, about a thousand miles south from where Mount Rushmore would be. In 1915, the KKK would be reborn (it had faded during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War) in a ceremony on Stone Mountain.

Borglum was an “avid and influential supporter” of the KKK, Taliaferro wrote in “Great White Fathers,” even though there was no proof that he was a card-carrying member of the organization. He was involved in their politics, attended rallies, served on committees, and saw them as a source of funds for his work on Stone Mountain. He was a white supremacist who said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10,” and wrote, “All immigrants are undesirable,” even though his father was a Danish immigrant. He also took great pride in his Norse heritage, according to his writings.

The KKK did financially back the Stone Mountain project, even though Borglum tried to obscure its involvement. But infighting within the Klan by the mid-1920s, as well as stalled fundraising for the monument, led to Borglum leaving the project. He was approached by a historian to take on the Mount Rushmore project in South Dakota, enraging his backers on Stone Mountain. By 1927, he began carving Mount Rushmore, devoting the last 14 years of his life to the project that was finished by his son.

The KKK does not appear to have been behind any funding for Mount Rushmore. According to Deloria, Borglum received mostly federal funding for Rushmore, and he had left too much bad blood behind in Georgia to receive further funding. Taliaferro described how Borglum and the Mount Rushmore committee struggled to find funds for Rushmore for a few years. They scraped together finances from magnates and a senator, and by 1929 received federal funding. Out of the total expenditure of $989,000, the government had contributed $836,000, according to “Great White Fathers.”

Even though this meme highlighted key elements of Mount Rushmore’s darkest history, some of its facts were incorrect or pulled out of necessary context. While the man behind Mount Rushmore was very closely aligned with the KKK, evidence suggested that the organization itself did not fund the monument’s creation. But the monument remained tied to a racist past, highlighting figureheads who were slave owners and despised by Native Americans, and built on land that was indeed stolen by the U.S. government.

Hmm. Would be nice to have a source to go on in either direction, some kind of details on its funding.

funded in part by the Ku Klux Klan

I gotta remember this part to say to unsuspecting liberals who think US patriotism is some kind of internal struggle and triumph over racism, rather than the creation of it.

Edit: Corrected on the details. It would seem a more accurate way to say it is that Rushmore project was spearheaded by an avid KKK supporter / white supremacist. See: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7163539/6035893

Well, partly I’m thinking of like people who lost jobs or journalists who got temporarily locked up over speaking out for Palestine. But those two are maybe a bit different, one is the corporate wing punishing people and the other is the state wing punishing people, and you’re probably right that for the most part, the state wing only goes after regular non-specialist roles like a journalist if they’re taking action. Or I guess we could say it’s like, the amount of perceived threat (to the empire) of what you do is directly correlated to how quickly they sweep aside their “free speech” spiel.

Yes, there is that too. You can still get in trouble for saying stuff that opposes imperialism, but you can purchase any one of fifty-seven brands of frozen peaches. :P