CleverOleg

In honor of today’s doomer discourse, I present you all with this absolute gem of a comment from comrade @DiscoPosting@hexbear.net in one of the news megas in the days after Oct 7.

I am a bloomer, and I would like to think that I have very good, grounded reasons for my bloomerism. But I do worry that being a bloomer leaves me with blind spots in my analysis.

I have a "friend" from childhood. While his political and religious ideologies are 100% in opposition to mine (and yours), I've decided for now to keep this person as a friend (though at a distance) because a.) like most other Americans, he is ultimately an apolitical person, and b.) ever since we were kids and to today, 99.9% of what we talk about is shallow stuff about sports, movies, board games, TV shows, etc. News and politics never comes up.

He has never brought up Israel / Gaza until this morning. He listens to Ben Shapiro so I assume he has the worst, ill-informed takes, but I don't know because we've literally never talked about it. He says "Did you hear about these exploding pagers and walkie talkies in Lebanon?"

My intentionally boring but uninteresting response, in the interests of maintaining a friendship for now, was "I really hope this doesn't lead to a broader war".

I feel like that was an honest-enough answer. It doesn't seem like he wants to pursue it any further. I do feel conflicted about how to respond, I'm generally of the opinion that you're just wasting energy on American chuds who will almost certainly never come around. But I don't know, I'm open to criticism on how I'm handling this situation.

Edit: well apparently he doesn’t want to leave it there, called Hezbollah “terrorists”. Here’s to the probable end of a 25 year friendship today.

I think if Trotsky became head of the USSR, there probably would have been counter-revolution and full capitalist restoration one way or another within a decade or two.

I noticed a day or two after she was murdered, the media flipped from calling her an “American” to a “Turkish-Amercian”. The hyphenated descriptor allows you be assured she wasn’t a “real” American.

And is it just me who thinks it’s completely insane to see left wing publications regurgitating neoclassical myths like using monetary policy to control inflation

While this isn’t an excuse, I think even on the left it’s hard to escape the underlying economic assumptions of society. While we should insist that leftists and leftists publications educate themselves and be better informed how the economy works… it’s not as simple as reading up on the first volume of Capital or even the third volume. Understanding the nuts and bolts of modern capitalism is hard. Of course it’s imperative the Marxists most of all understand it (again, not making excuses), but I think there’s just a dearth of resources out there to improve here.

Yeah if there’s one thing Americans are demanding this election, it’s to spend tens of billions more on the war in Ukraine.

Also when did the US ever actually “stand up” to our boy Papa Joe? Honestly the US never was able to do shit to Lenin, Stalin, or even Khrushchev frankly (the US did kinda back down in the Cuban middle crisis)?

I’m not sure, it’s fairly common knowledge nowadays (my teacher in HS covered it). Real estate speculation in lands not yet fully ethnically cleansed was a massive source of wealth for many of the founding fathers.

Yakovlev taking over the glasnost media and immediately putting anti-communists in every position of power is a big reason why we don’t have the USSR anymore, IMO. Just to further your point about Zdhanov.

We’re also seeing that either the Chinese government has less control over its own banks than we previously thought, or they believe that the economic benefits of trading with Western countries still far outweigh a closer relationship with Russia (a very tiny economy compared to the collective West), indicative of their inability to wean off an export-oriented economy.

My hunch is that it’s the later. It tracks with all the other moves China has made in recent years, where trade with the west is prized over potentially harming that trade with “hostile” moves like de-dollarization.