Dimmer06

I'm not a shoplifter but have worked in retail for a while. I would think the best thing to do would be assuming you will be noticed because between cameras, other customers, and employees you almost certainly will be seen. The question then boils down to if they can identify you and build a case against you. To avoid this, knowing company policies and applicable laws is key. How much do you have to lift before you'll be hit with a felony charge? Can employees detain you or forcefully recover product? Are police on site? Are you a known entity to police or the stores you're lifting from?

If you disperse your lifting over location, company, and time, don't take anything too valuable, and make yourself hard to identify you'll probably be fine. Also if you get caught immediately leave, don't listen to store employees who have no legal authority over you and whatever you do never admit to knowingly stealing anything unless your lawyer instructs you to do so.

If someone has "official write in status" then they are counted. Otherwise they are tossed.

Everyone seems to forget that a significant economic downturn started in late 2019 and it was only the unprecedented stimulus in response to the pandemic that staved it off. Well now here we are almost five years later with most of that stimulus cut off and in a much worse international position. They're just trying to pretend it isn't falling apart through the election but next year we're in for a bad time.

Idk all the anti-vaxxers where I live are insane wealthy white baptists that would have been in the klan a century ago (if they aren't right now). The poorer people in town tend to get their shots.

Maybe we should differentiate colonized/imperialized peoples that are skeptical of Western medicine because they've been victims of it from those that are Nazis that hate everything modern or any expectations of them.

I work with a Ukrainian guy and he writes English in immaculate cursive. Idk how that translates to Cyrillic but I'd assume it does which probably means he's well practiced with it.

It's a pretty nebulous term the roots of which are in Lenin's Imperialism in which he describes a class of workers that sides with imperialists because they receive a portion of the superprofits of imperial exploration.

Historically it was used to describe business union leadership or union workers more broadly, especially those in the war industries. Further left tendencies tend to broaden the scope of who is a labor aristocrat including professional workers or even the whole of the white working class.

Personally I think as Marxists we need to reckon with the fact that many workers in the imperial core have petite-bourgeois brain worms precisely because their minds have been thoroughly rotted by debt and consumerism subsidized by the blood and sweat of the global periphery. That doesn't mean we should eschew work among these workers but we should understand it's limitations.

For instance there's a massive naval shipyard near me that employs many people (mostly cis white dudes). They have a militant union and excellent pay and benefits. Unsurprisingly they're all ridiculously conservative and nationalist and I've had multiple employees there tell me war would be good for them because it would mean more work and better compensation. Just because many of these workers are union proles does not mean that they will easily align with the interest of the global proletariat and if we are organizing or agitating them we need to understand that.

Check your local laws. In a lot of places infestations are the responsibility of the landlord and if you want it dealt with you might not be on the hook.

The enemy are cruel and unrepentant murderers and we must bring them down by any means because this is war but also it's bad to kill them and if they are killed it signals a dark turn for the character.

Blowback is the best resource for the answer to this question but in short

1. Kuwait was purposely overproducing oil to undermine the Iraqi economy. The Kuwaiti contribution to the war effort ended up costing about $32 billion USD, Iraq had only requested renumeration of $10 billion prior to the invasion. The conflict was never about money or democracy it was about destroying Iraq.

2. The US government turned Iraq into the state it was in support of them during the Iran-Iraq conflict (including making it the fourth largest military in the world in 1990), and US diplomats expressed at minimum that they had no position on inter-Arab conflict (many have interpreted US statements as tacit endorsement of the Iraqi invasion).

3. The US invasion was in defense of an autocratic petro-state to prevent an emerging successful Arab Republic and to keep most of the Middle East crushed under the boot of imperialism. The bloodshed (including numerous war crimes) and subsequent sanctions that occurred due to US intervention were far worse than anything that might have happened had they not intervend. Furthermore the American public was extensively lied to about the invasion, such as the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter's lie that she told under oath before Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers killing babies in incubators. While the lies alone don't justify Iraq's invasion, it should raise the question why Americans had to be lied to in order to gain their support. All the lies about democracy and freedom fall hilariously flat faced when you remember Kuwait is literally a brutal autocratic monarchy.

In all reality it probably isn't even true either. When Trump took office membership and activity of left wing organizations exploded. It was so much easier to organize people into a state of rebellion when they couldn't pretend things were fine under Trump than it has been under Biden.

Funny, my Democratic governor has been the primary roadblock to indigenous sovereignty in my state and continues to fuck them over at every turn she gets. I'm sure they're glad she's there thinking of them though.

While I think the members of Red Star mean well and their faction generally has good positions, I've gotta push back on the idea that they've significantly pushed DSA's international work broadly or their anti-zionist work specifically in a better direction. The recent gutting of the anti-zionist resolution by the NPC and the retraction of the statements on the Venezuelan election and the Israeli assassination in Iran show that at the highest level DSA is firmly in control of chauvinist social democrats on these issues (I had to scoff when I heard of the "left" NPC getting elected last year, as if Bread and Roses are left lol)

Furthermore, DSA's position on the presidential election has always been firmly invested in working within the Democratic party as seen by their focus on the "uncommitted" movement and their recent statement about Harris picking Walz as her VP. They still hide in their dirty break/party surrogate position which functionally ends up the same as the CP's line.

There are a lot of good people in DSA and I learned a lot when I was a member but the organization is fundamentally repelled by any sort of discipline and the social fascists on it's right wing maintain their power through that disorder and have demonstated that they do not care if their opportunism harms the organization or anyone else for that matter. Changing it into something viable would take an immense amount of work that would be sabotaged by SMC/Groundwork/B&R every step of the way, or you could just join an actual Leninist org.