The live thread was full of dispair. A half hour later the astroturf set in and the message returned to "vote blue no matter who, even if its a corpse."

Gotcha.

It makes just about as much sense for Hell to have a space program as it does for Bolivia to have a navy. Am I missing something?

The coup forces have apparently withdrawn from La Paz as Luis Arce has swore in new military commanders. The space in La Paz around the government building has been taken by the people.

There was an attempted coup in Bolivia (again) which seems to be floundering.

https://x.com/KawsachunNews/status/1806083169726198113

You don't need any doors. Body parts inside of coffins don't create any miasma, and doors are only required if you are trying to paint multiple tombs in one stroke. As long as a tomb has a coffin before it gets 'claimed' by a deceased resident, they'll get placed properly. Problems only happen when a resident reaches their tomb before the coffin.

Checking the megathread every morning to see if Israel has been destroyed yet

On Friday (yesterday) the White House released a statement calling for a 37 billion dollar investment in law enforcement and the recruitment of 100,000 additional cops.

We can’t stop now. My Safer America Plan calls on Congress to invest $37 billion to support law enforcement and crime prevention, including by funding 100,000 additional police officers for accountable community policing, investing $5 billion in community violence interventions, and enacting commonsense gun safety reforms such as a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and a universal background check requirement.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/03/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-record-decrease-in-violent-crime-in-2024/

Not sure if this is staged, but I have seen it floating around.

A lot of people think this is a media control thing, but as far as I can tell the US has already forced TikTok to acquiesce to placing US national security apparachiks in positions of power. As a result, I think this motion is simply a favor to Congress's deep-pocketed patrons in Silicon Valley, using "national security" as a pretext.

Of course, it will still lead to censorship.

Liberalism is a political philosophy which generally embraces republicanism, constitutionalism, rule of law, political equality, free markets, private property, among other things. Setting aside the outright Fascists, the majority of American Conservatives are in-fact Liberals, though they have exceedingly terrible opinions about social equality. The spectrum of acceptable political discourse in the US is simply so narrow that it runs from Liberal to Liberal but enthusiastically bigoted.

From the Marxist perspective, culture, politics, and ideology are all outgrowths of the underlying material conditions. In the grand durée of history, the emergence of Liberalism coincides with the wave of Bourgeois revolutions which marked the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism as the prevailing mode of production (which didn't happen everywhere all at the same time). To this day it is the prevailing ideological framework under the conditions of Capitalism (except under conditions of overwhelming crisis where all pretenses of republicanism and rule of law are dropped to defend private property against the threat of social unrest).

The Marxist critique of Liberalism comes from a few angles. Naturally, we take issue with the inviolable right to private property. We believe in the collectivization of the means of production. Likewise, we take issue with the sort of free market absolutism which puts a price tag on everything under the Sun and turns everything into a commodity. We think the rule of law, republicanism, and constitutionalism are all for the birds insofar as these institutions stand as a bulwark against the realization social justice (which they invariably do under a Capitalist oligarchy).

But more fundamentally, we are Materialists. This gets really abstract, but basically there are two overarching schools of philosophical thought: Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe that ideas are the driving force in nature, which the world is shaped by, while Materialists believe that our ideas are simply a reflection of the material world we find ourselves in. Liberalism is an idealist philosophy. It essentially proposes "This is the way things ought to be. If enough of us share this belief, it shall be so." Marxism is a materialist philosophy. It begins with an empirical study of the material conditions throughout history, attempts to identify the processes which are unfolding, the forces which transform society, and uses that as a basis for identifying the most fertile points of social struggle.