with a war as complicated and (to at least westerners) surprisingly opaque on the ground as ukraine (as they’re obfuscating the. obvious) i want to send friends resources, though i don’t know any they won’t automatically reject.

It took me a month or two of going back to The Netherlands for me to want to claw my eyes out. If you don’t live in the big cities everyone will try to beat you into conformity.

You ever come across the excuse where, in response to a criticism regarding something about America, the defenders say something to the extent of “it depends on the area” or “you cannot just generalize something like that”? This is silly because accepting their viewpoint means that you cannot point out any patterns of systematic failure or oppression that exist on a nationwide basis.

From what I can find on the origins of home hospice, it seems like the kind of thing that was meant to be well-intentioned but probably got integrated into the US as a way of putting more of the burden on the individual / family unit. I can imagine there are cases where it works well, but from what I’ve seen of it, it’s trying to make the person’s end of life more comfortable at the cost of the rest of their family (and doesn’t do a very good job on the comfort part). I don’t mean that in a selfish way; it’s not like I’d want to shunt a family member off to a badly run facility and then wash my hands of it (and this shit system has some badly run facilities). But at the same time, caring for someone who is dying, even with the help of hospice professionals who are around occasionally, can be a big burden. Like to some extent, it’s less about willingness or desire, and more about what you are equipped to handle as a household.

And I am sick to death of a system that finds every fucking way it can to put more of the burden on you. We do not know what the hell we are doing. And the professionals don’t seem that much better some days.

It just makes me think, I’m not sure people realize how badly fucked the US is going to be if nothing is done to fundamentally improve its healthcare system and it keeps getting worse instead. I can’t look at this and go “this is just a weird isolated incident.” I’m like, this is some microcosm shit. I’m getting a closeup look at just how bad things are already.

“People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!” ~ Mao

From Italy! La Resistente Genova

Confession: The reason I don’t use chatbots is because, when presented with a prompt, I can’t can’t think of anything to type. I overthink what to ask it and then eventually walk away, without having asked anything.

Comrades, have you watched the series called “How the Steel Was Tempered”?

I am seeing it recommended frequently in XHS but wanted to check with you all if any of you recommended it as well.

We don’t seem to have a food/cooking comm and I don’t think its worth a whole post but I’ve been making fruit and nut bars and I’m pretty stoked on the whole deal.

You know, there is this video produced by sol TV (YouTube channel of TKP’s media arm, lit. “Left TV”) that called Saudi Arabia a “freak remnant of the middle ages”, which I found to be unprofessional.

Then today I saw how many airstrikes the Saudi state has carried out against Yemeni civilians, in retrospect TKP was being nice if anything.

I recall I tried to make a program to help Socialist countries, y’know with Input-Output tables and material balances.

Then I read the five-year plans developed by China and it’s mostly text with some goals, so no Linear Algebra needed. Then I planned to make a program that helped coordination between specialists. Like, a chairman sending a task to an enterprise, or a small producer sending a task to another small producer. With checklists of course.

Before starting to code, I realized that I basically reinvented emails.

Always remember: trial-and-error is still the only algorithm that has ever produced true intelligence.

DPRK legos

Been thinking a lot about the state of organizing in the US Empire, and increasingly I’ve come to the conclusion that the main 2 options for anyone organizing are either the DSA while joining an explicitly ML caucus (at the moment Red Star) with the “DSA as the incubator for the vanguard, not the vanguard itself” strategy, or PSL. Starting a new org is tremendously difficult, and will likely come from a split from another org, rather than growing from a study circle like Red Clarion proposes.

Joining the DSA and an ML caucus is like a microcosm of being in the PSL, just narrowing your exposure largely to radicalized workers. The DSA is where the radicalized liberals flock to, not the PSL. This has tremendous advantage in terms of exposure, but you deal with the DSA’s paper membership. The 130,000 members the DSA promotes sound incredible on paper, until you realize that there is no commitment requirements to speak of. Nevertheless, an ML faction within the org has the ability to steer the org in a more correct direction and perhaps can form the basis of either a split from the DSA, or a new center to purge the reformists and force them to split. In either case, it isn’t a strategy without historic basis.

The PSL is a weak ML org. It has problems with the structure and adherance of democratic centralism, and has rapidly grown in the last couple of years to its own detriment, as the party seemed ill-equipped to handle this influx. There are problems with how discipline is handled, and the strategy for recruitment is a high bar, as it is a cadre org. Nevertheless, it is far more theoretically correct than the DSA could hope to be without the aforementioned purge of reformists, and at the present moment I have more faith in their ability to improve as an organization thanks to their cadre approach than I do the DSA to become a good org.

The main tasks of the Statesian MLs are to build up cadre, and build up organization within the working class. Membership is fragmented. I expect either the DSA to split or the PSL to overtake them, and any ML should be watching the movement carefully. There could even be a new org that gains in membership quickly, like the Trotskyist RCI, only with an ML line. However, this is not that moment. This is the time before a vanguard has formed, and thus it’s our job to gain as much organizing experience as possible and front the most correct lines as possible, with careful attention to settler-colonialism as is often neglected.

CPUSA is thoroughly compromised and reformist. FRSO has been a tiny org for decades and minimizes settlers colonialism. Unlike the DSA, the CPUSA is too small the party incubation strategy to make any coherent sense, it’s weaker than the DSA as a reformist org and weaker than the PSL as a demcent org. It’s the worst of both worlds. Therefore, any communist should look to see the status of their local DSA and PSL, depending on which strategy you believe most advances your own organizing skills and your ability to advance a correct ML line to the radicalized working class.

I wish I had a definitive answer at this time, but there isn’t a vanguard. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, most of the energy is in the DSA, which invites new opportunity for communists to expose the working class to a correct understanding of theory and practice. However, this energy can quickly fizzle out as the DSA is not a cadre org and is reformist, so this moment in particular should fade. Where we go from there depends on the ever-shifting landscape.

Thoughts?

just saw a video about USA scientists going missing, 200k views but otherwise not extremely sensational or explicitly conspiratorial thumbnail, scoured comments, saw one remarking how midway through the video he starts referencing alien abduction. #okay.