Lol thanks, it was in fact inspired by discord’s recent post about age verification (along with many other times I’ve seen PR speak over the years).

You make a good point about rights. In particular, I think of the USian fetishizing of the constitution. There are plenty who believe in it to an almost religious degree yet are more reactionaries than they are something resembling communists. And they don’t need to be communist to believe in it because the liberal framework does have belief in individual liberties and rights to a degree; in fact, it tries to have this exist alongside capitalism, in spite of how contradictory this can end up getting.

I tend to think that in the US context, and possibly similar western contexts in other countries too, communists need to be wary of playing into “you believe in rights too? yeah, let’s go” and instead focus on teaching people about power and where it derives from. That the reason the so-called rights keep falling short of the seeming ideal on paper is not because “humans are imperfect” or “the system is corrupt”, but because the system of power, who controls the means of production and distribution, is intentionally oriented toward an exploitative ruling elite, not toward public good. And that liberalism is designed not for the purpose of the common public good, but for legitimizing and sanitizing this model of an exploitative ruling elite. “Trickle down economics,” in spite of being said by a member of the US republican party, is I think a good example of liberal philosophy. The idea is that the ruling elite are creating something of value, which is then passed down to the greater public; instead of the reality, which is that the greater public is creating something of value and the ruling elite is seizing the majority of gain from the greater public for personal use. So it is not trickle down, but rather siphon up. I know I’m preaching to the choir on that, but I wanted to go through the thought process of it and why the distinction is so important.

Perhaps this is the reason why Hell was conceptualized. When you stand before God you cannot say: “But I was told by others to do thus or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice.” Sometimes I wish this was true, but as we can see this idea in itself doesn’t seem to be capable of creating a better world either. Some say it ended up bringing even more suffering.

Reminds me of the tv show The Good Place. Potentially big spoilers about how that show unfolds, but:

It fits well with the Christian conception of facing down temptation and overcoming it with individual will. But as you point out, this alone does not fix the world. Because urging people with fear of hellfire to be a better person and emphasizing their individual power to overcome can’t change the reality that their willpower is actually pretty limited in most situations and the range of their behavior derives in part from the limitations of what their surrounding environment, culture, etc., has taught them. Instead, what I find is it causes people to be overly hard on themselves about their failures and wrack themselves with guilt over perceived wrong they did that was often more multi-sided than they think; or on the flip side, try extra hard to shift blame in order to avoid feeling like, or being named as, “the bad person”.

It is oriented, in other words, toward marking people on their use of willpower (sinner, virtuous, corrupted, forgiven) rather than being oriented toward identifying cause and removing harmful causes where possible, in order to avoid repeats.

I feel similar lately with sugar. Feels like this year has been extra stressful. Hope things get better for you soon, one way or another. ❤️

The U.S. has demanded sweeping concessions, including the cessation of all nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil, the end of Iranian support for regional armed resistance movements, and strict limits on the Iranian ballistic missile program—the only meaningful deterrent that Iran was able to employ during its conflict with Israel last year.

So basically demanding that Iran agree to not defend itself, which means Iran should accelerate arming up as fast as possible.

If you can’t defend yourself, the empire will take over without a fight.

If you can defend yourself, the empire will demand you stop defending yourself so it can take over without a fight.

If you disarm, the empire will take over without a fight.

If you refuse to disarm, the empire may attack you anyway, but at least you have a fighting chance.

It leaves only one path for sovereignty, which is to arm as efficiently as possible, while trying to delay attacks on you until you’re ready.

My hypothesis is that much of it comes from need(s) being unmet consistently and traumas that can linger even when needs are getting met from times in the past that they weren’t. Needs meaning basic things that include what people would usually think of like food, water, and shelter, but also includes less emphasized things (especially under capitalism) like intimate connection (can be platonic), sense of community (in the meaning of interdependence not fandoms), sense of purpose and direction, sense of safety and security.

Capitalism is far from the first or only system to fuck people up (formalized slavery comes to mind), but… if we’re looking at it in detail, capitalism puts the working class in a precarious position where they are disposable, which fucks with any sense of safety and security; it destroys community; it warps relationships toward the transactional; it reduces purpose to “live to make money and buy product”; it leaves direction in the hands of liberal individualism. From the perspective of basic needs, these are a lot of very big problems and it’s no small wonder people will turn to various unhealthy coping mechanisms, some of which plays right into capitalist profiteering; it has industries ready to fill the void with “treats” and the less fulfilling these treats are, the better (for the capitalist) because that means you’ll need to come back for another hit more often.

Opportunist can also mean those who sacrifice long-term gains or principles to gain short-term gains, an example would be Bernstein.

Well that makes more sense to me. Again, wasn’t sure what definition you were using.

I apologize if I seem mad, it’s just crazy to think there is still an argument when he himself will admit revisionist tendencies- and openly too.

The problem is, and this is something I thought about mentioning in response to Red_Scare saying “I shouldn’t have said anything, I know nothing about internet personalities” as a way of being understanding about it: people like Hasan stream for hours on a regular basis. It’s genuinely hard to keep up with what exactly they are doing and profile them accurately unless they say or do super obvious problematic stuff that’s easy to point to and is impossible to argue as meaning anything else in context.

Like part of why I’ve been careful in how I chime in here is because even though I’ve watched some recordings of him at various times, it’s a drop in the bucket next to the entire picture of it. So maybe I’m being way too forgiving on account of not having seen enough, or not watching the right moments to pick up on what you’re picking up on. I may have seen other facets of him and got a picture that would cause me to have a higher opinion of him.

For example, I know from things I have seen that he does have people who will take what he says out of context and there are times he’s gone to great lengths to address misrepresentations (like literally hours of going over stuff, which is kind of absurd to me). This does not mean you’re wrong about him, but it’s one of the reasons I am perhaps more wary of painting him in a way that I would consider means we should be outright recommending people avoid him.

The content form of it also makes it hard to break down what these kind of people are saying in detail and do responses to it from a more ML perspective. We can link a NYT article here and do a response in the process that goes over its reactionary, colonizer nonsense. It’s hard to do that with somebody who’s going on for hours.

I honestly don’t know what to do about this from a logistical perspective other than telling people “be wary of streamers”.

Oh I agree completely on that. It’s important to take that kind of stuff into account and be wary of those who are, by their position in life, incentivized to act in various ways against the interests of the international working class, the marginalized, etc.

To use myself as an example: Even though I’m no petty bourgeoisie streamer, I would expect an ML analysis to have some wariness pointed at me because I live in the imperial core and so my conditions are going to incentivize me to be more protective of the status quo than someone who lives in an imperialized country. That doesn’t mean I’m de facto a less trustworthy person, or that I must necessarily have a worse understanding of the world than people in an imperialized country, but it does mean that broadly speaking, it makes sense for international efforts and analysis to take that dynamic into account when considering how to organize, where to put the most attention, and so on.

Well this is why I wondered about the use of the word, if it is being used in some way I don’t follow on the meaning of. Because unless you have things you can point to that he’s done or said that would suggest he’s insincere, I’m not sure opportunist is the right word for it. People can be true believers and still do harm, so it’s not like he can’t also qualify for criticism even if he’s not an opportunist.

I can say that the way I tend to interpret the word: an opportunist is someone who seizes on a moment for personal gain, even if (or especially if) it’s at the cost of harm done to others; the aim is to play whatever part needs to be played in order to “get theirs” without really believing in it or taking it seriously.

I don’t think this is the same inherently as acting on your material interests, even though the two can overlap.

At any rate, I’m more interested in whether he’s overall doing harm or good to the cause than whether he’s fully sincere about it.

At best, Persona can be used to create comprehensive surveillance graphs of users for the companies it serves, the researchers say. At worst, the software could file automated reports directly with the government.

How is this “at best”? Am I too tired to comprehend this properly right now? They both sound terrible.

“The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they’ve learned to work together.”

In other words: The capitalist class wants to see everything. Therefore, the state, which in this case is controlled by capital, wants to see everything. And they’re furthering the consolidation of the two in response to the decay of capitalism, which creates… fascism.

It seems that they are basically trying to figure out how to use automation to actually do the kind of total surveillance stuff they accuse socialist states of doing (which the socialist states never actually did). The one reassuring part is it will no doubt have internal contradictions to it.

He is an Opportunist

Maybe you’re using the word differently than I understand it, but in my understanding of it, he does not appear like an opportunist. He appears to me like someone whose heart is in the right place, who started moving left around the same time some of the rest of those in the US were doing so, but is in a way a victim of his own success.

The nature of his position will implicitly motivate him to do a certain amount of watering down, holding back, and courting mass appeal over taking unpopular principled stances, in order to stay popular, grow in viewership, and avoid being deplatformed; in other words, the nature of his position works to stunt his own political growth. Suppose, for example, that some principled MLs really got through to him in a big way and he started talking like one, framing everything through an ML lens, defending AES states boldly and blatantly as successful socialist projects, and so on. Would Twitch even allow that, given his audience size and scope of influence? Would his audience allow that or would it start shrinking and turning on him? Would any value from him being positioned where he is to drag people away from the far right become weakened as a result of him being “left” to an unacceptable degree?

The important question to me is, is he actively harming people’s ability to move past his positions to principled ML ones? Or is he helping pipeline them, whether intentionally or not? If he’s doing more corralling than pipelining, that’s a problem for the USian left and others that he reaches. But if he’s helping pipeline, while staying wishy washy liberal enough to avoid getting deplatformed, that can have value.

He’s not the ideal, but I think it’s important to be clear on whether he’s overall “not good enough” or “actively harmful”, which is a difference.

One thing it makes me think of is, like… I think one of the most important lessons I learned from my time on Twitter, which is probably a lesson some of these people have yet to learn, is to just say less on matters I don’t know enough about. Twitter kinda pushed me materially to learn that lesson because if I mouthed off too ignorantly, I could get steamrolled and humiliated, which wasn’t exactly fun. On top of that, reading up on “no investigation, no right to speak” hit home for me the importance of understanding rather than trying to invent narrative out of thin air.

In particular, the comment with the person who admitted at the end to have had a fried brain and misread is what made me think of it. Had that person taken a moment to process and consider before reacting, they probably wouldn’t have said what they did in the first place.

Another important lesson has been internalizing how context can be more important than universalized principles. I think this is something I’ve internalized largely as a result of having to contend with “critical support” of nations and peoples whose cause is overall just, but whose cultural beliefs or practices are not something I seem to be very aligned with. So how this relates: with the second comment you linked, they appear to be trying to force universal principle over context and in the process, are dismissing important history just to insist on some pet peeve about phrasing. It seems to me that it is the same kind of thinking that would have an atheist “leftist” rejecting Iran because of its religiosity, while ignoring the importance of its anti-imperialism and self-determination; in this case, rejecting the whole of a historical piece because a single aspect of it steps outside what they deem okay.

Thanks, I wish you the best with your writing as well. And yeah, the blank page can really be intimidating, as some people put it. The interesting thing is when I briefly had a job that involved writing, the format of it had me doing more setup on plot and characters than I’d normally tend to do, but I think it also made a difference in allowing me to sort of “improvise on guidelines” rather than get lost in unguided twists and turns.

Empire in decline: Under mounting internal pressure, the Colonizer regime plays its latest card against the stalwart people’s democracy of Cuba… piracy???

The Colonizer regime occupying Turtle Island, led by the clandestine terrorist organization known as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), continues to lash out at Cuba, a comparatively small nation with a self-determining, sovereign people, who have often readily stepped up to help other nations with the limited resources they have, in spite of the ongoing pressures from the neighboring Colonizer regime to extinguish their revolutionary flame and bring them under the lash of imperial control.

Trump J. Donald, a former reality television show host, real estate mob boss, wanted sex criminal, and the current administrator of the capitalist class’s democratic front for the CIA, has taken it on as one of his many missions to destroy the Cuban revolution, even if it requires destroying Cuba’s people in the process. His assistant, Rubio Marco, an often forgettable but nevertheless vicious member of one of the two capitalist vanguard parties, has drawn special attention to himself in trying to turn up the pressure on sovereign regional holdouts more broadly. After the Colonizer regime kidnapped the president of Venezuela, Rubio alleged that this meant the situation in Venezuela was improving.

How exactly an international terrorist organization kidnapping a beloved president of a sovereign nation is an improvement for said nation’s people was not explained. Neither has it been explained by said terrorist organization how putting Cuba under further siege is supposed to further any kind of peace or stability in the region. While children suffer and die because of the acts of terrorists, the sovereign peoples of the world remain steadfast in their fight for self-determination and in their human right to have that self-determination.

In the fine print:

the best paint chips

Reading this thread. :P

I’ve been fiction writing more lately, some novel-length project ideas brewing mostly in my head at this stage, but still haven’t nailed down what I want to commit time to. I’ve long wanted to do a fictional representation of revolutionary struggle that is not, like… derailed by things like liberal idealism, “great man theory” over-emphasis on a “hero” main character, skating over the details and downplaying how much logistical complexity goes into it, using it as a cheap vehicle for a romance plot, stuff like that. Various problems that have plagued me in past story drafts of one concept or another. My standards are probably a bit high, but in general, I want it to be something that inspires and teaches people meaningfully, rather than being so divorced from reality that it might as well be about dragons and magic. Cause if all it’s gonna end up as is entertaining, I might as well go for a concept that’s easier for me to write than something I’ve never actually lived through (a successful revolution).

You make a good point. I was kinda second-guessing emphasizing that part. The US would still be a nightmare prison complex with or without for-profit prisons, of that I’m sure. I do think there is something distinct, though, about formally tying market profit motives to putting people in prison and keeping them there.

The article notes that CoreCivic, the private company running the prison, defers all questions to DHS. Dilley, CoreCivic, and DHS all have one thing in common: they are beyond reform. They need to be shut down.

Some context I could find on CoreCivic:

from late 2025: https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2025/10/06/corecivic-300-million-ice-contracts/

CoreCivic prison company will rake in $300 million from new ICE contracts

also from late 2025: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2025/08/19/corecivic-damon-hininger-ice-immigration/85723038007/

CoreCivic CEO to step down amid flurry of ICE contracts, soaring profits, prison violence

CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger will step down after serving as head of the Brentwood-based private prison giant since 2009.

The company in an Aug. 18 announcement said President and COO Patrick Swindle will replace Hininger. Swindle will also take Hininger’s seat on CoreCivic’s board.

“I am humbled by the opportunity to have served this great company since I started my career as a correctional officer in 1992," Hininger said in a statement.

What a shock that the previous CEO started out as working for the prison system and became a CEO of a company profiting off of it. Something something revolving door.

The leadership change comes as CoreCivic and GEO Group - the country’s two largest private prison systems - have reported significant profits amid the sharp rise in immigration arrests and detainments.

In a second quarter earnings call on Aug. 11, Hininger said the country is seeing the highest detention populations ever recorded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been CoreCivic’s largest customer.

“Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment,” he said. “We are in an unprecedented environment with rapid increases in federal detention populations nationwide and a continuing need for solutions we provide.”

Capitalist profit language in service of a manufactured rise in imprisoning people is some wild shit to read. It still boggles my mind that for-profit prisons are even a thing.

Yeah, it’s gut-wrenching to think about. We have to see it through and make sure they see their end.

Not only brave, but the level of planning it must have taken to get to that point and then to carry out it effectively.