I guess I’m operating within the mindset of “if these are the rules (like you don’t send a giant swarm of hogs towards the capitol) then he broke the rules and he should pay.” It’s also pretty clear by now that very little will happen to him. I know the libs are coping, but we all know Trump is only leaving the race by two means: voluntarily stepping down or nature takes its course.

My civil rights, civil liberties brain says “yeah people should be able to do this stuff minus the breaking in portion.” Not because of property damage, but because, I mean, I absolutely despise Nancy and if something had happened to her then I’m not going to feel particularly sad over it. But it could also be a non total sack of shit and having a norm of “these few thousand hogs are really angry, so the Speaker just had to die” 🤷‍♀️ also seems “pretty bad.”

And of course my leftist brain is ripping itself apart between “If (s)he dies, (s)he dies” and “this will directly lead to even harsher crackdowns on BLM, anti-Israel, etc. protests by the left” Which are basically all violence-free, yet get met with 100x the reaction of the hog rally directly threatening (to whatever degree) congress’ lives. Of course that’s happening ANYWAY and this prosecution or pursuit of prosecution will probably only accelerate timelines (I’m not an accelerationist because as of right now that just leads directly to true fascism, whatever that ends up looking like (not just orange man)).

So, in the end… I guess I don’t care? I mean I don’t like what he did, obviously. [liberalness] The courts are the proper place for his grievances not in DC with his loyal squad of piggies. [/liberalness] But had it been a left winger or even a Bernie type who felt cheated, and I legitimately agreed with his claim of being cheated, then I’d want to do (hypothetically, in a book, etc.) what they did. Or, more hypothetical things even.

Of course this all runs up against reality which is you don’t take over a government by force by occupying its capitol. You don’t even do it by killing all those leaders. The government is run by thousands of faces and names we don’t know and it would continue with or without those elected names in place. And liberals don’t want to go down THAT road of speaking about actual revolutionary tactics, who would have to “go”, what places have to be captured, etc. Certainly the MSM doesn’t anyway for obvious reasons. The fucking FBI director would probably call Chris Hayes live on TV if he started talking about that shit. “Did Trump supporters plan to bomb local electrical infrastructure? New evidence is comin- hold on… ok, my producer is telling me to move on… ok… Trump was back in court today for his next round of slander cases…”

I don’t know how much weight is placed behind “intent but lacking the knowledge or ability” vs pure “intent” devoid of context such as knowledge. Like if you intend to overthrow the government, but you think doing so means breaking into the capitol, is that an insurrection? I dunno. I’d classify the whole thing probably as a riot myself. Obviously libs love institutions so defacing the beautiful capitol is a crime worthy of execution by itself in their eyes.

I haven’t seen a dipshit neoliberal with the fortitude to post here since… a long time. You guys all get so utterly blown the fuck out and slink away.

Keep supporting genocide though, Nazi boy.

I agree with many points in here or don’t disagree enough to really respond.

However, I will say about the “insurrection” stuff: did Trump orchestrate it? Depends on what that means to you, I guess.

To me, a sitting president spent 2 months-ish crying because he lost, refused to just say that he lost, and then tweeted “everyone! I have evidence! Come to the Capitol Jan 6th! It’ll be wild!” (Paraphrasing there obviously). And (further paraphrasing) had his henchmen and kid give speeches followed by himself which boiled down to “we’re gonna go to the Capitol building…and convince them to not certify this election. wink wink”

So he purposely and clearly spent months after and years before the election laying the ground, prepping his base (and Republicans had done this for 40+ years waaaaaay prior to Trump. They’ve been whining about election stealing back to Kennedy, LBJ, etc. (some legitimate, some not. Also they did the same shit anyway).

Then he gave them a specific event which he manufactured basically and pretended it mattered beyond ceremony (the actual stuff on Jan 6 is literally just ceremony. All the locking-in has been done by that point. As Pence correctly has said, it didn’t matter what he did/didnt do that day (from a purely legal outlook)).

And on the day he planned he gave a speech basically like “go MAKE them listen.” Did he say directly “go kill Nancy!”? No. But did he need to? Does a mafia boss have to say directly “kill whoever” or can it be reasonably assumed at a certain point that they’re saying certain things, doing certain things, etc. with a clear agenda towards encouraging an outcome?

I mean, look. I don’t actually care about congress, the Capitol, their ceremonies, etc. We all know this is a farce and has been for quite some time… it isn’t a democracy it’s just a capitalist-controlled hellscape. But I’m also not gonna pretend Trump didn’t sick his hordes of most brainbroken, most fanatic supporters on congress to harass them. Do I think he expected them to actually break in and accomplish anything (killing members, specifically)? No. But he knew what he was doing.

I think the event itself is overhyped, but, be definitely did that shit. What I find more concerning is the stuff like threatening officials in GA (a perfect phone call folks!). Again, liberal democracy blah blah blah, but if we’re playing the game, and we all are because we are stuck in it, he definitely was going far beyond any acceptable practices there and his party leaders should’ve barred him from office. Can’t have a shitty liberal democracy if one party is just clearly ignoring the law, telling a state official to “find votes,” etc.

I know this will absolutely never happen, but every time I hear Trump speaking on legitimate problems, I’m like “GODDAMNIT man! Can he drop the Nazi bullshit and just do… good stuff? He wants us to like him. Just do good shit!” Obviously that’s pure fantasy, but it’s absolutely frustrating sometimes hearing him speak, how he can read a room, and then seeing him pivot directly into the same neoliberal bullshit as everyone else.

Is Poland ok?

Not trying to read too much into this if it’s a joke, etc.

But

Marx was stating as an absolute statement of what he viewed as fact (and seems to be correct over a long enough timeline) that capitalism will fail due to contradictions

The Che quote is the less philosophical, more “in the shit” statement. Much like Lenin before him, these guys understood that the contradictions of capitalism lead inevitably, as Marx was getting at, to failures and collapses and it’s at those moments that revolutionaries spring up and rile their base of support within the labor force of the country. Until that moment of crisis things were bad, but tolerable. During the crisis, conditions are intolerable and people are willing to do anything, including overthrowing the government/capitalist class and possibly dying for that cause. Because the alternative is death anyway. Or a living death.

On a side note, this is why there will never be (for any foreseeable future) a socialist revolution in the US. 1) material conditions are broadly “good” (although they are worsening) 2) there is effectively no leftist political movement in the US. There are a few thousand people who are genuinely anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and want a revolution, but that might as well be zero in a country this size. Not anything new or crazy to point out that as people’s conditions worsen further they will turn towards more and more radical leftist ideas or right wing ideas. Considering the racist undercurrents of the US and lack of any desire for any international cooperation amongst workers mixed with the (unfortunately extremely effective) FBI/CIA ops against US leftists in the past, there’s only really one path that we’re likely to head down…

Keep pushing those numbers lower and lower 🫡

Doing monthly (or more frequent) inventory of the store will “check” the cashiers, as every store has to do. When employees go through and get a total accounting of items actually on hand vs what the system says. Well, it tells the entire story not just on cashiers. How well the stockers kept track of damaged/expired items, theft, cashier mess ups, etc.

I worked grocery, all departments, including receiving when I was younger and had to do inventory all the time. Of course it relies on the employee not being lazy (👀) and actually, you know, doing inventory. Usually the managers waddled their asses over if they wanted “real” inventory done because tbh I spent about an hour actually counting shit and then went and took a nap in the bathroom (had a bench for changing clothes) and just marked everything as matching. Something something pay minimum wage, get minimum work.

Them stopping customers has to be for lowering shrink from theft, but that shit is already negligible anyway. Smart management knows that it’s already baked into the profit margin for the store and harassing people, treating everyone as a thief, will just drive away regular customers. If I get continually hassled somewhere and my time wasted there’s no way I’m gonna keep going there. Even if they manage to catch a bunch of people stealing stuff it just kind of… doesn’t matter.

This is another one of those cases of individuals not understanding statistics and profit margins, etc. You see chuds crying all the time about “but you can’t just steal the chicken! Price go up!” and they seriously can’t comprehend that, as someone who worked in the store(s), they throw away more food (from damage or spoilage) constantly than hungry people could ever realistically try to steal. Like, yeah, there’s a threshold and if literally every shopper is stealing then sure the system breaks. But most people don’t. The people who do, overwhelmingly, are doing so because they have little other choice. It’s just incredibly stupid that managers and especially random employees or (the worst) random customers try to give a shit about theft like this. I’ve had more than a few times where I was working on something and some old guy comes up like “hey. I think that guy over there put something in his pocket.” And I’m just like “ok.” And go back to whatever. I mean wtf do they expect? Should I immediately man the store’s .50 cal turret and blow away the college kid or poor single mom who stuffed a steak in their jacket pocket? I’ve seen entire cases of chicken and other meats being crushed in the waste compactor week after week. That steak doesn’t matter.

I was wondering why I felt sad all year

Thanks for summing it up

Unfortunately the person(s) who replace him are likely to be the same or even more genocidal.

Not to say that hatred is misplaced, it’s not, it’s just that him finally croaking will be much like Reagan or Kissinger or insert whatever other terrible, shit leader. Their legacy is just being another mass murderer in a whole-ass club of murderers and there’s always more murderers clamoring at the door to be even worse than those before them.

There’s been so many fucking “canaries in the coal mines” over the last several decades that at this point… “Deserve” is a word I’d use for whatever might come.

Israel right now is such a perfect fucking microcosm for the US and the world. We’re arrogant, entitled, over-extended, and too fattened up on our own bullshit to see that those “animals” are figuring out how to destroy us. Not because they “hate freedom” but because they hate being held under the boot of the US and its allies. If the US had any real leadership, any soul to speak of, it would see the results in Israel of decades of oppression and ruthless treatment and (obviously after forcing an end to that shit by forcing a one state solution) finally start to, in actual good faith, begin relations with Russia, China, nations in Africa, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, etc. Maybe instead of crying about Chinese loans and Chinese industrial domination, fucking accept it’s over, the free ride is done, and it’s time to either negotiate a peaceful descent into equality with the world (not as its dominator)… Or, the alternative is, and I can’t see any other outcome, the total destruction of the US which probably means the world.

It’s this bullshit American exceptionalism mindset that has led to centuries of suffering from indigenous Americans all the way up to modern day Gazans and workers in the third world. The US just can’t fucking accept it was wrong about everything, it was founded on dogshit ideals and propped up by slavery and genocide, and it’s the same today, just most of it has been exported. I don’t understand why non-capitalists can’t see there is no "winning. There is no maintaining this empire even if you want to. It will end, and you can glide it to a respectable halt or explode like the fucking Hindenburg.

I think that’s about the deepest-cutting argument I can make to liberals and right wingers. It’s over. Everyone sees it’s over. You can explode and die or you can choose some sort of honorable path by rejecting your ancestors and choosing a more humane path. I think this is starting to sink in with younger generations, but not quickly enough, and those who end up in power even if "young"ish are still operating under the same mindset as the old ones. So, I dunno what’s to come in the US or the world. Absolutely nothing fucking good I can say that. When diplomacy with other countries is “bad” then I can promise NOTHING good will be coming. (But maybe)

“In 2018, Kim Jong Un and then U.S. President Donald Trump launched high-stakes diplomacy on the future of the North’s advancing nuclear arsenal. But their summit diplomacy fell apart a year later in 2019 due to wrangling over international economic sanctions on North Korea. Kim Jong Un has since focused on expanding and modernizing his nuclear arsenal, a move experts say he thinks would give him greater leverage to win U.S. concessions in future negotiations.”

How dumb do they think readers are? (Don’t answer that)

One of the very very very few Ws from Trump’s presidency was his attempts to restart diplomatic relations with DPRK.

It wasn’t ended by “COMPLEX THINGS YOU PLEBS CANT UNDERSTAND” it was ended by internal bad actors. The same war criminals who have lurked for decades (or a century in one case…). The types (not to say they DID this one, but this type of person) like John Bolton, Kissinger (rest in pissinger), Rumsfeld back before he bad actual power (also rot in piss), Stephen Miller, I mean the list goes on and on with all the little disgusting neoliberal, anti-communist, anti-human fuckers.

Yes, people in the west specifically the US need to realize the only purpose of messaging like this is to put the barest level of grease on the window so that it lightly obfuscates what we can see.

This statement and others like it will be (attempted) to be put forth by Israelis and their defenders for decades to come when people bring up the genocide of Palestinians in 2023 and annexation of northern Gaza. They’ll say “no no read the tweets! See! They let them leave!”

I hope the commenters are Ukrainian or at least have real ties to Ukraine because if they’re just Americans or whatever and this obsessed with the most obscure facts of the conflict… It’s just weird. It’s good to be generally educated on stuff, but if you’re discussing building bridges and shit as if it’s your buddy’s unit doing it but you live nowhere near the place… Just pure LARPing

Has to be a Nazi “playing both sides.”

They get to call pro Palestinians Nazis (Nazis also recognize being labeled a Nazi is bad optics, but they still love the ideology, thus the buff “gigachad” version of Hitler).

Perhaps if I read deep into the Nazi symbology, and I will, the two pictures could be taken as symbolic of eugenics and the idea of the “strong, Aryan man” opposed to “the weak Jewish man.”

Something like that.

“Nothing good” as another commenter said.

Honestly amazed anything was done here. I remember when I first saw this story the guy had contacted police regarding the harassment and they told him there was nothing they could do. Lazy, racist ass cops.

Also, I feel like it’s my duty for the rest of my life to point out they cited the ADL here which for a rise in hate crimes since Oct 7. The ADL is a discredited Zionist organization whose spokesperson Greenblatt has been been on record as virulently pro-Israel, Islamophobic, pro-genocide, and recently admitted to working directly with known antisemite Elon Musk to censor (non-antisemitic but anti-Israel) speech on Twitter while saying nothing of Elon’s comments like “concerning!” on Nazi propaganda shit about white genocide. The ADL has to go away. I support the existence of something like it, but it has to have NO ties to the Zionist project and it absolutely cannot have someone like Greenblatt as a spokesman. Greenblatt himself is only a more polite version of the man who was harassing this street vendor. He bullies teenagers for standing up against genocide and throws out constant, false accusations of antisemitism for questioning him or what Israel does. A shitty person.

I don’t know about that last sentence from you. I would not recommend it for non-Jews especially.

But as far as the ADL and specifically baldremoved Greenblat are concerned: I have a viciously strong desire to see this man ruined by any means necessary. I think it would be a huge blow to Zionists everywhere since he has put himself forward recently and in the past as their non-governmental leader. Ie as a private citizen attempting to act as a public official. He holds far too much influence, his organization and he are morally and ethically bankrupt and complicit in genocide. He’s a disgusting antisemite and racist. In a just society he’d be cough in prison. Yes. Prison. But I would settle for public humiliation, denouement from all his political benefactors and allies and essentially never seeing his gross face on a screen ever again.

The ADL has got to go. I don’t know the “value” or whatever of overfocusing on them and Greenblatt, but I think they are an extremely damaging organization, so it seems correct to laser beam them into non-existence and shun Greenblatt as an “example.”

I have no fucking clue how this can be achieved in the west though considering every administration supports this Zionist scum, he has effectively infinite funds at his back via ADL donations, and of course the ADL/he will hide behind all the (I suppose) legitimate work and reporting they’ve done that is unrelated to Israel. For me personally, the ADL was always “suss” for more than just Israel, but Greenblat and their recent actions and statements have fully removed all doubt that they are not a pro-Jewish organization but rather solely a pro-Zionist and anti-Jewish organization.

Fuck em.

But the way things have gone in the past, and hopefully that changes, is you get legitimately good people like Finkelstein “cancelled” (lack of better word) while pedos/liar-asses like “the Dersh” are on Fox News every other night despite writing a book that was entirely debunked and destroyed AND hanging out with Epstein in… more than a lawyerly fashion, one could say. (And one will say)

I’m not so hopeful that this current eruption of visible violence (to the western world) will result in a free Palestine, although I do reserve a naive glimmer of hope for all good things somewhere in my mind. Two things I hope people everywhere walk away with are the humanization of Palestinians as worthy of life and being denied it by Israel and erasing the concept of “complicated” from this whole situation. Everyone who is paying attention sees an uncomplicated situation where one side subjugates another and the subjugated ones fought back and are now being collectively massacred as a result. Everyone can see the inherent injustice in such actions even within the “starting on Oct 7” context. Once people uncomplicate things the solution becomes clear.

Not unlike a materialist view of the world, once you strip away the bullshit film smeared on by neoliberals to mystify everything, it all becomes so simple that you wonder how you never saw it before. And you wonder how it is that all those around you can’t also see it.

That’s my super paraphrased, shitty, condensed Marx summary.

All the “it’s complicated” people just use that framing to either obfuscate the truth from you/others or to cope within themselves. Whether it’s economics or the conflict in Palestine, it’s rarely ever complicated at the core. I hope people learn to kneejerk reject that framing. That means the next step to solving things is really close.

“We should challenge students in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

I think at a certain point you have to just assume he’s accidentally saying his real thoughts.

He also praised men like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd. He gave the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral after the motherfucker somehow lived to be 100 (LITERALLY).

For those unaware, Thurmond was one of the two senators from SC in the fucking 19 goddamn 50s up until 2003 when he finally croaked despite the daily injections of baby blood serum. His most famous moment in his career (one of them anyway) was vehemently opposing the civil rights bill and filibustered for 24 fucking hours trying to stop its passage. INSANELY RACIST. Dude was born in fucking 1901. He lived through WWI as a teenager and WWII as a full ass adult. Then he opposed rights for blacks which he had always been able to oppress for his entire life. He was in his 50s and 60s (!!!) when the fight for civil rights fully erupted. He saw the rise of Malcolm X and MLK Jr., their assassinations, the rise and fall (!!!) of the USSR. The rise of the US empire after the destruction of the pacific and European nations. He lived his entire life as a dog and a champion of capital. It’s most vile figurehead who not only supported subjugation abroad but also at home.

And Joe Biden eulogized this absolute demonic piece of human dogshit. I seriously cannot describe how big of a piece you have to be to even speak to a man like Thurmond, a living relic of virulent racism and a deeply held conviction that white people like himself are truly superior, much less be friendly enough to eulogize him and defend his legacy.

They don’t call Biden “Jim Crow Joe” for no good reason.

He’s such a piece of fucking shit.

Massive tangent there, but fuck Biden, seriously.

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”

I almost want to sort of thank this fascist dipshit.

All the libs hide their feelings towards workplace democracy, but Mark (I will not type that legal name. Gun to my head, I won’t) is violently open with his contempt for average people and his privilege and lies about said privilege.

Too many Americans still think “self made” is a thing. Or that people like Wayne worked hard. No, they inherit capital gained from the exploitation or theft of capital from others, and then when they use that capital to accumulate more capital, which is the entire purpose, people are baffled and forget the source of the original capital and go “oh, wow, he did something!”

So Mark here is showing his ass, showing that he’s dimwitted, showing his open hatred for people and his desire to subjugate labor everywhere in any way he can. He’s just personally too stupid to withhold his anger over TWITTER COMMENTS. Any time that little myth bubble gets penetrated, I almost want to thank the dumbass capitalists for showing everyone who they are.

(he also posted a pic outright threatening some podcaster. He was holding a gun and the caption was like “anytime any place” clearly as fuck a threat but where is Biden’s FBI? Hmm. No no Biden needs another pudding and to call a pro-Palestinian protestor anti-Semitic for demanding he stop allowing baby murder)