Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On August 20 2026 23:01 GreenHorizons wrote: Of course I have [posted about what meaningful activism looks like] [here it is] "We need to work on that together while organizing with other like-minded people. I come at it through a Black Radical Tradition lens but the general tenets (the details of which being what we need to work on together among like-minded people since this is a bottom up project) of what needs to be done are pretty universal from what I understand.
-Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation
-Parallel Institutions/Mutual Aid Networks
-Non-Reformist Reforms
-Symbolic Defiance: Basically, publicly treating the government’s symbols, laws, or leaders as irrelevant or void
-Legal and Constitutional Challenges (My interpretation on this is probably a bit of an outlier but I would include appealing to the international community for help/condemnation of the US's illegitimate government in this)
Exactly how any individual can help most effectively necessarily varies based on a variety of factors, but those are the general things I believe we need to be working on. It's not a comprehensive list."
I did see that post before, but a bunch of its suggestions just read so vague to me chatGPT could have given me them, honestly.
"Don't obey the government, sometimes" Could mean anything. I would suggest the rightist econobros who spend days of their year on minimising their taxes are essentially doing this, too, for example.
"Make support systems that are parallel to taxes" Does sound actionable, but if you believe this now you are putting the responsibility on the Hasans of the world to use their small pockets of wealth to actually lift others up.
"Non-reformist reforms" As per wiki, these are reforms that "challenge existing power relations and pave the way for more revolutionary changes in the larger society necessary for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world". Sounds very circular, but if you dig into [the wiki page, lmao] apparently it's things like "don't criminalise domestic violence because police are bad, that's reformist reform". This also doesn't actually say how to meaningfully organise to make such reforms happen.
Now, GH, you might say "why on earth should it fall solely upon me to figure out all the details of how to herd a bunch of cats into actually doing these things?"
And you would be right about that, it shouldn't, and it wouldn't if you did not spend every other post here insisting that you are the only one doing anything that matters.
Considering they're basically the standard pillars of all effective organizing/political progress in US history (and anathema to dyhb/corporate/establishment/third way democrats) that shouldn't be remarkable
The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
Over a year ago I gave you the most detailed/effective plan for how Democrats and their supporters can organize/fight fascism (within their liberal framework) that's been provided here before or since.
On March 04 2025 13:29 Zambrah wrote: Ive watched a few Hasan videos recently and I dont really think your assertion that he characterizes Russia as anything but the villain in their invasion of Ukraine is correct, in like, any capacity. I will say I always roll my eyes at leftists who instinctually feel the need to defend the Chinese government, but frankly Im not actually educated enough about whats happening their to say anything for certain about it, the Chinese government is certainly capable of doing terrible shit though so I hardly find myself wanting to defend them.
Well partially the problem is he says a lot of stupid stuff, and just a lot of stuff in general, so it won't always sit together coherently. I'm sure he's made plenty of comments casting Russia as the villain, but has he not also made plenty of comments essentially blaming the whole thing on NATO aka the US, which culminated in calling it US disinformation that Kyiv would be attacked? Apparently he also said Crimea was a justified invasion, although that one seems greyer to me and I don't wanna take my own turn talking too far out of pocket so I'll leave it at that.
To Hasan's credit, I found out looking into this that he raised $200k for Ukraine, which sort of talks louder than any "take" on the issue.
As for the American federal government not killing the slavers and stuff, I'm just gonna have to hard agree with him there assuming he did say that like you're saying he did. I agree. We didnt press our boots down nearly hard enough after the Civil War, we let too many scum fuck monsters not only live, but assume power. I don't really think that killing monstrous oppressors who engaged in one of, if not the most, brutal forms of slavery in human history is a tankie authoritarian type thing to do or believe.
I wasn't objecting to his language there for the US, I don't consider myself informed enough to comment on "how hard" the South was stomped down upon, or should have been. Slavery is fucked though, I can comfortably say that. My objection was to comparing Tibet (and especially Taiwan?!?!) to this. That's the tankie part, as you say, instinctually defending the Chinese government. It's especially weird to me because China's got similar (slightly higher) wealth inequality than a bunch of countries nobody is calling communist (say Australia or the UK), so you don't even get the supposed benefits of communism from the "communist" government.
Anyways, that's all academic. The reason for bringing up Hasan was that maybe the people who have acquired a lot of both financial and social influence off of... let's call it praxis... should be the ones escalating when shit is apparently hitting the fan. If the left is to mobilise, and mobilise those not currently committed to their message, this seems to be the angle, not telling people working for the government that they're complicit in whatever Trump or Musk decided to do after the latest three seconds of thought if they don't quit.
Maybe Hasan should run, haha. Or be calling for that general strike.
I want to be transparent, I'm not going to pretend to be a leftist warrior, but this isn't all some concern troll either. Like,
I've already declared myself one of the cowards, and one has to think about their young children when it comes to things like striking, but I'd happily vote for a Sanders or a Corbyn. When it comes to the US, where income inequality is particularly prevalent, a hard kick to the left seems especially needed. This doesn't even need to be achieved from explicitly leftist theory either, like I heard something very interesting about how the unavailability of public transport in a lot of the US hits the poorest people the hardest, who are stuck relying on used cars that are more likely to break down. Better public transport would then be a lever that would remove one of the mechanisms through which poorer people are kept poor. And fuck yes tax the very rich harder to pay for that.
On March 04 2025 12:26 GreenHorizons wrote: But yeah, generally speaking, random middle class workers (along with people from every walk of life) will have to risk more than just their jobs to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US and globally. We should all be thankful we're only talking about participating in blogs, electoral planning, and refusing to forward a chain email instead of storming a beach in Normandy or digging a foxhole in Pokrovsk.
That's kinda what I'm getting at. Haven't a whole ton of your posts been about how that isn't enough? When you imply people should quit their job because Musk sent a dumb e-mail, you're (again) suggesting the time for talk in corners of the internet is long gone. Blogs and chain e-mails won't cut it, you yourself said this was all needed "yesterday". All GreenHorizons wants to say is "go try socialism locally" and when asked what that looks like says "using a socialist lens to realise that for example health care sucks", but okay, that was the past. LibHorizons is here now. What's LibHorizon's dot points of what a leftist Project 2025 might look like?
Seems like it'd do a lot more good than antagonising until political numpties like me are trolled into shitting up the thread.
primary Democrats that aren't showing sufficient will to fight/oppose the Trump admin's agenda a bit: Not every Democrat needs to be primaried. Those of us in safe blue states with Democrats unlikely to not clear the bar for not being primaried can direct resources toward places where the Democrats do need to be primaried. But we need a reasonably objective way to determine which is which.
Thus far Democrats and their supporters have failed to provide that. I'm open to hearing their ideas, but lacking that, I feel obligated as a progressive to present something that is better than nothing. Sooo...
Having a deliberate and executable plan (with a simple name like "project 2025" or "The New Deal" or whatever) and making support for it be the litmus test. You support it, no primary. You don't support it, you get primaried, and the party doesn't bail you out. The party should let Bernie, AOC, and The Squad lead the way in setting the terms, but they've all shown they can be very reasonable and show deference to the party generally. So it's not as if they would ignore the needs/preferences of the more centrist parts of the party entirely, or even to the degree they've been pushed to the periphery by said centrists.
(which is more than anyone else) I'd elaborate by saying: Beyond the basic outline of a plan of how to even get the opportunity to vote for people like Bernie I have provided, I presume you're asking what are Bernie/AOC/The Squad's positions I currently think should take center stage?
1. Medicare for all 2. Green New Deal 3. You can pick
There's a process to the electoral system in the US, and part of it is the primary. In order to have someone like Bernie to vote for in a general election against the Republican, they have to win the primary against the Democrats that "aren't willing to fight" sufficiently against the Trump administration's agenda.
But to know who those Democrats are we need some sort of fair/honest/objective metric. Since 0 libs/Dems/ilk provided anything resembling such a metric I provided the idea of making it essentially whether or not they supported the aforementioned 3 policies.
Winning such a primary also requires spending every possible second developing the opposition campaigns to any of these entrenched Democrats that are collaborating with or appeasing Trump/Musk.
Based on how aggressively the libs/Dems/ilk here are refusing to even try to work on how to improve the candidates Democrat voters have to choose from and/or ensure they have legitimate elections to engage in, I can't believe their rhetoric about wanting Democrats to be any better/more than they are being right now. Their inattentiveness is enabling the worst aspects of Democrats (and also the most fascist Republicans).
Unfortunately, no one here is actually interested in developing a plan among themselves (without me or anyone else they deem unworthy) or doing the bare minimum to fight fascism and pretty much everyone has made that explicitly clear in a variety of ways. To the degree that anyone else here even ostensibly thinks that is a worthy pursuit, they don't believe this is a place to do it.
They basically all believe this place (and political engagement generally afaict) is for whatever one wants to call what they spent all those posts/time doing instead (not entirely unreasonable hobbyist escapism basically).
We would be it would be even more inconvenient than not using and spreading a social media company owned by the richest man in the world who is most certainly a fascist and one of the biggest drivers of fascism in the world.
On August 21 2026 01:02 dyhb wrote: It makes talk pretty easy if you're never required to back it up. Let's say he was a total hypocrite and fronting for his subscribers. He's rich, and likes it, and is confident that his fellow rich will stop measures aimed at him. Would he act any different? Anything at all?
Back up what? Is he going to commit tax evasion if taxes are raised on people like him? Then he can go to jail if that happens.
He'll never have to pay them if he's indeed a hypocrite that only talks a tough game. His rich compatriots with the same luxury lifestyle protect him. Heck, he can even move out of California to dodge a wealth tax. Your defenses of "it's only a drop in the bucket" would still ring true!
If he does something blatantly hypocritical then I'll be happy to condemn him for his hypocrisy.
He is under no social responsibility as a millionaire or a billionaire if the government doesn't actually compel him to give his money? I want to make sure I am understanding your point of view. The whole "Elon could do X but doesn't" isn't actually a thing if "Hasan could do Y but doesn't" would never suit him, no matter how small the ask.
On a personal level I think any rich person who blows it on stupid stuff like giga-yachts when they could be giving to charity are assholes, sure. Since Elon Musk is literally like 100,000x richer than Hasan it's 100,000x as true for him. But I'm not advocating for more taxes on them because they're assholes, I'm advocating more taxes because of a politically-engineered structural inequality.
Hasan Piker with the $200k Porsche Taycan Turbo S and the $2.7 million dollar west hollywood home and the $5,000 Cartier glasses and rings are his millionaire's conspicuous displays of wealth as the yachts are to billionaires.
Literally every post of yours that goes "I think any rich person who blows it on stupid stuff like ..." makes me think the next sentence out of you will be "and obviously Hasan Piker fits that mold to a T." Is that the next sentence out of you? If not, why not?
I'll skip further discussion of personal social responsibility from the rich, since you don't care about him personally and don't know anything about him other than what Republicans bring up to you. Which, ouch, relying on Republicans to learn about the charity and lack of charity from the rich?
How many people in this country have $8m or more? Something like three or four million people last I checked. Do you want me to personally stalk each and every one of them until I find something to be outraged about? Would that be a good use of my time?
If you don't have the time to examine a prominent example, I won't make you make time.
That does begin to explain your perspective. I do care that the rich guys who talk about all their grand ideas for improving society are also the rich guys who don't do anything besides talk about said grand ideas. You don't have to, in fact you don't have to comment to those that do.
If Hasan were running for office you'd be well within your rights to not vote for him because you hate millionaires or hypocrites. But letting Mike Rogers win the Michigan election for U.S. Senate even after he said he was going to protect a sieg heiling CSAM-mass-producing centibillionaire because you don't like that El-Sayed hangs out with a hypocritical Internet streamer seems pretty absurd to me. Seems more like something a strawman of socialists would do rather than the "moderate Democrat" you've self-identified as.
I'm still not entirely clear why you don't seem to be outraged at rich people who want to cut their own taxes (essentially making life worse for the 99% just so they can buy more frivolous bullshit or more elections), but rich people who advocate raising taxes on themselves is a line too far. Although I do understand that you'll find some excuse to complain (whether it's envy or hypocrisy) whenever anyone does.
You act like I have to be big mad about "letting Mike Rogers win," like the hypothetical is I vote in both the Democratic primary against El-Sayed and the Republican primary for Mike Rogers. Also moving the goalposts to "hanging out with" from "refused to denounce during the primary" is a nice touch. Take what I said, not a strawman that I didn't say.
Just check if actions match rhetoric? It's not hard, particularly if you have millions of dollars. I can't rectify your objections to billionaire conspicuous consumption if millionaires are inexplicably exempted by you.
On August 21 2026 02:30 Gorsameth wrote: So is this the latest angle to fight the electoral successes from the left? 'centralists' purity testing left candidates.
Hasan Piker is a candidate for some office?
Yadda yadda yadda. You keep telling us about how much of a hypocrite Hasan Piker is and we keep telling you: nobody gives a shit. I tried with a parody to show you how contrite you sounded, but it went whooshing over your head.
I gave a one-sentence comment on somebody else who brought up Hasan Piker. It’s all of y'all that had further questions of me. Well, I start responding to those questions and maybe you get the impression that the volume of responses conveys “gives a shit.”
I've watched some of his videos and a better attack would be that he's a self-important twat who thinks he's the greatest gift to mankind since sliced bread (or at the very least, since Lenin). He's unbearable. And despite all that, socialism is a great idea and the US could use a shitton more of it. If someone running for office is buddies with a socialist who drives a fancy car, I don't give a crap: either he's sincere and accepts that his fancy car is currently on loan from the state. Or he's full of shit, thinks his fancy car is secretly his own property and even so, makes videos that aim to convince other people to take away his fancy car. Either way: the message works just fine for me. And would work for anyone who would vote for El-Sayed in Michigan based on his policies.
You really misjudge my desire to attack. Somebody asked me how I would vote in Michigan’s primary, and I answered. That involved who he campaigned with and what I thought he should do about it. Later, somebody had a comment in the good potentially done in his name, and I gave a comment. If nobody brings his name up again or asks me what I think about him, why should I care?
Now if you doubt El-Sayed's character because he's friends with an insufferable SOB, that's fine, but if we're going of which candidate has the most punchable buddies, Rogers is chums with Trump, winner of the most punchable face award 9 years straight! So even if we ignore message and go purely on who has the least sleazy friends, you have in no way justified any support for a liberal like you to vote republican over democrat in this particular election.
Just care that El-Sayed didn’t publicly disavow comments in the primary after campaigning with him. You’re imagining that there’s some deep characterological issue.
On August 21 2026 10:33 GreenHorizons wrote: The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
I am pointing out you contribute nothing of meaningful substance. Apparently your secret to organising, that demands we stop talking about anything else here because all else is unimportant, is "be an active member of whatever group is as left-leaning as you are". Okay, thanks for your fucking wisdom.
"Sealioning" is a good one, though, because it exposes precisely how you post here. Sealioning is when somebody unwelcome shows up to litigate something that others in the conversation are happy to hold as assumed truths, perhaps because they're offended by those truths or perhaps just to be a distraction. Like, that's literally the comic that kicked it off. "Men suck." "Yeah." "Well now, not all men suck, let's clarify precisely which men suck and how."
So, me musing out loud about what you think are good steps forward is "sealioning" to you, because I am not just assuming as truth that, for example, de-criminalising domestic violence is a good idea. Well, if you were having a nice deep conversation with a fellow revolutionary socialist about this, and I came along to "umm actually" you, you'd be well in your rights to say "go away sealion". When you hinted I was unwelcome in your blog for calling the old communist texts impenetrable and vague, I respected that and disappeared.
But you're not having that conversation here, are you? You're (supposedly) trying to get the rest of the forum on board, sometimes deliberately antagonising posters here as part of that mission, and yet when anyone tries to actually take things down to brass tacks with you, they either assume everything as truth that you do or they get nowhere. You can see it with WombaT on the previous page. "Say precisely this phrase and mean it or you can't speak with me". It's laughable.
On August 20 2026 23:01 GreenHorizons wrote: Of course I have [posted about what meaningful activism looks like] [here it is] "We need to work on that together while organizing with other like-minded people. I come at it through a Black Radical Tradition lens but the general tenets (the details of which being what we need to work on together among like-minded people since this is a bottom up project) of what needs to be done are pretty universal from what I understand.
-Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation
-Parallel Institutions/Mutual Aid Networks
-Non-Reformist Reforms
-Symbolic Defiance: Basically, publicly treating the government’s symbols, laws, or leaders as irrelevant or void
-Legal and Constitutional Challenges (My interpretation on this is probably a bit of an outlier but I would include appealing to the international community for help/condemnation of the US's illegitimate government in this)
Exactly how any individual can help most effectively necessarily varies based on a variety of factors, but those are the general things I believe we need to be working on. It's not a comprehensive list."
I did see that post before, but a bunch of its suggestions just read so vague to me chatGPT could have given me them, honestly.
"Don't obey the government, sometimes" Could mean anything. I would suggest the rightist econobros who spend days of their year on minimising their taxes are essentially doing this, too, for example.
"Make support systems that are parallel to taxes" Does sound actionable, but if you believe this now you are putting the responsibility on the Hasans of the world to use their small pockets of wealth to actually lift others up.
"Non-reformist reforms" As per wiki, these are reforms that "challenge existing power relations and pave the way for more revolutionary changes in the larger society necessary for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world". Sounds very circular, but if you dig into [the wiki page, lmao] apparently it's things like "don't criminalise domestic violence because police are bad, that's reformist reform". This also doesn't actually say how to meaningfully organise to make such reforms happen.
Now, GH, you might say "why on earth should it fall solely upon me to figure out all the details of how to herd a bunch of cats into actually doing these things?"
And you would be right about that, it shouldn't, and it wouldn't if you did not spend every other post here insisting that you are the only one doing anything that matters.
Considering they're basically the standard pillars of all effective organizing/political progress in US history (and anathema to dyhb/corporate/establishment/third way democrats) that shouldn't be remarkable
The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
Over a year ago I gave you the most detailed/effective plan for how Democrats and their supporters can organize/fight fascism (within their liberal framework) that's been provided here before or since.
On March 04 2025 13:29 Zambrah wrote: Ive watched a few Hasan videos recently and I dont really think your assertion that he characterizes Russia as anything but the villain in their invasion of Ukraine is correct, in like, any capacity. I will say I always roll my eyes at leftists who instinctually feel the need to defend the Chinese government, but frankly Im not actually educated enough about whats happening their to say anything for certain about it, the Chinese government is certainly capable of doing terrible shit though so I hardly find myself wanting to defend them.
Well partially the problem is he says a lot of stupid stuff, and just a lot of stuff in general, so it won't always sit together coherently. I'm sure he's made plenty of comments casting Russia as the villain, but has he not also made plenty of comments essentially blaming the whole thing on NATO aka the US, which culminated in calling it US disinformation that Kyiv would be attacked? Apparently he also said Crimea was a justified invasion, although that one seems greyer to me and I don't wanna take my own turn talking too far out of pocket so I'll leave it at that.
To Hasan's credit, I found out looking into this that he raised $200k for Ukraine, which sort of talks louder than any "take" on the issue.
As for the American federal government not killing the slavers and stuff, I'm just gonna have to hard agree with him there assuming he did say that like you're saying he did. I agree. We didnt press our boots down nearly hard enough after the Civil War, we let too many scum fuck monsters not only live, but assume power. I don't really think that killing monstrous oppressors who engaged in one of, if not the most, brutal forms of slavery in human history is a tankie authoritarian type thing to do or believe.
I wasn't objecting to his language there for the US, I don't consider myself informed enough to comment on "how hard" the South was stomped down upon, or should have been. Slavery is fucked though, I can comfortably say that. My objection was to comparing Tibet (and especially Taiwan?!?!) to this. That's the tankie part, as you say, instinctually defending the Chinese government. It's especially weird to me because China's got similar (slightly higher) wealth inequality than a bunch of countries nobody is calling communist (say Australia or the UK), so you don't even get the supposed benefits of communism from the "communist" government.
Anyways, that's all academic. The reason for bringing up Hasan was that maybe the people who have acquired a lot of both financial and social influence off of... let's call it praxis... should be the ones escalating when shit is apparently hitting the fan. If the left is to mobilise, and mobilise those not currently committed to their message, this seems to be the angle, not telling people working for the government that they're complicit in whatever Trump or Musk decided to do after the latest three seconds of thought if they don't quit.
Maybe Hasan should run, haha. Or be calling for that general strike.
I want to be transparent, I'm not going to pretend to be a leftist warrior, but this isn't all some concern troll either. Like,
I've already declared myself one of the cowards, and one has to think about their young children when it comes to things like striking, but I'd happily vote for a Sanders or a Corbyn. When it comes to the US, where income inequality is particularly prevalent, a hard kick to the left seems especially needed. This doesn't even need to be achieved from explicitly leftist theory either, like I heard something very interesting about how the unavailability of public transport in a lot of the US hits the poorest people the hardest, who are stuck relying on used cars that are more likely to break down. Better public transport would then be a lever that would remove one of the mechanisms through which poorer people are kept poor. And fuck yes tax the very rich harder to pay for that.
On March 04 2025 12:26 GreenHorizons wrote: But yeah, generally speaking, random middle class workers (along with people from every walk of life) will have to risk more than just their jobs to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US and globally. We should all be thankful we're only talking about participating in blogs, electoral planning, and refusing to forward a chain email instead of storming a beach in Normandy or digging a foxhole in Pokrovsk.
That's kinda what I'm getting at. Haven't a whole ton of your posts been about how that isn't enough? When you imply people should quit their job because Musk sent a dumb e-mail, you're (again) suggesting the time for talk in corners of the internet is long gone. Blogs and chain e-mails won't cut it, you yourself said this was all needed "yesterday". All GreenHorizons wants to say is "go try socialism locally" and when asked what that looks like says "using a socialist lens to realise that for example health care sucks", but okay, that was the past. LibHorizons is here now. What's LibHorizon's dot points of what a leftist Project 2025 might look like?
Seems like it'd do a lot more good than antagonising until political numpties like me are trolled into shitting up the thread.
primary Democrats that aren't showing sufficient will to fight/oppose the Trump admin's agenda a bit: Not every Democrat needs to be primaried. Those of us in safe blue states with Democrats unlikely to not clear the bar for not being primaried can direct resources toward places where the Democrats do need to be primaried. But we need a reasonably objective way to determine which is which.
Thus far Democrats and their supporters have failed to provide that. I'm open to hearing their ideas, but lacking that, I feel obligated as a progressive to present something that is better than nothing. Sooo...
Having a deliberate and executable plan (with a simple name like "project 2025" or "The New Deal" or whatever) and making support for it be the litmus test. You support it, no primary. You don't support it, you get primaried, and the party doesn't bail you out. The party should let Bernie, AOC, and The Squad lead the way in setting the terms, but they've all shown they can be very reasonable and show deference to the party generally. So it's not as if they would ignore the needs/preferences of the more centrist parts of the party entirely, or even to the degree they've been pushed to the periphery by said centrists.
(which is more than anyone else) I'd elaborate by saying: Beyond the basic outline of a plan of how to even get the opportunity to vote for people like Bernie I have provided, I presume you're asking what are Bernie/AOC/The Squad's positions I currently think should take center stage?
1. Medicare for all 2. Green New Deal 3. You can pick
There's a process to the electoral system in the US, and part of it is the primary. In order to have someone like Bernie to vote for in a general election against the Republican, they have to win the primary against the Democrats that "aren't willing to fight" sufficiently against the Trump administration's agenda.
But to know who those Democrats are we need some sort of fair/honest/objective metric. Since 0 libs/Dems/ilk provided anything resembling such a metric I provided the idea of making it essentially whether or not they supported the aforementioned 3 policies.
Winning such a primary also requires spending every possible second developing the opposition campaigns to any of these entrenched Democrats that are collaborating with or appeasing Trump/Musk.
Based on how aggressively the libs/Dems/ilk here are refusing to even try to work on how to improve the candidates Democrat voters have to choose from and/or ensure they have legitimate elections to engage in, I can't believe their rhetoric about wanting Democrats to be any better/more than they are being right now. Their inattentiveness is enabling the worst aspects of Democrats (and also the most fascist Republicans).
Unfortunately, no one here is actually interested in developing a plan among themselves (without me or anyone else they deem unworthy) or doing the bare minimum to fight fascism and pretty much everyone has made that explicitly clear in a variety of ways. To the degree that anyone else here even ostensibly thinks that is a worthy pursuit, they don't believe this is a place to do it.
They basically all believe this place (and political engagement generally afaict) is for whatever one wants to call what they spent all those posts/time doing instead (not entirely unreasonable hobbyist escapism basically).
The ‘plan’ as it were is to at the very least win elections to avoid Fascists coming to power. May not be a plan one likes outside of that specific goal but it is a pretty effective plan for that.
Could you be any more condescending? Fuck me if teen me had got pontificated to in the manner you do I’d have ended up a Neo-Nazi or something
What is your plan? Far as I can tell it’s heavily reliant on the power of magic
On August 21 2026 10:33 GreenHorizons wrote: The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
I am pointing out you contribute nothing of meaningful substance. Apparently your secret to organising, that demands we stop talking about anything else here because all else is unimportant, is "be an active member of whatever group is as left-leaning as you are". Okay, thanks for your fucking wisdom.
"Sealioning" is a good one, though, because it exposes precisely how you post here. Sealioning is when somebody unwelcome shows up to litigate something that others in the conversation are happy to hold as assumed truths, perhaps because they're offended by those truths or perhaps just to be a distraction. Like, that's literally the comic that kicked it off. "Men suck." "Yeah." "Well now, not all men suck, let's clarify precisely which men suck and how."
So, me musing out loud about what you think are good steps forward is "sealioning" to you, because I am not just assuming as truth that, for example, de-criminalising domestic violence is a good idea. Well, if you were having a nice deep conversation with a fellow revolutionary socialist about this, and I came along to "umm actually" you, you'd be well in your rights to say "go away sealion". When you hinted I was unwelcome in your blog for calling the old communist texts impenetrable and vague, I respected that and disappeared.
But you're not having that conversation here, are you? You're (supposedly) trying to get the rest of the forum on board, + Show Spoiler +
sometimes deliberately antagonising posters here as part of that mission, and yet when anyone tries to actually take things down to brass tacks with you, they either assume everything as truth that you do or they get nowhere. You can see it with WombaT on the previous page. "Say precisely this phrase and mean it or you can't speak with me". It's laughable.
I'll respond to the other part after.
No. I'm somewhat meticulously laying out how/why the materialist analysis I'm posting is objectively/demonstrably true.
On August 20 2026 23:01 GreenHorizons wrote: Of course I have [posted about what meaningful activism looks like] [here it is] "We need to work on that together while organizing with other like-minded people. I come at it through a Black Radical Tradition lens but the general tenets (the details of which being what we need to work on together among like-minded people since this is a bottom up project) of what needs to be done are pretty universal from what I understand.
-Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation
-Parallel Institutions/Mutual Aid Networks
-Non-Reformist Reforms
-Symbolic Defiance: Basically, publicly treating the government’s symbols, laws, or leaders as irrelevant or void
-Legal and Constitutional Challenges (My interpretation on this is probably a bit of an outlier but I would include appealing to the international community for help/condemnation of the US's illegitimate government in this)
Exactly how any individual can help most effectively necessarily varies based on a variety of factors, but those are the general things I believe we need to be working on. It's not a comprehensive list."
I did see that post before, but a bunch of its suggestions just read so vague to me chatGPT could have given me them, honestly.
"Don't obey the government, sometimes" Could mean anything. I would suggest the rightist econobros who spend days of their year on minimising their taxes are essentially doing this, too, for example.
"Make support systems that are parallel to taxes" Does sound actionable, but if you believe this now you are putting the responsibility on the Hasans of the world to use their small pockets of wealth to actually lift others up.
"Non-reformist reforms" As per wiki, these are reforms that "challenge existing power relations and pave the way for more revolutionary changes in the larger society necessary for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world". Sounds very circular, but if you dig into [the wiki page, lmao] apparently it's things like "don't criminalise domestic violence because police are bad, that's reformist reform". This also doesn't actually say how to meaningfully organise to make such reforms happen.
Now, GH, you might say "why on earth should it fall solely upon me to figure out all the details of how to herd a bunch of cats into actually doing these things?"
And you would be right about that, it shouldn't, and it wouldn't if you did not spend every other post here insisting that you are the only one doing anything that matters.
Considering they're basically the standard pillars of all effective organizing/political progress in US history (and anathema to dyhb/corporate/establishment/third way democrats) that shouldn't be remarkable
The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
Over a year ago I gave you the most detailed/effective plan for how Democrats and their supporters can organize/fight fascism (within their liberal framework) that's been provided here before or since.
On March 04 2025 15:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
On March 04 2025 15:08 Turbovolver wrote:
On March 04 2025 13:29 Zambrah wrote: Ive watched a few Hasan videos recently and I dont really think your assertion that he characterizes Russia as anything but the villain in their invasion of Ukraine is correct, in like, any capacity. I will say I always roll my eyes at leftists who instinctually feel the need to defend the Chinese government, but frankly Im not actually educated enough about whats happening their to say anything for certain about it, the Chinese government is certainly capable of doing terrible shit though so I hardly find myself wanting to defend them.
Well partially the problem is he says a lot of stupid stuff, and just a lot of stuff in general, so it won't always sit together coherently. I'm sure he's made plenty of comments casting Russia as the villain, but has he not also made plenty of comments essentially blaming the whole thing on NATO aka the US, which culminated in calling it US disinformation that Kyiv would be attacked? Apparently he also said Crimea was a justified invasion, although that one seems greyer to me and I don't wanna take my own turn talking too far out of pocket so I'll leave it at that.
To Hasan's credit, I found out looking into this that he raised $200k for Ukraine, which sort of talks louder than any "take" on the issue.
As for the American federal government not killing the slavers and stuff, I'm just gonna have to hard agree with him there assuming he did say that like you're saying he did. I agree. We didnt press our boots down nearly hard enough after the Civil War, we let too many scum fuck monsters not only live, but assume power. I don't really think that killing monstrous oppressors who engaged in one of, if not the most, brutal forms of slavery in human history is a tankie authoritarian type thing to do or believe.
I wasn't objecting to his language there for the US, I don't consider myself informed enough to comment on "how hard" the South was stomped down upon, or should have been. Slavery is fucked though, I can comfortably say that. My objection was to comparing Tibet (and especially Taiwan?!?!) to this. That's the tankie part, as you say, instinctually defending the Chinese government. It's especially weird to me because China's got similar (slightly higher) wealth inequality than a bunch of countries nobody is calling communist (say Australia or the UK), so you don't even get the supposed benefits of communism from the "communist" government.
Anyways, that's all academic. The reason for bringing up Hasan was that maybe the people who have acquired a lot of both financial and social influence off of... let's call it praxis... should be the ones escalating when shit is apparently hitting the fan. If the left is to mobilise, and mobilise those not currently committed to their message, this seems to be the angle, not telling people working for the government that they're complicit in whatever Trump or Musk decided to do after the latest three seconds of thought if they don't quit.
Maybe Hasan should run, haha. Or be calling for that general strike.
I want to be transparent, I'm not going to pretend to be a leftist warrior, but this isn't all some concern troll either. Like,
I've already declared myself one of the cowards, and one has to think about their young children when it comes to things like striking, but I'd happily vote for a Sanders or a Corbyn. When it comes to the US, where income inequality is particularly prevalent, a hard kick to the left seems especially needed. This doesn't even need to be achieved from explicitly leftist theory either, like I heard something very interesting about how the unavailability of public transport in a lot of the US hits the poorest people the hardest, who are stuck relying on used cars that are more likely to break down. Better public transport would then be a lever that would remove one of the mechanisms through which poorer people are kept poor. And fuck yes tax the very rich harder to pay for that.
On March 04 2025 12:26 GreenHorizons wrote: But yeah, generally speaking, random middle class workers (along with people from every walk of life) will have to risk more than just their jobs to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US and globally. We should all be thankful we're only talking about participating in blogs, electoral planning, and refusing to forward a chain email instead of storming a beach in Normandy or digging a foxhole in Pokrovsk.
That's kinda what I'm getting at. Haven't a whole ton of your posts been about how that isn't enough? When you imply people should quit their job because Musk sent a dumb e-mail, you're (again) suggesting the time for talk in corners of the internet is long gone. Blogs and chain e-mails won't cut it, you yourself said this was all needed "yesterday". All GreenHorizons wants to say is "go try socialism locally" and when asked what that looks like says "using a socialist lens to realise that for example health care sucks", but okay, that was the past. LibHorizons is here now. What's LibHorizon's dot points of what a leftist Project 2025 might look like?
Seems like it'd do a lot more good than antagonising until political numpties like me are trolled into shitting up the thread.
primary Democrats that aren't showing sufficient will to fight/oppose the Trump admin's agenda a bit: Not every Democrat needs to be primaried. Those of us in safe blue states with Democrats unlikely to not clear the bar for not being primaried can direct resources toward places where the Democrats do need to be primaried. But we need a reasonably objective way to determine which is which.
Thus far Democrats and their supporters have failed to provide that. I'm open to hearing their ideas, but lacking that, I feel obligated as a progressive to present something that is better than nothing. Sooo...
Having a deliberate and executable plan (with a simple name like "project 2025" or "The New Deal" or whatever) and making support for it be the litmus test. You support it, no primary. You don't support it, you get primaried, and the party doesn't bail you out. The party should let Bernie, AOC, and The Squad lead the way in setting the terms, but they've all shown they can be very reasonable and show deference to the party generally. So it's not as if they would ignore the needs/preferences of the more centrist parts of the party entirely, or even to the degree they've been pushed to the periphery by said centrists.
(which is more than anyone else) I'd elaborate by saying: Beyond the basic outline of a plan of how to even get the opportunity to vote for people like Bernie I have provided, I presume you're asking what are Bernie/AOC/The Squad's positions I currently think should take center stage?
1. Medicare for all 2. Green New Deal 3. You can pick
There's a process to the electoral system in the US, and part of it is the primary. In order to have someone like Bernie to vote for in a general election against the Republican, they have to win the primary against the Democrats that "aren't willing to fight" sufficiently against the Trump administration's agenda.
But to know who those Democrats are we need some sort of fair/honest/objective metric. Since 0 libs/Dems/ilk provided anything resembling such a metric I provided the idea of making it essentially whether or not they supported the aforementioned 3 policies.
Winning such a primary also requires spending every possible second developing the opposition campaigns to any of these entrenched Democrats that are collaborating with or appeasing Trump/Musk.
Based on how aggressively the libs/Dems/ilk here are refusing to even try to work on how to improve the candidates Democrat voters have to choose from and/or ensure they have legitimate elections to engage in, I can't believe their rhetoric about wanting Democrats to be any better/more than they are being right now. Their inattentiveness is enabling the worst aspects of Democrats (and also the most fascist Republicans).
Unfortunately, no one here is actually interested in developing a plan among themselves (without me or anyone else they deem unworthy) or doing the bare minimum to fight fascism and pretty much everyone has made that explicitly clear in a variety of ways. To the degree that anyone else here even ostensibly thinks that is a worthy pursuit, they don't believe this is a place to do it.
They basically all believe this place (and political engagement generally afaict) is for whatever one wants to call what they spent all those posts/time doing instead (not entirely unreasonable hobbyist escapism basically).
The ‘plan’ as it were is to at the very least win elections to avoid Fascists coming to power. May not be a plan one likes outside of that specific goal but it is a pretty effective plan for that.
Could you be any more condescending? Fuck me if teen me had got pontificated to in the manner you do I’d have ended up a Neo-Nazi or something
What is your plan? Far as I can tell it’s heavily reliant on the power of magic
Tone policing aside. Most definitely. I filter out a lot of the petulant/emotional lashing out at me personally entirely to focus on the structural/systemic material analysis. That you believe your younger self would have went with "the socialist being mean made me a Nazi!" in reaction explains a lot though.
On August 21 2026 10:33 GreenHorizons wrote: The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
I am pointing out you contribute nothing of meaningful substance. Apparently your secret to organising, that demands we stop talking about anything else here because all else is unimportant, is "be an active member of whatever group is as left-leaning as you are". Okay, thanks for your fucking wisdom.
"Sealioning" is a good one, though, because it exposes precisely how you post here. Sealioning is when somebody unwelcome shows up to litigate something that others in the conversation are happy to hold as assumed truths, perhaps because they're offended by those truths or perhaps just to be a distraction. Like, that's literally the comic that kicked it off. "Men suck." "Yeah." "Well now, not all men suck, let's clarify precisely which men suck and how."
So, me musing out loud about what you think are good steps forward is "sealioning" to you, because I am not just assuming as truth that, for example, de-criminalising domestic violence is a good idea. Well, if you were having a nice deep conversation with a fellow revolutionary socialist about this, and I came along to "umm actually" you, you'd be well in your rights to say "go away sealion". When you hinted I was unwelcome in your blog for calling the old communist texts impenetrable and vague, I respected that and disappeared.
But you're not having that conversation here, are you? You're (supposedly) trying to get the rest of the forum on board, + Show Spoiler +
sometimes deliberately antagonising posters here as part of that mission, and yet when anyone tries to actually take things down to brass tacks with you, they either assume everything as truth that you do or they get nowhere. You can see it with WombaT on the previous page. "Say precisely this phrase and mean it or you can't speak with me". It's laughable.
I'll respond to the other part after.
No. I'm somewhat meticulously laying out how/why the materialist analysis I'm posting is objectively/demonstrably true.
On August 20 2026 23:01 GreenHorizons wrote: Of course I have [posted about what meaningful activism looks like] [here it is] "We need to work on that together while organizing with other like-minded people. I come at it through a Black Radical Tradition lens but the general tenets (the details of which being what we need to work on together among like-minded people since this is a bottom up project) of what needs to be done are pretty universal from what I understand.
-Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation
-Parallel Institutions/Mutual Aid Networks
-Non-Reformist Reforms
-Symbolic Defiance: Basically, publicly treating the government’s symbols, laws, or leaders as irrelevant or void
-Legal and Constitutional Challenges (My interpretation on this is probably a bit of an outlier but I would include appealing to the international community for help/condemnation of the US's illegitimate government in this)
Exactly how any individual can help most effectively necessarily varies based on a variety of factors, but those are the general things I believe we need to be working on. It's not a comprehensive list."
I did see that post before, but a bunch of its suggestions just read so vague to me chatGPT could have given me them, honestly.
"Don't obey the government, sometimes" Could mean anything. I would suggest the rightist econobros who spend days of their year on minimising their taxes are essentially doing this, too, for example.
"Make support systems that are parallel to taxes" Does sound actionable, but if you believe this now you are putting the responsibility on the Hasans of the world to use their small pockets of wealth to actually lift others up.
"Non-reformist reforms" As per wiki, these are reforms that "challenge existing power relations and pave the way for more revolutionary changes in the larger society necessary for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world". Sounds very circular, but if you dig into [the wiki page, lmao] apparently it's things like "don't criminalise domestic violence because police are bad, that's reformist reform". This also doesn't actually say how to meaningfully organise to make such reforms happen.
Now, GH, you might say "why on earth should it fall solely upon me to figure out all the details of how to herd a bunch of cats into actually doing these things?"
And you would be right about that, it shouldn't, and it wouldn't if you did not spend every other post here insisting that you are the only one doing anything that matters.
Considering they're basically the standard pillars of all effective organizing/political progress in US history (and anathema to dyhb/corporate/establishment/third way democrats) that shouldn't be remarkable
The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
Over a year ago I gave you the most detailed/effective plan for how Democrats and their supporters can organize/fight fascism (within their liberal framework) that's been provided here before or since.
On March 04 2025 15:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
On March 04 2025 15:08 Turbovolver wrote:
On March 04 2025 13:29 Zambrah wrote: Ive watched a few Hasan videos recently and I dont really think your assertion that he characterizes Russia as anything but the villain in their invasion of Ukraine is correct, in like, any capacity. I will say I always roll my eyes at leftists who instinctually feel the need to defend the Chinese government, but frankly Im not actually educated enough about whats happening their to say anything for certain about it, the Chinese government is certainly capable of doing terrible shit though so I hardly find myself wanting to defend them.
Well partially the problem is he says a lot of stupid stuff, and just a lot of stuff in general, so it won't always sit together coherently. I'm sure he's made plenty of comments casting Russia as the villain, but has he not also made plenty of comments essentially blaming the whole thing on NATO aka the US, which culminated in calling it US disinformation that Kyiv would be attacked? Apparently he also said Crimea was a justified invasion, although that one seems greyer to me and I don't wanna take my own turn talking too far out of pocket so I'll leave it at that.
To Hasan's credit, I found out looking into this that he raised $200k for Ukraine, which sort of talks louder than any "take" on the issue.
As for the American federal government not killing the slavers and stuff, I'm just gonna have to hard agree with him there assuming he did say that like you're saying he did. I agree. We didnt press our boots down nearly hard enough after the Civil War, we let too many scum fuck monsters not only live, but assume power. I don't really think that killing monstrous oppressors who engaged in one of, if not the most, brutal forms of slavery in human history is a tankie authoritarian type thing to do or believe.
I wasn't objecting to his language there for the US, I don't consider myself informed enough to comment on "how hard" the South was stomped down upon, or should have been. Slavery is fucked though, I can comfortably say that. My objection was to comparing Tibet (and especially Taiwan?!?!) to this. That's the tankie part, as you say, instinctually defending the Chinese government. It's especially weird to me because China's got similar (slightly higher) wealth inequality than a bunch of countries nobody is calling communist (say Australia or the UK), so you don't even get the supposed benefits of communism from the "communist" government.
Anyways, that's all academic. The reason for bringing up Hasan was that maybe the people who have acquired a lot of both financial and social influence off of... let's call it praxis... should be the ones escalating when shit is apparently hitting the fan. If the left is to mobilise, and mobilise those not currently committed to their message, this seems to be the angle, not telling people working for the government that they're complicit in whatever Trump or Musk decided to do after the latest three seconds of thought if they don't quit.
Maybe Hasan should run, haha. Or be calling for that general strike.
I want to be transparent, I'm not going to pretend to be a leftist warrior, but this isn't all some concern troll either. Like,
I've already declared myself one of the cowards, and one has to think about their young children when it comes to things like striking, but I'd happily vote for a Sanders or a Corbyn. When it comes to the US, where income inequality is particularly prevalent, a hard kick to the left seems especially needed. This doesn't even need to be achieved from explicitly leftist theory either, like I heard something very interesting about how the unavailability of public transport in a lot of the US hits the poorest people the hardest, who are stuck relying on used cars that are more likely to break down. Better public transport would then be a lever that would remove one of the mechanisms through which poorer people are kept poor. And fuck yes tax the very rich harder to pay for that.
On March 04 2025 12:26 GreenHorizons wrote: But yeah, generally speaking, random middle class workers (along with people from every walk of life) will have to risk more than just their jobs to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US and globally. We should all be thankful we're only talking about participating in blogs, electoral planning, and refusing to forward a chain email instead of storming a beach in Normandy or digging a foxhole in Pokrovsk.
That's kinda what I'm getting at. Haven't a whole ton of your posts been about how that isn't enough? When you imply people should quit their job because Musk sent a dumb e-mail, you're (again) suggesting the time for talk in corners of the internet is long gone. Blogs and chain e-mails won't cut it, you yourself said this was all needed "yesterday". All GreenHorizons wants to say is "go try socialism locally" and when asked what that looks like says "using a socialist lens to realise that for example health care sucks", but okay, that was the past. LibHorizons is here now. What's LibHorizon's dot points of what a leftist Project 2025 might look like?
Seems like it'd do a lot more good than antagonising until political numpties like me are trolled into shitting up the thread.
primary Democrats that aren't showing sufficient will to fight/oppose the Trump admin's agenda a bit: Not every Democrat needs to be primaried. Those of us in safe blue states with Democrats unlikely to not clear the bar for not being primaried can direct resources toward places where the Democrats do need to be primaried. But we need a reasonably objective way to determine which is which.
Thus far Democrats and their supporters have failed to provide that. I'm open to hearing their ideas, but lacking that, I feel obligated as a progressive to present something that is better than nothing. Sooo...
Having a deliberate and executable plan (with a simple name like "project 2025" or "The New Deal" or whatever) and making support for it be the litmus test. You support it, no primary. You don't support it, you get primaried, and the party doesn't bail you out. The party should let Bernie, AOC, and The Squad lead the way in setting the terms, but they've all shown they can be very reasonable and show deference to the party generally. So it's not as if they would ignore the needs/preferences of the more centrist parts of the party entirely, or even to the degree they've been pushed to the periphery by said centrists.
(which is more than anyone else) I'd elaborate by saying: Beyond the basic outline of a plan of how to even get the opportunity to vote for people like Bernie I have provided, I presume you're asking what are Bernie/AOC/The Squad's positions I currently think should take center stage?
1. Medicare for all 2. Green New Deal 3. You can pick
There's a process to the electoral system in the US, and part of it is the primary. In order to have someone like Bernie to vote for in a general election against the Republican, they have to win the primary against the Democrats that "aren't willing to fight" sufficiently against the Trump administration's agenda.
But to know who those Democrats are we need some sort of fair/honest/objective metric. Since 0 libs/Dems/ilk provided anything resembling such a metric I provided the idea of making it essentially whether or not they supported the aforementioned 3 policies.
Winning such a primary also requires spending every possible second developing the opposition campaigns to any of these entrenched Democrats that are collaborating with or appeasing Trump/Musk.
Based on how aggressively the libs/Dems/ilk here are refusing to even try to work on how to improve the candidates Democrat voters have to choose from and/or ensure they have legitimate elections to engage in, I can't believe their rhetoric about wanting Democrats to be any better/more than they are being right now. Their inattentiveness is enabling the worst aspects of Democrats (and also the most fascist Republicans).
Unfortunately, no one here is actually interested in developing a plan among themselves (without me or anyone else they deem unworthy) or doing the bare minimum to fight fascism and pretty much everyone has made that explicitly clear in a variety of ways. To the degree that anyone else here even ostensibly thinks that is a worthy pursuit, they don't believe this is a place to do it.
They basically all believe this place (and political engagement generally afaict) is for whatever one wants to call what they spent all those posts/time doing instead (not entirely unreasonable hobbyist escapism basically).
The ‘plan’ as it were is to at the very least win elections to avoid Fascists coming to power. May not be a plan one likes outside of that specific goal but it is a pretty effective plan for that.
Could you be any more condescending? Fuck me if teen me had got pontificated to in the manner you do I’d have ended up a Neo-Nazi or something
What is your plan? Far as I can tell it’s heavily reliant on the power of magic
Tone policing aside. Most definitely. I filter out a lot of the petulant/emotional lashing out at me personally entirely to focus on the structural/systemic material analysis. That you believe your younger self would have went with "the socialist being mean made me a Nazi!" in reaction explains a lot though.
You patting yourself on the back and insulting others is painfully obvious to everyone left here. No one believes you are taking the high road or are the victim. You’ve only got one move and you use it too much.
On August 21 2026 11:48 GreenHorizons wrote: No. I'm somewhat meticulously laying out how/why the materialist analysis I'm posting is objectively/demonstrably true.
Well, you cut out basically all of my post just to say only this, so I think that conversation is a dead-end. I'll leave it to the room to decide if anything you've posted here, ever, has been a "meticulous" analysis, materialist or not, of anything. Let alone one that's so airtight it proves itself true.
It's precisely this intense level of delusion and cognitive dissonance that keeps trolling me into giving the forum cat more attention, though.
On August 21 2026 10:33 GreenHorizons wrote: The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
I am pointing out you contribute nothing of meaningful substance. Apparently your secret to organising, that demands we stop talking about anything else here because all else is unimportant, is "be an active member of whatever group is as left-leaning as you are". Okay, thanks for your fucking wisdom.
"Sealioning" is a good one, though, because it exposes precisely how you post here. Sealioning is when somebody unwelcome shows up to litigate something that others in the conversation are happy to hold as assumed truths, perhaps because they're offended by those truths or perhaps just to be a distraction. Like, that's literally the comic that kicked it off. "Men suck." "Yeah." "Well now, not all men suck, let's clarify precisely which men suck and how."
So, me musing out loud about what you think are good steps forward is "sealioning" to you, because I am not just assuming as truth that, for example, de-criminalising domestic violence is a good idea. Well, if you were having a nice deep conversation with a fellow revolutionary socialist about this, and I came along to "umm actually" you, you'd be well in your rights to say "go away sealion". When you hinted I was unwelcome in your blog for calling the old communist texts impenetrable and vague, I respected that and disappeared.
But you're not having that conversation here, are you? You're (supposedly) trying to get the rest of the forum on board, + Show Spoiler +
sometimes deliberately antagonising posters here as part of that mission, and yet when anyone tries to actually take things down to brass tacks with you, they either assume everything as truth that you do or they get nowhere. You can see it with WombaT on the previous page. "Say precisely this phrase and mean it or you can't speak with me". It's laughable.
I'll respond to the other part after.
No. I'm somewhat meticulously laying out how/why the materialist analysis I'm posting is objectively/demonstrably true.
Perhaps I'll address more when you finish?
On August 21 2026 11:11 WombaT wrote:
On August 21 2026 10:33 GreenHorizons wrote:
On August 21 2026 05:50 Turbovolver wrote:
On August 20 2026 23:01 GreenHorizons wrote: Of course I have [posted about what meaningful activism looks like] [here it is] "We need to work on that together while organizing with other like-minded people. I come at it through a Black Radical Tradition lens but the general tenets (the details of which being what we need to work on together among like-minded people since this is a bottom up project) of what needs to be done are pretty universal from what I understand.
-Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation
-Parallel Institutions/Mutual Aid Networks
-Non-Reformist Reforms
-Symbolic Defiance: Basically, publicly treating the government’s symbols, laws, or leaders as irrelevant or void
-Legal and Constitutional Challenges (My interpretation on this is probably a bit of an outlier but I would include appealing to the international community for help/condemnation of the US's illegitimate government in this)
Exactly how any individual can help most effectively necessarily varies based on a variety of factors, but those are the general things I believe we need to be working on. It's not a comprehensive list."
I did see that post before, but a bunch of its suggestions just read so vague to me chatGPT could have given me them, honestly.
"Don't obey the government, sometimes" Could mean anything. I would suggest the rightist econobros who spend days of their year on minimising their taxes are essentially doing this, too, for example.
"Make support systems that are parallel to taxes" Does sound actionable, but if you believe this now you are putting the responsibility on the Hasans of the world to use their small pockets of wealth to actually lift others up.
"Non-reformist reforms" As per wiki, these are reforms that "challenge existing power relations and pave the way for more revolutionary changes in the larger society necessary for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world". Sounds very circular, but if you dig into [the wiki page, lmao] apparently it's things like "don't criminalise domestic violence because police are bad, that's reformist reform". This also doesn't actually say how to meaningfully organise to make such reforms happen.
Now, GH, you might say "why on earth should it fall solely upon me to figure out all the details of how to herd a bunch of cats into actually doing these things?"
And you would be right about that, it shouldn't, and it wouldn't if you did not spend every other post here insisting that you are the only one doing anything that matters.
Considering they're basically the standard pillars of all effective organizing/political progress in US history (and anathema to dyhb/corporate/establishment/third way democrats) that shouldn't be remarkable
The rest of that post that you deleted and replaced with your deliberately malformed caricatures included more of the sort of details you seem to be sealioning for:
though it's not like I have the basic tenets of political organization locked in my vault (third way Democrats really did a number on people's understanding of politics).
For those ("vote blue no matter who" Democrat advocates) in the US though, being an active member of the party is an obvious and indisputable bare minimum.
Additionally, for those to the left of centrists that religiously defend the status quo, it would be being an active member/supporter of unions.
Left of that, it would be being an active member/supporter of DSA
Left of that, it's basically local/international orgs with socialist/anarchist tenets.
Internationally, it would be supporting those (and their local equivalents/allies) in the capacities one can.
Over a year ago I gave you the most detailed/effective plan for how Democrats and their supporters can organize/fight fascism (within their liberal framework) that's been provided here before or since.
On March 04 2025 15:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
On March 04 2025 15:08 Turbovolver wrote:
On March 04 2025 13:29 Zambrah wrote: Ive watched a few Hasan videos recently and I dont really think your assertion that he characterizes Russia as anything but the villain in their invasion of Ukraine is correct, in like, any capacity. I will say I always roll my eyes at leftists who instinctually feel the need to defend the Chinese government, but frankly Im not actually educated enough about whats happening their to say anything for certain about it, the Chinese government is certainly capable of doing terrible shit though so I hardly find myself wanting to defend them.
Well partially the problem is he says a lot of stupid stuff, and just a lot of stuff in general, so it won't always sit together coherently. I'm sure he's made plenty of comments casting Russia as the villain, but has he not also made plenty of comments essentially blaming the whole thing on NATO aka the US, which culminated in calling it US disinformation that Kyiv would be attacked? Apparently he also said Crimea was a justified invasion, although that one seems greyer to me and I don't wanna take my own turn talking too far out of pocket so I'll leave it at that.
To Hasan's credit, I found out looking into this that he raised $200k for Ukraine, which sort of talks louder than any "take" on the issue.
As for the American federal government not killing the slavers and stuff, I'm just gonna have to hard agree with him there assuming he did say that like you're saying he did. I agree. We didnt press our boots down nearly hard enough after the Civil War, we let too many scum fuck monsters not only live, but assume power. I don't really think that killing monstrous oppressors who engaged in one of, if not the most, brutal forms of slavery in human history is a tankie authoritarian type thing to do or believe.
I wasn't objecting to his language there for the US, I don't consider myself informed enough to comment on "how hard" the South was stomped down upon, or should have been. Slavery is fucked though, I can comfortably say that. My objection was to comparing Tibet (and especially Taiwan?!?!) to this. That's the tankie part, as you say, instinctually defending the Chinese government. It's especially weird to me because China's got similar (slightly higher) wealth inequality than a bunch of countries nobody is calling communist (say Australia or the UK), so you don't even get the supposed benefits of communism from the "communist" government.
Anyways, that's all academic. The reason for bringing up Hasan was that maybe the people who have acquired a lot of both financial and social influence off of... let's call it praxis... should be the ones escalating when shit is apparently hitting the fan. If the left is to mobilise, and mobilise those not currently committed to their message, this seems to be the angle, not telling people working for the government that they're complicit in whatever Trump or Musk decided to do after the latest three seconds of thought if they don't quit.
Maybe Hasan should run, haha. Or be calling for that general strike.
I want to be transparent, I'm not going to pretend to be a leftist warrior, but this isn't all some concern troll either. Like,
I've already declared myself one of the cowards, and one has to think about their young children when it comes to things like striking, but I'd happily vote for a Sanders or a Corbyn. When it comes to the US, where income inequality is particularly prevalent, a hard kick to the left seems especially needed. This doesn't even need to be achieved from explicitly leftist theory either, like I heard something very interesting about how the unavailability of public transport in a lot of the US hits the poorest people the hardest, who are stuck relying on used cars that are more likely to break down. Better public transport would then be a lever that would remove one of the mechanisms through which poorer people are kept poor. And fuck yes tax the very rich harder to pay for that.
On March 04 2025 12:26 GreenHorizons wrote: But yeah, generally speaking, random middle class workers (along with people from every walk of life) will have to risk more than just their jobs to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US and globally. We should all be thankful we're only talking about participating in blogs, electoral planning, and refusing to forward a chain email instead of storming a beach in Normandy or digging a foxhole in Pokrovsk.
That's kinda what I'm getting at. Haven't a whole ton of your posts been about how that isn't enough? When you imply people should quit their job because Musk sent a dumb e-mail, you're (again) suggesting the time for talk in corners of the internet is long gone. Blogs and chain e-mails won't cut it, you yourself said this was all needed "yesterday". All GreenHorizons wants to say is "go try socialism locally" and when asked what that looks like says "using a socialist lens to realise that for example health care sucks", but okay, that was the past. LibHorizons is here now. What's LibHorizon's dot points of what a leftist Project 2025 might look like?
Seems like it'd do a lot more good than antagonising until political numpties like me are trolled into shitting up the thread.
primary Democrats that aren't showing sufficient will to fight/oppose the Trump admin's agenda a bit: Not every Democrat needs to be primaried. Those of us in safe blue states with Democrats unlikely to not clear the bar for not being primaried can direct resources toward places where the Democrats do need to be primaried. But we need a reasonably objective way to determine which is which.
Thus far Democrats and their supporters have failed to provide that. I'm open to hearing their ideas, but lacking that, I feel obligated as a progressive to present something that is better than nothing. Sooo...
Having a deliberate and executable plan (with a simple name like "project 2025" or "The New Deal" or whatever) and making support for it be the litmus test. You support it, no primary. You don't support it, you get primaried, and the party doesn't bail you out. The party should let Bernie, AOC, and The Squad lead the way in setting the terms, but they've all shown they can be very reasonable and show deference to the party generally. So it's not as if they would ignore the needs/preferences of the more centrist parts of the party entirely, or even to the degree they've been pushed to the periphery by said centrists.
(which is more than anyone else) I'd elaborate by saying: Beyond the basic outline of a plan of how to even get the opportunity to vote for people like Bernie I have provided, I presume you're asking what are Bernie/AOC/The Squad's positions I currently think should take center stage?
1. Medicare for all 2. Green New Deal 3. You can pick
There's a process to the electoral system in the US, and part of it is the primary. In order to have someone like Bernie to vote for in a general election against the Republican, they have to win the primary against the Democrats that "aren't willing to fight" sufficiently against the Trump administration's agenda.
But to know who those Democrats are we need some sort of fair/honest/objective metric. Since 0 libs/Dems/ilk provided anything resembling such a metric I provided the idea of making it essentially whether or not they supported the aforementioned 3 policies.
Winning such a primary also requires spending every possible second developing the opposition campaigns to any of these entrenched Democrats that are collaborating with or appeasing Trump/Musk.
Based on how aggressively the libs/Dems/ilk here are refusing to even try to work on how to improve the candidates Democrat voters have to choose from and/or ensure they have legitimate elections to engage in, I can't believe their rhetoric about wanting Democrats to be any better/more than they are being right now. Their inattentiveness is enabling the worst aspects of Democrats (and also the most fascist Republicans).
Unfortunately, no one here is actually interested in developing a plan among themselves (without me or anyone else they deem unworthy) or doing the bare minimum to fight fascism and pretty much everyone has made that explicitly clear in a variety of ways. To the degree that anyone else here even ostensibly thinks that is a worthy pursuit, they don't believe this is a place to do it.
They basically all believe this place (and political engagement generally afaict) is for whatever one wants to call what they spent all those posts/time doing instead (not entirely unreasonable hobbyist escapism basically).
The ‘plan’ as it were is to at the very least win elections to avoid Fascists coming to power. May not be a plan one likes outside of that specific goal but it is a pretty effective plan for that.
Could you be any more condescending? Fuck me if teen me had got pontificated to in the manner you do I’d have ended up a Neo-Nazi or something
What is your plan? Far as I can tell it’s heavily reliant on the power of magic
Tone policing aside. Most definitely. I filter out a lot of the petulant/emotional lashing out at me personally entirely to focus on the structural/systemic material analysis. That you believe your younger self would have went with "the socialist being mean made me a Nazi!" in reaction explains a lot though.
Well, you cut out basically all of my post just to say only this+ Show Spoiler +
, so I think that conversation is a dead-end. I'll leave it to the room to decide if anything you've posted here, ever, has been a "meticulous" analysis, materialist or not, of anything. Let alone one that's so airtight it proves itself true.
It's precisely this intense level of delusion and cognitive dissonance that keeps trolling me into giving the forum cat more attention, though.
Unlike all the people that have complained about this, I keep the content and context there in spoiler. As opposed to the people complaining that frequently delete the context/content and substitute it with their own caricatures as you did and I pointed out to your dismay. You are now appealing to the in-group dynamics, throwing up your hands, and (ostensibly?) storming off.
Theres a serious conversation about how and why young men fall down into the alt right>neo nazi pipeline to be had. Things are going to get much worse in the next economic collapse but young men these days are in a dire place. There is just so much hate and anger in them and society is not giving them any help in dealing with it. They get taught that they're the bad person and they don't understand why.
On August 21 2026 13:29 GreenHorizons wrote: Unlike all the people that have complained about this, I keep the content and context there in spoiler. As opposed to the people complaining that frequently delete the context/content and substitute it with their own caricatures as you did and I pointed out to your dismay. You are now appealing to the in-group dynamics, throwing up your hands, and (ostensibly?) storming off.
Yep, it makes it way better when people reading along can click "open spoiler" to see for themselves just how much content you rudely ignore, lmao
Meanwhile, you say I'm showing the same rudeness by "substituting your words with my own caricatures" when I make the effort to understand your post and then decode it into something more generally interpretable. Of course you'd complain if I replace "Civil Disobedience" with "Don't obey the government" because here I am trying to have a forum conversation in a conversational tone and meanwhile you're over there saying These Special Capital Letter Magic Words Mean Something Very Specific and if You Would Just Read 800 Pages of Impenetrable Text and Agree with It You'd See that Just Mentioning the Words is Meticulous and Materialist Analysis
On August 21 2026 13:29 GreenHorizons wrote: Unlike all the people that have complained about this, I keep the content and context there in spoiler. As opposed to the people complaining that frequently delete the context/content and substitute it with their own caricatures as you did and I pointed out to your dismay. You are now appealing to the in-group dynamics, throwing up your hands, and (ostensibly?) storming off.
Yep, it makes it way better when people reading along can click "open spoiler" to see for themselves just how much content you rudely ignore, lmao
Meanwhile, you say I'm showing the same rudeness by "substituting your words with my own caricatures" when I make the effort to understand your post and then decode it into something more generally interpretable. Of course you'd complain if I replace "Civil Disobedience" with "Don't obey the government" because here I am trying to have a forum conversation in a conversational tone + Show Spoiler +
and meanwhile you're over there saying These Special Capital Letter Magic Words Mean Something Very Specific and if You Would Just Read 800 Pages of Impenetrable Text and Agree with It You'd See that Just Mentioning the Words is Meticulous and Materialist Analysis
"Civil disobedience" is the term most people in the US have familiarity with/learned/associate with the Civil Rights Movement. Which also references my systemic/structural/historical material analysis about how (what would become known as) establishment/third way Democrats shifted people away from the politics of material economic and social leverage (with things like civil disobedience) to a politics of preemptively conceding to electing the "lesser evil" in a futile and unending appeal to the "center-right". Your deliberately malformed caricature is intentionally meant to deprive a highly coordinated, strategically disciplined historical method of its actual meaning.
You also sarcastically mentioned my describing of joining political organizations as if in the 10+ years people have ostensibly been saying they'd like the Democrats' party to improve it has never occurred to them they need to join it to do that (or it has and they refused anyway). AFAICT none of the international posters are active members of political parties/orgs like I described either.
On August 21 2026 13:39 Sermokala wrote: Theres a serious conversation about how and why young men fall down into the alt right>neo nazi pipeline to be had. Things are going to get much worse in the next economic collapse but young men these days are in a dire place. There is just so much hate and anger in them and society is not giving them any help in dealing with it. They get taught that they're the bad person and they don't understand why.
The problem is almost all social movements nowadays are about anti-establishment more than anything else.
You have all these pro Palestine with lgbtq+ and feminism group, Australia and many have these same group with pro Aboriginals group etc.
Men don't belong to minority and hence they don't get support from these well funded organized group. What slogan can they feel comfortable to use?
On August 21 2026 14:22 GreenHorizons wrote: "Civil disobedience" is the term most people in the US have familiarity with/learned/associate with the Civil Rights Movement.
Perfect microcosm of what I'm talking about. One looks up the definition of "civil disobedience", they get
Civil disobedience is the active and professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders, or commands of a government (or any other authority).
So, what I said, and responded to.
But to you, as you say here, "Civil Disobedience" is Susan B. Anthony and it's Gandhi and it's MLK Jr and those people did good and therefore it is by definition good. The "analysis" is done, and ready to be invoked simply by invocation of the word (well, pair of words).
Now, I'm not even discrediting those historical datapoints' function as datapoints. I also accept that this is the US Politics Thread, and I'm an interloper, and if hearing those two words doesn't magically summon up a whole bunch of US-specific context that might be on me.
Either way, you're leaving the magic words to do the work.
- ANALYSIS -
Also, I am realising we have different definitions of "analysis". I accept that the word does get used in say, revolutionary socialist/communist circles to mean essentially "deciding if something is bad or good upon taking the tenets of socialism/communism to be true".
Like, to grab out a bit of your post you linked as an example:
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets.
I won't police whether this is or isn't "analysis", and it was a bit unfair and imprecise of me to snark about it before in that manner. After all, it'd be rich of me to assign too much special specific meaning to the word after suggesting you do similar and it does you no favours above.
I have a science background, so to me "analysis" typically begins with data/evidence. Now, your paragraph there doesn't have any appeals to data or evidence, but that doesn't mean we should immediately discard it. Indeed, analysis in purer strains of mathematics does often operate by simply seeing where a bunch of axioms might lead, generating a logic chain from some observed fact back to those axioms that an expert could explain. Now, when I read this paragraph, I'm full of "why?"s and "how do you know that's true?"s. You're the expert on it, you might be able to show that indeed, it's "demonstrably true" and there's an airtight chain that gets back to the axioms. I sort of doubt anything can be airtight once we leave the comfort of pure logic and mathematics, but also things don't have to be airtight to be meaningful, so that's a wash.
Here's the issue, though. The axioms that one could step back to from any sentence in your analysis are not widely accepted to be true.
Are they right or wrong? Who knows. But when we don't know, that's when we need to experiment. Does special relativity make me really uncomfortable, that one can make some argument about mirrors on a train and light travelling at a fixed speed to mathematically arrive at "therefore moving very fast makes you heavier and time slows down"? Do we use those calculations in space flight and GPS and hence know experimentally that they're true? Yes, much to my dismay.
So, where are the experiments here? If we don't have any "facts of surprise" that can cause one to be forced to update their mental model of reality to explain those new facts, then one's beliefs stay where they are. Hell, the sad thing is a lot of people are immune to the facts of surprise too, maybe we all are for our own select set of facts.
We can use the datapoints about civil disobedience as a good example, I would say. They provide evidence that civil disobedience can work to effect positive change. Alone, however, they are not proof that it will work in a given scenario, or even that it's most likely to work among the options. A complete analysis of this would require a comparison of the facets of civil disobedience efforts that were and were not successful, it would require datapoints of success/failure of competing strategies (say, electoralism), etc.
Now, I'm sure you're probably still reading all this as just "perfect as the enemy of the good" concern trolling or something, but my point isn't that we need a complete analysis to make the try. My point is if you want to convince others to also try, and they don't share your axioms, it's going to take more than telling people a few magic words and then yelling at them when they shrug and go back to discussing what they want to discuss.
- SARCASM -
You also sarcastically mentioned my describing of joining political organizations as if in the 10+ years people have ostensibly been saying they'd like the Democrats' party to improve it has never occurred to them they need to join it to do that (or it has and they refused anyway). AFAICT none of the international posters are active members of political parties/orgs like I described either.
Yes, I was sarcastic because you love to lord over everybody here as the only sensible person in the politics thread, but then your sage advice about how to organise was to "join an organisation". Again, the expectation wouldn't fall on you to have deep knowledge abut how to effectively effect political change if you didn't spend most every post here criticising how other people are trying (or not) to effect political change.
The people aren't activated because they're not convinced it will help them, that it's worth some use of their limited time/resources, that it's worth the risk of consequences. All you've got to sell them on the idea that it is, is stuff like "why are you doing anything else here?" or "believe what I believe before we can talk further about this".
They don't need you to explain that there exists organisations they can join. They need the why, and they need a why that doesn't depend on first accepting all your core beliefs unquestioned as axiom.
Your deliberately malformed caricature is intentionally meant to deprive a highly coordinated, strategically disciplined historical method of its actual meaning.
I don't know if I missed this on first read or you edited it in, but literally, no.
I took "civil disobedience" literally, and responded to it literally. I've already copped to the idea that it might be me missing US-specific context, and this is the US thread, so my bad.
But maybe instead of playing victim again, suffering the horrible fate of a snippy reply in the Snippiest Replies Mega-thread, you could use this opportunity to reflect on the fact that even with posters from the US, so many of these words that you revere and hold as so rich with meaning, are just a few words on a page to them.
For example, I wonder how well-established "non-reformist reforms" is as a concept outside of revolutionary socialism. If it's confined to there as I suspect, I wonder how many other posters in this thread even bothered to look it up like I did.
On August 21 2026 13:29 GreenHorizons wrote: Unlike all the people that have complained about this, I keep the content and context there in spoiler. As opposed to the people complaining that frequently delete the context/content and substitute it with their own caricatures as you did and I pointed out to your dismay. You are now appealing to the in-group dynamics, throwing up your hands, and (ostensibly?) storming off.
Yep, it makes it way better when people reading along can click "open spoiler" to see for themselves just how much content you rudely ignore, lmao
Meanwhile, you say I'm showing the same rudeness by "substituting your words with my own caricatures" when I make the effort to understand your post and then decode it into something more generally interpretable. Of course you'd complain if I replace "Civil Disobedience" with "Don't obey the government" because here I am trying to have a forum conversation in a conversational tone + Show Spoiler +
and meanwhile you're over there saying These Special Capital Letter Magic Words Mean Something Very Specific and if You Would Just Read 800 Pages of Impenetrable Text and Agree with It You'd See that Just Mentioning the Words is Meticulous and Materialist Analysis
"Civil disobedience" is the term most people in the US have familiarity with/learned/associate with the Civil Rights Movement. Which also references my systemic/structural/historical material analysis about how (what would become known as) establishment/third way Democrats shifted people away from the politics of material economic and social leverage (with things like civil disobedience) to a politics of preemptively conceding to electing the "lesser evil" in a futile and unending appeal to the "center-right". Your deliberately malformed caricature is intentionally meant to deprive a highly coordinated, strategically disciplined historical method of its actual meaning.
You also sarcastically mentioned my describing of joining political organizations as if in the 10+ years people have ostensibly been saying they'd like the Democrats' party to improve it has never occurred to them they need to join it to do that (or it has and they refused anyway). AFAICT none of the international posters are active members of political parties/orgs like I described either.
Perfect microcosm of what I'm talking about. One looks up the definition of "civil disobedience", they get
Civil disobedience is the active and professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders, or commands of a government (or any other authority).
So, what I said, and responded to.
But to you, as you say here, "Civil Disobedience" is Susan B. Anthony and it's Gandhi and it's MLK Jr and those people did good and therefore it is by definition good. The "analysis" is done, and ready to be invoked simply by invocation of the word (well, pair of words).
Now, I'm not even discrediting those historical datapoints' function as datapoints. I also accept that this is the US Politics Thread, and I'm an interloper, and if hearing those two words doesn't magically summon up a whole bunch of US-specific context that might be on me.
Either way, you're leaving the magic words to do the work.
Also, I am realising we have different definitions of "analysis". I accept that the word does get used in say, revolutionary socialist/communist circles to mean essentially "deciding if something is bad or good upon taking the tenets of socialism/communism to be true".
Like, to grab out a bit of your post you linked as an example:
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets.
I won't police whether this is or isn't "analysis", and it was a bit unfair and imprecise of me to snark about it before in that manner. After all, it'd be rich of me to assign too much special specific meaning to the word after suggesting you do similar and it does you no favours above.
I have a science background, so to me "analysis" typically begins with data/evidence. Now, your paragraph there doesn't have any appeals to data or evidence, but that doesn't mean we should immediately discard it. Indeed, analysis in purer strains of mathematics does often operate by simply seeing where a bunch of axioms might lead, generating a logic chain from some observed fact back to those axioms that an expert could explain. Now, when I read this paragraph, I'm full of "why?"s and "how do you know that's true?"s. You're the expert on it, you might be able to show that indeed, it's "demonstrably true" and there's an airtight chain that gets back to the axioms. I sort of doubt anything can be airtight once we leave the comfort of pure logic and mathematics, but also things don't have to be airtight to be meaningful, so that's a wash.
Here's the issue, though. The axioms that one could step back to from any sentence in your analysis are not widely accepted to be true.
Are they right or wrong? Who knows. But when we don't know, that's when we need to experiment. Does special relativity make me really uncomfortable, that one can make some argument about mirrors on a train and light travelling at a fixed speed to mathematically arrive at "therefore moving very fast makes you heavier and time slows down"? Do we use those calculations in space flight and GPS and hence know experimentally that they're true? Yes, much to my dismay.
So, where are the experiments here? If we don't have any "facts of surprise" that can cause one to be forced to update their mental model of reality to explain those new facts, then one's beliefs stay where they are. Hell, the sad thing is a lot of people are immune to the facts of surprise too, maybe we all are for our own select set of facts.
We can use the datapoints about civil disobedience as a good example, I would say. They provide evidence that civil disobedience can work to effect positive change. Alone, however, they are not proof that it will work in a given scenario, or even that it's most likely to work among the options. A complete analysis of this would require a comparison of the facets of civil disobedience efforts that were and were not successful, it would require datapoints of success/failure of competing strategies (say, electoralism), etc.
Now, I'm sure you're probably still reading all this as just "perfect as the enemy of the good" concern trolling or something, but my point isn't that we need a complete analysis to make the try.
to also try, and they don't share your axioms, it's going to take more than telling people a few magic words and then yelling at them when they shrug and go back to discussing what they want to discuss.
You also sarcastically mentioned my describing of joining political organizations as if in the 10+ years people have ostensibly been saying they'd like the Democrats' party to improve it has never occurred to them they need to join it to do that (or it has and they refused anyway). AFAICT none of the international posters are active members of political parties/orgs like I described either.
Yes, I was sarcastic because you love to lord over everybody here as the only sensible person in the politics thread, but then your sage advice about how to organise was to "join an organisation". Again, the expectation wouldn't fall on you to have deep knowledge abut how to effectively effect political change if you didn't spend most every post here criticising how other people are trying (or not) to effect political change.
The people aren't activated because they're not convinced it will help them, that it's worth some use of their limited time/resources, that it's worth the risk of consequences. All you've got to sell them on the idea that it is, is stuff like "why are you doing anything else here?" or "believe what I believe before we can talk further about this".
They don't need you to explain that there exists organisations they can join. They need the why, and they need a why that doesn't depend on first accepting all your core beliefs unquestioned as axiom.
That's a silly point and silly way to make it when the thread generally already established that convincing other posters isn't what anyone is here to do (I also said this when you recently *supposed it) and that trying would be a silly effort on a/this forum.
Yep, when pointed out that your methods aren't very persuasive, you say that you're not trying to persuade anyone.
Then you go back to using half your posts to tell others what they should be doing instead of what they are, and another half of the remaining half reminding posters here what you already told them.
But not because you wanted them to be convinced by that post you keep linking them, or anything! B-bakaaaaaaa!
On August 21 2026 13:39 Sermokala wrote: Theres a serious conversation about how and why young men fall down into the alt right>neo nazi pipeline to be had. Things are going to get much worse in the next economic collapse but young men these days are in a dire place. There is just so much hate and anger in them and society is not giving them any help in dealing with it. They get taught that they're the bad person and they don't understand why.
I'm convinced it's largely social media algorithms spamming Andrew Tate and similar garbage to kids when they're impressionable and their brains are still forming. I don't let my kids use any social media except youtube with a whitelist and they haven't been exposed to any misogyny or Nazism yet.
The only bit of shining light he is all those influencers audiences are shrinking rapidly at the moment. Whether that is the movement losing its steam or that Russia can’t afford to keep promoting them as hard is tough to say.
I do think that Trump being a complete failure at everything helps. You can only blame the others for so long when you control everything and it is getting worse not better.
I think it’s very telling that from Fox News to News max to political ads and influencers, none of the right is talking up any accomplishments. It’s still all “bad Dems”. And our posters who download their info from it are the same.
On August 21 2026 13:39 Sermokala wrote: Theres a serious conversation about how and why young men fall down into the alt right>neo nazi pipeline to be had. Things are going to get much worse in the next economic collapse but young men these days are in a dire place. There is just so much hate and anger in them and society is not giving them any help in dealing with it. They get taught that they're the bad person and they don't understand why.
I'm convinced it's largely social media algorithms spamming Andrew Tate and similar garbage to kids when they're impressionable and their brains are still forming. I don't let my kids use any social media except youtube with a whitelist and they haven't been exposed to any misogyny or Nazism yet.
I agree. Social media is a cancer on society. It is addictive and influences people to be the worst possible version of themselves.
EPT
