InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided]

Do you think the Iranian leadership is always correct and have never made mistakes?

There are a number of loud commenters here who do think exactly that. And anyone who questions the wisdom of some of the choices made by the IRGC is just a “doomer ultraleftist.” They think the only analysis that has any legitimacy is analysis that assumes it as a foregone conclusion that Iran knows with omniscient power what the best course of action is. If you disagree, you’re just a fool western armchair general, and you have to be over there literally fighting if you want to have any ground to disagree. Nearly everything they say about “doomers” could be said just as reasonably about them, but applied to their non-materialist rose colored glasses regarding their belief that anti-imperialist states are incapable of mistakes or bad tactical decisions.

I almost exclusively lurk rather than comment, but I don’t know why much of the rest of the newsmega seems to go along with it so easily. It’s a shame because on several broader issues, I tend to agree with them more than the one or two bold commenters here who are willing to put up with their petty name-calling and try to engage with them and argue against their Panglossian commentary. The constant “you’re just a doomer” and “you have no valid concerns or thoughts because you are just a lib/ultraleftist westerner” is beyond off-putting and it makes it harder for me to take the rest of their analysis seriously. For all their complaints of how much “doomerism” there supposedly is here, it’s their own pettiness that really drags down the quality of discussion and analysis in the newsmega. It’s all the more ironic when someone posts a comment they they don’t like (which is anything slightly critical of any of the choices Iran has made) and they pull out the “what, you think you know any better you weak minded westerner?” line, because it’s practically certain that there are elements within the Iranian leadership structure that have similar concerns and probably disagreed with a number of the decisions that were ultimately made.

There is plenty more I could say, but I feel like what’s the point when a top level comment getting scores of upvotes is equating a number of people here with literal Zionists just because they have discussed fears that Iran’s agreement to the ceasefire may have been miscalculation.

edit: swapped out a common but potentially ableist word for an alternative.

Well said. To add to that, as for domestication specifically, many aphids are litetally domesticated by ants. But we would never say that those aphids are not found in the wilderness.

Agriculture and domestication are practices undertaken by certain ant species and colonies. These ants use agricultural methods and are known as one of the few animal groups, along with Homo sapiens, to have achieved the level of eusociality necessary to practice agriculture. It is estimated that ants began this practice at least 50 million years ago. The domestication of plant, fungus, and animal species by ants is well documented.

Exactly this. Not only did it essentially wipe out entire populations and even drastically alter the course of civilizations (repeatedly), it has not “disappeared.” It is still endemic in mammalian (mostly rodent+flea) populations in some areas including in the US. Every year there are people who get infected with it. I think it’s an average of like 7 people per year in the US, but as usual, countries more heavily exploited by the US and its vassals get it worse. Hundreds of cases per year in DRC for example. It’s hasn’t “disappeared,” this antivaxxer nitwit just doesn’t know about it because modern medicine has made it treatable and precluded its ability to spread as it did in previous centuries.

It’s obviously not mandatory or anything, but posting an archive link is always a nice thing to do even when the news site you’re posting isn’t paywalled or blocked. For one thing, if the article gets changed or removed, it will still be there on the archive site, in the form it was when the snapshot was taken. It also doesn’t give that site traffic when people reading your post click through to read the article, and usually that’s good, considering the profiteering of mainstream news sites is not something leftists like to contribute to. Those MSM sites also can’t track people who see the archived version instead of going to their site. And finally, although sometimes some ads will get archived along with the snapshot of the news site, generally it makes it a lot better for folks who don’t use an adblocker, as it cuts down if not eliminates intrusive ads.

So yeah, no big deal, but it can be a helpful, considerate thing to do for future reference. I’m only explaining all this because you asked the person requesting the archive link what they meant.

It’s not wrong to say that population is the driving problem.

Yes it IS wrong. Population is NOT the driving problem, the capitalist mode of production is the driving problem.

• literal straight facts presented in OP
• user arrives and starts speaking of foreign propagandists arriving
• without missing a beat, same user starts repeating blatant propaganda that doesn’t even address facts stated in OP but amounts to “bad country no freedoms!”

It never fails, if you post something positive about any of the countries on the “bad-guy” list of enemies of the US, you’ll get these pathetic fed bots and/or dronies swarming in, whinging and bleating and stinking up the thread with US state department talking points, western state funded media links, or other such obvious propaganda. It’s tiresome and embarrassing to watch.

not every communist is a strict Stalinist unwilling to compromise.

There is a vanishingly small, insignificant number of those. What people call “Stalinists” are just Marxist Leninists, most of whom don’t demonize Stalin as this great evil, but as a an imperfect but still exceptionally good leader that presided over one of if not the greatest mass improvements in the quality of human life in history. There is nothing there that one should be “willing to compromise” on aside from that vanishingly insignificant number who deify him. When you say something along the lines of “those weird uncompromising ‘Stalinists’ are bad and gross, but I know there are still lots of good commies who aren’t like that!” you’re still just perpetuating the kind of simplistic, naive, children’s story book (Animal Farm) level of red scare cliches.

As for maintaining the term as a “critique” of the historical context it has since been divorced from, I find that highly suspect as well. I doubt you will find any Marxist Leninist who would argue that critique is not incredibly important, but coining and using a pejorative term as a thought-terminating cliche is hardly a valid form of critique. That doesn’t mean no one ever should use derisive terms for their ideological enemies, only that it’s a significant error to confuse that for critique. And this doesn’t even begin to go into the general consensus now of Marxist Leninists that those who sided with the Soviet Union for crushing a fascist-led uprising in Hungary in 1956 were, while not above critique, correct in their support, with the British communists who coined the term tankie ultimately the ones proven to have had the flawed analysis, siding with imperialists.

This is just funny. There are so so many more western anarchist teens (and people in their early 20s) than there are western Marxist-Leninist teens in no small part because it is so much more socially acceptable to label oneself an anarchist than a communist. And you’re saying these ML channels which only very recently got any traction at all, and are still dwarfed by the anarchist-acceptable Breadtube channels, are what all the anticapitalist cool kids are flocking to? The first one, I’ve never even heard of, wow_mao. Then you list Hakim and Yugopnik, and say “most notably thedeprogram” - Yugopnik and Hakim, along with one other, are The Deprogram podcast - you’re bulking out your list by naming the same people multiple times. And Bad Empanada?? Does he even consider himself an ML? Doesn’t matter, he is notoriously anti-AES which is the biggest point of disagreement here, as seen by 90% of the comments in this very thread and OP’s initial framing of their issues with “tankies.” Bad Empanada is on your side when it comes to China, DPRK, etc.

I haven’t paid attention to any of the youtube channels or podcasts for a couple years, but if Marxist-Leninist channels like The Deprogram are now gaining real popularity among the western leftist youth, then that is actually awesome, but I just cannot believe that they have anywhere near the same scale of viewers or listeners as the Breadtube crowd did who nearly all called themselves anarchist. I should also say I’m in my 40’s and went through the young anarchism phase for years before learning more through much reading, study, experience, and organizing, arriving at Marxism-Leninism all long before any of these people uploaded their first video.

Coming back to the popularity of anarchism vs Marxism-Leninism among the youth, I’m just going to paste something I wrote months ago in a thread that was concerned about the failure of MLism to match the popularity of anarchism for young people in the west:

I wouldn’t say that the anarchists are succeeding where ML’s are failing, rather it takes more steps to deprogram oneself and end up at Marxism-Leninism than it does to end up at an immature version of anarchism. So it is almost an inevitability that there will be more young anarchists, since our material circumstances in the west make it easier to start a leftward political journey from a place where you still hate the west’s enemies.

To put it another way, in my experience there is a typical and understandable order to the brainworm de-worming process. Some propaganda goes deeper and is more tenacious due to it’s prevalence even as “common knowledge.” For example, it is easy to hate the government since that is acceptable and normalized across the political spectrum (see the old rightists and their railing against big gubmint). So it’s also an easy and still socially acceptable step to then say “I hate all governments; governments are bad in principle!” Even libs love the “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” canard.

For a budding western leftist who is beginning to see the horrors and atrocities of their own ruling class, usually via the power of the state (the government), it only takes a relatively small step to apply their criticisms across the board to say that all states are bad, and voila, then label themselves anarchist. They are encouraged to do that sometimes even by their enemies, people with power for obvious reasons: “Yeah, the US sucks and is evil, but so is China. In fact China is even worse because it holds all the power of their corporations too!” And that’s what I mean by the more tenacious propaganda that they aren’t educated or experienced enough yet to deprogram themselves from. It’s very similar to why anti-imperialism in particular is such a huge stumbling block for so many too. “Everyone knows Stalin was evil. It’s common knowledge and denying that he killed a bajillion people is just as bad as the neo-Nazis who downplay Hitler’s atrocities! Everyone knows the Soviet Union was cruel totalitarian dictatorship where all the people were just as bad as before their revolution. Communism always leads to those kind of dictatorships. It’s been tried and we always see the horrible results! We don’t want any part of that!”

In this weird ass fucking societal milieu that includes such ridiculous ideologies as right-libertarianism aka “anarcho-capitalists” it is still a relatively socially safe position to take an anarchist stance. And they still don’t have to deeply analyze the proverbial water they’re swimming in as fish.

A couple things I do want to note here… Firstly, I don’t want this to come across as sectarian. In what I’ve been saying about anarchists in this comment, I’m talking about the young, still politically underdeveloped people who are in the early stages of their exposure to leftism and who glom onto anarchism without having really delved into its theory, or have done so very selectively. Secondly, I phrased it up above as “in my experience” because this is what I’ve seen happen with other, younger people, so I know what you are talking about. But I also mean it in that it’s the kind of progression I went through myself, only it was further back because I’m older. I don’t think this more-young-anarchists-than-ML’s situation is completely new to this most recent generation, as there were similar or at least analogous processes that older leftists had to go through as well before arriving at a genuinely Leninist political ideology.

Either way, we do have work to do as ML’s to help guide younger generations of leftists towards deeper, more materialist and more dialectically sound analyses and understanding of the mechanisms of capital and the world.

I’m curious (in a genuine, friendly way) what you read that led you to anarchism over Marxism-Leninism. Was it a theoretical text that reverberated particularly well with you, historical texts that you felt made anarchism a more justifiable position than MLism, something else entirely?

Because for me, like others have answered, it was reading more that led me from identifying as an anarchist to (to me, personally) recognizing MLism as far more theoretically sound and realistic. And to answer my own question, it was mostly reading Lenin that did this for me, but plenty of others helped, from more contemporary advocates like Michael Parenti and Vijay Prashad to actually reading and contemplating the works of the big bad Stalin and Mao themselves.

I still am strongly tied to an anarchist mindset, despite seeing MLism as simply the factually correct position. For example, as someone else (u/axont) in this thread mentioned one difference in irl organizing she’s noticed with both MLs and anarchists is that the latter tends to be more willing to do illegal stuff - let’s just say I am far more likely to side with anarchists in situations where that more immediate tactical question might come up. I’m also a bit more sympathetic to so-called adventurism, given the current political climate and lack of organized left in the west, than most of my ML comrades are.

Still, when it comes to a broader understanding of history, theory, long term tactics, and the support of international AES projects, I can’t come to any other conclusion than that Marxism-Leninism is simply a more accurate lens to see the world through than anarchism is, more theoretically robust as well as being proven a more successful methodology for revolution. And given the phrasing OP used, I also don’t hold the frankly naive and simplistic (not to mention convenient for our bourgeois enemies) view of AES = bad and “authoritarian.”

This was before my time though, so someone who has lived through it could give you better insight.

You gave a pretty thorough explanation and background, I appreciate it.

A big thanks for this list from me too.

Edit: The first result I got for the second band, Наутилус Помпилиус (Nautilus Pompilius) https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=LACAhkdGq4c is an extremely heavy handed anticommunist video, including English-translated lyrics. Do you happen to know if those are accurately translated? Was Nautilus Pompilius known to be an anti-Soviet band?

Thank you!
It looks like jumble.top has a pirate feed for that podcast, so I’ll subscribe to that and find it from there.

Do you happen to have on hand any article or even blog post or something that goes into detail about NYCrimes’ evil stance on trans women? I have an older liberal (but very pro-LGBTQ for a boomer lib) relative who thinks it’s the pinnacle of journalism and I’m going to start trying to convince her of what a wretched fascist-abetting rag they are.

That could literally be an alternate title for the bingo card, and is almost certainly the motivation for like 90% of the people who wish plants were conscious. And even if their flawed logic were true, it’s just more testament to how morally bankrupt they are. Because all they’re saying is “since we might be causing suffering on an incomprehensibly massive scale in this hypothetical case, that means it’s perfectly fine to also keep causing suffering on an incomprehensibly massive scale in this other case where it for sure is happening undeniably. Gotcha, vegan!”

The picture is definitely just some artist’s conception, but it’s not claimed to be a photo or meant to be anything other than what it is, an artist’s conception. You’re right that for the most part, a star is needed for aurora, at least for the kind of aurora we have on Earth since it depends on the solar wind interacting with the planet’s magnetic field. But if there is anything that can be said about what we’ve discovered astronomically in the last century or so it’s that there are always exceptions to every supposed rule.

The authors attribute the auroras to SIMP-0136’s magnetic field being vastly more powerful than Jupiter’s (750 times stronger according to a previous study). Electrons (presumably stripped from atoms by internal processes) would flow with the field and hit atmospheric molecules fast enough to make them glow, they conclude.

• How Does Rogue Planet SIMP-0136 Have Auroras When It Has No Stellar Wind?

Aside from the aurora part though, none of this is exceptional or rare (and maybe even the aurora part isn’t rare either). Rogue planets are probably extremely common, possibly even more common than planets that are gravitationally bound in a star system. And objects of this size, which is really around where we’d start calling it a brown dwarf, are also very common, with more of them than there are main sequence stars.

Yeah, a lot of the historical references and descriptions were good, but then when it got to the present day, essentially the “what is to be done” section, it just flopped hard. Paraphrasing: “a coalition of blue states can just ignore the federal government and do their own thing, boom, fascism defeated.” It’s not actually discussing anything about how fascism can actually be defeated even though the whole first half of it sounds like it’s supposed to be a set up to do just that.

Instead it descends into ridiculous cringe:

California could request Canadian peacekeepers for “election security.” New York could invite European observers for “financial transparency.” Make it embarrassing. Make America’s collapse visible to the world. Force the international community to pick sides.

This is your solution? That’s how fascism is defeated? Any respect I may have built up for the author when they were accurately talking about how fascists slither their way into power using the liberal* political apparatus was nullified by this point.
*(even though the author always insisted on calling the fascist appeasers “conservative” at every turn rather than using the more appropriate word “liberal”)

Every solution is just another form of “blue states should just pretend there is no federal government,” even the last one which is titled “International Intervention” but that just means making all the other totally-not-fascist liberal “democracies” play ball with the new blue coalition instead of the liberal democracy that elected Trump.

No, the UN can’t invade America. But they can isolate it. Sanctions work. Ask Russia.

Ask Russia? The country whose economy improved after “the mother of all sanctions” were imposed on it? Russia, who is indisputably winning the conflict that those sanctions were supposed to stop, all while Russia’s economic ties with other enemies of the US have grown and blossomed? How about asking Cuba if sanctions work. Yeah, they work to starve the population and cause civilian immiseration and death, they don’t and never have worked to depose rulers. This doofus has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.

And even with the historical stuff, it left a big fucking gaping hole where the people and organizations that DID successfully fight fascism should have been. But nope, not even a mention. Clearly Christopher didn’t want to admit that communism IS the cure to fascism, theoretically and in practice, historically and right now. This essay is just more cringe liberal drivel.

You ever fuckin’ seen a homeless person? How about the miles and miles of tents along stretches of highways just outside the cities? That’s one of many other forms of political violence. Remember how we stopped counting the death toll from Covid and were all told to get back to work? You know how many “incarcerated” “prisoners” we have doing slave labor? GTFO with your “have to be chronically online to see any political violence” bullshit. You’re fucking steeped in it but you’re too blind to see even what’s right in front of you, even if it’s a boot your tongue is apparently stuck to.

Are you genuinely that ignorant of reality, or is it a willful ignorance thing?

They’re fighting because they woke up to an invasion.

lol, right the Ukrainian nazi coup regime just suddenly woke up one day and that mean ol Putler was invadin! Ukraine hadn’t been running an ethnic cleansing campaign in the east, bombing and murdering civilians who identified as Russian speakers for years. Nothing like that. The “invasion” just happened out of nowhere!

How did this absurd cringe comment even get 11 upvotes? Must be a lot of dipshit libs who think history started in February of 2022 still lurking around here.

lol, “brigade”? What do you think a “brigade” is? When a person sees a post in their feed and clicks on it? Because that’s the only “brigading” I partook in. Even with all that aside, you still couldn’t tell a single person in this so-called “brigade” what the fuck you’re even talking about. Your refusal to explain your bullshit take has nothing to do with who you’re talking to, it is entirely because you did just pull it out of your ass with absolutely nothing substantial to back it up but are too chickenshit to admit that fact.