“Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let the outside world break it’s own head!”

“He’s right. As the good book says, if you spit in the air, it lands in your face.”

“Nonsense! You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.”

“…He’s right.”

“He’s right, and he’s right, they can’t both be right.”

“You know, you are also right.”

The car just slammed into a wall and it’s backing up and preparing to slam in into the same wall for the third time, and I’m yelling at the driver to turn left so it doesn’t hit the wall again, and your response is like, “Why are you criticizing the driver? You must be trying to distract them so the car crashes!”

Since you’re totally not saying that the democrats are above criticism, since that’s only me “twisting your words,” why don’t you tell me what the democrats did wrong that they could’ve done differently or could do differently in the future to avoid an outcome like this?

The US pulling out of the UN would allow them to pass all sorts of cool stuff, like recognizing and admitting Palestine and calling for a ceasefire, recognizing the universal rights of children, and condemning the far-right, all of which the US used its veto power to stop against overwhelming support on the other side.

Personally, I don’t draw a distinction between economic and social issues, because solidarity between oppressed groups is vital for building collective power necessary to confront capitalism economically and laws that make people more vulnerable also affect us economically. But admittedly there are people who do view them as separate issues.

This sort of thinking is why Democrats keep repeating the same mistakes. Any sort of criticism, even if it’s constructive, is treasonous. It’s always someone else’s fault.

Organizations either adapt or die. Rejection of criticism is a suicidal, accelerationist position. When people are so concerned with deflecting blame that they’re incapable of performing an honest, frank assessment of which strategies work and which don’t, then you are destined to fail no matter whether its a political party or anything else. If you’d prefer the Democrats keep doing things that don’t work because you’re afraid of them losing face, then your perspective is worthless.

That depends on what your goals, methodology, and material conditions are.

If you have static and predictable demand for something, like, everybody needs enough food to eat and a roof over their heads, then the state can effectively plan for and deliver on that. When you have something that just needs to be done for its own sake, then introducing a profit motive isn’t necessary or beneficial, and can lead to enshittification and cutting corners. There are also “natural monopolies,” like for example cable where it doesn’t really make sense to build another set of cable lines so the consumer is going to be left with one choice anyway, and it would be better for that to be run by the state where there’s at least some democratic input on how things are done. There’s also what’s called “externalities” where for example building a train line makes an area more accessible and brings value to the surrounding area, beyond what can be captured by the line itself - and conversely, there are negative externalities, such as a factory putting out smog or dumping chemicals, that will lower the value of the surrounding area but the factory won’t bear the brunt of the costs. There are also natural resources where the supply is inelastic so taxing them doesn’t make the economy less efficient, as the Nordic countries do with their oil.

There are situations where private industry can make sense. Like, say people want plushies made of different anime characters. There’s no real reason for the state to run that. There’s a low barrier to entry, and different companies can use different methods to predict which character will be in higher demand and whether people will want higher quality or lower price. Or with cars, they can design different models balancing all sorts of factors from safety to performance to aesthetics.

There’s also many cases where a state doesn’t have the freedom to implement whatever system they want. Some states are rich in natural resources, but they are owned by foreign corporations that have owned them since colonial times. If they try to nationalize them, or even tax them, it would be beneficial to the economy but it could lead to sanctions, coups, or invasions. But generally the people in the country don’t benefit from those situations and the relationship is parasitic.

Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism.

In the US, socialism has historically been shunned and not represented in the political sphere, to the point that the right started using “liberal” derisively and associated the term with socialism. Internationally, the term retains more of its original meaning, for example, in the UK the “Liberal Democrats,” are more like libertarians.

Liberals are generally conservative, meaning they support the status quo or gradual change. US “conservatives” are sometimes more accurately called reactionaries or regressives, because they don’t just want to preserve the status quo but to actively roll back progress that has already been made.

Because leftism is a very broad term, it’s difficult to define exactly what leftists believe in an uncontroversial way, but generally speaking leftists support radical change away from capitalism.

The democrats’ message this cycle was literally, “Trump doesn’t actually want to do anything about immigration, he just wants to campaign on it. We’re the ones who are actually going to build the wall, he’s all talk,” and now they’re all suprisied that they lost a bunch of Latino votes. Who could’ve predicted this?

When did any tankie claim that Trump was “the sane one?”

Also calling for a ceasefire while unconditionally arming Israel is like telling a mass shooter you disapprove of what they’re doing while you hand them another clip.

• Obviously, the main reason for record turnout in 2020 was COVID.

• Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn’t even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was “untested” to put it mildly.

• The economic situation was different.

• Regardless of to what degree he was responsible, under Biden the US got entangled in foreign conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.

• It’s not that there are 10 million commies that liked Biden but not Harris, it’s that us commies believe that you can win over the working class by appealing to material interests.

• Biden didn’t campaign with fucking Dick Cheney

Oh, Iranian history is a special interest of mine, if you express the slightest interest in it…

The roots of it go back to the 1800’s, when the Qajar dynasty were trying to maintain exorbitant lifestyles on the backs of an extremely poor and undeveloped country, so their solution, rather than developing the economy to increase long-term tax revenue, was instead to basically hold clearance sales of the entire country. The Reuter concession is an almost unbelievable example of it. They tried to sell essentially the entire country’s economy to the guy who founded Reuters news: trains, trams, roads, forests, mines, canals, irrigation systems, telegraph systems, mills, factories, workshops, and even the national bank - in exchange for cash in the shah’s private bank account. It was so bad that even the colonial powers of Britain and Russia said it was too much and wouldn’t allow it.

The people were so pissed off about this sort of behavior that after they sold off tobacco rights to the British in 1890, there was a widespread boycott of tobacco, possibly the most successful boycott in history encompassing people across all of society, with a major religious leader even issuing a fatwa against violating the boycott, and going all the way up to women in the shah’s own harem participating in it, forcing the shah to break the deal. The success of this mass action, combined with dissatisfaction with the shah selling out the country, led people to rise up in protest and start demanding things like a constitution and parliament. They even got the shah to sign off on it, and they brought in an American named Morgan Shuster to reform the tax code and root out loopholes and corruption. But when the shah died, his successor had other ideas, and he called in Britain and Russia, who were making quite a bit of money off loopholes and corruption, to come in and shell parliament.

Fast forward to WWI. Once again backed by Britain and Russia, the Ottomans invade Iran, and conduct the Armenian genocide. At the same time, there’s a major famine, and the Spanish Flu is running rampant. When the dust settles, the old dynasty is gone, and a new shah comes to power, backed by Britain: Reza Shah Pahlavi. He attempted to push back against the oil deal but the British stonewalled him, and he lasted until WWII, when the Allies invaded to establish a strategic supply line between Britain and the USSR and to ensure Iranian oil didn’t end up in the Nazi’s hands instead of theirs. Afterwards, Britain forced him to abdicate and put his son in power, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The new shah also attempted to renegotiate the oil deal, and again was stonewalled. British advisors hand-picked prime ministers for the shah to appoint, in the mostly powerless parliament, but even then they stonewalled their own prime ministers when they attempted to negotiate. Public sentiment grew increasingly heated, and the advisors sent word back that the situation was reaching a boiling point, but still the British wouldn’t move an inch. Finally, the shah became more afraid of a revolution than he was of the British, and he appointed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister, with a huge wave of popular support calling for nationalization of the industry.

Still, Mossadegh attempted to negotiate, and the US under Truman attempted to intervene as a mediator to prevent a crisis. But the Iranians had been struggling against British colonialism for a very long time, and the British still wouldn’t budge. The oil industry was nationalized, and the British responded with a naval blockade that shut down Iran’s economy and caused rampant poverty. Churchill approached Truman asking him to use the newly formed CIA to oust Mossadegh, and Truman told him to go to hell, that Mossadegh was a legitimate democratic leader and that the CIA was supposed to be about stopping communism not enforcing colonialism, and that the British brought this on themselves. There was no real animosity between Iran and America on either side at this point, the Iranians saw America as well-intentioned but naive, while Americans saw Iran as sympathetic but stubborn.

But Truman was replaced by Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was not acquainted with the background of the conflict, and Churchill and Alan Dulles were both pushing him to do it. Churchill changed tacts from talking about protecting Britain’s property to warning that Mossadegh might end up aligning with the USSR, and also saying that he wouldn’t support the formation of NATO or the Korean War unless Eisenhower gave him Iran. So he signed off on it.

They took over nearly every media outlet in the country, they bribed anyone who would take it, from politicians to vote counters to religious leaders, the hired protesters to march against the government and false flag “pro-government” protesters to go around wrecking things. Just before the coup, the American ambassador called up Mossadegh and told him a false story, that he was worried he would have to shut down the embassy because Mossadegh’s supporters kept calling to give death threats, even to children at the embassy. Moved by the story, and eager to improve relations with the US, Mossadegh sent out a radio announcement telling all of his supporters to stay home and stop causing trouble. That’s when the CIA made its move and deposed him, and no one was there to come to his aid.

They covered up their involvement for decades, until it was far enough back in history that people wouldn’t care that they could finally admit it. That was the first democratic government they overthrew, and once the precedent had been set, they repeated around the world, Iran on behalf of BP, Guatemala on behalf of Chiquita, all across South America in Operation Condor, and so many more.

Oh god, apologism for the fascist shah, take it back to Reddit.

The the government Iran had in the 70’s was the result of a CIA coup to oust the progressive leader Mohammad Mossadegh who became prime minister with overwhelming popular support and reclaimed control of Iran’s oil from the British colonizers who had made an extremely exploitative deal with a different authoritarian dynasty before the country had any form of democracy - a deal, which despite being extremely favorable to them, they still consistently broke, lying about how much oil they were taking. This coup crushed Iran’s fledgling democratic movement and reforms, and the shah proceeded to use secret police to hunt down and exterminate his political opponents, primarily leftists. In order to give the country the appearance of modernization, he banned women from wearing traditional religious garb. In other words, even then the government was still controlling how women dressed. This shit is falling for decades old propaganda from an awful government.

Because the shah was so successful in suppressing and killing leftists, when he fell out of favor as a Western puppet and lost foreign support, guess which faction remained that had the power to take advantage of the situation? The Islamic fundamentalists. The modern Iranian state didn’t just spring up from nowhere, it came about as a result of the actions of the CIA and the shah.

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First of all I live in Illinois, so my vote doesn’t matter at all. Second, Harris would’ve needed a lot more that 0.3% to win, she lost PA by a solid 2.0%. Even if you do the unrealistic thing y’all do of adding third party votes to your candidate’s total, you’re not going to have enough to win.

But none of that is really relevant. The people who helped Trump win were the people who voted for him. I didn’t help either candidate win because I didn’t vote for either candidate. I helped Kamala exactly as much as I helped Trump.

I don’t really have an interest in continuing this purely semantic argument where I consider myself to be objectively correct about the meaning of terminology.

So we’re back to this idea that there is fundamentally no way for me to hold my position or defend it without you calling it bad faith and accusing me of being a secret Republican, regardless of anything I say or don’t say. Any disagreement, any criticism of Harris or Biden whatsoever, is a “Republican talking point,” and I’m expected to craft this completely delusional worldview where I ignore all their faults rather than acknowledging reality.

Completely ridiculous.

“Insane leaps of mental gymnasics,” like, “Doing nothing has no impact on the election.”

As opposed to “logic,” like, “Doing nothing is a +0 which is neither an increase nor a decrease except also it is a decrease because it’s not an increase and not increasing is the same as decreasing because zero doesn’t exist.”

Tell you what, if doing nothing counts as helping someone, then rest assured that I’ll give Kamala my “help.”

Could’ve said that from the start! You didn’t have to die on this hill.

I don’t especially want to continue the conversation into that with you after it took 20 comments of you slinging insults and shit over something that you now say doesn’t matter to get here. If I have to pull teeth over something so simple, obvious, and relatively unimportant then I see no sense in discussing other stuff.

It’s not as if the terms I was insisting on would make it impossible to criticize my position. There’s no reason you couldn’t have accepted those terms to start and continued the debate.

It doesn’t matter how many times you repeat it, you’ll still be as wrong as saying that I’m draining a pool by standing next to it with an empty hose. It’s simply not how language works and you can twist words around and tell me otherwise a thousand times, and it just means you’ll be dead wrong a thousand times.

“At fault for not fighting something” you can argue that, sure. “Benefiting,” or “helping” you cannot. There is no argument, it’s just definitionally false.

Letting the water evaporate is not the same as causing the water to evaporate. Letting Trump win (if he will) is not the same as causing Trump to win or helping him win. The baseline is doing nothing. If I did not exist, then the odds would be the same. Therefore I cannot be said to be helping Trump. That’s just not how language works. Otherwise you could just as easily say that I’m helping Kamala by not voting for Trump, at which is a clear contradiction.

“You’re helping Trump compared to if you had voted Kamala?” Fine. “You’re helping Trump?” False. That is how it is and no amount of saying otherwise or trying to play games with language is going to change it.