it is known, the second hamas charter accepts the 1967 borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter

pretty sure they can buy US weapons and tech through Israel that would otherwise be prohibited from getting. I also think that the whole support for a 2 state solution thing was an artifact of the six day war and a consensus of the UN mediated peace process that has been nearly every UN members “official” line (except for maybe Israel, Iran and a few others) since then, and is also the position held by Hamas

Good thing I allegedly could pirate everything they make

I think the a major component of the blockade is that one they begin to capture or burn ships, the insurance rate goes way up. Once the ships become even slightly more costly the margins go down. Once it is even possibly unprofitable to use the straight, they will have effectively created a blockade.

One thing that will never seem to leave my head is that I had read that the current mountain tops of the Appalachians are actually the original valleys of the mountain range. The mountains were so old and large that the valleys of todays Appalachian’s were the footprint of what was once maybe the largest mountain range earth has seen

definitely aimed at you, but also edifying for anyone who might think the USA was solidly on the side of good during the war. The US entered the war in 41, but they refused Stalin’s repeated requests to open a second front against Germany. They went to north africa first and then italy, waiting until the German eastern front had nearly collapsed before landing in Normandy. The US was essentially racing against the red army, trying to prevent the soviet union from liberating the entirety of europe under the banner of liberation for humankind. Once the US reached Germany and peace began, the US almost immediately formed NATO and appointed Nazi war criminals into its upper ranks while putting nazi war ciminals in charge of west germany. The yankee government is bad and always has been. throughout all of its history it only has made good choices when it has been dragged kicking and screaming.

There is no moral or legal justification for what Israel is doing right now. And the Palestinian people have a legal and moral right to resist their occupation by whatever means they decide, according to the UN charter and international law. Israel has turned Gaza into an open air concentration camp. It is one of the most densely populated place on earth and half of its population are children. Israel has laid a complete siege to Gaza for 17 years, sniping civilians and paramedics from towers and bombing it every few years. It forcibly relocated people there and it controls nearly everything about Gaza, its water, food and electricity. The conditions that are there are Israel’s fault, and Israel is openly committing an ethnic cleansing with US support. Israel blames Hamas, but Israel literally funded Hamas and tried its best to dismantle every other political organization in the Palestinian resistance. A leaked cabal to the US even said that they prefer Hamas win’s so that they can level collective punishment on all of Gaza by labeling it a hostile state.

I always hear people in the US musing how they couldn’t imagine sitting idly by while the Holocaust happened in WW2, but now I hear those same people doing mental gymnastics to excuse some of the most horrible atrocities live on tv.

Curtis has made some creative narratives in his documentaries that provide a sometimes useful and interesting way to present a critical perspective of history, for liberals who are becoming more radical it can be refreshing and thought-provoking. But the moment Curtis speaks about the left and historical/current examples of socialist projects, it is clear that he has anticommunist boomer baby-brainrot. His analysis of the Soviet Union, China, or even more amorphous left social movements is facile and often factually wrong.

It is clear he feels he knows all about socialism, but has never done the reading. After I became radicalized and started reading and organizing, revisiting his works is painful and irritating. Ultimately, it serves some of the very problems he poses in his critique, where he rejects an alternative to the system as it exists and forms a narrative that offers no solutions and only concludes with, “oh, dear!” He has nothing to offer the left, or working class people and the world generally, because he uses all of his creative energy to ultimately undermine the liberation of mankind.

Fauci lied about the effectiveness of masks to preserve supply and turned half the US into anti-maskers, even though there’s now a shitton of masks (with N-95s still being expensive instead of free like they should be).

I think it is worse than that, in some ways. It is why I don’t really blame people for being anti-mask, or even mask ambivalent, even though a lot of them are just petit bourgeois and selfishly looking for their personal failings to be somehow vindicating. Fauci said that he was lying, and that it was to preserve masks for healthcare workers. But it is really unclear to me that he wasn’t just very completely wrong and saying that he lied in order to maintain a level of credibility. So, either way he is untrustworthy. People were right to be skeptical of his advice, but liberals ignored this and insisted on him being infallible. Questioning Fauci became its own political statement, and liberals identified it as reactionary.

But, the reality is that Fauci was highly inept and political and identifying his advice with “science” removed the capacity for the CDC to ever influence public behavior short of physical violence. If 50% of the country now looks at the CDC in an oppositional way, it is a collapse of credibility that renders the institution itself meaningless. It is the absolute worst outcome from a public health perspective, but another 50% of people still act as though he is good. They aren’t even bothered to see the damage it did and instead blame mostly working class people for being reactionary (when in reality, reactionaries were simply using selfish petit bourgeois impulses and mask-skepticism in an opportunistic way)

When Biden “rewarded” people who were vaccinated by ending mask mandates for them, but only working on an honor system, Fauci was parroting that shit even though there was no evidence it was a good idea, and socially it had the actual effect of ending the only pandemic measure they were willing to insist upon. It happened and then immediately we stepped into the delta wave. Liberals still became hostile when I pointed out it was Biden and Fauci making an objectively political decision that killed hundreds of thousands. That was when I realized that the Pandemic was “over” and that it had essentially become an unsolvable problem under our political-economy. Its why I basically just count my blessings that I survived and that there is little I could do.

Our social system failed, it is continuing to fail us all. Working people are mostly just responding to the material reality of that, and sometimes it is ugly. I think it just ticks off another box as to why the need to build a communist movement is an existential crisis in itself. I have given up on the pandemic in some ways, but I have become obsessed with organizing instead, because that is something that could resolve these contradictions, eventually. Anyway, sorry for the rant. I hate Fauci. I don’t get mad when people don’t wear masks. Most of the working class has been forced to contract it already by our social system, so it has caused most working class people to give up. Whether they understand it or not, they behave as if they have no control, probably because they unconsciously know they are subjects now. It is a manifestation of the callousness of capitalism and the dictatorship of bourgeois “democracy”.

I have been looking into cryptpad, but I don’t know if it is really secure/private, but it appears to be a privacy-oriented, self-host able google doc alternative: https://cryptpad.org

When the US was founded it excluded about 94% of the people from within its borders from participating. Slavery existed on a mass scale throughout the world’s early, liberal (so-called) democracies, or often their economy was subsidized by slave labor abroad in their colonies. So if slavery didn’t exist within their immediate borders, it existed for the people their political & economic system subjugated. The idea that industrialization or “democracy” (not even sure how you are defining it, really) came into existence suddenly isn’t accurate, although there are revolutionary periods where social change came suddenly or breakthroughs in technology that occurred that reshaped social production. Those didn’t ever occur in a vacuum, and those discoveries were only able to affect the social system in so far as the social system was developed in such a way that they could be utilized… Often those big revolutionary changes in the social system were due to contradictions (compounding antagonistic relationships) within the social system itself becoming untenable. Trying to shoe-horn a somewhat obscure military “law” isn’t really going to explain how those changes occurred in a realistic way, because human society is much more complicated than that. You seem to want to reinvent the wheel here, you should try reading Marx, you might find it quite satisfying.

On your last point, the French Revolution was crushed ultimately, although the new social order retained changes that were beneficial to its new ruling class. But weapons themselves aren’t necessarily going to singularly shape the way in which social conflict resolves. Military technology is important to these developments, but ultimately a part of the larger social system that is always changing to either maintain itself or undergoing revolutionary change.

I think Mexico is the dark horse

There are several branches in California, some are quite large. The Bay Area and LA, probably. They list most of the branches on the website, and most of them have an instagram page. If you aren’t moving for some time or don’t think you will join right away, I would just start getting involved in organizing irl now on single-issue or community-based things

Definitely join. It is worth it if you are serious about organizing and building a communist party. … If you move to a place with a big branch, or in a place where there is no party presence yet, it could take a lot of time to join and you won’t really get the full picture of what they are doing until you are in. As a branch becomes larger, they tend to draw recruitment out and (somewhat exhaustively) scrutinize people… but they want people who are serious and who are willing to work and it can cause problems if people join and then immediately dip out

its been years now, I am fine, thanks. I am almost more certain that it was covid now than I was during the early part of the pandemic… but I sound like a nut when I talk about it with people. I have also met another healthcare worker who got sick in October of 19, after caring for a person who had come directly from Wuhan, but no… We are supposed to believe that the first covid case in the US was in March of 2020. I think it was all over the place early on, and China was the only country that had the sophisticated equipment, and the desire, to ID it. When people get a virus in the US, they never look for something novel. It would be expensive and it would also put the hospital out of business, like what happened to the Texas hospital that had a case of Ebola. The people who run hospitals are very often slimy corporate types who would literally trade lives for a bit of extra profit

most likely by an aged Hannah Montana

is there a way to remove the offending programs from tv sets?

I don’t want to stoke your conspiracy theory, but I remember getting violently ill in November of 2019, and everyone I worked with was sick at the same time. I was coughing up a lung, to the point where my throat was completely raw, and I could barely breathe walking to work, or even doing anything. there were multiple young people I worked with who were admitted with viral pneumonia, but specifically not the flu. I kept going back to an urgent care, and they gave me like 3 tests for the flu that all came back negative, but just shrugged their shoulders and gave me some meds. On my last visit, asking for another course of steroids/taper, the doctor said that I should probably be admitted, but I pushed back because I needed to work. Every door in that clinic had some dumb warning about vaping… Hardly anyone I worked with vaped. I don’t want to dox myself, but I worked at a hospital that was not too far from a famous US lab that was closed down a few months prior… cough … everybody tells me it is impossible that it could have been covid… it took me almost 3 months to start feeling like I had energy/my breath back… I still think it was covid.