Chana [none/use name]

Left: Adam Right: Cool Adam

I’m sorry I know this reference.

Oh man, the pair of vindictive boss + senior cowirker hits too closs to home.

In my experience this is liberal careerists rationalizing reactionary approaches because it keeps their “connections” alive and avoids rocking the boat. Is that what was happening at your newspaper?

The most important part of dentistry is getting divorced during a midlife crisis and buying an expensive car and bicycle, FULL lycra mode.

In the first case it is generally charity bereft of political education or organizing their communities. They’re basically doing NGO charity work without the tax breaks and calling it radical. Membership is sporadic and mostly free of political education themselves, being mostly liberals dipping their toes in but arresting their own progress by spending 90% of their “free” time actually doing “mutual aid” (actually following a charity model). This is an easy thing to casually join and leave and is rarely more political than volunteering for any charity. There will be some members who are politically educated, but this is not something that typically occurs through the work itself and it is also in no way exclusive to anarchists, as mutual aid groups will also have MLs and Maoists.

The latter is a long-standing bias in the West, where Trots were the least-repressed communists because they were and are hypercritical of nearly every socialist project and do roundabout propaganda work fir empire. This also makes them appealing for liberals in the imperial core because they can still embrace their own chauvinism while changing their language and reasoning to feel like they are its antithesis. Trots also have their own canon, they read a carefully curated list of Trot works and actively avoid even reading Capital, in my experience, preferring Trotskyist summaries and oddly paternal (and rife for abuse) mentorship instead. I do not, honestly, see Trots doing much political education or agitation, mostly just attending actions (with their pamphlets) organized by others, taking credit for things they didn’t do, and doing a bad job at tabling. Trots are more about getting you to join and therefore start on a path to worthiness while paying a tithe.

There are several ML orgs in my area and those for which I have this kind of knowledge are growing rapidly. They do the work of organizing protests and rallies, hosting teach-ins, hosting political movie nights and discussions, gathering money for Palestine, etc etc. I think their historical paucity has more to do with needing a critical mass of people to have the capacity to do political work and they have been historically repressed. It is a full-time job to create and run an organized and you have to build enough capacity to rotate roles, otherwise it isn’t really organizing in the first place (organizing must build capacity!). I also think that pipelining is challenging for MLs due to the larger jump from liberalism a person must make. This is why groups like PSL have probation periods and FRSO has two tiers of membership. New members usually don’t know shit, they must be educated, and these are the people willing to join a communist org in the first place that runs counter to everything they have previously been taught. Feeder orgs (including fronts) have historically worked to address this but also require a critical mass of people to do the organizing work. And they are being actively targeted, e.g. principled pro-Palestine groups run by commies. Samidoun gets shut down but your local Trots are unscathed.

The ones depicting US soldiers / vehicles often have direct involvement of the US military about how they may be depicted. Just like in Hollywood. This ensures that the US is never shown to be the bas guys. And that the bad guys are always at least vaguely similar to the targets of US empire.

I think the US military tries to target fairly aimless young people. The point at which they are targeted is before the first recruiter talks to them, it is in media directed at kids and teenagers.

Thom Yorke (Radiohead guy) has put out a liberal Zionist statement that centers himself, chalks up the genocide in Gaza to Netanyahu and explicitly letting the genocidal “Israeli” public and other politicians off the hook, and criticizing those who say Free Palestine by talking about Hamas and hostages.

This is basically just a recitation of liberal left-punching as old as liberalism itself. Per liberalism, every disruptive social movement is, at the time, too extreme and counterproductive. A few years later, liberalism claims to have always been on the side of that movement and takes credit for it. At no point are the liberals repeating this doing anything other than a defensive recitation. They do not really have or believe in morals or politics as a real-world struggle.

All of the pictures in the article are just people working normal factory jobs for average pay or being celebrated and given themed clothes when leaving Xinjiang to work in the factories. There’s a video of people walking through crowds with the themed hats and one of them clearly smiles and waves when they notice the camera. Somehow this is evil and not just people traveling together for a business program.

Imagine if every Western business retreat was characterized with atrocity propaganda because all your tote bags looked the same at the mini golf course.

I think they just want “plausible” deniability for the entity’s next planned/declared steps because the entity’s internal racist genocidal discourse is becoming increasingly external. It’s not like Europe is actually reversing course on “Israel” in any meaningful way.

I always get these guys confused with panic at the disco. Can’t even make my bad Buttigieg joke

I mean it is really elementas of both. They are shoulder deep in propaganda and do not have the capacity to free themselves of it most of the time. We are all brought up in propaganda, from schooling to entertainment media to news to politicians to bosses to family and friends. Most people are just internalizing what they pick up along the way and that has not been confronted out of them, like a major life event that forced them to see the bullshit. The same socialization that teaches the propaganda also teaches how to approach discourse: always project knowlegability, it is ties to one’s ego, and reading the New York Times is basically the height of intellectual discovery, it makes you a news head. Engaging critically with literally anything is not th3 default, it mostly happens ad hoc as a way to defend and entrench one’s biases. They are socialized to believe they are on a team and that criticism comes from the other team. Only simple binary good guys vs. bad guys thinking allowed, there are only two teams, and so they lap up things like horseshoe theory because they need everyone to be at a pole away from themselves ane bad in the same ways, and secretly on the same bad guy team.

This way of thinking is harmful. It is why such people are the most prolific cheering audience for genocide, via a lens that allows them to pretend they aren’t doing so. And it can have elements of malice, like how they respond to disagreement in bad faith. But even that is taught and many are not really cognizant of it. They are reacting like an upset toddler because it is more about ego than anything else. Upset toddlers lie and pout and lash out. But they aren’t calculating, scheming, or particularly knowledgeable about geopolitics or media critical.

They’re not the same as the bloodless ghouls that know better and lie and mislead for their often genocidal projects. They are the common person, completely incoherent, frequently defensive, and absolutely unprepared to do anything valuable politically on purpose.

I think it ia sort of entertaining, how easy they are to fool. Most gullible, incurious, and arrogant people on the planet.

Uyghurs working in factories throughout China has been explicit ans intentional national policy in China for nearly a decade as part of their economic modernization campaign in Xinjiang. Aa the article notes this also includes others like Kazakhs, as they also live in Xinjiang. This fact, implies to be salacious, is not nefarious and already well-known.

The other parts of the article intendes to imply or state problems, like forced labor, rely on completely unstated claims referencing “experts” and “human rights advocates, Marco Rubio, and claiming workers migrating follows the " pattern” of forced labor. What pattern? They don’t deign to say.

They have literally nothing to go on and so they are instead trying to stretch implicatioms and guesswork (making shit up) as much as they can.

Keep in mind that the groups that worked on tgis article have all carriwd water for the current Zionist genocide and uncritically publish IDF statements as if they are fact.

The Belgians know how to hit the Dutch where it hurts: windmills

I do not like that look

It has happened many times. I believe there are even bots for taking subreddits this way, as they rapidly move to remove other mods and add their “friends” (bots/alt accounts) as mods. Not even just political subs, but hobby subs, which is what I use Reddit for.

Not sure! He was initially interested in Red Star, a ML caucus, but they have rules requiring that you have done some organizing first so they asked him to reapply after getting experience.

This is why I write all software from scratch in assembly.

Making shit up instead of accepting criticism and dealing with it head on is perfectly on brand.