🗽UNITED STATES POLITICS 🦅<"Pied Piper" EditionThread for the hellish discussion related to
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565 posts and 179 image replies omitted.>>2297982>The fuck did Equatorial Guinea do? That's a damn good question actually. They have oil money but the uber-oligarch Obiang family owns it all and buys mega yachts with it. It seems like the kind of country we like. And I thought we did. What a mystery.
>>2297919>oh no. the bombs will no longer be gay.The brands are not changing their logos this month either. Man, not the brands. I love brands!
>>2298035this is admittedly partially a cope on my part to not fall into complete suicidal despair but I have been telling myself a lot this year that you can tell porky is getting scared by how outwardly disciplinary the US has suddenly shifted towards when the strategy for the past 50 years has largely been control. in an advanced capitalist society, it's easier to stop people from wanting to change the status quo by capturing as much desire into capitalist relations of production, e.g. the well-known Situationist concept of recuperation, or "selling out" in 20th century music subcultures. let the working class share in the spoils of imperialism to a limited extent, affirm their desires while also subtly changing what they want so that they can't even imagine any alternatives (cf. Capitalist Realism), and in the few cases where this doesn't work just imprison, torture, and kill the actual dissenters as secretly as possible. even when people find out about it, the sort of domesticated herdlike existence that Americans were groomed into is so normalized that they never even think of actually doing anything when we find out about how the CIA trafficked cocaine into black communities or how AIDS was allowed to spread in gay communities or how we have illegally detained and tortured people indefinitely for being suspected terrorists (or even fucking BLM organizers who were straight up sent to black sites).
like I said it is remarkable how bad things have been for as long as they've been and comparatively you can tell that things are really falling apart because the bourgeois state has reverted back to the old disciplinary methods. they're trying to modernize them with AI and surveillance tech, ironically trying to create the exact New World Order that rightoids have been crafting a bizarre repressive eroticized horror of for decades now, but it's getting to the point where they can't win without killing off most of the population. which is the main thing that scares me, because they've been doing their best to make that happen.
>>2298035The trouble is that Sorel's preference for violence as an act of purification lends itself to "cringy anarchism" already, and while I personally am an anarchist I agree that the kinds of militant edgelord nihilists that flock to the black banner are not helpful. Which is why ACAB must be only one of a collection of narratives, others of which should emphasize the social aspect of the revolution. Cops aren't simply bad because they're the enforcement arm for "the system", they divide communities and disproportionately target those who are disadvantaged by neoliberalism. Therefor ACAB can be incorporated into collectivist ideals such as mutual aid and parallel governing structures operating in tandem with trade unions and organizations dedicated to spreading revolutionary consciousness to prep the people for a mass uprising. Combining myth making with real world activism helps prevent the movement from being bogged down by terminally online edgelords who think posting is praxis on its own, and can easily be incorporated into the overall myth of the General Strike
All that said, some of the more "enthusiastic" anarcho nihilists could be useful as front line shock troopers of sorts, their overconfidence might get them killed but can also serve to inspire others to action. Part of the purpose of myths is to generate an emotionally charged mass ready to destroy all of those who stand in the way of utopia, and if some people want to act like barbarian berserkers then I see no reason why we shouldn't utilize them. For any one of those could be like the Uruk-Hai in The Lord of the Rings who throws his great sword upon the charge and sacrifices himself to blow a hole in the walls of Helm's Deep. I admit it's not a perfect analogy but it's a striking image and inspirational to those foolhartey enough.
>>2297707Yeah seeing the constant terrible news and people's usually terrible reactions is incredibly distressing and depressing.
I want to do something but I don't know what because this area, including my workplace, is teeming with reactionaries. Like Democrats don't even run candidates here. There's some presence in the cities that's closer to actual leftism (WFP, GP, DSA, CPUSA, IWW) but even then they don't have much sway. It's disheartening to say the least.
>>2298034I welcome the collapse of the Trump coalition over this shitty bill but you'd have to be fucking stupid to embrace Musk at this point unless you're an actual fascist.
But what am I saying? We're talking about the Democratic Party here.
https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/trapped-in-the-maw-of-a-stillborn
>In a conversation with Hedges, Schüll doesn’t mince words:
<“When you look at contemporary slot machines, they don’t operate on volatility,” she continued. “One designer of the mathematics and algorithm of these games said we want an algorithm that makes you feel like you are reclining on a couch. The curves, architecture and the softly pixelated lights, they want you to sit back and go with the flow. I just couldn’t make sense of that for the longest time in my research. Gamblers would say, ‘It’s so weird, but sometimes when I win a big jackpot I feel angry and frustrated.’ What they’re playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. Winning disrupts that because suddenly the machine is frozen, it’s not letting you keep going. What are you going to do with that winning anyway? You’re just going to feed it back into the machines. This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate is a desire to really lose a sense of self. They lose time, space, money value, and a sense of being in the world. What is that about? What does that say? How do we diagnose that?”
<“It’s the flip side to the incredible pressure, which is experienced as a burden, to self-manage, to make choices, to always be maximizing as you’re living life in this entrepreneurial mode,” she said. “We talk about this as the subjective side of the neoliberal agenda, where pressure is put on individuals to regulate themselves. In this case, they are regulating themselves, but they are regulating themselves away from that. This really is a mode of escape. It’s not action gambling. This is escape gambling. You can see it on their faces. The consequences and ethics are distasteful. It’s predatory. It’s predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They’re not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They’re kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it’s a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don’t want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don’t see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want—in this case escape—and [to] profit from that.”
>This, Hedges argues, will be the building block of our future politics: perpetual immiseration obscured by public-private partnerships to build digitally mediated pleasure palaces, alongside robust efforts to improve access to various opioids and soma, and reinforced with a healthy dose of outright force when we step out of line. After CES, I think this vision doubles as a diagram that connects gambling and Vegas (as a laboratory of odious technologies of surveillance and social control and extraction and immiseration across society) to CES (as a place to fine tune hype narratives obfuscating the scramble for these tools) to capitalist technology and our political-economic order. >>2298049Reading what you wrote made me think of Luigi Mangione
The man play a role in The Myth or hell he could a Myth himself. Unfortunately people turned him into thirst bait.
>>2297975Its so funny that Bernie is grooming her to be his replacement. She's just gonna be a heel from here to eternity.
AOC will be repeating the same talking points now and when she is 90.
>>2297981I am going to enjoy tremendously when she finally outlives her utility. If shes as deranged as it seems she'll lose her goddamn mind if she ever gets shelved by the activist complex and her privileges revoked. If she's as you say, in control of her own agenda, then they'll just martyr her and replace her.
Either way, it's going to be cinema and it's going to be soon.
Re the Boulder attack and the Holocaust survivor victim:
https://www.cuindependent.com/2019/04/08/barbara-steinmetzs-story-of-escape-wraps-holocaust-remembrance-week/
>Steinmetz was born in Hungary on Nov. 26, 1936. Her parents ran a hotel on the island of Lussinpiccolo, off the coast of Croatia in the Adriatic Sea, which at the time belonged to Italy. Today, the island is known as Mali Lošinj.
>Italian dictator Benito ᴉuᴉlossnW stripped the Italian Jews of their citizenship in 1938 while forbidding them to hold positions in government and in certain professions.
>By 1940, Steinmetz’s father decided that enough was enough and took the family back to Hungary, where they tried desperately to convince other family members to leave the country.I don't know, isn't this kind of stretching "holocaust survivor?" She never experienced the Holocaust. She and her family fled to the Dominican Republic. It just seems like another devaluation/exploitation of terms like "anti-semitism" has gone through.
>>2298076Democrats are trying to recruit Elon?
But then again, Elon was a Democrat donor before he turned to Trump
>>2298095we've already been at the point where mostly the only people who take the Dems seriously are their ranks (like celebrities and journalists) who function in a partially unofficial capacity as part of the ideological apparatuses like the media and universities that has been their main strategy for co-opting anything on the left. meanwhile normal people who would have been centrist libs a year ago are starting to wake up. aligning themselves with someone as widely hated as Elon Musk is pretty much the stupidest thing they could do right now and will only delegitimize liberalism even more and push people further left.
it's all extremely disorganized, but a vibe shift of sorts is happening and the Democrats are accelerating it.
>>2297975>>2297967periodic reminder that the DSSA was literally and explicitly formed to hamstring the new left after it's founder, Michael Harrington, was expelled from the SPUSA for supporting the vietnam war.
he then toured america trying to create an anti-communist, pro-war "leftist" coalition before finally merging one of his groups into the DSSA in the 1980s.
it is, was, and always will be pro-imperialist and constitutionally anti-communist.
the only use for the DSSA is to raid their chapters, both figuratively and literally, for members and then liquidate their cells.
>>2298119Check his political history.
>>2298120This. All the hysterical libs whining about "fascism" are no different from the alt right whining about "communism".
If Trump were to be put in charge of a fascist regime, he would need to be assassinated by his own officers.
>>2298103So was Ronald Reagan and Tucker Carlson.
A lot of Republicans were Democrats in their political infancy. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who was a consistent Republican voter from the get-go.
>>2297579>l think Pete and Kamala split the centrist vote This didn't work in 2020, when Buttigieg and Warren decided to drop out and endorse Biden so he could beat Bernie.
And I think you're seriously overestimating Harris' appeal. She was laughed out of the 2020 primary and only got the VP position because Biden explicitly wanted a woman of color.
AOC will just go for Schumer's senate seat if anything.
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