I heard Elissa Slotkin in an interview the other day, and she would not commit to trying to pursue reduced funding for ICE, much less abolishing it…

“They wanted the taxpayers to pay for them to go on vacation because they decided they didn’t want to support law enforcement,” she said. “So, the breaking news tonight? I fired them all! They are FIRED from the office.”

Not a major point, but when an employee wants to resign they are saying that they want their PTO paid out, as they are entitled to under law or contract. That’s what those former employees were saying. Bondi is saying she fired them, but she will still have to pay out that PTO all the same.

I certainly don’t disagree, but I think it’s very useful to highlight how this has changed (IMO) in recent decades. I think there was a time when the boomer generation was earning relatively good incomes that allowed them to live comfortably and accumulate wealth (mainly in houses and the stock market). I think this arrangement between capital and the (predominantly white) working class created a situation where even those workers without much wealth could be “bought off” and swear allegiance to capitalism. This wasn’t sustainable of course, as the postwar industrial boom and then the gains from neoliberalism were never sustainable. Couple that with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and with it the “threat of a good example”, and I would say that this arrangement lasted as late as the GFC at most. I think this helps explain how older people today - even if they are solidly working class - might still be hostile to anything they think is “socialism” while younger generations do not share those opinions, it seems.

I was reading Michael Roberts’ blog the other day, and he pointed out something similar. The official calculations for inflation significantly understate it for various reasons. However, if you look at actual labor hours needed to cover the essentials of life, and you use the median income amount from 1950 (for the US), then that number comes out about $102k per year. Said another way, for a standard of living based on real life, to have the standard of the median American in 1950, you would need to earn over $100k today. But if you take that 1950 median income and just adjust it for official inflation, you only get to like $42k.

“Sadness is a weapon of bourgeoisie” -Iosef Lilianovich Dros

Respectfully, the two things you are trying to compare are not really comparable in any meaningful way.

Edit: If I am being as generous as possible, I suppose you could stretch the definition of “colonialism” to include Tsarist Russia and Siberia (not sure I would agree, but let’s call it that). But even then, by the time you get to the USSR I don’t see how you could call it that, as opposed to the USSR literally just developing part of the Union.

While this is good news in terms of where the industry is hopefully headed, FYI Dell (and HP, for that matter) is currently considered a priority boycott target of the BDS movement. Don’t buy one.

Yes, because if you are counting on Democratic politicians to reverse anything - this, Denali, Gulf of Mexico, Kennedy Center, etc - then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Fossils like Schumer think reversing incredibly unpopular things somehow loses them support from centrists.

Slower growth was a problem from circa 1975 to 1985. By the mid-80s, the Soviet economy had problems but none of them were catastrophic (and tbf, consider how various capitalist economies right now have very serious issues but those economies are not collapsing). That was the view of Western intelligence agencies in the mid 80s btw - that there were problems but that everything was more or less fine.

A former unnamed CIA director once told historian Eric Hobsbawm that had Andropov lived another 15 years, the USSR would still be around today. I do think as late as the Andropov era, the leadership in the USSR had a good understanding of their problems and were starting to put the country on a better path. Then Andropov died and a lot of the changes made by Gorbachev and the leaders around him really threw a bunch of spanners into the works.

The book Socialism Betrayed is an excellent book if you want to understand the reasons for the collapse of the USSR (Chernobyl was not a major factor, but I wouldn’t say it had zero impact). Or, if you would prefer to read a book not written by Marxists, Revolution From Above would fit that and IIRC the authors of the later largely come to the same conclusions as the former.

Much like the collapse of the Roman Empire, it’s a very complex topic that isn’t easily boiled down into simple answers.

I think this is something that’s not being considered enough. This really struck me a few months ago when Trump was talking about Portland being some lawless, smoldering ruin when everything there was just fine (except for the ICE presence ofc). Obviously Trump lies about everything but the way he talked about Portland was odd, like he really believed it. Also just a weird thing to lie about, when it’s so obviously not only not true but incredibly not true.

I think the people around Trump were feeding him false info about Portland. Probably telling him things like “sir Portland is literally burning to the ground and crime is out of control”. I honestly think they are probably feeding him a steady diet of AI slop videos and telling him it’s what’s actually happening in the world.

I’ll add that Disney+ is on the BDS list, so I consider pirating Andor to be a moral imperative.

Nova

I know plenty of people who think saying the earth is >10,000 years old is propaganda.

It’s not about ticking boxes though. It’s recognizing that just sitting on your hands and doing nothing for people other than saying “well at least we aren’t the Republicans!” and not fighting tooth and nail for important things (like the PRO Act, voting reform, minimum wage increases, etc) just means people are gonna walk away and try voting for the other team next cycle because at least they’re promising something.

I second this. I enjoyed reading Lenin’s Imperialism very much, but it also felt very dated (as it should, it’s well over 100 years old now). I can’t help but think that if Lenin were alive today, he’d agree. That doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly important work that we can’t draw from today, but we should also understand how the world has changed since.

I haven’t read John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21st Century yet, but I’ve heard it’s a very good update.

You’re talking about simple conquest. By that definition any offensive side in a war is imperialist, which is nonsensical as that means nearly every war in human history involved at least one “imperialist” power.

Imperialism is system of establishing and maintaining hegemony over large areas for the benefit of an elite (capital in modern times, patricians in ancient times, etc) within a metropole (probably too simple of a definition but it works). The Romans were an empire not just because they had an emperor and not because they conquered lands, but because they controlled lands from Spain to Syria and wealth flowed from those lands into Rome.

I support the DPRK but tbh their flag is kinda mid.

Invading / starting a war is not the same thing as imperialism.