I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.

Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).

It’s also worth noting that Mandela founded the ANC’s guerilla branch. Western media today portrays him as a purely non-violent, MLK-like figure, but in reality he was central to the ANC’s decision to begin an armed struggle against apartheid.

It’s almost as if:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

The people violently resisting a genocide are also good guys.

If someone is trying to kill you and everyone who looks like you, shooting back is good.

repairing harm through dialogue between victims, offenders, and community members

What if the person who committed the crime doesn’t want to engage in this process? What if the victim of the crime doesn’t want to? What if a person accused of a crime maintains their innocence? There are plenty of cases where restorative justice can work, but many others where it won’t.

addressing root causes like poverty, mental health issues, and substance abuse

the goal is to create a society where crime is less likely to occur

I think this is a much better framework to work with than prison abolition. Picking up the pieces after a crime has been committed is expensive and usually leaves you choosing from a range of bad options.

Sometimes the law is wrong, and following it is wrong

Dying for nothing in a lost war is one of those times

don’t come complaining when Trump deports your family

You can’t claim to give a shit about people and then say things like this

I can see the argument, but the amount of free labor it takes to maintain a slave system is so high (especially when there isn’t much in the way of technology) that significant slavery at the dawn of agriculture seems unlikely. Seems like that’s something you could only start to pull off with a decent sized city state’s worth of overseer labor, and at that point you’ve already had agriculture for a while.

Two-thirds of ILA members are constantly on call, with no guaranteed employment if ships are not available for work

a job that is dangerous and requires dockworkers to toil long hours in all kinds of weather

It makes sense why unions want to keep their jobs as they exist, but these are jobs automation is perfect for. We don’t want people working dangerous jobs if we can help it, and it sounds like scheduling is a perennial issue. I wonder what is being discussed – you might be able to square the circle with early retirement buyouts, paid re-training for other positions, or even just big severance packages.

It’s easy:

1. Start with a conflict where most people don’t know the specifics
2. Establish that the State Department side of the conflict is The Right Side To Be On with wall-to-wall favorable reporting
3. Bury negative stories where few look, if you run them at all
4. Let the conflict simmer indefinitely

After the last step, most people still don’t know the specifics of the situation because you never really informed them and they have other priorities than a war far away that they perceive they have no effect on. They see a story every month or so about another arbitrarily large amount of money getting sent overseas and it just blends into the background; they’ve seen that story countless times about many countries.

Parenti’s quote about “supporting every revolution but the ones that succeed” really hit home with me. See also the broader concept of critical support, and viewing states as X% good and Y% bad instead of simply good or bad.

The only way this can turn around for Ukraine is a the war expanding into a (more) direct conflict between Russia and NATO, which would create a high risk of a nuclear exchange, which is unacceptable.

Ukraine lost. The only question now is how many more of their people they’ll send to pointlessly die before they start serious negotiations (i.e., not wild demands like getting Crimea). This is the months leading up to the end of WWI.

Entirely understandable, because an invasion of their country would almost certainly result in the deaths of millions of their citizens. It’s easy to pound the table for a stronger response when it’s not your head on the chopping block.

love Cuba (but denounce all other AES

Many such cases

There are a lot more lurkers on any forum than active members who comment. Everyone here has read a thousand more posts/comments than they’ve made. Getting lurkers to consider what you say is a very real thing, and people do change their political beliefs based on what they read online.

You’re right that interrupting shipping along this route would be much harder than closing the Suez, but the U.S. still has carriers and submarines, so it could act alone without any of those nearby countries you mentioned.

In my mind, the big shift here is (1) cost and (2) forcing a longer route now means you have to shoot at boats, you can’t just refuse them entry to a canal. It would mean a much larger escalation.

The former group isn’t negatively impacted by patsocs because the former group aren’t fucking stupid, and the latter group will never engage with you or anyone seriously no matter what you do

This is good to keep in mind, but I think you can still say Patsoc types hurt the cause. The problem is most people who are exposed to their stuff don’t engage with anyone about it, so there’s no opportunity to have the sort of discussion you describe (where you can reach the reachable, and the unreachable respond predictably).

A bunch of reachable people get turned off by this/get misinformed about socialism by it, and then we never hear from them (and get to explain what this shit is and why it’s bad) because they don’t talk to anyone about it the way most people don’t talk to anyone about stuff they read online.

With this election and with Allende, there are two separate-but-related questions:

1. Can a leftist party gain state power through elections?
2. Can a leftist party that gained power through elections hold that power against reactionary attacks?

Allende succeeding at #1 but failing at #2 does not mean every party that succeeds at #1 must fail at #2. It’s a question worth asking, but we have basically one data point.

“You can say anything about China and people just buy it” is a good one. Doesn’t push too hard right away, doesn’t invite any easy lib talking points in response, and is obviously true enough to get anyone who would ever be receptive to at least pause and think a little.

How long could you pay your rent and other bare necessity bills if you lost your job? How long would it take you to find a new job with comparable pay?

If the answer to the last question is more than the answer to the first, I’d say you’re housing insecure.

ai art is art because people are mad about it.

Most persuasive point here haha

Also seems useful to separate the economic impacts of AI art (on artists, on the environment, etc.) and larger criticisms of how AI is currently used (destroying the usefulness of search engines) from the question of whether AI art has artistic value.