***Official Political Discussion Thread***

-Red- -Red- all that ain’t going to make a bit of difference when Bernie can’t and doesn’t make it out of the primary to get the nomination. His numbers ain’t added up.....mainly people wanting to vote for him in comparison to others.

You and him are just prolonging the inevitable......which is defeat for Bernie. Same as before. He’s made no progress since the last time around and has actually gotten worse in some areas. Enjoy what you can for now. I’ll be sure to remind you of your mistake when it’s time.
 
ajiiiplatinum said:
Not trying to call anyone out but an individual here does not agree with my use of graphic imagery to make a point in support of a particular candidate. In order to focus on the message I will refrain from mentioning a particular candidate that cares about peace in the middle east on all sides. Not just for jews or muslims but for all and for what is fair.

So all I will say is...support candidates that will favor diplomacy over tough guy rhetoric.
Support candidates that will keep us away from endless wars where there are few winners and millions and millions of innocent victims.
Lets try and put an end to these type of injustices.
Drastic change nationally and internationally is needed. The status quo republican and democrat wont work.
Elections matter.

BBC
Refugee child
War in Syria
Click to expand...

For anyone interested, this is a really good (and extremely long) piece on U.S. interventionism, the longstanding (and still standing) hegemonic bipartisan consensus on the issue, and the failure of the U.S. left to coherently challenge this dynamic. It's also worth noting the U.S. sanctions have killed more than 40,000 Venezuelans since 2017 alone.

At any rate, some good excerpts...

When I watched U.S. corporate media’s straight coverage of what should have been the manifestly absurd spectacle of political unknown—less than 20 percent of the Venezuelan population had heard of him before the US anointed him—Juan Guaidó’s press conference declaring himself president and then swearing himself in, I couldn’t decide whether it was so viscerally appalling because it reflects the extent to which post-Cold War interventionism has been normalized or because it brought to mind the automatically self-justificatory anticommunist interventionism of the pre-Vietnam years. In a matter of days, the media went from describing Guaidó first as “the man who proclaimed himself president,” then “the man the US recognizes as president,” and then “interim president” and the elected president, Nicolás Maduro, as “self-proclaimed.”

Moreover, a rhetoric centering on proclamation of “humanitarian crisis” freezes discussion of the situation in Venezuela on images of the immediate moment, ultimately not much more than captions for the decontextualized visuals, and sidesteps the political issues at stake as well as the origins of the nominal crisis.
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Humanitarian crisis cannot capture the deep, substantive, zero-sum political-economic nature of the conflict in Venezuela. That characterization seems to warrant a non-ideological call for urgency and compromise, but it is moralistic, not political. Moreover, much of the crisis has a Potemkin quality, produced through what Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal describe as the “regime change laboratory” of the United States. I discuss below Marcie Smith’s important examination of that apparatus and its links to “strategic nonviolence” as the equivalent of a left politics, also disconnected from class and political economy. This is politics that makes use of the symbolic architecture of insurgent social movement action to project an illusion of popular rising against tyranny. (One giveaway of the real focus of the demonstrations is that many of the signs brandished by demonstrators are in English.) Human rights discourse, because it ignores class and political economy, works well with that Potemkin activism, which mimes popular insurgency. For that reason it is important to consider how concern with human rights came to displace the earlier left focus on egalitarian social transformation.
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It was only a matter of time before human rights anti-interventionism would become human rights interventionism. As human rights activism was removed from conventional left projects of social transformation and took on an intentionally apolitical character, it accommodated ever more easily to a tit-for-tat liberal moralism that defines human rights violations in abstract ways that conveniently ignore both the sources of conflict in other countries and domestic U.S. conditions and practices. In the 1990s, allegations of genocide raised the moral stakes of non-intervention. In addition to charges emerging from the wars in the Balkans, human rights advocates’ responses to the mass murder of Tutsi people by the Hutu majority government in the Rwandan civil war helped impel toward the transition from anti-interventionist to interventionist human rights ideology. Assertions that the West stood idly by as the Hutu government slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus sparked comparisons to Nazi exterminism and provoked declarations that no similar travesty should ever again be permitted to occur. Suggestions that western inaction stemmed from lack of concern for Africans’ suffering only redoubled the sense of righteousness that attached to the indignation.

Genocide thus became the gold standard for justifying demands for intervention in contravention of national sovereignty because, as Mamdani argued regarding Darfur, charging genocide raises the bar of moral urgency to the highest height, from which any skepticism or hesitation is tantamount to criminal complicity. (The genocide charge vis-à-vis western Sudan was ratified by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who certainly was familiar enough with genocide, given his record in Vietnam and role in retailing the lies that sold George W. Bush’s trumped up war on Iraq.)
Click to expand...


As Smith observes, this is a “progressive” activism that is largely blind to political economy and class struggle. It doesn’t seriously examine the political and structural conflicts that underlie unrest in the countries toward which activists direct their judgments. It relies on what Lancaster describes as a degraded and cretinized public discourse in which moralistic clichés stand in for analysis. Corruption, for example, is an ambiguous charge, as is tyranny, or state repression; as characterizations, they can depend on perspective and social position – the concrete interests with which one aligns in a particular social order. A presumptive mindset that governments’ actions are oppressive and protest demonstrations express popular will reflects the extent to which a fundamentally reactionary anti-statism is embedded in several political tendencies that operate as a left in the United States. Without moorings to definite constituencies or need to consider strategic realpolitik as a constraint on one’s own political practice, freelance radicals have little basis for making nuanced, pragmatic judgments about left movements and governments that have to navigate maintaining broad, internally contradictory coalitions while trying not to undermine their larger transformative objectives. Such disconnected radicals often don’t grasp the reality that movements actually contesting for and trying to consolidate power and to govern inevitably have to improvise through messiness and contradictions.
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-Red- -Red- gonna be at the next cookout watching deuce king deuce king like...
giphy.gif


On some "dis dude better not start with me" today steez
 
cedric ceballos said:
It’s crazy how you see a total difference in service, quality and the overall structure of how things are ran at companies who have a reputation of doing right by their employees.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately companies only seem to do that when they know the employees can easily find better opportunities. My department treats us pretty well, but they also know we can leave and get a 30-50% pay raise.
 
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