From the article, since no one is willing to actually quote it:

More than three years into the war, Ukrainians’ support for continuing to fight until victory has hit a new low. In Gallup’s most recent poll of Ukraine — conducted in early July — 69% say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory.

This marks a nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022, when 73% favored Ukraine fighting until victory and 22% preferred that Ukraine seek a negotiated end as soon as possible.

The entire point is that mocking someone for “looking trans” is wrong regardless.

I agree, but I don’t see anyone doing this. Not the person you responded to, nor the meme in this post.

1. Clavicular isn’t actually trans. He’s a mentally ill conservative grifter, and calling him a “Male to Male Transsexual” is a philosophical point more than anything.

2. I have you tagged as “JK Rowling Bootlicker” so I have a feeling you’re not exactly acting in the best faith here.

And honestly, despite my many issues with her, it would be the best thing to happen in this country in half a century

If she were to win, it would be because the bourgeoisie would be engaging in an embracing and subsequent extinguishing of the nascent Socialist movement in the US.

Large swathes of DSA hate AOC at this point, and for good reason, but if the right opportunists get their way, and AOC wins, I think DSA and co. go belly up. It’s not a mature enough org to mobilize to influence a president and AOC is too embedded in centrist liberal hegemony to be the bull in the imperial china shop that a truly left wing president would need to be.

Sadaam was a bastard, but at least that country had free healthcare, education, and a near perfect literacy rate.

Sadaam’s Iraq also didn’t have Humvee’s rolling around, because your conception of Iraq comes from the US occupation. But the reason the US today looks like the occupation of Iraq, is because the Imperial Boomerang has come back around:

The Imperial boomerang, or the colonial boomerang, is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to enforce imperialism or control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.

Americans weren’t joking when they said that stuff about China, they were parroting an exaggerated version of the reality, which was being fed to them by people who don’t actually care about limiting mass surveillance.

Ok, this is the second time today that I’ve seen Trump depicted as hiding in a rolling cart.

Wtf is the context here?

I played it recently, and enjoyed it. It wasn’t quite what I wanted out of a quake game, but as a standalone sci-fi horror game, it’s a thoroughly fun romp

There are numerous more equitable models that China could have built its system around. For example, they could have built their market economy based entirely around worker-owned co-ops. Co-ops can compete just fine in markets

Well, you’ll be quite pleased to know that a significant part of China’s market reforms, has been the development of worker co-ops as a significant part of its economy.

Why couldn’t China build a market economy, but just have a hard rule of “no one is allowed to amass more than X amount?” Even if people couldn’t hoard more than say, $100 million, that still gives people plenty of incentive to start new businesses, get an education, work hard, etc.

Because they established markets to bring in foreign capital investment. Foreign companies, wanting comparatively cheap labor, were encouraged to partner with Chinese (usually state owned) firms, to access said cheap labor. Over the decades, the Chinese have taken this foriegny capital, invested it in its own domestic economic development, and encouraged the establishment of worker co-ops, in place of foreign firms. Huawei, for instance, is a worker co-op, and came out of the capital generated from partnerships foreign telecom companies.

Now, a private, national bourgeoise does exist, and people have gotten very rich. But China also puts those people on an INCREDIBLY tight leash. The reason they don’t limit the wealth you can amass, is because they wouldn’t want to limit the generation of capital that could be spent on economic development goals. Instead, they use the slightest steps out of line to seize those rich people’s wealth for thepublic good.

I’m interested specifically in the billionaires. So why the billionaires?

Essentially, the TL;DR is that billionaires in China are a byproduct of market reforms designed to generate domestic capital, and development. While they’re there, and their presence creates contradictions, they don’t have the ability to impact politics the way they can in the west.

The Chinese state, being a socialist state, seeks to manage the contradictions of market reforms, and funnel the gains from them for socialist ends. Those ends being the development of the productive forces (domestic industry, ending poverty, etc.), while also developing the relations of production, via state ownership of major industries, and encouraging the growth of cooperatives in the consumer goods market, and workers Congresses and party committees in nominally private businesses, to give workers a greater say in firm management.

100% they have a class based system it’s just not talked about.

It’s literally on their flag though. Those stars aren’t just decoration, they stand for the peasants, workers, petite bourgeois and national bourgeois, unified and led by the big star: the communist party, and its allies.

China is a people’s republic, which historically would mean that those various class strata would be represented in government, by various parties and mass organizations. Not just a single communist party (see, East Germany, Socialist Poland, or the early DPRK). As China has developed its productive forces, however, a decision was made to allow the Bourgeoisie to be an element within the communist party itself, so they couldn’t form their own separate base of political power. While that brings contradictions, they’re far more manageable than they would be otherwise.

They’re pretty open about all of this.

People are leaving rocks at the site of the “grave”, which they’ve repeatedly been told not to do, specifically because of concerns about harm to the environment. So they might have accidentally helped in some respect, but it doesn’t exactly mean much when they’re showing up themselves, and fucking it up anyway

I think http/https is dead at this point.

Who wants to hop over to the Gemini Protocol with me? There’s even a forum

Honestly? While it’s legally a 501c4, it still acts more like a political party than any of the major parties in the US at this point.

Multi-User Dungeon, they’re a relic of old pre-web bulletin board systems, and they’re pretty neat!

They don’t immediately get smarter and virtuous simply because they were in the military

Sometimes they get worse, and commit war crimes ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Post that shit to Ao3

It’s obviously cringe, but I don’t think it’s some trivial thing, it’s a trauma of Colonialism. Americans don’t truly have a claim to the land they pillaged to live on. Whiteness absorbed European ethics like the borg, stripped them of a language and culture, and all they have left is getting run over by a Ford F250 in a Walmart parking lot.

So a lot of white Americans have this near libidinal need to tie themselves to a culture they consider to be more real or substantive. I don’t think that’s a trivial desire, but insisting that you’re Italian, despite not knowing anything about the place, or claiming your great great great grandma was a Cherokee princess, or some shit… That ain’t it

so the DSA managed to get one out of pure luck

Al-Sayed isn’t a DSA member, nor is he endorsed by DSA

hope he doesn’t fuck it up and go full commie

I hope he goes full Tankie. I want him to make Stalin look like an Anarchist and personally drag every healthcare CEO to the Ms. Rachel Zohran Mamdani Memorial Gulag, outside of Dearborn, where they will be summarily 9/11’d to death

I do my best o7

:(