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Oh there are some people in this thread who even take the SRA quite seriously. Don’t worry about that right now though!

That’s fine. I would hope people are more alarmed by veteran activism at this point, but let’s come back to it later. I have someone else going full Youtube comments on me and accusing me of supporting rape. Just thought that the thread could use a bit more than a dozen people saying the organization is secretly awesome and has transformative potential not already demonstrated.

Folks who have been part of the same imperialist forces that dropped Rainbow Pesticides all over SEA & forbid troops from referring to Vietnamese people as human beings don’t benefit from being told that they are special sparkling stars. Their place in a working class movement needs to be strictly clarified.

Ah yes, “the episode” of the show. Well if they say the same thing in every one, it must be a great use of our time. I should not even be responding to personal attacks which treat what I am saying as condemnation of everything either of them have ever said, you’re being completely disingenuous. Whatever you think of veteran activism portraying troops as victims in imperialist wars is none of my business. I’m here to discuss the party form of socialism, not student activist-tier naievete with added bickering. Maybe you ought to consider who started making personal attacks over a Youtube video before deciding who is acting like a “jackass” here, no?

Are you aware the democrats also namedrop sexual assault in their ranks & in the military? Do we take people’s statements of intent at face value or do we examine their actions? How do you think Prysner intends to do something about the US military? This whole project’s claims of usefulness has an expiration date, and with the looks of things in West Asia we may be closing in on it sooner than expected.

This isn’t about discrediting the entirety of the ideology they use for recruitment. Anyone can point out the obvious about how fucked up the USA is and we can nod our heads and tune in for the next episode, nothing happens. It’s primarily about what drives the organization (where their limitations come from) and how they plan to achieve what are ostensibly their goals.

Okay, then maybe we can have a separate discussion another time on if we think tricking people into doing fake revolutionary activity is good or bad. I usually post on my phone when I shouldn’t post at all, so I’ll definitely get back to you after sorting out my bookmarks. Thought that someone else might find the experience of listening to Becker and Prysner shoot the shit a bit jarring after interacting with PSL accounts.

My contention is this isn’t the party form, it’s one of many ideological nodes in a wider alternative media and NGO fundraising network that developed out of a preexisting network of money laundering and capture that was exposed during the McCarthy era (I’m not basing this on their opinions and current tactics alone). One that actually crosses over seamlessly into Scott Ritter/ACP territory. Not to mention Margaret Kimberly, RT, and PressTV (personally I do not think that black Americans and foreign state media should spare resources on distractions in a battle for life and death). If I were trying to sort people into good and bad buckets I wouldn’t even notice this stuff.

The prison activism stuff is particularly heartbreaking once you realize how this kind of thing is used to stall people out and ruin their lives, just long enough to avoid prison riots. Have you read Blood In My Eye by George Jackson? https://annas-archive.pk/md5/20f816158d230048174c52c634c6eb2e

(Apologies if this is not the best file on offer from Anna’s, I’m trying to keep better track of it these days but mostly going off files on the ereader and searching.)

Actually I have one more thought about the saviour/villain thing. This is much more serious than that. It’s about distilling what we focus on down to what’s important so we can spend more time with family and friends. Isn’t that important to you? Isn’t the political energy expended on protests valuable and finite? The time spent reading articles by Ryan Grim instead of reading Leila Khaled’s story or finding comrades internationally?

I need to emphasize if the PSL changes its form of organizing that it will lose a large part of its fundraising network and collaborations. Internally, maintaining these ties is justified as “coalition building” when it is in fact limiting tailism. (You can be a tailist strategically and run your own candidates sporadically, see progressives/US greens.)

Because he intends to achieve antiimperialism via electoralism and marches. Picture a guy installing fake airbags in your car and saying he just wanted to make you feel better when it kills a passenger. Do we credit ACP for their inconsistent ideological support of AES countries (depending on how public the group/voice chat is 👀)? They are building influencers and a settler labor movement in the fashion of the CPUSA and DSA. Their existence is dependent on large donors, their fundraising network is synonymous with progressivism (I realize this is a structural claiming requiring extensive citations, I’d like to cover every one but each day a new person like that Abugazelah lady pops up and adds 6 more to the graph).

The USA crushes people who support militancy or build the party form of socialism. The PSL is training influencers that, if you go to your local protest, have built a relationship with the police in order to make things peaceful and orderly. Unless they have radically shifted in the past 2 years since I left the country. Following them online, it seems to be the same.

This is all assuming that you can even join the party. They often tell people to bugger off because they’re full and want to balance their demographics for optics, because again they are not a mass movement. Notice how people here are not saying they are actually in the PSL, only what they have heard about it.

Is this making any sense, or should I save this all for something long-form to avoid agitating and confusing others? I would like to cover the history of the FRSO as well. Avakian is fun too but he’s too blatantly kooky.

No seriously, go watch Brian Becker’s own show and come back and tell me I’m wrong. You are looking at a democrat who barely even hides it.

Yes, but anarchism is also right-wing, so it has no meat. The actual left wing criticism ought to be historical, based in the evolution of these groups from stuff like the Worker’s World Party.

Lots of enthusiasm in this thread, but no mention of what Brian Becker’s actual goal is: voting out the republicans and triggering a widespread elevation of consciousness among the settler population via protesting and posting online. PSL is just one of his ideological Pokemon lol. Is… anyone even aware of what he says on his own show? Go watch his show right now, preferably one with Mike Prysner crying about the poor little veterans having to spill their precious blood in Iraq. It’s fun! Just imagine how ballistic Marx would have gone listening to the radio. Makes me clean and cook like a kind of reverse-tornado.

If it means anything, yes I love that documentary too, everything about it, one of the first things that really transported me into what it would be like to endure a torture center. Something about the depressed lawyer with his crappy paper cup of coffee just pulls me in. I have also made a lot of assumptions about what the PSL is and enthusiastically debunked harebrained MLM/anarchist smears against them.

The issue with why all these orgs have such a tolerance for informant behavior like sexually assaulting people will have to be left for another time, so maybe it is best for me not to even mention it, because it is a topic of the utmost severity and must be approach throroughly and comprehensively.

Right this is what worries me since it fits the model I’ve been working with for this whole conflict. My consolation is that I misjudged how rapidly we would accelerate into the whole oil industry across the region getting decimated. This does allow Iran to maintain MAD in a sense. They are aiming their weapons like they want to kill people at insurance companies via cardiac arrest, it’s very calculating. As for Israel independently launching nukes when its entire intelligence-military apparatus is in the hands of the USA, I think that may be unrealistic. We can still skate by without nukes dropping.

We need to be Trusting the Plan, not trusting Random Accounts That Use The Most Questionable Capitalization Possible.

Logseq. It works with Markdown or Org. Joplin is fine but I’ve moved away from it for Orgzly Revived + Logseq mobile/Emacs Orgmode + Logseq desktop all integrated with each other to do some stuff Logseq and Orgzly cannot do alone.

You will not find a better option honestly I love my tools. Tried a lot of things and this is one that will grow with you and never overwhelm you if you respect it.

Particularly nice to be able to smoothly turn Logseq/Orgmode stuff into LaTeX stuff and use Emacs Zotero integrations. I can publish professional-level papers and articles of pretty much any kind, from the same system where I work on Minecraft mods and remind myself to do house chores so my wife thinks I am a genius (because I am). I could write an entire textbook with it. It feels like being forced to use a revolver for years, and then switching to an AR platform.

Is this more George Galloway/Scott Ritter news? Israeli sources (we never know why alternative media figures were led to believe their sources, by the way, they can lie to them! they can give CIA-sourced “insider info” to “prove” they are in the IRGC or whatever) would get an easy W by claiming this and walking it back. It’s the best they have other than claiming all videos of missiles hitting Israel are AI/misattributed.

Two easy-to-explain crossovers here are the event where Jill Stein, Cornell West, and Claudia de la Riva all did a joint “vote out fascism” drive, and the No Kings rallies.

Another issue with PSL I neglected to mention is their social media focus. It’s a requirement to post like it’s your job and have zero opsec!

Main issue with orgs related to or following the same strategy as PSL is the form of their organizing, not necessarily the stances they take ideologically. They’re NGOs doing recruitment drives, not mass movements. There is a reason why they ultimately try to form a coalition with democrats! They’re rebranded progressives/US Green Partiers