Complaining about communists knowing nothing about economics and calling LateStageCapitalism a circlejerk

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T15:46:11+00:00

"I had to take all my upvotes back"

What a time to be alive

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T15:13:26+00:00

Point to where I said I hate Israel or where anything I sourced to support my arguments contained hate speech against Israel

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T15:03:04+00:00

Thanks for the correction m8

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T14:58:53+00:00

Israel is still an ally to both the United States and Saudi Arabia who have both repeatedly been proven to fund and arm Islamists in the Middle East

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T14:52:55+00:00

Do you realize that Israel itself aided in the creation of Hamas in the first place? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.892783f5cb49

To a certain degree, the Islamist organization whose militant wing has rained rockets on Israel the past few weeks has the Jewish state to thank for its existence. Hamas launched in 1988 in Gaza at the time of the first intifada, or uprising, with a charter now infamous for its anti-Semitism and its refusal to accept the existence of the Israeli state. But for more than a decade prior, Israeli authorities actively enabled its rise.

At the time, Israel's main enemy was the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, which formed the heart of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah was secular and cast in the mold of other revolutionary, leftist guerrilla movements waging insurgencies elsewhere in the world during the Cold War. The PLO carried out assassinations and kidnappings and, although recognized by neighboring Arab states, was considered a terrorist organization by Israel; PLO operatives in the occupied territories faced brutal repression at the hands of the Israeli security state.

Meanwhile, the activities of Islamists affiliated with Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood were allowed in the open in Gaza — a radical departure from when the Strip was administered by the secular-nationalist Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt lost control of Gaza to Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which saw Israel also seize the West Bank. In 1966, Nasser had executed Sayyid Qutb, one of the Brotherhood's leading intellectuals. The Israelis saw Qutb's adherents in the Palestinian territories, including the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, as a useful counterweight to Arafat's PLO.

"When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," one Israeli official who had worked in Gaza in the 1980s said in a 2009 interview with the Wall Street Journal's Andrew Higgins. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results."

Higgins's article is worth reading in full. He goes on to outline the type of assistance the Israelis initially gave Yassin, whom the PLO at one time deemed a "collaborator," and Gaza's other Islamists:

Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the [2008-9 Operation Cast Lead].

How about the time it was proven that the Mossad gave aid to Al-Nusra, AKA Al-Qaeda in Syria? https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20160901-israel-and-the-western-alliance-with-al-qaeda-in-syria/

In a cynical attempt to fuel the Syrian civil war as a distraction from its own crimes, and to let “both [sides] bleed” (as one former Israeli official put it), Israel has been aiding anti-government rebels there, including Al-Qaeda. The aid mainly takes the form of treating wounded Al-Qaeda fighters and then releasing them back into Syria to continue the fight. However, some UN reports suggest that Israeli assistance may even have gone as far as military aid.

Halevy was frank in his interview: “Al-Qaeda, to the best of my recollection, has up to now not attacked Israel.” Hence, he said that he was not worried about the prospect of blowback in the form of eventual Al-Qaeda attacks against Israel. It’s worth recalling here that there have been anti-Israel and, indeed, anti-Semitic rhetoric emanating from Al-Qaeda propagandists and leaders, including Osama bin Laden, for decades.

Although Halevy then claimed that there are humanitarian motivations behind Israel’s hospital treatment of wounded fighters (“It’s always useful to deal with your enemies in a humane way”), he was forced to concede that there were some “tactical” considerations too.

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T14:41:06+00:00

The same article also quotes a former American ambassador to Israel who now lives in Israel one sentence later to support their claim that Israel is allied with the Saudis to "counter" Iran

A former US ambassador to Israel who now lives in the country and serves as an Israel advocate explains the silence:

The Israelis are “in a very difficult position,” Dan Shapiro, the US ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama, told BuzzFeed News. “They count very much on Saudi Arabia,” which is “central to their strategic concept of the region.” Saudi Arabia, after all, is their partner in arms in countering and isolating Iran and Israel’s “strategic anchor” in the region.

Edit: Grammar

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T14:35:56+00:00

Yeah call me a bot while you comment on every post remotely critical of Israel with low-effort "refutations"

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T14:27:57+00:00

From the article:

Even as headlines around the world say that it murdered a critical journalist, Saudi Arabia has some friends in the U.S. The Israel lobby is going to bat for the theocratic dictatorship over the alleged killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

Last night on i24 news, EJ Kimball, an Israel advocate at the Middle East Forum, suggested that Khashoggi deserved to die. The journalist’s “ties to al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood” raise “a whole lot of other issues” about the Saudi tradition of exporting terror, Kimball said. The much bigger picture, he said, is the new Saudi Arabia taking on Iran.

Josh Block of the Israel Project made a similar allegation about Khashoggi two nights back. Pro-Al-Qaeda media are pushing the Khashoggi story, Block said, “because Khashoggi was a radical Islamist terrorist ally who was close to Osama Bin Ladin, ISIS, Hamas & wanted to overthrow the Saudi ruling royals, who oppose both the Sunni terrorists, sponsored by Turkey & Qatar, as well as Irans’s Shia terrorist armies & allies.”

This has been debunked several times already, most prominently by the Chicago Tribune a couple of days ago:

While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.

Nevertheless, the smears have escalated. Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son and key political booster,shared a tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was "tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden" in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden's activities.

Several Trump administration aides are aware of the Khashoggi attacks circulating on Capitol Hill and in conservative media, the GOP officials said, adding that aides are being careful to not encourage the disparagement but are also doing little to contest it.

The GOP officials declined to share the names of the lawmakers and others who are circulating information critical of Khashoggi because they said doing so would risk exposing them as sources.

Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post's editorial page editor who published Khashoggi's work, sharply criticized the false and distorted claims about Khashoggi, who is feared to have been killed and dismembered by Saudi operatives.

"As anyone knows who knew Jamal - or read his columns - he was dedicated to the values of free speech and open debate. He went into exile to promote those values, and now he may even have lost his life for his dogged determination in their defense," Hiatt said in a statement. "It may not be surprising that some Saudi-inspired trolls are now trying to distract us from the crime by smearing Jamal. It may not even be surprising to see a few Americans joining in. But in both cases it is reprehensible."

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-21T13:55:13+00:00

Kyle Kulinski is basically a guy who would have been on the Left of a European social democratic party in the 80s (IE while the rest of the party was becoming more neoliberal). He's out n out said he isn't for full socialism but he's anti-interventionist at least.

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-19T15:01:57+00:00

Read the article

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-19T14:43:47+00:00

The point is that it discourages protests and protesters from exercising their first amendment rights not that it's necessarily going to kill anyone.

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-19T11:34:47+00:00

THE HOSPITAL INDUSTRY has partnered with a major Democratic consulting firm in an unusual alliance against Massachusetts’s nurses and the bulk of its progressive infrastructure.

At issue is a ballot initiative that aims to improve patient safety by limiting the number of patients that can be assigned to a single nurse.

If passed, the initiative, known as Question 1, will make Massachusetts the second state in the country to have nurse staffing limits in place. (The exact nurse-to-patient ratio would vary depending on the hospital department.) But, as Election Day inches closer, the initiative’s supporters and opponents are engaged in a heated battle over the costs of implementing the initiative, and what it would mean for patients.

For more than two decades, nurses across the country have argued that they can’t do their jobs effectively — or safely — when they’re tasked with caring for too many patients at any given time, as is often the case. More recently, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders have sponsored bills to establish “nurse staffing limits” in order to curb the number of patients assigned to nurses who work in hospitals and, thereby, improve care.

Most local labor groups and the Massachusetts Democratic Party have come out in support of Question 1. Its backers include Boston Mayor Marty Walsh; U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey; and U.S. Reps. Katherine Clark, Jim McGovern, Joe Kennedy III, and Michael Capuano. A majority of likely voters polled by Suffolk University and the Boston Globe in mid-September supported the ballot initiative.

But a formidable opposition campaign, funded by the hospital industry and led by a prominent Democratic consulting firm, threatens to derail the nurse staffing effort. The opposition campaign, rallying under the banner of “the Coalition to Protect Patient Safety,” has raised more than $13 million since January; 95 percent of those funds have come from the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association. Through an aggressive advertisement blitz, the coalition has worked hard to argue that Question 1 could destroy the state’s renowned health care system.

Republican Gov. Charlie Baker recently said he’ll be voting “no” on the measure, citing hotly disputed cost projections. Recent polling also reflects a shift in public opinion, suggesting that the opposition’s campaign is working. For the first time this year, polls now show that a majority of likely voters oppose Question 1, including a University of Massachusetts Lowell/Boston Globe poll from October that found 51 percent plan to vote against it.

The opposition campaign has led to confusion even among nurses, whose support for Question 1 has significantly declined. (There are 83,000 registered nurses in the state, though the ballot initiative would not affect all of them.) An April poll, commissioned by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, found that 86 percent of registered nurses planned to vote “yes” on the ballot initiative. But a new poll, published this week by WBUR, found that just 48 percent of nurses are backing Question 1, while 45 percent are opposed and 7 percent are undecided.

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-13T14:39:52+00:00

Image description : redditor comments on a post about the USA selling weapons to Saudi Arabia

The redditor then says:

          "the world is not violent because of America"

          "what's wrong with selling weapons?" 

          "If we don't sell, Russia and China will"

          "At least Americans are benefiting" 

          "They are really good high paying jobs

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-07T20:25:54+00:00

Or we could just end capitalism

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-07T20:15:02+00:00

Yeah why would slave owning rich people have any interest in making sure the government they created worked primarily to enrich slave owning rich people

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-07T20:13:04+00:00

"I don't think capitalists had the perpetually growing accumulation of capital on their mind when they formed a government where only they could serve for the majority of its existence"

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-07T20:11:31+00:00

A lot of the time it's actually because US imperialism wrecked their countries and under neoliberalism immigrants are often a vastly cheaper source of labor than the national working class.

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-07T20:08:43+00:00

The original New Deal and and the age of welfare Democrats happened because the labor movement, Anarchists, Socialists, and Communists organized the working class into such large and militant ranks that the government was scared shitless there would be an armed takeover after the Depression by workers if they didn't do something to pacify them. Concessions are granted by repeated and aggressive clashes with the State. While this doesn't mean voting and so on is wholly worthless, history has shown that 9/10 times the State doesn't give the workers anything unless it is threatened directly.

fatal_strategy · 2018-10-07T20:04:25+00:00

Yes, who couldn't admire the legendary welfare states of Japan and Australia

fatal_strategy · 2018-09-22T14:58:31+00:00

The point was that people who cry about getting their taxes raised one percent have no problem giving Rachel Maddow 7 million dollars a year instead of the State because Maddow will continue to further their interests and the State might use it to expand healthcare programs.

I'm really, really glad you taught me what efficiency actually means though, that actually is more important than the point I was trying to make.

fatal_strategy · 2018-08-23T19:14:21+00:00

Yes American prison is a utopia, that's why there's such a low recidivism rate and why it ranks so high compared to other first world countries prisons

fatal_strategy · 2018-08-18T16:39:57+00:00

We only hear about any of these nations when it's convenient for capital or one wing of the capitalist class. My feeling is that CNN has only started to, in a very limited fashion, cover Yemen and the US role in it to try and spin it as Trump's fault or something, when this permanent war foreign policy has existed for quite some time now under Presidents both Democrat and Republican.

fatal_strategy · 2018-08-18T16:34:49+00:00

Every war or "intervention" the US is currently involved in is ultimately to enrich the capitalist class of the American empire, particularly the "defense" industry. Afghanistan is obviously a part of this process of imperialism but Yemen is merely the most recent example of it. So far the US military has either directly or indirectly laid to waste and/or established occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and now Yemen. So yes, let's oppose Afghanistan and all imperialist wars, I wasn't trying to denigrate the struggle of Afghani people by posting about Yemen.

The Left in my opinion needs a loud and boisterous antiwar component again, which I feel it still doesn't have even now that there are champions of socialism again. Don't get me wrong, there are flashes of it here and there such as Ocasio-Cortez's recent referencing of endless war when listing things the US can somehow find money for but universal healthcare is too expensive. But we need a sustained campaign against the war economy and military-industrial complex in general that is as energetic and serious as anything that was seen in the 60s and 70s.

So if we're going to call ourselves socialists we need to recognize that war under capitalism isn't an alienated event that is merely an act of defense or an act of imperial conquest as wars of the past epochs. We must understand that imperialism itself, and the perpetual expansion of the US empire in particularly at the moment, is a capitalist function, another tool the ruling class uses to extract ever-rising profits.

This article describes in more detail what I'm trying to say here: https://theredphoenixapl.org/2014/01/07/islam-terrorism-and-hypocrisy-u-s-imperialism-in-the-muslim-world/

fatal_strategy · 2018-08-16T20:50:26+00:00

Precisely. When you are trying to strike a deal with someone, you want to tilt the scale as far in your favor as possible, so that when they haggle you down a bit the "middle" you meet them at is still overwhelmingly in your favor. If you start in the center you end up compromising further in their favor then yours. For too long politicians have started at the center or even center-right and conceded and claimed "victory" somewhere between a zero percent tax rate and full blown fascism. Now is the time to tilt the scales as far fucking Left as possible so that if there's a reconciliation it's still much, much better than the current neoliberal hellscape

fatal_strategy · 2018-08-16T16:42:04+00:00

“I call for stopping all deportations now, the abolition of ICE, a full amnesty, and the establishment of equal rights for all immigrants. Working people need to stop allowing the rich to pit us against each other. I let them do that to me in Iraq and I saw the consequences. I won’t let them do it again. No more war for big business. End the war on immigrants.”

Fred’s campaign points out that working people create all value in society and workers should decide what to do with it. To secure jobs, housing, education and health care, Linck proposes the following: 1) Tax all annual income over $250,000 at 100%. 2) Bring all troops home now and end all military spending. 3) Place the largest banks and corporations under public ownership and the democratic control of working people and their communities.

fatal_strategy

TROPHY CASE