Car sales on the RF are up something like 50% over last year and last year had relatively normal numbers.

The RF’s central bankers keep trying to tank their economy but it isn’t working because of all the direct investment required to offset sanctions. They are maxing out debt costs, basically, trying the neoliberal “fighting inflation” strategy that does the exact opposite most of the time. It makes them precarious economically despite how well they’re doing but for a very different reason than “sanctions are working”. If they kicked out their neoliberals it would be smooth sailing.

The genocide is already accelerated. The Biden-Harris administration already gives Israel all of the material, military, and diplomatic support they need for genociding Gaza and ramping up against the West Bank, the latter being something that has already been happening for months. And people like yourself tolerated that, accepted that from “your” candidates, and fought against those for whom it was correctly a red line.

In short, both Biden and Harris would rather lose than be anything other than 100% materially supportive of Israel’s genocide. They made that choice and y’all backed them up on it. Time to own those decisions, the decision to lose in support of genocide, and do some self-criticism around how what you subscribed to was actually neither particularly strategic nor morally sound.

Biden and Harris already openly pledge unconditional material support to Israel in its genocide, organize Europe in this same direction, and go after anyone opposing them on this. Israel receives what it materially needs to do all pf this. Any further escalation in the West Bank will be done with materials, funds, and diplomatic cover provided by the Biden-Harris administration.

Biden and Harris feign empathy and try to run little games around redefining what a ceasefire is for PR purposes. But in terms of the basic reakity of supporting Israel to do whatever it wants to Palestinians, as in providing them the means they would otherwise nit have to do it, there is no sense in which they are less bad than Trump.

Harris did and does support genocide and if you tolerated that you should do some self-criticism.

And I think you will find that there has been no material difference in what “Israel” is actually doing. They’ve been ramping up occupation and violence in the West Bank for months, going in exactly this direction already. They murdered an American activist in the West Bank as part of this and swept it under the rug using the pretense of an “investigation”, remember? The West Bank is already occupied, it is already split into isolated districts, travel is already highly restricted, there are racist curfews for those who must commute to work in Israel, forced through several checkpoints and fearing jail for any delays, giving themselves 3 hour buffers for travel tine, and their government is compradors that work with the IOF to arrest and jail them and out down resistance movements.

The main difference between Dems and GOP on Israel is that Dems feign empathy and concern while Republicans are openly racist. But materially the outcomes are actually very similar, with Dems often being worse because they can more effectively count on your lack of dissent and in coordinating with Europe.

You might remember that there has been a US-backed genocide in Gaza for over a year, under a Dem, and they were willing to lose the election rather than stop supporting genocide.

Blue MAGA needs their Two Minutes Hate. They’re continuing their “you deserve everything you get” arc rather than doing any self-criticism about politics or its mechanisms or whether they shouldn’t have gone all in on genocide.

Harris is an empty suit candidate. She has no consistent policy positions. She has never stuck her neck out for anything. Harris has ever won a presidential primary and lost to Andrew Yang (lmao).

She was selected behind closed doors, presumably by donors and horse trading with party insiders. She is exactly the kind of candidate you would expect from that: someone that caters to donors, punches left, tries to embrace “never Trumpers” as the main campaign strategy. Left policies are directly against donors’ interests.

She is not your friend and not a good person, and is definitely not on your team. These people don’t care about you and they don’t care about things like whether they “insult their boss”. Also, the president is not the boss of the VP, the VP can do whatever they want and the only consequences would be partu fallout. Distancing herself from Biden, both around the Democrats’ embrace of genocide and the objective degradation in conditions due to a reduction in real wages, was the obvious way to actually try to win. And to be clear, as empty suits serving donor interests, ahe could have done both of those things in eords only and then done their bidding once in office. That is how beholden she is to donor interesrs: she couldn’t even play the false promise game that every Dem uses to get elected.

Harris has only ever indicated unwavering support for the genocide and the the wider ethnosupremacist apartheid settler colony that is Israel. This is entirely consistent with being a vehicle for donor interests, who are all wrapped up in the petrodollar and investments in Israel. There is no reason to think there was some kind of plan to hurt her election chances by demotivating the base and to then do the popular thing once in office. The tendency is to do the exact opposite of that.

And if they convinced you to tolerate genocide for this, take a real hard look at yourself.

Yeah that is basically the modern strategy of having way too many managers. It works against workplace organizing.

Though this is a double edged sword because they are setting uo thr conditions for a return to militant labor organizing.

These are institutions, not your friends. They are not making an oopsie, they knowingly downplayed genocide because it disagreed with their political commitments, the ideology they enforce through hiring and firing practices and editorial oversight. They had staff members making noise about this on day 1 and rather than accept this they hounded them out.

Here they are telling their staff not to sign solidarity petitions That article, which is also itself full of Zionist false tropes re: what is antisemitism, cites other examples that I recommend reviewing. These include The Guardian firing a cartoonist because they depicted Netanyahu operating on hinself in the shape of Gaza. And firing a columnist for retweeting pro-resistance accounts on Twitter and (correctly) claiming Israel bombed a hospital. This was back when the media figured it just needed its usual apparatus of nisibformation and downplaying to give Israel deniability for some short-lived crimes.

You can also find a member of The Guardian defending Israel’s actions here https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-gaza-bbc-journalists-accuse-broadcaster-of-bias. As is common for liberal Zionists that happen to be Jewish, they attempt to leverage a false sense of victimization to justify Israel’s crimes and make this about “antisemitism” that they personally exoerience, which 99% of the time is just criticism of Israel. The real goal of these media putsches is to get their Israel-critical colleagues fired, providing their employer with an “acceptable” excuse.

There is also one or more first hand account of how this dynsmic worked at The Guardian specifically on the issue of genociding Gaza: https://novaramedia.com/2024/03/12/how-the-guardians-editor-in-chief-caved-to-pro-israel-pressure/

Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.

You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.

Which speaks to a much greater problem regarding Sanders: he dropped the chance to build a movement and parallel platform and instead just became a sheepdog for Clinton, Biden, and Harris. He was a useful lightning rod for the popularity of social spending policies and getting debt off the backs of the vast majority of people, but only served as a lightning rod, not turning it into organizing or strength. Just like Obama disassembled his electoral team to use party insiders and lose the 2010 midterms, Sanders gave away his donor list for a song and left his ground game operation hanging until they fucked off and did their own things.

This is why any turn to the Democratic party is a death knell and why we need the exact opposite approach to building the left. The heart of left strength is organizations, of people workinh to educate one another, recruit, and engage in action according to an independent political program that does not wane or falter just because one old guy capitulates to Democrats. There needs to be hundreds of people ready to replace any “important” figurehead or candidate or politician, they must be jettisonable as needed and beholden to members’ will, not donors’.

Yes, join a socialist organization and help delegitimate these (literal) losers and help put focus on the issues faced by working people!

If you are are still particularly interested in electoralism, then I recommend getting together with like-minded people to create a disciplined voting bloc who loudly announce that they will not vote for Dems unless a certain policy regime is adopted.

The sassy way for me to put this is that there will be no blowing up or realignments so long as you and others vote for these clowns! This is why they try to pander using PR and not policy concessions.

In this timeline, Dems will endorse and successfully help pass a repeal of the 22nd Amendment so they can run against Trump again (because he’s so beatable!) and still lose.

Blue MAGA out in force

American universal healthcare would mean eliminating a huge pile of profits for healthcare-related companirs that are effectively just charging you rent for the privilege of going to a doctor. Those companies are large donors and fund think tanks that spread PR about how it is actually fiscally irresponsible to pay less for healthcare while changing where the balance sheet is calculated and what will happen to all of those jobs predicated on wasting your time and money to get healthcare?

You will not get universal healthcare, let alone single payer healthcare, without having some kind of leverage and using it in a disciplined way. And unless you are a CEO, your leverage can only come from collective organizing, of power in numbers, of political education so that everyone in the org is practically aligned on these goals and will noy disintegrate or be coopted by liberals.

This is a cold take it has been 8 years of Sanders actinh like this. What would you expect to need a source for, exactly?

It is not harm reduction to support genocidal neoliberals. It is not pragmatic to contradict all of your stated ideals to go to bat for them, give them your donor lists for a song and fail to do any movement building whatsoever.

Stop defending these losers.

Trump got fewer votes than in 2024. Dems ran a pro-genocide empty suit that did not distinguish themselves from a disliked incumbent and got even fewer votes than Clinton in 2016.

And the party itself doesn’t really care that they lost aside from how it impacts individuals’ careers. They are not your friends or allies. They probably would’ve won if they just had Harris pander on Gaza and introduce 1 (1) major policy plank people could grab on to. She wouldn’t have even followed up on either one of those topics, it would’ve just been the usual false promises and it probably would’ve worked. That is how closely they stuck to the donor class: they could not even construct their usual bad faith strategies. So instead you got Liz Cheney constantly on the campaign trail, lmao.

I’ve asked 4 Harris voters irl to name a single major policy plank and they each just plain went silent for around 10 seconds.

If you want to actually fight for yout causes, it is important to look at this with clear eyes. The failures of the Democrat political class are not your failures. They don’t listen to you and you had no input whatsoever on theit policy platform or choice of candidate. You don’t need to defend their failures or act like they don’t bear responsibility for running historically unlikable campaigns and candidates. Just because there is a dang cheeto does not mean Dems are redeemable for what they do. It has been a year of naked genocide and they demanded your complicity and still lost.

To oppode the right it is necessary to join and build othrt organizations, organizations grounded in working class power.

Will do!