thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]

Anecdotally my partner gets motion sick from cars and also needs to be shotgun or else they get really sick, and they do not get motion sick at all from trains.

The same “can do” attitude that lead to them losing every single one of those wars? No thank you.

You can run Deepseek R1 on your local machine

Hey, she’s just following the orders of the bond market and the Invisible Hand, ok?

We need our favorite 21st century Italian Marxist on here pronto

It’s the only offer on the table. Trump has changed the game, every country is getting tariffs. Vietnam is not willing to play hardball with their largest export market.

What products can the United States sell in Vietnam that will displace Vietnamese industries? Virtually nothing. Everything the United States makes is far too expensive or useless to be of any benefit to Vietnamese consumers, nor is American manufacturing at all a threat to Vietnamese manufacturing. The United States exports mostly agricultural products like soybeans and cotton to Vietnam, as well as some cameras and probably some computer chips. Total exports are around $10 billion (compared to Vietnamese exports to the US, ~$115 billion). So even if that doubles, that’s not really doing much.

Vietnam’s median income is around $9000USD. They’re not buying $90k+ pickups and SUVs lol, even if their infrastructure could support cars of that size. The next step up from mopeds is a ~$5k small Chinese EV, not a giant SUV.

Yeah Williamsburg was a total blowout. The bastion of brunch libs is the Upper East Side, that went heavily to Cuomo.

But can that security detail be bought? If you’re a high profile socialist, you need committed socialists as security.

I mean he’s got time to build an ideologically committed security detail like right now. None of that is dependent on him being mayor.

I hope so!

When are the Zohran Fedayeen sign ups coming for New Yorkers? Only somewhat kidding.

If armed socialists in the United States got into a full confrontation with ICE I think you’d know because this site would probably be shut down by the FBI lol

Dual power, Zohran has to build it himself tbh. He’s the new mayor in all but name, if he wants to enact his agenda he’s going to need to take on the biggest gang that actually runs NYC, which is the NYPD. He’s gonna need goons for that. If he’s got any brains and is actually serious about enacting an even remotely socialist agenda he needs armed goons like a supervillain, and they’ve gotta be loyal to him. I don’t think you’d be able to get an org to do this.

Yeah I was mostly bullshitting, I too wish we had actual third places in reality. Love you folks but nothing beats hanging out in person.

Buddy, you’re posting in the tankie third place right now

If Zohran has any sense and is “hiding his power level” even a tiny amount, he needs an armed guard of committed socialists like yesterday to prevent this exact scenario from happening. If deporting him is at all hard for ICE to do without making it into a big public Incident, they’ll have to come up with some other shenanigans unless they want riots in NYC.

It’s because North Korea has no bourgeois class to speak of; both Russia and Iran have a ton of rich businessmen who desperately want to normalise with the West so they can make more money. This class of people simply does not exist in North Korea. Likewise, let’s say you want to bribe a North Korean to work with you; how the fuck do you even pay them? Pay them with what? North Korea is entirely cut off from the global financial system, there’s no workarounds that exist, unlike places like Russia and Iran.

You combine this with the DPRK state taking collaboration and intelligence far more seriously because it’s a communist state, not just a global South aligned would be capitalist state like Russia or Iran. The DPRK is run by communists who watched the United States devastate their country in living memory, they take security extremely seriously. There’s a reason the DPRK has nukes and Iran doesn’t, and it’s entirely because of this difference. Communists have no hope that they’ll be able to work with the West, they see no benefit to working in good faith with those who would seek them dead.

I have read Lenin, and yes it’s a bit more complicated since he does talk about financial imperialism but not in the same way things have developed post war. Also this is Jameson, in the introduction, describing his choice of “late.”

What ‘late’ generally conveys is… the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.

And Mandel on “late”:

… will enable us to explain THE history of the capitalist mode of production and above all the THIRD phase of this mode OF production, which we shall call late capitalism’, (page 42)

Neither of these convey the idea that this is the last stage or a terminal stage, just another, most recent stage. And indeed Mandel does try and claim late capitalism is different than the imperialism described by Lenin, writing

the structure of the world economy in the first phase of late capitalism is distinguished by several important characteristics from its structure in the age of classical imperialism. (page 69)