aerdil posted:

actually it might be good if the FBI infiltrated our political party as it'd actually give us funding to do things

i love all the bleating from aging leftists about Richard Aoki being an obvious FBI agent. "he did more good than harm", "documents show the fbi believed he was an agent but he really wasn't", "he was an fbi agent but dropped out and ended up on the side of justice". all socialist parties in the USA are probably 1/4 FBI/CIA or more, something we just have to accept.

jools posted:

discipline posted:

haha maybe should start our own marxist-leninist party. it's still a forum with front page articles but also a platform and suggested reading page. then we can coordinate with people in our geographic locations or whatever. this would be a radical experiment with party feedback, the upvote and downvotes and home pages etc, oh... hello mr. fbi, welcome to tHE rHizzonE

please see a doctor

lol

HenryKrinkle posted:

plus there's the fact that the US got rich through imperialism and plunder.

Unlike Moscow which granted the right to choose self-determination to all the imperial gains of tsarist Russia yeah

blinkandwheeze posted:

lets all see doctors

i signed up for a family doctor here but the bureaucracy surrounding it is sort of ridiculous so i dunno when i'll have an appointment. sigh.

Crow posted:

some people don't have insurance or live in a country with universal healthcare

then see an imam.

discipline posted:

as for the "being able to leave" thing, I had this conversation with two different groups yesterday actually. if you sink a lot of investment into education, housing, healthcare etc and there exists a strike breaker who is offering a half mil, house and job to your doctors and scientists, you will generally be cautious of people leaving. also you have to patiently explain that the ability to travel is a privilege that not many have

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden's poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):

To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.


The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the-morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men — I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means — the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don't advertise their callousness, and they don't speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.