[quote=@mdk] Basque finally surrendered its last arms, and Spain is cool now I guess, but for the record, Spanish revolutionaries didn't stay cool forever. Granted, all I really learned of the Spanish Civil War came from Pan's Labyrinth, and at least in that depiction the government wasn't exactly cool either. I can find absolutely nothing negative to post about the Zapatistas, and as much as I generally appreciate Kurdish efforts to blast away at nasty people in the middle east, apparently lots of Kurdish groups are themselves terror networks and it's goddamn impossible for me to separate all the who's from all the other who's over yonder. Confuzzling. Anyway. I only commented to throw some more gas on that 'revolution fetish' catchphrase I pseudo-invented in the previous post, primarily because romanticizing the nobility of any one particular quasi-terrorist struggle is inherently dangerous. I'm sure Spanish anarchocommunists were generally sweet from (at a minimum) a few perspectives -- just saying. [/quote] One man's terror group is another person's freedom fighters. This is the entire notion of insurgency, what matters is degree of insurgency. Are you bombing targets associated to the state and going on a guerrilla campaign against assets that serve to safeguard the power that be in that you're hitting the military and police in that they put themselves in the way of the government so considered detached from street-level reality as your group believes, in the vein as Basque, Catalonian, or Irish insurgency? Or are we bombing everything because literally everything not you is literally the enemy like ISIS? [quote=@mdk] Yeah Yugoslavia didn't really, ah, break that whole genocidal mold we were worrying about, in the end.... But you're certainly (implicitly?) correct that it's pretty unfair to lay THIS PARTICULAR mass-slaughter wholly at the feet of communism. [/quote] It's so of hard to go about things when specific cases aren't used. Though I also don't want to sound like I'm someone to try and defend the Holocaust, because I don't. But in most situations as I have learned about them it's less active malevolence on the part of the state (unless we're discussing someone like the Tatars, then there was a targeted effort there). In most cases it's inactive ability of bloated government being too incapable of acting in the interests of oversight against itself because there's no over-sight mechanism. But I while I'll admit Stalin's Holdomor and Mao's mass famines during the Great Leap Forward did exist, they're not exactly anything that wouldn't have happened if the basic ideology of the state was any different. If the Communist Party of China was a new phase in Chinese dynastic heritage with the same modernization vision then it would have been just as likely they would have fucked up. Much in the same amorphous sense Captialism and factors associated [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl]have created its own disasters[/url] through willful ignorance. [quote=@mdk] NOTABLY: cities run by leftists are also the ones falling apart and/or literally shooting themselves and/or burning themselves down while packed into a warehouse because they can't afford their own inflated rent and/or rioting about the damage in the city while damaging their city. Texas, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs.... they're doing just fine. Which of course begs the (admittedly pretty partisan) question, why the [i]fuck[/i] would we listen to the other guy here? Ya know? I mean that's harsh, yeah, but.... come on now. The world's orange-est capitalist took power 100 days ago and the industry in these old manufacturing towns [i]has been on a non-stop skyrocket ever since[/i], slowing only when rumors began to swirl that he was't going to deregulate quite as much as people thought he might. Who left who behind again? The Rust Belt made their opinions on the matter quite clear, much to the chagrin of -- well, basically everybody else in the world. My own stated perspective aside, I'm taking their word for it. [/quote] I live near one of those major industrial American, rust belt cities. I haven't seen shit. But here's the thing: the American economy has been on track for growth for the passed couple years. Irregardless of Trump, the activity we're seeing right now has had its roots back long before him. [img]http://www.isa-world.com/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_US_GDP_Growth_7f6cc6e6a4.png[/img] Trump likes to brag too about obliging companies to not go overseas, but we have to really consider that such decisions in such industries are not ever snap decisions. They take several years to consider, so if they agreed to pull out of going to Mexico they probably had already been reconsidering or weren't wholly dead set on it. And even in the case of [url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/17/trump-just-took-credit-for-stopping-ford-from-moving-a-plant-to-mexico-but-it-was-planning-to/?utm_term=.da48bf9cba19]the Ford deal[/url] nothing would have changed anyways since it was only one line moving somewhere and it wasn't even decided yet where it would go, and per the plant in Kentucky the line workers would have just started work on the Escape which had come to more-or-less fully replace the previous model. But this doesn't change the nature of the Auto Industry, workers are used to regular lay-offs for model year changes. Saying you convinced Ford or GM to hire on a thousand new workers isn't a big victory when you step and consider they would have hired those same thousand hands once the changes had been made and those people laid off come back from an effective vacation. [quote=@mdk] Or any number of things in-between, or nothing. Teach a man to fish and he'll drink on weekends, give a man a living basic income and he'll eat forever. Give a man a 105" UHDTV and he'll forget he's supposed to eat. Inequality only matters in a context of scarcity. You walk past some untold number of Starbucks mugs every day, and even if you're not currently holding a starbucks mug yourself, it's simply not a big deal -- of course, if you're on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and the other guy is holding a snicker's bar, that's worth killing for. The point being this: in a distant future where work is no longer required for production, even first-world problems are (logically and presumably) as rare as an actual genocide. Case in point -- nobody goes to war for control of emojis. You can already have as many emojis as you need, want, or accidentally utilize. Scarcity of emojis does not exist. The concept of struggling over them is ludicrous (at least it should be, I'm sure there's a guy). In the future we're talking about, basically everything is as readily available as emojis. I'll grant you that capitalism isn't prepared to deal with that -- sure. Communism DAMNED SURE isn't ready either; nobody is. It just so happens that Capitalism is taking us there, and for the life of me I can't think of a reason we should stop. Shit man that's gonna be awesome. ....and I started going forwards and realized you addressed some of that, but fuckit, we're doing long srs posts in spam now, this am me srs face. [/quote] As I'm sure I already pointed out before, this too is the goal of communism. The difference being when its achieved I'm not paying Applebucks to get an Applecoffee, or that I need a basic income anyways to get what's needed because the system has already been altered where every means of production is now the public property and if there's any one thing I want I can get it. What's different is how the approach is made. Marxists (or in this case, Marxist-Leninists) would argue there needs to be a strong state to oversee the change from A to B while Anarcho-Communists argue there needs to be immediate change from A to B since the transitional period is irrelevant. Where-as Market Communists would suggest that in order to effectively shift to communism we need to - for a while - play nice in the global market place because there is at the moment still capitalist countries that can derail the revolution in much the same way Napoleon derailed the Revolution and when he got deposed Europe just replaced the entire French power structure with a king (to then depose). [quote=@mdk] ...but like, why? We're in the garden of Eden, arguing over who gets to name the apple. Just fucking take some, have a bushel, call them Krauttestes if you want. [/quote] Because it shouldn't be Steve Job's property if he isn't laboring to actually grow the apple, and if in the future is laboring to grow the apple then it stands that no one should own the apple. Fucking eat the apple and stop worrying about spooks, you'll feel better. [quote=@mdk] I absolutely get what you're saying -- it's just that [url=https://s3.amazonaws.com/libapps/accounts/94632/images/e-nable_hand.jpg]this[/url] is so radically and empirically inferior to [url=https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1415722/double-amputee-controls-two-prosthetic-arms-just-his-mind.jpg]this.[/url] And I'm not, like, super patient about the gradually-improved-over-time process for like my actual limbs. I say that with the utmost respect and appreciation for all you small-arms dealers out there -- you're doing an awesome thing, and I hope someone's paying you lots of money to do it. Just.... you know. We've had, what, all of human history to figure out prosthetics? Then in the last fifteen years we started throwing actual money at it, and went from hooks and strings to fucking Evangelion in a decade. As the interested party, I'm going with money on this one. [/quote] By market rules the most accesible product on the market is the most succesful. There's a reason Apple's iPhone actually doesn't lead the smart phone revolution despite being in some ways the superior product because it's such a carefully crafted self contained environment. But it's the Android and phones like it because they used open source Linex as its operating platform and didn't spend so much money for people to stare at paper on polished wooden tables in highly polished fiber-glass office-labs while sipping twenty-dollar mocha-capacinos. Android just did it and it's a tool that works well enough, can be used as a future platform for other shit, and is cheaper than the iShit. [quote=@mdk] I mean compare it to the similar period east/west counterparts. Capitalism generated wealth and Meemaw got to eat Chef Boyardi from her microwave oven. Communism generated poverty and Babushka got buried in a mass grave with political dissidents (assuming she hadn't been executed by the state for wearing glasses). [/quote] Can I get a helicopter ride? [quote=@mdk] Dysfunctional is a strong word. For all we know, American politics is just boring (preposterous suggestion after last year, I know). Nonparticipation is only an issue if it's compulsory, and in the US it's only compulsory in the case of convicted felons. I'd hardly call that a crisis. In short: let's not spend too much effort trying to straighten the horns on a bull here. Maybe they SHOULD be curved. [/quote] Last I checked folks like Jefferson wanted more people to be involved because if there weren't more people involved then the system isn't valid. He may have told slaves and women to fuck off, but at the least he wasn't saying the bankers and speculators should be the only ones to be involved. [/quote] I'm jumbled a bit. Sounds like what you're saying is essentially that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. My meme-level response is that Communism doesn't equal liberty and AntiFa ain't patriots -- flesh that out in your mind, what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al [i]agonized[/i] over the decision to go to war with England -- not out of cowardice or their inability to be effective, but out of wisdom. More frequently than the proponents of glorious revolution would care to admit, the goons running around cracking skulls are just that -- goons. [/quote] [quote] what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al [i]agonized[/i] over the decision to go to war with England [/quote] This sounds like you're implying that the Founding Fathers were of one mind and that George Washington totally wasn't impatient to get the ball rolling and that the Peace Delegate should really stop beating their meat over appeals to King George to save them from Parliament. Or at the least in opposition to the Stamp Act. They didn't send a strongly worded letter. They fucking committed what we would happily call terrorism today. [img]http://www.cr-cath.pvt.k12.ia.us/lasalle/Resources/8th%20Websites%202013/Josh%20Sophia%20Brylie%20Nicole%20Rev%20War/Sophia%20Maher%20Rev.%20War/images/boston-tea-party-3.jpg[/img] The Olive Branch petition wasn't really unanimously regarded as a positive move by anyone. There was plenty support against it and cynical attitudes against it doing any good, particularly by John Adams. And Thomas Jefferson had written the original draft so offensively it had to be changed before sending it off.