Yeah, it is a prohibition on willingly eating pork. But to Islamaphobes this gets twisted into some belief that any presence, contact, or image of pork products hurts and condemns Muslims (I have heard this referred to as “Christian Ham Magic”, which I think is a good term for it). Like how soldiers were claiming they dip their bullets in bacon grease so that if they kill a Muslim with them, they would, by “Muslim” belief, go to hell.

Eh, that is one explanation, but pigs are only slightly worse than other domestic animals, which also have parasites and whose meat would spoil. The other and I think more likely explanation is formalizing differences between themselves from other ethnic groups in the region and making that division explicit. The early precursors to Israelites and Judeans were inland in the hills and shepherds, and were defining themselves against the more urban and coastal Philistines and other Phoenecian peoples. Pigs are preferred by more dense populations since they can be kept in a pen and don’t have to move around to graze, and the coastal element is why there is also prohibitions against shellfish.

All the analogies of people to lobsters was projection.

Red Son was just a confession!

They should have been Rage For The Machine!

Well, can’t guarantee that he can maintain the record over the next few months, but currently Biden holds the record.

Interesting analogy I have found. There is a plethora of psychology and sociology studies that show that children in abusive relationships end up hating the parent that refuses to stand up to the abusive parent more than the parent doing the abusing. Even if the child wouldn’t phrase it this way, there is an acceptance that abusive alcoholics exist. It is the supposedly good and sober parent letting it happen and enabling it that generates the greatest anger and hatred in the child.

Hating the government is right and good. The problem is the crushing of the left, the popular front, and the Democrats taking up all space for opposition to the Republicans, while wanting to be “polite Republicans” and maintaining the status quo above all else is what gave opening for hating the government to take this reactionary form.

It is never the party’s job to appeal to voters. There is one designated party that is just owed support and should never have to craft another appeal besides “The Republicans can’t fill out the paperwork properly, that is why we will build the wall faster, put people in concentration camps at greater numbers, and do fascism better and more politely than the dumb, knuckle-dragging fascists”

No, Democrats and Liberals using Trump 2 as an excuse to be vocally pro-genocide and forcing people to accept pro-fascism is what caused Trump 2, since the party cannot fail only be failed by voters willing to accept fascism but not turned off by crude, ham-fisted forms of fascism. The problem, supposedly, is people that oppose Trump’s policies, rather than just needing the Trump policies being polite. It is the Democrat’s need to always adopt all of the previous Republican policies, and their only goal is being the Republicans, but polite. If Genocide and fascism is not a red line, but completely acceptable to support, as long as you can imagine another regime doing the genocide slightly worse, there is no evil you will not work for and support.

It was right-deviationism of using markets and foreign capital investment to build up productive forces.

Almost as if every person is capable of shitting their pants, and I will baselessly assume, does so regularly like me. As always, there are differences in degrees and causes. Outside of capitalism, famine actually correlates to not having food to feed people, rather than markets saying that food has to be wasted while people starve because it is not profitable to feed them (e.g. the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for American examples). Also ignoring how it was intentional in colonial powers.

The difference between communism and anarchism isn’t the aims, but whether the state could immediately be abolished or that there must be a transitional period.

It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.

The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.

The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.

American Capitalism? I invoked multiple genocides and political repressions that weren’t American. I am sure that 1840s Hungarians and Irish, 1930s Bengalis, and 1990s and 2000s Iraqis are glad to know that capitalism isn’t repressive or intentionally creating starvation because the people creating the repression and starvation said that they aren’t. Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng and Cuba has been strangled by American blockades, both have not been nearly as active in war mongering as “Western Nations”, nor as repressive, despite active propaganda about them. And Western repression is much more tied to their economic modes than other nations. You have to kill anti-war protesters (e.g. Kent State) because if not full colonialism, we need neo-colonialism, so pro-Vietnamese protests can’t be tolerated. And we need to support Israel, so “anti-Semitic” a.k.a. anti-Zionist protesters can’t be tolerated and have no rights, because of their ties to the military and arms industry. Such as Mahmoud Khalil, who needs to be disappeared and sent to an undisclosed location to try to push fascist anti-protest, anti-speech laws.

Yeah, as someone with Lakota, Irish, Bengali, Kurdish, and Iraqi friends and opiate and meth addicted family, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at children of your kind. I am sure the 1990s and the introduction of capitalism was a great and prosperous time.

We are seeing the capitalist West’s descent into fascism. The direct proof of the 1930’s maxim, “fascism is capitalism in decay” between the AFD, Orban, Erdogan, Starmer being basically indistinguishable from a Tory, Macron pulling a Hindenburg by using the presidential power to appoint a prime minister that will unify the center-right liberals with the far-right to prevent the left from having any power in government, and Meloni being an acceptable, reasonable western leader because she follows through with whatever US foreign policy is on offer. We are seeing a direct breakdown because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (law of diminishing returns, applied to profit, if you are a child that believes in neoclassical economics). So profit has to be sought out by purely national protectionism and reshoring since there is not a growing pie, but you just have to claim a greater slice of the pie. Capitalism on any sufficient timescale is Fascism, the destruction of WW2 and the Marshall Plan reset this “diminishing return on profitability” so that we are reaching the same state of the 1920s. But since there isn’t a strong socialist movement we have to modify Gramsci’s assessment. “The old world is dying, a new one is completely stillborn, now and forever is the time of monsters”

Communism by any other name would smell as sweet

Indonesia, Chile, West Germany, Congo, Iran, Bengal, Guatemala, Nicaragua…