#121
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when i went to medical school i took a lot of drugs. spironolactone is also a drug, made by pfizer. this is an example of dialectics, which i invented.
#122
UNUSUALY COOL
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the one good thing ISO ever did was be a bunch of young adults' first encounter with Trots and do such a terrible job of promoting Trotskyism that they inoculated those kids for life
#123
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

trakfactri posted:

I remember reading about an attempt in Ireland last year with the abortion referendum to the extent that U.S. right-wing groups sent over paid canvassers to knock on doors, apparently in violation of the law.



Not only was it illegal, when journalists asked them about it, they unknowingly confessed their crimes, because the nature of the United States person is such that it never occurred to them to have like an hour-long meeting with an Irish organization on "their" side of the referendum to find out when and how to lie

#124
Ireland
Post rating: +
ISO were so shit they even got kicked out of the Cliffite International. RIP

As for the amerikans who came over here for the referendum: some of them never left. They're now harassing women around clinics.



The reason these people never bothered to check with local Irish groups is that the Irish groups are largely funded and quite often run by Brits and Americans. They're practically puppet groups a lot of the time. Same goes for most of our far right groups. One of the biggest Irish fascist recently got outed as ex British military. This isn't to say we don't have far right agitators or a great number of anti abortion activists, but they'd be in total disarray if it weren't for foreign cash and support. The current biggest fascist group in Ireland (which has maybe 100 members at best), the Irexit Party, somehow managed to raise 40,000 euro to put giant posters up around the country demanding we leave the EU.
#125
UNUSUALY COOL
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What I mean, though, is that the kooks from the U.S. failed to ask somebody who could've told them the basics of what they weren't allowed to do, how to do it anyway and not to confess to everything with a big stupid smile on your face when a reporter asked what you'd been doing. They didn't even need to ask about that in particular, all they had to do was ask someone who would've known the issue and said, "Let me check on what you're 'allowed' to do here."

I don't think a lot of them even bothered to think about how those local groups could have guided them, much less about who ran them. They just figured the entire English-speaking world was part of the United States, and it's a free country.
#126
Black Belt
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Speaking of China
#127
Post rating: +
speaking of the american left
#128
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

sovnarkoman posted:

speaking of the american left



Haha wow, the DSA, Jacobin and ISO... can't get much worse

#129
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +


LMAO there is like nothing that New York DSA can manage to do that isn't insanely fucked up and evil
#130
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If you join the NRA you get a subscription to American Rifleman included in the package, but you don't even get a copy of Jacobin if you pay for a DSA membership. Seems like a ripoff. What kind of significant discount is this supposed to be anyways
#131
Post rating: +

sovnarkoman posted:

speaking of the american left



there's some good stuff in there but theres also some reaches like;

"As an avowedly anti-communist organization, the ISO eschewed symbols long associated with the communist left, like hammers and sickles and red flags. Instead, it chose a clenched fist — one eerily similar to the symbol used by the US government-funded Serbian activist group Otpor and similar offshoots in Eastern Europe, which carried out Washington-backed neoliberal “color revolutions” in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism."

#132
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It does seem like a reach unless there was something about the timing. Like, if they took up that logo post-otpor.
#133
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I don't think the clenched fist thing works either as a "smoking gun" and comes across as a distraction in the article, but I think it's kind of hard to tell the story in a conventional journalistic format since it's more about a whole set of practices and an ideology that objectively just functions to co-opt DSA kids into supporting contras. Like no one has to necessarily be taking money directly but they're fetishizing spontaneous protest as the location of the authentic revolutionary moment against bureaucratic command Stalinism or "the establishment" or whatever because that's how you make the socialism, and before the kids know it they're in a protest camp that is only working because the most disciplined cadre are the Ron Paul people or the Nicaraguan equivalent of the Ron Paul people.

Even still the Trot guy in the article who is blatantly lying to the DSA kids is pretty shocking. Behind the scenes he is well aware they're just the Nicaraguan falangist youth but when called on it he's like "Well someone might have given some money to some kids and they might have been working with ultra-right-wing forces but who are we to say?"
#134
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
my read on that was dan la bitz, being a fogey, simply got taken advantage of by nicaraguan falangist youth and was too much of a dip to admit it, or maybe even to realize it
#135
[account deactivated]
#136
Post rating: +
yeah, its a clear reference to faust (1971)
#137
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
there's some sort of symbolism in which fist happens to be clenched i believe
#138
Post rating: ~
i clench my fists between my posts and still insists i sees the ghost (of communism)
#139
Post rating: ~

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

there's some good stuff in there but theres also some reaches like;

"As an avowedly anti-communist organization, the ISO eschewed symbols long associated with the communist left, like hammers and sickles and red flags. Instead, it chose a clenched fist — one eerily similar to the symbol used by the US government-funded Serbian activist group Otpor and similar offshoots in Eastern Europe, which carried out Washington-backed neoliberal “color revolutions” in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism."


I agree that it's pretty spurious in the article, the recent War Nerd episode on Gene Sharp gets into some of the rationale for it about 10 minutes in.