neckwattle posted:

cars posted:

lolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

cmon dawg logically.ai is as clear a CIA website as i've seen, i'm not "anti-vax" or whatever idiotic abstraction you're gonna whip out next but seeing all the stops pulled to destroy this guy's reputation because he voiced basically mild concerns about the regulatory process is more worrisome than funny i think, irrespective of what you think of him. the objection they have to him being called the inventor of mrna tech boils down to 1) other people were working on similar things at the same time and 2) that he didn't literally bring it to the market, as if every other existing therapy had the billions of dollars in necessary R&D shouldered by research labs who can barely afford to pay their assistants. from what i've seen he's not a crackpot libertarian type, he's just not politically savvy enough to understand why the only media outlets willing to speak to him are, like the epoch times, reactionary intelligence cutouts. anyway the only really embarrassing things in this thread are your appeals to vulgar scientism and repeated attempts to draw people into the mud for no reason, i dont recall anyone saying anything close to resembling "vaccine-mutated humantids and how their minds are being invaded by microwave clairaudience", stop being dense

on the other hand all you have to do is click on the dude's website and see that he's clearly a crank and a grifter. if you can't clearly see that then i question your basic analytical skills in basically anything.

pogfan1996 posted:

karphead posted:

who cares about the surveillance cost in the face of a worldwide pandemic

Communists

well, excuse me

liceo posted:

colddays posted:
now shapes: you say a lot of words without ever really saying anything at all.

truly i was the worst D&D poster this entire time

this is not desirable nor revolutionary, so i have no idea why you would bring it up.

i literally qualified this statement a sentence later.

to use a historical analogy, the 1905 Russian Revolution was not Marxist, ultimately lead to some fairly tepid bourgeois parliamentary reforms, and whose most famous figurehead was a priest that acted as a police informant.

but the fact that it was an inchoate revolutionary movement does not mean that it was not a reaction to very real crises that were deepening in Imperial Russia, and only got worse over the next 12 years until October came along.

Sanders is a chump, and likewise most of his fans' ideas are an incoherent potpourri of vaguely leftist ideas that have been left on the floor over the last 30 odd years. but like Occupy, the badness of his ideas does not mean that his popularity does not represent its own reaction to the deepening crises in the US.

how do you know? give some clear examples where the bourgeois is not laughing because last i checked, the bourgeois is getting rich as hell off of the pandemic. the failure to provide student loan relief, and every other deliberate economic decision the u$ has made, strengthens the bourgeois.

the bourgeois getting richer and the crises deepening are not at all mutually exclusive. if anything, they go hand in hand -- the bourgeois have almost always consolidated their wealth during crises, as capital destruction means that anyone with cash reserves lying around can go bargain hunting.

but this is not sustainable for them, since every crisis turns more and more people away from capitalism and towards socialism. and they're very aware of this. not in Marxist terminology, obviously, but there is a real, growing sense of dread in among the bourgeois that their hold is extremely precarious.

it pervades their entire bourgeois edifice, from increasingly grim articles in FT, to alarmist calls about "rising populism" (where Sanders and Trump are painted in the same demagogic tones. Social democracy as the left wing of fascism... maybe they are Marxist Leninists after all!), to Larry Summers admitting to shock and horror that crises may actually be *gasp* endemic to capitalism, to billionaires doing everything from float UBI proposals to buying bunkers in New Zealand.

i disagree. the unemployment insurance was widened for two reasons: (1) to make the government appear benevolent during a real crisis and (2) to prevent a lot of people from going out into the streets and tearing things apart. this is exactly the outcome that happened. now you have loads of people who make up the internal-periphery who think that trump was a good president because he gave them more money than anyone else ever did. this would have been no different if it were biden or obama or bush. we all know that the prez is a shitting figure head. the point was to make people more dependent on a purely evil system and it worked.

there are not "loads of people" who think Trump was a good president because of the extended unemployment, outside of the tiny Dore/Greenwald/Tracey league (who, anyday now, will complete their transformation from their Sorelian cocoon and hatch into their adult Strasserist form).

among Trump followers, it is an article of faith that the extended unemployment was bad, because there were not enough people desperate enough to work for $8.50 an hour so you could get your Culver's Butterburger™ in under 10 minutes. it is treated as an embarrassing spur of the moment thing they'd rather forget.

this has extremely little if nothing to do with the pandemic and has been a trend for over two decades. perhaps the pandemic didn't help but it is at most a weak correlate and not causal in any capacity.

it would be very weird if i said that an 18 month pandemic was solely responsible for two decades of imperial decline!

but i am directly responding to an earlier post of yours

liceo posted:

the fact is that mass death and enhanced surveillance are not a result and catch-up of an incompetent government response but instead has been the plan from the outset in order to bolster imperialism internationally.

so now we've gone from the pandemic response was designed from the onset to bolster international imperialism to "well, perhaps the pandemic didn't help."

imperialism cannot live on drone strikes and CIA coups alone. there is an enormous amount of soft power involved, from asymmetric trade deals to fostering and nurturing potential compradors. the last 20 years have shown that the threat of the American stick isn't what it once was: it still hurts, but it's not a guaranteed death blow. and the pandemic makes all the other stuff harder to do. it is harder to rake someone over the coals on a trade deal if your own economy has X's for eyes and is blowing steam out of its ears. it is harder to convince some ambitious colonel that "we can give you all the support you need" when you can barely keep the basic functions of state running in your own country. particularly in an age where China is now a real, viable alternative as a state partner.

this is also not true. the ruling classes have been largely exempt from any of the negative social-consumer benefits of the pandemic. they have enjoyed basically the same lifestyles as they had beforehand because they are already largely separated from the general public and the things that the general public do.

this has nothing to do with the bourgeois. as much as they fantasize about it, the bourgeois cannot make an economy by themselves.

i am talking about everyday working people, good ol' AmeriKKKan labor aristocrats. if 4K people are dying every day, they are going to cut back on their day-to-day economic life, regardless of whether there are lockdowns or not. we saw this back last winter, when many states refused to lock back down again, and the economy still ground to a halt.

this has nothing to do with whether Madison can make a "COVID pod" with the other prep students and take a charter jet to an isolated ski resort. this is about keeping the engine of capitalism going on a fundamental level. M - C - M'

what i am going to say here has nothing to do with vaccine effectiveness: what you wrote is going to happen with or without any or all of the vaccines because it is a facet of capitalism that cannot sustain itself, which is why euro-counterpart governments have not maintained that model. the collapse of the medical system is a time bomb and has been crumbling for decades. and we will see 1m+ deaths probably before february if things continue as they are now.

i am talking about 1M+ deaths right now, at this point, if there had been no vaccines. but sure, there's nothing about that point that i fundamentally disagree with

this is also not true. i have my own points about the plan above. if you think that the federal government making states responsible wasn't a calculated decision, then you need to reevaluate that.

your entire thesis is that the hegemonic state has had a master plan from day 1 to increase surveillance and further instill fortress nationalism, and that things like mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports are part of that.

you're now claiming that a confederated, state-by-state response was also the plan from the beginning, which is why... Texas and Florida have explicitly banned vaccine passports?

this doesn't make any sense and has nothing to do with anything i've ever posted. discussing social policing and invasive tech is a different discussion.

it has quite a lot to do with what you've posted! because my argument is, "no, this was not their master plan from the outset, just a series of reactionary flailing."

but even if we somehow were to receive incontrovertible proof that no, this actually was their plan from the outset, then my position would shift to, "well, that's a really freaking stupid plan!"

because the meager gains they've acquired in surveillance and social policing, which they've already had covered by existing powers and is just overdetermination at this point, was absolutely not worth exacerbating the system's existing crises in the long run

you are really obsessed with this, aren't you? i explicitly said in multiple posts that talking about the effectiveness of any of the vaccines is not a productive conversation because while they are helping people, there are still objective unknowns.

you certainly seemed to think it was a productive conversation earlier, back when you made it clear that you thought the vaccines were not effective, ie,

liceo posted:

shapes posted:


because even a history of CIA chicanery and malicious negligence from pharm companies does not erase the desire to prevent needless communicable disease among the people.



fwiw it doesn't particularly seem like the covid vaccine actually does this (and it definitely will not continue to) and is instead proving to be far more a behavioral gesture of submission (with absolutely unknown future health consequences) than an actually beneficial medical intervention.

... right before you got very upset that "i was putting words in your mouth, reading things that weren't there, etc. and NOBODY was mentioning things like ivermectin, but since you brought it up, did you see THIS STUDY THAT SHOWS THAT IVERMECTIN IS EFFECTIVE, if only the authorities weren't suppressing the REAL CURES" as if your secret support for the horse de-wormer was something i was projecting and not the most obvious thing in the world

and yes

i can hear you object now. it is not fair to refer to ivermectin as "the horse de-wormer" because that unfairly lumps you in with the people going to pet supply stores and shitting out their intestinal linings. it is not an entirely unreasonable objection!

but

it is funny, and by God, if we are past the point of making jokes in the comedy Maoist forum, then what were we even fighting for?

that said, it is above and beyond the most important and most critical line to maintain that hegemony always has plans, that they exploit any and every phenomena they can for their benefit, and that they are not, in any capacity, incompetent at exploitation.

and so we come full circle, because i cannot disagree more that this is the actual 'critical line'

liceo posted:

all i was saying was that they are not effective at "preventing needless disease". they beneficially mitigate the outcomes, as i've acknowledged repeatedly, but they do not in fact stop the disease or stop it from spreading.

jesus christ how is that even a meaningful distinction

you were alluding to it directly and so i said it outright and shared a study from the third world that demonstrates potential benefit for the third world. that is objectively in your original response to me a few weeks ago. if you want to imply that you think that treatments that third world nations are desperately attempting are idiotically using veterinarian medicine (for one of the most surplus human medicines in the world), then by all means, but i don't think that's very productive and certainly doesn't help the global proletariat.

when you say things like this:

liceo posted:

especially in light of the fact that the only reason vaccines are in use for coronavirus is because real, functional, successful treatments for the virus have been ignored, suppressed, and taken out of public and political discourse.

it is actually EXTREMELY easy to suss out what you are referring to and what your positions are. you were alluding to it, i outright said it, and you couldn't help yourself.

the study you posted is not new, it's actually from February of this year. it's a case controlled trial that did not control for dosage, usage, or any other interventions being used concurrently. it was entirely unconvincing to me back then, and nothing has changed in the interim.

does it definitely prove that ivermectin does not help against COVID? no, that's not how science works. but the quality and quantity of evidence for vaccines is several orders of magnitude higher. the graveyard of cures that showed initial promise during cursory studies is a large one

and what difference does it make that the study was done in the Third World?

shapes posted:

it is absolutely not funny. there is actually nothing funny about large swaths of the population (including the most oppressed population globally) dying and suffering and trying to identify solutions to reduce that. and if it shows some signs that it might, then that research should be pursued scientifically for the "public good".

lmao the idea that you would attempt to conflate third world countries with poor access to vaccines trying medicines they have on hand out of desperation to an Amerikan expat in Germany talking about how the authorities are SUPPRESSING THE REAL CURES, or suggesting that mockery of the latter is also mocking the former by extension, is utter delusion

just a few weeks ago, you were saying "maybe this is callous, but it is better that hundreds of thousands of people die rather than support increased imperialism and fortress nationalism, my go-to example thereof being a time when a girl made fun of me for not having a smartphone." so you will excuse me if i find that your "but think of all the death and suffering!" routine rings a little hollow

i am very much in favor of mitigating the suffering and deaths in the third world, which is why i support such anti-imperialist action as letting China and Cuba export as much of their working, life-saving vaccines to as many third world countries as possible. i understand why countries are trying things like ivermectic, but it doesn't help anyone to claim they have an effectiveness that they absolutely have not demonstrated, and that First Worlders amplifying this message is objectively harmful

shapes posted:

1) i never stated that it was there master plan from day 1. i said that they immediately began exploiting the crisis to their imperialist benefit.
2) i did not say that it was "the plan from the beginning" but instead that it was a "calculated, deliberate decision". if you're going to quote me, then do it right.

absolutely getting hung up on tedious minutia, insisting on word-for-word direct quotes and waving around "all i was saying" like it was a talisman

you still have not addressed, after 2 posts, how some of the largest states in the country explicitly banning mandatory vaccines or vaccine passports, squares away with your position that the plan (whether from Day 1 or not? who gives a shit) that they would use these measures as a way to strengthen fortress nationalism

shapes posted:

i don't find their gains meager and it is still very early to claim that their benefit is meager.

that's fine. i disagree!

shapes posted:

you actually explicitly said:

shapes posted:

you don't have to go the University of Chicago Milton Friedman School of Economics to realize that many of the rational actors that make up our free market

maybe i misunderstood what you meant by "rational actors who make up our free market", but i took it to mean people who are in decision-making positions.

you did misunderstand, glad i could clear that up

i've never said either of those things.

you JUST SAID, in that very post, that "i said that they immediately began exploiting the crisis to their imperialist benefit."

this constant "that's not what i said because string A != string B" is just the worst kind of pedantry

shapes posted:

sanders is not a "chump" but is instead a literal and working representative of the imperialist state

you are correct in calling me out when i incorrectly used the scientific term "chump." let me amend my error by saying... he's a real jerk! ! !

and his popularity does not signal anything revolutionary whatsoever. by thinking that he is popular as a response to the deepening crises, then you are tacitly giving him credit as symbolic of revolutionary politics. sanders, by representing imperialism, has ceded to it. similarly, first worldist democratic socialism should be outright rejected and resisted by any marxist because it has shown that it will always cede the imperialism which birthed it.

you constantly demand that others quote you word-for-word, that nobody make the slightest inference from anything you say, that every one of your statements be taken at objective face value. and then you go and suggest that saying that Bernie Sanders' popularity is a reaction to a crisis is "tacitly giving him credit as symbolic of revolutionary politics."

geez louise!

it does not follow in the slightest that saying that a social phenomenon is a reaction to a crisis means that they have revolutionary politics, symbolic or otherwise.

for a very clear example of this, it has been the Marxist-Leninist line for about 90 years now that fascism is a reaction to capitalism in crisis. it would be absurd to suggest that this implies that Marxist-Leninists are giving credit to fascists as being "symbolic of revolutionary politics"

not only can reactions to crises be decidedly reactionary themselves, but it is often the case that a true revolutionary movement is preceded by failed reactionary movements. The October Revolution was preceded by the 1905 Revolution, the Chinese Revolution had many failed uprisings before the final success of the CCP. if anything, turning to reactionary movements and seeing them fail is part of the dialectical process of acquiring class consciousness.

neckwattle posted:

aerdil posted:

Allow me to remind the absolute morons here flirting with right-wing covid denialism and anti-masking/anti-vaxx bullshit of the pristine fact that a socialist public health policy led to less than 5,000 covid deaths in China versus the crippling mass death of 700,000 and counting in the capitalist amerikan west. If you want to spend your time doubting the social good of public health policies that save lives and instead want to shrug off the massive death toll of the poor and elderly you are simply not a marxist or a socialist and have no business on this website.

i mean your post articulates pretty clearly how "public health" has an objectively different character in socialist and capitalist societies, so i don't see any contradiction between a concrete critique of the genocidal capitalist response and a commitment to public health in the abstract. and also, though maybe this is just me, but being a marxist is firstly a commitment to winning this shit and only secondarily caring about the public good on terms dictated by a fascist state seeking to destroy the social preconditions for even the germination of action and organization by the oppressed. flattening all critique into its reactionary counterparts (which, again, are often deliberately spread as a salting technique) seems more anti-marxist to me than trying to trace, for example, the almost total consolidation of the state and the pharmaceutical firms, a response that's either been completely mangled in deference to the accumulation process or expressly designed to kill off as many people superfluous to it, irregularities in a regulatory process we know to be completely captured by industry, the incoherency of mandating a treatment in the name of herd immunity that state bodies themselves admit no longer prevents infection, shifting the blame for decades of medical austerity (and zero planning for capacity since the pandemic itself!) onto people who for whatever reason are suspicious of the amerikan state's largesse of spirit (and, though they might not be giving themselves away at the clown protests, are overwhelmingly poor and racialized), etc. etc,

i'm not defending this specific guy to the death, i pretty much agree with liceo that debating the merits of the vaccine itself is beside the point, i'm more worried by supposed materialists pushing scientism indistinguishable from like New York Times screeching while everything is going to shit. i only became aware of him because of the massive character assassination apparatus deployed at top speed for him saying stuff like this:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/ukx8L3lh5CA7/

tldr; all he says is that 1) the FDA did vaccine safety testing but omitted the testing for gene therapies for some reason 2) there were no reproductive safety tests done in spite of some concerning data from Japanese trials 3) he found 1 and 2 worrisome because there's evidence the spike protein itself is biologically active, and the nature of the delivery mechanism makes it impossible to precisely regulate how much of it is replicated, leading to outliers and extreme immune responses 4) a treatment that doesn't prevent infection or transmission is irrelevant from the perspective of herd immunity and it therefore makes no sense to mandate it for people whose rate of hospitalization is lower than the rate of side effects. maybe he's been driven insane or co-opted or something, i wouldn't know because i don't follow what he says, but the response to these like pretty conservative critiques in his capacity as a vaccine epidemiologist maybe should make you re-think the total certainty that there aren't any objective unknowns as liceo said.

counter-point: literally every tweet and retweet this right-wing grifter has made Tweets by RWMaloneMD

perhaps being a dumbass right-wing quack should make you rethink his credentials and whether he's operating in good faith

or just fuck off and get out, i don't care anymore

aerdil posted:

the marxist critique of this whole thing is the failure of the amerikan government to do a proper lockdown with adequate support like china and vietnam and instead relying entirely on the vaccine as a magic bullet. and then hoarding that vaccine from the third-world for profit instead of the rational course which is to vaccinate widely outside your borders because a virus knows no borders.

none of this means that the clearly safe and effective vaccine should be avoided. the majority of the people choking to death in ICUs right now are unvaccinated. the discourse throwing doubt at it, and it's a reality that 99% people who are anti-vaxx are also anti-mask, anti-lockdown, and right-wing folks who vehemently oppose the socialist public health policies of china or vietnam, is literally killing more people than would otherwise without this misinformation out there. and i'm sick of it. people are insulting the deniers in this thread because perpetuating a discourse that allows a pandemic to spread is as far from socialism as you can get. right-wing bullshit shouldn't have a place here even if its couched in bad faith just-asking-questions-from-the-left. so fuck you all.

cars posted:

new poster STUNNABOY is mustang

that's not a new poster it's dizastar with a namechange

aerdil posted:

the marxist critique of this whole thing is the failure of the amerikan government to do a proper lockdown with adequate support like china and vietnam and instead relying entirely on the vaccine as a magic bullet. and then hoarding that vaccine from the third-world for profit instead of the rational course which is to vaccinate widely outside your borders because a virus knows no borders.

none of this means that the clearly safe and effective vaccine should be avoided. the majority of the people choking to death in ICUs right now are unvaccinated. the discourse throwing doubt at it, and it's a reality that 99% people who are anti-vaxx are also anti-mask, anti-lockdown, and right-wing folks who vehemently oppose the socialist public health policies of china or vietnam, is literally killing more people than would otherwise without this misinformation out there. and i'm sick of it. people are insulting the deniers in this thread because perpetuating a discourse that allows a pandemic to spread is as far from socialism as you can get. right-wing bullshit shouldn't have a place here even if its couched in bad faith just-asking-questions-from-the-left. so fuck you all.

neckwattle posted:

what seems to be happening is people getting filtered at the level of the simple negation of a line deliberately sown on the right. the whole pro-/anti-vax binary is a canard designed to make it nearly impossible to discuss anything on a political level. the only "question I'm asking" is whether the state is really a shambling corpse or if it isn't, in spite of the devastation and wreckage it's caused, more or less intelligently pursuing its goals in the class struggle. i don't understand why the anti-revisionist line on this is indistinguishable for so many from libertarian bullshit. It seems politically suicidal to assume the former even if it turns out to be correct. and if we're gonna let second-order effects dictate what's discussed here then it seema far more harmful to me to enforce a line that effectively can't distinguish marxism from right wing conspiracism

as i've said before, i don't find the argument that the United States' response to the pandemic was "intelligently pursuing its goals in the class struggle" to be a convincing one.

there are many differences between right wing conspiracism and a Marxist anti-imperialist analysys of states (deep or otherwise), but one of the crucial ones is that the latter understands that everything that happens is not some Illuminati masterplan -- that states, ostensibly acting in their own class interests, can and do fuck things up

it's not political suicide to assume that the ruling class doesn't sometimes make unforced errors. if anything, ascribing intentionality to all their outcomes mystifies the situation.

like, the incident that always comes to mind is when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, they discovered that the imperial Russian aristocracy and courtiers were obsessed with tarot cards. sometimes the ruling class can be kind of dumb!

again, if the United States' response to the pandemic was a coherent plan from the ruling class to solidify their class power (and i'm not at all convinced it was, but let's assume), then it was a bad plan! whatever gains they acquired were pretty meager relative to the risks they took and the potential for a massive crisis, especially if their #1 fear is an ascendant China.

and so lends implicit support to the ongoing medical enclosure of work, school, sociality in general. just because it partially corrects for earlier neglect. everything we know about the state should tell us that none of this will be rolled back except by force.

the inverse of this is also true: by assuming that every action of the state is part of a plan to further entrench their class power, you implicitly lend support to the idea that any of their actions to remedy the situation must be resisted, including vaccination efforts.

shriekingviolet posted:

id like to hear your criticism, so without dismissing anything you wrote i want to point out the post right above as an example of what i'm talking about, a reductive attack line that didn't start with me but with liceo's far more considered posts about the ways the pandemic response is being used to bolster fortress imperialism. more velvet-gloved Core measures aren't the most pressing contradiction in all this of course but im only talking about them because they were used to tar liceo's actual position.

Edited by neckwattle (Oct. 5, 2021 20:36:17)