If your job resulted in the design, testing validation, construction, streamlining, or otherwise indirect contribution to a weapons system that is actively killing children in Gaza as I write this comment, why should I consider the reasons you had to take the job? Should I also refrain from shaming an organ trafficker or a mafia capo?
edit: ah sorry, checked your profile and literally every single comment is concern trolling. Won’t waste my time here!
looks like i am right and u are wrong, as always 
How do you feel about going into academia? I’m not in physics but I have a similar predicament (I have more options though, not just bombs) and I considered the idea of continuing studies, getting a PhD and just being a professor so I didn’t have to worry about ethics, but the lack of opportunities to organize labor + the fact I’d probably just be training students to go work for defense companies anyway convinced me to just try to find a more benign job in industry.
Department of Defense should be called Department of Ethnic Cleansing.
These people would have my whole family killed for a $200 raise and then tell me I’m the bad guy when I say the American military industrial complex is one of my greatest enemies, including its workers.
There’s nothing incorrect about this comment but I get the feeling you’re getting something backwards. Dems weren’t getting anyone closer to revolution, but Trump is. Under the past few Democratic admins, most of the US were complacent and they just put their faith in the imagined progressive forces of the Democratic Party to make things better. Under the Republicans, way more people get radicalized and start to look for solutions outside of electoralism. That does come with the flipside that the Republicans are more brazen about crushing dissent and arresting protesters, but Democrats also happily use the surveillance state and the militarized police against the left (see: Palestine encampment crackdowns last year).
Do you think we think revolutions just… happen? That we aren’t working incredibly hard trying to find allies, build the labor movement, build the indigenous movement, the queer movement, the anti-racist movement? That we’re not trying to bring those struggles together under the same revolutionary banner? I understand you might not see much of this as being related to leftists because socialists and communists often put aside their specific political labels when it’s time to organize, but I guarantee that if you go and do something real (not voting) you’ll immediately start coming across the communists. That’s what a communist does, in practice.
So true, bestie, everyone who disagrees with me and cites their sources are irrational. True rational enlightened thinkers just call their interlocutors tankies and log off.
I’m at least glad this one was receptive and open to confronting evidence that contradicts years of moral licensing to bury their head in the sand and pretend we live in a good world.
Bailing out the banks was an actively bad thing. That’s what gave the banks the power to barrel through with the rampant foreclosures that annihilated PoC wealth.
This is like saying FDR was great because he saved capitalism from destroying itself. If they had done nothing at all it would’ve been better in the long run because the crisis would have destroyed capitalism and we could finally move on to a system that puts human need above the acculumation of endless wealth.
Besides, this is completely ignoring the pillaging of Libya that took place under Obama, where Libya went from a forward-looking (yet flawed) democratic country to a failed state ruled by human trafficking operations and various statelets that control oil fields. It’s the only place with open air slave trafficking markets. It ignores the occupation of Afghanistan that also took place under his watch. The expansion of the surveillance state, Guantanamo, the US-Mexico border camps, the support of Israel during 2012’s Gaza bombings, the drone strikes in Pakistan and several other atrocities.
Hey, that system is pretty cool. I like it. You should keep in mind, though, the social relations of production that undergird political reality are much more impactful over the outcome of elections or any other political process, than which specific voting system we have. If the world switched to proportional approval voting tomorrow, it wouldn’t change the relationship between the international imperialist institutions, the workers of the imperial core, and the workers of the periphery. >80% of productive labor would still be done in the periphery, imperialism would still just find ways to quiet dissent and destroy its opponents.
What’s the huge difference in outcome? Why is voting the only type of action being considered?
Also, where’s the part about mysterious funding? I don’t think I caught that in the article
Here:
One of the Israeli venture capitalists, Joe Raby, oversaw admission to the Sunshine Bronx business incubator, which also provided Ocasio-Cortez space for a company she founded called Brook Avenue Press. This was a publishing company for children’s books, though it is not clear whether the business ever published a book.
If you google the name of the company there’s a ton of articles from right wing rags scrutinizing the shady finances. I’d rather not link them, but I think at the very least the fact that this enterprise which was basically a front company operating under an Israeli venture capital firm is extremely suspect and obviously bears resemblance to something like a CIA front (in this case, probably not the CIA, but the DNC working as if it was the CIA).
And I think you might be missing the point a little bit. Yes, of course she’s advocated for positive changes. And it’s not like working for Ted Kennedy instantly discredits you (that’s probably one of the weaker points raised by the article). The point is to show that she didn’t enter politics because she was a community organizer, she entered politics as a ladder climber and a creature of the Democratic Party. She was identified by the party as someone who moved a certain base and represented the right people, but that would fall in line; and she does! she didn’t have to defend Joe Biden like that, and she constantly punches left because her role is to represent the farthest left the establishment is comfortable with anyone going: further left than AOC and she turns into a cop and will beat you back in line, using her position and credibility to make everyone else believe only she understands how power works.
she still said that she would work to stop what was happening in Gaza and specifically didn’t want to provide further arms to Israel
I empathize a bit, but it’s not like democrats haven’t been getting more leftward either.
The furthest left democrat with any sway is Bernie “Israel has a right to defend itself” Sanders.
Most politicians are just not online enough to gather the discourse that we would be experiencing,
I think you don’t have to be online to understand several incredibly acute contradictions that are mounting at the moment, between the horrible brutality of genocide in Gaza, concentration camps at the border that have been active since the Obama years in addition to CECOT and Guantanamo, the coming climate collapse, erosion of queer rights, and all manner of civil rights. These phenomena signify a movement of the entire capitalist ruling class, who wield empire in their hands, to the most extreme forms of violence. It’s a bipartisan affair. They aren’t carefully measuring public opinion, Joe Biden deliberately went out and confidently lied about Palestinians beheading Israeli babies while the IDF massacred the children of Gaza. There is no calculation of how to balance public concerns in that action, they only want to control you and brutalize the weakest among the oppressed people of the world, to consolidate power in uncertain times and weather the storm. If the public rejects the carrot, we get the stick and that’s Trump. They want you to be a good little peasant and go back to the carrot while they slaughter the people of the oppressed nations and the most marginalized minorities.
Some do forget over the years, but a lot join politics because they genuinely want to make life better
She’s only one woman, but she’s probably the most visible example of this myth. AOC is not a “bartender and community organizer turned political leader” she’s a Democratic Party plant who operated an LLC that received mysterious funding and became a prominent political figure out of nowhere. Obama has a similar legendary backstory as a “community organizer” but his family on his dad’s side has intelligence ties. I don’t think every single local politician is part of some crazy conspiracy, though, but you’re engaging in some level of magical thinking if you think the Democratic Party can somehow be run by well-meaning local leaders, in a world where the establishment can create an AOC to capture and redirect public sentiment very easily.
“Now he is a communist”
What part of that sounds like he’s doing nothing? Do you have any clue what communists do? Like, you can go ahead and open What is to be Done and at no point does Lenin say “yes and at this point you wait and do nothing,” feel free to investigate the matter and call me out if I’m wrong.
You need to zoom out. Imagine you’re looking back at this moment from 100 years in the future. If people said “the Dems won’t make it better but at least they won’t make it worse” and just kept the system going, do you think it will ever lead to progress? Will the whole system ever improve?
You need to look for a solution outside of that system. Stop looking for lesser evils in the ballot box. First, look to the people immediately around you and try to join local organizations that might be directly working to improve their conditions (soup kitchens, women’s shelters, etc). Then, organize labor: figure out how to join a union, if there isn’t one read the IWW (or any other big union near you) manual on organizing your workplace and find support to start organizing your workplace. Then from there, your objective should be to take the workers’ struggle to the national and international stage. Change doesn’t come from the ballot box, it comes from building alternative power structures ourselves.
actually this time it’ll be different, we just won’t have another crisis of capitalism that requires the stamping out of revolutionaries
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