The point of the comparison is that the two aren’t actually alike in scale though. Stubbing your toe and getting shot are both painful but it would be odd if someone with a gunshot wound was loudly complaining about their stubbed toe.

I think it’s more likely they’re just a USian, they deliberately elect these kinds of governments over and over.

I mean maybe it’s just an American values thing but I actually don’t think scientists are as bad as Epstein associates.

Yeah having talked with people I know who work in schools since last night I think there’s a good chance they are hoping to just intimidate this into stopping. Might be really difficult to explain why anything more than marking students absent happens in response to this if they walk off school property.

Assuming you decide to meet with them, here’s some things that occurred to me.

1. Have you been documenting the things they’ve said to you? Are they communicating in digital/written formats? Having those receipts will be useful if you decide to try to take this show more public, or to threaten it.

2. You are in a tough spot, they have the power to keep you off the premises and the legal right to do so as I understand it. (Edit: talked to my partner, I understood wrong, there’s a good chance they’re bluffing apparently). However you have something they want, and that they can only get from you. They want this to blow over, you can figure out what that means to them and bargain with them about it. It almost certainly doesn’t mean headlines where a promising high school senior isn’t allowed to attend graduation because of their political views. Take their offer to ‘resolve the conflict’ seriously, I strongly suspect they want this to go away in the least obstructive way they can get it.

These people also weren’t born yesterday, there’s a reason they’re doing the same thing to you that they did to your friend- getting you alone makes it easier to get someone in a key position to flip on important demands. Meeting with them is an opportunity for both sides to try to get what they want in a less confrontational way, and the admin folks have experience talking young people into the correct position. If you agree to meet you will want to have a game plan with your parents and clear red lines you are not willing to cross, guiding principles to keep you from getting derailed in talks. But think hard about what those lines are, because if you get totally boxed out of campus and away from the people you’re helping organize that’s not really a win for you. Some things might need to be compromised on for the sake of bigger goals.

3. Assuming these people are mostly liberals, they see themselves as valuing speech and civic participation. They believe they want to train the next generation to be conscientious involved citizens. Exploit that belief. You want to express yourself. You have strong political beliefs. There is almost certainly some version of group expression they would accept, if/when you meet ask them what they think is an appropriate way for students to advocate for their political views. Show you’re interested in getting your views out there and that you are willing to assess the merits of different ways of doing that.

If their proposal is not acceptable to you, allude diplomatically to points 1 and 2: You can make this a bigger problem for them, or you can make this go away less painfully for them. Are there alternatives you would accept as a win? Advocate for those, try to propose actions that keep the people you’ve organized on side but will be more tolerable to the admin if they won’t budge.

4. As difficult as they are being, you will get further if you seem like you’re operating in good faith and being reasonable. Insist on things that you can pitch to liberals, appeal to values you know they believe themselves to hold. They have cards here, they have the more or less unlimited capability to keep you off premises. You have cards too, play well and I think you can negotiate something, which will demonstrate you’re serious to the admin and also make them less afraid of you and what you might do because you’re behaving in a way they understand.

Good luck, comrade. I join everyone else here in admiring your work and commitment.

Hey, so there are two things that stick out to me.

First, you are not a failure and you should be proud that you have acted according to convictions you feel so strongly. You are familiar with conditions on the ground so take my perspective with caution because you are in a better position than I am. That said I would encourage you to try to get in the head of the school admin. They are (most likely) not ideologically Zionist, they are probably trying to keep the lid on a situation that brings them a lot of attention and gives them extra work. Most people in the imperial core are not actively thinking about these things because they are not conscious of them like you are. There will still be tension of course, but they do not want to crush you or hurt you (again, most likely, you are there and I am not) they just want things to blow over quietly.

And second, I would encourage you to think strategically about this. You are heavily invested in this project, and that might be affecting how you are analyzing the situation. You have in fact accomplished something impressive: You have a bunch of your classmates paying attention to news and listening to a perspective that is driving them to action as well! You are, in fact, already organizing them. So there is a tactical decision here, as I see it. You can, and perhaps should, continue confronting the administration with these moves that they are working to stifle. But that’s not the only thing you can do. You can continue educating your peers, you can lead a book club or discussion session or platform other perspectives to help them grow.

Put another way, don’t let the administration set the terms of what you are able to get your peers to do. If their resistance to one approach becomes overbearing you have the ability to pivot to something else without losing your cadre. You have a ton of options, so don’t feel like if this particular step is not worth the heat, then you have been defeated. Adapting is good praxis

Finally, I’m sure this is an annoying thing to hear from a stranger, but take care of yourself. I’m sure you’re more than aware but this whole thing is to clearly affecting your mental health and your home life. Those are big costs to pay, make sure the things that are causing those pains are worth it. You’re ahead of the curve and you clearly have talent in organizing. Don’t burn yourself out in school, we need people like you for things that are ahead of us.

The Supreme Court could stop the count and declare a result. They have done that already once.

Presumably he will be monitoring the polling and will intervene using his agencies if it looks like things are going wrong. Declare you won, show your evidence for it such as it is, convince your supporters that you’re correct and then dare the Democrats to do literally anything to stop him.

Yeah it feels intentional and it makes me uncomfortable.

Where’s the part where people are making funny quotes about Tiny Man and stuff? I’ve been scrolling through the thread to see what you were talking about and haven’t found it yet.

Edit: I just searched for the tiny man square part of your quote and this post is the only thing that comes up.

Yeah there’s really no room for nuance on some of these topics for some reason. You don’t accept the line, a line fed to us by a government we ostensibly don’t trust about a sanctioned enemy that it has every incentive to make you dislike, and somehow you are questioning objective reality to defend an authoritarian.

I think it’s the sheer volume of anti China consent-manufacturing material that does it. Westerners are just bathing in it constantly.

Work was disorganized and a pain to catch up on but that’s how the supervisors prefer to run the unit so what can you do. I got a cheap pizza earlier and the day and some beer to share with the neighbors before I came to my shift.

My family is off visiting other relatives so even though I’m stuck working it doesn’t feel as bad as it would having to go in during the middle of festivities and leave them all. Silver linings etc.

The problem for Ukraine is not one of budgeting. Foreign policy is largely the domain of the president especially since the legislature has given up on war powers and doing anything to restrict the use of force.

Ukraine isn’t winning with the resources and backing it currently has, and it was losing ground even when supported by the comparatively enthusiastic Biden admin. Trump (correctly in my view) believes the situation will continue to deteriorate and that Ukraine is best off negotiating an end to the war as soon as it can before the terms get even worse.

Congress can’t compel Hegseth to conduct the war in a certain way, what Trump wants is what he is going to get until he leaves more or less. Which means Ukraine needs to hold out until 2029, at which point the damage will be done most likely.

Edit: I know the US isn’t fighting the war directly but the use of its intelligence sharing, materiel, and logistical/soft power have been indisposable to the conduct of the war before Trump came back. If he can’t be forced to be more generous with these things, which he can’t, he can force the war to end and worsen Ukraine’s position however much he would like to. A prospect that becomes more and more likely the more irritated he gets with what he perceives as Ukraine not cooperating with his goals.

People unironically say shit like LLMs are intelligent and it bums me out so much. It makes me wonder what they think other people are and what they believe they’re doing when they have a conversation with someone.

I dunno. I don’t love the America of the 90s that was impoverishing the entire Eastern Bloc and like, invading Iraq and stuff. Or the one that opened a torture prison in Cuba in the 00s, invaded Iraq again, and terrified people across the world with an unaccountable drone war through the Obama years (to say nothing of Libya and the militarization of police).

You loved that America? The drone war/war on terror one?

You don’t understand, western nations helped defend one side of the civil war and propped them up as part of a global ideological conflict they wanted to engage in with countries on the other side of the globe from them. Not agreeing to allow their proxy to act with impunity is textbook imperialism.

Imperialism is when you don’t concede that a bunch of fascists who fought and lost a civil war and then fortified themselves on an island with the help of foreign powers and violently purged dissenters get to claim to be the government of both your country and other neighboring countries. The more that you spend decades seeking reconciliation diplomatically instead of through military ventures, the more imperialist you are.

There are a lot of more knowledgeable comrades who I hope will elaborate at greater length than I can.

My understanding is that the Chinese experiment is basically “can a Marxist-socialist government keep its capitalist class at heel?” I think there’s room for debate as to the level of danger/success they’ve had but the ‘China is socialist’ side would basically argue that the means of production is under the control of a genuinely worker-controlled government.

They tolerate their capitalists but their capitalists do not operate with the same degree of freedom as their counterparts in the west. Since globally the proletariat is still not in a position to restrain their bourgeoisie, the state cannot yet wither away into communism, so the task that modern China has taken up is to develop the productive forces in the state they control and outlast/overpower the capitalist states in the long run.

Of course you could reasonably question whether their commitment to the project is genuine, or how much worker control there truly is, etc. But I think that’s the basic position of the pro-China camp.

So when the proletariat takes over a state, it begins to use it, as you observed, as a weapon to suppress the bourgeoisie. However capitalism is global, like you say, and the real problem is that the class war transcends national boundaries. How this is resolved has been the subject of debate among Marxists: Karl seemed to believe that the revolution would be global once it began and would happen in one large movement. Conditions on the ground have never actually gotten to that point, however, and some Soviet and Chinese theorists have argued that it’s possible to sustain socialism within one country without achieving a global revolution.

Regardless, as far as I can tell, it’s not really possible to transition to a stateless, classless society until the revolution is either global or has achieved critical mass such that there can be no bourgeois resistance. Socialism might be possible in one country, but communism will be an all-or-nothing proposition, for the exact reasons you’ve observed. It only makes sense to surrender a tool you need to defend yourself once you are no longer under threat.