leonardpierce.bsky.social
Marxist, wife guy, ne'er-do-well. Concerned with words, generally. Chicago-based eating enthusiast. Crime, baseball, communism.
http://immortal-science.com
10,026 posts
2,663 followers
507 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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I think you should eat poison
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Keeping expectations low: that's the Democratic Promise (TM)!
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Are you seriously asking someone to offer a viable alternative to fascism
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The bloody history of the last century is tattooed with this exact variety of filthy leech, sitting atop an uncountable pile of corpses to stay rich off whatever the big bosses kick back to them, and the few who the people managed to burn off have kids and cronies all salivating to get back on top
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When people ask why I insist capitalism has to go and it's going to do nothing to replace Republicans with Democrats, this is a big part of my answer: both parties consistently use US military power to prop up exactly this kind of parasitic, brutal toad for whom execution would be a charitable end
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Robots talking to other robots, idiots talking to other idiots
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Here's footage from Compton (where cops previously drove tanks into people's houses as part of the War on Drugs supported by both parties) driving a tank into someone's house as part of mass deportations supported by both parties. But leftists, socialists, and communists are the REAL tankies
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But nobody calls the brave boys and girls of the IDF, their right-wing government, or their innumerable bipartisan defenders in the US 'tankies', even after it came out -- just this year! -- that the communists were right all along that the Hungarian revolt was engineered by the CIA to begin with
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Even if you accept the numbers proffered by the most anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli interlocutors, Israel has killed something like thirty times as many Palestinians since 10/7 than the communists killed in Hungary during the entire 1956 revolt. Israel beat that bodycount in the first two months
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Also it's cool how if you're even slightly left of, say, Nancy Pelosi people will call you a "tankie" while, in real life, the unquestioned ally of the United States, blindly supported by both parties, are using actual tanks to blow starving homeless children to pieces
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It's the same reason they keep saying "you have to vote for bad Democrats because the GOP is worse, you only have two choices". It never even occurs to them that you could organize and force a change to that, they just act like it's an eternal reality
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There are so many people who think the way to political victory is wishing that everyone was as nice and good and smart like they were but since that isn't happening they just complain about how dumb everybody is, at no point do they talk about the use of state power
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FDR, the president who was popular for not improving material conditions
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Pal if you're coming into my mentions grousing about tankies and people who hate Americans you're barking up the wrong tree
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I mean, whether they're saints or not, they are capitalists and they work to preserve a capitalist system, so as long as they stay within that paradigm, not only are they not going to fix the problem, they *can't*.
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I would *much* prefer to work for pay. I hate being idle and useless in every goddamn way I can hate it.
So if you have any writing, editing, or proofing opportunities, hit a fella up: leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com. I am pretty good.
PS I know most of you reading this are in the same boat.
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I'm a communist, I don't want money driving anything!
I think anarchists have a lot to offer in terms of cautions against state overreach, but I also think that it is very easy, especially in a very individualist society, to confuse free expression and the liberty to say anything, however harmful.
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I'm not a carceralist, mostly, and history teaches not to make martyrs of our enemies. But faced with a choice between letting right-wing media run riot and ending up where we are now as a society, and regulating reactionary propaganda to preserve the gains of a just society, I know what I'd pick.
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Well, for one thing, I'm not against markets, but let's not get stuck in that trap for now.
I think it would have to be handled on cases. Advocating for an idea, not so bad. Telling lies about it? Worse. Taking money from reactionary forces to overthrow the government? Very bad!
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I always order mine neat
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Let's hear it
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I don't even think disallowing rich reactionaries to own huge, powerful media outlets that they use to spread right-wing lies is censorship. I think it's just basic regulation of the sort you would practice in any other important (and potentially harmful) industry.
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If anyone with money can fund a 'free' media without censorship or control, how do you stop the richest reactionaries from just flooding the information environment with right-wing propaganda 24/7? How, in other words, do you keep the situation we are in right now from happening over and over?
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And I get it. Nobody wants to be the big bad mean commie dictator who takes all the rich peoples' money away and tells the media what they can and can't say.
But if we all agree that widespread misinformation is a serious problem, how do we solve it without drastic measures? How do we fix this?
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I am, not to be coy about it, one of these people!
This view, unfortunately, is widely decried across liberal and conservative lines as 'censorship', 'repression', or 'state tyranny'. Which is odd, because it neatly solves a problem that almost everyone agrees is leading to terrible outcomes!
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So what's the alternative?
A certain type of person might suggest that if their ideology were to come into power, they would simply shut down the right-wing media machine, seize the wealth of its funders, and support state and independent media so long as it confines itself to actual journalism.
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One might notice a similar dynamic in the process of voting (championed as 'democracy' by people who don't really care to investigate it too deeply) in a two-party system.
And one would be right to so notice.
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If we continue to idealize a 'free' press - which is in fact not free, but controlled by the people with the most wealth and thus the most reactionary - then we will endlessly repeat cycles of ebb and flow, with the left riding waves here and there but the tide always coming in from the right.
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And so we return to one of the crucial flaws of liberalism. As long as the 'marketplace of ideas' is valorized, and ideas are in competition based on appeals to individual consumers in a profit-driven environment, the messages that win will the best-funded, and the best funders are conservatives.
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The current vogue is 'create a left-wing media to counter the right-wing media'. But this just introduces competing narratives, both often equally deceptive, that one may believe or not believe, which is usually decided by one's already-existing political tendency. It is also terribly expensive.
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But the question always is: What to do about it? For a long time, the answer was 'support the free press', but that no longer refers to a single media ecology. Everything is fragmented. 'Fund journalism' also lost its punch when news outlets started to get bought by wealthy partisan interests.
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It's a situation that leads to 'low-information voters' and a 'hostile media environment'. People do not truly understand what is going on; they are lied to constantly; and they trust information that should not be trusted. It makes for an ill-informed citizenry that makes bad decisions.
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This is augmented by a more 'legitimate' media apparatus that, nonetheless, does not really oppose or even balance the right-wing media, instead getting bogged down in the appearance of neutrality or, depending on the political bent of its ownership, actually amplifying the right's messaging.
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For the millionth time, read a fucking book and learn what the instinct of trying to find common cause with the political element that is actively calling for your destruction gets you. You can't keep calling for unity when everyone on your side but you has been shoved into a mass grave
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So, again, *who is this for*? What is the point of this 'let's all just get along' shit? It's ineffectual and silly at the best of times, and she's doing this now in the face of a right-wing Christian-nationalist fascist who literally MURDERED HER FRIEND AND WANTED TO MURDER HER.
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The left certainly doesn't care. They're going to correctly point out that Democrats are playing tee-ball against big-leaguers and that it's useless to call for unity against violence from a political faction that is pushing for more violence in every aspect of American society and foreign affairs.
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The Republicans don't care, they aren't going to start being civil. They're glad this happened. They're producing blatantly false propaganda blaming the shootings on the left.
The Democrats don't care, they're already being civil and they agree with this weak-ass 'tone down the rhetoric' bullshit.