Parenti's mostly positive portrayal of the Soviet Union and "actually existing communist states" seemed different from how proletarians and the general population in those states saw them. A lot of communists saw him as a Stalinist while others considered him a mere campist. Not great either way.
It seems like another confirmation for the "masculinity is working-class aesthetics" theory. People can't help unconsciously perceiving rudeness and bigotry as working-class traits.
I guess Bessner is close to 40, but I'm not sure. Maybe early 40s.
I kinda feel like a 14 year old kid would post constantly about Nirvana/Smashing pumpkins, but most in their 20s would tend toward deeper cuts in the pop culture, and these days more than in the 90s, towards showing some multi-ethnic range in taste and style, but it's not a rule.
He's probably solidly middle class but I doubt rich. I don't want to research it. I know you're not suggesting it, but I wouldn't tend to guilt people over income level as class has a lot more to do with relation to capital and whether one has to earn a wage or salary to live (as you know).
But I also think the Corgan/Cobain fixation is a window into his stifled mind and sheltered life.
Yeah, I usually don't judge people's musical tastes but I'll make an exception for Bessner who acts as if his every pronouncement is a world changing morsel of information for his devotees and fellow great scholars and thought leaders. I used to love Nirvana but avoid them now for personal sanity.
Ha ha. Sorry for that. I just enjoy how obvious his musical tastes are, and I actually do think you could make a case it's reflective of his bad politics, and bad life choices in general.
Billy Corgan. Studio photo. He is in a black shirt looking stern. The right side of his body (our left) is somewhat shadowed but still visible. He is bald with a five o'clock shadow of a beard.
Black and white photo of kurt cobain grinning happily looking upwards and holding his guitar with the strings facing his body. He has fallen on the ground during a performance.
Daniel Bessner's two most beloved rock icons seem to be Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain. Both embody obvious, safe, mass based, lilly-white AngloAmerican hipster culture, but one is a MAGA creep, the other a leftish progressive. To him, it's all just great art. This is red-brown consciousness.
If tyrannical regimes can use global chokepoints to stop the world in its tracks with the goal of defending themselves against other tyrannical regimes, could an internationalist working class movement do the same, but to bring capitalists to their knees? We dare not even imagine it.
Whoever is the next Secretary of State is going to have some big shoes to fill.
Workers in Kentucky will strike a meat packing plant belonging to the company that gave the single largest individual Trump donation of $5 million. It will be the first time this Kentucky plant has been struck. The union formed in the 1990s. The conditions are horrible and wage theft rampant.
Right-wing populism offers easy solutions to the real failures of liberalism and 21st-century capitalism. Right? Yeah?
Maybe sometimes. But Austria? They have it good: health care (free), education (free), trains (on time). The appeal, I think, is something else. www.theredoubt.net/fight-for-so...
Instablocked. Well played, right winger.
Argue better.
You're regurgitating standard Campus Republican talking points and sound like you've never set foot on a campus or seen the very standard bias against Palestinian student groups and anyone protesting Israeli apartheid and genocide for many decades now. I have experienced it.
Detail: The Ala Moana protest is on a highway, Ala Moana Blvd. which is wide. They were on a traffic island at a crosswalk and it took a while for others to get to them because of the car traffic. We weren't just letting it happen. But there were some people nearby to help defend her. Guy was huge.
Others ran to her defense and the women around her screamed at the guy, tried to get the signs back and took photos of him. He left and no one was badly hurt. My point is that MAGA is getting more belligerent. They feel entitled to beat or kill leftists on the street as a form of "justice."
Meanwhile in Hawaii, I was on my way home from our anti-ICE protest in waikiki when a guy asked about my sign then threatened to beat me up after seeing it. The next day at the Ala Moana anti-ICE protest, a member in an inflatable bee suit was attacked and beaten with her own sign by a large dude.
To be clear, I have no idea if the kids were making noise outside, and I'm not assuming they were. The people harassing them seem to have made their minds up already about how they feel about Mexican people.
Watch the embedded video too. I've had noise problems with neighbors as someone who's lived most of my life in apartments, but you don't just threaten with the cops or deportation for fucks sake. And you don't treat them like animals, dousing them with water. All of that is just racist.
Show some guts by sacrificing your life for war so that my poll numbers look good.
From the Israeli Communist Party facebook page: Under the missiles, protestors in Tel-Aviv protested today against the Imperialist war
About 100 demonstrators gathered today between siren and siren to demonstrate in Bima Square against the imperialist war.
Please imagine this but with Lou Reed singing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AT7...
Yeah, it's a problematic premise: She worked for the ADL. Based on a Cosmopolitan article interviewing her. Their first sting sounds like _entrapment_ of a radicalized ISIS wannabe. But I didn't watch "The Americans" because I loved Stalin. More about what they did with the subject matter.
I forgot there was going to be an Apple TV series about an "extremism researcher" who infiltrates far Right Hate groups to prevent mass shootings/violence. Apple pulled it from release after Charlie Kirk was killed. That's too bad. I would have tried it.
I feel like his MarxismLeninismMaoism schtick doesn't fit with the online influencer routine and the campism just negates any trace of communist authenticity. Embracing state ruling classes as if they carry the torch of revolution is anti-communism. Fertile ground for reactionary takes and advice.
The last photo of Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, a third-grade student killed in the reported U.S./Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran.
He is waving goodbye to his mother.
A card in the game Bloc by Bloc, reading Chief of Police Fired —Reshuffle all other police ops cards —Then place this card as the first in the discard pile
In the game "Bloc by Bloc," which dramatizes the experience of participating in an insurrection, there is a "chief of police fired" card. When you draw this card, you gain nothing—you simply reshuffle all the cards in the police strategy deck and continue playing.
crimethinc.com/blocbybloc
