The election discourse has become cancerous because it keeps going in circles. This is because liberals have become fixated on the narrative of there being some large bloc of leftists who are going around trying to convince people to not vote. However, this contingent, does not actually exist? Most of the people I have seen take a stance against voting for Biden aren't telling other people to not vote. Some are, but the number of these people is so vanishingly small (compared to the rest of the electorate) that it becomes clear that the election discourse is entirely a waste of time.

Liberals are also really trying hard to convince these people to vote (by berating them online), and it just seems like this is the most idiotic and time wasting strategy possible. These people have negative charisma.

Even if they actually could actually speak persuasively, wouldn't it be far better to target the large number of non-voting centrists/apathetic people rather than leftists who have taken a principled stance (and thus could only be convinced if you knew more about American and world history, which liberals are blissfully unaware of)?

For as much as liberals are fond of accusing leftists of being impotents on a moral high horse, the election memers aren't accomplishing anything either.

Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. In the time-disgraced tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.

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After studying DPRK wages and prices for a while, I wanted to make a comparison between the economic life of a north Korean coal miner in North Hamgyong Province compared to one in West Virginia, USA.

Working conditions

Workweek

DPRK: 6 hours/day, 6 days/week (36 hours)

USA: 10 hours/day, 5 days/week (50 hours)

Paid Time Off

DPRK: 52 weekends + 71 national holidays + 28 PTO = 151 days

US: 104 weekends + 11 national holidays = 124 days

% unionized

DPRK: 100% (+ Taean work system giving extra worker democracy)

USA: 17%

Monthly wages & expenses

Wages

DPRK: 360,000 KPW

USA: 4,600 USD

Rent

DPRK: Free

USA: 600 USD (13% income)

Utilities

DPRK: Free

USA: 200 USD (4.3% income)

Food

DPRK: Free (From PDS)

USA: 710 USD (15.4% income)

Healthcare

DPRK: Free

USA: 1400 USD (30% income)

Taxes

DPRK: No taxes

USA: 750 USD (16% income)

Leftover Salary after monthly expenses

DPRK: 360,000 KPW

USA: 940 USD

One-time purchases

Television

DPRK: 22,000 KPW (6% of saved income, subsidized by state)

USA: 100 USD (11% of saved income)

Bicycle

DPRK: 250,000 KPW (69% of saved income, unreliable figure)

USA: 100 USD (11% of saved income)

However, most Americans cannot navigate with just a bike and need a car (15,000 USD) while DPRK residents only need a bike due to better-planned towns.

Aspirin, one bottle

DPRK: 600 KPW (0.17% saved income)

USA: $8 (0.89% saved income)

Eating out at a medium-grade restaurant, per person

DPRK: 20,000 KPW (5.6% saved income)

USA: 25 USD (2.8% saved income)

Ski Vacation, per person

DPRK: Free (Paid for by government)

USA: 2,500 USD (278% saved income)

Long-term Expenses

Childbirth

DPRK: Free (Covered by healthcare)

USA: 20,000 USD (2200% saved income)

Tertiary Education

DPRK: Free (All universities)

USA: 52,000 USD (4 years at WVU, 5780% saved income)

Funeral

DPRK: Free (Paid for by government)

USA: 5000 USD (556% saved income)

Please tell me if I made a mistake or missed out on something crucial. Of course, there is no way to portray the increased workers' rights and enhanced democratic system in numbers.

I was the one who coined stonetoss is a nazi and that's my claim to fame 🥲

A bit late, but this is a good interview.

I don’t have the will power to listen to this, if anyone does let me know how it goes.

This is a repost of my comment on Hexbear’s news megathread.

I figured it would be good to post it here aswell for further visibility and perhaps invite more responses.

Euros being delusional as per usual.

Malaysia’s PM Anwar Ibrahim makes ‘no apology’ for Hamas links on Germany visit

The Malaysian PM visits Germany and gets accused of supporting Hamas by an audience member - but are these westerners completely illiterate?

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has defended Malaysia's relations with Hamas, saying he made "no apologies" for his nation's historical links with the Palestinian militant group and reiterating his stance that the Middle East conflict predates the October 7 attack on Israel.

"What I reject strongly is this narrative, this obsession, as if the entire problem begins and ends with the 7th of October," the prime minister said. There had been decades of "atrocities, plunder and dispossession of Palestinians," he added at a press conference alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin.

Despite the hysteria that the “geopolitics understanders” made about Anwar Ibrahim’s NED credentials months ago, Westerners seemingly forget that his initial rise came from the radical student organizations in the 1970s which were in-part connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution and other influential Islamic movements at the time.

Of course he will be anti-Israel. That has been the hallmark of Malaysian foreign policy since the beginning - even with our 1st PM in 1957 - and he was the most Western friendly of them all.

As the article mentions:

Anwar's staunch support for the Palestinians can be traced back to his years as a student leader in the 1970s including as the leader of the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement.

Muslim-majority Malaysia does not recognise Israel's statehood. It has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, hosting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1984 and 2001 and welcoming Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal, leaders of the political wing of Hamas, in 2020.

This reminded me of when multiple “Israeli” news outlets accused Malaysia of being the most anti-semitic country on Earth, despite historically having no native Jewish population, and a residential population that at it’s peak only reached the teens. Completely unhinged and insane.

And then there’s the palm oil issue.

Banning our palm oil will not change the fact that we were able to succesfully industrialize its production and outcompete your local biofuel industry. Europeans needs to stop barking like a rabid dog. It isn’t the 1800s or even the neocolonial late 1900s anymore.

These deindustrialization policies will not work, especially when you yourself have lost any capabilities of enacting economic warfare. Hiding behind a facade of environmentalism doesn’t change reality.

As Bloomberg noted, there will be other markets that the palm oil could be sold to. You are kneecapping yourself just to appear “environmentally friendly”.

Perhaps it’s just the final cries of a region declining into subordination. The garden after all, will inevitably be reclaimed by the jungle. It just takes time.

Also I read the worst thing ever when I was researching for the post, titled “A Close Encounter With Asia’s Anti-Semitic Capital”.

Warning: Terminal crackerism.

The concept of trasformismo is highly relevant in today's political climate. It refers to the practice of creating a centrist coalition government that shuns any deviation from its ideology as extreme. This term was coined after the Italian unification and gave rise to Italian Fascism.

We are currently witnessing something similar where only mainstream liberal views are considered acceptable, and any ideas outside this framework are pushed to the fringes. As people lose faith in the system, parties that were previously excluded from politics gain power. This is why we're seeing a rise of far-right movements across Europe.

It's also notable how liberals often dismiss one-party systems while trying to create their own version with extra steps.

We saw about this time a year or two ago, that the USA was manufacturing a lot of propaganda to manufacture consent for war in Haiti.

Like all good Machiavellian strategists, they have let the first wave of propaganda sit and ferment, allowing some people, some mass conscious pioneers that act as emissaries to the public with the will of the Empire, to familiarize themselves with Haiti's existence.

Now, a second wave has begun, and with greater reach and intensity. I think we can expect more tangible actions intended than a smattering of Kenyan militia being sent to Haiti--after it is established that the American public and its bleeding heart liberals have expressed approval of a "humanitarian mission."

Now is the time to educate ourselves, our comrades, and those within our sphere of influence as individuals and as a group about Haiti, its long past of brutal invasion consisting of mass murder, rape, and looting by the USA, the UN, and European powers, the actual situation of the "gang problems" cited by the USA as justification for military action, and the Haitian leadership.

The white supremacist empire has never forgiven Haiti for freeing itself by the blood of slave masters, and they have spent a century punishing them for their bravery, audacity, and dignity.

This is the exact blueprint for "cartel violence" the the USA is creating and then citing to build casus belli against Mexico.

If we can get ahead of the wave, it will save us a lot of headache in fighting the psychological war for American hearts and minds, not just for Haiti, but for Mexico, and all the other last-ditch-effort blundering invasions the dying empire will lash out with in the final act of its existence.

Yes it's finally out.

Released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 so... have fun!

And please share as far as you can!! This is a really important book!

Apologies for the subpar source. But the gist of it stands: Kstovo oil refinery was struck by an explosive carrying drone last night, Moscow time. I've included a link to Google maps, to give an idea how far the place is from the SMO frontlines.

HRW put out a new report fearmongering about the 'closing of north Korea' and as with all HRW reports about AES states, it's chock full of CIA funded nonsense.

I know most comrades know about Radio Free Asia and how it was started by the CIA to propagandize against America's enemies, but not enough know about DailyNK. It's funded by the National Endowment for Democracy ('funded' might be putting it lightly, their press kit states that without the NED they couldn't exist). The NED is a CIA cutout as admitted by both of its founders:

In 1986, NED's President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 1960s and that's why it has been discontinued".[71] Throughout the course of a 2010 investigation by ProPublica, Paul Steiger, the then editor in chief of the publication said that "those who spearheaded creation of NED have long acknowledged it was part of an effort to move from covert to overt efforts to foster democracy" and cited as evidence a 1991 interview in which then-NED president Allen Weinstein said, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."[15]

See also: GrayZone grilling the current VP of the NED

If you get the PDF version of this HRW report, you can search the whole thing including the footnotes for 'Daily NK'. 57 results. There's also 8 hits for Radio Free Asia, of course. Just like Radio Free Asia, DailyNK exclusively uses anonymous, almost certainly non-existent sources. Here's an example, the first DailyNK citation in the report (emphasis mine):

Around 200 North Korean soldiers from several branches of the military have died from symptoms that may have been caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Daily NK has learned.

A Daily NK source inside North Korea’s military reported on Mar. 6 that the military’s medical corps had sent a report detailing the impact of COVID-19 on the country’s soldiers to military leaders.

Every. Single. DailyNK article is like this, just like every single RFA article. They're CIA backed/funded organizations that exclusively use anonymous sources, yet Human Rights Watch and other orgs, along with all of western media, seems fine with citing them for the majority of their DPRK coverage.

The crux of this HRW report is literally based on a mistranslation that was first reported by RFA and then further spread by DailyNK. They purposely mistranslated a word, resulting in them lying about the DPRK issuing orders for soldiers monitoring the border to shoot dead anyone on sight. What they actually ordered, is for warning shots to be fired before switching to live ammunition if absolutely necessary. Here's a good article debunking their nonsense.

The HRW report also draws on the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry about the DPRK, which is widely cited despite it being based on an admitted liar's testimony, along with testimony from a few western stooges from CIA funded think tanks. Here's the first day of hearings, you can see that the first speaker, the star witness, if you will, is Shin Dong-Hyuk. He's the subject of this Guardian article about how he recanted most of his story. That article is from 8 years ago. We've known that the star speaker for this COI is an admitted liar for 8 years, and HRW still cited it.

If you look at day 2 of the Washington DC hearings, you'll see Victor Cha, who is a former advisor to George W. Bush and now works for CSIS, which is funded by a smattering of American corporations and defense contractors and various governments that are hostile to the DPRK, including, of course, the US. CSIS spread tons of propaganda about the PRC and the DPRK.

You'll also see Marcus Noland and Andrew Natsios at that Washington hearing, both of which also work for organizations with similar funding to CSIS.

Yea... it's CIA nonsense all the way down.

Context: He is a Russian who live in France and is known for his videos comparing Russian and French culture. At the start of the the invasion in 2022, he bought on to western propaganda and fled Russia in a panic (he happened to be there at the time) and didn't return for 2 years. He finally returned to Russia recently and just published this video a few hours ago in which he give a pretty fair account of how Russia is really doing 2 years later.

The video is in french but the auto subtitles work decently enough.

I think this is interesting for 2 reasons:

1. This is a big shift in opinion for him, back in 2022 he was firmly on Ukraine's side and in favor of the economic sanctions and now there he is telling to his audience that everyone who lost their mind about the sanctions were wrong and that Russia is actually doing even better than before the sanctions.

2. He has a massive audience (>2M subscribers), this is the first time I see such a huge internet personality openly acknowledging the real economic situation in Russia, from a guy who is literally known for being Russian too.

He has 2 or 3 weird takes but otherwise the video is decently fair and nuanced.

“This is a story about how many Uyghur women raised their status in the family and in society. This is a story about how grassroots deputies in China improve the living standards of the people they represent. Here's the story of Aynur Abbas, a successful female entrepreneur and deputy to Xinjiang's People's Congress.”

Welcome again to everybody! Make your self at home, Pull a seat up next to Uncle Ho Chi Minh. For the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2034700

As some of you may have heard, Sahra Wegenknect is a first generation Iranian-German MP and splitter from Linke in her own party known as Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (yes, its her own name). In the 90s, she was part of the successor party to the SED in its left faction known as Communist Platform. Unfortunately, she has yet to remove her brain from the mainstream 90s communist movement and has yet to advance on social issues. This has been glossed over on by many liberal commenters without any quotes from the devil-we-know, and I am going to discuss her most horrendous takes in depth here.

I will also be comparing her stance with Linke. Most quotes are from her own book 2021 Die Selbstgerechten: Mein Gegenprogramm - für Gemeinsinn und Zusammenhalt. (The Self-Righteous: My Counter-Program - for Community Spirit and Cohesion). It should be noted her book is not published for free online, which is suspicious for an alleged socialist. Other quotes are from her party, MP, or personal websites.

CW: Transphobia, Racism.

---

On Queer, Transgender, and Racial Issues

It should be noted that Sahra Wegenknect has in the past supported LGB rights. In 2017, she supported the gay marriage vote in Germany.

Excerpt 1:

New fashion words are constantly emerging, which of course one should know and use oneself as quickly as possible. In recent times, the terms "misogyny" and "cis-women" for female citizens who are not transgender have been added to the left-liberal vocabulary. Anyone who wants to participate in lifestyle-left discussions without being criticized therefore needs one thing above all: enough free time to stay up-to-date on questions of correct expression.

The typical lifestyle-left person lives in a big city or at least a chic university town, and rarely in places like Bitterfeld or Gelsenkirchen. He or she is studying or has a university degree and good foreign language skills, advocates for a post-growth economy and pays attention to biologically sound nutrition. Discount meat eaters, diesel car drivers and cheap Mallorca air travelers are anathema to him.

This does not mean that he himself does not drive a car or never gets on an airplane. He or she even loves to travel - with the exception of Corona times - and usually flies particularly far, because mobility and cosmopolitanism are part of his or her DNA. But these are not about Ballermann tourism, but about educational trips that help to get to know other cultures, to visit the last remaining wild orangutans or to get closer to the inner self in an Ayurveda hotel.

The fact that inner-city journeys are often made by bicycle or electric second car makes it easier on the conscience.

In the next excerpt, we can see a supposed socialist coming to the defense of a billionaire for the purpose of shitting on transgender people.

Excerpt 2:

One does not have to think conservatively, express oneself on migration problems, or defend the social survival of one's home region in order to become the target of vehement attacks. Even the thesis that there are natural differences between women and men, and not just social role models, can lead to a veritable shitstorm, as Harry Potter author Joanne K. Rowling had to experience. To understand the background of the campaign, one must know that left-liberal gender theory seriously denies the existence of a biological sex. In the meantime, Rowling has even been wished death for alleged transphobia, and her latest book has not only been ostracized by the Twitter mob, but publicly burned, an act whose dark history did not seem to bother the actors in the least.

The way we deal with the no longer existing genders has also become more complicated. A well-intentioned compliment, addressed to the wrong person, can quickly make a man the object of rude accusations of sexism. The number of commandments and rules of conduct is growing at a pace that ordinary citizens - i.e. people who spend their days with other things than discursive awareness - have no chance of keeping up with. In the end, it is best for them to simply say nothing more. The fact that, according to a survey from 2019, more than half of German citizens are worried about expressing their opinions freely outside of their circle of friends, in light of the increasing intolerance with which such debates are conducted, is not surprising.

Not wanting to make anyone feel left out, she has decided to defend black face.

Excerpt 3:

Who is allowed to play Othello?

According to the guidelines of identity politics, it is now considered sacrilege in theaters, for example, for Shakespeare's Othello, a black man, to be played by a white man. This follows from the aforementioned thesis that a member of the majority society is unable to empathize with the inner life of a member of a minority. If he tries to do so anyway, even as an actor, this aggressive act of appropriation must be rejected by all means of public campaigning.

For the same reason, the well-known American-Danish actress Scarlett Johansson received a fierce Twitter tirade when she announced her intention to play the role of pimp Dante "Tex" Gill in a movie. Gill is not only a Mafioso, but was initially a woman and later paid for his sex change with the money he earned in brothels. Such a role should definitely only be played by a transgender person, was the accusation, i.e. a man who was once a woman, or vice versa. In the end, Johansson apologetically canceled the role and publicly apologized. Nothing has been heard of the film project since then.

Even ordinary people can be guilty of cultural appropriation if, for example, they wear the typical hairstyle or clothing of a minority. If you are white and decorate your head with dreadlocks, you should better not get too close to the campus of some universities. Identity-political zeal also brought a kindergarten in Hamburg into the national headlines because it recommended to parents not to dress their children up as Indians for carnival anymore. For most people, such debates are likely to trigger exactly two reactions: astonishment and bewilderment.**

The debate over cultural appropriation is a complex one, and there are no easy answers. On the one hand, it is important to be respectful of other cultures and to avoid appropriating their traditions and symbols without understanding their significance. On the other hand, it is also important to be able to appreciate and learn from other cultures without being accused of appropriation.

Ultimately, it is up to each individual to decide what they feel comfortable with. If you are unsure about whether or not it is appropriate for you to wear a particular piece of clothing or participate in a particular activity, it is always best to err on the side of caution and avoid doing so.

---

On Palestine, Foreign Policy

Here, she is actually somewhat decent. She supports a hands off approach to Ukraine and Palestine. It should be noted that she has a myopic view of events here, the war started in 2014, but she says its been 3 years.

Excerpt 1, Ukraine, Published on JungeWelt:

The war in Ukraine is entering its third year. Every day, young men are killed or mutilated on the front lines, and large swaths of Ukraine are devastated. The World Bank estimates the damage to Ukraine at around 500 billion US dollars. But our future is also at stake in this proxy war, which has already cost us more than 200 billion euros in prosperity, according to German economic institutes.

The strategy of economically ruining Russia through sanctions and militarily defeating it through arms exports to Ukraine has failed miserably. The Russian military is on the offensive, while Ukraine is running out of soldiers. 600,000 Ukrainian men of military age have fled to the West because they do not want to be burned up in a preventable war that could have ended in a negotiated peace after a few weeks if the West had not interfered in a fatal way and nourished the false hope of a Ukrainian Siegfried.

Will we finally come to our senses and try to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia? There is no alternative - except for a total escalation with incalculable consequences. But not only the Union, but also large parts of the Greens and the FDP are beating the drum for the delivery of rockets with a range that reaches Moscow. "I am surprised that some people do not even think about whether it could lead to war participation by what we are doing" - with these words, Olaf Scholz has rejected the delivery of "TAURUS". But can one rely on a chancellor who has previously drawn red lines and then crossed them, and whose olive green and "liberal" partners are already partly looking at a coalition with the Union?

The "TAURUS" missiles would not be a game changer either. In order to force Russia to withdraw militarily from the occupied territories, it would need a multiple of ammunition and ultimately also soldiers from NATO countries to fill the gaps in the ranks of the Ukrainian army. Following this fatal logic, French President Macron has now brought the deployment of ground troops into play. At the latest, this would set in motion a spiral that could lead to a third world war with the use of nuclear weapons.

"He who says A does not have to say B. He can also recognize that A was wrong," Bertolt Brecht once said. Since neither the traffic light nor the Union can bring themselves to admit their own mistakes, all reasonable forces are called upon to increase public pressure and spread the realization: There is no military solution to this conflict! Whoever wants to carry the war to Russia with German weapons is carrying the war to Germany and is thereby recklessly gambling away our greatest asset: a life in freedom, peace and security.

Excerpt 2: Palestine

Linke Comment on Palestine:

The chairman of the Die Linke (the Left party) parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Dietmar Bartsch, criticised this immediately, saying: “I distance myself in the strongest possible terms from the term ‘open-air prison’ used to describe the Gaza Strip at the Wagenknecht press conference.”

source: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/meltdown-die-linke

Sahra on Palestine:

I strongly condemn the barbaric attacks on Israel, it is a big crime. Nevertheless, there is a need to de-escalate the situation now, one cannot do this with military means

The Middle East conflict cannot be resolved militarily, and of course, this conflict has a history. Gaza has been an open-air prison for many years

The Middle East conflict is again an example that shows that weapons and military actions will not bring calm to the tensions. On the contrary, there is a danger that many people will die, making the whole Middle East into a powder keg,

---

Summaries on the rest of her platform

I have also skimmed over the rest, and they are fairly well known. She does have some leftist stances on how to handle the economy, and has an anti-immigration platform, which could be construed as left wing in its framing (re: visas are ways to get what amounts to slave labor until citizenship). If there is further interest, I can do a deeper dive on this, but her social issues leave a lot to be desired and I feel people should be made more aware of that. I am currently trying to find her stances on homelessness, but all I can find are critiques of what leads to homelessness, not sponsorships of policies like Housing First.

Is critical support warranted? Maybe, if you are in a strongly AfD district. Her party is much better on foreign policy than almost any other german party, as they are balls deep on supporting Israel. But it should be known that she is strongly transphobic and has racist tendencies.

When you decide if he gets your critical support, the transphobia accusation is 100% legit.

But the stuff I hear about him not being socialist, grifting, opportunism... the man has held the same positions on Western Imperialism and worker's rights consistently since the 70s. Demonstrably so. Loudly so.

Title

source

Happens about February-March of every election year (the, ahem, independent media goes out of its way to induce it). Get ready for the next lib wave, and a bunch of iterations of the following script, which they've been practicing since like 1999:

• 1. "Eh, I disagree with [Democrat candidate] on a lot of things, but to pretend he's not better than [Republican candidate] is just delusional."
• 2. "Yeah, I know [Democratic candidate] is a war criminal and complicit in a genocide, but have you considered that [Republican candidate] is a war criminal as well, plus he said rude things about [minority group]? In the interest of harm reduction for Americans only, I have a duty to vote Democrat."
• 3. "Your vote actually does matter."
• 4. "The only reason the Democrats aren't Wholesome Progressive Scandinavian Model Chungus is because they have to play politics with the Republicans. You have to recognize the reality of a two-party system."
• 5. "We can push the Democrats left."
• 6. "Such-and-such Democratic policy (usually the Affordable Care Act) was actually really progressive."
• 7. "My [minority group] partner, whom I've never mentioned up to this point and very possibly just made up, is voting Democrat." (This tactic also gets used by libs defending porn and/or prostitution, e.g. "my totally-real girlfriend loves it when I post videos of us having sex online").
• 8. "If even one less person dies because [Democratic candidate] is in office, it's my moral duty to vote for [Democratic candidate]. I am a mature, compassionate person who absolutely understands socialism."

LOL