This is just absolutely wild to me. Just true unfiltered insanity. The democrats literally sent 50B in military aid to a nation that is literally committing a genocide, and if someone complains about this your reactions to effectively say “geeze complain much?”. I truly, fundamentally, do not understand how a human can have that response. It just does not compute. The only thing I can think of is that you actually don’t believe there is a genocide, or that the democrats didn’t fund it. But that too seems so far fetched, because these are both so easy to verify. None of it adds up

Exactly! Which is why moving right every cycle has proved to be such a winning strategy for the democrats! Finally someone talks sense.

Lovely how not actively supporting and funding a genocide is a purity test now. Beautiful stuff.

Elections are not the time and place for democracy, that’s some tankie shit. If you want to make your voice heard, do it any other time. Not during elections. It’s just not right.

Go out and pressure the DNC to not be shit

How about you go out and draw the rest of the owl there? The main power we have is our right to vote, and you’re saying we shouldn’t use that to pressure the DNC to put forth a pro-worker anti-war candidate.

The time to protest vote is in the primaries.

There were primaries?

I take issue with your use of the adjective “good” in “good cop”.

I think the main problem is the private ownership of the means of production.

It’s like they get zapped with an amnesia ray right after every election, and are prohibited from reading about history. I guess four years is a long time and reading is hard. Better vote blue because who knows what might happen if you don’t!

No no bro bro listen

humanitarian nightmare

Genocide. The word is genocide. A genocide that doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere and kind of “happens”, but is actively being committed by Israel and the United States since October 8th 2023.

That’s assuming the only way to help is to vote for the fascist enablers. And it isn’t! I feel like you’re not engaging the argument in good faith

No bro just roll over and take it bro pls I’m telling you

I don’t think this is quite true. People that call themselves centrists can come from a benign place. In my mind, the folks that call themselves centrists tend to mainly care about preserving the status quo, no matter what it is.

They’ll usually use terms like “big tent”, “adult in the room”, and if they went to school “realpolitik”. Usually privileged, they don’t understand the urgency for change for those in need, so they’ll balk at any method that may actually achieve some progress for the marginalized and underprivileged. Usually they’ll say some wise, enlightened thing about “optics”.

And they’ll tell themselves that they care. They’ll tell themselves and others that they’re the good guys. They’ll watch CNN and read the economist, and they’ll tell themselves they’re informed. They’re always on the right side of history, but only ever when it’s already too late. I think they genuinely don’t know.

Not to mention Oprah

The purpose of a system is what it does. Capitalism is functioning perfectly fine.

I feel like you’re a bit too emotionally involved. It’s just a cartoon, calm down.

Anyway, to clarify my comment, which I thought was brief and to the point enough that it was easy to grasp, but apparently not for you: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with covering current events or lampooning stuff. The way south park does this is sanctimonious and smug, to the point where I find it a bit hard to watch.

Whenever they take on real world stuff, they’re incredibly smug and sanctimonious about it. This has been the case since the start, and I can’t say I’ve ever been able to get past that.

I’m getting strong rest of the owl vibes from a lot of what you say.

So for example, you say you need strong allies. Well, list some candidates! China? They have a policy of non-intervention, so don’t count on it. Cuba? Not very strong. The US, or some other nation that’s captured by the owning class (Netherlands, France, Germany, etc)? Fat chance.

Same with the focus having folks join unions more. I think it’s a great outcome to strive for, but how do we achieve that goal? On a systemic level we see union membership dropping, and that’s no coincidence, because more and more anti-union legislation is enacted across the board in Europe and America. And that in turn is no coincidence because the people who really don’t want us to unionize have enough money to lobby this legislation into existence, and they happen to own the media, so they’re also doing a good job of convincing us that it is against our interests to join a union. Voting a pro-union candidate into power is incredibly difficult for the simple fact that campaign funds are a pretty decent predictor of electoral success, and guess who has the money to contribute significant amounts to those funds? Not me.

The education thing too is pretty great, but it assumes that some worker-friendly entity already has control over the education system. How do you get there? And education only goes so far of course. At some point folks leave the educational system, and their main source of information becomes the media. I’ve seen well-educated folks be completely convinced that there is no genocide in Gaza, and I could not blame them, because for the first year no major outlet would even utter the word. How do you prevent the media from being captured by the owning class?

Ultimately the problem is that the opponent has the means and willingness to use violence to quell your movement. And they’ve shown time and again that they will use these means, and history shows it works (Allende, the Spanish anarchist revolution, the Paris commune, Indonesia’s takeover by Suharto, Lumumba, etc). How do you defend yourself effectively against a violent aggressor without resorting to illiberal means yourself?

Yeah! And we need to do it in a way where the incredibly rich and powerful who have a vested interest and desparate need for us to fail won’t kill our movement! In the past and present, any socialist movement was met with

• death squads
• propaganda
• military invasions
• assasinations of heads of state
• funding, arming, and training the opposition
• economic sanctions
• so, so much propaganda

all funded by the absurdly wealthy to make nations fail and make them more amenable to re-exploitation by the owning class.

Any ideas on how to defend ourselves against this phenomenon which occurs over and over again?