Exile to Elba arc let’s go!!

“You wanna know why I use a syringe? Pills are too quick. You can’t savor all the little… emotions. You see, with their new hormones, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I knew your friends better than you ever did…”

“Would you like to know which of them were puppygirls?”

“How many of your friends have I femmed?”

There is a point and purpose to life, determined by the concrete historical conditions of your life: your place in history and in class society.

As a member of the working class and as a human, you have specific rational self-interests in the form of things you want to obtain and things you want to avoid. These interests align with the other members of your class, so that what’s in the rational self-interest of the working class as a whole is the same as what’s in the rational self-interest of each member of the working class. And the most effective methods of fulfilling these interests can be determined scientifically, using the rational power of the human mind. Fighting to advance your own self-interest, through advancing the collective self-interest of the class you belong to, at the place and time in history that you were born into, is a clearly defined and non-arbitrary ‘purpose’ to have in life.

And as history shows, the collective action of millions of people, fighting as partizans of the working class, can bring about enormous victories - improving their living standards, tearing down unjust structures and making society more inclusive, and creating miraculous wonders never seen before in history. The only reason life is so awful for so many people is because we haven’t won yet. But in some places we, the working class of the world, are winning and life is improving, so sometimes when I’m feeling hopeless I watch this video. I think my favorite part of the song, which I’ve never seen in other versions, is the final verse:

Which is correct, all we have to do is win and then we can finally see the red sunrise at the dawn of human history, that is, history written through the conscious choice of all humanity.

As to the question of why any of this is happening at all, here is what I think: at the beginning of the universe there was only energy in the form of photons of light. Through a series of dialectical interactions with the other fundamental fields of the universe, that light was transformed into physical matter, which then in turn began interacting dialectically with itself - through gravity, accumulating into stars; through atomic forces, transmuting into new chemical elements; through the dialectical evolution of the balance of those two opposing forces, causing supernovas and releasing the new elements back into the universe.

As these elements accumulate, through random interactions new molecules are formed; as these molecules accumulate on the watery surfaces of planets across the universe, eventually, at random, some of them may form into cell membranes, enzymes, RNA, DNA; as cells accumulate, at random, some of them may mutate in a way that joins them together into a single organism; as organisms accumulate, they randomly mutate and evolve until eventually, by chance, a conscious being may come into existence; these beings may develop intelligence, form societies and create new forces of production; the operation of these forces of production may split society into classes; these classes develop, the forces of production develop, the contradictions between the class structure and the power of the forces of production develop until at some historically contingent place and time, the workers gain control and start building communism.

At no stage is anything directed, nothing is ‘pushing’ matter towards more complex forms or ‘pulling’ it towards an end state, but the simple fact that it is possible for any of these things to happen means that, if the dice are rolled for long enough, they will happen - and once they do, they set the new ground state for all future dice rolls. The light from the dawn of the universe is pouring like a waterfall down these stepped pools, swirling and bubbling at each stage until in some random place the sloshing happens to send a little overflow into the next pool. The light swirls there again until it happens to overflow again, and again, and again… and at the bottom, or at least, at the point where the light can start consciously choosing to try and overflow to new levels of complexity, is a sapient being who is a communist.

Unfortunately, we live in the pool just before that one, where we have to struggle in an irrational society built on an outdated, contradictory framework - but even now there are places that have reached a higher level of complexity, and the advantage those places have by being more rationally organized means that the higher complexity will spread out from there, and inspire those trapped under the old system to tear it down and break free. In the midst of this, you may just be a single individual mote being buffeted around, forced to suffer, and see others suffer, terrible crulties and injustice at the hands of monstrous beasts, but at the same time, as a class-conscious member of the working class of this world, you are an inerasable shining link in the chain leading from the beginning of the universe to a future world that is flourishing beyond all possible imagination under the light of a red star.

The sudden realization of this, through the synthesis of an astrophysics education with dialectical materialism, into the image of this ‘cascade of light’, is why I chose this name, and so, even though the suffering in our time, in our lives, in your life and mine, is terrible and sometimes almost unbearable, in my heart I have a tiny little unbreakable piece of hope because ultimately communism will win, and it will win forever, until the end of the time, over and over again everywhere in all of space, because the universe is a machine for turning photons into communists.

France also had special ops in Azovstal and mounted all kinds of crazy suicidal helicopter rescue operations to get them out.

WW3 prevented entirely by the love of one man for making deals

Once again, MMT is only a description of how money works, in the same way that hydrodynamics is a description of how water works. Hydrodynamics can tell you how to build a pump for a well, but not whether you would be violating someone’s water rights. MMT can tell you how to utilize money to organize social activity, including the most relevant thing to us, building industrial capital, but it doesn’t tell you whether bond markets or anyone else would allow you to.

In fact, half of Hudson’s Killing the Host is about exactly how US institutions are completely beholden to finance capital, and would never allow the use of monetary policy to increase industrial production! Hudson uses the MMT framework to explain how the Federal Reserve prints staggering amounts of money to inflate the price of financial instruments (including stocks and bonds) for the benefit of financial capitalists, instead of printing money to inflate the prices of goods and labor which would lead to the formation of a productive economy.

The whole point of MMT is that money is just an organizational tool, like writing or calendars - as a technology it was invented (in the ‘western’ world at least) in ancient Mesopotamia and has persisted through multiple system of political economy. But in every case, its basic features are the same: it exists only as an IOU issued by a government, which can later be used to pay taxes, and a government with currency sovereignty can issue money at will to order people subject to its taxation (or who, for whatever other reason, need to obtain money denominated in that currency, such as, for instance, repaying IMF loans or making international trades) to hand over goods or perform services for the government.

Whereas this person is saying that the behavior of money depends on “the consensus of the monetary system’s stakeholders”, and the fact that the federal reserve didn’t take action to slow rising treasury yields (i.e. falling global demand for dollar holdings) is proof that you “can’t consolidate the central bank and treasury”. They seem to go on a lot about “constitutional consensus” as a reason MMT doesn’t work, as if the behavior of money in general through all of history is dependent on the specific provisions of a specific state’s constitution. They say “it is a constant theme of their literature that the foreign sector can be treated as a non entity that does impose constraints on policy space” when that is literally the opposite of true, and Super Imperialism is primarily about how US interference in other countries’ monetary policy prevents them from being able to use their currency sovereignty to develop their own economies.

It’s true that by the logic of MMT, a country with all of the resources it needs within its own borders (== within the boundaries of its monopoly on violence == within the region it can enact taxes on) can print however much money it needs to mobilize fallow resources (or until 100% employment is reached) while ignoring the effects on its currency’s exchange rate, precisely because it doesn’t need to obtain resources through trade - exactly as was seen in the USSR under Stalin and, as a shadow of that, Russia after 2022. The sanctions applied to Russia “should” have collapsed it, because most other countries in the world would have collapsed under this sanctions regime, but unlike those countries Russia is capable of producing all its own food, fuel and raw materials. Indeed, freezing a bunch of the oligarch’s money and preventing capital flight from Russia meant rubles had to be invested in productive industries, on top of the state increasing spending on war production, which combined to give a massive boost to Russia’s productive economy! However, the Russian central bank did everything in its power to prevent and undo this, because it’s controlled by neoliberals, so printing money to develop the economy “doesn’t work” because at every turn, neoliberals will sabotage it!

They say “sure would be cool if we had an agency in the government in charge of investigating insider trading”, but using their logic the fact that insider trading wasn’t investigated proves that it can’t be - and in our currently existing political economy, they would be right! Investigating insider trading is specifically against the financial interests of the groups that hold political power over this economy, so it is impossible to investigate insider trading in the same way it’s impossible to implement the recommendations of MMT for building a productive economy. But that doesn’t mean that ‘investigating insider trading’ as an activity can never occur, the same way it doesn’t mean that MMT is incorrect.

…rather than understanding that “green dollars” - the kind of money you keep in your pocket in real life - and “yellow dollars” - US treasury bills - are called that because of the color of the paper they’re printed on?? That seems like a pretty important feature of the dollar economy to be completely unaware of!

“Bandera Smoothie”, aka the inside of his lungs after he breathed in all that cyanide

Good work comrade, I’m saving this post for future reference

It’s really useful to show the difference in the level of conversation between a communist who knows what they’re talking about and has the ability to do research, and a lib who’s already decided what they believe based on half-remembered propaganda tropes and hearsay.

He sounds the gong as he finishes draining each one (pause)

In addition to needing to pay interest on IMF and World Bank loans, these countries need dollars for two things:

• buying oil, which can only be sold in US dollars. Trying to sell oil in other currencies is actually the primary reason the US destroyed Saddam’s Iraq, as he tried to sell oil to Europe in exchange for euros, and Gaddafi’s Libya (the details of which I can’t remember off the top of my head). The ‘petrodollar’ was agreed with OPEC by Nixon in 1971 after the US had gone off the gold standard, essentially by the implication of the US’s military prowess.

• buying food, because most of their food agriculture was destroyed during colonialism and replaced with cash crops, and since then the IMF has refused to issue a single loan that would enable food security - indeed, destroying the last vestiges of food crop production is usually a condition of IMF loans. Meanwhile, the US is one of the largest producers and exporters of grain in the world, and uses the threat of cutting off this supply to keep its subjects in line. In fact, they produce so much that giving away food for free as aid is another key tactic to destroy local agriculture, as the farmers can’t sell in a market saturated with free grain and so go out of business. But if the local government tried to counter this by heavily subsidizing food production the way the US does, they would be refused IMF loans or even hit with sanctions that would starve them out before their food production could develop sufficiently.

This means that the US has a total stranglehold on almost every global south country, because at any time they can impose sanctions that will cut off food and fuel to that country. Without oil, modern economies grind to a halt, and without food - well, the results are obvious. So these countries need to export products to the US to get dollars.

I’m six hours late but I just had to tell you, you can relax, there’s no need to fret: Ukraine did manage to start training child soldiers before the war

The link there let me download it for free, but even so, here you go

Did you know? There is a memorial in Donbas called the “alley of angels”, engraved with the names of over a hundred children killed by Maidan regime forces and paramilitary fascist militias since 2014, during their ethnic cleansing and terror bombing operations against the Russian-speaking ethnic minority of Ukraine - ostensibly their own citizens.

After trying desperately for nearly a decade to make peace via the Minsk I and Minsk II accords, the Russians (and in particular Putin) finally learned the same fucking thing that every single indigenous and socialist group in the world could have told him: that the US/NATO/the West CANNOT BE REASONED WITH, that any agreement reached with them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and even at the very moment their pen is signing their absolutely most solemn oath upon their very souls, they are betraying you. So, Russia, kicking and screaming, was dragged into the ongoing civil war (after first spending three days on parliamenary procedures to recognize the DPR and LPR as independant states and make defence pacts with them), on the morally correct side, sending a limited force - essentially a militarized police action - to end this monstrous persecution and secure their most vulnerable land border.

Having determined that Russia would react unfavorably to NATO expansion, that it could lead to violence in Ukraine itself, up to and including civil war, and that Russia would be forced to intervene even though it didn’t want to, the US decided to do exactly that.

Here’s John McCain in Ukraine in 2017 (after the signing of the Minsk II agreements) telling Ukrainian soldiers that “2017 will be the year of offence”

Here’s a Ukrainian neonazi talking on the 5th of February 2022 (!!!) explaining how NATO plans to balkanize Russia and put Ukraine in a position to “fight and kill” for the West, a project that is “cool and ambitious”. (As a bonus, he explains how the Maidan coup would have been a “gay parade” - and would have gone nowhere - without the action of Ukrainian fascists).

And last but not least, to bring it back to dead children, here’s some Ukrainian neonazi special forces with a classic joke prop, of the kind you make when you’re the good guys:

Tin cans of “separatist baby meat”.

What’s “”“”“vile”“”" is sacrificing 600,000 Ukrainian lives on the altar of… being able to genocide Russian-speaking Ukrainians

It was a false flag by neonazis:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266855828_The_Snipers’_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine

I think they meant that watering your plants with a hose not rated for drinking water will introduce more lead into your vegetables than the amount leaching from the chicken wire.