I didn’t log in for like 10 days and I come back to all this shit. What the fuck have you been up to chapo chat.

I remember taking a cell microbiology course and reading and doing all these tests on living cells, like attaching fluorescent tags onto cytoskeletal proteins, taking antibodies from Donkeys against a certain marker in human cells and seeing if they show up on a Western Blot, or everything they do in reserach using HeLa cells (cancerous cells taken from an African-American lady in the '50s against her knowledge or consent and which we still use today despite her family saying they don’t want them to be used in research anymore) or a whole lot of shit. I remember getting the feeling that we really shouldn’t be messing with life on this deep of a scale… kinda like reading Jurassic Park. Like, the US military keeps smallpox around even though it’s supposed to be eradicated in the wild. With the power we have at our hands with gene editing, they could design some variant of smallpox that is even more communicable and also skips past immunities.

I understand that people might have legitimate ethical concerns with gene editing even if the libiest example Kurzgesagt gives is “people the west considers to be dictators might live a long time.”

In the sense of the Mass Line, Maoism is not only applicable but the only way forward in the modern West. Communists must not be separate from the community but consult them and fulfill what they ask for.

This can be DSA brake light repair events, Fred Hampton-style hot breakfast for school kids, running safe injection sites, aiding the homeless, starting community gardens, providing protection to protestors, etc. We take the unorganized aspirations of the working class and turn them into praxis and educate on Marxism and how their conditions have degraded this way under capitalism. We invite the masses to participate in our meetings and encourage them to join our cadres.

In the sense of hiding in the mountains or forests as in Protracted People’s War… it doesn’t seem to be a strategy that it viable in modern America. Perhaps if conditions degrade sufficiently and there is mass civil unrest and militias and police forces clashing it would be viable.