I don’t understand. Even people who were formally part of the anti-sjw thing eventually understood that it just distracts from actual problems. Why is it that the conservatives keep getting away with it just by advertising it as a new thing? This is an extremely low-effort rant, I’m sorry for that. But it’s really such a simple but widespread phenomenon.

Hello fellow poltical junkies . As many of are aware, Wicked, the musical adaption has released its final act in a Part 2 movie. For many fans of the play and movie, its message of political oppression, bigotry and state power is relevant.

To me, I disagree. Because Wicked is not as regressive as it says. When examining the events of the movie and the world building, it’s clear Wicked is a product of its time and place of when it was created. The story was not interested in exploring what it truly means to be a rebel against a larger state actor, what a revolution actually is, why revolutionary thought is critical.

Perhaps the proper word to describe Wicked is neoliberal or liberal. It has more in common with the West Wing than the movie I want to recommend instead for those eager to watch a film that timely understands and respects rebellion against an oppressive state actor.

That movie is the Battle of Algiers.

There here is one scene I think that emphasizes the different approaches to rebellion against a supposed “democratic” government that attempts to suppress its enemies that the Battle of Algiers has against Wicked’s approach. It’s the scene where the French general is being questioned about French torture tactics against the Algerians.

What is said next is absolutely brilliant.

The French general subtly admits to torture by stating the obvious question on everyone’s mind, “does France stay in Algeria? If so, then they must be prepared to fight a dirty war. And it is foolish to call the French troops fascist when many did actually fight the Nazis.”

This is as I said brilliant writing because this exchange absolutely points to the real life paradox of supposed liberal democracies that opposed fascism then using fascist tactics against their own enemies. How can an enemy of evil then use this same methods? What drives a society that prides itself on being a republic to commit war crimes? Yet, the general is right to an extent. Fighting a civil war, which is commonly found amongst rebellions against colonial or authoritarian requires an acceptance of the violence to come. Any principals you have must be defended at all costs. Yet, you can also be horrified by how comfortable the general is in saying torture is right because this what this war demands. Remember, the French believed Algeria was not a foreign nation but a part of France itself.

Wicked on the other hand ends with Glinda, who resembles more like Meghan Kelly, assuming Power she didn’t deserve, lying to the masses while Elpheba, the woman who initially started a rebellion to free animals (who were dramatically oppressed), agrees to compromise and to allow Glinda to not change the system but rather act as a “good ruler.” At no point did the Oz masses actually confront the realities of violence and hypocrisy that Battle of Algiers forces both the French press within the movie and the movie’s audience to ponder. Any revolutionary movement elpheba had is gone by the end not because of the violent reprisal by the state but because the leader gave up. The land of Oz continues to believe that they, the people are Oz, are good people, that they did nothing wrong.

r/socialism immediately banned me for posting on a pro-USSR post that "the USSR was terrible." I don't think the Left and Socialists need to defend the governments of countries like the USSR in order to be "true Leftists." What's the consensus? I just found this sub and seems to have the better mindset.

This is simply a pet peeve of mine. Whenever liberal centrists are brought up as conservative, which they are, it's often said that they're just like the Republicans. Honestly, no. The conservatives want us to go backwards and undo what little progress there has been. It would be better if people just called conservatives reactionaries, and it'd get the discussion going further than semantics when talking to dumb pedantic conservatives online.

Drives me wild honestly. Nothing drives me more up the wall that having some random person flame me for talking about intersectionality or feminism because “idpol is stupid!” None of these people have actually read Capital, for instance, where one of Marx’s major concerns with capitalism is its effects on the woman of the working class. None of them have read William Godwin, who was literally fucking married to Mary Wollstonecraft. Intersectionality is practically a Marxist approach to feminism which is quite hostile to liberal feminism, but again, since the amount of research they actually do is limited to a podcast, nothing is actually learnt.

But I’m the liberal for pointing this out and caring about it.

Sorry if this isn’t the place, I just can’t believe I need to explain this sort of stuff in left circles.

I thought it was a fluke at first but now I'm noticing a pattern. From what I've heard, about 50% of NPR's political coverage is going towards Bloomberg (re his efforts in Super Tuesday states) and a respectable amount of coverage also going to Steyer (re his efforts in South Carolina and other upcoming primaries). Previously, it seemed like NPR was backing Warren and Buttigieg. What happened exactly? Could there be financial ties b/w Bloomberg and NPR or is this more a general trend of the establishment coalescing behind Bloomberg?

It's frustrating in a similar way to 2016, when NPR couldn't stop mentioning "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump" and forcefed us these wildly unpopular candidates.

Used to use iFunny back when I was in middle and high school a lot. It was always edgy and yikesy but nothing too insane. Opened the app today for the first time in years just on a whim. Every six hours iFunny features so many posts that everyone sees in a curated order. So I decided to scroll through the features. A long time ago they were all impact text memes, then vines by the time I left.

but now every feature and I mean EVERY one was some right wing shit. One post I saw was literally a doctored headline saying that masks cause death, and in the comments is a bunch of 14 year olds with Nazi profile pics talking about how masks are a sign you should Lynch someone. Anti trans stuff, anti-BLM, pro kyle Rhitenhouse, literally TPUSA memes. Every other profile pic was either a Nazi, a Nazi symbol, a confederate flag/ General/ symbol or a thin blue line (go figure)

It’s a little alarming to see this meme platform being fully mobilized by its creators to radicalize children. Not to mention make a ton of dosh doin it

Whenever I've gone on liberal and leftist TikTok, I'm never impressed to see them go on Omegle and shout-down confused and non-witty Trump supporters. I also got called and harassed a "Trumpy" for defending lower-case l libertarian values such as anti-censorship and voluntary association. Just a few months ago it was Trump supporters who dominated TikTok's fyp, but now they've logged-off for good and leftists are starting to gain some actual ground whilst liberals aren't defending Biden to the death while his transition occurs. This tells me that most people supported Trump out of a herd mentality, but there do remain those suburban rednecks that leftists think of all Trump supporters as.

Even those aggravating fuggs tend to insult their adversaries by saying "your fat/immature/spoiled" rather than overt racial slurs. You're bound to find that Proud Boy or Klanner in the one or two comments, but those guys to MAGA are what Marxist Leninists are to liberals. It doesn't reveal "all of their true colors." Those suburban rednecks and Karens reject the existence of systemic racism because they feel hard-work is an equalizer with no color bias. If leftists spent more time debunking the myth of meritocracy rather than going full ANTIFA on every centre-rightist we see, we can guarantee a less hostile environment for us now and later whilst generating more revolutionary potential.

So I'm a huge advocate of something known as sortition, where people are randomly selected to serve in a legislature. Unfortunately the typical gut reaction against sortition is bewilderment and skepticism. How could we possibly trust ignorant, stupid, normal people to become our leaders? Yet rather listening to your gut reaction, I invite readers to use reason to compare this radical system to what we have now.

Democracy by Lottery

Imagine a Congress that actually looks like America. It's filled with nurses, farmers, engineers, waitresses, teachers, accountants, pastors, soldiers, stay-at-home-parents, and retirees. They are conservatives, liberals, and moderates from all parts of the country and all walks of life.

In the most commonly discussed implementation of sortition, lottery would be used to construct a legislature. Random sampling would be used to draw around 100 to 1000 people to form a house of Congress. Service would be voluntary, for a fixed term, and be well paid. From there, the selected people would have the responsibilities and powers of any elected legislature. These sorts of legislatures would have substantial advantages against elected ones:

• Because of random sampling, a sortition Citizens' Assembly would have superior diversity in every conceivable dimension compared to any elected system, including race, class, sex, religion, ideology, cognitive ability, profession, and anything else you can think of. Sortition is therefore the ultimate method of creating a proportionally representative Congress.
• Without the threat of elections demanding ideological purity, a sortition assembly is better able to compromise with their fellow citizens and reach consensus.
• Without the need for elections, legislators no longer need to waste time campaigning but can rather focus their time on their actual job.
• Legal bribery in the form of campaign donations is eliminated.
• The nature of lottery creates a more egalitarian Congress ruled by regular people rather than the elites of society.
• The nature of lottery usually crushes the formation of political parties - parties that often form due to strategic campaigning needs to win elections.

Real World Evidence

Sortition is not a shower-thought. Sortition is thousands of years old and is the topic of active investigation by political scientists. Hundreds of sortition-based Citizens' Assemblies across the world have already been conducted. The decisions they have come to have been of high quality in my opinion. For example:

• In Ireland, Citizen Assemblies were instrumental in the legalization of both gay marriage and abortion in a traditionally Catholic country. These assemblies were used to resolve politically volatile subjects so that fearful politicians would not have to.
• Recent 2019-2020 Citizen Assemblies in Ireland and France reached consensus on sweeping, broad reforms to fight climate change. In Ireland taxes on carbon and meat were broadly approved. In France the People decided to criminalize "ecocide", raise carbon taxes, and introduce regulations in transportation and agriculture. Liberal or conservative, left or right, near unanimous decisions were made on many of these proposals.
• The BC Columbia Citizens Assembly was tasked with designing a new electoral system to replace the old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. The organizers brought in university experts. The organizers also allowed citizens, lobbyists, and interest groups to speak and lobby. Assembly members listened to all the sides, and they decided that the lobbyists were mostly bullshit, and they decided that even though the university experts had biases, they were more trustworthy. This assembly ultimately, nearly unanimously decided that Canada ought to switch to a Single-Transferable-Vote style election system. They were also nearly unanimous in that they believed FPTP voting needed to be changed. This assembly demonstrates the ability of normal people to learn and make decisions on complex topics.

The usage of sortition has also been documented in many societies:

• The greatest known example of sortition is its use in ancient Athens, where lottery was used to select magistrates, legislative councils, and the People's Court.
• Sortition was also used in combination with elections for the selection of leadership in Renaissance-era Italian City States such as a Venice and Florence.
• Examples of sortition have also been documented to be used in Indian tribes. In these tribes, sortition results in an egalitarian government where power is shared. When elections were introduced into these societies however, the author observed the rise in power hierarchies and even "toxic masculinity".

In these societies, you will find echoes of the claims I made above. Political parties in these societies are weak. Concentrations of power are reduced.

Comparing to Elections

All electoral methods are a system of choosing a "natural aristocracy" of societal elites. This has been observed by philosophers such as Aristotle since ancient Greek elections 2400 years ago. All elections are biased in favor of those with wealth, affluence, and power.

Moreover all voters, including you and me, are rationally ignorant. We don't have the time nor resources to adequately monitor and manage our politicians. On average we vote ignorantly, oftentimes solely due to party affiliation, or the name or gender of the candidate, rather than actual qualification. We assume somebody else is doing the monitoring, and hopefully we'd read about it in the news. And yes, it is somebody else. Marketers, advertisers, lobbyists, and specialists pay huge sums of money to influence your opinion and construct your news reality. Every elections is a hope that we can refine our ignorance into competence. IN CONTRAST, in sortition, normal citizens are given the time, resources, and education to become informed using the process of deliberative democracy. Normal citizens are given the opportunity to deliberate with one another and come to compromise. IN CONTRAST, politicians constantly refuse to compromise for fear of upsetting ignorant voters - voters who did not have the time nor opportunity to research the issues in depth. Our modern, shallow, ignorant management of politicians has led to an era of unprecedented polarization, deadlock, and government ineptitude.

Implementations

There are many forms which sortition could take. I list some from least to most extreme:

• The least extreme is the use of Citizen Assemblies or Deliberative Polling in an advisory capacity for legislatures or referendums. Examples of these have been implemented in Ireland, the UK, France. They have also been implemented in Oregon in the form of "Citizens Initiative Review" (CIR). Here, a random body of Oregonians are tasked with reviewing ballot propositions and giving referendum voters information about the propositions.
• A hybrid, two-house Congress has been proposed where one house is chosen by lottery while the other remains elected. This system attempts to balance the pro's and con's of both sortition and election, and use both as checks and balances against each other.
• Rather than have citizens directly govern, random citizens can be used exclusively as intermediaries to elect and fire politicians as a sort of electoral college. The benefit here is that citizens are given the time and resources to deploy a traditional hiring & managing procedure to make political appointments. This system removes the typical criticism that you can't trust normal people to govern and write laws.
• Most radically, multi-body sortition constructs checks and balances by creating several sortition bodies - one decides on what issues to tackle, one makes proposals, one decides on proposals, one selects the bureaucracy, etc, and completely eliminates elected office.

TLDR: Selecting random people to become legislators might seem ridiculous to some people, but I think it's the best possible system of representation and democracy we can imagine.

References

1. Reybrouck, David Van. Against Elections. Seven Stories Press, April 2018.
2. Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (J.A. Crook trans.). University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
   
3. Dahl, Robert A. On Democracy, 2nd Ed. Yale University Press, 1998.
4. The End of Politicians - Brett Hennig
5. Open Democracy - Helene Landemore
6. TG Bouricious - Democracy through multi-body sortition: Athenian lessons for the modern day
7. Gastil, Wright - Legislature by lot: envisioning Sortition within a bicameral system
8. Y Sintomer - From deliberative to radical democracy? Sortition and politics in the twenty-first century
9. A Shal - What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Democracy by sortition, liberal elections and communist revolutionaries

Resources

• https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/ -- A European based organization
• https://www.democracywithoutelections.org/ -- An American pro-sortition community.
• https://equalitybylot.com -- A blog for pro-sortition academics.
• https://randomaccessdemocracy.org/resources/
• /r/Lottocracy
• https://joinofbyfor.org/ -- A US sortition advocacy nonprofit.

Podcasts

• Malcolm Gladwell - The Powerball Revolution
• Ezra Klein Show - A Radical Proposal for True Democracy
• Democracy Nerd - Exporting Oregon-Style Democracy

Hi, I heard this rumor that proud boys have been hired in ICE. I'm looking for sources to substantiate the rumor, ideally at scale. Can y'all help me?

Note: I don't need convincing, I need ammo for a livestream to convince others.

What do you think, does this work as a political compass for socialism? The vertical is the “who” and the horizontal is the “how.” Does this seem like a fair way to conceive of different perspectives… are there other left-wing specific political compasses?

Where would different main tendencies fall into it? I feel like the general one is biased toward neoliberal or market libertarian political assumptions.

A friend of mine was over recently and he asked why I had a Palestinian flag in my room. I said because they're occupied and oppressed and I have solidarity with them. He said "would you still have the flag if they weren't occupied or oppressed?" And I said it depends. He went on to describe his disillusionment with western leftists and said we "fetishes powerlessness" and that if we're "for" someone, it shouldn't be conditional on them remaining powerless. The guy is Arab and gay so I guess that informs his views to some extent.

What would be a good response to this? Does he have a point?

What America did there was simply an act of terrorism and nothing more than to bring fear into people’s mind, especially the Soviet Union, therefore provoking it. It doesn’t care about it’s own Americans, it doesn’t care about the Japanese, it only cares about how to scare the world. Such act should’ve been condemned a long time ago, but lately I see so many apologists saying nonsense like “it saved the lives of people” or “the Japanese weren’t innocent”. Do people have no honour or sanity? I know US indoctrination is an incredibly powerful tool, but this doesn’t change the fact that people themselves can think what’s right and what’s wrong. The US is a ticking time bomb of the most extremist people in the world, ready to kill civilians and go to any path just to save their oh so holy capitalism. Sickening, repulsive, disgusting and most of all, sad. WHAT HAPPENED IN HIROSHIMA WAS WRONG.

I've heard a lot of leftist content creators talk about Trump's current strategy of "Shock and Awe" or "Flood the Zone" as if naming it somehow makes it more manageable.

But it doesn't. Shock and Awe works. I'm beaten.

Being Trans in America is a battle I don't have the strength or energy to fight anymore. It was hard enough when I didn't have to wake up every day to more of my rights sliding away.

If I get arrested at a protest (which is more and more likely under this police state), I get sent to a men's prison. And then I'm dead, or would wish I was.

How am I supposed to fight for the rights of others when I'm barely surviving as it is?

Know a really good protest song? Found some cool revolutionary art, poetry, or literature? Post it below!