zifnab25 [he/him, any]

If voting isn’t enough (I didn’t think it is) then do more. Go knock on doors for the candidate that you like. There are a million ways to participate in democracy.

Love to door knock for Heinrich Himmler.

These “both choices bad. Better to not vote” people really don’t make any kind of sense to me.

Hey, listen. I vote every year. This year, 90% of my ballot is going to be blank, because so many of the candidates are absolutely abhorrent. But when I am presented with the Himmler / Hitler choice, I will be firmly bubbling in © None of the Above. I might even knock a few doors and tell my neighbors about how great © None of the Above would be. If I could figure out where to send my money, I could even see myself donating.

Image being unhealthy and saying “it’s going to take more than a 20 minute walk once a week to get in shape. Better not even do that then cuz what would be the point?”

Its funny, because I’m picturing you trying to recover from a broken leg with that mentality.

Diploma mills gonna mill diplomas

Republicans. Would. Be. Worse.

We will be more like China

We won’t be like China. We’ll be more insulated and divorced from Chinese media, culture, and conversation.

That’s the stated end goal. Bringing up sharp walls between nationalities in order to control the flow of information between people.

If we keep TikTok open, we risk exposing American young people to Chinese norms, ideals, and social standards. We might even be exposed directly to Chinese mass media (ie, propaganda).

This is a real security risk, as it raises a possibility that younger Americans won’t accept American mass media at face value.

Nintendo gets to do this (the Yuzu shit) because so many other developers have stopped making anything except slot machines.

Behold, the unlimited power of a fully nationalized war time economy.

No Poor Muslims Allowed

More than 122 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war.

America deserves a President Kamala Harris

I mean, the joke is going to be in the enforcement, as a battalion of Australia’s largest and roundest uniformed fascist shitheads march through the streets breaking windows and swinging at the heads of anyone sporting a Palestinian flag.

You’re going to have folks with swastika face tattoos explaining why these anti-Zionist activists just need to obey the law.

Ah shit. Have the Tamil Tigers entered the chat?

M.I.A. is going to have to make a new music video about this one.

Certainly possible that elements were AI generated. However, this image feels like it had someone putting polish on it. The symmetry - both in the setting and in the focal point of the image - plus the sharper color contrast particularly between the red of Mt. Doom and the blue of the mountains and the way that you get a real sense of light coming directly from the volcano and radiating out into the rest of the image. Someone definitely had their hands on this in a material way, even if it was just moving clip-art onto a canvas and tweaking the colors a bit.

Politics are inherently inseparable from economics.

That doesn’t get you from “Democratic Socialism” to “Imperialism”, as evidenced by your own linked article.

They absolutely align with the US because of their political organization.

Per your own linked article, they remained neutral even after the end of WW2 and sympathized more with the Non-Aligned states than either of the two Superpowers.

Nowhere have I argued that socialist structures benefit from imperialism.

Alright, asshole. I think we’re done.

I’m not talking about things Nordic countries are producing. I’m talking about the basic necessities of life Nordic countries import that are produced by effective slave labour using resources extracted from the global south.

This has absolutely dick-all to do with their political configuration. It is a consequence of supply and trade routes wholly outside their command. Social Democracy as an organizing principle functions to create and administer domestic civil services and is, if anything, undermined by the process of outsourcing capital and labor demand. The quippy “Nords Bad Because Social Democracy” mischaracterized milquetoast liberalism on the periphery as the kind of expansionist imperialism that Scandinavian states have neither the capacity nor the interest in mustering.

These countries piggy back on US imperialism

Because of their geographic position and ethnic sympathies, not because of their political organization. Were Sweden positioned off the coast of West Africa or deep within the Amazon, it would have a completely different set of social relations. Bolivians and Senegalese socialists do not enjoy parallel social relations, despite desiring much the same in terms of housing, health care, education, and transportation as their Baltic peers.

Scandinavian companies get to plunder the global south along with the rest of the west, Scandinavians enjoy commodities extracted from the global south by the empire.

A select group of Scandinavian business interests get a minority stake in the imperial projects of wealthier and more well-armed western nations, on the condition that they police and corral their native populations. The end result is a deteriorating public sector in Scandinavian states, as the profits of imperialism are plowed into neoliberal privatization at home. The benefits of social democracy are not defended by imperialism but clawed back. The institutions of social democracy are not girded but undermined.

Imperial tendency is adversarial to social democratic institutions and policies, as the profits go not to improved standards of living but greater degrees of surveillance, incarceration, coercion, and media-instigated hysteria.

That’s the wages of empire. Not cheaper commodities and greater social comforts but grander delusions and more entrenched phobias.

The case of Sweden shows that the democracies are curtailed by the domestic capitalists https://jacobin.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo

The Swedish economy got off to a flying start after the end of World War II, a conflict in which Sweden had remained neutral. Sweden benefited from the three-decade-long postwar economic boom, the so-called Trente Glorieuses. As the historian Eric Hobsbawn pointed out, it is perfectly justifiable to characterize the quarter-century between 1950 and 1975 as the period during “which the most dramatic, the fastest, and the most wide-reaching revolution in people’s everyday lives” took place. There was a sort of symbiosis between the capitalists’ demand for mass production and the people’s demand for mass democracy. Fordist welfare societies were created on the foundation of economic growth.

The case in Sweden showed the bounty of neutrality in the wake of a continent-wide obliteration of domestic capital.

What’s more…

Sweden was strongly affected by the radicalization of the 1960s. As in most other countries, it began with youth solidarity with the Third World. Swedish opposition to the Vietnam war was broad and influential. Swedish students joined others in demonstrations and in occupations. This new left contributed to pushing socialism further up on the agenda.

This would posit a distinctly contrary view to what you’re stating above. Far from sympathizing and allying with imperialist states, the Swedes continued their commitment to the non-aligned movement and to independent sovereignty both for themselves and for their Third World peers.

In 1976, the social democrats lost control of the government. This was not — as many in Sweden claim today — because welfare had become too extensive or taxes too high. On the contrary: at the time, no party challenged the solidaristic welfare state, and the new bourgeois government continued to raise taxes. Social democracy’s loss might have been the result of a protest vote against a party that, after ruling for 44 years, had become overly autocratic. (The most important reason for the 1976 electoral loss, however, was the social democrats’ support for an expansion of Swedish nuclear power. This brought it into conflict with the radical environmentalist movement.) By the time the party regained control over the government in 1982, its leaders had accepted the basic principles of neoliberal politics.

Since then, the welfare state had been successively weakened. Increasingly large parts of the public sector have been privatized. The pension system has been fundamentally revised, and today Sweden has growing numbers of poor pensioners. Large sections of the public-owned housing stock have been sold. Today, Sweden is among those European countries whose economic and social divides are increasing most rapidly. This is most notable in increased segregation within the educational sector, which has become increasingly privatized. Bourgeois governments have led the way in this development, but social democrats have accepted the reforms afterward. They have not attempted to launch alternative political platforms.

So, far from the narrative of imperialist calf-fattening, we’re entering the 80s (a period of consumerist glut) and social democrats are falling out thanks to the conflict between public demand for cheap energy and local environmental activism. They’re embracing neoliberal policies not out of hunger for foreign imports but due to a sag in the post-war boom.

At the same time, despite the political consensus among the leaderships of the different parties, this development is deeply unpopular among Swedish citizens; discontent extends deep within the bourgeois parties’ own core troops. A large majority of the population still supports a commonly owned public sector and is prepared to pay the taxes necessary to finance it. This fact comes as confirmation that the solidaristic welfare state of the 1970s represented a series of collective conquests by broad layers of the Swedish people.

When people in the rest of the world point to Sweden as a prototype, it is these conquests they mean — not the increasingly hollow welfare state that has survived to today.

These are not conquests of foreign territory but conquests within the Swedish economy of Swedish residents in opposition to foreign investors and military powers.

The Swedes yearn not for their own foreign feudal lands but for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The reality is that it’s both.

That is not the reality, unless you’re going to explain how public education and biotech are extractionary. And if that’s your game, you’re going to have to explain Cuba.

That’s just a false narrative.

The US system of empire is failing, from the industrial bedrock of the Chinese cities to the farmlands of Ukraine to the mountains of Bolivia. Maybe Blinken (or the next guy) will turn things around, but we’ve been losing traction since the end of the Bush Era pretty much globally.

Scandinavian states participate in the plunder

The Scandinavian state services responsible for education, health care, and transportation had no discernible role in the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, the bulk fabrication of arms and armor in Ukraine, the string of failed coups in Latin America, or the ongoing occupation of Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the Mid-Atlantic. They weren’t even NATO members until very recently.

This as dick-all to do with democratic socialism and singling these countries out as responsible fully whitewashes the conflict.

the benefits however are never permanent and end up being rolled back in times of regular capitalist crises

The benefits are only rolled back when the democracies themselves are curtailed, as the states are bombarded with fascist propaganda via foreign media. A compelling argument for a Scandinavian Firewall, but a piss poor criticism of the democratic institutions themselves.

Social democracy isn’t part of any transition, it’s a mechanism that props up current capitalist relations.

Capital relations are degraded through the imposition of social democratic reforms. And as residents rely on these reforms to sustain themselves, they become intractable. Only by unleashing fascist media, shock doctrine economics, and foreign coercion on a country do you curb the transitionary process. That’s exactly what western political strategy has been for the last 60 years.

Not sure what that’s referring to even.

What nascent leftists and left-liberals find appealing about the Scandinavian states are the high quality low cost public services.

The difference is that there were stronger social safety nets erected at the peak

Which were rooted in domestic industry and professional services, not extractionary practices targeting populations abroad. The erosion of these social safety nets has matched the erosion of labor unions, socialist organization, and left-wing party activity within the Scandinavian states.

the west has continued to dominate the global south

Western state control of the Global South has eroded with the outsourcing of US domestic industry abroad - particularly in the wake of the 1980s, when industry transplanted itself to the South Pacific. Latin American states are no longer dominated by western military juntas. African states are increasingly free of colonial and apartheidist regimes. South Pacific states are operating at parity with their western peers, rather than as occupied subordinates.

But even outside of this fact, the Scandinavian states are nearly non-existent in western foreign policy. Finland only just joined NATO, for instance. And only thanks to a collapse in European-Russian foreign policy relations, which I’d count as a mark against imperial domination rather than one in its favor.

USSR was not under these restrictions and did not behave in the way you suggest

The US actively embargoed Soviet States starting with the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1951. These sanctions continued into the 1990s and were slowly repealed under Clinton and then Bush in exchange for concessions by the United Russia government of Yeltsin and then Putin. What trade did occur was not inhibited by any some moral compunction of Soviet leaders. Exxon did business with the Soviets well into the 1980s, for instance.

USSR was able to have positive mutually beneficial relations with their partners as opposed to exploitative ones

That’s simply not true. The USSR had strategic partnerships with a host of left-leaning governments. But these were driven by tactical considerations, not ethical ones. The Soviets were happy enough to trade with the Israelis all through the Cold War period and with both England and France for most of its history. Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet split persisted for decades despite the mutual benefit a Russia/China alliance would have had both for the region and for international communism broadly.

Soviets would routinely aid domestic revolutionary forces against colonial governments if it suited their needs, but were happy enough to back Syrian military dictators and Romanian dipshit demagogues entirely out of Realpolitik.

It’s not possible to have any meaningful democracy when the means of production are owned privately.

Social democracy creates public institutions that control the means of production within their fields. But the public institutions tend to be confined to education, health care, transport and other civil services. They don’t extend out to the industrial wing of the economy.

So if you want meaningful democracy, you’re going to be doing some social democracy at some point in your transition. Freaking out at people who organize towards publicly financed colleges and hospitals and calling them evil imperialists will do nothing to advance the cause of public ownership in the industrial sector.

the short term overall standard of living is raised

But we’re no longer in the short term. Scandinavian social democracy has been ongoing since the 60s. That’s three generations worth of living standards which have largely leveled off and even begun to decline relative to their Eastern peers as neoliberal trade chews into proletariat standards of living. Scandinavian states were explicitly neutral during the Cold War and avoided the imperialist impulses of their southern peers. THIS is the windfall they reaped into the end of the 20th century.

However, people in the west enjoyed a far higher standard of living than people in the countries the west has been subjugating

This has been less and less true since the 90s, as the western states become heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports. It is the Middle Eastern bloc that’s seen all the real material benefits of imperial subjugation. Dubai and Riyahd and Amman and even Tehran have seen enormous windfalls. Folks in London and Boston and Berlin have not. Standards of living in Scandinavian states are slipping and poverty is rising (abet marginally).

If you look at the supply chains for practically any goods, such as cell phones, you’ll see that most of the resources needed to produce these goods are extracted in places like Africa using slave labor.

Scandinavian social democracy has nothing to do with American / East Asian materials extraction patterns. What’s more, as Chinese business interests take over traditionally western owned-and-operated enterprises along the African coastline, quality of life is improving. We saw this first in South Africa, as it joined the BRICS block and pivoted away from reliance exclusively on US/UK monetary policy. But we’re seeing it in Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar, and the DRC as well.

Should we laud Scandinavians because their purchase of electronics is finally becoming a boon for African miners? Should we laud democratic socialism for this transition? Of course not. Neither should we defame it for the atrocities committed by American, English, French, and Spanish post-colonial corporate thugs. No more than we should blame a shopper at an American grocery store for the crimes committed by the United Fruit Company.

I’m talking about how Cuba behaves as a nation and we can also look at how USSR behaved.

Cuba’s trade practices are strictly regulated by the American Navy and Coast Guard. Meanwhile, their retail markets and agricultural/biotech exports are what would inevitably draw in the exact same criminally sourced consumer goods. This isn’t a problem of Cuban (or Nordic) social democracy. It is a problem of foreign monopolistic exporters in occupied regions of the global south. And the Scandinavians, at least, lack a meaningful contribution to that project. The citations you link to are token at best. Akin to blaming Poland for the invasion of Iraq in '03.

USSR did not subjugate other nations the way the west does, and when it collapsed the standard of living in places like Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea also collapsed because they had a mutually beneficial relationship with USSR.

At which point they had to reorganize and reestablish new trade ties in order to rebuild their living standards. But this had to do with access to developed industrial capital, not the exploitation of labor through imperial expansion.

Democratic Socialism is just a the sheep’s clothing of imperialism.

Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.