this was posted before, it's a 5000 person survey by a non-profit for "finding the intersection of religion in society for clergy and the public" (hence the weird religious breakdown), which they got by just emailing people on a USPS list with a few hundred self-selected opt-ins on top. Which also inherently excludes a bunch of people, like those who've moved a lot or recently, any and all homeless, lumpenized people and people in distant or ad-hoc or delapidated communities with vague USPS lines and addresses, those who don't have internet access, those in prisons, and those who don't check their email, and those who wouldn't be arsed with these kinds of surveys by religion-in-politics non-profits, and countless other groups. Inherently. The study also has no breakdowns for class or income, if they live in rural, urban, or suburban environs, or even generation breakdowns for most of the questions including this one (but does for some others, weirdly); and the 18-29 age group is vanishingly small compared to the others; and just a bunch of god awful things. Which is shocking to be taken at face value, this trash 5000 person "christian nationalism" survey as "percent of Americans" like the survey says. And then you get such god awful trash takes like in this thread of "if only I'd organized harder" absolutely anti-marxist nonsense, nihilist trash.
it literally isn't a good sample size, especially for their selection process in the breakdown of a place as diverse and varied in peoples and living conditions and environments like the US and its 350 million people. It's a religious-focused NGO for "christian nationalism in politics", has vanishingly few young people, does terrible breakdowns in the full report and tells us nothing about class or income, self-selects for those who are on consistent addresses in USPS lines with internet access who would be arsed to do these surveys (as well as has hundreds of self-selected opt-ins), the report is trash by a non-profit for "finding the intersection of religion and politics for clergy and the public"
which is always funny because United Russia exists as it does from its origins in the turn of the century as basically a big tent "quick everyone get in here so we can be bigger than the communists and keep them from winning legislative and voting-bloc majorities" party (which the communists would have won the presidency too in the 1996 post-fall elections over Yeltsin but Yanks To The Rescue!
#JustLeopoldIIThings
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society xxxv places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
(...) I have now to prove that society in ~~England~~ [Canada] daily and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder, I shall have proved, when I cite official documents, reports of Parliament and of the Government, in substantiation of my charge. That a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and is so ill-provided with the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot be healthy and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident.
^link^
“We are heartbroken and our deepest thoughts are with our associate and their family. We extend our sincerest condolences to those who were closest to them,” the Walmart spokesperson said. “We’re also supporting our associates during this incredibly difficult time and have provided access to 24/7 virtual care and will provide on-site support, including grief counselling.”
Yeah we see how much you give a shit about your AsSoCiAtEs. Yeah I'm sure this is so difficult for you, corporate whitewash mouthpiece.
guy has no political acumen to make the austerity, theft, and plundering less shameless. guy thinks US is gonna protect him from the pitchfork mob while he's doing everything to ensure the cops and military open the gates to his compound for them; but he's gonna be too much of an awkward political liability for that, Trump or whoever's just gonna let the phone ring as he gets ripped to shreds by the masses.
OP @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net it's Pridnestrovie, not 'Transnistria.' 'Transnistria' is what the imperialist and neo-colonials in "the west" call it, to refuse the status of the country because it just means "[the Moldovan territory] past the Dneister (river)," as well as to treat it as simply a historical legacy, not of the USSR, but of its previous administrators: the Nazis.
Pridnestrovians don't want to be called that, consider it a grave insult actually, because it's literally the name the Romanian and German Nazis used for their occupation government when they carried out the Holocaust there (Transnistria Governorate). Pridnestrovie was deeply impacted and affected by the Holocaust, and the Nazi-occupied administrative territory of the "Transnistria Governorate" served as a junction point where Jews from surrounding areas were deported to in 'processing' for enslavement or liquidation or later transfer elsewhere.
It is a point of deep national consciousness, this experience, and of national pride that they did as much as they did to resist Nazism and to shield Jews in the territory ^[^^sci-hub^ ^link^^]^; an uncommon phenomenon in most of Europe which saw huge collaborations and pogroms against Jews.
They by and large do not connect with the legacy of their previous occupiers who lay claim to them. During Catastroika and fashnost leading to the breakdown of the USSR, which caused the vicious resurgence of right wing nationalism, there grew large radical movements of Moldavian and "Greater Romania" fascists, who began demanding things such as the removal of all languages but Moldovan/Romanian, change to latin script, and expulsion of Slavs from the country and eventually in 1990 acquired power in the central government of the Moldavian SSR and started to implement their policies. It is in this environment that the Pridnestrovians had organized ad-hoc independence referendums, which were met with violent resistance by these fascist groups (just as we saw a much more drawn-out version of in the DNR/LNR in Ukraine) and declared independence
because they feared an independent Moldova led by these people would not only directly abuse them as they had already begun to, but also align and possibly even unite with the core country of their previous occupiers and exterminationists in Romania. Pizzachev annulled their independence but they in practicality maintained it and after the failure of the August coup in 1991 they declared independence in secession from the USSR as well as Moldova. They even fought a 2 year long low-intensity war from 1990-1992 to maintain their independence (and in which Ukrainian Nazi volunteers fought against Moldova, but for trying to annex Pridnestrovie into Ukraine) resulting in the death of over a thousand people.
And so they do not wish to be called anything but Pridnestrovie, or the full name Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.
Fanon right again
Many such cases. I've said it many times and will never stop, The Wretched of the Earth ^(pdf^ ^DL^ ^link)^ is fundamental required reading for anyone in a colonialist or colonized country (or both, in the case of settler-colonies). It is absolutely critical for a material understanding, and Fanon being a professional doctor and psychologist as well as a Marxist gives incredibly valuable foundational insights to not only a dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the material conditions, relations, and struggles in and against colonialism, but also of the superstructural political, social, cultural, and psychological outcroppings from the colonial relation and their mutual interpenetration and cyclical reinforcement.
It is also the direct theoretical lineage of so many liberation struggles which came after, including in the US with the BPP and BLA; and so it is quite literally necessary, in general and in particular in the places which inherited the legacy of those Fanonist struggles, for one to engage with in order to not be speaking nonsense about colonialism and the colonial relations which exist, and the contradictions and struggles therein. Fanon is no lesser than what Malcolm X was to the heart of the struggle and its history and theoretical body of work.
From there the next step is reading the criticism and self-criticism and analytical adaptations from the experiences and lessons of those struggles (Huey Newton, George Jackson, Maroon Shoatz, and newer generations such as Kevin Rashid Johnson), which are also necessary because their knowledge derives from practice and its lessons better than anyone who has not this experience. As Mao wrote in On Practice:
Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man's knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by "failure is the mother of success" and "a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit". The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, "Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality." The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice. The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice. Only social practice can be the criterion of truth. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.
If one could hypothetically only read one thing about colonialism, the Wretched of the Earth would be firmly at the top of the list I give them. There is also Orientalism by Edward Said which is too invaluable for those in "the west", but is more of a broad-focused general deconstruction of the historical notions of "the west" and "the east" and such politically-charged and inherently violent concepts as "western values" (as opposed to the values of these 'others') which Fanon touches on in its specific relations and expressions in colonialism, but Said does more broadly in its superstructure and relation to its base in the roots from whence it arose and was constructed out of the dialectical relationships of the history of europe, and of imperialism and colonialism, etc. It is more of a deconstruction through historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the broader history and concepts in and out-of-from "orientalism" than acting as a direct foundational analysis of and for the specific struggles which have been carried out as the Wretched of the Earth has.
Reminds me of that Frankie Boyle bit
American foreign policy is horrendous 'cause not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later, and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad~ boo hoo~
Americans making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch.
Colonel Ehsan Daqsa, 41, was killed after his tank and another tank were hit by explosive devices during military operations in Jabalia refugee camp
I feel like I've seen this one. quite a few times, even! Let me guess: literally no infantry were around protecting the armor at all, and so some guy in flipflops was able climb out of a hole dug into the ground, run up, put a 
on it, and then jump back into the hole in the ground, while taking no fire in doing so.
How close was I?
That comment pissed me off, the whole trend of doomerist opportunism too. this site is so often just a black hole that no one is interested in fighting against and I'm fucking myself up wasting my time trying in the tide of it. It's an active negation of revolutionary consciousness in an environment which needs it cultivated and brought into the real material world. So many people seem near universally more interested in uncritical and angry insular bias-spirals and opportunist defeatism, opportunist self-confirmation of 'nothing to be done' and 'might as well flee' (which shows a petty-bourgeois affordance), and the worst: opportunism-masquerading-as-principle then shit out onto others in a misery-loves-company kind of way, than anything else constructive. Just straight-line-segment-from-the-curve understandings, as fuel for undialectical projections of doomsaying, so do-nothing opportunists can say "SEE?!?!?!" at whatever they think gives them the opportunity and get applause from other do-nothings, which facilitates the furthering the comparative growth of reaction more than the reactionaries are capable of facilitating themselves than if people were interested in constructive active forward-moving analysis of things.
Socialists in the real world (which are exponentially growing in number every month and have been for almost a decade) I've worked with don't talk like people here, by and large engage more healthily about problems in society, and are more interested in engaging critically along lines of where the problems are and aren't in given things, and working the angles to separate them along dividing lines. This site is 75+% online ultra-leftism wearing the mask of something else. There are people who have been being tortured in US prisons for decades for their activism who have more revolutionary spirit, optimism, fluidity, criticality, and desire for and KNOWLEDGE OF whole-inclusive revolutionary change, and active political consciousness and preparedness to fight by it than the metaphysical one-sided self-satisfied petty-bourgeois-oriented shit I see here.
"iF oNlY i HaD oRgAniZeD mOrE~" People who say this shit are do-nothings. People who support and further it are do-nothings, thinking the people who turned out in the Floyd uprisings, the ever-growing militant labor and tenant movements, and even students occupying colleges at the cost of their petty bourgeois futures over Palestine (A THING WHICH DOESN'T DIRECTLY EFFECT THEM, compared to Vietnam protests where they were being DRAFTED
a MARK OF ELEVATED CONSCIOUSNESS) are nothing compared to these 5000 home-owners (or otherwise long-term tenants) who decide to partake in a shitty religious email survey? Because, and not just from this, that's what I get and what I hear, more than I get or hear anything else on this site. I wonder, where have these people been this past 10 years, if they have not been on the street seeing what I've seen in just my small part of it? They seem to be seeing less than comrades writing from inside prison walls somehow.
Yes the US, particularly in its bourgeois and petty bourgeois, is largely reactionary, we know this (without this trash 'American Academy of Religion' member survey which should be thrown in the trash); particularly in the ongoing historical inheritance of colonial relations, and that this is an avenue where false-consciousness gets pushed when alternatives are not posited and constructed due to these historical relations and its inherited contradictions. But Christ. I've seen more things and comments on this site, whose only purpose and only constructed framing is to uncritically reinforce insular and doomsaying biases as dead-end metaphysical 'truths', to spiral people into do-nothing emptiness and defeatism before any battle has even been fought by ANY of the people saying these things; than I've seen constructive forward-moving dialectical considerations. I've seen more attempts by do-nothings to self-indulgently self-satisfyingly panic-monger and doomsay about their imagined reality "out there" where they do not stand or in some dreamed-up future, to inflame destructive and opportunist impulses in people to make more do-nothings (or worse), than positive construction toward anything
or even serious Marxist criticality toward circumstances or material put forward, as long as it confirms OPPORTUNIST, ULTRA-LEFT BIASES and helps people feel like their do-nothingism is somehow 'principled analysis' and they can feel self-satisfied in saying so. Which is effectively reactionary, discouraging socialists of the possibility and reality of change being built, and passing it off as 'principled analysis' based on one's own shallow and actively-sought bias-confirmation as a metaphysical truth, rather than developing working and critical dialectical consideration in one's analysis of material circumstances and events, their internal components, and relations to other circumstances and events as a whole living reality and unfolding history in which we are all partaking in in the ways we do.
Log off and join an org