Gabriel Rockhill » Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime

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I don’t claim to be merely anti-oligarchy; I’m socialist. And I don’t mean progressive liberal like AOC was or Sanders is, I mean actually socialist.

Anyway, maybe the strike really would have forced you to shutter, or maybe you could have gotten the PPP loans to limp through it. Or maybe in response to the strike, Congress could or would have increased the PPP loans to employers and/or COVID relief funds to families. We’ll never really know.

How to say you’re a scab without saying you’re a scab: Won’t somebody please think of the economy?! And what happened soon after Congress defanged workers’ safety concerns? The East Palestine derailment catastrophe.

Citations Needed podcast:

• Jul. 2023: As UPS Strike “Looms,” Media Frames Working-Class Revolt as “Threat” to “The Economy”
• Nov. 2023: How Media’s Use of ‘The Economy’ Flattens Class Conflict

AOC was never anything but a “progressive” liberal, and she completely sold out not long after getting into office. Have we already forgotten that she voted to crush a worker strike and voted against raising minimum wage? She’s a scab and a career politician working for the wealthy donor class.

• Kshama Sawant, Dec. 2022: Rail Workers Betrayed By Biden & The “Squad”
• Freddie deBoer, Jul. 2023: AOC Is Just a Regular Old Democrat Now

Please stop harassing this person so I don’t have to ban you. Plenty of us find this SovCit-level nonsense annoying, but the thing to do is block them, not continually harass them.

Relatedly, we get a lot of reports against you, which is a pain in our asses. Please make our jobs easier and work on your bedside manner.

The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

When the United States entered WWII, the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, bemoaned that his country was fighting the wrong enemy. The Nazis, as he explained, were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the true enemy was godless communism and its resolute anti-capitalism. After all, the U.S. had, only some 20 years prior, been part of a massive military intervention in the U.S.S.R., when fourteen capitalist countries sought—in the words of Winston Churchill—to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib.” Dulles understood, like many of his colleagues in the U.S. government, that what would later become known as the Cold War was actually the old war, as Michael Parenti has convincingly argued: the one they had been fighting against communism since its inception.

All you’re doing is repeating your assertion without adding anything, and the assertion you’re repeating is the the one you received from a lifetime of Western capitalist Cold War propaganda, and I don’t think it’s ever occurred to you to question it.

When he resigns, loses an election, or dies, obviously.

I know it’s hard for people who live in capitalist bourgeois democracies to imagine that a president could sustain popularity over a long period of time. They’re used to getting fucked over, election cycle after election cycle, because their governments don’t work for the majority, they work for the capitalist class. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

Xi keeps getting elected because people keep liking the results.

• Most in China Call Their Nation A Democracy, Most in U.S. Say America Isn’t
• Long-term survey reveals Chinese government satisfaction
• Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says [UN] Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
• China’s Energy Use Per Person Surpasses Europe’s for First Time
• At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low
• China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
• Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States [for China]

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You are part of why people don’t like .ml

Speak for yourself, and you know where the exit is.

Believing Western capitalist Cold War propaganda that China is a dictatorship is cringe.

The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer may claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).

1. Wikipedia isn’t a citation.
2. What does that random dude have to do with anything?

• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR): TikTok Law Is an Attempt to Censor, Not a Warning to Big Tech (Emphasis original)

  [NYT’s Cecilia] Kang’s thesis [link] was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)

  If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”

  Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.

• CNN, 2022: TikTok moves US users’ data to Oracle servers to address security concerns
• US private equity firms own more of TikTok than anyone. WSJ: What Is TikTok Worth? Some Say $20 Billion, Others Say $100 Billion. The CEO is Singaporean, Shou Zi Chew, and the VP is American, Michael Beckerman.
• [Mitt] Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza

  “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” said Romney. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

• Paris Marx: The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power The platform isn’t a national security threat, but a challenge to Silicon Valley’s dominance

I point none of this out to defend TikTok as some beacon of hope: it’s just another corporate social media platform. I don’t have a TikTok account and don’t use it.

She’s got an excuse for everything. They’re shit excuses to historical materialists, but they’re good enough for corporate social media platforms. She should write Langley’s Liberal International Order hasbara handbook.

Scratch an Global North liberal and an imperialist bleeds.

This person is very smug about her capitalist realism, probably because she’s convinced that she personally benefits from it and wants to maintain it, while simultaneously crying liberal crocodile tears about the damage it does.

There are no “other sides” to capitalism than the oligarchy and their imperialist projects that you say you have never liked.

The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

That is true for private property, meaning land for resource extraction and for situating factories & offices, not for personal property, meaning homes to live in.

Why do insist on being confidently incorrect over and over?

It seems you’re going way out of your way to aggressively not understand how imperialism and neocolonialism work, nor compradors’ role in it.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method
• https://michael-hudson.com/2021/10/3rd-edition-super-imperialism/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
• https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-against-empire

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At this point I think your ignorance is intentional. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a person to understand something when their self-interest prevents them from understanding it.