First he purged rightist employees (even his friends) working at Current Affairs to consolidate an editorial line under his leadership, now he reposts in support of Dengist developmentalism.
The libertarian socialist to Leninist pipeline is real.
It's just so obvious. I don't get how people don't understand: a strong, publicly funded, centralized authority is the most effective way to fund and scale infrastructure.
Privitization is wasteful and fragmented. Infrastructure should not be a for-profit enterprise. The state is the only logical solution for public works like this.
The US experienced this with the highway system - which is the US equivalent of the Chinese high speed rail network in terms of scale for the US at the time. Over 78,000 kilometers in 35 years, with major routes completed much earlier. Massive government spending (taxes & bonds) directed toward a publicly beneficial infrastructure project completed in record time. It has been highly successful despite efforts to privatize the construction of for-profit toll roads and privitizing the maintenance of the highway system, causing serious degradation of many of the roads and bridges.
i have long found the fancy lad of socialism to be a much more consistent and reasonable voice than most other purportedly leftist outlets like jacobin.
He’s got bad takes, but he does have a knack for presenting socialism in a way that’s palatable to baby leftists/recently ex-liberals.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/04/attempting-to-understand-north-korea
8 years ago he was calling DPRK red fascist authoritarians. Maybe he has improved since then, many of us have, but don't pretend he's been reasonable or consistent. That's revisionist history, he still hosts this article on his website despite 'wrestling control from the rightist friends' or whatever bullshit made up about palace intrigue at the petty bourgeois revisionist substack. He's a chauvinist and social fascist. None of these people are principled communists, they are social democrat 'left libertarian' lesser-evil chomskyites. He's tailing Dengism because anybody with eyes can see China is better than the USA, it's becoming irrefutable. He's an opportunist tailing a revisionist lmao.
He's a chauvinist and social fascist.
If we want it to mean anything, we have to stop using "social fascist" so loosely. It means someone who supports social-ish policies in the imperial core while supporting fascism in the periphery. Whatever else you think of the guy, he isn't that:
He's far from Parenti when discussing the merits of AES states, but he's also far from supporting basically any part of U.S. foreign policy.
The entire US is also basically at zero for HSR.
High-speed rail in the United States
The New York Times and Al Jazeera [do] not consider the United States to have any high-speed rail.
There are a few snippets on the page that are like this.
Amtrak's Acela, operating between Washington, DC and Boston, MA, is North America's fastest high-speed rail service, reaching 150–160 mph (240–260 km/h) on a total of 50 miles (80 km) of track along the Northeast Corridor. Between Washington, DC and New York City, the Acela operates at an average speed of 82 mph (132 km/h). NextGen Acela reaches top speeds of 160 mph (255 km/h) on 35 miles (56 km) of its 457-mile (735 km) route.
By comparison, the Shinkansen has a regular operating speed of 200 mph/322 kmh
And it's more than 60 years old.
The first line, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, opened shortly before the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, the 552.6-kilometre (343.4 mi) route connects Tōkyō, Yokohama, Nagoya, and Ōsaka, the four largest cities in Japan.
I'd love to know typical 1960s and 1970s and 1980s predictions about when the US would have ~500 km of HSR. Could the US will get there by '64? 2164 I mean. I think I'm being way too optimistic for Hexbear.
Morocco has more HSR than the entire US. It took them 6 years to build 220 miles of track (2012-2018). CA HSR construction began in 2015 and not a single sleeper has been laid, to say nothing of track.
If California were to exist billions of years from now - when the sun goes ~~nova~~ red giant - the democrats will say they have a "proposal to start work to make high-speed rail a reality". But not quite yet. First - they need to form a committee to...
Ninja edit. Oops.
Guess who benefits most from that particular stretch of actual speed? The ~~professional liars~~ politicians in Washington, to no surprise.
That's because politicians prefer lines of coke to lines of speed.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.