Randomly stumbled into this article and found it very interesting. At a glance, his other articles here also seem promising.

I'm not Statesian (thank god!), but I've been paying some attention to Cornell West's campaign since he announced it.

He's not a Marxist, seems to be some kind of Christian socdem/demsoc, but I've noticed he's pretty willing to denounce US imperialism, structural racism and genocidal practices. He seems to have gained some repercussion recently due to his support for Palestine, and he also has a history of cooperating with American Indigenous groups.

I know that the PSL has also announced their candidates (though tbh I haven't heard much about them), but I want to start this discussion regarding the pragmatic decision to try and get West in one of the presidential debates.

I have no hopes of Statesians ever getting a Marxist from PSL there, but I think it's in the realm of possibilities to have a third-party socdem to attack the DemRep duopoly for the sole purpose of building distrust from the population in both parties.

What do y'all think, does West deserve a little bit of critical support?

~~sorry I had to do it, I don't even like second thought~~

Turns out replacing rounded silicon shells with hard-edge thin plastic on a handheld device, then expecting you to buy a second silicon shell anyway was a very lucrative decision.

In other news, I'm looking into getting a new phone. I don't really use phones for much other than messaging apps, firefox and the occasional lemmy browse, so lowest possible price is cool. No 1080/4K stuff.

I'd also want to avoid the 2.5 phone lifespan problem, since Moore and his law are dead so durability trumps performance every time.

It'd also be nice if it was supported by alternative OSes like Lineage. Any particular model or model series y'all recommend?

So you're telling me that, not only are federal elections decided by states rather than votes, but each individual state has their own set of laws to prevent you from appearing in the ballot? And it's somehow still fine because "you can just do a write-in vote"?

My favourite one is the Texan one, where you need to have gotten boatload of votes in order to appear on the ballot.

For a registered political party in a statewide election to gain ballot access, they must either: obtain 5% of the vote in any statewide election; or collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast in the preceding election for governor, and must do so by January 2 of the year in which such statewide election is held. An independent candidate for any statewide office must collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast for governor, and must do so beginning the day after primary elections are held and complete collection within 60 days thereafter (if runoff elections are held, the window is shortened to beginning the day after runoff elections are held and completed within 30 days thereafter). The petition signature cannot be from anyone who voted in either primary (including runoff), and voters cannot sign multiple petitions (they must sign a petition for one party or candidate only).

In Democratic America, you can only win elections if you've already won the elections.

Edit: apparently the author went full QAnon in 2020. This article is from 2018 and is reasonably well-researched, though it downplays the participation of the USA agencies and corporations in the astroturfing campaigns, but I needed to put forward this disclaimer regarding all her other content.

[Cherizier:] “Let’s become conscious, to unite, to see that this country cannot continue the way it is going, and let’s reconcile, let’s forget what’s happened in the past, let’s figure out how we can get together to fight those thieves, those who are the real problem for the country… Let’s unite to give Haiti a second independence and struggle to lift the nation out of where it is, so that people who look like us stop dying and being victims. That should cause our conscience to revolt. Let’s turn our guns on the true enemy. Let’s put ourselves with people who have the same ideology, who see Haiti and not their pockets. Let’s get together with them and see what we can do to liberate this country.”

[Guy Philippe:] “As Faustin Soulouque [Haiti’s ruler from 1847-1859] said when they threatened to bomb him: ‘To force, I will respond with force’. Today we have an even greater force; it is our will as human beings, it is our will as a people to make the foreigners understand that we are tired of being their slaves. To tell all the thieves in Port-au-Prince, that we are tired of seeing all the ministers, general directors, prime ministers get rich, in two weeks they become millionaires while the our people are floundering in poverty. They are also responsible for a lot of the young men and women taking up arms and killing…”

By tradition, the Haitian head of state makes a speech in Gonaïves on Jan. 1, but Haiti only has a de facto head of government, Dr. Ariel Henry, who deemed it too dangerous to travel to that city, especially when recently repatriated former soldier, policeman, Senator-elect, and “rebel” leader Guy Philippe was speaking there, launching a nationwide revolutionary uprising against Henry.

We're now in the "calling it a revolution" stage. Can we do a "send money to Haiti" campaign again, but this time to help the anti-imperialist troops?

The story seems to be the usual slow week "news" about North Korea, but their alleged reasoning of "the empire is overextended" doesn't sound too unrealistic this time.

And it gets extremely weird by the end. He spends some 70 episodes just between 1905 and 1917, but then the timeline is horribly compressed to the point where 1922 to 1938 are all told in just some 5 episodes.

There are constant grammar mistakes and names keep being swapped around (at multiple points he even says Trotsky wanted to be "Stalin's heir" when he meant Lenin), to the point where I had to keep going back and check to make sure I wasn't going crazy. The best example of this, on the very conclusion, he cites a Bakunin quote as though it was said by Bukharin (link, at 49:45).

In one episode he is very critical of Trotsky's arrogance, but then in the following episodes calls him something like "most important revolutionary after Lenin". I'm not sure if he ever even mentioned the existence of the Fourth International even though he followed Trotsky all the way up to the icepick.

And the whole history after the civil war just boils down to a multiple hour and episode-long of Stalin Bad, without even putting any effort to dispel common myths. Stalin also becomes basically the only character with agency, and things just happen to any other named individual. Not to mention how Stalin was barely mentioned during the entire narrative except being introduced for the Tiflis bank robbery, and hardly ever directly quoted (as is tradition with anti-Stalin historiography).

Foreign policy ceases to exist (except for one off-handed mention of the Chinese civil war to contextualise Trots trotting), Stalin is portrayed as "delusionally paranoid about foreign powers" in the same episode where it's casually mentioned the Nazis took power in Germany.

Gulags and the GPU are mentioned multiple times before they are even formed. He even does a thing where he sneaks in a "Black Book of Communism"-style section where he talks about all the death toll that happened in the period of the revolution, including those of the first and second world wars.

No actual opposition is ever actually mentioned after the end of the civil war, from either inside or outside the Union, and apparently every single problem in the USSR was purely self-inflicted.

Sometimes I think he even forgot that Stalin was Georgian and not Russian to try and pin Russian chauvinism on him too.

Best part was when he actually did a somewhat reasonable explanation of natural and economic causes of the 1931 famine, but then ends with something like "some people call it Holodomor and say it was intentional because Stalin hates Ukrainians, but maybe the whole famine was intentional because Stalin hates everybody, I don't know, I'm no expert."

Not gonna lie, all of this, combined with the sudden decrease in writing quality and getting sponsorships from a literal (digital) bank got my inner "paranoid Stalin" a bit concerned that the script was having to go through a final sponsor pass. Though I think he was just tired and wanted to end it, and trusted his Anglo sources and general social-liberal predisposition too much.

I've recommended this podcast in the past due to being fairly entertaining and accessible, and I still think the first part of this series is pretty good (up to the february 1917 revolution), but the last few episodes really soured the whole thing for me. I'm not particularly well-versed in soviet history, so I wonder how much less obvious nonsense I didn't notice.

Anyways, just had to get that rant out of me there.