they must run a new placebo-controlled trial after a variant arrives
The dominant variant shifts every 3-6 months.
Chana
joined 6 days ago
Nary a one!?
I don't see anything to be conflicted about here. If I had to suggest something, maybe participate more directly in organizing so that you can feel confident that donation money is well-spent. Getting a personal sense for how serious a local party is can be revealing.
Just about every socialist has lived under capitalism. We seek to overthrow the dominant socioeconomic order. Existing socialist projects must still live and develop in capitalistic ways and have different experiments in how they diverge from this. But people there still have/had jobs, retirements, houses.
Which period of the monarchy do you pine for?
Do you have a sudden craving for plain bread and drinking milk?
This is entirely expected but I would guess that this kind of confirmation is valuable for pushing forward any bureaucracy that could respond.
Remember when "the adults in the room" actively denied that SARS-CoV-2 could be spread by aerosol and they were telling you to not buy masks and to instead disinfect your produce?
All my ~~apes~~ liberal-brained fascist apologia are gone.
That's good! And good to focus on union affiliation questions early. It will determine how much support you get during the campaign and some unions are so bad at this as to be counterproductive while others will send you a ride or die comrade.
Relationships with management often result in surprising "changes" when you try to unionize. Companies are top-down dictatorships. Except in extremely rare circumstances, the reaction will come from the top and filter down through management, who will need to choose between losing their job and engaging in union-busting: sharing information (perhaps naively) with their own "superiors", stalling, helping build anti-agitprop, and eventually firing organizers. Smart companies will try to leverage personal relationships to undermine the campaign, "sure they fired KatySosa, but the guy who announced it is such a nice person and they said it was for performance reasons. That guy has us over for parties and I've met his kids! He wouldn't do anything for a mean reason."
You should go into any unionization campaign expecting to be fired and for your coworkers to need to strike / do walkouts for your resinstatement. Are your coworkers ready to do that? I don't mean to discourage, the advice I'm giving is meant to increase your chance at success. You want to build up with structure tests and a committee before showing your hand or the compsny will just fire you and kill the campaign early through this intimidation.
I haven't checked but if you're the person who got active in part with PSL support I think it should be noted that they are not a known quantity in labor organizing. They might be more interested in radicalization than a successful campaign, e.g. suggesting agitprop before building a committee or a list (list building is always step 1! Always!). Or PSL mighy just be naive.
I think Ghorman has a mix of inspirations. I think its main character is different from Gaza, however, and in ways that matter.
spoilers
Ghorman is portrayed as vaguely Western European, with French-Germanic language, exclusively white people, a wealthy country with one make export: extremely expensive textiles made of silk. They are not portrayed as imperialized, but as a wealthy and proud group. Their racial characteristics are in line with those of the empire, just without British accents, whereas imperialized groups in Star Wars are depicted as racially diverse humans or "aliens".
The Ghorman resistance is portrayed as incompetent and arrogant, generally unserious and making poor strategic choices. They are constantly surprised by the outcomes of their actions. They do not listen to the free advice of people with more experience and revolutionary resources. Their main leader is literally a wealthy businessman nationalist. The people under him are naive youths. They have no consistent goal or idea of how they accomplish the major goal of removing occupation. They think a big show of "peaceful protest" and singing songs in a square will work and are massacred for it. Very late in the game their main leader realizes his idealism will lead to this massacre but nobody listens to him. He has no caché even among his alleged subordinates. They are a liberal bourgeois shitshow. They are even depicted as a color revolution in many ways.
Ghorman is closer to the idea of fascism returning home, or otherwise betraying its allies for its own interest. It has the one common attribute with Gaza, which is genocide and forced migration by an imperialist group, but it is not done for colonization, but resource extraction. They're mining a mineral so extensively that it ruins habitability. There is no real precedent for this among Euro imperialists: they destroy habitability via extraction outside the imperial core, not within it. Even when conquering one another! Ghorman us a mixture of elements.
But the main "message" of Ghorman is that "if it can happen to us, it can happen to you", something that wouldn't make sense if they were already considered marginal and downtrodden. Ghorman are insiders of the Empire, they are rich, they are ethnically privileged, but the Empire saw it necessary to destroy them to keep the rest of their subjects in line via a superweapon, so Ghorman was destroyed. And via the propaganda apparatus, consent for this was manufactured and bourgeois democrats sold it as a necessary evil against an arrogant state gone rogue.
Hexbear lionization of adventurism isn't allowed until we have sufficiently pathologically sexualized him.