One thing that will never seem to leave my head is that I had read that the current mountain tops of the Appalachians are actually the original valleys of the mountain range. The mountains were so old and large that the valleys of todays Appalachian’s were the footprint of what was once maybe the largest mountain range earth has seen

Death to America.
your friend should consider reaching out to BreakThrough News or another left media outlet with the tip about the golf courses fr

Rediculous. The PSL (which was never named in the nytimes article and afaik has never directly received funds from singham) and adjacent media have been agitating against the New Cold War for years, but you have only started paying attention because of an outrageous hit-piece written by the "paper of record" (the US state dept. mouthpiece). The "expose" of a Black communist who came into hundreds of millions selling a tech company he started in his 30s. I won't pretend that he isn't bourgeois, but that doesn't mean an individual in the ruling class cannot be radicalized and become an ally to the workers movement. There are a lot of examples of individuals working against their class interest in the communist movement, Engels was thoroughly bourgeois, Zhou Enlai was born to a scholar-official family, Souphanouvong was a prince that joined the Pathet Lao and became the first president of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, to name a few. Acting as though a cash infusion to large number of communist and communist-adjacent organizations is in itself bad and shady seems to conveniently line up with a narrative that would deprive socialist organizations the means to organize in general. Was there anything to suggest they are misappropriating the funds? I haven't ever come across information that has ever indicated that. You are also missing the point of the article, which wasn't to malign the groups for having more money than the DSA, the point was to discredit the growing communist movement and paint it as an arm of the CPC. Which side are you on?

Anyway, just because you are unaware of the work that these groups are doing, doesn't mean they aren't doing good work, or agitating against the new cold war. Here is an org that has been working with since 2020 on the very issue, looking at old newsletters from 2020 you can also see People's Forum speakers and other adjacent groups presenting at events for the org. Here is another group organizing against the new cold war since 2020. It is disingenuous to say that these organizations are only putting out newsletters and youtube videos.

The DSA has millions of dollars and as of 2022 had 32 full time organizers. Yet, my towns local DSA chapter lost nearly 50% of its paper members. I don't want to get into a thing about the DSA, but they operate in a fundamentally different way than communist organizations, and are not going to be subject to the same level of repression or want to completely expose their inner workings to the state. The DSA are essentially a mass org and so it would make sense for them to publicly air out their inner workings and finances. Are you a member of these other groups that have gotten money? Why would they be accountable to you?

An aside, if you read the nytimes article, what initiated the reporter's "investigation" was what the reporter described as "Twitter anti-fascists" ... I seem to remember this coming up originally, and it just seems like the wining of a bunch of idealists who expect everyone to obey some sort of unrealistic purity-tests. I would love to see what those individuals have done to build working class power, but so far they have just given ammunition to the ruling class to paint US communists as Chinese agents and expose them to repression. I am sure the DSA will be totally insulated from that sort of repression, especially when their members who get elected to congress feed into the cold war narrative itself, or give funding the the IDF, or Ukraine (disregarding the DSA's own positions and their international committee's own statements)

Beautiful boaters

Not really, no. But it would have been really fucking cool if the US hadn't intervened in their affiars and supported reactionaries who dismantled the incredibly progressive home-grown, communist-led government that had liberated women and built infrastructure and housing. The Taliban is a direct result of US intervention in Afghanistan, as is Afghanistan's subsequent historical trajectory. The Taliban offered up Osama Bin Laden in order to avoid an invasion, but the US said "no" ... All that blood and suffering and the US couldn't manage to build a political institution that could withstand the Taliban. The blood is entirely on the US governments hands since 1979, so I would say that they are definitely the bad guys in this scenario, even if the Taliban suck... way more innocent people have been killed and had their lives ruined by the US than the Taliban as far as I can tell.

The Democratic Party just represents another faction of the bourgeoisie. They only “support” different social issues to opportunistically appeal to a different voting blocs, but they have little or no intention to truly do anything. The only constituency they serve are just a different group of capitalists. Once you understand this, that all bourgeois politicians don’t represent you at all, US politics and policy decision making becomes crystal clear.

But wasn't Pakistan also thoroughly a US puppet at this point?

idk what a challenger 2 is, and i didn't click the link, but i can only assume it is a NATO missile named after the space shuttle challenger.

sound like you don't know what you are talking about. Germany and Japan first aligned themselves in the Anti-Comintern Pact which was literally an anti-communist alliance. The axis in ww2 was literally born as an anti-communist project. You are confused, you are so confused you would have sided with Hitler in world war 2.

The other reasons people listed aren't wrong. But I think primarily it is political opportunism, which is true of every bourgeois politicians anyway. In that sense it is unsurprising.

Its cool that you admitted you just didn't want anyone from hexbear to be right. That takes a lot of insight. You should consider opening your mind now to the possibility that you could be wrong about much more. You reflexive distaste for hexbear probably has more to do with your own cognitive dissonance than whether our opinions are wrong. Most of the people (bots) on hexbear were (are) libs too, but at some point opened their minds and began to approach history, political-economy, and current events with a more critical eye.

checkmate! it can’t be called a war if we simply lob misiles at a country and arm every lunatic we find, completely destroying it in the process

The collar with a bell works, but you could also just listen to music/podcasts aloud on your phone as you walk around so that as you walk toward them the music is slowly audible. Then you also get to have a soundtrack around the house

I have met academic physicians who have gone to Chinese universities... I can't think of a more onerous system of gatekeeping than academic medicine (or medicine in general) in the united states... I think you will be fine

Still, per Axios, some aides would prefer it if the president showed his anger to the public more often to show the 80-year-old’s still fiery and not too old to serve.

That last paragraph made it clear that his campaign leaked the story intentionally. Sad.

please, enlighten me, what is this utopia with which you speak of?

Under your definition, nearly every person is living under fascism. That is why it is meaningless