Reminder:
The point of why I post this is not “Hooray for Assad!”.
It’s “we have no proof that Assad was behind the attack, it is not at all implausible that another faction is responsible, and nobody outside of Syria appears to have any way of conclusively judging who actually did it”.
If it was Assad, it was monumentally stupid. It doesn’t appear to have provided any tactical or strategic advantage, and it creates an easy excuse for the Americans and their proxies to attack. The timing suggests a deliberate provocation, but there’s no sensible reason why the Syrians would want to do that.
Washington Post doing its Washington Post thing.
Most interesting bit at 7:45.
Hey! Some of us haven’t forgotten how he kept Ron “token white devil” Bykowski down!
Citation needed.
What I think Nina was trying to say was “as a matter of triage, we need to deal with the nazis and the wars; we don’t have time for endless intra-left arguments at the moment”.
i.e. Popular Front right now, squabble over what comes next once we’ve dealt with the emergency.
You ain’t gonna get ideological consensus among the American left any time in the forseeable future. It’s Popular Front or nothing.
Nina’s an anarcho-syndicalist, BTW.
That may have been what Dean intended. But in the current climate with the current administration, the effect of what he said is to dare Trump to start a war.
Dean ain’t the worst of it. There are plenty of liberals openly calling for war today.
One possible response to the obvious hypocrisy re: Yemen and Syria is to claim that chemical weapons are a special kind of evil, justifying an extreme response.
So, a reminder:
Okay, you get the ground-level, grassroots people on your side. Great. You try to accomplish something locally, and the local community organizations, which have a vested interest in the old way things were done, do everything they can to get in your way. So, you start a new community organization, and leech support away from the existing one. Eventually, they don’t have enough power to meaningfully interfere with your work.
So you petition your local government representatives to make the changes that need to be made. But they have a vested interest in the old way things were done, and they won’t budge for you. So, at the next election, you want to replace them, but the riding association gets in your way…
In order to fight from the bottom up, you need to take each level and hold each level long enough to fight the next. And if you’re doing that, it’s no extra effort to get the right people into those positions to be the pillars of the new society you’re trying to create.
Rallying enough people to take down the Nazis at the top isn’t a bottom-up approach; it’s practically the definition of a top-down approach.
And I don’t disagree with that, but triage and emergency manoeuvres are, again, fundamentally top-down approaches: dealing with the outermost layer while putting off the fundamental reforms until later.
Again, I’m not arguing with that approach, but it shouldn’t be called “bottom-up.”
Huh. That actually makes that definition of “bottom-up” make a bit more sense; if your philosophy is BTFSTTG and replace it with a worker’s movement, then once you’ve got a worker’s movement to attack the system from the top down, you pretty much have the new system in place already.
Apparently we’re now blaming the Germans for the Syrian gas attack?