/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>The appeal for the commercial enterprises that are bankrolling the research into the Familiar is indeed the unprecedented penetration into consumers' habitats and unconscious minds that it offers: this kind of AI can operate as a walking, live-in, always-on 'advertisement' for their products. 'It goes far further than that,' Bryant enthuses. 'The Familiar is the ultimate product: a product that collapses commodity, market research and promotion into one another. It's a product that sells you more products.'

http://ccru.net/archive/Commodities.htm

They have predicted so much.

The is supreme Court this morning ruled that Trump is basically allowed to pardon himself and that his trial for the January insurrection is postponed until after the election. This will set a historical presidence for the presidency. Is this the death of anything resembling democracy in the US? It's funny to hear liberal pundents work in circles to try and proclaim the SCOTUS is not political at this point, kek.

Less than 2 hours until Assanges extradition hearing

This will likely decide the fate of Julian Assange who is a journalist that was kidnapped and tortured for his democracy advocacy.

If the UK extradites Assange to his executioners in the US, the UK will declare it self a rogue state.

https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=LvdTG56Ubdc

Who's next?

Sometimes a two-word OP is all you need to get the point across. Especially on an image board.

Is conservative leftism the way?

>…In response, AMLO in office has combined efforts to shore up the countervailing power of Mexican workers with a blunt economic nationalism. On the labor front, he has boosted the minimum wage (without significantly raising unemployment) and promoted independent trade unionism. He has invested generously in the state oil company after years of neglect and messy marketization, resisted further privatization of the electricity industry, and stunted renewables competition—all to predictable howls of rage from Global North environmentalists, the Biden administration, the Brookings Institution, and The New York Times.
>AMLO’s resistance to Global North green-ism is a telling indicator of his leftist heterodoxy. In this as in many other arenas, he subverts the expectations Anglo-American conservatives and progressives alike have of what it means to be on the left. The differences are even more pronounced when it comes to social issues. While he has personally identified as a devout Catholic, his ruling coalition includes an evangelical junior party, and his government has extended federal funding to biblical-studies programs—a gentle tweak to the laicism that is one of the pillars of the modern Mexican state.
https://compactmag.com/article/amlo-s-conservative-leftism

How much damage will Javier Milei be able to do ?
He seems to be a US vassal, and a rather unhinged nutcase.
He wants to make children a commodity that can be bought and sold, and give the police, Judge-Dredd style, on the spot judgement/punishment powers.

Will that be like in Bolivia a few years ago where crazy reactionaries got into power and began causing massive upheaval and than quickly got kicked out again.

https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=FN6hoIb-QqA

The Soviets should have reduced the work-day
to 7h by 1965
to 6h by 1975
to 5h by 1985
and finally
to 4h by 1995

4 consequences:

1 The Soviet economy would have been forced to invest into labor-saving/productivity-enhancing technology like crazy to make up for the shrinking per-person labor-inputs. It would have eclipsed the west in industrial power.

2 There is no 90s dissolution/collapse because a shorter work-day means more time to politically organize and make reforms that work.

3 the soviet union would have become an attractive destination for labor, the bottom 40% of the capitalist sphere would have tried to move to the Soviet Union, because they weren't getting much in terms of capitalist luxuries anyway and as soviet citizens would have had a similar life-style with a lot more free time. Less work also means it's easier to raise children for the indigenous soviet population, and by the year 2000 the Soviet Union would have counted half a billion citizens.

4 Incidentally it would have saved social democracy in the west, because the shrinking labor-pool would have maintained the political leverage of western workers, even in the face of industrial offshoring.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/17/silicon-valley-military-tech-defense-contractors/
didn't let me post the archive link see pic
<Until recently, tech workers have bristled at applying the fast and nimble start-up ethos to fashion deadly weapons. When Google signed a Pentagon contract to develop AI to target drone strikes, thousands petitioned its CEO in 2018 to cancel it.
<Amid layoffs in tech, the latter has grown appealing. In a Morning Consult survey of 441 tech workers last March, 34 percent they are more likely than they were a year ago to apply their skills to military projects and 48 percent support their employer considering defense contracts involving battlefield technologies.
<“This deep sense of uncertainty about the future that young people have can be molded,” Dey Meyer said.
So the tech-layoffs was to cajole techies into the defense industry.

<Some reject the previous tech era, in particular the protests against Project Maven, Google’s work to target Pentagon drones. This worker dissent ultimately benefited America’s adversaries, former Google researcher Guillaume Verdon said in a recent podcast interview with Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder and tech investor.
<“What I saw with my own eyes was cultural subversion within Big Tech,” Verdon said.
IMHO This is why it qualifies as fascistic. There are people who simply do not want to build weapons, they are not being subversive, they simply want to build not destroy.

There is clearly a crisis. The war in Ukraine has shown how industrial production in the Euro-Atlantic bloc is in a state of collapse, and emerging economies are demanding the re-division of the world. The nature of the contemporary crisis is imperialist, because it is about the re-division of the world. The growing tensions in the Middle East to secure the oil-rich maritime area of Gaza after the failure in Ukraine show that the capitalist powers are ready to extend this crisis to the world. The moment the crisis enters Taiwan openly, it will be obvious to everyone that this is a world war.
But in the face of the growing crisis of capitalism, the Euro-Atlantic proletariat seems to be relatively calm. There are no mass revolutionary organisations, revolutionary organisations capable of building the foundations for the dictatorship of the proletariat; the workers' organisations are dominated by religious or patriotic groups. They are usually in alliance with a bourgeois party and so on. They are the police organisations of the bourgeois state. Other organisations are NGOs dominated by liberals. These two are the hidden arm of the ideological discourse that is being fed to the agitated masses. The presence of bourgeois political parties in workers' and other organisations means the domination and spread of (petty)bourgeois habits of thought in their mass base.

The revolutionaries are separated or part of a sect and feel safe in their bubble. This is a symptom of the intellectual who calls himself a revolutionary. In times of peace and debate, when the concrete task is propaganda and education, the intellectual is more than welcome if he adapts himself to the needs of his pupils and does not impose knowledge by repetition. But when the movement takes a turn in the other direction, from the peaceful to the preparation for open struggle, the intellectual is afraid of this change. They prefer to stick to their dying sects, carry out symbolic revolutionary actions for other like-minded intellectuals and call it a day for the time being. They refuse to cooperate consistently with the emerging movement.

A clear example of the lack of consistency is this moment. The protests against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians have mobilised many progressive people into the ranks of the anti-war front and given new impetus to anti-imperialism. The sheer relative size of the movement compared to the small number of self-proclaimed revolutionary organisaPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>“Montes betrayed our nation, but not for money. In fact, she never received payment for any of her actions – astonishingly, she was motivated purely by hatred for America,” Rubio wrote in an op-ed penned for Americano Media.
GIGA BASED

‘Queen of Cuba’ spy released from US jail
Ana Montes, described as “one of the most damaging spies” in US history, has been released from federal prison in Texas. The double agent for Cuba was freed on Friday after more than 20 years in custody, data on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website shows.

Montes, now 65, made a solid career with the US government, initially working for the US Department of Justice before joining the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) back in 1985. She ultimately became a senior intelligence analyst for Cuba –even scoring a nickname the ‘Queen of Cuba’– and worked in this role until her arrest in 2001, days after the 9/11 attacks.

It turned out that Montes had been spying for Cuba throughout her whole government career, as she had been recruited by that country’s intelligence when she was a student at Johns Hopkins University. Officials at the time said it was believed that the Cuban Intelligence Service (CIS) had pushed her to pursue the DIA career in the first place.

As a double agent, Montes is believed to have funneled highly-sensitive information to the CIS for nearly two decades. According to federal charging documents, Montes was very careful, never taking classified information from her work computer but memorizing it instead, as well as using water-soluble, easy to destroy paper to deliver the data to her Cuban handlers.

According to the Bush-era US Counterintelligence head Michelle Van Cleave, Montes has become “one of the most damaging spies the United States has ever found,” who has compromised “virtually everything” Washington knew about Cuba.

In 2002, Montes pleaded guilty to espionage charges which could have carried the death penalty for her, yet was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison under a plea deal. According to her lawyers, Montes was primarily motivated for spying by a belief that “the Cubans were treated unfairly by the US government.”
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.