These student walk outs have been great to see. The kids are all right.

“National attention on Minnesota has waned with the departure of Bovino and rhetoric by Homan that things are de-escalating,” the group noted, but recent data and reports from commuters in the field did not support those conclusions. Despite orders to the contrary, the group continued, “Agents continue to draw their weapons and deploy chemical agents against observers.”

This is how things usually go, isn’t it? Some kind of false “change” is made, one that functionally changes nothing, like the Gaza “ceasefire” or in this case the departure of Bovino, and it acts as a kind of signal to the wider media that this “conflict” has ended. The media shifts focus, attention is moved elsewhere, and the events actually escalate.

This is pretty fair. The US banned the use of Kaspersky in 2024. If I was the CPC I wouldn’t trust CrowdStrike either.

Probably more likely talking around each other. The agreement is that Nazism needs to be scrubbed out everywhere. I disagree that “These aren’t US forces as long a the nazis are in control.” Unless you also agree that Nazis have always been in control of US forces. To put it another way, when I read your comment it read similar to “This isn’t what American is about!” which, it is what America is about, and has always been about. To put it one other way, Donald Trump didn’t suddenly make America a Nazi state, he just removed its mask. That’s all. From our genocidal expansion westward, to our system of slavery and then apartheid after, dropping two atomic weapons on civilian populations, to our genocide in Korea in the 40s, to our imperialist wars through the 90s and 2010s, to our proxy genocide in Palestine. This is just another footprint in our path as we tread across the earth.

If you have a similar assessment, then we’re on the same page. If not, then we’re not on the same page.

I’m going to ask you to put a sarcasm tag on this one.

To quote someone involved in the organizing happening in MN regarding this article:

Pretty good but, of course, I found these points annoying:

6. With a revolutionary leadership, the movement could have gone significantly further. The mood and potential for an all-out general strike were 100% present. This could have shut down not only small businesses, schools, and cultural institutions, but the major levers of the economy: transportation, energy, communications, logistics, manufacturing, etc. After Alex Pretti’s murder, this could have spread across the country. The trade union bureaucrats did everything in their power to direct the energy of the masses into safe channels. Pressure from below had forced them to set a date for a “day of action,” but they conspicuously avoided doing anything more. What was required was to widen and spread the neighborhood committees into the workplaces, and above all to link them through elected representatives into a citywide body accountable to the mass assemblies and capable of coordinating the movement. Armed with this program, a Marxist cadre organization of even just 500 or 1,000 members rooted in workplaces across key industries in Minneapolis-St. Paul could have made all the difference.

9. The only real weakness of the US working class is its lack of a revolutionary party. The roughly 160 million wage and salary workers in America constitute a potentially unstoppable power, but this potential cannot be fully realized unless and until it has a leadership worthy of the name. In Minnesota, we saw the immense creativity of the working class when it is pushed into action, but also the clear limits of spontaneity on its own. To go further, and to eventually win political and economic power, the working class needs a Marxist leadership. A mass revolutionary party could harness the power of the working class to transform society on socialist lines.

The organizing of the two strikes - both city specific on 1/23 and nationwide on 1/30 - were led on the ground by a Marxist vanguard party: . It was PSL that dedicated over a hundred cadre on the ground to full-time outreach in Minneapolis in the week leading up to 1/23. Then cadre deployed their skills across the country to push for a national day on 1/30 which was hugely successful. It was PSL that made the call to push for 1/30 (at the behest of the Somali student groups who called for it in Minneapolis) and did all the initial work in cities across the country. It was the Marxist leadership and dedicated party cadre of PSL that made this happen. They did it while FRSO in the Twin Cities actively opposed it, abdicating and potential for their leadership of the movement, and while RCA was nowhere to be found.

Marxist.com is unfortunately a Trotskyist international organization and as such is pretty sectarian at times. There is mass organizing happening in MN, and there is a Marxist party doing their fair share of that organizing. Their other points remain well stated, but their comments on the actual organizing on the ground are strictly not based in reality.

What I’m saying is, “Nazi idiocy” is the “foundational cornerstone” of America’s “backwards culture”. So, there is no distinction between US Forces with or without Nazi control. American Manifest Destiny inspired the Nazi Lebensraum, American Jim Crow Laws inspired the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, much of the Nazi ideology was built on top of existing admiration for the American project.

Let’s make it bigger for mayday!

Hate to break it to you but…

If you’re fucking with me I will ban you.

Huh? They are having near constant blackouts as a result of this energy shortage. They are one of the most heavily sanction countries in the world. That means hospitals, people who need respirators or other medical equipment to live will die as a result of this, lots of vulnerable people.

That’s the trick! It always has been.

This is good, if only other democrats felt the same.

That’s what the article is about, the dangers of AI generated video and images of animals. From the “Key Ideas” section just under the image at the top of the article.

• Conservationists warn that increasingly realistic AI-generated wildlife images and videos are spreading misinformation that can provoke fear, panic and hostility toward wild animals.
• Fake footage distorts public understanding of animal behavior, making dangerous encounters seem normal or portraying wildlife as greater threats than they really are.
• Authorities and conservation groups are forced to waste time and resources investigating false sightings and responding to public alarm triggered by fabricated content.
• Experts say the trend could ultimately undermine conservation efforts by eroding public trust, encouraging wildlife persecution and normalizing the exotic pet trade.

Yes, I think these are positive signs that’s true. I worry these kinds of developments will build a kind of complacency. The difference is that these folks are under state orders, not federal orders. They’re from the state, not from out of state. These are important characteristics.

But we should also remember that Kent State happened on state orders.

Accept the good will. But always be vigilante. Hopefully the locals are striking up conversation with these guard members. Giving them their perspectives.

Handing out Donuts and Coffee is PR. It’s not “siding with the citizens”. When they put their bodies between ICE and the people, they are protecting ICE. When they’re deployed to the Whipple federal building, they’re not doing it to push ICE out of the city, or state, but to shield them from citizens.

“Our demand today is for federal agents in our City to act with the discipline and integrity we expect of our own officers every day,” said O’Hara. “We know there’s a lot of anger, but we also ask our community to be peaceful while we work through the details of this tragedy.”

That was the demand when the city requested aid from the guard on the 24th. The real question is, what do guard members do when a group of ICE agents execute another citizen in broad daylight, right in their sight line? What do you think the guard will do? When they attempt to subdue another citizen journalist or legal observer, are they going to get between ICE and the citizen, or are they going to get between the other citizens and ICE?

How much has the guard changed since Kent State, is the question you really need to ask yourself.

Honestly. This scenario liberals imagine, where there is some kind of red line that would cause a sitting governor to actively utilize the national guard against federal forces is pure idealism.

The last civil war was a social revolution born out of the contradictions between the slavery mode of production of the south and the rapidly growing capitalist mode of production of the north. The abolition of slavery meant more wage laborers for the north and the complete liquidation of debt leveraged “assets” for slavers in the south. This was the contradiction that drove the development of the Civil War.

The wealth of the South was tied up in debt and assets. Land and Slaves, two things not easily made liquid. Increasing slave productivity would require massive investment in industrial machines from the North. While these machines would increase productivity they would be over saturated with labor as they wouldn’t have enough to reached equilibrium and couldn’t as easily offload the unproductive slaves that didn’t have machines to work. Their reserve army of labor would become depreciating assets who still require food, shelter, and medical care regardless of how shitty it was. The end of slavery would literally be the end of the slavers “way of life” their entire economic way of life would be obliterated unless the state compensated them fair market value for their slaves. Which, would be ridiculous right?

The North, however, was rapidly industrializing and making effective use of the wage system. It didn’t matter to the capitalist if machines displaced workers. It was on the workers to feed, cloth, and house themselves. Petite Bourgeois business owners could exploit their workers by playing them tip only wages, since there was no minimum wage (the first state to have one wasn’t until 1912), leaving the burden of paying a workers wage to the patrons. This system was naturally far more effective at dealing with dead labor then slavery, since you didn’t own the worker, just the workers labor. This meant that the reserve army of labor of the north was effectively “free” to the capitalist and ultimately drove wages down as people competed for work. The capitalist never needed to consider if investing in machines would leave them with a population of unproductive workers, because they would just let them go, something the slaver couldn’t do because the slave was often collateral on loans.

While there is always an inciting incident to point to at the onset of a conflict, these inciting incidents are formed by political and economic conditions that had been building to that moment. You can’t run a simulation where a governor chooses to use the guard against ICE and then say it’s similar to current events in a vacuum. You have to ask the question first, what are the economic conditions driving these actions? The country isn’t divided economically like during the Civil War. There isn’t dueling economic models that Walz could find himself aligning with one over the other.

There are only two forces at play internally here in the US. Workers, and Capital. The people on the streets being killed by ICE are workers. The man killed today was a Union member. When Waltz deploys the National Guard, he doesn’t do it to push ICE out. He does it to put bodies between ICE and the workers doing their duty as legal observers, documenters, and citizen journalist. It obstructs them in those duties. He does it to support the police who actively work with ICE in their duties and have never been on the side of the workers. Tim Waltz is the same guy who sicked the cops and the guard on BLM protesters in 2020 in collaboration with the Trump administration. He’s a team player, and he’s not on our team.

The reason he makes these messages on twitter, is not to stop the killings exactly. It’s because he knows that at some point the only next step is deploying the military. If that happens it will only escalate the resistance of the workers of Minneapolis. Instead of individuals carrying weapons for self defense you will have groups carrying weapons for group defense. When the monopoly of violence becomes challenged, all bets are off, and Tim Waltz knows it’s safer for him if ICE just leaves. The likelihood of that happening however seems low.

Well, let’s see where this goes.