This article is about the ICC. ICC announced warrants against Palestinian resistance leaders and Zionist officials. ICJ in the case brought by South Africa ruled that the Zionist entity may be committing genocide and must stop its attacks.

ICC is for individuals, ICJ is for countries. The ICJ is a much more serious institution and less under the control of the West because it’s tied to the UN. ICC so far has mainly convicted Africans. It is clearly a colonial court (recently the head of the ICC even came out and said that a Western official told him, quote: “the ICC is for Africa and thugs like Putin”) and its warrants against Zionist officials are a transparent face saving measure.

The ICC is a joke. Their warrant against Putin was already utterly absurd and exposed them as nothing more than a political tool of the West, and now this “both sides” bullshit where they have the audacity to equate the victims of occupation and genocide with the perpetrators of those crimes is the final nail in the coffin of their legitimacy in the eyes of the global majority. And it’s long overdue, this institution was built from the start to prosecute colonized people for the benefit of colonizers.

I just think it’s funny how when westerners move to another country they’re never “fleeing” their country, they’re just “expats”. But when people from the global south do it they are never called that…

The algorithm gives people what they want to see. If there is that kind of a difference between western Tiktok and “Chinese Tiktok” then that is a reflection of what their respective cultures value.

True, true. I wasn’t saying that this is what everyone should do, but that revolutionaries as a whole should not abandon union work.

Brainwashed Nazi scum. No different from Wehrmacht or SS butchers. Their fate will be the same. Russia has experience in denazification.

This is the wrong approach. Unions are an essential battleground of the class struggle and abandoning them to the enemy is a grave strategic error. What should be done is agitation and propaganda work among the rank and file, first and foremost against the collaboration with the so-called “police union” (which is not a union since police are not workers but the reactionary guard dogs of capital), and secondly against the reactionary leadership which continues that collaboration. When sufficient critical mass has been built a political struggle must be launched inside the union aiming at the delegitimization and eventual unseating of the reactionary leaders.

For me the central passage of that text is this:

“We can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is no easy matter, but no other approach to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion.”

It is in effect a complete rejection of idealism, the recognition that we must work with the material reality at hand and not with the fantasy of an idealized revolutionary subject which we have constructed in our minds.

It’s funny you should bring this up because i know someone else who also asked this same question once upon a time: “Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?”. Of course the conditions today are very different so you cannot simply transfer their conclusions one to one to your situation, but it helps us understand how a revolutionary ought to think about and discuss these sorts of questions.

Study your conditions, analyze them and apply the dialectical materialist method and draw your own conclusions.

I’d say it’s a combination of both. The media is a powerful force and it does fool many people, but just like with what was happening in Nazi Germany, deep down most people probably know what is really going on, in general terms at least if not the specifics…they simply choose to tell themselves that they don’t because that makes it easier for them to go along with it.

if you could instantaneously pull the lever while simultaneously attempting to get people off or derail the train or sabotaging the track

You can do that. You can do that by voting third party or abstaining. As i tried to explain to you, these are also choices. These are also levers that you can pull, you are not forced to choose between pulling the red or the blue lever. Choosing such a third option has the beneficial effect of decreasing the legitimacy of the duopoly. The more people that choose to do this, the less believable the claim will be of whoever wins having a “democratic mandate”.

Further, as i have repeatedly tried to explain to you, it is not clear which if any of the two tracks that you think you have to pick from is actually the lesser evil. You axiomatically assume that you know which of those two tracks is less harmful, but you don’t.

One side has genocide, the other side has genocide and destruction of the environment

No, actually both sides have destruction of the environment. Biden blew up Nordstream in the worst act of ecological terrorism in history, forcing Europe into dependency on American LNG transported by highly polluting tankers. Biden just imposed massive tariffs on Chinese EVs and continued previous tariffs (imposed by Obama) on Chinese green energy tech. Biden has chosen to ramp up military production and give billions to the military industrial complex knowing full well that the US military is the biggest polluter on the planet. Democrats do jack shit for the environment, they are lackeys of the fossil fuel industry same as Republicans are, they are just better at virtue signaling, gaslighting and selling you false promises.

No. The trolley problem is an oversimplification that can never accurately reflect reality.

Another problem with the trolley analogy is that in the case of the idealized thought experiment you have perfect information. You know for sure which choice will lead to less harm. That is not the case in reality. In reality you are dealing with incomplete, imperfect information.

Furthermore, in reality there is always a third choice. Whether that’s third party or boycotting the vote, you can still make a choice that is consequential and distinct from the false dichotomy. This is not the case in the trolley problem where no such third option exists.

And lastly, in reality your choice of actions is not limited to the pulling of a lever. What if in the trolley problem you tried to get the people off the tracks? What if you tried throwing something on the track to derail the whole train? What if you worked to sabotage or dismantle the track itself? In other words, direct action.

You just need some courage and imagination to come up with alternative solutions. You don’t need to allow yourself to be limited to the lever-track paradigm. If you only have the audacity to think outside the box you can break out of the mental prison of “liberal democracy”.

Not when those two candidates both serve the same interests. What looks like two tracks may just be two sides of the same track.

The trolley problem presupposes a dichotomy which does not exist here.

Democrats are not a lesser evil.

Also, we’ve never told anyone to vote for Putin either.

Indeed. It would also be interesting to filter China out from the world line because China’s rise in itself is a big contributor to the world’s average.

Unfortunately i don’t really have much in-depth knowledge on this subject of how agriculture is run in China these days and how centralized it is. One thing i do know is that originally after the revolution a massive land redistribution took place, the biggest in the history of the world in fact, and basically everyone who lived in a rural area got their own plot of land. I would assume though that those plots were fairly small and that a large portion of the land was still farmed by collectives, and that over time consolidation into larger and more centrally controlled agricultural enterprises took place. But as i say, i haven’t read much on this subject, so it would be very interesting if someone were to do a deep dive on this for us.

I think that you are right about the broader mechanisms at work here that explain the disparity between India and China, namely that in China a lot more was re-invested into increasing the productivity of the land because there was a lot more central planning and less short term profit seeking. And yes there probably are more small farmers in India than in China nowadays (though again i don’t have the data to back it up), but i’m not sure how big the impact of that disparity is. Because even when you do have land consolidated under large agribusiness corporations in global south countries, they still tend to be very inefficient, unwilling to invest in long term productivity or sustainability, and focused on extracting as much value as fast as possible at the expense of the people and the land.

What’s wrong with juche?