Qassam Brigades will not shoot down medivac helicopters, I believe it is part of a religious conviction.

An American citizen who served in the IOF had his vehicle set on fire and “Death to the IDF” spray painted next to it in St. Louis, Missouri yesterday

Source

Based as hell.

Sure, anything made for exchange is a commodity. I was incorrect in saying this art is not a commodity if it’s made for exchange. But Marx is observing and analyzing generalized commodity production under capitalism (The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”). How commodities are produced under capitalism is unique. He is looking at commodity production while the means of production are privately owned, where wage labor predominates, and commodities are produced for sale in a market. Under these conditions, any given commodity is produced at a sufficient scale that there is a socially necessary amount of labor that must be used to produce it, and in the production of this commodity, since labor as a commodity is used to produce it, surplus value also is generated. When talking about someone making their own art with their own tools for exchange, while it is a commodity, the rules of value and surplus value don’t apply in my opinion, so I would still argue what OP is asking about is outside the bounds of Marx’s analysis.

Right, today it’s a bad-faith argument by liberals who have never read Marx and don’t care to learn, they just want to think “haha Marx thinks any sort of labor adds value”.

In Marx’s time… political economists before him understood that labor was the source of value, but couldn’t actually work it out. Marx did that with his concept of socially necessary labor time. He solved the riddle of value. From that point, economists were left with two choices. They could accept Marx’s ideas, or they could try and pretend they didn’t exist. Since all science reflects the ideas of the ruling classes, they went with the later. Thus, the emergence of marginalism and neoclassical economics. They basically said “why are we even talking about ‘value’, supply and demand and price is all that matters”.

In Capital, Marx is addressing generalized commodity production under capitalism, not a way to evaluate “value” in every object humans produce. A piece of art you make to sell is not a “commodity”. Mass-produced art made by workers in a factory, yes. But a single piece of art is outside the bounds of the laws of capitalism as Marx is describing. So it’s not really that your art does or does not contain value, it’s that it’s not a part of his analysis.

I’ve seen the idea you are citing to address the “mud pies” argument. Essentially, a commodity that no one wants (a mud pie) contains no value, even if it involves human labor.

I am admittedly getting into interpretation here and open to criticism.

My oldest is starting kindergarten this month. I just found out yesterday that they are issued iPads on day 1, and they need to have these tablets with them every day. Genuinely feeling pretty upset about this. We are very lucky in that our kids seem to have absolutely no interest in tablets and phones. My wife and I (and least me) are very intentional about our time on our phones around the kids. They do have a bit of a TV addiction but I can work with that.

Where does this even come from, this idea that handing kindergartners a tablet and having them use it every day is a good idea?

I always feel weird when I bring this up, but I feel I need to given that I think there are misconceptions about “boycott bans” that a lot of us run with. And it’s important we all understand it lest some libs dunk on us for getting something wrong.

At least as things are now, YOU can boycott Israel as an individual citizen. You can organize a boycott to get a group of people to boycott Israel. The furthest any law could TRY to go would be to outlaw organizing a boycott publicly, but even with our dogshit SCOTUS that would get shot down.

What the state and local anti-BDS laws are designed to do are prevent government entities from formally boycotting Israel. They also sometimes ban the government from banning contractors following BDS but good luck finding some petite boug construction businesses who are also following BDS. Functionally this only ever happens with universities and small municipalities. There might be some laws somewhere that disallow government employees from organizing BDS, but I can’t recall if I’m just imaging that or if it really happened somewhere.

Michael Roberts is also pretty good about getting into these stats on his blog.

They blame the housing affordability crisis on “immigrants getting free housing”, I’m not even joking.

FYI I am seeing comments elsewhere about how this may be directionally correct, but this graph is just AI-generated slop based on bad data.

I swear to god, literally no one on planet earth is able to be normal about Sydney Sweeney.

I would distinguish between advertising and marketing. Don Draper shit is advertising. It’s coming up with ways to sell people on what you currently have. I think the corporations who live and die with advertising (like Coca-Cola) won’t give this up to AI but there is a lot more of your basic advertising (like a local realtor designing a highway billboard) that will, sure.

I don’t see marketing being given up to AI though. It can be bullshit but a lot of the time it’s fairly strategic. I would argue even a centrally planned economy needs marketing. It can be useful. Marketing involves thinking along the lines of “cell phones would last twice as long if we let people replace the batteries. The big phone companies do not allow this because of planned obsolescence. We could make a phone with replaceable batteries and position ourselves as the “buy it for life” phone company. That’s the sort of work I don’t see how AI could replace.

None of what I’m going to say is excuse-making; I think the left in the US isn’t where it should be. But that said, there are some significant conditions that should be accounted for.

I am in my early 40s, so my political consciousness began in the mid/late 90s. I can say from that point until the GFC and Occupy Wall Street, class consciousness was at absolute zero and the left was totally dead. The orgs that existed were tiny. The ingrained anti-communism of Americans runs very deep.

I actually think Occupy was more impactful than Bernie, but only because it actually started a tiny spark of class consciousness with discussion of the “1%” and the “99%”. Just the idea that there was a small group of rich people and then the large majority who aren’t rich, and don’t have the same interests, was a totally new concept to Americans.

We are also hampered by this dead left from the 90s and 00s is that we have no orgs and people with deep history and knowledge. Even a place like the UK has a lot of boomer Trots with some questionable social policy ideas. We here are all people who just started to put it all together either post-Bernie or post-pandemic.

That said, I am very bullish on where PSL is going. I think they do org building the right way and are having success. Again, not where we should be but I do think things are starting to connect.

I can’t get the video to play but I am assuming this is where Mamdani say “Israel has a right to exist… as a state with equal rights”.

That is unambiguously if perhaps using softer language, an endorsement of the one state solution. Some here might disagree but I have no problem with using very specific language when talking with normies who have little to no knowledge of the situation in Palestine. I do it all the time IRL with my boomer parents. I’ve brought them around to the one state solution over time, but to do that I had to walk them through it slowly and avoid terms or language where it would scare them away because they are profoundly ignorant. Yes, you educate and raise up the masses but that doesn’t mean you just toss them in the deep end. To a general audience watching a mayoral debate, saying “death to Israel”, though correct, only closes doors. Framing it first as an issue of equal rights will actually cause people to let their guard down and listen to you. I believe Mamdani’s approach is correct here.

I don’t recall him ever saying Israel has a right to exist. I do recall him articulating the one-state position, though.

For most people, working hard academically to get into top universities becomes your only shot at transforming your material conditions.

I know I’m pointing out something very obvious here and that the solution isn’t so easy, but it strikes me that the solution here is to make class mobility or other improvement in material conditions possible outside of this system. Trying to just stamp it out seems like it would be very ineffective.

Got it, just to be clear I read Kon-Tiki in 8th grade and hadn’t followed up on my knowledge since, I didn’t realize it was racist pseudoscience (but in hindsight I totally see that)

So was Kon Tiki just kinda bunk science or?

Notice that all these offers of recognizing a Palestinian state (which I should point out, should not even be up for debate since the State of Palestine was created with Israel by the UN in 1948) all include “if Hamas disarms”. This is a non-starter, it’s basically them dangling a little carrot to accept Israel’s “offer”. If Hamas disarms then it’s likely the entire population of Gaza will be removed at best, and murdered down to the last child at worst. Also, recognition is nice but isn’t worth much. Israel and the US don’t give a single care if the entire world recognizes a Palestinian state, they still won’t. It’s exactly what they do with the blockade of Cuba. The whole world tells them to stop, and the US just gives the world the finger.

I think images of starving kids make these politicians feel a little heat. So they are making an offer they know Hamas cannot and will not accept to save face.

And regarding annexation… the situation of who holds what is quite murky right now. Maps say one thing, but I don’t think the IOF is much able to hold on to anywhere close to that much ground. And meaningful annexation i.e. bringing in settlers… that is not possible. Not without a lot of dead settlers. Israel abandoned Gaza for a reason. I don’t see how Israel could do anything more than an annexation on paper than denies use of some land to Gazans but functionally doesn’t allow Israel any more than that (though admittedly, that is still quite bad as it would pack more Gazans into a smaller area). I also get the impression the Israeli military is really looking for a way out of this, I cannot see how they would think maintain a partial annexation would be viable long term.

To be clear, I am not disagreeing with anything you are saying, just offering a different perspective.

You know what the US also gave Fallujah in addition to that aid, EliSSa? The highest rates of birth defects in the world, on account of all the depleted uranium rounds used on the people there.

This woman is definitely going to run for president and do so on nothing but Kamala’s “most lethal military in the world” comment and football metaphors.