Yeah it’s definitely the Vladslav Zubok Collapse that they’re talking about. Brace has mentioned it in passing at least once or twice in other episodes.

The full audiobook of it is available on TankieTube btw.

Wanna learn something that’s really gonna boil your piss?

The entire scientific journal/paywall industry was pioneered by none other than arch-Zionist, Mossad asset, and Epstein-associate Robert Maxwell.

2. Uphold TC69 thought by starting up a book club (and hopefully more to follow) on feminist theory and encouraging mass participation, particularly from the he/him’s on the site. “The Will to Change” by bell hooks has been suggested by multiple people as a great starting point but please feel free to suggest any other works.

Audiobook available on TankieTube here

In a majority brown country, places like R*ddit talk about how dystopian and cult of personality-like this image is:

“I don’t know why but just looking at this gives me the creeps.”

“Let me get this straight, their government has money to distribute all of this material right across their country while their people starve?”

“Wow. Just wow. And they try and convince us that they’re a democracy?”

“This feels like something straight out of 1984.”

I kinda expected airing my grievances with the DSA and the CPUSA might open up an arena for infighting but I genuinely don’t want this to happen.

There’s plenty to be discussed about the DSA leadership but I think I’d only really do this face to face with people because the internet really doesn’t need yet-another unproductive slapfight.

At the end of the day there’s a lot of comrades and even just progressive libs in the DSA who are putting a lot of energy into fighting for a better world. I might not always agree with their strategies or the DSA leadership but this is where critical support isn’t some trope for me but it’s a very real thing; I largely support the DSA’s efforts, I have criticisms of the DSA (especially the leadership) but I would rather direct my energy against capitalism/imperialism/colonialism/the bourgeoisie and the DotB than putting it into attacking the DSA. Especially in a space like this one.

I’m gonna give some different advice to the rest of the comments:

I think the most important thing is to consider what you want to achieve out of joining a party. On the face of it this sounds like opportunism but hear me out before you jump to conclusions prematurely.

Do you want to develop your skills with activism in its many forms?
(Creating agitprop, making speeches, recording, making effective social media posts, and of course the pointy end of activism like hardcore protest strategy)

Join your local affiliation groups that are doing stuff like climate activism, Stop Cop City, anti-war protests, Palestine solidarity groups etc.

Do you want to develop your understanding of theory?

Join a local reading group or a larger national one like the PSMLS (did they have a split or something? I don’t keep up with the drama…)

Do you want to do mutual aid work?

Generally your local orgs are the best (and often the only) option.

Do you want to learn how to canvas and do the more formal party organising work?

Here I’d tentatively recommend volunteering for a campaign like Bernie/Jill Stein/Cornel West/the current PSL candidate. This will likely require you to hold your nose at least to a certain degree but if you want to learn the ins and outs, getting irl experience by rolling up your sleeves and doing the work is the absolute best way to do it.

Do you want to build connections and networks?

There are a lot of good options here but I’d recommend aiming for the stuff that is closest to the labour struggle/similar types of unionism (e.g. tenant unionism, radical prison outreach orgs, etc.) or to join a national organisation (assuming it has an active branch in your local area) such as the DSA(!) or even the CPUSA(!)

Remember that if it’s about building a network, you want to leverage the reach of the organisation you choose to affiliate yourself with so the bigger the org on a national as well as a local level, the better.

Do you want to form a vanguard?

This one is a little bit tougher. I’d recommend a good local reading group as the starting point but the other option would be to play the angles and drive a split in a larger organisation that is terminally revisionist like the CPUSA or the DSA (sorry CPUSA and DSA members, I know that your local people are probably really solid comrades but the top end of your orgs are absolutely dismal - I know you know it too and I don’t intend to shit on your local branch).

The ethics of causing a split are a very big discussion that is kinda tangential to the purpose of this comment. In cases like the CPUSA and DSA, I’d argue that they are already very much in motion (especially in the case of the DSA) so this is significantly different to joining a unified party and acting like some Trot wrecker within those ranks; a split where it’s only you splitting is the same as getting booted from a party. A faction of malcontents is a necessary precondition for a split and while you shouldn’t go fomenting disunity within a party, if one already exists then so be it.

There are probably some other aspects of development that I haven’t given attention to here but this is just a quick rundown off the top of my head for you to consider and to use as a point to spring off from.

Note that these things don’t have to be mutually exclusive; your local mutual aid group might also be deeply involved in activism and it’s likely to be a decent place for developing connections in too. You get the idea.

Party-hopping is poor form, generally speaking, so do commit to a course for a good while unless you have genuine cause to leave (corruption, gross mismanagement of the org, the org goes dormant or is disbanded, serious misconduct from org members, irreconcilable ideological differences etc.) although you can also pick and mix, depending on what your involvement allows so you might be able to be part of a national org while dedicating some time on the side to local unionism or solidarity/mutual aid work etc.

I guess in a sense what I’m trying to impress upon you here is that it’s okay to treat organising work in a similar way that you would a career. Obviously it shouldn’t be about ruthlessly selfish personal advancement at any cost but considering your own personal strengths, your passion, what areas you want to develop, and where you want to take your organising work is actually really commendable imo, especially if you plan to be a leader of some sort or you want to become part of a backbone of an organisation because you have critical skills and experience in certain domains; anyone can join and org and just follow along but almost invariably there will a desperate need for more niche skills like public speaking, skilled artists or organisers, and stuff like administration. So think about what you want to get out of joining a party/org and consider what you want to get out of a mutually-beneficial arrangement with them as well as where you would like to end up focusing your organising efforts on.

I vote Alevi. Feels like nearly everyone would get offended by an Alevi revert lol.

All The Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer is a good place to start to form the backdrop of contemporary Iran

Is it my fault for being a bad prime minister?

No, it is the transes who are to blame!

Honestly it was pretty gruelling to work my way through this book. Doesn’t help that I was extremely depressed at the time.

Zubok is neutral to positive in his assessment of Gorbachev and his reforms imo but for me it painted a picture of a very strategic dismantling of the USSR, mostly on an economic level, which seemed very cynical and calculated so that even if Gorby got ousted or someone assumed his position the reforms would have already gained enough momentum to basically ensure a capitalist restoration regardless of any later efforts to prevent it. Imo it was a counterrevolution established via policy. It makes my blood boil to think of all the immense sacrifices made just so Gorby could piss them up the wall. The book is definitely a fascinating autopsy into what happened and I definitely recommend it but at the same time it’s a very grim case study for a communist to delve into, for obvious reasons.

Anyway if you’re interested, there’s this Werner Herzog documentary Meeting Gorbachev where he interviews Gorby. Might make for an interesting way to close things out once you finish the book by getting a retrospective from him in his own words.

It’s gonna be down to the wire imo.

Kamala has lost steam and there’s such desperation from the voteshamers that I think most of her supporters have at least some degree of latent awareness that she isn’t capable of drawing in support outside of her base, either to the right of her or to the left.

Donald is low energy but almost all of his base is willing to hold their nose and vote for him, which drives the Blue MAGA crowd wild with envy. I really don’t look at that end of US politics much at all because it’s gross and I don’t have the stomach for it, plus it achieves nothing whereas there’s a chance I might be able to peel off the occasional progressive whereas conservatives are low yield per input so my take is that it’s a waste of time focusing on them. (Don’t get me wrong I’ll agitate anyone opportunistically, even a diehard Trump supporter, but I’m really not focusing my energy on honing my rhetoric and hooking in to their primary concerns because there are much easier targets out there.)

I think in it being such a close race it’s probably going to come down to one of those key states falling to one side or the other and who really knows which way the chips are going to fall in that situation?

If Trump wins I think he’ll lose the popular vote though.

If this happens, I’m going to blame the Dems for how they had the opportunity to abolish the electoral college, to make the presidential election a popular vote, and establishing ranked-choice voting to instead push through military aid and financial relief to support the genocide in Gaza as their top priority which means Joe Biden chose this and now we have to respect that choice and live with the consequences of it because Biden and Harris didn’t want to listen to the voter base.

When they blame us for the loss, remember to ask them this: if we are such a powerful, important voting bloc then why did Kamala choose to speak over us rather than recognising that the most important factor in politics is to make crucial compromises in order to achieve progress and to prevent Trump from seizing power?

Use it to defend West Asians from the inevitable hate that will be directed at them for “making” Kamala lose as well, please.

It’s Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada.

Here’s a documentary about the Canadian Residential School system featuring interviews with people who suffered at the hands of this egregious injustice against First Nations peoples.
Note that this documentary came out before the largest discoveries of unmarked graves at residential schools was made.

Here’s a documentary about the Highway of Tears.
Given the history of so-called Starlight Tours, and especially the fact that no pig has ever been charged for causing deaths by freezing, I find it harder to believe that zero cross-burners are implicated in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women phenomenon than to think that they are complicit in it. The abject lack of investigations done into MMIW certainly points in that same direction too.

This is the Canada that condescends to the world about how it’s imperative to uphold human rights. No justice, no peace.

Of all the people aside from uncle Ted, I would have assumed that Tolkien the arch philologist would have gotten the eat your cake/have it too phrasing the right way round. Apparently not.

Who tf ornithologists naming these birds!?

I’d say that there’s the assumption that she went to the vet and said “I tried to gas my dogs last night and now they aren’t walking around” or “I accidentally left the gas on and poisoned my dogs” when she might have just said she found her dogs this way, which is much more likely.

With urgent medical treatment like this vets would have a protocol. Dogs are ridiculous for eating things that cause self-termination and it happens all the time. If you have two dogs presenting with an inability to walk then immediately the vet is going to ask “Wtf did they eat??”.

When it comes to medical interventions like this in an urgent setting, I’d hazard a guess that charcoal is routinely administered. If there’s any toxin in their digestive tract then it’s the best chance of adsorbing it. Activated charcoal will adsorb orally administered medications too but you can hook a dog up to an IV so they can mainline any meds and even if there’s a remote chance they ate something bad, charcoal is very cheap and very safe to administer especially as something that only occurs rarely.

If a vet told me that as a matter of routine whenever a dog presents with any kind of poisoning symptoms, they administer charcoal I’d absolutely believe it. Same goes for doctors in an emergency setting working with young kids and people with intellectual disability.

This is one of my favourite Nina Simone moments

Here’s a TankieTube link to a documentary about the Bhopal industrial disaster.

Lots of anti-dandruff shampoos can be used for jock itch. You want something that has selenium sulfide or zinc pyrithione in it. The higher concentration the better (as long as you’re buying it off the shelf in a grocery store anyway).

Apply the shampoo to the affected area. Leave it to sit for the time stated on the bottle or longer because that really is not going to do you any harm. If you really want to knock it on its head apply the shampoo before you shower so it doesn’t get diluted by the water and let it sit on your skin for a few minutes and then jump in the shower.

Rinse off. Dry your skin thoroughly, paying close attention to the affected skin areas. I’d recommend using a hairdryer or a fan to dry your skin in these areas completely before you get dressed. Repeat this daily until the itching and skin discolouration is gone then continue with the treatment for at least a couple of days longer.

Keep the shampoo bottle in your shower and if you notice any itching starting up again, apply another round of the shampoo as a maintenance thing and you should be good.

If this doesn’t work then see a doctor/speak to a pharmacist and bring out the heavier stuff. But you might be surprised at how effective antidandruff shampoo can be and you can get a huge amount of treatment for only a couple of dollars. Probably less if you can find antidandruff shampoo in the dollar store where you are.

I’ve worked in the NGO sector. Obviously it will vary between countries but by and large the experience of interviews with NGOs leaves you scratching your head wondering if they’re a serious operation.

Thing is though, it’s the really slick NGOs that give a strong impression of being serious that are the ones to avoid, at least most of the time. Sure, the poor quality interviewer NGOs come with plenty of their own flaws but if the NGO is slick and corporate then most often they are the worst of the for-profit world with being ruthless and cutthroat while also paying like a non-profit and expecting workers to do their jobs (with plenty of unpaid overtime) because of their passion or dedication to a social cause.

The other NGO is the militant sort. Those ones are rare and they’ll mean business in a completely different way to a corporatised NGOs. Hard to find, hard to get into but if you’re good at what you do and you don’t fuck around then they can be really good places to work. Or they can be toxic as fuck but because everyone’s so single-pointedly focused on achieving outcomes, nobody rocks the boat and the culture of the NGO becomes worse each year.

It’s a weird corner of employment tbh.