agitprop

Below is a copy pasta of my own post on the general megathread:

Since Trump is obviously lying daily about the Hormuz situation you can provide resources to them that both explains the situation and makes them realize the US is evil for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl-sSsZnSP8

"Why America is Losing the War With Iran (w/ John Mearsheimer) | The Chris Hedges Report"

Both of these are perfectly normal-looking older white guys so it won't set off any boomer alarms. They do not use any ML terms or language that is difficult to understand. They do not drone on and on (looking at you Chomsky).

Also you can direct them to www.presstv.ir so they can "see what the Iranian government is saying". Most Americans can't read well so you have to know your audience.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/4404

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

From Caitlin’s Newsletter via This RSS Feed.

linky to twitter

It should be in order starting with Obama's press secretary Jen Psaki. There have been a lot over the ten years and I forget some of them and have forgotten the order. It might also be helpful to point out what their actions were and how it failed. Most of the failures are just not following through. I used to post these on reddit to defuse libs hope for the daddy of the week who was "definitely gonna stop drumf this time" but kept getting and assurance that this time is different. Maybe people will take a good hard look at the list of a decade of failure at a moment where confidence in the system is at an all time low and it will change some minds finally. Libs love a good Gish Gallop. Too bad so many people had to get hurt in the process.

Here are a few off the top of my head:

Jen Psaki "rang the alarm bells about the incoming admin" (nobody did anything to put up guard rails)

The Epstein stuff (part 1) self explanatory.

Rachael Maddow: swore she had Trump's taxes finally, as if he just had a line item that said "crimes". Huge flop. Lots of people tuned in and it was nothing.

Robert Mueller: Russiagate investigation (flopped, basically exonerated trump in the court of Republican opinion)

Stormy Daniels: told scandalous details of Trump's private life and sued him

Lev Parnas: still really don't know what that was all about. Was he a snitch on his way to jail? Resulted in nothing

Jack Smith: attempted to prosecute Trump for... Stuff. Mishandling documents? (Failed to get anywhere, ran the clock out and was fired. Plus, Biden was caught doing the same shit)

Fauci: tried to point out how the pandemic was handled poorly. Handled it poorly himself

Joseph Robinette Biden: beat trump in an election only to hold the door for him to come back. No guard rails wee installed, and no prosecution of anyone from the previous admin. Carried on Trump's policies and even made some worse. Was a bit corrupt himself so it gave trump people ammo to be like "everyone does it". So much more, but that would be it's own post.

Merrick Garland: slow walked prosecution and ran the clock out. Libs were pissed! There were sure this was it™

Alnur Mussayev: started the "agent Krasnov" stuff with no evidence. Fizzled out.

The Epstein stuff (again)

Pulled up to a state park this past weekend and balked at the admission price.

“This is insane. What are our taxes for?”

I hear ya, man.

“You know, this is why we need a socialist revolution. It’s way overdue in many ways.”

Ya goddamn right about that.

2nd conversation (spurred by a rant):

Walking down city street wondering aloud if favorite Middle Eastern restaurant would still be there…

“I’m not sure if that’s it; looks like a different name now (note: it was the same). You can never tell anymore with all this capitalist destruction in our lives!”

Woman behind me:

“Exactly; that’s true.”

Folks, speak up loudly and often in public. Comrades need to know that each other exists.

We’re getting somewhere…

linky to tweet, don't know if it's the author

It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities: but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and of prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts, expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited and angry, and read me preachments about the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that caused all the misery in society's cellar. When I mentioned that I couldn't quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the intem-perance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life and called me an "agita-tor" —as though that, forsooth, settled the argument.

Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had expected to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high places—the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors, and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, auto-mobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands. Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead —clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the men who live up to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence." I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.

I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans and steamer-chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered tbat their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black. browed boss of a municipal machine. This editor who nublichar patent medicine advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising. Called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I told him that his political economy was antiquated and that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.

This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a gross, uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. And this railroad magnate broke his word as a gentleman and a Christian when he granted a secret rebate to one of two captains of industry locked together in a struggle to the death.

It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime—men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble but who were not alive. Then there was a great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean.

It did not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it. Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have refused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime. I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlor floor of society.

Intellectually I was bored. Morally and spiritually I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious working men. I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.

So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing edifice of society above my head, holds no delights for me. It is the foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to labor, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder, with intellectuals, idealists, and class conscious working men, getting a solid pry now and again, and setting the whole edifice rocking. Someday, when we get a few more hands and crowbars to work, we topple it over, along with all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden materialism. Then we’ll cleanse the cellar and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlor floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.

I am not sure if this is the right space to post this: Jason Hickel and his colleagues have just launched this website collecting their work on global inequality, including many aspects, such as unequal exchange, climate injustice, carbon inequality, debt and structural adjustments programs. It's very comprehensive and full of graphs that can be very useful for agitprop.

If anyone talks to you about USSR, Russian, or Chinese imperialism show them this graph:

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5110414

"This is just as bad as those places we intentionally destabilized!!!"

Comment section full of people saying things like "At least someone has the backbone to stand up to Trump!!"

This is what taking a stand looks like to you?

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

Hexbears! I come to you with a challenge, an agitprop-off if you will. The most libbed community on Reddit, WhitePeopleTwitter, has been downed by the Admins. Now is the time for us to create a bunch of memes to post around reddit/bluesky to generate some movement behind a "Reddexit". Encourage people to sign up for Lemmy instances, or encourage Subreddits to break off and form their own instances.

If you are feeling daring, reddexit . com is available on Namecheap for like $6 a year.

As a bit of inspiration, I had deepseek generate this:

They need to start being honest with themselves that there is a reality where the Democrats never win another US election.

Are you really just going to "wait it out" and watch Trump Jr. or Meatball Ron takes over in '28? Then what?

Just like in Shadowrun Treaterinos

time is a flat circle