r/worldnews is almost exclusively bots, paid posters (US or Israeli troll farms), or right wing techbro suburbanites.

I was looking for a serious answer and posted that USDA factoid as a frame of reference, not an attempt at levity that in any other situation might be considered amusing.

I do however, appreciate your attempt.

It did give me a sad smirk, because your intent was not to downplay my inquiry but to provide relief from the stress and pain of having to witness these horrors for the past 361 days.

Don't mean to be a pedant, but I've a question in search of primary or strong secondary sources:

• According to the USDA, the average American eats one tonne or ton (2k and 2.2k pounds) of food a year.

How many tons/tonnes of food got into Gaza for the past year? (Maybe Israel revealed this data itself but tried to divert/obfuscate it)

You feel like this because defeat and victory are not inevitabilities but forgeable and unpredictable chains of decisions that produce such a conclusion. I doubt Hezbollah will cease in its efforts but it is actually looking grim, assassinations aside.

The conclusion we all fear is that since Israel has the full support of the US, Hamas and Hezbollah are effectively fighting the US, and therefore it is only a matter of time that Israel destroys them both and finishes the genocide in Gaza. That the world just stood by, again, to witness and failed to stop genocide. And that follows a precedent that genocide is OK (even if the precedent was that it was tolerable if the US supports the ally doing so. ) And if the victims resist their own extinction.

I think this anxiety also comes from that Israel's strategy of targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure to undermine the military capabilities of their enemies also is not just meant to undermine their enemy's political and military capabilities/credibility, but the objective in of itself. The terrorism, the mass murder, the cruelty, are all the point.

The notion that Israel has the right to torture, deform, maim, kill, and oppress its victims in Palestine and abroad, that this right is inviolable and retribution for violating this right is annihilation and decimation is a cruel and vicious one that is impossible to bear.

Scholars, commentators, journalists can all try to forecast "Here is why Israel is actually doomed" but genocidal and fascist projects like empire and settler colonialism do live on. They are fueled by human sacrifice. The only thing that can stop these things are power.

The hope is that Israel collapses on its own power before it is too late.

yu yu hakusho, I think is probably better dubbed.

Don't let him be near the owl family

Fair point. I suppose I thought if one is too lethargic to read then one is too lethargic to think, then at that point you might as well outsource it.

tier thought, shouldn't have advised it. mb.

I've loosely followed Hedges' career for several years since I read his book, Empire of Illusion.

Because he's a journalist who tours countries and interviews people, his experiences are anecdotal and real. He touched grass for a living while his contemporaries were in hotel rooms in safe areas in conflict zones, e.g: he was an active duty journalist in the wars in Yugoslavia and the uprisings in Palestine. So while it is a personal experience he brings to his analysis, his anecdotes are not without empirical merit, nor does he remove empiricism from his books and articles.

In that sense, Hedges thinks of himself as a prognosticator of capitalism's and humanity's fate and a diagnostician of our current state of affairs. He is deliberately vague on a post-revolutionary society- he does not know or have an imagination on what one would look like.

Hedges claims there should be some style of Nordic "socialism"/social democracy, he may even think there are some aspects of capitalism worth having but Hedges is quite critical on private control, operation, and ownership of fossil fuels, etc. He probably would go along with a mass proleterian communist revolution if one were to come along.

Hedges does not specifically advocate for these positions, but instead chooses to be more of a critic than advocate of capitalism, liberalism, Western hegemony, etc. Ultimately, what he does explicitly advocate for is for the resurgence of non-violent mass movements to retake power and pressure both state and capital to capitulate to the demands and aspirations of the public. Not through voting but organizing, educating, agitating, and civil disobedience and resistance. While Hedges says he is not a pacifist, he does write that because the state "speaks" violence much more brutally and brazenly, non-violence - distinct from passive resistance - is a more sophisticated form of resistance than violence is.

He does revere leaders like MLK but Hedges is not ignorant of the context and parallel movements that had violent resistance in its time, or that sometimes it is necessary. (e.g, Palestine)

What Hedges is trying to accomplish is the advocacy fo that old axioms: educate, agitate, organize. Or touch grass with other people. What every "breadtuber" just ultimately has to advocate for and toward. Because that is all going on in the moment; there is no Lenin or vanguard here in the US or West to catapult change in this current hour, year, decade.

On Marx & Hedges:

I remember reading or hearing him speak about Marx; not as that Marx's analyses are wrong but his solutions are. He says he doesn't really believe the proleteriat are the origin and catalyst of revolt - as we can see in the decade of the 2010s that spontaneous proleterian that amounted to little - but the intellectual and middle manager class of decaying institutions and states that find no hope of advancement and self-actualization, that these people who abandon the project are ultimately the vanguard leaders - these disillusioned administrators of capital and empire - that lead worker revolutions.

I think it's fair to be critical of Marx, Lenin, and other leftist thought leaders because it still is a science of sociology and understanding our world. Heretics are necessary to defend and adapt your ideas toward, to reinforce current ones or adapt new strategies for advancing political struggles.

Ultimately, I just think this interview is a bad one. He has bad interviews, like the previous one on his website with Jimmy Dore. :facepalm

I think their issue is on focusing on tokenism or identity in of itself instead of how a proleterian of one or multiple identities might interact with capitalism; e.g, how an indigenous person, an LGBTQ person, each have their own specific yet categorically proleterian interactions and experiences of living under capitalism, and is managed by capitalism & the state.

Seems they're trying to say that liberalism hijacks identity politics to shelter the capitalist system from serious critique, and deflects and redirects academic and intellectual critique to the avenue of amelioration and reform of the capitalist & state welfare systems.

I couldn't get much further, but knowing Chris Hedges' works, I'd like to think that his, and perhaps Christian Parenti's, call-to-action is to emphasize how identities are part of the broader class experience instead of isolated islands of lived experience; each of the issues of the working class are interrelated. i.e, We are not free until all of us are free.

At least that's what I want to think from Chris Hedges. I don't know if he does have this genuine beliefs or he just entertains anyone who wants to get on his show; he still has Jimmy Dore as a guest though.

He did have excellent opinion pieces and news regarding Palestine though. I guess I'll just regard him as the same manner as Norman Finkelstein.

Two things you can do:

• ChatGPT bullet points summaries of people who just post excerpts from news articles and treat that as a genuine comment or interpretation of the facts thereof, with a prompt like "analyze this but from a marxist leninist analysis". (That really annoys me btw, people just posting a paragraph and highlighting it. Say what you mean/interpret. It's a lot t have the reader have to sus out what you mean".)

• Read a page at a time of State and Revolution and Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism. Afterward, just paraphrase the theories from those publications and remember to cite his works when addressing topics of conversation like news, politics, and economics.

e.g: Saying something as common knowledge in Hexbear like "Police are inherently reactionary in a bourgeois state since state violence is the means of mediation of class conflict between the capitalist and labor classes." is in fact, Lenin's premise of why the state exists in State and Revolution.

I'm kind of reminded of a game from childhood, Radiata Stories, where they handle goblin as sentient people with their own culture and agency. Unfortunately the plot forces a zero sum game upon the human and humanoid (non-human in the game) people for their survival.

Speaking of, Runescape does the goblin thing quite well with the variety of tribes from what I remember of the quests.

12 Kingdoms, Rayearth, Escaflowne, and El Hazard were decent Isekai from what I remember. They're all from the 90s/00s though.

They still had trash Isekai in the 90s, like Those Who Hunt Elves.

If you've seen Scary Movie, it's the same sort of humor from that era. It isn't just shows from the 2000s, it's being a Millennial child in the 2000s that made it palatable.

Rewatching it now is really ugly. Kind of like that Marge Simpson story where her story is really gross, bizarre, and bigoted - a reference to the caricature of Apu - where you'd just find it severely distasteful.

I think that is their rationale; I didn't mean to imply that I believe this but it is on the back of my mind that this is a grim possibility.

Don't destroy your life to spite theirs. Spite their life by keeping consistent course of reminding them that their ideology demanded genocide and demanded it be normal. Don't let it be normal.

A lot of videos, articles, and academics were exclaiming this is the end of Israel. But the US is determined to see this through because any breaks are an admittance that most of the government, legislative, administrative, executive, elected, appointed, and mid level officers were complicit and enabled genocide.

This is a fight over logistics, and Israel has US resources at its disposal.

They plan to get Hamas to surrender, occupy Gaza, cleanse the rest and hide the evidence and investigators, journalists, activists will be barred from inspections. Census, forged.

You can't remain civil with people trying to downplay genocide through deflection, downscale, and redirection.

If you are trying to articulate why this bothers you, the reader, as it does me then allow me to attempt an articulation:

Giving this person free reign is not civility but license to exercise the normalization of genocide by painting its dissidents as irrational and uncouth; a license to dehumanize the victims of genocide as lost causes because Hamas has disqualified them from human protections. In other words, they are the white moderate from MLK's reference. Paraphrasing for the modern times: I want to sympathize with your plight but it is unseemly to do so.

Also the lethargic pace of banhammer or just the lolz amusement ideology of interacting with the troll before the ban comes.

Fair enough since making an argument of why one opposes something helps form our identities and understanding of it, but it is kind of trite.

Reaching 80 years in the past as if history was suddenly 1946 -> 2024.

Despite what the geese would tell you, never cuddle with a giant cabbage during hamburger hour at Gamestop.