It’s certainly true that politicians and the owning class oppose environmental action very strongly, but that doesn’t make it hopeless. We, the working class, are the basis of their power and wealth; we concretely have the power to force them to cooperate or topple them entirely. Clearly, the enviromental movements aren’t that strong yet, but they are getting stronger and the decaying environment will provide a basis for accelerating their growth as more people like you and I begin to take these issues seriously.

and there’s apparently nothing to be done to fix it in our lifetimes,

This really isn’t true, and treating it as true will lead to a much nastier future than “it feels really hot out most of the time”. It has implications for agriculture and ecological collapse, with entire societies being destroyed and some of the more privileged ones turning to eco-fascism. It’s a much darker future than you give it credit for, but also much less inevitable.

(at which point Peter Thiel’s next Moldbug inspired ghoul will present themselves)

It’s almost like this mindset is more of a stalling tactic than a strategy, because there will always be some new Threat to Democracy

Having a rapist for a president is a joke.

I’ve got bad news for you

There might be another Capitol Riot-style clownshow, but like the first time, nothing of real significance will happen. A few zealots and or cops might die, but nothing rising to the level of a “blood bath”, let alone a “civil war”.

I don’t think Trump was being literal when he said bloodbath though. It’s a common English idiom.

I’m unimpressed. The US has crushed rebellions from its inception, famously including the civil war but also many other attempts, and I would say that the patterns of what some call the New Afrikan nation within the US to revolt, going solidly up to the 1980s or further depending on your interpretation, are perhaps the most important.

As some guy said, “Revolution is not a dinner party” and establishing and maintaining a revolutionary state requires its own violence. No Marxist says otherwise, as it is the famous quote of Engels: “The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.”

Technically it doesn’t legalize it, it just avoids the criminalization of it. This is significant because it makes it much easier to reform (which is how around half of states have reformed it at least a little), and this combined with the fact that most states lack significant reforms tells you a lot.

Literally what is a single basis for what you’re saying? When has the SC ever struck down a law raising prison labor wages on the basis that prisons have a legally-protected right to slave labor? I genuinely think you have no idea what laws are if you can’t tell a difference between a sanctioned right and the absence of a prohibition.

The 13th Amendment doesn’t say “You must use slave labor” and, in fact, doesn’t even say “Prisons have a right to do slave labor,” it just says “This stuff we’re saying here forbidding slavery doesn’t apply to penal labor”, it’s negative, not positive.

Anyway, my original point is that you absolutely do not need to change the Amendment to amend prison labor laws, hence how prison labor laws have been amended in many states already.

Fair enough, I mostly agree. I can imagine that China, Vietnam, and Laos are on the list because of, uh, capitalist roading, and the DPRK is nationalist to a reactionary degree and kind of culty, but what criticism would you apply to Cuba? Do they do capitalist roading too? I don’t hear much about them in that regard.

Is it your stance that every nominally Marxist country is actually Marxist? That there are no revisionist countries even though, for example, the USSR spent most of its existence being revisionist?

I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.

The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn’t just implode of their own accord. Now, it’s fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren’t able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that’s a very different assertion from “communism doesn’t work”.

You probably want to replace “atheism” with “antitheism” in that context. I would disagree either way, but I think you’d have a point with antitheism.

I apologize about the language bit. I rarely get a liberal arguing about this who wouldn’t use such a term as “comrade” derisively.

Anyway, I explained the reason I shared it, which is that it is:

showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.

But that’s not precisely what you asked for, I just don’t have a good source on your real question.

The ICC is not trustworthy, and I certainly trust the objective events that even liberal media report on when they come into conflict with what the ICC says. I don’t know what Putin says on this and have not cited him once because that would be absurd. You are denying reality in favor of statements.

Aside from the ICC notoriously being an American running-dog, charges are not convictions. We’ve already seen Russia cooperate with returning children, we can’t say that there’s no intention of it.

They were children abandoned in a war zone. Russia needs to do something about keeping them fed, housed, and clothed. If it didn’t, then it would still be getting accused of genocide, though in that case with more reason! Furthermore, Russia clearly and demonstrably is cooperating with humanitarian organizations to reunite families, and many have been reunited already. The accusation is alarmist nonsense from the perpetual self-proclaimed ethnic victims to justify their fascist cult to literal perpetrators of the Holocaust.

No worries about the Israel part

I would say that yes, it would certainly involve reliquishing land, that’s the reality of the situation. I don’t think there’s any credence to the “abducted Ukrainian” story. On the off chance you mean POWs, they would surely be returned. If you mean the children who Russia evacuated from the war zones that it controlled, most likely the children with a surviving guardian will be reunited with them as has already happened, and the children who can’t be reunited with a guardian (for any number of reasons) will wind up in the local foster system in Donbass. The Ukrainian government loves crying wolf about being the victim of a supposed genocide by Russians, but here as ever there simply isn’t adequate reason to believe it’s true.

To be clear, I’m not saying Trump would take any action an anglosphere liberal would approve of (though I think his stance on Ukraine is the one thing he supports that is surprisingly reasonable if it’s true), I’m just trying to explain as best as I understand it the things Putin would take into consideration. This is of course all in the “pro” column for him, but it’s also extremely unreliable (Trump could easily be lying about his position, though I believe he isn’t) and doesn’t make up for the much worse possibility of Trump dramatically increasing US involvement. As things stand, Russia is surely going to win the war, so it would be poor strategy to rock the boat with the wildcard Trump currently represents with respect to this specific issue.

I’m not saying he’s a dove or anything, but he doesn’t really give a shit about NATO therefore isn’t terribly invested in protecting the Zelensky regime, and he has been consistent about saying the war should be ended so Ukrainians survive, [which, to be clear, I doubt he personally cares about, but it’s his platform] and even said this when he was pressed with the insanely unprofessional and ridiculous bait question “Do you want Ukraine to win?” at the debate.

Anyway, it’s no guarantee, he’s a very unstable and erratic guy, but I think he sees the war as a waste of money and would prefer friendlier relations with Russia.

People are imagining this like (if you’d forgive the analogy) Dragon Ball Z, where Vegeta is the big villain and we all need to rally around defeating him, but then an even bigger and more evil villain appears, Frieza, so now we team up with the still-evil Vegeta because he’s more good than Frieza.

That’s not what this is. This is Reaganites tipping their hand that they and the democrats are fundamentally on the same team, they are all part of the neoliberal establishment, and Trump, in his instability, is rocking the boat.