Nola

Why do we assume this is real to begin with and not just more theater in the lead up to the re-escalation?

Nothing Hegseth did was without the explicit consent of the president and the implicit consent of Republican controlled congress(and quite a lot of Democrats)

And at ANY TIME congress could have pulled funding for the war as is their power constitutionally.

This is simply a way to shovel all the blame onto one person while obfuscating their own accountability, Trump’s own accountability, and Israel’s accountability.

While actively avoiding the mechanism in their face that could end this war tomorrow because deep down most Republicans and a good chunk of Democrats support these actions or at least the larger foreign policy behind it.

Which TBC also only works if Trump doesn’t continue the war and goes further up the escalation ladder. Which by all accounts he is positioning to do.

No one does false flags

I wouldn’t go that far…

Second Gulf of Tonkin, The Nayirah Testimony, Operation Northwoods, USS Liberty, Gleiwitz Incident, Ryazan, Lavon Affair, USS Maine

And it depends on how strictly we are defining that term, cause CIA activities are awash in operations meant to create or foment incidents, create pretenses for further interventions/escalations, and obfuscate US or western responsibility.

This feels like it needs a semester more than a few paragraphs lol. But I will attempt to answer some of it to the best of my ability cause I think if nothing else it can be helpful cause almost everything you said here I come across all the time.

1.) Communism is an end goal strived for after achieving sufficient social and economic transformation, not something you simply enact by decree.

Socialism though, broadly speaking, is understood as a transitional process of transforming the institutions, property relations, and class structures inherited from capitalism into one that serves the proletariat as opposed to the capitalist class.

And developing those productive forces can take a myriad of forms, including managed capitalism.

This is actually one of the fundamental misconceptions I see people fall into constantly.

And that process will necessarily look different depending on a country’s historical circumstances, material conditions, level of economic development, and position within the global economy.

That’s why Marxism is fundamentally a materialist framework rather than a strict blueprint for organizing society. The goal isn’t to immediately abolish every market, private enterprise, or capitalist institution regardless of circumstances. It’s to transform the underlying class relations and develop the material conditions necessary to eventually transcend capitalism altogether.

2.) China and Russia are not really interchangeable beyond their relationship as adversaries to the US hegemonic order.

First, Russia doesn’t even claim to be communist anymore from what I read(maybe nostalgia for the USSR). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Russian Federation that emerged underwent an enormously destructive process of capitalist restoration thanks to US shock therapy and Yeltsin’s government(which Putin comes out of). Which led to mass privatization and oligarchic consolidation. Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian capitalist state and the re-hardening of hostilities is it’s own chapter but the friction points came over perceived encroachment into it’s spheres of influence and economic protectionism America saw as acts of economic warfare.

China is a fundamentally different story, and the distinction is important because it goes directly to questions of class power and who ultimately controls the economy.

China has billionaires, private capitalists, wage labor, markets, and significant wealth inequality. That is all true

However, unlike Russia, where the post-Soviet transition transferred enormous amounts of public wealth into private hands and created a politically powerful oligarchic capitalist class, China’s proletarian revolution retained substantial state ownership of strategic industries, a state-controlled banking system, and a Communist Party that maintains ultimate political authority over private capital.

TLDR: Think of the words of lesser remembered founding father and first Supreme Court Justice John Jay:

The people who own the country ought to govern it

This gets to the heart of what separates Russia and China’s relationship to capital, property, and who holds power in the state and who that state is designed to serve and preserve. And I often find it a bit frustrating cause a materialist understanding of Russia today is more like a sneak preview of America tomorrow than it is of anything to do with communism.

3.) So why even pretend to be Communist?

The theoretical justification behind the Great Leap Forward and then Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms was that China, emerging from centuries of imperial domination, war, and extreme underdevelopment, needed to develop its productive forces before it could construct a more advanced socialist economy. And that in order to survive as a nation had to be reflective of the broader global economy, geopolitical realities, and historical context they existed within.

And attempts to go against that were met with what places like Cuba, the USSR, and any number of other attempted socialist revolutions(or even just unaligned nations) experienced in terms of economic isolation, sanctions, embargoes, political destabilization, covert operations, military invasions etc.

Market dependency, foreign investment, private enterprise, and class dynamics were therefore treated as instruments of development rather than necessarily being incompatible with a socialist transition.

China considers itself to be in primitive socialism.

And i think there is a pretty passionate debate about whether some of the same capitalist relations used to develop productive forces also reproduce capitalist class interests, inequalities, and concentrations of economic power that may ultimately undermine the socialist transition itself.

TBH I also think that feature can become it’s own problem too.

The Fediverse may be good at combating certain forms of enshittification(it’s too small right now to know for sure), but what qualifies as such can easily drift into ideological balkanization, purity testing, and arbitrary in-group/out-group policing…Which I already see happening here during my short stay.

And social networks thrive and grow on cross-community connectivity, discovery, and engagement, excessive ideological sorting and fragmentation then undermines that. That is a core contradiction in the Fediverse that I am not sure is easily reconciled.

Where the incentivizes toward that balkanizing also increases the risk of creating a network even more unfriendly or overwhelming to newcomers to navigate(ideological boundaries they didn’t create, didn’t consent to, and may not even understand), while risks decreasing broader political dialogue, coalition-building, and productive disagreement that makes town square social media what it is and not just a more convoluted Discord for messageboards.

And how many accounts are just dormant for a decade or at least until some bot farm hacked it and repurposed it to do some Hasbara on your local community sub?

Honestly? Cause much of the entirety of the US tech capitalist model is just digital feudalism.

Create a compelling reason to join your digital kingdom then when enough people move there you put up the enclosures and start profiting off exploiting your subjects and charging tolls to people wanting to access them.

And ideally enough of that peasantry remain dependent on your digital commons that realistically they can’t leave.

The upside is that this process naturally lends itself toward enshitification over time. The downside is that unlike messageboards of old, social media deploys incredibly addictive algorithms to keep a core type of user engaged. And then those habits harden and leaving feels impossible.

In summary, they want the world as it largely exists now but they don’t want the poor reputation, political backlash, civilian unrest, and for some of them, the personal guilt associated with the exploitation they built their fortunes off of and need to sustain to keep it.

It’s not a bad litmus test under current US politics.

It is about the most powerful third rail in politics right now that exposes the contradictions within the Democratic Party and their voters

Someone that is an Israel First Democrat is basically a 1 for 1 for being corporate captured on other issues as well.

And a willingness to call Israel a genocide, an apartheid, and support a full arms embargo(including defensive weapons) is also a good clue they won’t be speaking half measured on healthcare policy, housing, wealth taxes, universal childcare, fighting Trump, ending Citizens United, supporting unions, banning AI data centers, a living wage, and any other issue that faces internal contradictions with Establishment corporate Dems and their voters.

And sure enough, Ossoff is problematic on all those domains as well.

Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest

Money(and power)

ICE at it’s core is a jobs program

It’s shitty but this is one way that fascism has historically rooted itself into a nation.

It shores up support by creating a defacto jobs program for disaffected, immiserated, and angry people that buys their loyalty by providing them a good salary and the promise of social status as an enforcer of the regime. And for others it is a job that was hiring in a economy with a precarious job’s market. Which creates a golden handcuff problem under capitalism.

And the other side of this is that for many supposed “pragmatic” oppositional politicians they recognize this co-dependency and are scared of dismantling it. In part cause they might risk losing voters(see Talarico in Texas) but also cause they will simultaneously be beholden to their own oligarchical dependencies, typically thru the donor system or party disciplining, that prevent them from offering what is actually needed which is a replacement jobs program, or wholesale economic restructuring that deals not just with this problem but the larger driving forces of broad economic immiseration, alienation, and disaffection. But because that runs afoul with many of their donors(and in some cases constituents), they box themselves into this “reform” posture both toward ICE and larger economic fixes.

Which just ends up as someone being another do nothing Democrat.

And while this author gives good analysis to this economic relationship and offers some tactical advice for the oppositional movement, it similarly fails to offer a deeper fix for the underlying class and economic problems that not only risk still remaining, but actually risk intensifying if not addressed simultaneously.

Democrats are the HR department of the Oligarchy

Ossof is a conservative Democrat that is somewhat adept at co-opting a shaved down language of left wing economic populism(while functionally upholding the class interests of donors and the party status quo aligned with them). So he is good at tricking Dem party loyalists and pundit-brain rotted progressives into thinking he’s the next Obama.

Hence why he is also currently circulating as the new hot 2028 candidate from the Dem pundit and consultant mouthpieces in the media.

Mamdani is seeding enough people that can jump into that Senate race if AOC runs for president.

For instance I still contend the long play is to have Brad Lander run for Schumer’s seat

And depending on his ambitions I could see Mamdani running for governor of NY in 2030 and one of the NYC DSA reps challenging Gillibrand.

Ok, but counterpoint

What if instead we just passed some mandatory sensitivity training and made them take their masks off when temperatures are above 65 degrees(we wouldn’t want to force them to get sniffly noses when it’s chilly)?

#BIPARTISANSHIPOVERSOLUTIONS

I think the question comes down to who are the states not on board that can now come on board and would it benefit them?

And unfortunately, the states that could sign on that now have trifectas according to the article are all benefitting from the current system: Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. Since they are swing states.

And several of them have presidential hopefuls that I am sure are trying to fundraise on the fact they can deliver those states. 2 of which are governors. So I think this is all a long way of getting to what the OP said…

TLDR: Most likely no, they will not sign on.