Jabril [none/use name]

If rent control is not possible, maybe getting an elected rent adjustment program board set up could help. It’s basically an elected board that tenants can bring housing issues toand the board can decide to lower or waive rent in response to grievances. They generally also exist to mediate tenant landlord disputes. Often times landlords spend money to get “their guys” elected on these boards (like every elected position) but there could be some clause that landlords and their agents can’t be on the board or something like that

seems like substack is popular now too, could be a good place to be if they aren’t. I’m only on hexbear because of my masochistic nature, no other platform can satisfy me like this place

This person gets into a fight with almost everyone they interact here with off the jump. Plenty of people have tried being more charitable with them, myself included, but they don’t seem interested in engaging that way and have forfeited any baseline of respect.

This is more or less a leftist shitposting site which allows for people of many perspectives, which means allowing for disagreement and debate. If you want a more serious experience lemmygrad has that and they probably would have banned him by now and it wouldn’t even be an issue. I am here because I like the shitposting and less serious nature of the website. I haven’t reported that person or suggested they be banned, and if they were some other person with the same politics would show up and fill the void. This is like the third ultra taking these stances since I joined and when one vanishes it isn’t long before another appears.

As far as the “what if” scenario you posited, the majority of people who regularly post here seem to be on a similar wavelength about this guy and politics in general, even the anarchists that post here, so I just don’t think the scenario you are concerned about is really on the table. If this person wants to deescalate the self crit thread is available and there are many cases they could self crit about that I’ve seen in the last few months, if they did that I’m sure most people here would be fine cutting them some slack. Until something like that occurs, I don’t feel responsible for being “the bigger person” on a shitposting website to a shitposter. It feels like a sort of tone policing to insist that people need to be nice and friendly to assholes or else they are somehow responsible for the asshole’s personality flaws.

That does sound like a cohesive strategic view but have you considered that Venezuelans should be strapping explosives to shipping boats and sailing them 1,300 miles past 5 other nations to blow up a buoy outside Miami?

Seriously, every example was “just do what Vietnam did to the US, just do what USSR did to Germany, just do what Iran is doing now, this is material analysis.”

There is so much to pick apart about why it makes no sense and is antithetical to material analysis but truly you don’t even need to if you just glance at a map

think Venezuela should fight the imperial machinery to the last abuela.

This is really the part that has made me so consistently push against this here for the last few months. No one has provided an alternative aside from raining hellfire on abuelas and having essential national infrastructure destroyed, and even if that happened they can’t say how it ends up with Venezuela in a better position. It is really ghoulish suggestions, very online video game type behavior which sees human lives as zeros and ones.

tbh the only reason I did it is because they finally explained themselves after being asked what they would have done differently many times over the last couple weeks and it was wildly ignorant and I don’t think many people saw it because it was buried in a thread at the end of the week.

for weeks this person has been saying Venezuelans should have “struggled” more and that since they didn’t, they are fully vassalized by the US and run by a comprador government. and many people here were seeming to support that narrative.

so now that we finally have them explaining themselves fully and what their plan would have been after being asked so many times for so long, it seems like a shame to have it buried away where no one really sees the analysis behind their consistent vague anti-Venezuela posting.

I want to make sure it is very clear that the people who have these kind of purity politics positions, asserting that no one actually doing any work in the world is ever revolutionary enough, are really saying they want revolutionaries to senselessly die with no strategy for how it ever translates into victory. they think that victory is what Iraq and Afghanistan look like right now. If a socialist state isn’t putting itself into a position where it ends up looking like 2026 Afghanistan, they are reformists in the vein of Gorbachev. They think that because people in Iran have died and they continue to fight, Venezuelans should put themselves in the position to have more of their own people die. Not dying is a sign that you are working with your enemies. This is literally what this person is saying and it is not only tolerated but supported here, and I just think it should be said and that it is good to put it all out there and hopefully invite more discussion, especially from those people who seem to agree with the user I am linking to. I would love for the people who upvoted his posts there to explain why they agree with him that Afghanistan and Iraq “won” against the US, and what they have won, for example.

It does seem weird but Chavez did the same thing and so did Maduro, the most recent round was beginning to be planned under Maduro even though it was passed after his kidnapping. So it has a historical precedent in their movement, despite seeming like a move most of us imagine we would reject if we were involved.

I take posting on the internet as a deeply unserious thing to begin with and the tone is self indulgent, partially to entertain people who agree with me and are also tired of the same things I am. It’s funny to me at least but I’m obviously a liberal so my taste is atrocious.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/images/venezuelan-govt-backs-communes-to-boost-coffee-production-increase-exports/

Some positive news in the PSUV relationship with communes. They have turned over a coffee processing plant to commune control, serving 80 different coffee growing communes in controlling their means of production from seed to export.

Delcy spoke during the event and said, “Coffee is one of the most important items where the communal economy already has the entire production chain organized." This affirms that the overall plan of strengthening communes and diversifying the economy through communes is still a priority for the government, despite what ultras on the outside like to speculate about while parroting US imperialist narratives.

According to some users here, everyone involved with this should be dead if they were really communists, and since they are instead alive and continuing to strengthen their grassroots revolutionary movement even in the face of constant US aggression, they are really just slaves to the US with no sovereignty or autonomy.

I am glad these people are alive and continuing to strengthen their movement while under siege and have to trust that they will self correct based on their conditions and organizational capacity but I guess that’s not very communist of me.

It seems like wanting people to die is the communist position for many people here and that wanting people to be alive and in a position to prepare for future escalation from their enemies is seen as reactionary.

No one can explain to me how it makes sense but many people support it anyway, they also seem to think Iraq and Afghanistan “won” against the US though so maybe those people are actually not people at all but ghouls who only can spread US imperialist propaganda under the guise of "the left "

Many such cases, I stopped organizing with anarchists because some variation of this was happening in every different group I came across

They didn’t cooperate with fascist Germany, they signed a non aggression pact after they tried to rally the rest of Europe against fascist Germany and the Europeans said no and then signed their own agreements with Germany. The soviets being the last to try and avoid war with the fascists through a non aggression pact after the Europeans decided to cozy up to Germany means the soviets were the least culpable in the situation. Considering their entire economy was fucked after world war 1 and the Germans were already saying Slavic people were subhumans controlled by Jewish Bolsheviks before the non aggression pact was signed, there is literally no reason to assume bad faith on the Soviets part for trying to stave off more war for a few years to prepare for the inevitable.

And yes, it’s the communists who not only defeated the German fascists, but also the Italian ones as well.

And Japanese fascists. which is who was “mass murdered” by the Chinese after being colonized and brutally ruled by the Japanese for 14 years. The Chinese lost over 22 million people fighting fascism

When you grow up in nations that have villified communists, you default to believing all the lies and falsehoods you are told about communists.

Then one day you see people who have actually looked into those lies and found out they are made up stories by the ruling class to keep workers from overthrowing them and you think those people are “falling into the Tankie mindset,” and that you are the one free from being the victim of propaganda.

It is incredibly ironic, especially when people who are “against authoritarianism” start censoring and blocking users from educating people about these topics