It can feel that way because stimulants increase your heart rate. What size was it? I’d strongly advise against drinking an entire large can at once. When it comes to caffeine i find that less is more. I dilute my coffee with plenty of milk and when i do have energy drinks (though i generally try to avoid them) i will water them down in a 50-50 ratio.

The culture war has broken a lot of brains but the key to undoing that is to appeal to people’s class interests. They may not consciously understand those interests but they instinctively feel them. They are looking for validation and explanation, but unfortunately oftentimes they will turn to conspiracy theories, identity politics and other forms of magical thinking for answers. Our task is to provide them a real, materialist explanation, but do so not in a condescending way (the most ineffectual way to do class consciousness raising propaganda is to talk to people in the kind of smug, accusatory, “better-than-you” way that liberals do) but in a way that makes them feel seen and feel that their material woes are being taken seriously.

That is completely understandable. It’s impossible as a normal empathetic person to watch what is happening and not feel deeply affected.

They are incapable of comprehending the concept of two sovereign countries that aren’t in an overlord-vassal relationship and also aren’t enemies, because those are the only ways that the US relates to other countries.

Those same “Maoists” would have denounced Mao himself for the idea of New Democracy and the policies he adopted toward the national bourgeoisie. What all ultras have in common is that they refuse to take real material conditions into account, and this results in their inability to conceive of any sort of tactical flexibility as anything other than “betrayal”, a straying from the purity of the dogma. They live in a world where reality and the constraints it imposes are irrelevant and all that matters is having the perfect ideas; in short they are idealists.

Communism, no, sadly, not yet. The global south, yes. This is the weakest the “West” has been in four centuries, and if the current trajectory holds that decline will only accelerate. That in itself is a very good thing as it makes it much easier for communist movements and socialist societies to emerge and flourish. De-colonization is an absolute pre-requisite for any progress in a world where imperialism is the primary contradiction.

It’s war. There’s going to be death and destruction. Everyone who supports the resistance must steel themselves and understand that there will be sacrifices and suffering, and that the struggle will be long. But it is also important to remember that Palestine and Lebanon are only part of the larger axis of Resistance. The Great Satan could not even subjugate Afghanistan, so their pet neocolony certainly has no chance of subjugating the entire region. They will never again know peace no matter how many innocents they murder.

Finally, those of us who do not live there should not presume to know better than those who have been involved in this struggle for decades what strategy they should employ and how or when they should respond. They are not stupid and they are not blind, they understand at least as well as we do the enemy they are facing.

Sorry if it’s a repost, i’m not on tiktok so this was new for me.

Thanks! I’ve never used tiktok so i don’t really know the proper way to share a link to a video on that site.

My thoughts exactly!

I have no doubt that if the tables flip, and Rumble becomes big and mainstream enough to start getting pressure from the US government and corporate sponsors, this will probably all change

That’s probably how it will go. Then a new Rumble will appear and so on. The last resort of the imperialists will be to censor the internet right at the provider level, which will leave the imperial core (“the West”) in an information bubble increasingly detached from reality.

Rumble’s audience is already skeptical of mainstream media and other big tech platforms, so I’d say that it’s more likely your stuff gets traction on there

This is a very good point!

Twitch is already the reactionary version of Twitch. Twitch is a pro-imperialist platform and even more censorious than YouTube toward anti-imperialists. The post was asking about platforms that won’t do the State Department’s bidding. Twitch literally complies with anti-Russia sanctions, it bans and demonetizes Russian or pro-Russian channels.

If someone is looking for alternatives to YouTube because YouTube banned anti-imperialist channels that were getting too big, they are definitely not going to find that in Twitch.

Inevitably people who wake up to what is going on in the world are going to want to get away from these highly controlled mainstream platforms which are becoming more and more repressive as the establishment’s political control is threatened. Telling people that it’s not ok to go to alternative platforms because there is right wing content on there will only have one of two results:

Either they will abandon any nascent anti-imperialist sentiments they may have in order to be allowed to stay on the mainstream platforms, or it will drive them straight into the arms of the right which will welcome them into the alternative spaces and validate their frustration over the censorship and control they experienced on mainstream platforms.

Ultimately it is going to be inevitable that communists migrate to alternative platforms because the mainstream ones are just going to escalate their crack downs on anti-imperialist content. Branding these alternative platforms as “right wing platforms” is not going to help us in the long run. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as leftists will avoid them and these places will become more and more right wing echochambers. Meanwhile, everyone who remains dependent on the mainstream platforms will be forced to increasingly self-censor out of fear of getting banned.

The best thing to do is to establish a presence on these alternative platforms sooner rather than than later so that when the ban on the mainstream spaces does come we will be ready and will not be starting from zero.

If that is the case then Germany is currently backsliding hard on the civilization scale. The state of the German railways seems to get worse by the day. Feels like every other train is either delayed or cancelled these days. And they don’t even announce the cancellation ahead of time, if you go online they have the train as on time and supposedly running according to schedule until 10 min before it was supposed to come and then it’s suddenly “never mind, it’s not coming after all”. And by then it’s too late to look for alternative connections, you just gotta wait for the next one and hope that one comes. Makes getting anywhere on time impossible.

Sorry i know this was barely related to the topic of the post, i just needed to get that rant off my chest.

It may be better advice to ask a local PSL representative what is the right way to do things if you want to vote for them, because the official government channels where you would think to inform yourself are probably 100% controlled by either the Democrat or Republican party and may intentionally give out misleading or confusing information in order to get people to not vote or accidentally invalidate their ballots so that third party candidates get fewer votes.

If anything i am more inclined to be mistrustful of self proclaimed revolutionaries with large channels because that tells me they and their followers may be spending more of their time and energy online consuming and making content as opposed to irl doing real organizing work. You can have a million followers and that’s all well and good for education and propaganda but what have you done lately for workers, how have you fought landlords and corporations, when is the last time you went out to participate in direct action against war and against the arming of Nazis and the Zionist entity?

By what metric is this success defined?

he literaly thinks China is being rewarded by God […] and America is being punished

The fact is that China is on a rapid upward trajectory and the US empire on the opposite. People of all kinds of ideological inclinations and world views (except perhaps for a few deeply delusional diehard liberals) can see this.

It is natural to look for explanations when faced with profound changes in the world, and when someone lacks a materialist understanding of reality but is instead deep in the grasp of idealist magical thinking, they come up with all kinds of kooky ideas. The takeaway here is that even people who are as far removed from reality as these weirdos can see which way the wind is blowing. I take that as a very good sign.

Does it matter? Whatever someone’s reasons are for supporting China, the important thing is that they do. Results are what matter. The fact that millions of people around the world have a positive view of a prospering socialist state that is currently the biggest threat to the global imperialist hegemony is conducive to our goals as Marxist-Leninists and anti-imperialists.

In general i care less about why someone does something and more that they do it.