This is an image of a panting of the Execution of Marie-Antoinette in 1793; in the Carnavalet Museum, Paris.

A reasonable position on Nietzsche is that his writing is so imprecise and often contradictory, that whatever insights he does have are so buried that the opportunity cost isn’t worth it. There’s no instance where there isn’t something more important to read that takes half as much effort.

This is a tale as old as time. I’m not sure this article is even saying anything novel about the disagreement. I’d add that the issue now is that there’s *so much* content, that clarity, concision and precision are even more important than they were previously.

I think it shows how committed the oligarchs are to holding onto power by any means necessary, and that those of us fighting against those who work forces, and don’t have the luxury of being a playboy, have to approach politics with the exact same level of seriousness.

It is unfortunate for all of us that the laws that govern the motion of US empire are a nuclear chain reaction, but it means that the only solution is to send the US into the sun.

So to get back to the original point, pundits reflexively ascribe idiocy to Trump and his minions, forgetting the history of the US and its *identity*. Empires are not created by leaders, they create the leaders they need based on their own internal logic — their “laws of motion”.

Or, the decisions are a combination of inertia and lack of operational flexibility. Like a duel where the stakes are death even if you put down your sword. Richard Sakwa has said about the Ukraine war exactly this: Zelensky is held at gunpoint by Azov to continue, and Putin by the Russian people.

Or those decisions can be inertia. That is, there is no *current* decision being made, because that’s not how geopolitics works. It takes *years* to plan any particular geopolitical action. Iran spent decades preparing for this, as have the Americans. And the US has chosen war.

It is notoriously difficult to assess someone’s motivations, in particular when you’re ascribing psychological states to organizations. Outcomes that seem terrible or unintelligible can easily be either incompetence or corruption, that is, unintentional or intentional, even with full information.

How can you wield what Kissinger called “madman” diplomacy (that the US is psychotic and will destroy everything if it doesn’t get its way), if you sit down at a table with your enemies and talk it out? Madmen don’t negotiate.

What if the US *wants* global chaos, as Peter Thiel has advocated for, because they know that the status quo will slowly lead to the downfall of the empire, and chaos is their only “choice” for continued domination? To go out with a bang instead of a whimper?

Brian Berletic has said this over and over: the US does not negotiate, they use negotiation as a stalling tactic to continue their wars from a more advantageous position. Moreover, the US *knew* the SoH was going to be closed by Iran, so is it surprising that they’re now blockading it themselves?

I’ve mentioned this before when thinking about geopolitical events, but it’s very helpful to, at least hypothetically, take them at “face value”. I’m seeing commentators talk, again, about Trump and his teams incompetence at negotiations. But what if they don’t *want* to succeed?

Maybe for the ultra religious types the cross dressing itself is an issue. For most of us, the cross dressing isn’t the issue. Be yourself, express yourself, whatever. The issue is how fucking weird he was being with it.

If you don’t think that the conflicts are intimately connected then I’m not sure what to tell you.

And this isn’t just hand waving. Article 5 necessitates that Canada participate: “Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against them all.” And it does not matter if the attack against NATO is in self defence.

It doesn’t matter if Carney condemns the war of aggression. The fact remains that it can only be waged due to the assistance of NATO, and Canada is a NATO member. The US is using bases in Germany, Portugal, UK etc. Until Canada removes itself from NATO, it is a participant.

I would go so far as to say that anyone who was not out at No Kings trying to convince people to be a communist doesn’t know how to be a communist.

The Bolsheviks, because they were organized and disciplined, used the Russian version of the No Kings rally to their advantage, showing up, protecting people and pushing their message of Peace Land Bread. And guess what fucking happened after that?

Communists will fail if we always act like smug self-righteous know it all’s who never make any material sacrifices, but blather on at everyone about how their politics aren’t right and so therefore it would be better if they stayed home.

I’ll just add another thing as I’m thinking about this. Lenin called appealing to mainstream mass politics “tailism”, and he loathed it. Why? At least partially because he believed in communism and thought others would be convinced if we were organized, advocated for and protected the people.

If communists want to be taken seriously, they have to be the vanguard they profess to be. Even if no kings was mostly shitlibs, you gain a lot of prestige with the people when you prevent them from getting fucked up by fascist cops. Our fight is with the fascists, so we should focus.

That said, I don’t hate popular music or even the *idea* of popular music. I wish the airwaves weren’t saturated by trash. I love, for example, popular Indian music from the 70s, or popular Irish folk music. I’m not trying to be an esoteric hipster. I just want music that sounds authentic.

Its perfectly reasonable to have a visceral dislike of music that’s made explicitly to support the idea of celebrity, whose artists have no connection to anything their songs are about, and are made in pop song sweatshops for the benefit of monopoly record labels. It sounds fake and it is.

What this also means, though, is that Marxists believe there are legitimate constraints on your choices of political activity, and you cannot simply conjure up any society you want. This is why Marxists won’t, for example, support reformism in most instances, because it’s impossible or ineffectual.

And, if you’ve done everything correctly, you can figure out where society could be headed, and act in a way to help propel history forward. Just like how gravity will pull objects into a black hole, but they can move faster or slower if we increase or decrease their acceleration.

So when Marxists talk about having a good “analysis” in order to understand how to do politics, all we mean is that you have to know the current anatomy of the society you’re looking to change. These are the “initial conditions”. You then plug these conditions into the laws of historical change.

Marx’s theory of change is slightly more philosophical than what I just wrote about, and that’s probably a topic for another day. But hopefully the idea of thinking about human civilization as similar to any other natural process we can understand through science helps demystify things.

These changes, just like in a whale as it evolves, are the product of external constraints, (I.e. the natural world), and internal ones, (I.e. the current configuration of the society or the whale’s physiology). Marx believed the engine for this change is contradictions within society.

After extensive research and study, Marx concluded that, at an abstract level (Engels says, “in the final instance”) the laws governing the flow of human civilization are primarily productive, that is, human society evolves as its modes of producing the things it needs changes.