Yeah, this is a conversation we need to have more often. Bernie is basically a modern-day Bernstein. A century apart, but they’re playing the same game, pushing reformism that acts like a political pacifier. It sucks all the energy that should be going toward actually dismantling capitalism and redirects it into these dead-end, “safer” channels.

Bernstein was a big deal in Germany’s SPD, and he fully rejected the idea of revolutionary change. He argued that we could just slowly, gradually reform capitalism into socialism through voting and parliament. He basically tried to write off class conflict as some outdated concept. And in the end, he totally defanged the SPD. Instead of building real power, the working class got distracted with fights for slightly higher wages or limited welfare programs, all while the core capitalist hierarchy stayed perfectly intact. Rosa Luxemburg called this out perfectly saying that it turns socialism into a mild appendage of liberalism, sapping the working class of its transformative agency.

And you can see people like Bernie walking the exact same path. Sure, he talks a big game about inequality and corporate power, but his entire platform is just social democracy 101. It’s policies like Medicare for All, free college, a $15 minimum wage. These are bandaids on a bullet wound. They treat the symptoms but leave the underlying disease of capitalist relations totally untouched. Even worse, his whole project was about winning an election, which funneled what could have been a massive, militant grassroots movement straight into the Democratic Party, an institution that exists to manage and preserve capitalism. All that incredible energy got absorbed into phone banking and voter outreach instead of building real, lasting power outside the system, like strong unions, tenant organizations, and community networks.

Then the moment he conceded to Hillary and then Biden, his base just dissolved into thin air. People got disillusioned or fell back into voting for the “lesser evil.” There was no independent structure to keep the pressure on. It’s a direct parallel to how the SPD got integrated into the capitalist state in Weimar Germany. But even if his entire agenda magically passed, it would still exist within a neoliberal framework. It’s like the New Deal that coexisted along side Jim Crow, imperialism, and violent union-busting. Reforms inside the system are always conditional. They’re only allowed when they’re useful for capital, and their real purpose is to demobilize us.

A real challenge to capitalism needs a long-term strategy that mixes direct action, mass education, and building our own power bases from the ground up. Imagine if, instead of just telling people to vote for him, Bernie had urged his supporters to unionize their workplaces, organize rent strikes, and create mutual aid networks alongside the electoral stuff. Look at movements like MAS in Bolivia for an example of how you build grassroots power that can actually pressure institutions while raising people’s consciousness. But instead, his campaign became all about him, and when he lost, his followers were left with nothing.

The really scary part is how the reformist path actively paves the way for fascism. By channeling everything into parliamentary games, the SPD deprioritized mass mobilization. Workers were told to seek concessions instead of challenging capitalist power, which eroded class consciousness and left everyone totally unprepared to fight the Nazis. When the fascists started gaining ground, the SPD clung to their legalistic strategies and even refused to support strikes or armed resistance against Hitler. Their blind faith in bourgeois democracy made them miss the existential threat, and in a final, infamous betrayal, they ended up allying with the Nazis against the communists.

And now we’re watching the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party follow the same exact playbook. They operate entirely within capitalist constraints, which undermines any chance for radical change and just fuels the right-wing backlash. The Democrats are brilliant at absorbing people’s energy into their campaigns, and their reliance on corporate donors guarantees that they can only pursue watered-down policies that leave people disillusioned. The SPD’s reformism literally enabled fascism by disorganizing the working class and making capitalist violence seem legitimate. In the same way, the Democratic Party’s “pragmatic incrementalism” sustains a system that breeds the reactionary monsters today. Trump is a direct product of these policies. We’re literally just watching history repeat itself as a farce.

I would argue the core issue is more fundamental. Liberalism holds the rights of private property as inviolable, thereby placing them beyond public debate. It’s a system that establishes an economic structure where the critical decisions over resources and labor are made by the few who own the means of production. Such an arrangement is irreconcilable with any meaningful definition of democracy.

AliExpress

The most accurate way to look at the issue is through the lens of class. Liberal democracy functions as a full democracy for the capitalist class, which holds dominant power in society. Societies are not homogeneous entities with shared interests. They are divided between those who own property and the means of production, and those who do not. The former, the business owners, hire the latter as workers. The fundamental interest of owners is to maximize profit, which creates a pressure to lower wages and reduce benefits. Conversely, workers have a direct interest in securing higher wages and better conditions. This creates a fundamental class contradiction. In such a system, the government inevitably represents the interests of the dominant economic class.

Yeah, it’s going to be a long process realistically, and hopefully there’s actual sustained state level commitment to getting that done from the European countries. Frankly, it should’ve been obvious why it’s a bad idea to become so dependent on foreign tech, but better late than never.

Russia already stated clearly and repeatedly that they’re not interested in a freeze. I honestly have no idea why this is still being discussed in the west.

Open source is the only realistic way forward for Europe, since reimplementing popular US platforms from scratch would be a herculean effort. Hopefully there will be a lot more funding and polish for popular projects as a result. Maybe Europe will get serious about using Linux instead of Windows finally.

It could be that it did happen before, but it was just individual cases and if the outage wasn’t long then probably wasn’t noteworthy. This time it was a whole bunch of people affected all at once for a prolonged period. And you’re likely right that there’s probably a series of states the device can be in, and it does calls to AWS as it moves through them, so probably got stuck at a particular stage and couldn’t move forward cause it couldn’t talk to the mothership.

Yeah, it’s almost certain everybody would just end up using the same library.

yeah sounds vaguely familiar

I mean here’s what top British military people are saying https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-defeat-david-richards-world-of-trouble-podcast-b2844349.html

Meanwhile, you don’t seem to understand how wars of attrition work. The goal of the Russian army is to destroy the fighting capacity of the AFU. They’re not aiming for territorial gains, they’re destroying the army, and that necessarily takes time. When the army collapses, they’re going to be able to take whatever territory they want and dictate their terms. Go read up on how things went in WW2, the front was largely static for most of the war, and then the Red Army marched to Berlin in a matter of months.

It’s kind of amazing to think about how none of these products are designed to have a fallback functionality during an outage.

I love how you trolls all read from the same script 🤣

The same source that’s been telling you that Ukraine is winning the war. But hey if you still believe that, what else is there to tell you.

Yeah, I’m mostly excited about LLMs that can be run locally. And it really does look like there’s a lot more optimizing that can happen going forward. Stuff like this is also really exciting. It’d be pretty amazing if we get to the point where models that perform as well as current 600+ billion parameter ones could run on a phone.

They have no large scale manufacturing at this point because Russia can hit anywhere in Ukraine with impunity, and does large strikes on daily basis now. On top of that, Ukrainian energy grid is on its last legs now. https://archive.ph/vRYOO

If you actually believe these stories of Ukraine working on their own missiles then you’re a highly credulous individual. The article you linked is from August, and we’ve seen zero evidence for any of what it says being true. I guess some people still can’t learn to spot bullshit after having been lied to by western media for the past three years.

What’s happening is that, unlike the Europeans, the US is trying to find an off ramp because they understand that they lost their proxy war.

wait till you find out that you need things like factories and electricity to produce missiles

I live in a shithole western country too. The fact that my country is going to shit doesn’t preclude me from understanding why. Meanwhile, if you want to see a country that’s not going to shit just go look at China or Vietnam.

If y’all actually did meaningful political action then you wouldn’t be living under a fascist regime today lmfao