Doubledee [comrade/them]

"In their defense westerners love to share a meme about an Asian man being yellow. Maybe it’s not racist. "

Right, people miss this but its literally one of the basic ideas of capitalist production. Mom and Pop might be nice people but the market WILL destroy them if they don’t participate in the most cutthroat practices to stay competitive. Forces are at play that supercede the morality of any actor.

I think that’s a slight exaggeration, although I get what you’re saying. But I think it’s important to demonstrate to libs that I’m being consistent so I’ll explain what I mean.

I don’t think the communal decision making bodies that spun up in the wake of the Japanese evacuation were necessarily completely aligned with Kim or the communists in exile, it was virtually impossible to maintain a functioning domestic apparatus and what I’ve read makes it seem like these were mostly improvisational.

That said, I think in the long run you’re right, I see it as similar to Vietnam later: because US foreign policy was aligned with elements that were naturally unpopular to the population of the country (in Korea’s case, the Japanese and domestic collaborators) a democratic resolution of the question of what sort of government a united Korea would chose for itself was not going to be an acceptable outcome to the US.

But we don’t know what they would organically choose for themselves because that decision was foreclosed by US occupation. I suspect a popular referendum was the best possible outcome but I think it would probably look very different from the current DPRK, for understandable reasons.

Yeah I don’t think they shouldn’t be allowed, but I also believe it would be a bad idea.

Yankees really lived through Afghanistan and Iraq and learned about Vietnam and still think they are being given accurate narratives of state enemies now. I had hoped by now we might see even the most rudimentary skepticism of US media but alas.

They were not though, neither the communists nor the Japanese collaborators believed the line was a legitimate or permanent division of the country. The plan was always reunification and no Korean party accepted the terms you’re talking about.

Ironically there was an independent government emerging in the wake of the collapse of Japan but the US occupation outlawed it when they came in.

I mean if you’re not positive that workers will reap the benefits of it it makes sense to resist. The poster is more specific: it says to fight the fallout of automation, less pay and more work for a smaller group of people. The Luddites are a joke to a lot of people these days but they correctly identified that automation was making their jobs worse and making everyone who did them more miserable.

Given how automation has impacted other communities in this country (take a trip through coal country some time) I think it’s wise to be skeptical. I’d love to live in a world where we don’t have to work because it’s all automated and I can go paint landscapes or whatever, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

Hell yeah!

Forreal your instance might be the one I’m most confused by, you’ve got like a 50/50 split of chill people who are okay with conversation and people who drop slurs and reply to any attempt at engagement in memes and gotcha one-liners.

I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.

When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.

So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.

The postal service runs functionally craft unions that don’t negotiate together, Rural Carriers bargain separately from City Carriers, who also are separate from the APWU which covers clerks and maintenance folks. There are upsides to this, for Rural Carriers specifically it let them get certain contract items that would be a huge ask to get for other carriers due to the specificity of their job requirements, but it’s led to a problem where regular rural carriers are in a pretty unique bargaining position relative to virtually everyone else. Importantly, they’re also divided into full time regulars and part time RCAs, which I think creates an engagement problem. When I was an RCA I paid dues, but I rarely interacted with or cared about the union because it was pretty clear pretty quickly that the union was mostly concerned with the regulars who had been there a long time. It was likely to be upwards of 5 years before I became a regular (I knew people who had been working part time for 7 years) and almost all the perks and benefits were negotiated to benefit the regular carriers.

I think over time new regulars are becoming less engaged, especially since there have been recent changes to the craft that undermine a lot of the promises that were ostensibly the reason you waited in line to become a regular in the first place. So the leadership is getting increasingly detached from the actual workforce, and the union is already one of the smaller and weaker ones to begin with.

EDIT: A bigger problem which I probably should have mentioned to begin with is that all postal workers are legally barred from taking a strike. So the unions have something of a more collegial relationship with management than you’d like, because you can only play hardball so far before you run into legal trouble.