Japan has low cost of living

Only in the rural areas where people struggle to get jobs. Where the jobs are, in the cities, cost is extremely high. If you’re a digital nomad then you can use your money from other sources to live cheaply in the Japanese countryside.

Failing to diagnose properly, if at all

Acting like they are superior in every way

Getting upset if you research stuff yourself beforehand

Telling you that it’s either “stress-related” or “age-related”

Etc. Etc.

Don’t vote, and whoever tries to shame me can go climb a tree

He was the one who ushered in the age of neoliberalism and set the stage for Reagan.

I mean you do have to be tactical when talking to others. You need to gauge what level they are roughly at before you use certain “buzzwords.” For example, you might want to say an industry is “mostly dominated by guys” instead of using phrases like “white cis male patriarchy” with some people because it WILL trigger them. Same thing when talking about racism. We all know what “white supremacy” means but to your average normie they think only of the KKK and stuff like that. Same with terms like “systemic racism” or whatever. I hate to say it, but it’s kind of a game of cat and mouse. We always have to be ready to phrase things differently because once we settle on something, the right will figure it out and then run their media on overdrive to let their base know what buzzwords to watch out for.

I mean before I was where I am today just saying Stalin or Mao would have triggered me to think of the “millions that died” or whatever. At some point you do have to be open about your views but that doesn’t mean you need to bombard someone immediately with words like “bourgeoisie” or “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “means of production” right from the get go. Even something as banal as “material conditions” requires the other person to kind of already know what you’re talking about in the first place.

I mean I still consume Grayzone content when it comes to anti-imperialist stuff. Max and Aaron, and the new guys like Kit, etc. are all really good. Now that the whole vaccine thing is kind of “over” so to speak, Max isn’t really bringing it up that much and is sticking to anti-imperialist shit mostly. I also consume Norton’s stuff as well. It’s kind of sad that they broke up as they were a great team. Aaron still seems to get along just fine with Max and I’m pretty sure he was against Max when it came to the vaccine stuff as well. So I’m not sure exactly what happened behind the scenes with Max and Ben.

Also it seems like the situation has gotten somewhat spicer: https://nitter.net/MaxBlumenthal/status/1710429732221616552#m

Once you become confident enough in your own ideological convictions as a Marxist-Leninist there is no reason why you can’t draw on sources with all sorts of different ideological inclinations as long as the analysis they provide is solid and valuable.

This is literally what Marx and Engels did. They read Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, etc and it was all important in forming their thought. They even read scientific stuff like Darwin, etc.

I think leftists need to look outside their little bubble otherwise things are going to blindside them. One example I can think of is how most lefists were completely blindsided by Andrew Tate and didn’t even know about him until after he had already blew up and was on the verge of having all his social media purged. And the standard response is “hurr durr why do I need to know about him, hE’s A nObOdY!!” I mean yeah, to you he might be but he was super influential to millions of men and boys(and still is). And if you want to reach these guys you need to know what they are immersed in. Then you can apply a mass line tactic of sorting them into advanced, intermediate, backwards and do all that analysis. But you can’t analyze what you aren’t even aware of.

they are nowhere near as “experimental” as some people make them out to be.

Even so it is kind of weird that they were basically fast tracked to the masses. Hell they even called it “operation lightspeed” if I remember correctly. I’ve never seen something get approved so fast. Part of me thinks that they needed something to get people to go back to work (of course service workers were always working but they seemed to also want to put the white collar workers back in line too)

Hell, there’s a minimum age for running for president for chryssake and it’s well past any definition of adulthood.

Yeah and it results in super out of touch people becoming president.

He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate

Even if you paid for everything, most likely these professors are barely going to get anything out of it. They get into shitty contracts with big publishers. So unless they publish stuff on their own, you’re not really helping them by buying their books. Oftentimes, you can just email the profs and they’ll send you a free pdf of their stuff because they just want to get their ideas out there and don’t care too much about the money.