I agree that nobody who is “Left” should support anti-abortion candidates. But it is curious how “purity tests” are applied only to gender and race issues, and only to the Sanderistas. Purity tests are seldom invoked when virtually all Democrats take cash from rich fucks and then screw over the working population. You…

The sooner Democratic party dies off the better. They are a bunch of looser assholes. They are incapable of conducting any political struggle or thinking strategically. All they can do is hysterically attack “pink” elements (Sanders, Ellison etc.), so that they can keep losing while raking in donations from rich…

More satisfying to whom?

We shake our head ruefully at the offhand racist comment and assume that its an anomaly, laugh at Trump voters as being rubes being run by a con man.

Even Milo Pedopolous is ok with Nazi-punching (saw him say it in a video). But that makes me wonder if it’s really a good tactic? In terms of combating the hard-Right, punching a Nazi soft target is emotionally satisfying, but what does it actually accomplish? Is the Left prepared to physically defend itself against…

GM was moving plants to Mexico in 1990's. Back then it was not in financial distress.

CORRECTION: actually it was possible for Ford workers to buy a model T in the mid 1920's. Back then it, cost 1/5th of a yearly wage. That wage was about 20K in today’s dollars and the cheapest model T cost 3-4K in today’s dollars.

I don’t recall GM actually being in “financial distress” when it was moving crap to Mexico. And if you want to talk about correlation: GM declined with the unions. (weaker unions; weaker GM) Of course correlation=/= causation.

Ford’s “Keynesianism” is a big myth. The only reason Ford raised wages and improved working conditions was to reduce turnover. During the boom years of the 1920's workers quitting was a huge problem and any complex production process is greatly harmed by turnover, retraining and general worker malaise. Obviously,…

Russian Jew here. The US did not have a history of murderous pogroms, which in Russia took at least 100,000 lives. Back then, Russia was the most anti-semitic country in the world by a mile. That ended when the Bolsheviks, many of them Jews, won the civil war. Since then, anti-Semitism fluctuated (brought back after…

I see almost no evidence of that frankly. It is no higher than in several other Easter European countries, and on the official level there is only strong condemnation of anti-semitism. Jews occupy many leadership positions and considerably better off than Russians on average. For all intents and purposes, Russian Jews…

Well done. Great obit Brendan.

Name one gay person he murdered for being gay. Cuba had an atrocious record on gay rights, like most countries. But Castro made no excuses for it—he apologized for past wrongs. The great film Strawberry and Chocolate was widely promoted in Cuba as part of the struggle against homophobia and machismo. I urge everyone…

But almost everybody else could trade freely, and if you were governing so poorly that you not only shrunk your GDP for decades from the original base but then governed for $0.75 on the dollar of revenue...it wasn’t the embargo that destroyed the lives of the Cuban people.

I think the Cubans estimate the cost to be about 400 billion over about 40-50 years. You can buy that or not, since they also got price subsidies from the USSR (mainly for geopolitical reasons, and partly because the USSR was itself shut out of some markets). But one cannot ignore the price of being under constant…

Thanks for bringing up the Cuban role in bringing down white supremacy in the Horn of Africa. This is truly one of Cuba’s key contributions to the world. But I think you’re wrong to say it was just to snub the US. The main motive was Cuban commitment to world revolution. With the exception of Ethiopia, Cuba only got…

For the record, I oppose all imperial wars, whether by Russia, America or the USSR. But I do not see Cuba as attack dog for any imperialism.

Cuba chose and conducted its own foreign policy, just as many Eastern European countries have chosen theirs after the fall of the wall. This has been established beyond all doubt by historians who’ve examined the issue. Just because a country allies with one or another superpower, does not make it a “tool of…

Not really, most coverage of Cuba in the US is highly negative. Americans don’t really know much, besides what they’ve been hearing from the State Department and Miami exiles. Practically anything these two allege about Cuba, will be taken at face value by the public and the press. So I don’t really see any…

Heh. “Revisionism” a term is very much abused. Half the time, “revisionism” is applied to analyses that are not even controversial among scholars, just controversial with the defenders of the “official version.” Bear in mind that there are as many “official” versions are there are regimes, each with its own axe to…