This piece from Amfang is worth highlighting.
The Iranian Revolution was supposed to be a victory for the people. In 1979, millions rose up and toppled the Shah, a U.S.-backed monarch who ruled through secret police, torture, and oil profits. It was a mass revolt. Workers shut down industries. Students marched in the streets. Religious leaders called for resistance. Marxist guerrillas fought in the hills. For a brief moment, everyone stood on the same side. But not everyone had the same goal. The revolution was real, but it was not finished. And what came next should haunt us.
The left was there. It helped lead the struggle. The Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen, secular radicals and Marxists all believed that Khomeini was an ally. He hated the Shah. He spoke against imperialism. He had the people behind him. The left told itself it could ride the wave of religious rage and steer it toward socialism. But Khomeini had his own plans. The clerics moved quickly. They created militias. They took control of the narrative. They positioned themselves as the true voice of the people. And when the dust settled, they turned their guns inward. The revolution devoured the very people who sparked it.
Political parties were banned. Leftist organizers were hunted, jailed, and killed. The Tudeh Party, which had cheered Khomeini just months before, was declared treasonous. Its leaders were executed. Its rank and file disappeared.
Remember that the Christian right thinks that everyone who ever participated in an abortion is a murderer. Remember that eliminationist rhetoric is dirt common. Remember that the Nazis didn’t kill Jews or Roma first, they mass murdered the left first, then liquidated ethnicities they didn’t approve of.
The Social Gospel was fundamental to both FDR and Theodore Roosevelt’s power, but that movement is dead. There is no powerful Christian movement in America that the left can cut a deal with. Even the Roman Catholic Church, while it has substantial overlaps on anti-war and social justice issues, must be considered dangerous. Remember that the Supreme Court Justices who are validating Trump’s over-reach and dismantling the Constitution are almost all Catholic. In American Catholicism social justice is important, but it is secondary to social warfare concerns.
The left and the right (the real left, Democrats are not left wing in any meaningful way) are fundamentally in opposition. The Christian right and the left overlap in “we hate the current system” and practically nothing else. And religious fanatics are “fundamentally” OK with mass murder of those they see as against their religion’s principles.
Don’t play patty cake or make alliance with the religious right. They want you dead.
If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.
The current plan is 35% tariffs on everything not covered by the USMCA trade deal.
If we were not in overshoot, the environment would not be degrading so severely: massive loss of insects, mammals, acidifying oceans, climate change, rain water that isn’t safe to drink, etc, etc… We’re eating into the carrying capacity of the Earth, producing more than the Earth can sustainably produce, and damaging the Earth in ways which will take ages to fix. Some of them, like loss of biodiversity, are not fixable on any human lifespan.
Both China and Japan have been moving hard to “gerontorobotics” (not sure if that’s a word yet.) They know there won’t be enough care workers, so they’re moving to robots which can help people live who are still mostly OK but just old, and they’re also working on robots that can help invalids and semi-invalids, including getting them into and out of bed, helping them bathe and use the washroom and so on.
If you think they wouldn’t do it to you, you’re in lalaland. They’ve proved they are OK with mass murder, and even if you’re white, don’t think it would save you. Look at Trump’s massive health care and food cuts, or Labour’s Starmer taking away aid from disabled people and cutting off heating for old folks, not to mention both being completely callous towards the exploding number of homeless people. In America far more homes are empty than there are homeless people, yet all the vast majority of politicians do is criminalize homelessness more and more.
Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, so 24.7 billion. This seems reasonable, since Uber never made a profit during the period.