has been built with massive debts

While they have been financed it has not resulted in substantial long term debts.

no immediate commercial viability

Lmao. This is public infrastructure not a business grift.

When the private sector is in charge of things like this they do it worse and at higher expense btw.

Not a million miles away from Victorian railway companies in London building lines for, hoped for, future demand.

Very different, actually.

I hope it works out, but there is for sure a risk of it becoming a millstone.

I'm sure the Redditor that thinks public infrastructure needs commercial viability has plenty of useful lectures for the Chinese state on how to drive production and transportation.

While this is true it is not because China has deviated from socialist theory, including that of Marx and Enfels. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat as described by Marx and Engels as the necessary precursor to communism. It is also taking a very specific strategy towards imperialism that involves special economic zones, or capitalism zones, in order to build productive forces while also coupling the well-being of imperialist countries to China's ability to produce.

Communism will never be achieved by a state and no state has ever expected to do so. The idea that any country ever could use a category error, it means a person doesn't understand the term at all as used by Marx a d Engels. It is, by definition, stateless, and could only happen after all states are eventually abolished. But again, being practical people, they expected this to happen through a long process of struggle with dictatorships of the proletariat being what socialists first formed and could use to overturn the capitalist order

Capitalists will gladly repackage and sell anticapitalist stories if it will make them a profit.

It isn't all doom and gloom, though. These things emerge from the systems from their class interest that is most often expressed through self-intrrest. They will sell you the exact media that can help radicalize you as well as the cooption garbage. So an element of this does have the capacity to work against them.

If you tell someone to root for the uppity underdogs against empire it can at least be a useful for pointing out why they should not support an empire putting down a just resistance.

House Democrats have repeatedly funded Israel in the middle of its obvious genocide and supported its genocider-in-chief and now vice-genocider-in-chief. Tlaib has been the lone consistent opponent and has been attacked by her colleagues for doing so.

I'm sorry you've had to experience that transphobia on Lemmy. It is unfortunately common. And sometimes it even lurks as internalized transphobia in people that do not think of themselves as transphobjc. For example, there are Lemmy instances that actually promote chasers.

I believe all instances if transphobia should be called out and obvious examples should result in bans. Sometimes it is good to let people have a chance to accept criticism and retract but I am biased towards more often banning. Comments that are transphobic should also be removed.

It's a press release from the White House. Why would you need a journalist to stenograph it for it to become news?

And OP's description is good, it helps cut through the typical liberal mealy-mouthed framings that are, otherwise, the only ones you would ever hear.

You can fight the trolley itself instead of justifying supporting genocide.

PS this is the real world not a meme. Political power is not a trolley problem, it is a matter of organization and education. You disempower yourself and others by pretending you can only backseat cheerlead a genocide. Instead of supporting this, go and join an organization that is actually opposing it and start doing work.

In the US, every student is eventually presented with lessons on the Holocaust and asked to think about what they would do. Right now, to be honest, your answer would have to be, "support it using poorly thought out propaganda".

You will understand why better when you take a look at who they say this to and who they don't.

This is not something that generally happens to white people speaking some French in the US. It does not raise the ire of this psychology. On the other hand, they love to target brown people speaking Spanish (almost exclusively, in fact). There is, naturally, spillover where white people speaking Spanish or brown people speaking Hindi would get targeted.

As others noted, and as these examples suggest, this is an instance of xenophobia and racism. Language is being used as a proxy, really, and provides a way for these people to unleash the frustrations they have been taught, societally, to have against them. Generally speaking, these are people that will call any brown person that speaks Spanish a "Mexican" regardless of their actual place of birth, where they were raised, or ethnic heritage.

But this is just a surfacr-level analysis. The next question is why they are taught to target people with xenophobia and racism. Why are there institutions of white supremacy? Why are their institutions of anti-immigrant sentiment? How are they materially reinforced? Who gains and who loses?

At a deeper level, these social systems are maintained because they are effective forms of marginalization. In the United States, racial marginalization was honed in the context of the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery, beginning, more or less, as a reaction to the multi-racial Bacon's Rebellion. In response, the ruling class introduced racially discriminatory policies so that the rebelling groups were divided by race, with black people receiving the worst treatment and the white people (the label being invented for the purposes of these kinds of policies) being told they would receive a better deal (though it was only marginally so and they were still massively mistreated). This same basic play had been repeated and built upon for hundreds of years in the United States. It was used to maintain chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and modern anti-blackness. It was used to prevent Chinese immigrant laborers from becoming full citizens and becoming a stronger political influence in Western states.

It was and is used to maintain the labor underclass of the United States, which also brings us to xenophobia more specifically. The United States functions by ensuring there is a large pool of exploitable labor in the form of undocumented immigrants. It does this at the behest of the ruling class - the owners of businesses - who have much more power to dictate wages and working conditions when it comes to this labor underclass. They make more money and have more control, basically. But this pissed off and pisses off the labor over class, as they have lost these jobs (or sometimes are merely told they lost them even if they never worked them). To deflect blame away from the ruling class for imposing these working conditions wages, the ruling class instead drives focus against the labor underclass itself, as if working that job for poor pay and bad conditions their fault. This cudgel should remind you of Bacon's Rebellion again: it divides up workers so that rather than struggle together they fight amongst themselves on the basis of race or national origin. The business owners are pleased, having a docile workforce to exploit.

So while racism and xenophobia are themselves horrific and what is behind the "Speak English!' crowd, it is really just an expression of the society created by this system that, by its very nature , pits workers against business owners while giving business owners outsized power (they are the ruling class, after all).

Another important element to this is imperialism and how imperialist countries carefully control immigration (it used to be basically open borders not that long ago). But I'll leave that for any follow-up questions you might have.

Luckily there's an easy fix: stop supporting genocide.

This is how the American system works. He's just not being classy about it.

Congressmembers do insider trading all the time and move into industry positions after they leave, having helped those exact industries (following the requests of their lobbyists). Congressmembers go straight to the top of boards for weapons manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, etc.

Regulators and other officials do the same thing. They cycle back and forth between the industries they're supposed to reign in and supposedly the job where they do reign them in. Work for the FCC -> work for a telecom -> FCC -> telecom.

In terms of the Supreme Court itself, it is an illegitimate body that has legitimacy only because the other two branches give it to them. Their major powers are not in the constitution and they have very few rules to follow.

You are right that gaining power to establish justice is what really matters, not "the rules" (which are always selectively applied). But it really depends on what you mean by the "good guys". If you mean Democrats, unfortunately they are also deeply embedded in this system and are not champions against it. They maintain power through the same kinds of industry connections and exit strategies and insider training. Their electoral apparatus is built on getting donations from companies and their executives so that they can buy ads and canvassers and phone bankers and data nerds to reach out and drive likely voters to turn out for them.

I've been in high-ish level Dem offices on various occasions. They put a lot of effort into shmoozing with donors and doing everything they can to get more money from likely donors. Big and small, though big get the most attention. The idea of building their base of power from the action of motivated grassroots individuals is rejected. And that's the only real base of power that is likely to reflect justice.

This is from 2018. It is basically the "huffing your own farts" version of bringing back the company town but this time it's neoliberal.

It's still relevant, though, because the economic forces that be were already doing this and have gained ground. For example, the transition from being able to own a home vs. renting your entire life. Included in that is the fact that people who "own" their home are often incorrect about this. In reality, the home was purchased in a loan and you are now paying a bank economic rent (interest) for the privilege. Over time we see the shifts: more people have to rent, they have to rent for longer, and loan terms and worse and worse.

Aid trucks remain stranded at the Southern entry points, with Raremoved closed over Israel crossing Biden's supposed red line. Israeli citizens - not IOF - routinely block the trucks and destroy their contents while the IOF watches. Israel maintains its blockade of Gaza that it has imposed since 2007 that prevents aid from entering any other way and used pressure campaigns on Turkey and Guinnea-Bissau to hamstring the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

It's important to remember that the oppression of Gaza and Palestinians is a central project of Zionism that spans multiple leaders and requires the active consent of several coordinating parties, with the US imperial apparatus at the top and the Israeli Zionist project just below. If Netanyahu died today virtually all of Zionists' policies would remain in place. Netanyahu was not in power when most of them were instituted.

Opinion polls now show increased support for Netanyahu since October and if you dig just a little deeper you'll find that the primary complaint of Israelis is that he's not even more militaristic, more brutal, and "protecting" Israelis in this fashion. In other words, the illusion of immunity was broken and they are lashing out. Imagine who would have power if Netanyahu died.

Biden provides unconditional support to this genocidal project and this is more or less in line with decades of US policy, although he is even to the right of Reagan in that he won't pick up a phone and actually draw a line. A return to the status quo, which was still horrible for Palestinians, is a bridge too far for the Biden administration. And as you can see, that administration enjoys wide cover from tired and bad faith talking points from a media apparatus that equates the humanization of Palestinians with antisemitism.

If you oppose genocide and consider Palestinians human, then our shared enemies include but also go beyond the current leaders of the United States and Israel. The deeper underlying forces are political economic. They're why when students demand divestment the University administrations would rather sic cops on them than lose a little cash. They're why military contractors nearly always get their way. They're why people like Biden and Netanyahu receive support in the first place, including the tired and politically incompetent lesser evil vote nagging. Political power is not to be a sheep following the orders of wolves, but to become educated and work together.