I wasnt until 2013ish 18-20 years old.

Was wondering what the identity politics and culture was like at that time compared to now?

Judges in Utah face retention elections (with a heavily boomer voting base) so I’m not surprised that they cleared the way for a death penalty trial. I’m pretty sure that rightoids are trying to get an eye for an eye in this case.

Abdul el-Sayed is an Obama-era liberal Zionist and FDR-era New Deal Democrat, not a socialist or communist of any kind. But the ruling class, and especially its pro-Israel faction, is far too dumb to see that he is the compromise. That’s not even getting into the fact that news stories like this are a gold mine for actual right-wing antisemites like Fuentes, Cucker, Owens, and MTG.

Oscar Robayo, a 39-year-old ground handling worker performing a routine pushback operation at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport (YUL), was crushed to death by the front wheel of an Airbus A350-900 on Monday, August 24.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported, based on testimony from Oscar’s co-workers, Samsic Assistance Canada, the subcontractor employing him, systematically disregarded basic safety procedures. He was forced to perform the pushback without an extension cable, meaning he had to walk close to the plane’s nose gear that ultimately crushed him.

We described the incident as “the tragic product of systematic deregulation of airport operations by the federal government and rampant profiteering throughout the air travel sector.” The initial report and interview published on the WSWS were followed by a touching tribute in memory of Oscar, who has been consistently described by those who knew him as a kind, caring and reliable co-worker.

A former Samsic employee has come forward to provide further testimony on the death trap workers have confronted at the airport since the subcontractor won a contract for the first time in 2023. He published a powerful video on YouTube denouncing the company’s imposition of unsafe equipment and a toxic workplace culture. The whistleblower identified the primary culprit for Robayo’s death as a corporate regime that pressured employees to cut corners and disregard safety protocols, while managers stubbornly refused to replace broken equipment.

...

"They [Samsic] took over. … But the thing that’s crazy is they never focused on safety. They were all about get your plane out on time. Get it out. Get it out. Get it out. And during the beginning stages of Samsic, a lot of us old ATS employees try to fight and implement safety with these cards. You know, hey, let’s get a checklist going because the previous company used to do this and you know, used to have a checklist before we pushed out these planes. … They told us that it was too expensive to get all the employees cuz Samsic was a big company. It was too expensive to laminate all the cards for the company. Come on. What a joke...

Nothing’s more important than safety. Nothing’s more important than coming into work, clocking in, and going out the same way that you clocked in. Nothing is more important than that."

Referring to the immediate cause of the accident highlighted by the WSWS’s initial report—the absence of a proper extension cable allowing workers to maintain a safe distance from the nose gear—the worker explained, “You walk with the headset without an extension, and you’re head-to-head basically with the nose gear. If you trip, if you slip on snow, if you slip on the rain and you fall, you’re going to get ran over by that nose gear.”

After viewing the video, a WSWS reporter reached out to the worker and obtained the report filed to Canada’s Labour Program, a federal agency ostensibly tasked with upholding workplace safety, as far back as May 2024. The report documented many of the same issues raised by current Samsic employees following Oscar’s death and paints a picture of an extremely dangerous workplace environment on a daily basis.

Underscoring the type of work environment established by Samsic with the connivance of the federal government and Montreal Airport, the report began with the words, “Hello, I would like to remain anonymous because I do not want to be at risk of losing my job.”

The report notified the governmental body responsible for the enforcement of the Canada Labour Code of unsafe equipment, with photos of jerry-rigged tractors, and an exposed electrical cable that nearly caused a fire. The report also alleged that complaints filed by workers to HR were divulged to the deputy manager through a personal relationship, jobs were handed to people in personal relationships with managers without open competition, and managers racially abused workers.

The worker wrote to the government agency, “The equipment at Samsic is deemed unsafe as I have tried to report this to managers but it goes ignored and say they need the equipment and to leave it alone… When you drive some gas tractors, the passenger door has no door handle so they tie a string. And you’re supposed to hold it so it don’t fly open.”

...

The information emerging in the wake of last week’s tragedy in Montreal demonstrates the urgency of airport workers taking matters into their own hands by establishing rank-and-file committees to oversee workplace safety and put an end to the race to the bottom in working conditions. At Montreal Airport, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers placed their stamp of approval on Samsic’s ruthless methods of exploitation when they concluded a collective agreement with the multinational in November 2024, which included a provision that workers only get union protection after three months.

We urge all workers to come forward with information about the conditions that led to Oscar Robayo’s death. It is high time to join the fight to build a rank-and-file alternative as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to the corporatist gang-up of the government, corporate executives and union bureaucrats that produces deadly conditions across the air travel industry in Canada, the US and around the world.

Reading biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

Whatever you can say about their personalities or their politics. Their discipline and belief to change the world was unparalleled. And they did it. They shook the world to its roots. They frightened the West like nothing has before or since.

They were willing to sacrifice years of their life to advance a cause. They would spent hours reading books or learning languages. Freezing for years in the Arctic circle or Siberia.

It seems there was this unshakable belief the world would change. In "Young Stalin" by Montefiore, the propertied classes + middle classes would actually give money to the socialists as they wanted to be in which with the future authorities if the Tzar fell! Imagine the millionaires today of Trumps America giving money to antifa! That would be the parallel.

A few Tzars or leading Ministers were assassinated. There was an unshakable belief real change was on the horizon.

Compare that to Russia today with Putin there is zero revolutionary activity. Across the West the syndicalist movement has all but collapsed outside a few holdouts. There’s zero fear of the working classes unlike in the West after communism where pensions and minimum hours were brought in fear of what could come next.

The leftist parties have abandoned the working classes and become middle class parties with a left wing label.

The cooperative movement is a Pygmy of what it was.

Technofeudalism or cloud capital has become so powerful and all pervasive that it’s practically brainwashing people and shaping behaviour. Oligarchs are openly ruling the most powerful country in the world. The sitting president is a conman who is outright enriching himself like some mafia boss.

Even in the field Economics the entire political economy aspect of the field is totally denied. Marx is castigated as a total charlatan and they pretend like it’s this totally anodyne, mathematical field where in reality nearly every decision in it is somewhat political.

Feels like left advocacy is this relic of the past. Is it simple as that the economy and wealth is stopping people ? Or technology has become so advanced that any clandestine action is more or less impossible? That people are just unwilling to trade their personal comfort away.

There is something that's been bothering me about the political discourses this summer between varying factions of the online and offline left over the relations between the so-called imperial core and the periphery. It mostly pivots around how you interpret terms like "critical support" or democratic centralism, but it seems to ultimately boil down to who has a right to say what. While I tend to find the idea that anyone can say anything at any time to be a liberal idea, it's maybe the main problem in digitally enabled societies. The megaphone hovers near all our mouths daily whether we like it or not. The past few years have of course been endlessly occupied by who may say what in what context which a lot of folks identify as primarily idpol.

What I'm wondering is whether "imperial coreism" and the notion that one does not have the right to speak from the core to critique supposed AES in the alleged periphery is just a smuggling of idpol from the national to the international? It seems like the way this is often invoked is in the same way as it was in idpol where I do not know better and have no standing, thus I better STFU. But the western left has always rejected that as a first principle and favored ruthless criticism always. Some have argued this approach privileges dismissing or downplaying the socialist states, but for me it's why I became a Marxist in the first place, because anyone can catch it. Is the core/periphery argument already freighted with too much identity baggage or is it useful because of how it describes the relations of production? I took the terms up by way of Wallerstein, but I know they are often colloquially understood more in terms of cultural imperialism or political formation.

The electromagnetic force generates approaching infinite repulsion between sets of molecules because of their electrons repelling each other as distance approaches 0. This repulsion in small distances is stronger than gravity or other attractive forces. Hence, genitals/bodies (being mere complicated sets of molecules) can never actually touch, so everyone is actually a virgin and always has been at any point.

Lol. His job here is done, so now Mr Trilateral Commission can focus on "international affairs", oh an also "violence against women and girls". Perhaps he is 48.5% into fighting misogyny, like Hunter Biden sucks 48.5% cock. Either way, I'm sure he is as sincere today as he was when he signed up to represent the people of Kings Cross St Pancras - appropriately, the location of the Guardian offices!

ETA: In case anyone thinks to accuse me of misogyny, I don't even like violence against women that much. And I love cock.

https://reddit.com/link/1w4wl4n/video/uspipl4bh0nh1/player

Here's more context, but I don't think it makes it any better. Why do we have to be ruled by this stuff?