I’d ask:

1. You really think a country of well over a billion people is going to do anything worth calling “depopulate” any time soon?
2. Do you have any examples of this happening anywhere (especially in peacetime)?

This has been a conversation for a few decades about Japan. They may have some issues with fewer young people having kids (and hard restrictions on immigration), but “depopulate” isn’t on the table, and I’m not even sure it’s at a crisis stage.

*The atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, but emphasis.

There is nothing Hamas could have done on October 7 that would justify committing genocide against Palestine.

Every path to something better will be at least that complicated, likely more. Working around legal challenges is part of “playing the game well enough,” and even a loss can radicalized people. How many people were radicalized by the coordinated dropout/endorsement to juice Biden’s campaign in the 2020 primary? And that wasn’t even some dubuous procedural issue, it was just libs being organized and hostile to the left.

My reading of this is that he was in favor of participating in elections, but to disrupt, not to win.

I think this is overstated. If we participate without a credible chance to win – just to disrupt – we’re not going to attract many people. That creates a risk of getting disconnected from the masses, as well as a risk of not adequately testing our ideas against reality. We’ve had plenty of miniscule, insular leftist campaigns that have achieved little – what we need is something with at least the potential to become a mass movement.

Leftist campaigns have to both run on platforms that would be genuinely disruptive and play the game well enough to have some real shot at winning.

Compare how much legacy media coverage this gets vs. Bob Vylan

Any reading you can recommend on this?

Who cares if the arguments resemble one another? The underlying situations are what determine if the argument makes any sense.

“I was afraid for my life” is a fine argument for firing back if someone pulls a gun and starts shooting at you. It’s ridiculous when it comes from a cop who opens fire on a kid with something in his hands.

if ukranians want to stay independent russia should respect that

The parts of Ukraine Russia controls right now were trying to break away from Ukraine before the war. And again, Russia is not trying to conquer Ukraine – the goal is to keep Ukraine out of NATO.

nobody can strip their right to resistance and the over 60k dead Palestinians responsibility lay exclusively on Israel

Palestinians and Ukranians both have a right to resist attackers. I’m saying it’s sensible for Palestinians to do so (because their attacker has stated their intent to exterminate them, so it’s either fight or die), but not sensible for Ukrainians to do so (because their attacker just wants them not to join NATO, and because there is no realistic hope of the war turning around).

As for who’s responsible for the deaths: Ukraine’s government almost immediately sold out their people when they (on the advice of Boris Johnson) backed out of ceasefire agreement they had tentatively agreed to in the opening weeks of the war. By choosing to use their people to fight a proxy war for NATO when there was an easy out on the table, they are partly responsible for the deaths of their people.

Israel say that there is no Palestinians and all the land is our , Russia say that Ukrainians are just Russians that Ukraine was simply part of Russia .

It cannot be overstated how completely different these situations are. Israel is trying to exterminate Palestinians. Russia does not want Ukraine to be part of a hostile, nuclear-armed military pact. Palestinians are fighting because otherwise Israel will kill them. Ukrainians are fighting because their coup government is having its strings pulled by NATO.

I think Russia could have with economic pressure alone stop Ukraine from joining NATO

They tried since 2014, and Ukraine still wouldn’t give it up (or keep their domestic fascist groups from attacking Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine). It turns out Ukraine and NATO weren’t even negotiating in good faith, as Angela Merkel admitted about the Minsk II agreement.

There is the type who say palestinians should resist… They say if hamas never attacked

If anyone says this, they don’t mean it, because it’s completely contradictory. They’re lying to you.

I would like ukranians to stop dying but not by giving up part of their land

There’s no future resolution to this war that leaves Ukraine with more land than they have today. Continuing the war just means it will end with less Ukranian land and less Ukranians.

It’s unlike Palestine because Russia is not fighting a war of extermination and is not trying to drive residents from their homes. The people in the parts of pre-war Ukraine that Russia now controls aren’t being massacred or evicted; they are predominantly Russian speakers who had (to be charitable to Ukraine) legitimate grievances with the Ukranian government after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014.

From the Ukrainian perspective, there is actually a benefit to a peace on Russia’s terms: Ukraine keeps more of its land and its people stop dying. There’s nothing to be gained by continuing the war because it isn’t going to turn around. This is again unlike Palestine, where peace on Israeli terms would involve at minimum the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and where western public support for Israel has collapsed.

They think Palestinians should be driven from their homes or exterminated. They don’t care how many Palestinians die, so why would they make that argument? I’ve never heard a zionist say that.

If you care how many Ukranians die, you’d want the war to end sooner rather than later. The peace terms aren’t getting any better, so all their government is doing is getting more of their people killed.

[Resources are] finite, as is our capacity to replenish them.

You think this is propaganda?

Arming Ukraine just prolongs a war that’s clearly lost. That costs more lives than it saves.

US, Israeli militaries jointly drilled Iran strike during Biden administration

Trump deported fewer people last month than Biden a year ago

What’s more important than the nuances of appropriations is the fact that Biden could have stopped giving weapons to a state committing genocide, but didn’t.

Everything else he did or didn’t do with respect to the situation is comparatively minor.

Why wouldn’t they be low after supplying Ukraine and now Israel for so long? They’re finite, as is our capacity to replenish them. There’s been plenty of reporting on the limits of our ability to do so.

Skepticism is warranted, but it could easily be true.

This is a good counterpoint – there’s a real career risk here, which is part of what makes it such a meaningful statement – but Kaepernick was in a very different employment situation. For him, taking substandard offers (whatever non-NFL pro league was active at the time) wasn’t worth it because of injury risk. So he had only 32 possible employers (realistically, fewer had QB needs) and they actively collude all the time. Extremely easy to get blackballed in that environment.

Bob Vylan will lose money off this, but they can find smaller venues to play and doing so can’t jeopardize their career the same way a knee injury in the USFL could for Kaepernick. It’s not a career ender.

A major problem in the U.S. left is the habit of endlessly rehashing inter-leftist arguments that are not only from wildly different political contexts, but are also well over 100 years old.

1. It’s hard to imagine a topic with less immediate relevance to working people today.
2. Late-tsarist Russia (or interwar Germany) was so different than the U.S. in 2025 that you can draw exactly zero clean lessons from it. Every interesting takeaway must be couched in so many caveats that it loses most of its value.
3. 99% of people who engage in these discussions have at best an undergraduate level knowledge of what Russia was like before the USSR and the transition to the latter. Nearly everyone is working from a patchy understanding of the facts.
4. Nonsense in the form of “I didn’t like the historical XYZ group, and today’s ABC group is basically the XYZs all over again, so I can tell you with certainty what bad things today’s ABC group will do in the future” is inescapable.
5. This is point 1 again, but can you imagine how out of touch you look getting into this stuff with some baby leftist who’s being radicalized by, say, the health insurance industry?

Reading history is good. Reading theory is good. But this stuff isn’t scripture and can’t tell you how Zohran or someone will play out. We have to go figure that out ourselves. There’s a reason every successful leftist movement prominently involved its leaders writing new theory and guidance for their own specific circumstances.

Western marxists feel personally attacked for this position and end up rejecting it and discrediting it.

This is certainly part of it, but there are at least three other reasons western marxists hold some reservations:

1. Inside the imperial core, it’s often framed as essentially a defeatist position. If a leftist from the U.S. accepts the idea that pretty much everyone around them is inherently reactionary, what are they supposed to do? You can’t decide at the start that there’s no way to win.
2. While the material conditions of a poor person in the imperial core are better than poor people in the imperial periphery, the imperial machine rarely ties its exploitation directly to that benefit. A key part of modern imperialism (especially in the U.S.) is denying that you’re an empire at all. When that’s combined with obscene inequality in the core, you have the basics for building class consciousness even if on paper your imperial working class is better off than working people in the rest of the world.
3. It occasionally veers into determinist/essentialist arguments, which have all sorts of problems.

There hasn’t really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s

I think the primacy of the labor aristocracy (in the U.S., at least) has only really started to degrade much more recently. There was a fairly strong (though changing) economy in the 90s, the first dotcom boom, then the early tech boom, then the consolidation of the tech companies into 4-5 giants in the 2010s (after the Great Recession).

Now that even those jobs are drying up, and now that multiple generations are seeing the twin crunch of that + the cost of living explosion (in education especially), you’re finally seeing widespread, lasting pessimism about the economic future.