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Workers' Girder! Getcher Workers Girder!

seventh bullet said:
Given her background, Wollstonecaft was deeply contemptuous of the lower classes.

Ugh, that awful mob of market hags marching on Versailles.
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Incidentally self-styled radical left acquaintances at the university that i was studying at last year are running an event about Wollstonecraft's impact on feminism, as if feminism can be isolated in the abstract. Dangers of running a 'left' forum, noone actually knows what this nebulous concept of left entails...
 
BigTom said:
Yeah, probably better than Cliff, or one of the other three men.
Not sure we want anyone who does more than sell papers though ;)
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Not as mighty as the Fourth Sword of Marxism, though, when you get to the Maoist pack.

guzman6.jpg
 
Nigel Irritable said:
How about a "renegades" expansion for sect leaders who crossed over to the dark side? Lyndon LaRouche, Frank Furedi...

Or sect leaders who turned their sects into proper cults, although of those (LaRouche again, Fred Newman, Marlene Dixon, Gino Parente...) only LaRouche really came out of Trotskyism. More of them were Maoists, including that fruitcake in Brixton who was arrested last year and of course Bob Avakian. Dixon could go in the "intersectional" expansion too.
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I'd never heard of this Gino Parente, so I looked him up and found this:

As to its alleged ties with LaRouche, this is one of the funniest parts of the history. I was there for all of that. I remember going with Gino, Mary, Polly and several others to a talk by the LaRouchies at Columbia University around 1975. This was when LaRouche (aka "Lyn Marcus") was in his "Women as Vampire" phase (his wife had run off with another member to England -- that was the basis for years and years of political psychobabble from LaRouche), and everything was being blamed on "the Mother" for sucking the energy and politics out of kids.

The LaRouchies used this as a way to bypass sticky arguments.

Anyway, we were in a first-floor classroom jammed with 50 or 60 people, the EFWA (Eastern Farmworkers Association) organizers including me standing in the back, and Gino, in his black leather jacket, says to the speaker from US Labor Party (LaRouche): "Punk, you don't say anything about what you're going to actually DO to make the revolution."

The guy prattles about something, Gino cuts him off with some witty reparte, and the guy shoots back: "You're only saying that because you, like all of us, had an unnatural attachment to your mother."

Gino, a master at cutting through academic bullshit, rips his own jacket off as he climbs over people to get to the front, hissing, "Dat's my mudder your tawkin' about!" and flattens the guy. And the room full of Larouchies and potential recruits goes flying out the windows (first floor). I never saw a room clear out so fast, as Gino, Mary, Polly and I laughed and laughed.

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/304593.shtml

Good times, good times.
 
From that link - if half of this is true, this should be the basis for the next Coen brothers movie:

As I investigated this cult one angle or theme on it became following Gino's path to being a cult leader... .

Talented Shakespearean actor and local con-artist/buffoon, disc jockey, alcoholic, drug addict... ..

Becomes involved with AA, then (per ex-wife's and others) almost gets arrested for drugs, but instead becomes an informant and sets up arrests.

Becomes involved/exposed to Synanon (cult tied to UFW), the United Farm Workers,

Forms several armed groups in the early 70's in northern California. He opens the Little Red Bookstore in San Francisco and tries to interface with the established militant left (Venceremos, former leader groaned when I asked him about Gino—vehemently denied he ever had anything to do with the group other than show up at open meetings and spout off). They "train" and he declares war on the state. His best friend from Marysville I interview and he admits to me that he was an FBI agent. I ask him if Gino was and he refuses to answer. It's my educated opinion that Gino did all this as a spin-off from being a narcotics informant, just adding political targets to drug ones. But once he tasted the mileu and his power to encapsulate himself with others, plus studied other groups and cults, well.. the rest is history.
 
Idris2002 said:
. It's my educated opinion that Gino did all this as a spin-off from being a narcotics informant, just adding political targets to drug ones. But once he tasted the mileu and his power to encapsulate himself with others, plus studied other groups and cults, well.. the rest is history.
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I'd be very dubious about the idea that the CPUSA(P) was ever intended as an intelligence gathering vehicle for the cops. It's nearly entirely isolated politically in a way that would make it next to useless in that regard.

More broadly, to what degree Parente was a con man and to what degree a Walter Mitty style fantasist is hard to untangle at this point. His group stands out amongst cults originating on the left because it both stayed on the left and grew quite large. For the most part cults that actually grow exit the left quite quickly.
 
I got the new game cards done today and we had a little playtest with 3 of us tonight - not really enough to see the game playing properly, but enough to know that the cards being two-faced (like the politics) works fine. Need to get the rest of the card done and hopefully will have a big group to test with on friday.

I nearly forgot to take photos again, remembered the end, so all the unaligned people are members of groups at this point, and there's none in the middle:

0EX1HjF.jpg


This is a united front that has been setup by one party, and they're holding a public meeting to Save The NHS, which has been wrecked by sectarian interventions, people talking about irrelevant things or banging on about some thing they always bang on about. A couple of true party member saying what's right (they are kind of hidden in this photo) but all in all, the party is losing members as a result of this campaign, people who are tired of the crap and nonsense and stuff going nowhere, and to top it all, they only sold 5 papers between so enough is enough and fuck this we're leaving the party:

17X7yqB.jpg


I'm still really hopeful that this is going to work with 10-12 players and if it does then I might actually be there, other than designing the cards and writing the rules. Will need to play it at least half a dozen times before blind play testing (should really be more than that tbh but I'm impatient lol) and then lots more play tests before I'd actually be happy to release it. Looking good though :) didn't have the character cards done for this.
 
Russia's eurovision entry is a little bit space communism and a bold challenge to Putin's decrepit petty booj nationalism.
We are the world's people
Different yet we're the same
We believe
We believe in a dream

So if you ever feel love is fading
Together like the stars in the sky
We can sing
We can shine

When you hear our voices call
You won't be lonely anymore
A million voices
Your heart is like a beating drum
Burning brighter than the sun
A million voices

Now as the world is listening
From cities and satellites
We believe
We believe
In a dream
Click to expand...
 
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