the_dunk_tank

It's not about who is "good" or "bad", it is about who is beneficial and who is not

Agreed, and I'd say pretty much any prominent politician to the left of the main body of the Democratic Party is beneficial if you're trying to pipeline people left of the Democratic Party.

Take Bernie. Despite his many faults, he helped crank open the valve on the pipeline left. It's far easier to talk to someone about bigger ideas of economic redistribution if they're bought into universal healthcare. It's far easier to talk to someone about the structural limits of the U.S. electoral system if they bought into Bernie and saw him get ratfucked in 2020.

Some shithead in the House who gets elected just to Tweet Kropotkin and get pressured into voting Yes instead of Present on the latest Warcrime Bill before crying about it does not represent historical progress geopolitically or in any other sense.

There's definitely something to be said for a woman who runs and wins on a platform of strong unions and functional public services and a popular green energy revolution relative to the corporate flake she replaced. That she came in spitting fire and got flattened almost immediately by the Pelosi / NYC machine speaks more to the scope and force of opposition than it does about the quality of candidate that got shoved into the political sausage machine.

But the fact that she and a variety of other left-insurgent candidates were able to pop their heads up into Congress rather than being condemned to the political outskirts represents a real shift in the underlying composition of the electorate in those districts. She's a symptom, not a panacea.

you are smoking crack if you think they aren't significantly involved in the maintenance of imperialism.

If the roof of the House Chamber caved in tomorrow and flattened half of the 118th US Legislature, I do not believe the functions of empire within the US would suffer significantly.

The individual House Reps exist to maintain a flow of commerce out of the periphery and into their respective districts, with the expectation that doing so maintains domestic support for Empire. But no single individual involved in the process can do more to shape it than a single soldier on a battlefield can decide whether or not two countries continue to be at war. The US House is a collection of Middlemen who can, at best, improve or degrade the efficiency of the imperial machinery.

Were the whole Squad to go balls-to-the-wall obstructionist and take steaming shits on the Speaker's desk every time a vote for more war funding or police expansion or whatever came up, I do not think they could collectively be as effective at derailing the mission of the state as a couple of Ron Paul types who divert a few million dollars into their back pockets as a condition for letting a bill out of a subcommittee, then spend the next six months whining about military overspending on ash trays.

But neither Ron nor AOC can defang the federal behemoth, because that's not a power House Reps really have. All they can do is chip away at the edges by being annoying and hope the whole thing caves in eventually. And that's not big sexy revolutionary stuff. Its mostly just corrupt shits sucking excess cum out of the Pentagon's balls for 60 years, until its own weight brings it down.

It's not that Russia and Iran have progressive values but that they geopolitically represent historically progressive forces

Take caution along with this; many components of historically progressive forces can end up flipping in just a few years.