The only thing exhausting is people using whataboutism to make false equivalents and avoid genuine discussion. People are subjected to orders of magnitude more US propaganda than Russian propaganda, and it clearly has a much greater effect on public opinion. Thanks to people being indoctrinated into US propaganda, they dismiss legitimate problems as fictional Russian propaganda. The fact that you can’t comprehend this illustrates the problem perfectly.
Not what I said though was it? What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first. Russian media is even banned in most of Europe at this point. Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.
What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first.
I’m capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.
Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.
Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I’m sad that Chomsky’s age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.
I’m capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.
press x to doubt
Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I’m sad that Chomsky’s age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.
It’s incredible that somebody could be so deplorably ignorant to think that US doesn’t enforce censorship with state violence. US tortured Manning and is currently having UK torture Assange for revealing US war crimes. Chapter 10 in this book gives lots of examples of political repression in US where activists have been harassed, arrested, and even assassinated by the state archive.org/…/DemocracyForTheFew16147062951821
The only thing you should be sad about is your own ignorance. Maybe instead of claiming that Chomsky can’t distinguish things you should learn about what your regime actually does. Just a thought.
When people talk about censorship, they usually mean of media. Yes, I’m aware that the US government is an evil institution that targets activists and whistleblowers. You’ll never believe me, but I actually despise my government and nearly every person in it. However, authoritarian regimes also strike down those people, but additionally censor the media on top of it. So to say that state censorship is worse here and now is just asinine. There’s no need to make things up to seem worse than they are when they’re already very bad, it just leads to people swinging at ghosts.
Every government is authoritarian by its very nature. The government derives authority from having monopoly on legalized violence. The only reason there is the illusion of freedom of speech is due to the fact that mainstream views are carefully curated. Any ideas that are seen as a threat are eliminated just as ruthlessly in the west as anywhere else. Entire books have been written on this subject.
Nobody is making anything up here. The reality is that state censorship in the west is no different from the countries you consider authoritarian, the only difference is that it’s dressed up in a way that’s palatable to western public. In fact, it could be argued that governments in places like China are simply more honest with their public. They’re explicit regarding what ideas they reject while the west uses sophistry to create an illusion of freedoms that don’t translate into anything tangible.
Every government is authoritarian by its very nature. The government derives authority from having monopoly on legalized violence.
For goodness’ sake, can we not do this? I’m an anarchist, I know this. I oppose the state on a conceptual level for this very reason. I’m speaking to you like a normal person using language that I know you understood the intended meaning of. There’s no need to engage in academic fartsniffery here. Just be normal.
The only reason there is the illusion of freedom of speech is due to the fact that mainstream views are carefully curated.
The owners of our media have a vested interest in maintaining their own control. They are not compelled to act by outside force, they largely act of their own free will to maintain their position in our corrupt system. Understanding this distinction is crucial to being able to fix it. This is the true insidious nature of our system, at this point it is maintained by people pursuing their own interests rather than by an overarching plot. There’s no need for one anymore, it is self-sustaining and perpetuating, like a cancer.
For goodness’ sake, can we not do this? I’m an anarchist, I know this. I oppose the state on a conceptual level for this very reason. I’m speaking to you like a normal person using language that I know you understood the intended meaning of. There’s no need to engage in academic fartsniffery here. Just be normal.
Meanwhile, I’m not an anarchist, and I do not oppose the state at a conceptual level. However, I do think that the state represents the interests of the class that controls power in society, and that western capitalist states fundamentally represent the interests of capitalists. So, when people talk about capitalist states having some sort of free speech for the oppressed working class, I find that surreal to be honest.
Any meaningful free speech translates into tangible action, and when that happens the state uses brutal methods to stomp it out. MLK and Fred Hampton are two prominent examples of what happens when people in US try to exercise freedom of expression in a meaningful way.
The owners of our media have a vested interest in maintaining their own control. They are not compelled to act by outside force, they largely act of their own free will to maintain their position in our corrupt system.
They are the capitalist class who built the system to serve their own interests. The owners of the media are not compelled by force because they are the people whom the state represents. The state is a management bureaucracy for resolving the differences between capitalists in a civilized way.
Understanding this distinction is crucial to being able to fix it.
What’s crucial for fixing anything is understanding the nature of the state and whom it serves. Your comment makes it pretty clear that you lacking this understanding.
Anyone that disagrees with the US government is spouting Kremlin propaganda. Riiiiight…
I mean, if you take what I said and completely change it, I can see why you might be upset at that. Though I would encourage you to reply to what I actually said.
You are a joke.
I am indeed a very funny guy, it’s a bit creepy that you know that though.
I merely posited that you might be getting into arguments because you have drank the Kremlin propaganda, but from your posts I see it’s more that youblike to defend the Chinese government for some reason or at least like to do “a Whatabout the USA”
also I am not sure you ubderstand what ad hominem is, it’s attacking the person saying it rather what the person is saying, if I were to say “you are spouting Kremlin propaganda” would be the exact opposite since I would be “attacking” what you are saying not who you are.
A lot of americans and some other westerners always assume that anyone who disagrees with them must be infected with Russian/Chinese/(insert bogeyman) propaganda.
Whereas the truth is that the Western civilization is on a murder spree and the rest of us who are not Westerners are disgusted by it.
Little do people know everyone is shit and your personality that is only based on ideologies makes you look like a moron. Yes we know there is unfairness in the world. But any “ism” won’t fix it.
Yeah you’re right shits fucked so let’s just accept the status quo, oh would you look at that you’re just supporting the current oppressive system.
Being a centrist or “apolotical” is just being a conservative while still being able to fuck
I do mean it positively, but I can understand why you would get a negative reading. I was trying to illustrate how reducing words to their components and dismissing them like that is such a stupid thought terminating cliche. Botulism, anarchism, autism, midwesternism, descriptivism are all words ending in -ism but really do not refer to similar or comparable things. The deeper idea that subscribing to or employing an ideology inherently leads to failure, which the original comment asserted, has already been torn to shreds by others, so I targeted the less important but more annoying failure of thought. I should have more carefully selected my words, sorry.
I must say I had a pleasant conversation on workers’ rights in the US recently on c/technology (lemmy.world). By pleasant I mean “not being insulted because I live in France and workers do have rights so I’m a red commie” pleasant.
Hi from the autistic guy that is physically unable to understand the rules of „politeness“ and burns out while pathetically trying to mimic them just to look like a creep anyway.
A. This leads to politeness fetishists and tone policing. If someone says something offensive like “we should remove LGBT+ books from schools,” I’d rather shoot myself than speak nicely to that person.
B. This has not been my experience with my fellow Americans at all. I even saw a mod from lemmy.world post mod-flaired horseshit in their politics community about how “The US is not a racist country.” Fuck that.
If they have dogshit opinions about LGBTQIA people or immigrants to begin with, what’s rudeness on their part going to do? Lol
Their opinions and lives already lack any value.
Edit: Just noticed this guy moderates a community filled with bigots that engage in frequent use of an ableist slur, so it looks like this clown is referring to people like himself. “I may be an unhinged bigot, but at least I’m polite so I win!” Just the type of person I’m talking about.
Lmao you don’t know even know what you’re arguing against. I never said anything about whether you should be polite, I just said that if you’re going to be a cunt you can’t complain about people being cunts back
Also if you did 5 minutes of research you’d see that c/comedyheaven@lemmy.world doesn’t allow any kind of hate speech, there are no slurs in any of the comments, and our most recent post removal was because of ableist and racial slurs. But go off I guess
If you’re trying to lie about not being a bigot, you should really not lean into the sexist language lol. But thanks for confirming my suspicions, I suppose.
Anyway, dunking on bigots is always the right choice, so I’m not sure what you think you were contributing by telling me that. Just makes you sound like a typical fragile cis heteroni.
Hahahaha, nah, it’s just funny when people who think like you can’t handle people not praising you for being so enlightened. Think what you want about me. Weird that you’re bringing identity into things considering you don’t know anything about me. But at least I don’t have to waste more time with you. Seeing you added nothing I accept your concession, you can’t win them all. Just lose with more grace next time.
This is what happens when people base their entire world and political beliefs on identity, they always have to bring it up lol
Anyone who identifies as something and bases their entire personality on it is boring as fuck, my personality is all about my sexual interests, my personality is all based on my religion, my skin colour, my favourite beer…. Fucking snooze, 1 dimensional cardboard cutouts
Also just the dogmatism and zealousness. Like good grief dude, people aren’t going to conform to your worldview 100%, just like you aren’t going to conform to theirs.
But hey, what do I know, all I did was recreate an ironic humor community because I’m ableist and homophobic. I certainly haven’t been moderating to keep the good parts and leave the bad behind on reddit /s
I really don’t give a fuck about people like you or your opinion about me. I’m around you losers constantly where I live. I just find it ironic that someone as fragile as you would presume to lecture someone like me about politeness. I’m not patting myself on the back, either. It only takes a baseline level of awareness to avoid misogynistic language. I’m not praising myself, I’m just amazed that people like you exist, and that there are so many of you. Then you cry when you get deplatformed or banned. It’s fucking hilarious!
Bro all I said was that you can’t expect people to be nice to you if you’re being an asshole to them. Don’t care? Cool. Then keep being an asshole.
YOU are the one that got all angry and started making accusations and treating identity like an insult. Which, btw, has all been imagined because I literally have not argued a single position this whole time. “People like me” lmao. You clearly have some pent up rage that you’re just waiting to unleash on anyone who you imagine fits that mold.
“Misogynistic language” in this context is just a phrase you’re using to shut down conversation, just like you tried with cishet.
No they just implicitly welcome such users by not vetting applications like a proper instance
They want to be a new reddit, and reddit was a right-wing platform with shit-tier communities such as the extremely ableist and homophobic r/comedyheaven
No no, there was a test. They provided a list of all the things that MLs hate and don’t want people doing (took me days to reach the bottom) and we had to figure out how to do all of them. Because we’re evil. Literally Hitler. Oh and also none of us can read.
I’m sorry we can’t be Holy like you guys. You truly are a penitent congregation. Except I’m not sorry. Because I’m so evil
I’m not even a good person, but it takes zero effort not to use a sexist slur. Super easy just not to do that. You lot always huff and puff about how it’s so hard and so complicated and it’s just … not. We’ve known not to use the c-slur since like… the 1970s.
You really should do more research, how cunt is perceived varies by country and culture. Your worldview is not total. “You lot” continues to make me laugh. You resort to identity assumptions more than a republican. Just as zealous too.
How can we have a pleasant conversation about the murders the American soldiers are committing in the Middle East? How does one be pleasant about murder?
You mean your bullshit screed hating on public rail and showing your anti-homeless brainworms where you literally implied that “people don’t hate them enough”?
Also “boo hoo the ‘tankies’ (whatever that even means to you libs anymore) bullied me for supporting violence against some of the most vulnerable people in the imperial core”
lmao You have been complaining about this for FIVE DAYS holy shit.
I love public rail and took it all over the place when I visited Japan, I even still have the JR Pass ticket in my wallet. If I had one public transportation wish for LA it’s that every freeway have a light rail line like in the 105. As for the homeless situation I am all in for fully funded housing first initiatives and think we haven’t done anywhere near enough for them. That said, the unfortunate state of events between the LA Metro and the city’s homeless allows for some very problematic things to happen in light rail train cars especially during transit. I’ve seen quite a bit of drug use, littering, and even an instance when I had a taser brandished at my face only to find out a second later the guy was trying to sell it to me. I really wish people wouldn’t react so quickly to a post and start accusing them of being some kind of monster.
“they certainly don’t hate them enough to chase them away when they are smoking meth on the train” sounds kinda like you think that should be done and that the issue is people not hating the unhoused enough.
Especially when you come into a space that explicitly advocates for abolishing landlords and start saying that stuff, you should expect ridicule. Instead of complaining about it in other spaces for 5 days and repeatedly doubling down you could just do some very basic self-crit.
So whats your plan other then just let them smoke meth and steal from people obviously something needs to be done but putting your head in the sand and pretending there isn’t actually a problem won’t fix anything
A socialist state where housing is a guarantee and where poverty doesn’t lead to widespread drug use because it doesn’t exist. Also addiction recovery programs in the transitional state.
Why. What is yours, push them into a comically large blender? Or a prison, how about a prison?
For as much as the news talks about a declining birth rate, you are aware that people are still born in the west, right?
“Move”
You knowing moving isn’t free and it isn’t easy for most people to get a job in a country whose language they don’t speak, right?
Furthermore, even if someone does move, then you don’t take it as proof they are a hypocrite but rather proof they are delusional, so your original claims is just bad faith bullshit.
On the bright side, since you seemed to imagine that I was going there, you proved my point that the first claim (“why don’t you move there?”) is bad faith bullshit
Right the millions of poor rural Chinese living below the poverty line don’t exist sure if you pretend that the problem doesn’t exist it makes it easier to believe the ccp propaganda
the poverty line is very made up bullshit based on nothing but vibes some economists had, not even any statistics, it should be higher in a lot of places, lower in others where the price of things is lower, but in any case, no one claimed poor rural Chinese people don’t exist, ThereRisesARedStar said they don’t have a homelessness problem anywhere approaching the west, which is true, all of those poor rural Chinese people have homes, hell most of them even own their own homes, they don’t even rent, so, what exactly is your point? China has been the largest alleviator of poverty in modern history, yet, they do still have poverty, it has not been eradicated yet, but, they do not have a homelessness issue due to government initiatives that have worked very hard to make sure there is enough housing for their population (see western propaganda about ghost cities and the reality of how they’re all filled with people now)
what facts did I deny? do you want me to get you the homelessness and home ownership statistics for China? I assure you that they support my point, which is that the majority of people in China (even the poor rural people) are not homeless and even own their own homes.
I’m not the one that made this post but it would track with the general reddit-like nature of their other comments. It sounds like a very common thing I hear from reactionaries IRL that are clearly made-up or are hyperfixating on a hypothetical or outlier incident instead of just understanding that is not a failure of trains. Like the whole context was “sometimes trains aren’t good actually because I saw a mentally unwell person I have no proof is actually homeless.” Not all unhoused people look like the caricature most people have in their head, and not everyone that does drugs in public on a train is actually unhoused, though the latter is certainly a more reasonable assumption to make. The combinations of all these characteristics of this person it was clear they were engaging in bad faith at best, and outright lying at worst. I am not making a judgement either way but it is a specific sort of reactionary thinking that is encountered all too often in online communist spaces, and so it’s no surprise when people have short patience with this sort of thing.
If you’ve seen it enough you tend to get a sense for this time of debatebro and it’s rare that it’s a simple well-meaning misunderstanding because if it were it is very easy to have some humility. It’s the getting all offended by people laughing at something that is a textbook reactionary response, in a place where bullying libs and reactionaries is a pillar of its community culture. Furthermore going around other instances and complaining about said community sort of makes you fair game and I would not call it brigading, especially in a “what are instances you hate” thread, wherein the User compared us to right wingers. Which is itself a very tired very old trope known as “horseshoe theory”. And last but not least there is the term Tankie which is most often used to imply people on the imperial periphery or global south seeking national liberation are following a problematic ideology (because often the word gets used to refer to anyone left of Bernie Sanders on foreign policy a "tankie), which has deeply white supremacist or western chauvinist connotations.
So in short, does it really matter whether they live in LA or not? They certainly have a colonizer’s mindset with regard to their local community even if they claim to be for “paying for more social services.” That is like the core reason why social democracy and liberalism are derided as fascism lite by most communists.
You sure got a lot of context out of “they certainly don’t hate them enough to chase them away when they are smoking meth on the train”. I don’t think that was a great thing to say (not that it is not an issue and needs to be addressed) but instead of even trying some level of communication or rebuttal it seems like everyone just went full “reactionary” on them.
There is no “sense for this time of debatebro” or ability to see enough text to pull from that one sentence a sentence of endless fascism (or whatever problematic box). They have every right to get upset and go around other instances, because yours banned them. I have not seen a lot of humility here from anyone involved but what gets me is that some people think they get all the rights but others don’t.
Yes it does matter whether they live in LA or not as in one case they could be relating an actual experience they had and the other would be them spinning a web. In once case you could do some good and engage and for the other prove they where wrong and acting in bad faith.
Thank you for being a voice of reason MooPoo. I apologize if my original comment came off as callous and insensitive. I heavily sympathize with the plight of the homeless and my only problem is with those who can be a danger to themselves or others, especially in an enclosed area like a train. TBH I sympathize with ideologies that are beyond left of the American Overton window since I’m quite familiar with what Western countries have done to suppress them. Thanks for pointing out how they were the ones being reactionary without so much as giving a warning before the ban.
Nakoichi, I don’t expect you to unban me from your community but I hope we can at least understand each other enough to not see us as enemies.
You’re still sort of dodging the crux of the issue, you continue to place blame on the oppressed rather than engage with our comments and begin to grasp why the ultimate onus of responsibility lies on the oppressing classes. Let’s not get too derailed here (pun intended) from the original context: Your comments were a critique of public transit, followed by trying to back up that critique with a personal anecdote of a time you felt threatened by a homeless person. The responses to this barely surface level take that indicated influence by a deluge of reactionary propaganda were not out of line to make uncharitable assumptions about you, since we have had a large influx of bad faith arguments along these lines since federating.
I am not the one that banned you, and you’re right it’s not even in my power since I am not a mod of c/urbanism, but it should be a point of self reflection on why that is the route you took instead of being indignant about it. You’re the one that came into our instance and you might not understand what our rules fully entail or what reactionary behavior is but that’s not really our fault, I gave you a detailed breakdown of the reasons folks that post like this get banned so quickly and you might read it if you care as much as you appear to.
Hell you can still post on Hexbear if you aren’t site banned but you might try to start by asking good faith questions without preloading them with personal grievances. Or you can ask me, I’m pretty patient when I have reason to believe the inquirer is acting in good faith.
That said just be aware that civility is often reserved for people that have proven the latter so given prior engagement, just don’t expect people not to dunk on you for an exceptionally bad take. Ignorance is not always a good excuse.
it looks like the only comments of yours that were removed were for making inflammatory comments about homeless people on public transport in a place you don’t live.
Post your credit card number and DLN while you’re at it.
So a mod didn’t like a comment you made which was interpreted as encouraging anti-homeless hate. Instead of just moving on you decided to make this about “tankies” despite no one saying anything about Marxist ideology, China, or anything related. I think you’re just looking to pick a fight with us because we’re dirty pinko commies or something.
I love that y’all use that as an insult. It only carries any weight in your own echo chamber, you know that right? No where else on the planet (be it a forum or a physical space) does that mean anything. Well, maybe within north korea
I am pretty sure “classist” is seen as a valid insult even among radlibs, and many other people believe in equivalent terms (“elitist” is not too far off)
That’s even sillier, since American parlance is definitely not universal and in most countries the colloquial meaning of “liberal” is essentially that of a market-loving centrist
You say “again,” but that’s a radically different claim from “this is an insult nowhere in the real world”. Even in neoliberal states it’s often an insult!
A handle does not imply gender, I’ve been around since early IRC and it’s never been true.
I referred to you as “y’all” when I replied directly. When I replied later I didn’t even look at your name again, or remember who you were. I replied to “shimmering koi”. Is that a fish person? Obviously not.
I fucking hate tankies but I have zero issue with any gender, pronoun, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc. If I ever had to talk to you again, I’d be fine to refer to you as whatever you want. But I wouldn’t remember you because this is a anonymous social media platform and identify is meaningless.
Lol yeah they’re thinking about the coming winter, or the reality that they aren’t even allowed to leave their country (for all but the most privileged) unfortunately
[…] the Security Council today further tightened sanctions on the country, severely restricting fuel imports and other trade, as well as the ability of its citizens to work abroad.
Also acquired in the context of preventing the world superpower from killing 20 percent of them again without them having to spend so much on their conventional military.
Quick, tell me about the taean work system, which is used in all medium and large workplaces, without googling it. Since you’re so informed about the dprk
(The point of this is to make you reconsider how much you actually know about the country that isnt just straight up propaganda)
I’ll meet you: without googling I believe that is a work transfer system with China. I think it’s rail based, and I think they stay for some time.
But they aren’t free to go where they please, or leave the region entirely without ramifications.
Edit cause I was honest: I was wrong.
But are you purporting this agricultural system as effective?
Further I assume you bring that no fact up as argument that collectivist style policy is effective and happening, I would argue it is ineffective and still only a farce under authoritarianism. Else why would nk receive aid, and experience famine?
Lastly, I don’t need to know the economic history of the country to know where they are now. It’s not propaganda that got me here, it’s their own words and reports.
But are you purporting this agricultural system as effective?
It isnt their agricultural system, I would suggest you reread the whole thing because you’ve missed the most important aspect of what taean means. It means a collaboration between organized local labor and wider democracy, overseen by special interests such as the woman’s league.
Further I assume you bring that no fact up as argument that collectivist style policy is effective and happening, I would argue it is ineffective and still only a farce under authoritarianism. Else why would nk receive aid, and experience famine?
Why would you argue it is ineffective? Studies show the cooperatives work better than privately owned businesses. Also you haven’t established that the dprk is “authoritarian” any more than any other state.
They experienced famine after the collapse of the USSR, theyre doing fine on food now.
Lastly, I don’t need to know the economic history of the country to know where they are now. It’s not propaganda that got me here, it’s their own words and reports.
Well, you should. They tried to liberate the south when the US and US puppet dictator were killing tens of thousands of protestors. 20 percent of them died and all their infrastructure was bombed. After the war they did better under a socialist economy than the South until the US massively subsidized the South and the USSR collapsed, cutting off trade because of sanctions from the people who committed genocide on them (the US)
I would like to know what “own words and reports” you’re referring to.
It’s not propaganda that got me here, it’s their own words and reports.
This is an unusual claim, as most people do not let the DPRK speak for itself, even to then refute it. All you see is third hand horseshit along with defector “testimony”.
They are not the same, but it is America sanctioning both of them, and despite your worthless disavowed, your claim still rests on the tacit assumption that it is fairly arbitrating which civilian population deserves to suffer for decades.
If “on the planet” you mean primarily the U.S and secondarily the rest of the “west” while excluding the majority of humanity on the planet, then sure.
You’re so brainwashed and conditioned into believing you have more in common with some ghoul billionaire that values your life insofar as much as they can extract wealth out of you than your own fellow worker.
Obligatory comment that brainwashing is a myth rooted in orientalism and later pseudoscience, propagated by the US in order to make excuses for US soldiers defecting during the Korean War (et al).
I mean everywhere that isn’t China or Russia or one of their satellites/annexes yeah.
Not sure where you got the billionaire thing, I’ve never defended them, in word or action. (Living in a capitalist country and needing a job for resources doesn’t make me a billionaire apologist)
Liberalism and billionaire worship are not the same thing, same as communism and xi are not the same thing.
To be clear: just because xi figuratively leads a communist country doesn’t mean this policy is perfectly communist.
Same thing goes for billionaires existing in a liberal society.
Lastly, the existence of either doesn’t invalidate the tenets of either ideology
Xi is no different than any other billionaire shit head most of the communist party top leaders use there position to gain control over the state controlled businesses
This is incoherent. Xi has administrative control (or influence) over state enterprises, but he isn’t getting profits or stock options from them, so there are no grounds for calling him a billionaire
communist party top leaders use there position to gain control over the state controlled businesses
This is like saying you became a police commissioner to gain control over local police cars. Yeah, an explicit part of your job is that you can direct them, but the claim is so tautological that it looks like you are saying something else. It’s not like Xi will retain control of these enterprises after he leaves office.
Xi first started geting so much hate from the west because he actually started purging communist party members for being too involved in the private sector. If he was encouraging the bourgeoisification of the CPC he would be hailed by the west.
JEG VIL IKKE MERE! År efter år er det gået på samme måde. Alt er gået som det skal, indtil det er gået galt, og hvorfor? Fordi man er omgivet af hundehoveder, ignoranter, fæhoveder, fejehunde, uden fantasi, et par IMPOTENTE HÆNGERØVE, et par småimpotente grødbønder
Åh gud jeg ville betale gode penge for at se noget moderne med Egon. Desværre er Ove død, og ingen kan fylde Oves små og Egons mindre sko - Balling, Bahs og Sprogøe fik virkeligt fanget en karakter af dimensioner, og samspillet med de øvrige karakterer var på samme tid plat og eminent, især Kirsten Walther. Åh altså.
Et moderne reboot af Olsenbanden ville have en masse materiale at arbejde med. Det moderne erhvervslivs opblæste disruption-hype og finansielle fiksfakserier vil sagtens kunne skabe en ny version af Hallandsen. Den moderne Jensen vil passe perfekt ind i new public management. Og så vil der kunne være meget sjov i at lade de moderne Kjeld og Yvonne have mellemøstlig baggrund. De skal i hvert fald ikke bo i Valby længere, for det er blevet for dyrt. Måske skal den røde kuffert indeholde en harddisk med bitcoins?
Jeg kan godt forstå din entusiasme, men jeg synes efterhånden vi har set så mange reboots af ting hvor det er håndteret så ringe at det trækker ned på originalerne.
Dem der laver det er også fanget i en sump af at skulle respektere det gamle for ikke at få på puklen for det, ikke være for trendjagende, ikke at være for meget eller for lidt woke, ikke at have samme “feel” osv. Bare se de “nye” Far til Fire.
Den var også lidt en tidskapsel for det Danmark og især det København der fandtes dengang, om end i et meget statisk perspektiv. (Selv om jeg har kendt mange fra det miljø og den tid… Det er en type karakterer jeg ikke ser meget længere med mindre jeg finder et overlevende brunt værtshus eller tager på Staden)
Jeg må indrømme at jeg ikke har turdet se noget af “det nye” og ikke kan huske noget som helst af “den sidste rigtige” med de gamle drenge.
Hvis nu ham der spillede Børge ikke havde kastet sit liv i rendestenen kunne der have været et Kim af en chance for et ærligt “generationsskifte” hvor man finder nye stereotyper han kan spille op imod, evt. “hans børn” der nu ville være lige så gamle som de oprindelige bandemedlemmer.
På den anden side kan jeg da godt høre at jeg nok tager det mere alvorligt end nogen som helst i de gamle film gjorde. Jeg er bare bange for at der er nogen der kommer og besudler mindet om en serie der egentligt toppede i 1eren fordi der var nøgne damer.
Nye film må godt have nye ideer og så lade sig inspirere af gamle film.
Another great quote is made by Jensen, the burnt-out detective tasked with catching Egon and his gang. His younger and more naive colleague remarks that “crime doesn’t pay” which prompts Jensen to give the following answer:
Oh God! My dear, dear young friend, you are terribly mistaken. Believe me, I’ve been on the force for more than 25 years, and I know what I’m talking about. Duty carries its own reward, but it’s modest. Integrity is beautiful, but meager. Justice is proud, but one-eyed. Love is sweet, but costly. Friendship and camaraderie, those are good to look back on in your old age. But the only thing that pays, that’s crime!
Jensen makes a lot of glasses-off remarks such as “when the really big criminals arrives the only thing the police can do is to offer them protection”.
Yeah it’s honestly a really good series. There’s a reason it got big in the GDR. It’s wild what they could deliver while still keeping it comical. Like that text reads as some really deep quote, but in the scene it’s probably played for jokes. It’s great.
My only gripe is how Yvonne ping-pongs between being more insightful than Egon, and being an immense dumbass, depending on what the plot demands
My account is named after the character from a series of movies about bankrobbers. It was the only western movie-series allowed in the GDR. The guy had a bit where he would go on long insulting rants against his comrades after they’d fucked up, calling them all sorts of names, typically finishing off with declaiming they were SOCIAL DEMOCRATS (this being the worst he could call them). Here’s a compilation of him tearing into people, and also being torn into a little bit
Here’s a really famous scene where they rob a bank to Elverhøj
I DON’T WANT TO DO IT ANYMORE! Year after year, it’s been the same. Everything has gone right until it’s gone wrong, and why? Because you’re surrounded by dog-headed, ignorant, stupid, cowardly, unimaginative, unimaginative, a couple of IMPOTENT PIGS, a couple of small impotent porridge farmers.
according to some, i dont have enough hot potatoes in my mouth to translate danish blob-no-thoughts
A different version of the same rant can be translated to:
It’s the same thing every time! You have a plan, a brilliant plan! And then your surrounded by dogheads and deadbeats, lousy amateurs, miserable hacks, ridiculous shitkickers. Incompetent assholes, impotent mush peasants and social democrats!
Perfect translation 10/10 Maybe there’s a little bit lost in translation between the non focused way “Jeg vil ikke mere” goes than the focused way “I don’t want to do it anymore”, but that’s incredible nitpicking.
Some of those words hit much harder in english lmao. Gonna have to start calling people both impotent pig and “small porridge farmer”
“The study found that for most of the participants, the cost of housing had simply become unsustainable. Participants reported a median monthly household income of $960 in the six months prior to their homelessness, and most believed that either rental subsidies or one-time financial help would have prevented their homelessness.”
How do you differentiate yourself from them as a socialist? What is your theory of power and how it relates to authority, revolutions, and the working class that causes you to make this separation between supporting non-western communist countries and not?
I’m sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding here. I think the delineation between authoritarian regimes and non-authoritarian governments is pretty clear - are you implying that all socialist and communist influenced governments are necessarily authoritarian?
I think the dictionary definition is as I mentioned in a below comment, but the colloquial meaning has more to do with censorship by the government and restrictions on freedoms than go beyond those necessary for the health and welfare of other citizens.
So just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general I have a favorable opinion of Allende’s policy. Part of it is hard because, while he did some things that I agree with 10000% like increasing access to education and making basics like bread accessible, I don’t have enough context to accurately judge my feelings on some of the other policies that he enacted, like land seizure. The other half of that is it’s hard to see the long-term effects of policies that were then invalidated by a CIA-led coup and Pinochet.
Do you know of any places where his policies actively (for the context of our previous conversation) would be considered “authoritarian”?
Well, since you like reading (which is cool and good!) there’s a neat book on Cybersyn, but I was actually going in a slightly different direction. I respect the project Allende lead, but it’s undeniable that it was a catastrophic failure. Allende is one of many examples of attempting a gentle touch and underestimating the sheer brutality that is the reality of capitalist encirclement for a socialist state.
Allende was conciliatory when he should have been firm and his lax approach to purging (i.e. basically not doing it) is what very directly laid the groundwork for the coup that was the death of him and many other Chileans under one of the most vicious dictators the world has ever seen.
Someone recently reposted a Michael Parenti quote that I think discusses elements of this well:
You can look at any existing socialist country— if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist— whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways.
One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance. When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who are poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.”
And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?”
I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read.
So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.
Here I mean to most emphasize the last paragraph, though the preceding paragraphs are certainly relevant. “Are there civil liberties for the fascists?”
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think you missed the whole point of GarbageShoot asking you specifically about Allende.
just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general […]
I think this is the main problem here: a lack of knowledge about the historical context of “authoritarian” socialist projects, but nevertheless making generalized statements about them without even considering the material reasons why they were by necessity “authoritarian.” Read up more about the history of Chile and consider what happened to Allende and the hope of a socialist Chile. Who came after Allende (and almost as important, who installed that successor)? Why do these events seem so familiar when learning about every other attempt, successful or not, to bring about a communist society? When you’ve done that, you will at the very least have a leg to stand on when criticizing so-called tankie authoritarianism.
I’d also suggest reading The Jakarta Method. Here’s a somewhat relevant quote from it:
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
I was aware of Pinochet and the general CIA coup, but not Allende in particular; I don’t think it’s a failing to admit that the knowledge any one person has access to is limited. That’s why my immediate response was one of attempting to find resources, not trying to generalize about something that I was deeply unequipped to speak on. The world’s big, sadly I can’t claim to have knowledge of everything on it.
My little reading on Allende makes it sound like he was democratically elected and pretty widely loved among the left-leaning members of his country - again, the only potential authoritarian charges I see levied against him are the socialization of private sectors, which I personally have not enough economic background to really have a stance on either way. If that’s the only thing that he’s called authoritarian for, I’d say that my understanding of the colloquial definition is probably more focused on aspects like freedom of speech, religion, etc. being limited, as opposed to market freedom.
But maybe my internal understanding of what makes a nation authoritarian is flawed! I’m happy to be wrong if it means I learn something. Maybe there’s internal conflation of fascism and authoritarianism happening, and I need to re-draw some of the distinctions between the two.
I appreciate the book recommendation - the study I’ve done has focused less on political theory and more on philosophy, so if you have any other recommendations that cover things like the Marxist/anarchist split, etc., I’d be grateful!
, the only potential authoritarian charges I see levied against him are the socialization of private sectors, which I personally have not enough economic background to really have a stance on either way.
If someone is complaining about socializing private sectors – not that the profits of the now-public enterprises were used to enrich bureaucrats, but that the act of socialization itself inherently infringed on the rights of the capitalists – the correct response is to spit in their face. That’s not always the practical response, so I certainly am not telling you to go out and do it, but it’s the correct response. Anyone complaining about “market freedom” as though it is remotely comparable to “human freedom” rather than a tool to be used or put away as the people see fit is either a fool or takes you to be a fool.
In a third world country especially, private companies are frequently the basis of staggering siphoning of wealth from the third world to the imperial core, which is why movements to repatriate them are so popular (see also the oil industries of both Egypt and Brazil right before their respective coups).
Being transparent about things, your comments read as one of the relatively rare cases of someone who is deeply submerged in neoliberal ideology but also intellectually honest and open about it. I’d be happy to discuss things with you from a Marxist perspective if you like.
All governments are inherently authoritarian by their nature, but there’s a scale and I think in most people’s minds there’s a line.
The line is probably drawn where people are prosecuted or even killed when they publicly criticise the ruling regime, where you have to “escape” to simply leave, where there’s a culture of fear that your neighbour or friends or even family could report you for disagreeing with the government. More often than not there’s no way for the public to change the government through democratic means.
Ok, but if that’s the case, why are we drawing a line at a nation’s internal population and disregarding their external policies? The USA killed three million people in the War in Iraq, including Iraqis who were very critical of the American presence. The USA has assassinated Latin American presidents for speaking out against the USA and replaced them with more America-friendly dictators. And yet everyone who talks about authoritarianism doesn’t include western nations in their discussion, they instead make up a cartoon idea of what countries outside the west are like. Your definition of what is or isn’t tankie/authoritarian has some kind of nationalist bias built into it.
Every time someone describes what authoritarianism is, it makes me think that America and the EU are the worst perpetrators of this behavior, but they mainly export all their violence rather than use the worst of it domestically. Domestically they use private sector means to distribute violence, such as poverty, prisons, and the facilitation of ambient racism.
This reminds me of the dividing line that liberals use, which is when they say things like “that dictator killed HIS OWN PEOPLE.” As if killing people externally is more excusable crime?
Because authoritarianism is about the internal control of its own populace, not how a nation state acts against other nation states.
The illegal invasion of Iraq wasn’t authoritarianism. And I’m not going to start defending the actions of any nation that assassinates other leaders to try and get them under their influence.
And yet everyone who talks about authoritarianism doesn’t include western nations in their discussion
I think there’s very few western nations that fit that line I described in an earlier comment. That’s not to say none have authoritarian traits, the UK is always criticised for being a bit too much of a surveillance state, for example.
This reminds me of the dividing line that liberals use, which is when they say things like “that dictator killed HIS OWN PEOPLE.” As if killing people externally is more excusable crime?
Obviously killing people externally or internally is bad, but it’s more shocking in the same way that a parent murders their own child.
If invasions, sanctions, assassinations, and complete immiseration of other nations isn’t authoritarian then what is it? Why are we arbitrarily deciding there’s a distinction with how a country’s internal and external policies? These things inform one another. If a nation like America is doing far worse things than authoritarianism, except externally, why can’t we say that’s what it is?
Obviously killing people externally or internally is bad, but it’s more shocking in the same way that a parent murders their own child.
That makes no sense. Joseph Biden is not my dad and my shared nationality with him means nothing because he represents an economic class at war with my own. Was Hitler the father of German Jews? What the fuck are you talking about
I literally just said above. Why are you arguing about the definition of it? It’s like you’re trying to fit western nations under the term because you don’t like them to try to make a point.
Yeah they do fit the definition, because the distinction between external and international policy you’re making is arbitrary and meaningless. I’m a communist. My nation is the working class.
No they don’t fit the definition, it’s not meaningless or arbitrary. I don’t know why you’re arguing this, it’s not like I’m defending the actions of western nations here, or even labelled any particular countries as being authoritarian.
I’m a communist. My nation is the working class.
No idea what the point of saying this is, but just to provide some useless and irrelevant facts to this discussion, the telescopic ladder I have is 3 metres long.
I’ve got an easier one for you that should help you to understand. The policy of colonies regarding the population within its borders counts as “internal”, don’t they? What shall we say for the colonial occupation of Afghanistan? Shall we call this liberal?
Come to think of it, what do you think of non-citizen permanent residents, because America sure likes killing those within its borders and treating the rest quite brutally.
I’m not American and have no issue criticising them on their actions through history. I don’t even know why you’re bringing them up though? I just talked about what people define as an authoritarian state and you’ve gone off on some anti US tangent.
I don’t know if there is such a thing as a perfectly free, truly democratic society wherein everyone is capable of existing free of oppression lol, but I think there’s definitely a spectrum of authoritarian policy and sentiment, often correlated with nationalist and fascist fervor.
I may, as a person of color, experience more oppression in a country where I do not fit the standard vision of what a citizen looks like, and less in a country wherein which I do meet that criteria. That’s usually more an issue with nationalist rhetoric than systems of governance - unless that nationalism is codified and enforced by the government, which is the case in many governments that I would consider “more authoritarian.” America is one that has tended towards that, historically. Certainly, though, there are others that have also instituted systems explicitly designed to oppress.
I’d say, in general, I have many rights and privileges in current-day America that a truly authoritarian government wouldn’t allow. And that’s not to say that I think America is the greatest, or even good lmao. We’re constantly on the verge of disenfranchisement, and the fact that we’re constantly fighting for things that should be just baseline isn’t exactly a good look. But, in all, I’m allowed to openly state my thoughts in the court of public opinion, I’m able to vote to elect a representative, able to practice religion as I’d like, etc.
For sure, the validity of all of that is affected deeply by the corruption of capital in those arenas, but there’s something to be said about the power to openly share ideas and influence fellow citizens without active censorship. Keeping in mind things like COINTELPRO and Fred Hampton, etc, I obviously can’t say in good conscience that the government has never censored it’s citizens, but the purported adherence to the first amendment and being “the land of the free” at least makes them work for it.
Sorry for the novel lol. It’s a complicated subject and there’s a lot of nuance to try and tease out
I believe they are suggesting that, if “authoritarian” means anything, that every large state that has ever existed was “authoritarian,” though some diffuse the authority through things like enclosure of the commons combined with strict property laws or other, older methods like religious law.
That’s fair- where the line of “authoritarianism” is drawn depends on historic, social, and economic context. I think modern colloquial usage is certainly shaped by western values, simply because America’s primary export is culture, and that’s what happens when you shout loud enough over enough time.
No, I’m suggesting that authoritarian is a meaningless term unless defined specifically and was asking what theories of power and authority they had for making the delineation they are.
The derogatory term authoritarian is always leveled at socialist or communist countries, and never capitalist ones even though capitalist countries restrict rights for the majority of their populations by the very nature of the inherent power structure in capitalism. Even though communist countries usually enjoy far more decentralised authority, better voting rights, and higher political involvement in the populace, they are labeled as “authoritarian,” the implication being that they need “freedom” aka capitalism
My guy, that’s an awful lot of assumptions to be making about the general mindset of multiple nations, each of which contains millions of people. Derogatory? I’m pretty sure that authoritarianism has a dictionary definition lol. “Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.” From Wikipedia, just as a quick Google grab.
So do you think that, say, WW2 Italy wasn’t authoritarian? Or same-era Japan? Fascist nations are (by the above definition) authoritarian, so that actually includes tons of non-communist nations, both current and historical. Similarly, just because a nation is communist, does not make it magically except from having corrupt, authoritarian government. Id even say that America is well on its way to authoritarianism, and the right/neo-libs continue to salivate over the chance to completely fuck over the common person in exchange for a quick buck.
Genuinely, because I’m always looking to learn more; how does capitalism as an economic system inherently restrict rights? My understanding of the core premise is that it turns labor into a conceptual currency that we then use to acquire goods. It’s not, theoretically, at least, inherently oppressive. In practice, it’s been clearly a shit-show that causes more suffering than just about anything else on the planet.
As a side note; I’m deeply anti-capitalist, I’m also deeply anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian. I hate the idea that a human being is only worth the utility they provide, and I also hate the idea that oppression is a necessary consequence of an attempt to liberate the people of a nation from hyper-capitalist wagemongering. I’d like to think there’s a world where we can live and not oppress anyone, can genuinely engage in discourse and learn from each other without judgement.
thanks for the interaction here, and thanks for pushing back. you’re getting at what i was hoping to demonstrate, that all political systems inherently have a system of authoritarianism with the possible exception of anarchism – I don’t know enough about anarchist theory to talk through that and don’t want to be sectarian to my anarchist comrades, but your questions about it would be welcome at hexbear. we have a comm dedicated to theory. Bakunin (one of the big names in anarchist theory) wrote about authority, and Engels replied (he was not a fan). you might like their essays. theory has come a long way since then, but it’s worth looking at some foundational texts. this topic is what caused the marxist-anarchist split.
capitalism restricts rights by alienating the working class from the means of production. thus, workers have no say over their labor and have the value of the labour extracted. as more exploitation occurs and wealth imbalance increases, the ruling class will always move to consolidate power to protect their capital and positions in society, which naturally leads to one society of the bourgeouise and another for the labourers. this is at the basical level but it is much wider than this and effects all levels of society, e.g., the bourgeouise control media outlets to prevent ideas from taking root (e.g., newspapers in 1800s-1900s) whilst selling the idea of a “free press.” It means that all aspects of society are not focused on creating products useful for society but on creating products useful to make capitalist money through further exploitation. It needs to feed and crushes all who oppose it, even ideologically.
that’s a decent starting point, I think, but yeah come join us at hexbear. you can jump into the theory comms with questions or head to “askchapo” or just jump into the daily mega thread. we’re all nerds over there, so where I don’t know something someone else will jump in
I appreciate the super open and honest discourse! I’ve only studied a little bit of Marx/Engels and then some of the Frankfurt School and some post Marxist and post structuralist stuff, I’m looking forward to engaging and learning more.
If capitalism isn’t authoritarian why do we spend most of our federal budget on making sure people can’t leave the system?
Why does my boss get to decide my hair color?
Why is everything in my life dictated by the authority of money. How is living with that authoritarian boot on my neck freedom? I would be less free in a country like Cuba where I can marry who I want and leave my job without losing access to medicine?
When you say making sure people can’t leave the system, do you mean the military budget? Which is for sure super fucked- no doubt there. I think the driving force behind most warmongering is profit, as opposed to oppression for the sake of preventing dissent. Obviously CIA operations in foreign countries (and within the borders of the US) through time have shown we’re certainly willing to kill and ruin economies for control, however my (admittedly limited) understanding of a lot of those instances is that they are primarily built upon promises of extending geopolitical control as opposed to pursuing pure capital.
I think about the difference between the gulf war/Iraq/Afghanistan, which were for sure about extending control in an area rich with a resource that is incredibly valuable, and Korea and Vietnam -huge examples of attempting to avoid allowing political rivals to accumulate power globally.
Honestly I think workers rights is for sure an example of modern American policy being vastly (intentionally, in part) unequipped for modern capitalism. I don’t know if I think that it makes the core concepts of capitalism flawed- workers will need to work regardless of the economic system, and as long as people are working, there’s a power dynamic between workers and those who are utilizing their labor- the farmer will always need to sell their crops, and they can’t control if buyers won’t associate with them due to their hair color, or religious preferences, etc.
I don’t have an answer for that last bit- I think that’s where a just government that serves its people would be able to step in and provide for people who need it. I know countries are toying with Universal Basic Income, but ultimately it’s a complicated issue that doesn’t have an easy answer that I’m aware of.
I’m not sure how capitalism inherently prevents you from marrying who you’d like - could you elaborate on that? Do you mean things like marrying into debt? I definitely agree that the American healthcare system is oppressive - that’s absolutely a symptom of late-stage capitalism and the GLORY OF THE “INVISIBLE HAND” of the unregulated market. I think that’s one of those areas where a just government would be providing for its citizens.
What do we do with the economies once we controll them? We open the markets to our businesses and they raid the place. As our government is cpaitlaist all the decisions are based on making money. All those politicians that decide who to go to war with own stock in the companies that will profit. There is no difference between those drives.
Why did we not want rivals to gain power? Just vanity? No. The risk to future profits. When you look at wages and workers rights when the USSR fell the Capitalists had no competition. Wages were lowered everywhere as conditions would permit. After all, where else could people go,?
As to workers rights it is pretty simple. All that needs to be is that workers are given dignity. My boss can fire me and I might starve to death. If my survival wasn’t based on pleasing the most greedy people then I could make better decisions about how to use my time. So, just more money and safety. As communists we have a very specific idea we have about how to acomplish that.
Depending on what sate you live in you could very easily be fired for being queer. Because your ability to survive us based on money anything that riskes that is effectively not permitted by capitalism.
I’m in no way here to argue pro-capitalist rhetoric. I’m not super committed to capitalism as opposed to other systems of economic management, I am however willing to posit that the system of trading work for money does not inherently oppress- absolutely late stage capitalism is an unabashed fuck-show responsible for more misery than acceptable by almost any ethical standard. I hate the idea that, ultimately, you’re only worth what you can produce. I think that workers rights should be paramount, and there’s no amount of money that would be an acceptable profit margin to sell human suffering, full stop.
On the geopolitical scale, I think many decisions during the cold war were driven by fear of nuclear warfare. There’s for sure profit in controlling puppet states, but with Cuba on their doorstep and Russia very clearly taking the role of an international superpower, I think that there was some rationale about their ability to become more politically important and influence the world beyond the west’s ability to push back, and with nuclear armaments proliferating at a genuinely insane rate, there was a very real threat of apocalypse on the horizon. Do I think that justifies warmongering, interference in legal elections, and killing dissidents? Of fucking course not. But I don’t think it was motivated by money alone. Money is just a gateway to power, like anything else.
I think personally, the idea that you can use work to produce capital that you can then spend on other things is not necessarily authoritarian. It’s also definitely not a single catch-all solution to “how do we make a society that is just”- obviously unregulated markets go brr. I think the counterbalance needs to be systems that allow for people who can’t work to live a high quality of life, regardless of how much they can provide.
That is where history disagrees. In the bargain of trade the people who need money to live can never make deals on an even playing field with those that don’t. If trade determines your survival and we know it can’t be done fairly than we have created conditions that can only snowball into misery.
I see no reason to belive the people running an apartide government that used weapons of mass destructions on civilians should be given any benefit of the doubt. There is no evidence they were kind or altruistic in any other endeavor. Why would it be different here?
If the cycle was work -> value. Than I would agree that is what socialism calls for. However the accumulation of capital makes it impossible for a worker to get fair and just value for their labor.
I definitely think that if any theoretical government would be capable of making that core work-to-value cycle work, it certainly would look pretty radically different than the US, I mostly live here because I was born here, I have a support system here, and my ancestors were literally bled to death here lol
Yeah, you could make something work. I could make my car fly, it would just be easier to use a plane though.
Most of history worked just fine on other systems. Most of the time this system has worked terribly. The system we had was just the first one to encorporate the scientific method and rationality. It is a historical accident. We can do better.
I think that there’s quite a bit to be said for the ability to abstract something like labor and turn it into a common resource that can be utilized by anyone- if I need to buy a Japanese computer part from a very small manufacturing organization, that’s about the only way to make sure that all parties are seeing value in a transaction, seeing that there’s no guarantee that I have anything they would want or need, and I may never interact with them again.
I agree, we can for sure improve on the concepts involved, but that doesn’t mean that they’re accidental, and there’s a reason that the system was even marginally successful.
I think like, evolution is a great example of a similar process - the biological functions formed by evolutionary processes aren’t intentional, because intention implies cognitive processes that a natural law isn’t capable of; but they do serve purpose. They aren’t accidents, because the system is by its nature iterative and of course something would work eventually. Is there a theoretically more efficient structure than the one that we currently have for the human heart? Sure! That’s just not the structure that evolved through selective pressure.
Again, not to say we shouldn’t try to improve on systems of economy and government, but more to say that there’s still lessons to be taken from what we currently have; it worked in some small way, which means we probably wouldn’t benefit from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
Well no. In the example of buying a small computer part they probably see little value in the transaction. Between parts, overhead, shipping, materials. Ths majority of the economic signal there is lost to inefficient rent seeking, bloat, corrupt middlemen, and management costs. Who in this situation are we concerned about? The people who designed it? The people that assembled it? The people that mined the materials? The people that handled shipping? The market abstracts all this so people.habe a very hard time feeling the relationships between each other. Then rent seeking behavior overshadows all that and makes market forces effectively noise.
I do agree with the idea of evolutionary solutions. Consider the horse. Useful. When we abandoned the solution that evolved and created purpose built solutions we got way cooler and way more effective answers. Like, would you say the rocket ship was just an overcorrection to the inefficiency present in water buffalo based transport? No. It was the application of science, logic and reason to create good answers to hard problems. Every time we try to make something cool we do so. It’s rad. We should to do the economy what we have done every other technology
I think that for sure one of the drawbacks of the labor to currency system is the blind consumerism and the unethical conditions necessary to, say, make a bacon cheeseburger. I think the unethical parts of that interaction have more to do with corporate price-gouging and abuse of labor than the consumer themselves, who (in our current system) is kept intentionally blind to the real cost of their meal.
I think that for sure rent-seeking is one of those things that, in this theoretical government, would need to be addressed. Landlords and speculators are clearly opportunists with no connection to the stuff they milk value from, and that’s problematic.
On reflection, ultimately I have no problem with the premise that people don’t necessarily need to understand how to grow wheat, or even know someone who owns wheat, in order to consume the labor of a farmer- so long as that farmer is capable of truly leveraging their labor favorably and also benefits from that interaction. In that scenario, the farmer also uses the abstraction, which allows them to really utilize all of their labor through a larger base of people to sell to. They can also put this theoretical currency towards things that contribute to their fulfillment and that of their family members without knowing the person who produces those things personally, and so on.
I think one place I’m struggling with this is I’m having a hard time conceptualizing how people with more ephemeral skills would be able to leverage that skill into the resources necessary to obtain other types of fulfillment without a way to hold and transfer the value they generate. I’m sure there are philosophers who’ve written books on books about it, and I just need to find their work lol.
I think that we stopped using horses and adapted systems to do similar work, for sure, but that was after we had already iterated into the saddle, the cart, the wagon, carriage, etc. Horse to car is a big step if we look at the two of them without the greater context, but it was thousands of years of technology and iteration before we got there. They’re fundamentally interrelated- I mean heck, we even measure the power of an engine by horses.
I agree that the natural next step economically is coming, and that’s a fact- the questions in my eyes are: what’s the horse, what’s the carriage, and what are we replacing the horse with?
Cybernetics. The needs of people are essentially known and predictable. We can just make them and give them to people. That is also kinda how most of human history worked and it was fine then. It could be fine now, even better with computer data analysis and rational processing.
Sure there will be exceptions like little Japanese computer parts. However some democratic process could be used. Plenty of writers and scifi stories have possible systems. We can figure that out when we get there.
I’m actually not not into the idea of being able to instantly and accurately judge the needs of a whole nation of people. I mean shit, we already collect so much data through smart watches that once we are able to accurately measure metabolic rate, that’s like 90% of it right there I think lol
There is a book, the people’s republic of Walmart.
Basically every company with sufficient money does exactly this and they are very effective at it. Just what if instead of using the tech to make Walmart slightly more money we used it to make some public goods cheap and effective
seriously though, we live in a late-stage capitalist hellscape and it’s always funny to be when people use government monitoring fears to justify removing core social safety nets while simultaneously Walmart, Google, etc. Know when your balls ache because they have collected data on you from when you were prepubescent.
Those companies use the money they squeeze out of you to buy politicians to make your life worse. So life under capitlaism has trained everyone to mistrust that kinda thing. People have simply never lived in a world where anything like that was likely to improve their lives. So pessimism is a reasonable response to the conditions we find ourselves in. However a better world is possible.
hard agree. I think the only way we can improve our lives and the lives of those in our communities is to unflinchingly believe in the fact that we deserve better, and we can get better
A few things to keep in mind in addition to our comrade’s reply:
I’ve never met or talked online with any tankie who is happy with the fact that the “authoritarian oppression” is necessary. We often just take the position of Marx’s quote “we won’t make excuses for the terror.” You don’t have to want it, but because it’s necessary according to history and theory, we don’t bother with the whole game of waiting for the perfect excuse, because then it’s often too late for a movement.
The goal of tankies is to also reach that world of no necessary oppression and liberation from it for all through dialectical progression, however long and arduous that task is. We just try to be technical, tactical, and strategic about it. It can seem callous, but it’s a mistake to think we can stay on the emotional/values-only plane of thought while attempting large scale socio-economic changes because the enemies of those changes have a system behind them which fulfills all these tasks with low effort.
When we say authoritarianism is meaningless, we mean that the dictionary definition you gave is all encompassing at state-level analyses, rendering it meaningless for distinctions. There is no power which doesn’t fulfill all of those conditions (even just a low-level manager performs the contents of that definition, despite the form it takes being small scale. Like “reductions of the rule of law” can be as simple as asking you to do tasks on outside of your contract). The only difference is a vibe created in the mind of the user of the term.
The end of this authority at societal scale is communism. Countries sometimes called communist are better called socialist countries led by communists or something. The whole discussion is rendered confusing by mistaking a process/movement for some definitional standard. No socialist country is socialist for meeting definitions/conditions; they are socialist because they recognize and continue the process to progression to communism. See point 2 for the strategy which countries led by communists are doing.
Come talk with us, we have interesting ideas and people
I appreciate the reply and break-down of some of these concepts in context. I struggle with the necessity of authoritarianism, not because of the required restrictions on freedom necessary to protect others from oppression, but by shielding a system from criticism as opposed to allowing critique to be heard and resolved through collective discourse. I definitely also recognize that’s an arduous process that requires a necessary undermining of governmental authority, but I feel like there’s a sort of unintended arrogance in the idea that any system could be free enough of flaws to be above criticism- or that it’s good enough to be worth the oppression of the few without hearing their voices and honestly considering their plight.
I’m happy, always, to learn more and engage in conversations about this, I look forward to talking with folks on Hexbear and growing my understanding of these concepts!
any system could be free enough of flaws to be above criticism- or that it’s good enough to be worth the oppression of the few without hearing their voices and honestly considering their plight.
I don’t think there’s many MLs that would argue against you here, at least as far as ideals go. In fact you’ll find a lot of internal criticism of past socialist experiments. It’s just not really criticism if it’s not taking into account historical context and/or if it’s based largely on western misinformation.
What most western criticism of AES lacks is key historical context (this comment is very stream of consciousness so forgive me for being all over the place):
Threats of invasion, sabotage, espionage, assassination, etc have always been a threat to vested power, but even more so against revolutionary movements. Rosa Luxembourg was killed. Lenin was nearly assassinated (may have caused him to die early). Stalin may have been assassinated. Castro somehow survived hundreds of attempts and plans. Che was killed. Allende was overthrown (and maybe killed). Árbenz was overthrown. Malcolm X was killed. Fred Hampton was killed. Sukarno was overthrown. Sankara was killed. All this just off the top of my head, there’s plenty more examples.
The Soviet Union had 20 years to somehow industrialize well enough to face European invasion, withstanding both internal and external attacks. The alternative was quite literally death.
The absolute strength, size, and resources of the US empire are unprecedented, which significantly alters the material conditions and thus the strategies that must be employed by revolutionary movements for survival. US intelligence agencies have become very good at manufacturing or manipulating social unrest to destabilize a country and set up a coup. Check out The Jakarta Method for an overview of some of these strategies.
So yes, ideally we would all interact freely in the marketplace of ideas, and bad ideas would be refuted by facts and logic. But the unfortunate reality is that bad faith actors and saboteurs have proven incredibly effective at materially undermining revolutionary movements, and thus any criticism of those movements must take that into account or it’s a useless criticism.
What? The term authoritarian is thrown at non-communist/capitalist nations all the time. Syria, Nazi Germany, Libya, Franco’s Spain, Modern Russia, and a million other instances. Authoritarian is a clearly defined term and is in no way exclusively applied to communist nations in almost any circles. It also happens to have been applied to most “communist” countries because most of them have been authoritarian
It’s not clearly defined at all; try to give a definition of authoritarianism that applies to all of the countries frequently described as authoritarian, but not to any of the ones that aren’t, and you’ll see how vague a term it is.
Countries frequently have authoritarian tendencies without being overwhelmingly described as an authoritarian nation. When a nations primary mode of function is in authoritarian action it ceases to be a country I would consider something anyone should aim to emulate, which is why most people have problems with tankies and their support of the USSR or the CCP. It is fine to point at those countries and say “hey for all of their faults they managed to do X pretty well” but an entirely different thing to look at them and say “if only they came out on top, the world would be a much better place today”.
When a nations primary mode of function is in authoritarian action it ceases to be a country I would consider something anyone should aim to emulate
ALL nations and ALL governments’ ‘primary mode of function’ is ‘authoritarian action’. You can’t run a water main without using ‘authoritarian action’ to secure right of way.
God this is just like being in college again. You can’t be serious, as you must understand the difference between using eminent domain vs a pogrom. Like maybe I’m being dramatic, but I think that the Uyghurs might be slightly more inconvenienced than someone who at worst is getting a paycheck in order to move their house. There’s is a significant difference in how countries even go about implementing shit as well, as eminent domain in a modern democracy vs eminent domain in a authoritarian dictatorship could be executed radically differently.
You are however disregarding how a nation conducts itself internationally, instead focusing entirely on domestic policy. Should we not consider how a nation acts towards people outside of its own borders as this authoritarianism? If we include a country’s imperialism, you’ll find the overwhelmingly most violent, brutal and authoritarian nations are the USA, the EU, and the west in general.
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that there are serious human rights problems in the way the EU and US has conducted itself overseas in the past, you are grossly underestimating just how fucked up other countries behave themselves when operating past their own borders
Sure, you’re right, but again, you are downplaying atrocities by other nations far greater right now. Would I like the US to conduct itself better? Of course. Do I advocate and vote in a way that supports that? Of course. Do I think the US is the worst compared to other countries? Not even close
Who do you vote for to put a stop to US support for the occupation of Syria? Which US politicians are you voting for to end the murderous sanctions against Cuba, Iran the DPRK and Venezuela? Which US politicians have pledged to quit murdering civilians in Yemen? Which US politicians support Palestinian human rights or at least want to quit bankrolling the open air prison they live in? Which US politicians support ending the concentration camps at our borders? Or slowing down all the refugee deportations to Latin American countries we’ve devastated with all of our “interventions?”
Oh wait, there are none with any power or possibility of getting serious power. Actually the only one putting a stop to the bloodshed in Yemen is China.
The fact is that you probably vote for the Democrats because you wouldn’t be shameless enough to vote for Republicans and then claim that you vote against the US’s mass murdering behavior, but the Democrats don’t have any intentions of ending any of these atrocities and if you’re claiming that they do you’re either a gullible fool or a murder-supporting liar.
Maybe you vote Green? They might be less evil than the GOP and DNC but they will NEVER hold power so they have no impact on how evil the US is.
The external imperialism of western countries far outweighs the danger, threat, and damage to human life than even the most cartoonish and absurd claims about the alleged internal authoritarianism in countries like Cuba, China, and the DPRK. It’s such a massive disconnect and it’s also not even a dialectical comparison.
The external imperialism of western nations is precisely what generates the security apparatuses that are developed within modern socialist countries. Most of the time what you regard as gross and needless authoritarianism is in fact socialist states defending themselves from external aggression. Go listen to Parenti talking about the measures Nicaragua had to take in regards to capitalist encirclement.
And furthermore, the decision to not use the term authoritarian to describe western nations constantly confuses me. Is it because the term imperialism is more accurate? If you want my gut feeling on this: authoritarian, totalitarian, and related terms were all cooked up by liberal historians like Hannah Arendt to make the USSR sound like the same type of thing as Nazi Germany, which is frankly Holocaust trivialization.
I disagree and I don’t appreciate people splitting hairs when very obviously it is not the case. Anyone can sit down and stare that “oh well this is authoritarian because if you don’t pay your taxes you lose your home”, and it’s completely irrelevant to any legitimate conversation. There’s a difference between the United States and Pol Pots Cambodia, and if you’re gonna try to argue that they’re the same then I’m done
It’s not splitting hairs, it’s literally the entire point of the discussion. I understand that you’ve had the idea that there’s some fundamental, qualitive, difference between the authoritarianism of Western counties and the authoritarianism of foreigners so deeply instilled in you that the idea of questioning it, or even having to justify it, is absurd to you. But the fact of the matter is that it is perfectly reasonable “legitimate conversation” to actually ask you to back up your claims, and you trying to assert that it’s just “obvious” that you’re right and if anyone tries to argue “you’re just done” just makes it clear that you’ve never actually examined why you hold these beliefs and you refuse to do so.
There’s a difference between the United States and Pol Pots Cambodia, and if you’re gonna try to argue that they’re the same then I’m done
You’re right, there is a difference: an order of magnitude more people have been killed and emiserated by the USA.
Incorrect. In the past I had been a dues paying member of socialist/leftist organizations, I went to school for politics and philosophy, I’ve spent years of my life having conversations with people like you and reading arguments and following these topics. I’m not done because I’m ignorant or unwilling to face a truth, I’m done because I think you’re wrong, and that you’re unable to see reason. I’ve had this conversation dozens of times. No rational person would look at how an atrocity like the Pol Pot regime conducted itself and say “Yeah that wasn’t fun but look at America! That’s where the real evil is!” It’s insane. For that reason I hope you have a nice evening, I will not be continuing this conversation.
Incorrect. In the past I had been a dues paying member of socialist/leftist organizations, I went to school for politics and philosophy, I’ve spent years of my life having conversations with people like you and reading arguments and following these topics. I’m not done because I’m ignorant or unwilling to face a truth
Didn’t ask, don’t care.
I’m going off the actual content of your statements, and that content is that you take liberalism as axiomatically true and you fundamentally are unwilling to examine that axiom, instead writing off anyone who challenges it as “not rational” or even “insane” and refusing to engage further.
Notice you didn’t name the United States which is just as authoritarian as modern Russia by any definition we choose (voting rights? participation in political process? allowed dissent? access to clean water? basic access to healthcare? food desserts? policies meant to keep people in poverty?). That’s my point. It’s an ethereal term unless properly defined.
We’ll have to set Libya aside since after given “freedom,” there are now literal slave traders everywhere.
I don’t particularly care as that wasn’t my point. My point was to disagree with your comment prior which stated that authoritarian as a term was mainly used as a truncheon against communist nations in order to increase support for capitalism, which it isn’t.
Yeah, what they should have said is that authoritarianism as a term is mainly used as a truncheon against non Western countries in order to increase support for Western hegemony, which it absolutely is.
Yeah, but you doing that is unhelpful. It is confusing people because that is not a reasonable place to find criticism with the argument. Too much precision is not helpful in arguments and the CIA literally ran propaganda programs to get people to try to bog down any discussion of communism with meaningless minutiae. So, do better or something.
I never said that I don’t support communist countries. What I do not support are abuses of power by authoritarian leaders, even if they claim to be abusing their power in order to bring about a communist state.
Tankies accept most/all atrocities committed by so-called communist leaders with a “the ends justify the means” attitude that I do not share.
Have you never heard the phrase “the ends justify the means” before? It’s a pretty common phrase.
It means that any action, no matter how unethical or morally reprehensible, is acceptable as long as it is done to accomplish a goal that is deemed good.
This is the tankie attitude.
To reject this means that there are limitations on what actions are acceptable in pursuit of a goal. That there are some actions that are too repugnant to be justified.
That’s correct. I think in the real world that doesn’t come up. What is the hypothetical? would you murder an innocent little girl to save your child. That isn’t a gotcha. That wouldn’t work. Even if it did work, the ends of that is that everyone has to wory about their children being scrapped for spare parts. That logic works under cpaitlaism. That situation infact happens today for capitlaism. There just aren’t situations where if you accurately assess the ends it justifies terrible means. Under capitlaism we do terrible means for terrible ends. We are so used to thinking of that that it us hard to think of alternatives, but your failure of imagination doesn’t make you morally right.
That’s just thought-terminating. There’s no universal truth that ends do or do not justify means.
Is locking up a sex offender to prevent further victimization justifiable? Is taking bread from a store to feed a starving person justifiable? Is banning false advertisement justifiable? Is requiring licensure for medical practice justifiable? Those actions are all means that directly violate some conception of liberal human rights.
Additionally, there’s often not a clear delineation, in the real world, between means and ends. The real world is made up of complex networks of powers and interests competing against each other, regardless of what can or cannot be justified. We believe in advancing working class power, interests, and rights, which by definition necessitates undermining the power, interests, and rights of the ruling class and its enforcers/enablers. Within that framework we accept and perform criticisms of the methods used to progress those goals, but only inasmuch as those critiques can help to refine strategy and inform future liberatory movements. Otherwise it’s either carrying water for US interests or squabbling about the moral standing of dead people.
I don’t think you said anything meaningfully different from what I already said.
You do not consider the abhorrent unethical nature of certain actions as being a valid argument against taking those actions in the pursuit of establishing a communist society. The only criticism you’ll entertain is that certain actions may be ineffective or inefficient at accomplishing that goal.
This basically shows that what you care about is whether someone is anti-west or not. You are a western nationalist. Not a socialist, and certainly not an internationalist.
I’m anti-west. I don’t care at all if someone is anti-west, and in fact encourage it. But just because a regime is anti-west, that does not mean they’re in the right or should be blindly supported.
See that’s the thing: the fact that the west lies doesn’t mean that the east tells the truth. You are heavily skeptical of what the west has to say (good) but mostly uncritical of what any communist government has to say (bad).
Capitalist countries have done horrible things, but so have self-proclaimed communist countries
I have entire history books about how the west lies.
There is not a similar body of data about the loss of the east. Is it perfect? No. Do we have any reason to belive they are as bad or bad in the same kind of way as the people who oppose them? No.
General note: Most authors publishing critical material of the west in the (free speech) west don’t get silenced (edit: although professional blacklisting is all too common). Yes, I’m sure there are exceptions. You might not want to do that openly in China, Iran, or Russia these days, because the risks are well known/accepted. It definitely makes life harder for scholars and historians.
Do you have any evidence of China suppressing criticism? We know the western media openly brags about making up stories about the east.
I can find plenty of stories of publishing houses declining to publish material. That is effectively censorship but because it is done by a company we don’t care
Russia and Iran are more like the US than China so considering them as one unit is not helpful.
China seems to be far more about censorship and self-censorship. When public figures disappear from the public eye, they often reappear at some point. I hold great hopes for China’s future, and its potential as a successful & peaceful role model. Xi worries me a bit though.
They are not liberals. Here in America the anivaxx movement has kill tens of thousands to millions depending on how you do the math. In a better world stuff like that would have been censored. It only causes hardship and wastes resources. China does censor stuff like that. Now, does China have boomers that take that instinct too far? Probably. However they don’t have school shooters ever single day. They have 3x the population of us and that doesn’t happen there. So something is working there and something isn’t working here. A full rejection of their system is silly given how well it seems to work for most of them most of the time. Especially since, in every single case we can observe our system failing us most of the time.
I’d rather have big fat warning labels than censorship, to be honest. The issue is that many governments and people end up in a spiral of distrust & broken trust (justified or not).
Covid was/is a shitshow though. Where was the world class PsyOps then? Perhaps too busy scaring the hell out of everyone to notice that it might not be the smartest strategy.
I know you want that. I want to eat cookies for breakfast. Some things just aren’t good for you however. Ask any person drowning to death in their own lungs if they were happy they had the freedom to choose to smoke. Given a sober assessment of the situation they would have chosen other than their wants. The world would be better if cigarettes were banned. Their blood is on the hands of the people who gave them freedom they weren’t responsible enough to handle. Science has proven we are not fully rational creatures. We have biases and we need to protect and take care of eachother as we can to prevent that from causing harm.
The psyop around covid was to keep people from masks and vaccines. The million plus dead prove that was very successful.
Too many smokers continue to smoke after developing serious symptoms. People continue with poor diets and too little exercise despite their own doctor’s advice. We stare at screens for many hours per day. I’d still rather big warnings and community health initiatives than forced exercise/diets/screen-time-limits. Human rights / self determination is important. But organised efforts to appropriately highlight bullshit in public forums isn’t bad at all. In both approaches, the Q is how categorization happens, and can it be trusted.
Who was behind the anti-vax/mask psyops campaigns? To me, it seems to have been rolled up together with pro-trump, pro-russia/anti-ukraine, anti-LGBTQ, climate-change-denial streams. At least, these talking points are what a few older people (non-US-based) that I know started repeating. It looks like a giant pot of discontent, with a few usual suspects adding ingredients, no doubt with some profit opportunities along the way.
Except we know that mostly doesn’t work. It is weird to me that your preference is to waste resources and not help people.
It is a combination of antivaxx and general pro business types. If covid isn’t real you don’t need to stay home. You can go back to work and make your boss some money.
Except we know that mostly doesn’t work. It is weird to me that your preference is to waste resources and not help people.
I’m not against effective measures, but I’ve seen too many kind and well-meaning people make a lot of bad decisions over the years. I think this is often the case for politicians too, for which we expect high standards and judge harshly when they inevitably fail. I like to leave room for people to make mistakes, and the opportunity to admit & correct mistakes.
Maybe we need fewer politicians and petty dictators on soap boxes making claims and promises and more no-nonsense elbow grease bureaucracy, with more direct feedback loops, and KPIs that benefit the population.
I don’t belive that. I belive you have seen people who say they have good intentions. I simply think they weren’t telling the truth. Or they were wrong in obvious ways that that didn’t care to hear about.
The problem with politicians is to be one you have to be good at capitalism. Which is amoral at best and immoral most of the time. So the same people that decide them making money is more important than children having food and medicine are the ones that get to make policy. Unsurprisingly all their policy ends up with them making more money and the needs of people unaddressed.
That last thing you said, that sounds nice. However in terms of how the world actually works it is meaningless. The assumption that makes is that politicians simply don’t understand how to fix problems. They do, they just are the most highly bought into the capitalist system. The only problem they actually care is fix is how to make more money for them and theirs.
What exactly was wrong with Kruschev’s decision to send the tanks into Hungary to stop the fascist uprising?
Given the historical context of the literal genocides the US was facilitating in asia and south america at that time, even if you ignore the literal fascist collaborators hijacking the movement and pretend it was just a bunch of liberals fighting for “freedom”, keeping them from falling within the west’s claws would have been justified.
B-b-but have you heard of Nestor Makhno! Yeah, it’s pretty underground but he was this totally rad anarchist that shot a bunch of tankies (um, somebody call the BASED department!?!?) and was totally productive in doing other things like . . . Stopping some of the people who he armed and trained after they went and committed pogroms and . . . Uh, well, he had a newspaper in France where he totally stuck it to the tankies and also every other leftist around him until he died in near complete social isolation, but . . . Um . . . He helped kill that fascist leader that one time (by being very ineffective in trying to dissuade the Jewish anarchist who actually did kill that fascist).
Let’s take a look what started that “fascist” uprising. Years of economic mismanagement, opression, and being forced to pay a big chunk of their gdp to the Soviets for war reperations were all factors that lead to the Hungarian Revolution.
And who did these “fascist” pick as their leader? Imre Nagy, the man who was ousted from power by the soviets for having the audacity to be a more moderate communist than hardline stallinists.
The US doing something bad doesn’t justify someone else doing bad. Think about a nazi who uses that reasoning, they would sound like a nazi apologist.
Yes, the US did some bad stuff, but I still view them as the lesser evil when compared to the USSR or China.
Also Hungary doing something 65 years later doesn’t justify the actions of the Soviets.
Whether the initial protesters had good reason or not, fascists quickly co-opted the movement in the same way they co-opted the liberal protests in Ukraine.
Hungary doing something 65 years later doesn’t justify the actions of the Soviets.
Their actions 65 years later prove there were significant numbers of nazis waiting in the wings, and that the soviets were insufficiently oppressive.
I couldn’t find a single mention of a fascist movement in the uprising. So either it was neglible in size, or you are just lying.
“Insufficiently oppressive”. What? Hungary was a really oppressive nation during that time, and you wanted it to be more oppressive?
And opressive to who? Fascist? They can just lie about not being a fascist. That leaves out to just guess who is a fascist and that sounds like a wonderful time for the citizens.
When people say “anti-woke”, they actually mean that they are anti-doing anything about the awareness of systemic inequality that wokeness indicates. By definition, someone who is against change/progress is a conservative, so when someone says they are anti-woke, they are by definition expressing a conservative stance. That is, wanting to do something about systemic inequality is synonymous with having a progressive stance on systemic inequality.
Being a tankie, on the other hand, is not synonymous with being a comunist. Tankies are just one form of communist (militant).
And when people say they are “anti-tankie”, they actually mean that they are anti doing anything about the awareness of systematic inequality that tankie indicates. By definition, someone who is against change/progress is a conservative, so when someone says they are anti-tankie, they are by definition expressing a conservative stance. That is, wanting to do something about systemic inequality is synonymous with having a progressive stance on systemic inequality.
Being a tankie, on the other hand, is not synonymous with being a comunist. Tankies are just one form of communist (militant).
Other way around: communists are just one form of tankies, the word is also used to refer to anarchists and some soc-dems.
You’re spun around, flipped upside-down, and confused as can be.
Tankie is a term that specifically refers to one particular kind of communism; namely, the kind that supports authoritarian regimes that try to impose communism through the use of force to repress dissent.
You can be a communist and not be a tankie. You cannot be against progress and be a progressive.
even anarchist communes have use of force, those moltov cocktails being thrown at police officers arent non-violent and even recent projects like CHAZ/CHOP had para-police forces setup within them to hold order togther
Tankie is a term that specifically refers to one particular kind of communism
Nope, tankie originally referred specifically to British labor party members supporting the USSR’s actions against the coup in Hungary, and today is used to refer to any anti-imperialist leftist, regardless of tendency. Of course all of you claim otherwise, but these claims are provably empty, as nobody who uses the term today, including you in this thread, bothers to check for the actual political views of the people you call tankie, you see something that may go against the state department narratives that are spoonfed to you by V*ush and the reddit front page or whoever else has done this pseudo-leftist brainworming to you and you start yelling tankie at the top of your liberal, western-chauvinist lungs. A good number of the people posting on hexbear are anarchists and DemSocs, but you will label all of them tankie as long as they critically support China or question the narrative on the new forever war in Ukraine, which to you equals “thinking today’s Russia is true communism” and similar nonsense. Your understanding of politics is damaged beyond repair by being socialized as a smartass debatelord who has become entirely incapable of forming judgements not based on learned reflex and of engaging in good faith conversations. I would pity you if people like you wouldn’t be such a disaster for the Western left and for anybody in the Global South suffering from the continued imperialism you help enable by fighting the last genuine critics of genocidal US policies that are left in the West. You CIA tool, you psyop casualty, you neocon bootlicker.
If showing solidarity with victims of Amerikan imperialism makes me a tankie, i’ll prefer that over being a white supremacist warmonger who justifies the bombing of brown people in “shithole countries” like literally everybody who calls people a tankie online.
So what if i say “China is far from perfect, but the people there are a lot happier with their government than the Amerikans, they are much less of a threat geopolitically, maybe we should leave them alone because it’s honestly none of our business how the Chinese govern themselves”? Is it the usual 50 cent wumao genocide denier tinaman square then?
That’s not how the world works in the year 2023. Isolationism just isn’t a conceivable possibility. All countries are interconnected, and what’s happening in one country influences what’s happening in other countries in major ways.
Tankie is a term that specifically refers to one particular kind of communism
No, it’s used to refer a wide, vague blob of vibes, just like the word woke. The people who use it can can do use it to refer to all kinds of communists, most anarchists, and anything to the left of Elizabeth Warren in general.
that try to impose communism through the use of force.
As opposed to the kind of communism where you ask nicely for revolution? Have you actually read any Marx? I guarantee he was not a pacifist.
You can be a communist and not be a tankie
By your own definition you cannot, let alone by a definition of tankie that describes how libs actually use it.
As opposed to the kind of communism where you ask nicely for revolution? Have you actually read any Marx? I guarantee he was not a pacifist.
You deliberately misquoted me by cutting off the end of that sentence so you could have a nice soft strawman to swing at. The full sentence said
that try to impose communism through the use of force to repress dissent.
Forceful revolution by the workers against the capitalist class is a completely different matter from forceful repression of dissent by the state against students and professors.
Forceful revolution by the workers against the capitalist class is a completely different matter from forceful repression of dissent by the state against students and professors.
person above wasnt claiming to be the sole arbiters, dumb comment
il take the largest communist projects in the world, the word of millions + people who study marxism and practice it in reality everyday over a liberal who would struggle to define the word ‘socialism’ and whos political education starts and ends with there high school history class + 10 years spent on /r/politics
What have you actually done to help socialism then?
Are you a union organiser? Are you in a union? Which one? What party are you in? What projects do you support? What are you actually doing as a socialist? Other than voting for a liberal party every few years I mean.
My partner is a teacher and is in a union. We are both active in organizing and supporting. There are no unions for the industry I work in, so I work with hers.
Then you should know better than this bullshit, because you would be working with several of us. There is definitely not a teaching union that is not filled with MLs, education in particular has the highest number of us.
if your political activism starts and ends with being in a union you are useless to any socialist project, you even elevate yourself above others because of your union membership; liberal complancy, please boss uwu be nice and give us a raise.
Well your political activism starts and ends with posting Lenin quotes in online discussion boards, so I don’t know that you are in any position to be calling other people useless.
I am a union member too, I just also go out and organize on top of that; right now im trying to arrange a rent strike in my local community, I feed the homeless at soup kitchens and I attend every single march and protest for allinged interests that im able too.
Wait till you learn that there are right wing unions, and that union membership should be evaluated on a case by case basis;
Nah, I fully know you as a person, including everything you’ve ever done and everything you ever will do, from just a couple of internet comments, and I judge you useless. So give up. Stop being a socialist. I, an internet stranger, know you are not contributing anything of value, so why bother?
Sure you can have an opinion, but if its about something you know nothing about, and have not investigated then it is worthless. Not just to other people, but to yourself as well
I mean yeah, if you want to understand the devolopment of physics you are required to understand the foundations it was built on, this is basic study.
Its like telling someone they should read the bible if they want to be christian, or telling someone they should read the instruction manual if they want to actually know what the terms they are using mean.
Yeah, you should read Marx if you want to understand the historical development of socialist ideas, but if that’s where your reading ends, then your ideas are stuck in the past.
Socialism isn’ta religious dogma that is inflexible and unchanging. It’s an intellectual idea that grows and becomes more refined over time.
I used to think that Marx was overrated because I never needed to read him but holy shit it’s clear that 95% of the populace cannot form coherent ideologies without being taught them
Tankie usually refers to Marxism-Leninism (as well the ideologies that derived from it such as Maoism). But there are communist ideologies that don’t derive from ML such as Orthodox Marxism, trotskyism, libertarian Marxism, bulshevism, etc.
How would Trotskyism be any less “authoritarian” Than marxism leninism ? Also almost every claims on some level to be “orthodox marxist”, lenin most of all and MLs as well
Because you only advocate for ideas that dont exist in reality, and deride actually existing marxism as ‘tankie’, you can continue to advocate for idealist positions, but it requires you to build a coherent movement around it otherwise its just masterbation and contrarianism.
It’s speculation because you don’t know what the future holds. And just because you’re not interested in a particular ideology or don’t think it has merit doesn’t make it any less communist.
My only point is that words do in fact have meaning, Marxist-Leninism is not synonymous with communism. Therefore, one can be anti-tankie without being anti-communist.
“Orthodox Marxists” can hardly be said to exist, because the classical formulation of Marxism has long been empirically refuted, hence the need for new schools. Even Luxembourgists are more respectable than “Orthodox Marxists”.
That isn’t how Lenny works, though. Anybody can fire up an instance for any type of community. They could be pro-socialist, anti-socialist, liberals, Nazis, goldfish fanciers…you name it. If you don’t like them, you can defederate from them.
I mean yeah because the US does the same horrible horrible shit other existing countries do just more of it. Mentioning the smaller problem while ignoring the bigger problem(that we are closer to) is just how liberal brainwashing works.
Extending to the political party specifically for Germany, but not the others; could be worth doing that.
Like, EVERY country has its good people that hate the horrific actions of its administration. It can cause issues and paint xenophobia if you don’t identify and shame the bad actors. Instead, you get Chinese people that live in poverty thinking America hates all of them for having thin eyes.
Better thing to say imo: fuck Republicans and the CIA, fuck Putin, fuck the CCP.
See what I’m going to do is I’m going to make the nazis look equally bad to all these other things. That way the nazi atrocities will look less problematic and I get to smear my enemies with a tainted term.
You’re trying to hard to see what you want to see in order to sound morally superior for Internet high fives.
It is clearly a half assed joke saying that if you call a group horrible, someone with get butt hurt and respond accordingly. Which in a round about way is exactly what you did. Any further reading into it is on you.
Just so you know, Nazis have used assertions exactly like what Zoldyck said literally since the day after the nazis were defeated.
One name for it is “double genocide theory” which is used to a) diminish the crimes of the Nazis/ even to the extent of genocide denial and b) equate fascism and communism (an absolutely absurd claim, to be clear. Ask about it if you’re unaware!)
This is not something we regularly go around doing, we are very careful with what stuff we call nazi shit. We’re careful not to make the word lose its meaning. This was an example of a common nazi/nazi-adjacent talking point, and we take it seriously when we encounter it.
Its just like “Blue Lives Matter” is thinly veiled racism. other examples include 1488, the 14 words, ‘states rights’, etc.
It is clearly a half assed joke
They may have thought it was just a joke when saying it, but the intent doesn’t matter, because they may also have known what they were doing and did it on purpose, because they’re a nazi/ nazi adjacent.
You seem to know what you’re talking about, and not going to debate you on any of the points you just brought up. I certainly don’t disagree with anything you just said. I just still feel it’s a stretch to assume that comment is equating all of those things that were listed. That’s not what I took away from it at all, and still don’t.
just still feel it’s a stretch to assume that comment is equating all of those things that were listed.
I’m not sure I understand, Isnt that explicitly what the point of the post was? to equate all those things so that communists would get angry at them? what point was that comment making, in your view?
In my view, I don’t think it was aimed soIely at communism. Can’t speak for the intent of the poster unless they weigh in though. My view when saying they wanted to test something and then say several groups were horrible was to get a reaction from those that belong to said groups as a sort of half assed shotgun technique. I really didn’t expect it to get a rise out of anyone reasonable which is why I made my initial comment. All of those groups listed have various sized vocal subgroups that will aggressively defend their view points with a “them vs us” take.
That said the view points themselves are very different so that is where the equivalence stops.
I can understand that. From my perspective, as a communist, I probably would have come down on them even if they just said nazis bad US bad Australia bad
In this case I heartily agree, but we again have the issue of lackadaisically equating things to the nazis. Australia sure is a terrible trash fire of a settler colonialist planet killer, but they aren’t nazis and they didn’t do the holocaust
Every time one of you uses the phrase “Banned for being slightly critical”, it always turns out you were saying some of the most digusting shit imaginable. It’s such a tell, it’s like when you say "I was ostracized just for having a different political opinion!"
spoilerAnd the opinion was about who should qualify as human
By “being slightly critical” they mean even slightly implying that China is not in every way a completely perfect utopian paradise incapable of doing wrong.
I’m from hexbear, people are critical of it all the time on hexbear. You just can’t criticize China and not know the people there are far better off than those in the US
Mao killing the sparrows during the four pests campaign was bad. The cultural revolution produced excesses that didn’t need to happen if it was handled better.
Oh look nobody on hexbear is going to hate on this comment.
Modern day China is both capitalist and emperialist and has a disregard for basic human rights. It is not in any way shape or form a communist state. Oh, and it actively tries to censor and erase the fact that it ran down its own citizens with tanks.
Do you see how dishonest it is to claim that even slightly criticism of China is forbidden on Hexbear and then when the person speaks to you offers substantial criticism, your counterpoint is that we disagree when you say extremely bad shit about China?
What is a slightly negative thing about China that you feel you couldn’t share on hexbear.net?
How is China imperialist? The other stuff you’re saying us wrong too, but i know the propaganda you will point to to get there. But imperialist? You mean Belt and Road? Building hospitals in Africa?
Oh, and it actively tries to censor and erase the fact that it ran down its own citizens with tanks.
Are you saying that China doesn’t censor or try to hide this? Can I just go to Tienanmen square and start talking to locals about what happened there and they’ll openly talk about how awful it was?
While we’re on the subject of propaganda: what was it that made you believe China “ran down its own citizens with tanks”? What is the actual source of this belief.
What do you think happened at Tienanmen Square? Because you might want to figure that out before you start grinning like a moron while asking a Chinese person about “how awful what happened at Tienanmen Square was”.
Not at Tienanmen Square. Confirmed by western reporters at the scene along with contemporary US diplomatic cables later leaked by Wikileaks. Western media is really attached to that image of the guy in front of a tank, so everyone just pretends it was the site of a mass murder. Really odd.
It is. The only evidence of a massacre of protestors in Tienanmen Square presented in that article is Wu’erkaixi’s claim that he saw 200 people shot, but he had actually left the protests hours before the final protestors left, and literally everyone else present (including western journalists) says that the last protestors left peacefully.
Edit: Here’s an overview from the former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post, who was in Beijing covering the protests in 1989.
You mean the theocratic slaver state of Tibet that was liberated by the PLA? That’s a fine place to start to show that you are just another western left anti-communist.
Edit: I’d recommend Blackshirts and Reds to understand the phenomenon of left anti-communism in the West. If you’re serious about communism, it might help you understand the rift driven between you and the people you call “tankies” …wordpress.com/…/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-…
There’s a big a difference between the two actions. Let’s start with the US. They “liberate” Iraq and Afghanistan and proceed to extract value out of the country. Byzantine networks of private contractor orgs: Haliburton, KBR, Blackwater all making money, along with the military industrial profiteer complex. These countriee were hollowed out for profit and foreign extraction. US empire nakedly acts to make money for the ruling class.
Now, where is that in Tibet? Where is the capitalist extraction? Where is the hollowing out and using up of resources? People in Tibet are now freer, and better educated, and live better lives now than when they were slaves to the lamas. Its not cynical double speak to call what happened in Tibet liberation the way the US government claimed to he liberating Iraq. They freed an enslaved people, that’s not an act of imperialism just because it involved an army. An army literally named the People’s Liberation Army
You don’t know how to actually counter what i said because you don’t really know about Tibet or the PRC, or understand that while its not yet operating under full socialism, it does have a dictatorship of the proletariat guided by a revolutionary vanguard party. Not understanding these things, yet having an opinion about the PRC is charitably naivete
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, swims like a duck, annexes other countries like a duck. But it insists it’s a platypus so I guess we’ll pretend it’s a mammal.
Cool. It was one i found very clarifying when i was trying to learn more about AES and sort through the reality of those countries as opposed to the Western version of them
It is way easier to get banned on reddit for a lot less than a slight not conformist opinion. Here they downvote you, stop. And i talk about real controversies.
100% disagree and add in the fact that everything here is a ninja ban with no explanation. This place is an echo chamber in places like fuck cars and the socialist subs. Privacy too. Was banned for what I can tell was pointing out that lemmy instances do not protect privacy at all.
This place is an echo chamber in places like fuck cars and the socialist subs
What aspect of fuckcars do you consider an echo chamber?
There’s over a dozen socialism communities, if you find one to be an ‘echo chamber’ then I’d suggest seeking another. I’d imagine the socialism community on Beehaw would have a completely different vibe to the one on Lemmygrad, as an example
Was banned for what I can tell was pointing out that lemmy instances do not protect privacy at all
This is common knowledge though, wouldn’t be surprised if the mods were sick of the same discussion being created over and over again by various users. Something federated - designed to be open, decentralised, unrestricted, cannot be inherently privacy friendly.
If your privacy threat model brings you to an ideological disagreement with federated networks, it would be reasonable to consider moving to an alternative platform IMO.
No use for trucks, only Americans buy SUVs, you can’t find cars for under 20k etc. As for the mods, 🤷♂️ don’t ninja ban and maybe folks would understand.
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