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I'm having difficulty defending ML ideas when talking with people. The biggest issues being "if communism is so great why did it fail everywhere", "Communist were just authoritarian", "China is just as bad as the US". I just don't know how to defend these points properly tbh, I just don't present the ideas clearly enough.
honestly i think these are fairly easy!!!! like we can get into nuance and parts to critique about AES but youre talking about people who literally cannot fathom getting to a place where they can talk about AES like they're actual things and not just the embodiment of evil or sin
constant siege/sanctions/blockades. even if they cite dissolution of ussr it's simpler at this point (before getting into things like revisionists) just to say, china IS a communist state that has survived till now, compliant to socialist theory. they'll be like BUT IT HAS MARKETS at which point you can tell them that it's not just communist button/egalitarianism/any similar vulgar mischaracterization or simplification and then you can explain what ML theory actually entails. you could also get to other AES but china is the easiest gate as an undeniably successful project at this point
so what? i mean, that's reductive, but first of all they probably mean stalin era ussr, dprk, etc. or any other example that's usually been mythologized. hell, people dont even think dprk is a place that exists in reality, only in a far off universe that produces fantasy stories for westerners to jerk off to.
it's been very clear since october 7 that all pretense of free speech in the west is farcical and the only ones dumb enough to still believe this are completely unable to be argued with, but regardless let's look at the situations for each. ussr was literally under siege by nazis who wanted to exterminate all slavs and then colonize the region, THEN found itself in a cold war with the west who both absorbed a bunch of nazis + had crazy espionage campaigns that honestly even as a lib little kid i knew about. they were proclaimed ideological enemies of the ussr! they were of course going to be on their guard, only so long after the war and with such suspicious ties to the nazi leaders. again if u get them to this level u have a chance to explain capitalism and fascism being an integral part of it but youre focusing on the most blatant historical myths, this at least helps contextualize this before u can introduce theory
and there have been marked examples of color revolutions that destabilize + harm regions in long run, begging for a chance to strike, of course there is going to be censorship! there have been people that speak out 'on behalf of the country' that beg for regime change!! so censorship then occurs to protect the country!! is it ideal? fuck no!! is it what other states (like DOTBs) do? yes!! does this equate them morally to DOTBs? no because measure the results first!! two countries can use the same means for different ends, like how a gun in the hand of a nazi was not the same as a gun in the hand of a red army soldier!! if you want to eliminate censorship still first you must remove those who place them under siege + endanger them. if they're like 'all censorship is ontologically bad' you simply must just question this the same way you question the idea that all hierarchies are ontologically evil and not just natural!!! ask them how they think things like CSAM should be cracked down on!!! how they probably would and SHOULD endorse censorship in many fields!! free exchange of ideas should preclude totally nonsensical and antisocial and evil ideologies like fascism/racial ideology!!!!!!
for many this will be backbreaking since they worship the ideas of rights that can never be infringed, but it honestly turned around for me just thinking about the alternatives, connected to the previous point. yes i could finally admit to myself censorship was needed in spaces, even in conjunction with restorative justice! things should be taken down and some evil things that can harm a country should be repressed lest they turn out inciting violence or causing a deeply detrimental regime change as so many of these people fiend for!!!
how many in collapsed socialist states have suffered more under new neolib regime?? we know this!! looking at russia alone post-ussr dissolution is proof of that but i digress!! how many eastern europeans prostituted themselves, children, the tweet 'sadness in his eyes you can only see in eastern european gay porn' is not that funny when you realize it's fucking coercive by nature otherwise he'll fucking STARVE. that may be too much humanization of evil eurasian orcs for one day, though!!!! don't scare them away by asking them to please imagine russians/slavs (well chinese and dprkoreans too but i truly ardently believe china is now an easier sell) as humans and not drones!!!!!!
this is still half untrue, honestly, it's simply thought-termination and undying loyalty to western bourgeois rags under the impression this somehow passes as free press. first of all, on the purely global level?? never has china invaded another country since that minor fiasco with vietnam and since mao their foreign policy has been (to the point of criticism for many MLs/leftists) very lenient. they have never been particularly violent or exploitative, and again if we're comparing to the satanic state of the usa it still isn't a comparison to anyone remotely aware of what usamerikkka has even done, iraq war, afghanistan, vietnam, backing israel, etc. etc., and most allusions to this are myths that are beyond the pale (fucking go to xizang! they must look at what xizang was before the war instead of reading pedophile theocrats whine about how they cant enslave/skin women and kids anymore!! or xinjiang it's fucking crazy!!!) or misconstruing real foreign policy that actually benefits people (so called debt trap diplomacy is as flimsy as paper) i just!!!! IT'S FUCKING USA!! as soon as u show them what USA DOES this point is toilet paper!!
girl whose heart literally shakes and pulses weirdly when she gets mad at anticommunist talking points voice: yeah i mean like im normal and im happy and im not going crazy at all why do u ask
Another one regarding China is the mass surveillance and social points system. I've made a post in the past asking if the social points system even exists and in essence it doesn't, but what would be a good answer to the surveillance one apart from saying "The West also does surveillance" but to this I've gotten answers such as "The number of cameras in London monitoring people are 30k (idk what the exact number was) and in China it's in the millions".
Communism didn't fail of its own accord, it was shot down, backstabbed and slaughtered by Western imperialists. No account of the failures of socialist governance is complete without acknowledgement of the wider context of the 'Cold' war and in particular US interventionism across the world post WW2.
i prefer to re-frame this one as "if the death of the USSR was inevitable, why did the us spend such an enormous amount of money, manpower, and resources to make it happen?"
I've gotten replies that this is just conspiracy theories (even after pointing out that the CIA said so in their documents I get hit with "why would the CIA out themselves like that") along with "if the US didn't do that we would be fucked from the Russians"
These people don't want to learn or even think. They aren't a good expenditure of your effort. Hit them with the
Parenti unfalsefiable orthodoxy quote
"During the Cold War the anti communist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If Soviets refused to negotiate a point they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off guard. By opposing arms limitations they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armaments treaties it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full this ment the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions) this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system. If they didn’t go on strike it was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated failure of the economic system; and improvement in consumer goods only meant that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communist in the US played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African Americans, women, and others this was only a their guileful way of gathering support among disenfranchised groups and aging power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is an unfalsefiable orthodoxy so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the political spectrum.”
and leave it at that.
Is this from Blackshirts & Reds? I have that in my reading queue and it's probably going to be the most important text for me to frame against these types of arguments.
sometimes it's safe to disengage friend, not saying this disparagingly you tried all you could but it's also a maddening dialogue that often ends in nothing gained and all your energy lost, until the day westerners suffer a fraction of the imperial periphery will they actually realize that capitalism is an inherently evil and doomed system (which they can insult in minor ways all they want while disparaging any alternative, since they still have more to gain by keeping it around in the short term) and stop defending it so instinctively
watching the comment section of the solarpunk post makes me giggle
A bunch of Roblox players (myself included) have been migrating to a different game called Polytoria due to Roblox's CEO (David Baszucki) fucking up a lot of stuff lately. So many players have been migrating in fact that Polytoria's servers are slowing and/or crashing, though devs are working to fix it.
Maybe I can agitate there? Maybe by bringing up that Baszucki's actions are an inevitability under Capitalism, and that he (like virtually every other CEO) only appeals to shareholders instead of the community.
A bunch of Roblox players (myself included) have been migrating to a different game called Polytoria due to Roblox’s CEO (David Baszucki) fucking up a lot of stuff lately. So many players have been migrating in fact that Polytoria’s servers are slowing and/or crashing, though devs are working to fix it.
Cato did not just attack the Roman turn toward ostentatious consumption. Another feature of Roman life in the early second century BC also attracted his ire. Cato saw Rome’s growing engagement with the Greek world as a threat to the Roman and Latin culture he idealized.
His xenophobic attacks greatly exaggerated the impact of Greeks in Rome. Most Greeks would have come as slaves following a series of second-century Roman victories in the East. Relatively small numbers of free Greek philosophers, teachers of rhetoric, and doctors had come to Rome, but it was precisely these high-status, high-visibility Greeks whom Cato targeted. Cato said that Greeks “will corrupt everything” in Rome and predicted that the Romans would lose their empire when they began to be “infected with Greek literature.”²⁰
Cato used this malignant rhetoric to support a series of reactionary policies. When he campaigned for election as censor for 184 BC, he “proclaimed that the city needed a drastic purification” through which he could “cut away and cauterize the luxury and degeneracy of the age.”²¹ This message of moral decline and the promise of a radical return to a more virtuous Roman past propelled Cato into office.
(Source.)
Huh… interesting.
So, how’s everybody doing?
so Greeks were the Jews of Antiquity huh
fascinating
My Spanish is getting better every day, and I'm grateful for it. It's mainly because I'm consuming a lot of Spanish language content. I'm watching Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal on Netflix (which is a good show), and get a lot of Spanish Instagram reels on my feed lately. And because of this, I catch myself thinking in Spanish more. The key to language learning is to expose yourself to the language daily. It's the same way a lot of us learned English.
That's great, I'm glad it's going well for you! I've also been teaching myself Spanish and have been really enjoying the process of learning it.
I agree that it helps a lot to immerse yourself in the language. So in addition to Duolingo lessons daily, I've been reading news websites completely in Spanish (TeleSur in particular), reading short stories on https://www.fluentwithstories.com/, and have a browser extension called Toucan that changes many of the words on webpages into Spanish.
Telesur is great! I've also been reading news from Spain, Público and El Diario. They are the most left wing news publications in Spain
Gotta love airplane travel and people who are sick but cannot be arsed to wear a mask for an hour or two because I will be spending my week sick
I'm 75% sure I'll never get on a plane again just because of this.
The New Times cover:
spoiler
And what it should really look like:
Kinda crazy they're pushing for the reinstalling a monarchy and saying its for freedom, libs do know that the region, any really, monarchies are insanely oppressive yet they're cheering for one here? Also at this very conjunction where they got a masks off fascist regime!
because their entire opinion on Iran begins and ends with images like this:
lol but the same kind of photos about socialist afghanistan do not make em twitch.
you see that's different because it was imposed on them by the imperialist USSR or some other such horse shit
horse shit… yeah you would know something about that wouldnt you
(Dutch) conspiracy nuts have been saying there is an elite group of people running human trafficking rings for their sick fantasies and I gotta admit they were right. Probably not about them being blood drinking reptiles but they sure as hell were right about some of the people involved lol.
CW: disgusting shit
like the files quite literally mention Donald Trump being there on the island having vulva measuring contests with children who were then forced to give him head while his entire family AND Elon Musk were present and, like, nothing is happening?
The way American's talk about regime change is so insane. Random people with little to no geopolitical knowledge and absolutely no political experience, will flippantly say, "This is a great opportunity for regime change in Iran, we can't pass this up." Or, "I would love to see the Cuban regime toppled."
They talk as if they are strategizing military generals, in on the plan. Like bro, you are just some random American, how would any of this even benefit you?
Having a reasonable conversation on the topic can feel like a Sisyphean task.
And westerners then wonder why Vietnam's got a plan against color revolution and the US. Goddamn the NED, the USAID, and all those 'civil society' regime change networks of 'NG'Os they've webbed up
Amerikkka and Europe should get themselves regime-changed, ffs.
It's literally all they talk about all the time in mainstream media, just drooling and drooling about regime change.
i inhabit a lot of online spaces with kids in them (cuz i am one) and theyre usually usamerican/dominated by usamerican state dept talking points or adjacent gusanos. the amount of free palestine flags next to free iran/ukraine flags are a bit crazy (ukraine doesnt count bc its not regime change of zelenskyy but it's desire for russia regime change)
when i was younger and in my leftist but not ML phase there was a lot of yapping about mahsa amini
Europeans are awfully loud about ICE and Trump while Frontex exists. Last week 380 people drowned in the Mediterranean.
The grim reality is that most politically active Westerners you see are just following social media trends. If Frontex was making headlines you'd see protests for it also.
Like the average politically minded person (Liberal, but most of Europeans who are politically active are libs) is operating at a level that if they see something on the News they think it's important, because it's on the News.
you know what i'm just going to keep repeating "it's the cpv's birthweek" to myself until the anger abates. i doom and gloom too much on here, but i'm a hopeful fellow who just happens to be constantly driven insane. it's the cpv's birthday. the boy crying in that picture of the DHS agent with a gun is back home in cuba and has been for a while. china exists. what else is lovely? the sky and the sunlight and my friends, no matter what hardships torment me. a future whose arc bends to justice and a science that argues for that conclusion
i have a fat jar of kimchi and i've been fucking it up
i'm jealous of your kimchi
this is the community ive been hoping for. kimchi is one of the greatest concoctions in this whole wide world
pre menstrual syndrome is certainly an experience
Pro-Elon Conservatives have officially lost their fucking mind. They're going all in on the "He's just autistic, he didn't know any better" excuse. As if he's not a grown man with over 10 children and mutiple wives.
This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
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