DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]

Yes. This. This is exactly what I was talking about in my other comment in this thread, posted before seeing this one. I was calling it scale instead of scope, but this is spot on.

People will pick and choose how things function at one scope and pretend it applies at others. A lot of people, even good well-meaning ones, will do this and fall into this trap, but particularly shitty people will do this as a way to justify their garbage beliefs or justify hurting and demeaning others. Exactly like OP image “you don’t matter 'cause the Earth doesn’t give a shit if you’re here or not as one person. You’re a loser for thinking you matter at all.” FUCK that. You absolutely matter, just not necessarily at the scale/scope of an entire planet orbiting a star, that doesn’t invalidate or make meaningless the just as real scale/scope at which you DO matter. Their application of how things function at scale is always used in whatever way is beneficial to them at the moment or to prove whatever flawed, even sadistic point they’re trying to make. Capitalists, politicians, and of course the mass media under their control do this constantly and it infuriates me to no end.

It really is a matter of scale. Even at the scale of society as a whole, you as an individual don’t “matter” in that your presence (or lack of it) isn’t going to impact its course or functionality. It’s literally why we have to organize in order to even have any hope of achieving our aims. We certainly don’t “matter” on a global scale. However, what the person in the OP image said is entirely true. At the scale of our families and social group, and absolutely at the scale of our individual experience, each of us matters profoundly. At the scale of our individual experience, each of us is a universe unto ourselves.

It is infuriating to me when people refuse to understand that what is true at one scale may not be (and usually isn’t) true at another scale, but that this does not invalidate how true things are at any other given scale. The fact that your impact on the galaxy as a whole is so small as to be effectively insignificant does not mean that your impact on the world you live in, literally your sphere of experience and influence, is insignificant, because the truth is that it is extremely significant at that scale.

Western culture and society is pathological in how it simultaneously acts as though the only reality is what exists at the scale of the individual when it comes to blame and “rEsPoNsIbiLitY” but will utterly diminish and demean the experience of any individual that doesn’t spend their existence on this earth in service of the great evil god of capital. It’s Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families.” Meanwhile every single one of those individual men and women (rather the ones who don’t own or control capital) are treated as nothing more than a cog in a machine, a sliver of utility to be used as such then expended and replaced as such. It’s a philosophy that cherry-picks only the convenient truths of how things work at various different given scales and applies them across the board as if they’re true at all other scales, all of course to serve the interests of the ruling class. It is a source of many of the philosophical contradictions of capitalism and the diseased society that results from it.

https://htwins.net/scale2/

I’ve loved (and since missed) your weekly rankings. Fucking hilarious content. But I’m really happy to know that the reason they’ve been put on hiatus is because you’re gonna be a papa. Not happy about the difficulty part of course, I hope that all gets worked out comrade. Anyway, congratulations! Health and happiness to you, your wife, and your soon to be introduced to this world son.

Same. Deeply grateful for the pushback on it, though.

I know it was deployed against Iraqis during the first Gulf War, with Hillary Clinton claiming Saddam was issuing his troops with Viagra specifically so they could [redacted] more.

I don't doubt r**e was a claim made against Iraqis too, but it's the absurd claim about soldiers taking babies from incubators that most sticks out in my memory when it comes to Iraq and the first Gulf War. However, Hilary Clinton talking about soldiers being given viagra was definitely about Gaddafi. Keep in mind who was in power when those respective conflicts were happening.

I don't mean to refute that but they do have somewhat strict laws around nazi apoligia.

Yeah, about that…

https://hexbear.net/post/720421

1. Mostly it was about fooling you into thinking that, as a worker, you have even an iota of power within that company.

2. You: "The owners deserve all the value that results from owning the company and not the workers because the owners own the company, duh." Reread what you said and note the ridiculous circular logic.

3. The company would continue to function perfectly fine without the owner(s), yet would immediately cease to function or even exist without the workers. The only role the owner plays in the company (that the workers operate), is to siphon the value away from the workers who made it and unto themselves.

Alright, like I said, maybe I need to learn more about MMT, but as I’ve understood it so far, it’s a way of understanding the nuts and bolts of what’s actually going on with things like inflation, dollar hegemony, etc. It’s not contradicting Marxism at all, just delving into the ridiculous cult-religion of neoliberal economics and attempting to materially explain all those things that are taboo to classic western economists. It’s not a refutation of a Marxist concept of economy and it’s not advocating for social democracy. Do you think Michael Hudson is lying or do you think he’s confused, or is what he talks about not actual MMT?

I think all of that is a gross mischaracterization of what he’s doing. Have you watched his videos or listened to The Deprogram podcast? None of what you said is required to meet people where they are at. As I said upthread, I think it’s best to have a multitude of different approaches. But to act like going immediately from “socialism is when the government does stuff” to “Death to America” is the only correct way of introducing people to concepts and realities that they have been taught to despise and reject since they were old enough to speak, is naive at best. (Btw, they often say “Death to America” on The Deprogram, only it gets bleeped just barely enough that they won’t get instantly banned from every podcast platform.)

I don’t see the utility in convincing a bunch of people in the imperial core that they should be investing more into the long term interests of the western bourgeoisie. That they should be concerned about stabilizing capitalism and reforming it.

I completely agree. I just don’t think that the dude who runs Second Thought is doing that. That channel is among the best there is, if not the best, for getting liberals to start considering things outside of their bullshit worldview. The guy is as at least as radical as most people here, but he’s cognizant of the fact that the typical western libs aren’t capable of going from supporting “the lesser evil” blue team to calling for a protracted people’s war against the US. Pipelines are real, and JT as well as the other Deprogram boys have made an excellent opening for people to jump into it, people who would otherwise just scoff at anything that seems to resemble gommulism.

I admit I don’t know enough about MMT and am willing to learn about where I’m wrong. But from my limited understanding, MMT is narrowly just theory about how economics works without anything prescriptive to say about revolution. You can recognize that MMT explains a lot of the things that western “economists” are utterly blind to (and outright refuse to look at) and still be a dedicated Marxist/ML. Doesn’t even Michael Hudson talk a lot about MMT? Should we write him off as not worth paying attention to because of that?

I don’t know what JT’s views are on MMT, and I am skeptical it even matters. But I do know he’s not a social democrat, he’s a radical Marxist and has openly and frequently said so. If I remember right, even said so here during the last AMA.

people just get trained in Marxism right away. Why can’t we just do that and skip the cringe stage?

A multitude of strategies is a good thing. Different tactics work on different people.

We’ve been trying the succ dem slow pipeline for 200 years in the West and it hasn’t worked.

Tell that to all the people here who started their journey to radicalization because of . Also, JT doesn’t advocate for succdemery, he explicitly states it’s not socialism and actual socialism is what’s needed. The fact remains, one of the best strategies for getting people in the core to even begin questioning the water they’ve been swimming in their entire lives is to meet them where they’re at, then go from there.

I don’t know how to go about it - currently it sounds a bit like a left wing Wikipedia. In my head, I can see it more like a giant 4D map, or a big messy case file sprawling out over a desk.

Well to butt in again, I don’t know enough about it, but people here have said good things about Obsidian. This is the place I know of that shows how it might be used to build an interconnected knowledge base. I think it would be better for the kind of thing you’re describing than a wiki would. There’s no “4D map” but it does have a rotating 3D map of how different sections connect. Just a thought.

Country of the week.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

I am actually tempted to put some feelers out for the starting of a community researching project. I think we have a varied knowledge base and if we could put our collective minds to use in mapping the history of a country/region/issue in a similar way to the Ukraine stuff.

I think this is an excellent idea and believe that @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net has said something very similar. It was the major impetus behind the COTW thing that was started a few weeks back. It might be worth hitting him up to discuss further.

I guess I’m trying to understand what makes this a liberal viewpoint or why do you classify it as such?

I guess I am just trying to understand the viewpoints of my communist fellow humans

I’m not the person you’re responding to, but… A liberal viewpoint (in this context) is one that is idealist, not materialist. A liberal will point at a policy ostensibly drawn up to address some given issue, and whether that policy is effective or not, or even whether the policy is enforced, will claim that “something is being done” to address that issue. In a liberal framework, it is the policy itself that satisfies the condition that the issue has been addressed, not any actual action that makes a real material difference to solve or change the issue. Again, it’s just idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is a philosophy based on the former, communism is (among other things) a philosophy based on the latter.

Does a link directly to the pertinent image work for you?

https://archive.is/tgXRb/66db743718e9277d76256a497f02785d141f979d/scr.png

Certain antivirus software seems to have been blocking the archive sites for no good reason. I assume the real reason is because those sites are the easiest way to bypass paywalls.

I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with using the word as an insult because I don’t think it’s actually a slur. If anyone can point me to something that shows “troglodyte” in particular is used to refer to any disadvantaged group (like people with DS), I will retract this and never use it again. Like several other comrades who have already commented, I’ve used troglodyte for years to refer to the same people we all tend to call chuds here. In fact, cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller is pretty damn close to troglodyte. Speaking of which…

If you’re going to dehumanize a person, I think it’s best to call them something that’s entirely unhuman (e.g. demon, ghoul, etc.) rather than something human-like (e.g. orc, ape, etc.)

That’s not really the problem, as I see it. There’s no line between “unhuman” and “human-like.” How is ghoul or demon any different than orc in that respect? Not to be cliche, but it really is all about the context. Orc in general wasn’t bad to use per se, but now that it’s being used to specifically refer to Russians or more generally, Asians, it has become problematic. Ape is pretty obviously not a good word to use in most cases because of the history of it’s use to dehumanize people based on race. But even then, I wouldn’t consider it a slur if I were to playfully say to my large, muscular, white friend “you big ape!”

All that said, as always I’m open to being shown where I might be wrong.

If I’m understanding HornyOnMain (OP) correctly, she’s not trying to say it shouldn’t be used, just that it’s odd and suspicious that libs seem to have suddenly picked up on it and are throwing it around incessantly. I fully agree on that.

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.

That group was annihilated.

Im not liberal, im a socialist.

A “socialist” who believes capitalist propaganda and refers to the largest and most successful actually existing socialist state’s functionality as “antics”? Sounds pretty liberal to me.

And im not American either :)

The person you’re replying to wasn’t suggesting that you were. He signs all his comments with that phrase at the end, and strangely enough, it’s almost always fitting.

Anyway, yes, this instance does tend to try to talk about China accurately, and it does so in the face of overwhelming torrents of western propaganda cultivated by the capitalist’s/imperialist’s demonization of the state that poses the largest contemporary threat to their hegemony.

I just edited my comment to fix my use of “they/their” into “he/him” as per the other commenter’s pronouns. I mention this specifically because you said in another comment for us to “stop being against lgbtq.” This instance is the most lgbtq-positive space I’ve ever encountered on the internet. We frequently get hated on by transphobes because we include pronouns next to usernames. We were, and to my knowledge still are, the only instance to do so.