All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are beautiful western novels by Cormac McCarthy. Both are very much “a boy and his horse” kind of stories about learning to be yourself. They’re loosely related and there’s a third book that brings the boys together and concludes their stories
The Jungle and Oil! by Upton Sinclair are novelizations of Sinclair’s investigative journalism work in the meat packing industry and the nascent workers rights movement respectively. Oil! was very loosely adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (the film covers maybe the first 3-4 chapters by greatly expanding upon the material
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was a very impactful book for me as a child. It’s a YA novel, but still worth a read. The main character Brian survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and is forced to find a way to survive on his own
A few more recent novels that I enjoyed:
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Won the 2024 Booker Prize (best English language novel) about an authoritarian government taking power in Ireland and how that unfolds from the perspective of a mother with young children. It’s a hard read, but very well written
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Translated into English. A friend described it as “sexy witches in South America deal with authoritarian rule.” And that’s pretty close…
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. A semi-fictionalized history of the Korean Peninsula and the desire to have a unified identity. Many people come to the peninsula (same bed) with very different goals for its use (different dreams). Really fascinating book and engaging
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Follows a trio of friends as they explore the world of video game design. Starts in the early 80s and runs through the 2000s. Reminder me very much of the show Halt and Catch Fire.
My Friends by Hisham Matar. Follows a Libyan immigrant living in England in the 80s through 2010s as he wrestles with his identity, his homeland, his friends and family. Khaled’s closest friends serve as foils to his own feelings, reacting to the same circumstances very differently from himself
For literature I find 100 years of Solitude to be without equal. An absolute joy to read.
For nonfiction I have learned so much from 1491. It was recommended to me by a friend though I have never heard of it elsewhere. The premise is that basically everything we think about Native Americans before Columbus arrived is wrong. I could go on but here is one tidbit: we tend to think of Native Americans as peoples without government. Now of course there are so many different groups of peoples all over the Americas and across so many eras it’s foolish to even think of them as being this way or that way because who and when are you referring to? But there were many types of government. In fact the Incas were total bureaucrats! Anyway I’m doing a poor job selling it i know but it’s a great read.
For self-help try How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know the title sounds like it’s a guide to manipulation but it’s really not. It’s 100 years old but still holds up so well. Times change, but people don’t, you know what I mean? People 100 years later still appreciate it when you remember their name and look them in the eye and make time to listen.
May I ask, why did you like 100 years of solitude? Did you read it in Spanish or translated to another language? I read it in Spanish and can appreciate a lot of good things in it, but I always wonder how it feels like for people who don’t have a latin/Spanish background. Perhaps you do, I don’t know. Still curious!
It’s an extremely bizarre suggestion given your request. I do want to defend the game (though not the suggestion) a little though.
It initially presents as you say, but offers you opportunities to fight back in your capacity as border control. Letting in the right people can help the resistance and incite a coup, or enable you and your families escape from the country. It isn’t just Be A Good Tankie Simulator 2013, though you can play it that way too.
The Lenovo clock with Google assistant has the option for “Google impromptu” as the alarm sound. It creates a new melody every day (usually not a good one but at least is different)
new pixel with not ready for prime time gremlins, you don't say, where have i heard that before, except with every single pixel release since the dawn of time. every one.
Well, depending on what VR setup you have I can either help you set it up or it might be impossible.
Portal 2 in VR runs on a PC (a pretty good gaming PC) connected to the headset either through a cable or wirelessly. If that’s the setup you’re using, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
If you have an Oculus/Meta Quest and only play standalone (that is, no PC is involved, everything runs on the headset), then I’m afraid that’s not good enough for Portal 2 or Half-Life 2, though there is a VR port of the original Half-Life. All you’d need for that is any PC (even potato quality) and a USB cable.
Ah, it is Meta Quest 3. I haven’t used it much. I got to play a couple levels of Portal 2 a very long time ago. It was one of the very few video games I actually enjoyed. I don’t know anything about Half-Life. I’ll ask him if he knows about it first.
Ah, ok. Playing the original Half-Life in VR is great for the nostalgia value, though probably not that great if you’re not familiar with the game itself. There’s a bunch of great VR ports of old games for the standalone Quest by developers calling themselves “Team Beef”. Doom 1, 2 and 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 1, 2, 3 AND 4, Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy… the original Tomb Raider is coming soon too.
The real draw is to see those familiar game worlds from a new perspective.
Many of them, yes. They’re among the most radical of the leftist instances, which means that they attract a lot of propagandists and tankies. They have some perfectly reasonable people too, but you know, vocal minority. Its the main thing most people notice about those instances.
Many people block hexbear, Lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad for these reasons.
Pro-China sycophants. They’d be the ones driving the tanks at Tiananman Square.
I’d also argue that these people only put up a facade of being leftist. I’ve never once seen a hexbear user actually make arguments for leftist policies, socialism, or communism. They just shitpost a bunch of anti-American memes and rally for the Russian and Chinese governments.
In practice, anything left of the average Lemmy.world liberal/democrat.
I don’t Lemmy enough to say there are zero hexbear users who are pro China or pro wtfever people say, but I see almost none of the ridiculous shit the rest of Lemmy claim exclusively happens there. What I DO see is liberals (usually from lemmy.world if we’re swinging at instances) talking ridiculous trollish shit to hexbear users than using the silly trollish responses they get in response to justify these “all hexbears want to give America to Xi Jinping” posts.
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
I was sure to not be an absolutist for a reason, I’m not always cruising Lemmy. Hexbear in particular absolutely has a sense of humor sometimes that I myself am a bit old for, but judging them for that is very much more “Old man yelling at clouds” than anything. If you don’t like it, sure, but that doesn’t say A or B about them.
Maybe there’s blatant apologism, but in my experience it’s people taking whatever scraps they can find to claim “Apologism.” For example, discussing high speed rail development in China. Admiring a rail system isn’t “blatant apologism,” but most lemmy liberals would call it as such, because it was built by China. It’s like calling me a Putin apologist for discussing Dostoyevsky. Yes, I’m admiring a creation of the country or it’s culture, but I’m not saying that their current governments are the only way forward or really saying anything about governance at all.
Again, I’m not claiming you haven’t seen something “blatant” before (I could name so many one off events I’ve witnessed that don’t hold to norms,) I’m just saying that people claiming it to be this widespread norm on every leftist instance are spreading disinformation.
Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.
As I mentioned, I’d be inclined to wonder what you’re considering “apologism.” The fact that you didn’t address the points I made makes me think you fall into that camp of boiling an intentionally wide array of ideas, conversation, etc down to “apologism” to take up arms against instances you don’t like. I see discussion of those countries, and examples of things that are happening there, but not one time have I seen people celebrating violence or excusing it on either hexbear or .ml.
Don’t be gaslit, Russian warcrimes enjoyers are running wild on Nazbear.
What you saw is what I saw too, and that’s just disgusting. Don’t be fooled.
I’ve seen them pulling the debatebro tactics they complain about, and feigning ignorance when you talk about their favorite dictators.
Those people aren’t acting in good faith, and are trying to manipulate you. They’re pissed that they’re being treated like pariahs and are defederated from everything, because their influence has shrunk significantly and they’ve essentially been defanged (they’re getting banned left and right, even by real lefties).
the original origin of the term was a group british communists attacking anyone who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the hungarian uprising in 1956. it then morphed into a term used to attack anyone who supports the use of force and authority in general to suppress counter revolutionaries. it’s final degeneration is that it is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.
here is a good article about it. To be clear: this is written from the perspective of a marxist leninist, who are normally the number one target of being called a “tankie”. Still, it is very short, and redsails is a really cool website that has the footnotes with citations pop up as you read long
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
That’s the gist. Then he goes on with another paragraph of whataboutism but of course not a single mention of the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). [5] We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
this is directly preceding it. Even if I accepted your frankly hilarious black book of communism death tolls, the argument here is that the soviet union and China still greatly improved the lives of the average citizen compared to what came before while facing huge problems that you would crumble upon immediately upon encountering, like imminent war from the west that they predicted and prepared for correctly. As far as your other claim, it’s not nearly so simple as you make it out to be:
This essay resonates with me, thanks for sharing, the author makes her points pretty effectively. I’m not a historian and I don’t know shit, but I think even if I give the critics the concession that everything is absolute rubbish, I still think there’s no convincing argument that the beliefs are dishonest or malicious or not genuine.
There’s so much bullshit and conflicting views about literally every historical event that I find it really hard to penetrate the context of the discussion and feel confident in anything, but I think the fact that I keep seeing people who hold “tankie” opinions dismissed as malicious propagandists pushes me very strongly towards feeling that the critics have not made any attempt to seriously engage with the ideas they’re fighting against.
I think the realization I’m coming to now is that when part of your ideology is that people who claim belief in a specific conflicting worldview can be dismissed as bots or propagandists, finding out that those people aren’t manufactured makes it a lot harder to take everything else you’ve said seriously.
On the other hand, the guy you’re replying to is correct that the author’s points fall completely flat and are ridiculous once you hunt down that specific paragraph and remove the context immediately before and after. Then it becomes obvious to an unbiased reader that the author actually ignored communist death tolls because it was inconvenient for her argument.
glad it managed to reach someone! If you want the best nuanced review of Stalin from anyone anywhere, you will have to read Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo (free pdf here!). It is well sourced, and also uses western sources that should be biased against stalin to make its arguments! review on the same site as the tankies article here: redsails.org/on-losurdos-stalin/
additionally, some other articles I highly recommend if you want to understand our position better:
most of these are quite a bit longer, so sorry to flood you with them, but I’m always eager to share these excellent articles with anyone who will consider reading them!
It’s interesting how the only criticism anybody can drum up is “tens of millions dead,” but nobody bats an eye at the death toll of capitalism, capitalist countries, and their endless war machine/endless interference in other countries via funding coups or outright assassinations in support of harmful leaders who will play nice with the corporations.
Your link describes discussion of labor camps as if it’s some long lost relic of a bygone era - but slavery of inmates is, right now, legal and prevalent in the US subsidizing private industries for pennies on the dollar. It references the conditions of the camps, but plenty of current US inmates face subhuman conditions and treatment. You imply that everybody suffered all the time under the Soviets, but a far from insignificant number (depending on how you do the numbers, with more support for the USSR than we have for our own government this past decade or so) remember the USSR fondly, or at least as better than their current governments.
All the things y’all constantly belt about to argue socialism is the great evil of the world is shit we do now that you support as long as it benefits private entities instead of public. I’m not going to argue that everything was perfect, or that nobody was corrupt, but I WILL argue that y’all spend a lot of time defending those same imperfections and corruptions under capitalism with this lazy weak ass “but fixing it would be spooky scary socialism” argument. Per the common reasons people call socialism a failure, so is capitalism. That’s why leftists call for, as you call it, “prettied up” socialism - not to fool people, but because what we’re doing now is FAILING EVERYBODY and tripling down on funneling even more of our economy to 1-3% of the population hasn’t helped anything so it’s time for something different and realistic change is gradual, not “seizing the means of production” overnight. Practically, we find a functional balance like the rest of the “first” world.
To co-opt my criticism of zionists defending genocide with the “1,200 dead” figure: If tens of millions dead under socialism makes you so mad, just wait til you hear about the hundreds of millions dead under capitalism.
Mao was responsible for the deaths of 30-50M in famine. Estimates of Stalins score from famine, execution, forced relocation, labor camps is more difficult to ascertain. Estimates range from 3 -20M. Whether you disagree with this estimate it is incredibly likely that the prior poster was referencing the 33M–70M who died in intolerable conditions not the nazis.
The fact that you justify the state getting in the systemic murder business for any cause is a fundamental difference between our understanding of what can ever be morally acceptable.
The fact that they don’t tell you in the average anticommunist pop history youtube video is that China had been experiencing famines pretty much every single year for a thousand years by the time the Communists took over. The last famines occurred under Communist rule, but it is because of Communist policies that the cyclical famines stopped. This applies to the USSR as well.
Yes we can look back and see that killing the sparrows was a bad idea, but on the whole collectivized farms produced more food per hectare than smallholder farms did, and the policies of the Communists are what brought in sufficient numbers of tractors and other farming equipment to modernize outdated practices in rural regions. Without the Communists the simple fact is that the famines would have happened anyway, they would have been worse, and there would have been more of them.
This is the reason why, even when you include the famine deaths in your data, the average lifespan under Mao doubled from what it had been when the Republic of China controlled the mainland. The Communists won the war precisely because they treated peasants better than the then-central government did, and when they took power they enacted policies that massively improved the lives of everyone in China, and still continue to do so.
It sounds like ANY state of any variety anywhere in the world any time in modern history could have ended famines and you are somehow ascribing the benefits of modern farming to communism.
Any state can, but many don’t. And the point here was to explain why I don’t believe that blaming famine deaths on Mao Zedong is a justified position to take, when the cycle of famine was ended under his watch.
You’re linked a direct refutation on “anti-authouritarians” from Engels. Marx and Engels were criticized as “Authoritarian” by Anarchists of their era. Either Marx and Engels were Authoritarian in your eyes and thus not Leftists, or the Authoritarian argument itself is misplaced as a thought-terminating cliche as Engels points out, that avoids grappling with the Marxist theory of the State.
I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
Definitely a joke, I’m having trouble imagining a person who could believe this in earnest, let alone enough to say it out loud. I’m even having trouble accepting that you can imagine that a person would say this with no sarcasm. No one actually believes that.
edit: just realized that maybe you’re trying to be funny and I’m slow on the uptake
Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
Anytime a person claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link to it, they are lying or misrepresenting what happened literally 100% of the time.
Tankie is such a weird thing to call these communists. They are way way less violent than liberals and conservatives are. They don’t even support any on going genocides like the others do.
The historical through-line is that the term originated from British Communists that supported the USSR putting down the Hungarian Counter-Revolution, which involved tanks and violent fighting.
Nowadays, Tankie is used for everyone left of liberalism that agrees with the Marxist theory of the State, rather than the Anarchist, it’s muddled and has no meaning.
From a philosophy standpoint, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s a brutally tough read, but a very interesting perspective of a Holocaust survivor and some of the more “mundane” parts (which were still horrific) in between the parts most people know about. The philosophy that follows is interesting.
It’s certainly not without it’s faults and criticisms, though.
The other commenter fucked up instance vs community. Technically the admins moderate every community on their instance. It’s just that the post/comments didn’t violate instance rules I guess.
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