DD/MM/YY and YY/MM/DD are the only acceptable ones IMO. Throwing a DD in between YY and MM is just weird since days move by faster so they should be at one of the ends and since YY moves the slowest it should be on the other end.
I think most Americans do. Or at least it was taught that way in school when I was growing up. Maybe it’s because of the way we speak dates, like “October 23rd” or “May 9th, 2005”.
Regardless, the only true way to write dates is YYYY-MM-DD.
I grew up with DD.MM.YYYY. But I think, MM/DD makes sense in everyday usage. You don’t often need to specify dates with year accuracy. “Jane’s prom is on 7th September” – it’s obvious which year is meant. Then it’s sensible to start with the larger unit, MM, instead of DD.
Even in writing you see that the year is always given like an afterthought: “7th September**,** 2023“.
It’s how it is read in English (simplified) aka american english. Brittish english doesn’t do this nonsense, the talk in the correct format (first of january etc.).
(I’m sorry if i made some mistakes, english is my second language)
You only think it fits with how it’s read in English because that’s how you grew up saying it so it sounds natural to you. Your experience is not universal, and is in fact, a minority.
If you use DD/MM/YYYY, dumb sorting algorithms will put all of the 1sts of every month together, all of the 2nds of every month together, etc. That doesn’t seem very useful unless you’re trying to identify monthly trends, which is fundamentally flawed as things like the number of days in the month or which day of the week a date falls on can significantly disrupt those trends.
With MM/DD/YY, the only issue is multiple years being grouped together. Which may be what you want, especially if the dates are indicating cumulative totals. Depending on the data structure, years are often sorted out separately anyways.
YYYY/MM/DD is definitely the best for sorting. However, the year is often the least important piece in data analysis. Because often the dataset is looking at either “this year” or “the last 12 months”. So the user’s eyes need to just ignore the first 5 characters, which is not very efficient.
If you’re using a tool that knows days vs months vs years that can help, but you can run into compatibility issues when trying to move things around.
The ugly truth no one wants to admit on these conversations is that these formats are tools. Some are better suited to certain jobs than others.
Japan is YYYY-MM-DD, but when we talk about dates where a year is unneeded, we just cut it off which leaves it in the US standard format of MM-DD, much to the annoyance of non-US foreigners living here.
Have you tried taking a loan out on anything lately? Minimum 8% interest rate for someone with the best credit score imaginable. I know doctors and engineers who refuse to buy a house right now because we had an incompetent senior citizen decide to hand out free money several times when the country was shut down and burn money on pointless foreign conflicts that we have absolutely no business being in. This country was prospering when Trump was in office and it will when he’s reelected next year.
I did, and it’s just a list of him spending exorbitant amounts of tax payer money on the most random infrastructure projects. Bidens like the grandparent who goes out of their way to spoil their grandkids, there’s nothing wrong with it up to a certain limit, but if we just let them be in charge of our finances we’re all screwed. A Republican presidency is necessary to balance out the overspending of a liberal socialist president.
You obviously didn’t, if you’re still spouting trump’s talking points.
Or you actively want fascism, since he’s dropped the mask, finally. So which is it – are you being wilfully ignorant, or ready to be an open fascist? He’s making his stance perfectly clear. We can all see it now.
If you’re still willing to defend that… I want to say I pity you, but I can’t. Fascism will lose, hard this time. We’re onto it. We see it for what it is.
I’m simply a centrist constitutionalist, which is the farthest thing from a fascist.
I’m not going to vote for a president that consistently attacks my right to bear arms with a new law anytime a mass shooting pops off.
And I’m not willing to vote for a president that keeps on funding Israels genocide on Palestinians. Trump has already said he wouldn’t get involved in any foreign conflicts which is much more than Biden has done thus far.
I get you wanting that one thing. As a libertarian, it’s all about you, and nobody’s going to change your mind because you know best. Good for you.
Meanwhile, people with social empathy (that’s the actual definition of ‘woke’, by the way) will vote for all of your rights, not just the 2A. We want you to have full rights to your body and life, even if you hate us for it.
I want your children to grow up in a world where they’re safe and happy. One in which they can make all the own decisions after they’ve benefited from the best education and healthcare this first-world country can offer them. One in which they’re truly free. – intellectually, economically, and socially.
And despite what republicans and libertarians cry about, I will vote every time for people who will make that happen. And that’s never been republicans or libertarians. They’re lying to you. They’ve always lied to you, because they want power over you, and to get that power, they make you afraid.
I am not afraid. I refuse to be afraid. I’ve seen all of society – I’ve been homeless, and I’ve been at the pinnacle of a white collar career. My family had a beach house in Mexico in the 80s when tourism wasn’t much of a thing there. I hitchhiked across the US in the late 80s. I’ve seen some shit.
You’re being lied to. It hurts to admit, I get that. But some very savvy politicians are making you angry and scared on purpose. Please stop letting them do that to you.
I hope they listen to you. Chances are though, they have no interest in being swayed. The reason they are like this is they think they are more clever than all the rest. They have made their contrarian belief a part of their identity and abandoning that would cause them to have to change who they are.
That’s one thing I really do not get. The US is absolutely awash with weapons, some very high powered.
Yet it’s schools and concerts that get shot up and not wherever crazy fascist orange people hang out. I’m not advocating shooting up anywhere but it’s weird that it’s schools and concerts etc
Well, there’s two reasons for that. First, the vast majority of people who own guns are, shockingly, relatively normal, peaceful, law-abiding, not-the-type-to-kill-without-being-in-fear-of-their-life citizens. Those kinds of people don’t shoot at other people because of a messed up reason in their head. Second, the individuals who have shot up schools, concerts, congressman baseball fields, elementary schools, grocery stores, schools, big box stores, movie theaters, more schools, college campuses (shocking, that’s a school as well), night clubs, high schools, and more schools… wow, that’s a lot of schools… definitely don’t have all of their marbles in their bag. Aside from that baseball field with the congressmen, it would take a fair amount of skillful preparation to be able to even attempt an attack on government big boys. That sort of ability resides with the first group, while the will to do so resides in the second.
This is a stupid canard. Obviously the US has centrists relative to its own domestic politics, and obviously that’s what the idiot above is referring to.
I’m not going to vote for a president that consistently attacks my right to bear arms with a new law anytime a mass shooting pops off.
Ok…
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.
“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.
You’re not a centrist. You’re either arguing in bad faith or unaware that you’ve already drank ALL the koolaid. You’re echoing every single Republican talking point and dismissing all evidence to the contrary without actually reading it.
The infrastructure spending you’re being so dismissive of is a CRITICAL investment in our nation’s health that has been neglected by the last 50 years of for-profit governance and it passed with bipartisan support.
Inflation is nuts all over the world and not even remotely within Biden’s control. Interest rates are high because of a) COVID and the related supply chain disruptions, b) extreme corporate greed and, c) corrections for years of Trump artificially suppressing the federal rate despite numerous advisors telling him it needed to be raised.
If you’re genuinely concerned about the constitution and your rights, take a look at all the unconstitutional the things Trump has already explicitly said he would do if re-elected. There is no center position anymore. If you don’t oppose Trump, you support fascism.
What? Trump handed out more stimulus checks than Biden. Then there was the whole pay day loan fiasco that was rampant with corruption and fraud with absolutely no oversight.
It’s too bad that not giving weapons to a genocidal government is not on one of those lists.
I will never vote for anyone not currently involved in calling for a cease fire ever again.
Not that it matters though, support for Biden has fallen to single digits among Muslims in the swing States, whose numbers are required to win those swing States.
If stopping Trump was so important, why did Biden through it all away to support a genocide?
There’s literally never been a good position on the fucking decades long Israel conflict that will please people. Most people smart and/or old enough know to stay the fuck out of it. It’s a meme, for fuck’s sake. There was a Rick and Morty episode about it several years ago, that’s how much of a meme it is now.
If you’re judging Biden by that, you’re obviously too young to remember the last time this volcano of shit erupted. Maybe look at other issues that impact American’s lives that don’t have to do with inane fantasies about Armageddon.
I’m old enough to remember when democrats pointed out how horrible george w bush was while he was president (and rightfully so), but have only sucked his dick since then. Sorry, I don’t trust democrats to save a goddamn thing. Your padded and fluffed up lists don’t change that. I’ll continue voting for democrats down the entire ballot every single election, but I’m not stupid enough to think it will change anything.
Wait, are you saying democrats have sucked Bush’s dick? I must be misunderstanding what you’re saying, because that’s ludicrous.
I haven’t padded or fluffed anything. I’m very critical of all politicians, but I’m also realistic in what can be accomplished within the system we have. I don’t love democrats, and in my ideal world we’d have a better system.
But I will not allow fascism to grow in the bed of misguided discontent, which is literally what you’re doing.
As for your lists, all it takes is a glance to immediately see the padding and fluff. For example, there are multiple lines dedicated to student loan forgiveness which is hilarious, seeing as Biden was a key figure in creating the student loan crisis in the first place:
So while he can brag about a few billions here and there freed up by enforcing rules that already existed, the student loan problem is now around $1.7 trillion and none of his policies address the loans that are currently being taken nor the loans being taken out in the future. In other words, he’s not solving the problem, not even ones he helped create himself. That’s really democrats in a nutshell: play along with republicans to create problems and then present themselves as “the thin blue line” that protects us by providing minor relief. One step forward and five steps back means you’re still going backward.
That first link is ridiculous, because it’s not about democrats liking Bush, but about democrats pining for a sane candidate again as opposed to trump. I said the same things back then. I hate Bush, but at least he was sane. Your article isn’t about democrats liking Bush, but about them hating trump so very much, even the notorious Bush seemed decent by comparison, and that’s saying something.
How did we move from the 2A to you niggling over the student loan issue, which is most of your links? Do you even care about the student loan issue? I’ll bet you don’t, and it’s such a small part of what Biden has done, I can’t help but think you’re being disingenuous in bringing it up.
Come on, be real with me. What’s your real issue here?
A sane candidate like Bush, you know, the one who lied to get us into two wars. The guy who pushed for a border fence. The guy at the helm when the great recession hit. The guy who did nothing in the face of hurricane katrina. Yeah, very sane. If you paid attention to policy, you’d notice that Trump’s policies are merely a continuation of Bush’s.
I talked about the student loan issue because you asked how your lists were padded and fluffed up. You claim they’re such a small part of what Biden has done, yet this one issue has taken up at least five different lines of one of your little lists and I noticed this right away from a simple glance. The only one being disingenuous is you, who clearly has some agenda when you’ve made a community just to hold your padded lists. Would you like me to continue picking apart your lists?
My real issue is how you’re trying to present Biden and the democrats in general as saviors when really they’re part of the problem. People are still miserable and out-of-touch democrats claiming “no, no, everything is great now because the president is a blue guy” are not helping. How about we get some real solutions?
Did you miss the part where I said I hated Bush? Why are you so angry about that? Why are you so angry at me?
We probably want the same things. I’m just not angry about it at people I haven’t met, like you. I’m not afraid of people because people I also haven’t met are telling me to be.
You sound like a smart person. Stop arguing with someone you don’t know on the internet and start thinking about why you’re being manipulated to be angry at people like me. I’m not trying to take anything from you, I promise.
e: feel free to reply in a day or so after you’ve got a reply distilled from whatever group you might copy/paste my comment to. I’ll be here.
I’m forty fucking five. I want us to stay out of it. It’s our tax dollars that are paying for the weapons being used. This conflict exists BECAUSE we don’t stay out of it. If we did, Israel would have had to actually negotiate in good faith decades ago. You are directly paying to enact a genocide, because our current president is unwilling to tell Israel to knock it the fuck off.
Reagan stopped Israel bombing in twenty minutes with a single phone call. (Not that Reagan is a good person, just that the capability exists for Biden, he just chooses not to use it.)
I do remember Operation Cast Lead. I’m willing to bet that you didn’t even know the name of the last time it erupted. You’re so ignorant that you view actual knowledge and lived experience as ignorance, because you’re so ignorant you don’t know how ignorant you are.
Finally, this is not inane you fucking moron, you have no knowledge of foreign policy, and this very easily could erupt into a wider regional war that turns into WW3.
P.S. It doesn’t matter what I think you fucking blood thirsty child murder justifying fuck, What matters is that a large enough percentage of voters in the mid-west swing states to be required for a Democratic win are Muslim. They correctly see Biden’s actions as enabling a genocide against a people they identify with. As a result, their support has dropped down to single digit support.
Every other normally Democratic voter that wasn’t Muslim could choose to vote for Biden, and he would still lose due to actions that would have been possible for someone as idiotic as yourself to predict. The Biden administration has done it to themselves.
Unfortunately in our current election system, voting for the lesser evil is what we have to do.
Vote with your heart in the primaries, vote strategically in the end. So is the curse of our first past the post voting system.
And do what you can to help get the people who want to do positive change in your local elections into office. The only path to ranked choice voting is getting enough support in the states, there’s very little chance we’ll get it on the national stage without it becoming a reality on the state level.
Trump would never kill the Jews. Not because he cares about them at all (in fact, if it were profitable for him, he absolutely would), but his biggest supporters are evangelicals who need the Jews to be in control of the region in order to bring on their Armageddon.
There are tons of articles like that from evangelical groups. They legitimately think this is the end times, and they’re happy to see all of us burn for it. They publicly say climate change isn’t real, but privately they say it’s ordained and a sign of the apocalypse. They’re against people doing anything about it, and there are Dominionists in Congress and the Supreme Court. They’re going to kill us all if they can.
Arab-Americans form a large population in the mid-west swing states. This is a known fact.
They are a requisite component for the coalition that allows the Democratic party to win presidential elections in the mid-west swing states. This is also a known fact.
It requires very little intuition to know that Arab-Americans will react negatively to a person who approves of and enables the genocide of a civilian population group that they identify with.
That is what happened. Support has dropped for Biden among Arab-Americans in the swing states to a single digit.
Every other typically Democratic voting demographic group could vote the same as they normally do, and Biden would lose due to loss of a key member of the swing state coalition.
Biden took that action, knowing it would likely blow up his Arab-American support so that he could give weapons and support to a group that has so far killed at least 5000 children. If you sort them in order of age, it takes six pages to get to a child older than 0. That was what he was willing to destroy his chances of getting re-elected for.
I’m not arguing that anyone should vote, or not vote for Biden. I’m saying that a win is now impossible due to his administrations actions regardless of what I, individually, do. If you want to be angry about Trump becoming a fucking dictator, be mad at the person who made it a certainty so he could help kill 5000 children.
Heh. And you’re not deplorable! What a lovely assumption, but if someone had say, GAD, surely this is the reply to make them vote for the covertly fascist over the overtly fascist party. If someone had mpd, bpd, surely this is the answer to turn away the wrath and violence of j6ers.
I’m sorry you’re so devoid of imagination, you can’t imagine establishment D with zero personality won’t lose to the cult of evil personality, not imagine a viable solution.
When Trump was president we couldn’t leave our houses because of COVID. We had riots in some cities. He was separating children from their parents at the border.
For me specifically things were going so bad at my company that we had daily meetings just to talk about how shitty things were in the world. They told us to do as much work as we could but it’s understandable if you can’t concentrate.i have never experienced that before In my life. That’s what I don’t want ever again.
Maybe things were fine for you but that shit sucked for me.
I’ll be honest, unless you were in a special circumstance, that sounds like a you problem not a Trump problem. I didn’t and wouldn’t vote for him, but for most people he did not affect their day to day that much. 2020 was the peak of actual influence on daily life, but I don’t think that had as much to do with Trump as people imply, either. The whole world got Covid. The US had a bit more deaths per capita than the rest of the developed world (less than UK) but it also has a less healthy population in general.
I think we all sort of trained each other to fixate on the president and be anxious if they’re not on our team.
That’s ok, this map of native American lands is definitely outdated. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) lands are much smaller than it should be. As that’s the only tribal name I can actually read, I imagine it’s a similar story for the other tribes.
How is this improving the situation. Do people only throw away the caps? I think this is just some stupid law so that they can say they tried. I still think soda cans are just a better solution and make it mandatory that companies recycle their own waste.
I still think soda cans are just a better solution
That actually sounds like a good idea to me, or you could make them similar in design to those water-bottles that have the cap meant to stay with the bottle, shown in:
Just to get this straight, in Germany if coca cola sells a can of coke to a consumer and that it is somehow returned to them through a deposit scheme or something they are legally bound to recycle entirely that aluminium foil ?
If that’s the case that’s amazing but in many countries in Europe a lot of effort is done to collect recyclable stuff but that certainly does not mean it will be recycled.
There is a vast difference between something being mandatory to put in the recycling bin and it actually being recycled for real.
Aluminum is poisonous in larger amounts and a lot of can contents are pretty acidic. You could probably line them with non reactive metals like gold, but thst would be very expensive in comparison.
Glass because the added weight ends up being less eco-friendly than plastics during transport. So it’s better to only get glass from local distributers. Also the recycling process of glass is fairly eco unfriendly too.
Aluminum cans might be the best we have for now. I have seen paper milk carton style containers come up more often. As well as plant based plastics.
What? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you should still try to improve the situation. That’s like saying trucks that get 7MPG are bad for the environment but don’t bother making trucks that get 20MPG because it still runs on fossil fuels.
There’s actually a very simple reason for this phenomenon. A standard spring mattress essentially acts like a giant mirror, reflecting all sorts of radio waves, including your cellular signal. This can cause interference, leading to a dead zone in the near vicinity. The same effect was documented back in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcers table.
Some people are of the mind that anything less than firebombing an oil refinery is not taking action. We need both people firebombing oil infrastructure, AND people protesting in the streets
It appears they were partying before the protest even started
As for taking pictures and recording, it’s not every day you see a protest so it makes sense to record it (the person who made the original source also recorded it)
There wasn’t much laughing - at most there was the odd smile. There was one bold guy who was laughing but the vast majority were just using the balcony like a normal person would
No, they’re just standing around in a street and holding signs. Utterly impotent. So impotent that the people they object to co-opted their name and message and use it for corporate fundraising.
People on social media get banned for suggesting to do anything more than this.
There’s a trait you can pick that exactly explains my problems.with the game. The trait is ‘Dream Home’. It is described as
‘You own a luxurious, customizable house on a peaceful planet! Unfortunately it comes with a 125,000 credit mortgage with GalBank that has to be paid weekly.’…
I thought this was a cool way of adding increased difficulty for myself. I tend not to play at the hardest setting because I don’t have much time to play. But having to plan ahead and work around this limitation sounded like it would add an interesting wrinkle to the strategy I’d have in the game.
However, when you start the game you discover that the loan has to be paid off in full… And you have unlimited time to pay it off. The only way to be foreclosed upon is if you actively go tell the bank to foreclose on you. It’s like they had the idea, but couldn’t be bothered to implement it.
What’s worse is 120k is nothing in the game. You can easily get there within a few hours of play. This is just one example, but it speaks to the game’s complete unwillingness to give the player anything negative or push them any way from their ‘freedom’. The sheer fact you are not locked out of any faction or faction mission is another example. There are 0 stakes in the game and you feel 0 connection to the people you meet or places you visit. Not helped by Sarah potentially being one of the most annoying judgemental characters in any Bethesda game I’ve ever encountered.
Update: I eventually visited this ‘Dream House’. It kinda sucked. The planet it is on is kinda ugly. There is more to this mechanic than I originally thought, however. When you visit you can pay 500 credits for 1 week of access as a ‘payment’ towards the principal. Still very deceptive of the original description.
The only way to be foreclosed upon is if you actively go tell the bank to foreclose on you
Bethesda once again being so scared of the player making a choice, so they lock down anything that actually changes the game behind a giant 🚨 ARE YOU SURE??? 🚨
I mean there are a whole bunch of players that seem to have a problem with actually dealing with consequences. Just look at the bg3 players who are so pissed about “missing content” when they murderhobo their way through the game. Like no shit you killed the people who give you quests, of course you’re going to miss out on their stories.
I think it’s because so many space games try to dazzle with the unfettered dream of exploring the endless cosmos. But you obviously can’t fill an endless cosmos with interesting things to do. Hell, most of space is just dead rocks and hot gas.
I feel like dyson sphere program is somewhere further, it being a sandbox factory game means you can do basically as much as you can reasonably handle on your computer, although story wise it’s not great since it’s not meant to be a story game
Someday I’m interested in making an open world game (short on features because I’ll never have giant budgets) that embraces the friction of inconvenience, but finds enjoyable ways for people to circumvent them.
Eg: You can’t easily locate yourself on the map, but you can use a radio to ping towers and triangulate, which gives a breezy interface - or just ask locals. You can’t fast travel, but train stations get you where you’re going - and you might get an interesting conversation or even a whole questline on board.
There’s a little open world game called Miasmata with that triangulation system! It’s an open world survival horror. It’s pretty short though, and I bet you could get it for just a few bucks on sale. I really enjoyed my time in it, and the world is the perfect mix of dreary and serene.
When ARMA Reforger released it was chaos, with 95% of the people hopelessly lost at all times. It’s because the game gave you a map, a compass, and nothing else for navigation. Best. Immersion. Ever.
Always on instant GPS with augmented reality waypoints between abstract objectives is what kills player immersion (and developer creativity). If I can just follow an arrow from point to point and complete a game: it wasn’t worth making the game.
Yep. Theres no exploring, theres just “run to waypoint. grab thing waypoint is on, run to waypoint, hand over waypointed item, find next waypoint source, repeat”
Cause devs want to dumb games down so any mouth breathing reject can conquer it without any effort, to bring in that sweet sweet idiot money.
Man. Was really hoping to be wrong about it, but I mean, it is bethesda. Can’t expect a full up to date game without gamebreaking bugs or missing features when they could just rely on unpaid mod creators for that.
Why didn’t you pick any of the more negative traits? Like your example is the most basic harmless one. There’s ones with way more downsides. Did you pick the ‘2 loving parents’ trait and are mad they don’t kill you on sight? lmao. Like I picked wanted where I always have a bounty and it’s cool. I’ve had a bounty hunter show up in the middle of a boss fight before. Both in space and on ground. Added a decent complication. A few of the others are pretty long term negatives like weakening aids and food.
I also don’t know if you explored much because the game has a pretty robust ailments system. Like if you pre-plan sure you can have all the expensive cures on hand, but you can get quite a few ailments at once from fucking around. I had a cough for like 4 hours because I couldn’t find an aid for it. I eventually had to go to a doctor to get rid of it.
I did pick other negative traits. My problem with this one is it straight up lies to you in the description. You think it is going to be negative but instead it is the most basic boring version of what that trait could be. I’ve explored many hostile environments where conditions are common and haven’t had a situation where I didn’t already have the sure on hand but I tend to loot a lot.
You can’t change your traits after starting. For my play style, this one should have been perfect. Instead it just sucked all fun out of the potential mechanic.
makes a big deal out of having to send them money every week.
Its little more than a rounding error on your accounts, the amount you end up sending.
And they end up giving you several amazing things or free.
spoiler___ A big honkin awesome ship, Thats got amazing cargo capacity for as early as you get it: Just gotta visit them a few times to get it and a pretty fuckin awesome pistol that, when i got it, was outdamaging everything i had except shotguns by at least a factor of 2.
Seriously, money in this game is a joke. Getting to be a rich removed is easier than building water purifier settlements in Fallout 4.
I’ve noticed google maps always gives me the same, longer route while waze always gives me the fastest one. I believe maps has some kind of thing to manage traffic so it doesn’t always give you the fastest route.
I found a ridiculous road closure last week, and GPS routed me through a ton of backroads I had never taken before. It was only marginally faster, but I’m glad I was constantly moving, and not on a highway-turned-parking-lot for those 2 hours. Also, we got to experience some new scenery that we may never have seen otherwise, which is at least interesting.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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”?
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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
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
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.
4chan and their offshoot nazi spaces. It’s not entirely apropriated by them but it’s incredibly popular, there were shitholes like r/frenworld which sit all day and made fascist dogwhistles with pepe and clowns (and clown pepes).
I have MAGA family members and it’s not just 1+1=5. It’s a word-vomit tsunami of absolute bullshit. And if you convince them that point 1/367 is not factual, they won’t accept that it disqualifies anything else (including the idea that he never tells lies), and you will have to re-prove that point 1/367 is not factual a few weeks later. It’s exhausting, and I’m fairly sure that is the point (and I’m fairly sure this is also an actual Russian propaganda technique called a “firehose of falsehoods”, regardless of whether it’s being used in that context).
Thats our national issue, democrats care far less about the fascist vomit of the right than they do being polite, “understanding,” and “reaching across the aisle.”
J6ers tried to overtake the govt, hang em for treason. If their backers violently rise up, take em out too. Problem solved. Instead, dems make excuses for Republicans every day, say they can’t do anything about anything, then push a bunch of policies to further snuff out the left instead.
Democratic politicians feel this way because they are mostly friends with their colleagues across the aisle. They all eat at the same luncheons together, hang out at the same establishments in DC, attend the same fundraisers and lobbying events.
I think the voters tend to have a different point of view from those in DC. Consider that even Republican lawmakers were running for their life on Jan6. Dem voters are growing fatigued with the constant gaslighting from the establishment politicians, and hopefully soon might provide cause for their “elected representatives” to flee as well. At this point we’ve been left with painfully few alternatives.
Lastly just want to say I do agree with full treason charges for anyone involved with Jan6. Obstruction was a laughable wrist slap, this is far too serious for such measures. The rioters kind of had the right idea but for literally all of the wrong reasons. It’s tea party republicans all over again (which was funded by Koch bros of course). Instead of addressing this in a serious manner, Dems considered doing nothing at all for 2 years before they finally started bringing the wrong charges. Pathetic.
They reach across the aisle because they basically never have control of Congress. Dems need all 3 (presidency, house of reps, and Senate) to pass anything. When they don’t have all 3, they have to reach across the aisle to pass anything. So guess how long they’ve had all 3? They’ve had it for 4 years of the last 24 years.
And if they didn’t reach across, guess what happens. The GOP shuts down the government like they did to Obama.
So what can you do move things left? Give Dems consistent and overwhelming victories in all 3 houses.
Rewarding them for moving further right hasn’t worked for decades, but surely it will this time!
There’s a reason they cant pull the votes to get all 3, turns out the people voting for Republicans aren’t going to switch parties cause dems chase after them year after year abandoning anyone left of mid right establishment dems.
Everytime the Dems lose, they go to the center to find votes. And they find them! That’s how Bill Clinton won, he went to the center (some say right, whatever). Gore went a little left and then lost. So Obama learned to not run left and instead ran on broad “hope”. His reward for passing the ACA was losing Congress for his last 6 years. Thanks voters. Clinton went a little left on climate change, supposedly the important issue for the left, and lost. So Biden learned to not run left, and he won!
Every time the Dems go left they lose. So they go to the center to find voters and they find them. And you wonder why they go to the center?
I’m sure it has nothing to do with immediately abandoning those talking points once they’re elected. A single Republican gripes and “well there’s nothing we can do we’re just doing their thing now. Sucks to suck 🤷♂️”
Of course, as illustrated here they’re happy to blame the left though even though their entire thing is “fuck the left.” whether its outright like it is right now, or the passive “WE’LL TOTALLY DO LEFT STUFF GUYS JUST VOTE FOR US…whoops sorry someone said no so we’re conservatives now”
Is this the conversation where I said dems have had control for 4 years of the last 24 years? Yeah it is. Dude they are forced to reach across the aisle. Because they have lost control for 20 years of the last 24 years. That’s how Congress works, if you don’t have all 3 then you are forced to reach across the aisle and compromise. I’ll say it again, forced to. Because left voters never show up.
No matter how much you gripe, that’s how it works. So if you want them to do left things, then give them all 3 (presidency, house of reps, and Senate) consistently and overwhelmingly. It’s that simple.
(Want to go back further and include Bill Clinton? Then Dems have had control for 6 years of the last 32. Want to include Bush senior and Reagan? Then it’s 6 years of the last 44 fucking years. Read that again: Dems have had control for 6 measly years of the last 44 fucking years. And you wonder why we have slow progress?)
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