DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]

Compare China with the capitalist project? Ok, China is clearly winning in just about every conceivable way. Were you trying to make some sort of point?

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

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

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

I’m not entirely sure what this means specifically, but it does sound cool.

As for leftist internet personalities, JT of Second Thought (youtube channel) and The Deprogram (podcast) fame will be doing an AMA on hexbear on the 28th, and I hope lemmygradians come participate. Lemmygrad should get Hakim to do an AMA after that, then we can have some sort of posting battle for who gets Yugopnik as a follow up.

“Elevatorgate” and especially Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” letter made me step away from atheism as any organized movement.

the idea of standing with that bunch of euphoric reactionaries was unbearable by that point.

Exactly the same for me. Well, I would say I stuck with the movement a little longer, but only as part of the sliver that had no choice but to shift the focus of criticism towards our former atheist “allies,” the reactionaries and sex pests, which in turn made us the evil enemy SJWs, the fanatic feminists, the beta cucks, and the cringe white knights. While it was shocking how elevatorgate suddenly revealed this giant gaping rift in the community, and how full the entire atheist movement had been with the most disgusting of reactionaries, it was one of those things where in hindsight, all the misogyny, racism, white supremacy, etc. had been visible just beneath the surface all along, but had been easy to overlook as just a nasty patina sticking to the broader movement. Nah, turns out it was actually deeply intertwined with it.

I still think Rebecca Watson is cool (for anyone who doesn’t know but is interested, “elevatorgate” centered on her because she dared to say “guys, don’t do that” when referencing being hit on by a stranger very creepily when alone in an elevator at a convention, and was subsequently hounded, harassed, ridiculed, and derided even by the famous Dickie Dawkins). She still to this day puts out some banger videos sometimes. I will always have a soft spot for PZ Myers and his Pharyngula blog that I spent so much time on, finding community there because even then it was clear how ugly and toxic so much of reddit was. Pharyngula was like the last bastion where social justice was recognized as good and necessary, rather than demonized as something that needed to be snuffed out.

I’m also still an atheist. But that movement is dead, just as it fucking should be. Amusingly, but also sickeningly, the larger fascist-adjacent majority of it kind of morphed over time into things like Jordan Peterson’s cult, at least the parts that didn’t just fizzle out into the background noise islamaphobia and generic chuddery.

I should confess too, reading Christopher Hitchens (one of the “four horsemen”) was definitely a big stepping stone on the path towards my own radicalization. Though I wince to say it now, I did admire him back then and he wrote about being, or having been a Trotskyist, which was one of those little epiphanies that showed there were actually political positions to the left of “as left as it gets” liberal. Wanting to find out more about that is eventually what lead me to Lenin.

To be clear, I’m not saying that’s what radicalized me, though it was a small part of it. I’m mostly just commenting to respond to the New Atheist part of the discussion.

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

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

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

Pretty sure Egon means this: Ukraine: The Avoidable War, which if I remember correctly, has a decent run-through of American interference in 90’s Russia, but is not specifically about that. Correct me if you meant a different video, Egon. If so, I’d like to see it too.

archived link for those who prefer: https://archive.ph/GyCQD

I’m just going to toss out a relevant excerpt from The Jakarta Method:

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

I would also suggest Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth which we happen to be reading right now in Hexbear’s book club. We’re a couple chapters in already, but it’s a slow schedule so easy to catch up for anyone interested. (Thanks to @[email protected] for cluing me in on it).

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think you missed the whole point of GarbageShoot asking you specifically about Allende.

just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general […]

I think this is the main problem here: a lack of knowledge about the historical context of “authoritarian” socialist projects, but nevertheless making generalized statements about them without even considering the material reasons why they were by necessity “authoritarian.” Read up more about the history of Chile and consider what happened to Allende and the hope of a socialist Chile. Who came after Allende (and almost as important, who installed that successor)? Why do these events seem so familiar when learning about every other attempt, successful or not, to bring about a communist society? When you’ve done that, you will at the very least have a leg to stand on when criticizing so-called tankie authoritarianism.

I’d also suggest reading The Jakarta Method. Here’s a somewhat relevant quote from it:

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

I plugged it into an anagram solver in the hopes of something funny (I’m sure I’m not the only one), but no words use all the letters, at least in English.

If only using S for Saudi Arabia and the U for UAE, there’s “causeries” but that doesn’t include Brazil. If you use all the letters with SA and UAE, the closest English word is scarabaeus but that’s also leaving out a few letters.

late edit because I’m a nerd:

But there are a ton if you allow two words.

Because Siri (ugh), Because Iris, Biases Curie, Icier Subsea, Iberis Sauce, etc.

And literally tens of thousands if you allow 3 or more words. I liked Bi Curie Seas, or Bi Curia Sees, and AI is be curse!

This. The key is letting people think that they have arrived at these conclusions themselves, as then they become receptive to expanding their knowledge on those ideas. That may sound kind of arrogant, or like you’re tricking them, but it’s not a trick, as they really are coming to conclusions themselves, you’re just paving the path ahead of them to make it easy. In this case, if through your (Babs’) gentle line of questioning they come to view it accurately as genuine self defense, then the framing of “violent revolution” starts taking on a different, more acceptable shape in their mind. At least that’s the case from my experience.

I would argue some also misplace their hopes in false solutions, such as multipolarity or the BRICS trading bloc (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa)… The idea that social revolution is inconceivable and that the best we can hope for is an end to US/Western hegemony and the emergence of a multipolar world has been gaining ground among opponents of Western imperialism around the world.

From my understanding, it’s not that those who put their hopes in multipolarity/BRICS think that social revolution is inconceivable, it’s that we recognize that you have to have the right conditions for revolution before it can happen. Multipolarity is the best way of bringing about those conditions. Like has been said so often here, it’s about giving the global south the breathing room to be able to express its agency in the world, which in turn could allow the social revolution he’s talking about to happen without it being immediately obliterated by the sole world hegemon. The author is talking like it’s an either/or situation, when it’s not that at all. It’s a process that takes more than just a single fucking step, lol. And what (actual) leftist thinks an end to US hegemony “is the best we can hope for”?

In reality, a multipolar capitalist world, a world of rival hegemons and would-be hegemons contesting for power, is a world at war.

And a sudden world wide revolution wouldn’t be?

Totally worth it imo.

Go get a mic and slap a on it and hold it up while you shoot some video with people going into the summit building over your shoulder.

Personally, I would look forward to hearing 72T trying to pronounce your name. “Thanks aaaaaaadjsf ‘ayyyyy… aid-jeff ssfuh?’ that was illuminating. There you have it, folks. In other news, stay tuned, because in our top story tonight…”

You could go be the on-the-ground correspondent for Channel Hexbear’s NewsMega. Tell us what’s happening with live updates and each time close with “back to you, SeventyTwoTrillion.”

I haven’t read all the replies yet, but this misunderstanding over the term “liberal” has come up many times now since federation. I would highly recommend reading through this other thread which gets into it with quite a lot of detail and history: https://hexbear.net/comment/3731464

In yet another case where this confusion happened, I wrote a brief explanation. I’ll paste it again because why the hell not.

Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.

When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.

Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.

Saying “all X nationality is Nazi” is some Nazi shit. Yes, even when you excuse one tenth of one percent. Something like 20% of Germany’s population are minorities. Sure, that includes minorities like Poles who can still be Nazi, but African Germans are alone over 1 percent (a lot more than 0.1%), are they all Nazis too? Even that 80% German majority is not all fucking Nazis though. I normally really like your comments comrade but this take is shit.

It’s been a few years since I watched it, and it’s not specifically about trans people, but I remember Shaun made (as usual) an excellent video about women and chess, dismantling the ridiculous arguments that because there are more higher-ranked male chess players, men’s brainpans are better suited (than those of the emotional feeemale) for the kind of logical thinking that chess requires.

Tbf, seconds are defined by a fundamental physical property already, the properties of a caesium atom because that was the most accurate way of keeping time known. Seconds defined this way are part of the SI metric standard. If we were to meet ET comrades, so long as we could communicate what hydrogen is, which should be pretty easy, we could extrapolate what our time measurements are based on from there… probably more easily than using planck multiples, which to my knowledge has nothing in the physical world that oscillates by it. (Also, it’s no better or worse than using any other multiple, but using multiples of 10 is arbitrary because of our base-10 system that we use as a result of having 10 fingers. Who knows how many fingers ET has!) 👽

If we’re basing our units on something to appease potential aliens, I personally like the idea of using pulsars, which when discovered were thought at first to be aliens because they pulsed with frequencies more accurate than our atomic clocks.

Honestly, the dolphins should be making these decisions regardless.

I’m curious what aspects of that comment you thought were fantastical. Will you elaborate and be specific?