OBJECTION! @ Objection @lemmy.ml Posts 19Comments 2,782Joined 1 yr. ago
Blah blah blah. The Nazis started by coming after trans people too, gay people wound up in camps all the same. Divide and conquer, you're not as clever with this BS as you think.
Most of the regimes you support are the result of military coups of actual revolutions.
Really? Which ones, specifically? I'm not aware of any like that.
Why support the genocides or the oppression of workers?
I don't.
Still doesn’t make it socialism.
If you want to write off the whole history of socialist theory as well as every revolution that called itself socialist as having nothing to do with socialism, then I might suggest that you're the one who should find another name for whatever it is you believe. Marx and Engles were socialists. Lenin was a socialist. Ho Chi Minh was a socialist. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were socialists. They identified as such, acknowledged each other as such (when possible chronologically), and are widely seen as such. But I guess you personally are the ultimate authority on who is and isn't a socialist, and I just need to DM you whenever I have any questions about that.
Who exactly is a socialist in your mind, anyway? Any actual human being you can name, aside from yourself?
In practice, it's the opposite. You want to spend all the effort of revolution just to end up with more oppression because you get overthrown by CIA-backed fascists.
So, as I assumed, no answer to the Mossadegh problem.
Nowhere in that comment did I assume that you're against revolutions. You're in favor of them, as you said. A bit too in favor of them, tbh. You seem to think revolutions are trivial matters, that if the gains of a revolution are lost, you can simply do it again. If you're not prepared to commit to whatever's necessary to win and secure those gains, you're probably better off not doing it at all.
Nothing I've said is remotely disingenuous. You've just decided you hate me because of memes and meme ideologies. If you're attempting to demonstrate the importance of theory through this silly display of ignorance and infighting, you're doing a good job of it.
People become "tankies" because they take these questions seriously and study them. You can't understand it because you don't, and haven't. Your ideology (whatever it is) wasn't chosen because of a rigorous study of history and theory, but because it looks nice. It's fun to denounce people as authoritarians, makes you feel good, whatever. But you don't actually have reason or evidence to back up your position, you're not interested in engaging with such historical or theoretical questions at all. None of you are, really. It's all just memes and yet you have this bizarre, misplaced confidence, that because your catchphrases sound nice it means your ideology works.
and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.
I must correct my previous statement.
Socialism is when you violently overthrow the bourgeoisie, then immediately allow yourself to be overthrown by a fascist counter-revolution in which everyone on the left is exterminated, because you're too afraid of your own shadow to stop them.
Tell me, what are your thoughts on Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran? A progressive leader who came to power through a peaceful, popular movement against British colonialism, nationalized the oil industry and reclaimed it's profits for the benefit of the common people, and then, as the CIA began infiltrating the country, refused to implement any "authoritarian" measures, leading to his overthrow? Leading to the installation of the shah who hunted down and exterminated any and all leftists in the country with his secret police? Leading to generations of Iranians living their entire lives under far-right governments, with no end in sight?
There's a reason why existing socialist governments are willing to employ authoritarian methods, it's called "survivorship bias," as in, all the movements that were too averse to such methods were subverted and exterminated.
Honestly, I find your position less coherent and less respectable than outright liberalism. If you're serious about revolution, then you have to be prepared for what that entails and you have to understand the life-or-death stakes. If you blow it, not only will everyone involved be killed, but the example will live on and the next opportunity might not arise for another 100 years or more. You are playing with powerful forces, and failure is not an option. It's necessary to adapt to the situation and use whatever methods are most effective, whether those methods are "authoritarian" or not.
What you want to do is to try to fight the vastly superior foe of capitalism, but before you even start, you want to put on a blindfold and tie one hand behind your back. You want to win in the "right" way, the way that makes you feel good. You're trying to play games, but the other side does not fuck around.
Of course, I assume you don't have thoughts on Mossadegh because I assume you haven't actually studied historical examples to inform your views, nor actual theory. My views are not something I was born with or that were just naturally appealing to me, it's only after studying such things and seriously considering them that I arrived here. In a world where leaders like Mossadegh didn't get overthrown, I wouldn't hold the views I do, unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. I'd rather survive, win, and deliver on material improvements, rather than be an aspiring martyr.
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.
Fredrick Engles, famous non-socialist
Socialism is when you ask nicely for the bourgeoisie to pretty please give up their wealth and stop exploiting people and the nicer you ask the more socialistier it is.
Finally
Worse horses
I'm not "spreading discord" nor "trolling." I have no interest in disguising my beliefs.
Yes, I will defend the USSR. I will also "defend" just about any nation, if the claims being made about it are false, because my priority is the truth. For many people, the truth doesn't matter so much as they feel this need to demonstrate that they're part of an in-group or to communicate that they themselves aren't going to revolt, and so they allow all kinds of lies spread and propagate them themselves. Because to counteract blatant misinformation about a country is to defend it.
As for democracy, I don't believe in bourgeois "democracy" where the winner is decided by who has the most money and virtually every important decision is taken out of the sphere of public influence. I do not believe in a "democracy" where the people have to choose which face will be the one to commit genocide. That's not really democracy though, is it?
I embrace the label "tankie," mostly because it is thrown around so wantonly that it's meaningless, and loses any punch it might have otherwise have. In practice, if you have a single positive thing to say about any self-described socialist state in history, for example, "Cuba's literacy program was good," then someone's gonna call you a tankie.
Personally, I love that, because it turns it into this broad, all-inclusive term for any serious leftist, and papers over some differences. It's kinda like the word "queer." Whether you're an Anarchist or a Marxist or whatever else, if the liberals are calling you "tankie" you're probably a comrade, and if you're throwing around the term yourself you're probably a liberal. You Ain't Done Nothing If You Ain't Been Called A Red Tankie
It may have originated with trans people getting kicked out, shopping for cheap furniture, and then being pleasantly surprised to find a big soft friend at the furniture store - out of nowhere something fun and comforting appears just as they begin a new life.
However, that's speculation, nobody knows for sure. It just sort of became a meme.
“trans rights” and gay rights don’t mix very well.
Classic right wing "divide and conquer" tactics, try to drive a wedge between trans and gay people, pick off the trans people first, then come for the gays next. This nonsense is exactly why the LGBT acronym was made in the first place, because we (the vast majority of us, anyway) stand together in solidarity and reject this idiotic nonsense.
Yes, it's true in some cases.
It's not really that surprising. Just as there are straight men who are misogynist there are people who are attracted to femboys, trans people, and/or other gender nonconforming people who hold prejudices against the same group. It's massively oversimplifying human psychology to think it just comes down to a single linear axis of like/dislike. For some people, it might be that simple, but it's not always the case.
Take the song Hellfire and replace Esmeralda with a femboy, everything else can stay the same.
If Ireland had been colonized
"If"
It's not a good analogy for your point, it's just replacing one person everyone agrees as bad with another while keeping everything else the same, if Ghenghis Khan was running and everyone on Lemmy hated him I wouldn't waste much time talking about how bad he was either. The analogy is 100% pointless if you use it that way, and it's grasping pretty hard to act like you're owning me with it, it only makes sense if you already agree with your position. But then, I guess you're more interested in circlejerking anyway, so go for it.
Sorry for interrupting your circlejerk, I guess. Apparently we're supposed to spend a bunch of time talking about things that already have near-universal agreement here. I don't find that particularly interesting or worthwhile.
Cartoon dog after running straight into a mountain painted to look like a road vs. the same dog after using a bellows to reinflate themself.
We should try giving the measles virus a MS-13 tattoo.
Weird that you're taking all this time to call out people who focus their criticism on the Democrats, yet your post is completely silent on Ghenghis Khan. I can only conclude that you support rampant killing and pillaging since you don't spend as much time calling them out as you do calling us out, since apparently that's how you think logic works.
Alternatively, we can acknowledge the simple fact that it's not necessary to make arguments about why Ghenghis Khan was bad if nobody is defending him around here, and by the same logic it isn't necessary to argue about why the Republicans are bad when nobody is defending them around here.
The few times that I've seen a Trump supporter wander into Lemmy (and inevitably gotten ratio'd hard), I have attacked and criticized them. I can show my receipts if you like.
It’s mostly heaping scorn on the Democrats exclusively and sometimes taking time out to say that the Republicans are better or equivalent on some issue on which they objectively are not).
You can't present receipts of me doing that. Maybe somebody at some point has made such a claim, but it's generally a bullshit strawman.
"I disagree with both the Republicans and the Democrats."
"Impossible! You must be a secret Republican here to turn people against the Democrats"
"It kinda seems like you're assuming has to be either a Democrat or a Republican"
"Strawman! I never said those exact words!"
I have to say it's pretty ironic to accuse someone else of strawmanning while simultaneously rejecting every single thing they say about their own position and arbitrarily assigning them a completely different position that contradicts everything they say in a way that makes it easier to dismiss what they say.
Maryland Sen. Van Hollen meets with mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador
Banned for calling out a mod after they claimed that criticism of Japanese Internment was "not legitimate"
If you thought missiles were disruptive to trade, wait til you see what policy can do
On a scale of 1-10, how accurate do you believe the charge scene from "Enemy at the Gates" is?
Add "Havana Syndrome" to the list of fake stories that you're not allowed to question on .world
Dear CEO fans, when you watch Andor, you need to understand that Syril Karn is about you.
