Pump & dump is a usecase

Poor eggs

Gonna go with a different response and it's the people who like a movie for a dumb reason (protagonist is cool, big explosions, reaffirms preconceptions and doesn't challenge beliefs, makes references to pop culture and cultural touchstones) but cannot admit that to themselves and so they feel compelled to claim that the show is great because of the deep political satire of it or because of the philosophical implications of the narrative or because of the worldbuilding or some shit.

Please. You don't have to turn something that appeals to you into a post-hoc haute couture masterpiece. You can just like stuff because it's silly or fun or relevant to you, it doesn't need to be super deep to be enjoyable so stop trying to justify your taste to strangers on the internet.

Like, his definitions aren’t communist but they’re not anticommunist either so whatever

I disagree on this point.

He doesn't outright say it, which is part of his rhetorical game where he never says "I disagree with the antifascism of Stalin and Antifascistiche Aktion" and then proceeds to explain why he disagrees with the tactics of either. He just ignores their existence and proceeds to define them out of antifascism entirely.

Why would he need to make such rigid, inherently anti-communist definitions unless he's trying to shift the goalposts away from communism and towards anarchism/LibSoc-ism?

My issue is that it would be like posing as making a definitive list of all the forms of socialism and only listing the libertarian socialist interpretations; that's deceptive, disingenuous, and although never explicitly anti-communist it's still extremely anti-communist implicitly because propaganda works as much by emphasis as it does by de-emphasis and he's relying upon his audience sharing his biases or being historically illiterate rather than making his case or just saying "I don't like how the KPD did antifa because..."

I immediately take a massive dislike to his pseudo-objective stance in how he defines what things "are" (according to what he prefers them to be) because it's grossly anti-intellectual and it's extremely disingenuous.

You can't tell me that his definitions were accurate or comprehensive, or anything more than wearing his political bias on his sleeve.

Then he wraps up his ideological soapboxing in so much yakking that it does exactly what it intends to do - to bamboozle people with a sort of slow-burn Gish gallop until they just kinda get lost, shrug, assume that it's right, and figure that it must be profound because its tortuous logic is so verbose that there must be so much there (it's just that I'm not catching everything since I'm not understanding every point, I don't have time to break down and consider each claim, and so his conclusions slip in through the back door under the assumption that they are more or less correct.)

Consider this sort of stream-in-the-background pseud shit to something like Mao's writings which are extremely succinct, often numbered, and the key points are repeated, all-caps, and are a very clear logical progression. You wouldn't be able to distill RC's videos down to that sort of level, not even down to Lenin's style of writing, because it's mostly chaff and little else. It relies so heavily on assumptions and normative ideas and the ignorance of its audience that it drives me to distraction because ultimately it's (small-e) exploitative imo.

I didn't watch the whole thing but basically it's "Putin isn't doing an antifascism because anarchists have a monopoly on antifascism and that means antifascism by its definition must be decentralized, non-hierarchical, small group counterprotesting etc."

It's just trash.

If you fancy yourself an antifascist and you can't admit that the USSR engaged in the largest and most successful antifascist action in all of history, if you can't admit that the popular front in the Spanish Civil War was antifascist, if you redefine Antifa to remove the original Antifa from Antifa then you're not really antifascism; you just like it when your team does an antifascism and you are implicitly anti-antifascism (and you can go fuck yourself imo.)

You don't have to be a Stalinist to acknowledge that under Stalin antifascism hit its absolute peak. You don't have to support the communists in the Spanish Civil War to admit that they fought and died to combat fascism. You don't have to love Ernst Thälmann to admit that Antifaschistiche Aktion was antifascist.

You just need to be this 👉👈 historically literate and to have about as much in the way of principles.

And you don't get to invoke Putin's actions to deny the nature of antifascism any more than you get to invoke Putin to deny the very real and very prominent fascist presence throughout the Ukraine. That doesn't make you a Putin apologist. That makes you honest.

All of them. In everything.

beans

What really gets me is that he wrote the book on propaganda and yet he's a complete sucker for so much western propaganda and he promulgates it himself using his high-profile status.

Idk and I never will but that just seems awfully... convenient, y'know?

[I hate saying this because people will challenge it and they'll expect me to articulate my preconceived notions]

Who knows? Who cares to find out? Chomsky is an ideological windvane.

He's... fine when he's criticizing the US empire but there are much better sources out there and Chomsky is only useful for his prominence but much like Richard Wolff he's got some really trash takes (barely) below the surface.

Is it because he's an op? Is he a reflection of the ideological hangover from the New Left era? Is he just an opportunist? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seems like murdering civilians in cold blood is a more carbon intensive process than I thought

Seethe and cope. Or, better yet, rot you nazi goons.

I wonder if it'd be possible to host instances? ^idk^ ^I^ ^ain't^ ^a^ ^computer^ ^guy^

kiwifarms

Chomsky is what zero materialism does to an MFer. Here he is, literally arguing for MLism in a completely different context:

I'm not in favor of people being in cages.

On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there's a saber-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the saber-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there's a justification for cages. That doesn't mean cages are good things.

State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are saber-toothed tigers outside; they are called transnational corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.

🥴

Not a coder, just commenting to push this post up higher in the algorithm.

Burritos make everything better

Life is h*ck
Capitalism is a fuck
410,757,864,530 ████ CAPITALISTS

Just focused single-mindedly on the "optimism of the will" part of "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" equation.

How are you OP?

Comrade, have you read up much on mass work from Mao or Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

You might find that starting from a place of going to the masses parents and sincerely listening to their concerns and their issues then linking these individual or familial concerns to larger trends in society and situating them in a historical context would be less antagonistic and it might prove to be more productive.

I'd avoid labels and commie "dogwhistle" style terms and just work on developing a dialog and a mutually deepened understanding of one another.

Think about it like this: you aren't trying to convert your parents to communism, this is a perfectly laboratory for you to hone your skills at raising class consciousness and building solidarity. If you can practice it now and develop your skills then when you do future work in community organizations, when you are unionizing your workplace, when you are doing any sort of mass work then you'll be ready for it from all the practice you got in working with your parents.

Dat Z tho

"But bro, dropping the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely necessary and that's a totally different situation.

Bro, that's whataboutism that you'd criticize the US for actions they took themselves and proceeded to criticize others for doing something similar bro. What the hell bro, you lack a basic understanding of nuance.

Bro. We need to debate this. Come on my livestream tomorrow at 6pm bro."

Unzov

You claim that fascists are incapable of reform and yet in a bunker on April 13th, 1945 Hitler literally reformed himself.

Curious!!

Absolutely, and it's in no small part a piss-take of Motorhead symbolism because the umlaut on that ö sure has hell doesn't belong either. And to hell with Lemmy's iron cross as well

The character arc of Gavin McInnes wasn't an accident

Allende takes heed of the warning from Castro, the warnings about Pinochet from within Chile.

Sankara takes heed of the warnings about Blaise Compradoré.

A KPD revolution in Germany before the NSDAP ascended to power is another thing that is so tantalizing to think about that it breaks my heart.

I think he was either military or a volunteer/merc of some sort.

Yeah, it's pretty hardcore :/

I'm glad you did your research though!

The native inhabitants get exposed to smallpox and other contagious diseases from the Eurasian continent due to contact with Leif Eiriksson.

This has a significant impact but the population bounces back and there is a high level of natural immunity to these diseases by the time that European colonists arrive in force.

The Caribbean Islands still get slammed by the Angloids, unfortunately, but Turtle Island and the southern part of the continent never get conquered or colonized; the USA never exists, you can figure out the rest using the unlimited power of your imagination but it includes no NATO, no CIA, no Operation Gladio etc.

You're welcome, I'm glad it's useful.

You probably already know of this YouTube channel if you are Brazilian but I thought I'd mention that Jones Manoel does some great videos (that I can't watch because I can't understand enough Portuguese 😓)

Harahan glows like a full moon.

Listen to how he "introduces" APSI's Nathan Ruser, doesn't push back on any of the outrageous and patently false claims and wild accusations he makes during the interview, and then riiiiiiiiight at the end he briefly drops a little bit of info about Ruser's career just when everyone stops listening and skips to the end.

He did the same thing with another imperialist goon on his show, maybe not even disclosing where he worked. I'll try to dig up where that interview is.

E: This one. Also here's the Nathan Ruser one.

They can't do that, only the US State Department can do that.

The only rightful supporter of Mussolini is a steel girder

Care to share?

Ugh.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - who tf is dumb enough to split a party or a movement over China??

Say they are exactly as bad as their worst critics claim - it's still a fraction of how bad the US is. Unless you're in China wtf are you gonna do about it?

I can sympathize with, say, the Filipino Maoist insurgents for being pissed off with China for supporting the Filipino government but that's their fight, not ours.

At the end of the day if there is a successful socialist revolution that takes place tomorrow then it's gonna have to pick between China and the Untidy $nake$ of AmeriKKKa.

That shouldn't be a difficult decision for anyone to make. Until that point, the work for us as revolutionaries remains exactly the same as it always has and that work has nothing to do with splitting the movement over hot takes on China.

I really don't need to be thinking about Boris' Johnson. My day is completely ruined.

Sucks to say it, especially because I'm a communist in large part because I believe that a better world is possible, but unfortunately I'm a "by ^(most)^ any means necessary" sort of person when it comes to establishing socialism.

You only need to look at what they did to Allende, what they did to Cuba (Saul Landau has a great lecture on this), the years of lead, and the counterrevolution in Indonesia as examples of what we're up against.

Regrettably we don't get to choose whether or not the gloves come off, the only choice we get is whether or not we fight with one hand tied behind our backs.

Whose Johnson are we talking about here?