Welcome ex-Redditors!
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Mao is a Maoist, and the CCP claim to be 'the sole heir and successor to Joseph Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and the ideological leader of world communism,' and I think (hope?) we can agree that Stalinism is not communism.
Okay, what about Pol Pot?
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In the past week I caught a 7 day ban for "misinformation" (x3, then for reposting a link to the mod logs, "skirting the rules", "repeated offenses" etc.) from /c/WorldNews for accusing Democrats of being complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An actual fact - tens of billions of dollars in arms sent to an ongoing genocide/ethnic cleansing by Biden. No problems like that on lemmy.ml. That really says it all for me.
By the way, Lemmy was created by Dessalines, the admin of lemmy.ml.
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:::spoiler Glad you asked, more than happy to talk about it.
I was born in '91 in a conservative family, and I grew up with the naive vision that international conflicts were a thing of the past and we could put politics aside and work on developing science and technology for the good of all humankind. Then, when I was 10 years old, I watched as every adult in the country lost their fucking minds over a couple buildings falling down. I watched our civil liberties get stripped away while we started stupid pointless wars that accomplished nothing and left far more people dead, with complete bipartisan support. In high school, I leaned Libertarian because Ron Paul was a thing and basically the only antiwar voice in politics, though I grew out of that once I no longer had teachers and parents bossing me around lol.
I had hope for Obama, though I was still young and not politically engaged. He was going to shut down Guantanamo and hold the Bush administration accountable for their blatant war crimes and disregard for both international law and the constitution - or so I hoped. But he didn't. He kept the illegal mass surveillance going and, contrary to his promise to protect whistleblowers, hunted Snowden to the ends of the earth for revealing the government's crimes.
As for my personal life at this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I studied physics, thinking of it as a sort of "study of everything." But even that wasn't broad enough for me, I wanted to expand my cultural horizons as well, so I studied abroad in Japan for a year, which opened my mind to a more global perspective and reaffirmed my ideal of being a global citizen.
At this point, I was a liberal, skeptical of both parties, and politically disengaged. Watched The Daily Show and would probably fit in just fine with .world. But then 2016 happened.
I honestly didn't jump on the Bernie train at first, because I subscribed to the "conventional wisdom" of moving to the center to win over moderate republicans. As the republicans went more and more extreme, the democrats would achieve total political dominance as the "party of reason," Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he won. I was extremely furious and disappointed, I couldn't believe it! How could this happen?
In my personal life, I had entered the workforce. In spite of graduating with a B.S. in physics, my focus had been on studying things that were interesting to me, without regard to practical matters like my career. I'm probably somewhat autistic, I've always done very well on tests and grasped concepts quickly, but I got poor grades on account of neglecting homework. It wasn't until upper division physics classes that I found myself actually having to study. I was also privileged enough to not be concerned about practical matters growing up. After graduating, I've worked menial jobs, including warehouse work at Amazon, which gave me plenty of time to think. Since I started having a boss and a landlord, my politics improved. I also had a traumatic experience with my brother who came back from the Middle East, "self medicated" with meth, and almost became a mass shooter, but that's a story for another day.
In order to figure things out, I tried to find a place to debate politics online, and wound up in the cesspool of r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created by An-Caps. Freshly radical, I was of course more attracted to libertarian socialism, rejecting authoritarianism, though the term "tankie" was not popularized at the time. I saw right-libertarians as the more "reasonable" people on the right, an idea which I eventually became disavowed of by actually talking to them. Eventually, I realized that their whole ideology is based on wordplay, and that they, along with the right in general, have absolutely nothing of value to offer whatsoever, and their nonsense simply dragged down the level of debate, preventing anything of actual substance from being discussed.
Leaving that behind, I looked for a left-wing space, and found many of them to be clownish. I was turned off of r/socialism from the "Catgirl fiasco," and I was too skeptical of the democrats to fit into purely liberal spaces - both of which lacked the bluntness and diversity of thought I was looking for. As a last resort, I checked r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I had heard all sorts of nasty rumors about - but instead, it was exactly what I was looking for: a non-sectarian leftist space that didn't have a stick up its ass and wasn't afraid to tell off both right-wingers and crybullies, which made it reviled because the crybullies would run off and whine and make up rumors (just like .worlders do).
During this time, I also did a good bit of reading. Progress and Poverty by Henry George helped me get a basic grasp of political economy, while All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer taught me about Iran's historical attempts to reclaim their resources through a popular, liberal democratic movement, which was crushed by the CIA (similar stories can be found in many countries around the world).
When I was banned I migrated to Hexbear (yes, I'm from there). I was still very skeptical of states like China and the USSR, but my opinion of America had plummetted in 2016, and I saw them as acting as a counterbalance to US hegemony. I took a perspective of being system-agnostic, that non-aligned nations ought to have as much flexibility as possible in regards to their economic situation so that they can experiment and get it right, and then that system can spread out of that. When there's just a single hegemon, it can exert too much control, but in a multipolar world there are more options. I was reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and watching his lectures, as well as some snippets of theory.
But probably the thing that really pushed me beyond that was Covid-19. In the US, they lied to us, telling us masks don't work, and then sent us all back to work with no protections. Up until that point, I at least had trust in US scientific institutions, but that lie completely broke my trust, and it really sank in as real that the government does not give a single shit about protecting the people, and that my interests are completely in conflict with those of the state. Meanwhile, China actually listened to the science, they never told people not to wear masks, they did lockdowns, I even saw in Vietnam where the government delivered groceries right to people's homes so they'd stay inside, while in the US everyone was scrambling over each other to buy toilet paper. I had to quit my job because the situation was so bad, I lived in the south and we had no protections at all.
And yet, as usual, nobody was held accountable for the failure, and the government's mistakes were swept under the rug while the media blamed China and spread rumors that it was some sort of bioweapon. Naturally, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed because of that bullshit. You can actually see very clearly where most people were fairly ambivalent to China before 2019, and then there was a major shift, coinciding with a propaganda campaign. The goal, of course, is to sow fears of China in order to justify more funding to the military. It's no coincidence that China suddenly became a military threat the moment the war in Afghanistan started to wind down, always gotta have an enemy to justify why we're building bombs instead of healthcare. And if some random people get hate crimed, the government doesn't give a shit.
Ultimately, I'd love to return to my initial dream of setting aside politics and pursuing science to build a better world for all. But how can I do that when you have cases like Jane Y. Wu, a distinguished neuroscientist who committed suicide after the US government shut down her lab for the sin of being born Chinese? How can I pretend that I'm a global citizen when the government shuts down innocent intercultural programs like the Confucious Institutes? I never signed up for this shit. I'm in this for humanity, not the United States, and the United States government is making it increasingly clear that it's an enemy to the common cause of humanity.
So there's my life story. None of us are "Russian bots," we're mostly just downwardly-mobile disillusioned intellectuals.
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I think it's either trolls or people who have realised how capitalism exploits them, but instead of becoming actual leftists, they just jumped to worshipping another oppressive system instead. Lemmy seems to be very US-centric, so I think the thought process for some has been:
- America bad
- America says [insert communist or 'communist' country here] bad
- Therefore [insert communist or 'communist' country here] good
So basically, not being able to understand nuance.
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For example, this comment, i can only see one of the replies from the lemy.lol user.
Looking in to it deeper it seems like my assumption of lemmy.world being defederated is incorrect.
The 1st and 2nd screenshots are from lemmy.ml, and the 3rd is from lemm.ee.
From the Voyager app, showing replies but I can't expand the replies.
From lemmy.ml directly in a browser.
From lemm.ee directly in a browser.
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Extremism, whatever route it takes, is a byproduct of social isolation. And extremist groups, whether they are nazis, religious fundamentalists, incels, etc., feed upon the people who are marginalized by a conformist society giving them a fictional explanation on "why society hates them": the white genocide, infedels, women are like animals.
I don't think that "tankies" are as extreme as the other I mentioned but I believe the base mechanism is the same. -
Yea, i created an account over on hexbear and then this one on lemmy.ml as my alt as a more federated instance
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:::spoiler Glad you asked, more than happy to talk about it.
I was born in '91 in a conservative family, and I grew up with the naive vision that international conflicts were a thing of the past and we could put politics aside and work on developing science and technology for the good of all humankind. Then, when I was 10 years old, I watched as every adult in the country lost their fucking minds over a couple buildings falling down. I watched our civil liberties get stripped away while we started stupid pointless wars that accomplished nothing and left far more people dead, with complete bipartisan support. In high school, I leaned Libertarian because Ron Paul was a thing and basically the only antiwar voice in politics, though I grew out of that once I no longer had teachers and parents bossing me around lol.
I had hope for Obama, though I was still young and not politically engaged. He was going to shut down Guantanamo and hold the Bush administration accountable for their blatant war crimes and disregard for both international law and the constitution - or so I hoped. But he didn't. He kept the illegal mass surveillance going and, contrary to his promise to protect whistleblowers, hunted Snowden to the ends of the earth for revealing the government's crimes.
As for my personal life at this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I studied physics, thinking of it as a sort of "study of everything." But even that wasn't broad enough for me, I wanted to expand my cultural horizons as well, so I studied abroad in Japan for a year, which opened my mind to a more global perspective and reaffirmed my ideal of being a global citizen.
At this point, I was a liberal, skeptical of both parties, and politically disengaged. Watched The Daily Show and would probably fit in just fine with .world. But then 2016 happened.
I honestly didn't jump on the Bernie train at first, because I subscribed to the "conventional wisdom" of moving to the center to win over moderate republicans. As the republicans went more and more extreme, the democrats would achieve total political dominance as the "party of reason," Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he won. I was extremely furious and disappointed, I couldn't believe it! How could this happen?
In my personal life, I had entered the workforce. In spite of graduating with a B.S. in physics, my focus had been on studying things that were interesting to me, without regard to practical matters like my career. I'm probably somewhat autistic, I've always done very well on tests and grasped concepts quickly, but I got poor grades on account of neglecting homework. It wasn't until upper division physics classes that I found myself actually having to study. I was also privileged enough to not be concerned about practical matters growing up. After graduating, I've worked menial jobs, including warehouse work at Amazon, which gave me plenty of time to think. Since I started having a boss and a landlord, my politics improved. I also had a traumatic experience with my brother who came back from the Middle East, "self medicated" with meth, and almost became a mass shooter, but that's a story for another day.
In order to figure things out, I tried to find a place to debate politics online, and wound up in the cesspool of r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created by An-Caps. Freshly radical, I was of course more attracted to libertarian socialism, rejecting authoritarianism, though the term "tankie" was not popularized at the time. I saw right-libertarians as the more "reasonable" people on the right, an idea which I eventually became disavowed of by actually talking to them. Eventually, I realized that their whole ideology is based on wordplay, and that they, along with the right in general, have absolutely nothing of value to offer whatsoever, and their nonsense simply dragged down the level of debate, preventing anything of actual substance from being discussed.
Leaving that behind, I looked for a left-wing space, and found many of them to be clownish. I was turned off of r/socialism from the "Catgirl fiasco," and I was too skeptical of the democrats to fit into purely liberal spaces - both of which lacked the bluntness and diversity of thought I was looking for. As a last resort, I checked r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I had heard all sorts of nasty rumors about - but instead, it was exactly what I was looking for: a non-sectarian leftist space that didn't have a stick up its ass and wasn't afraid to tell off both right-wingers and crybullies, which made it reviled because the crybullies would run off and whine and make up rumors (just like .worlders do).
During this time, I also did a good bit of reading. Progress and Poverty by Henry George helped me get a basic grasp of political economy, while All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer taught me about Iran's historical attempts to reclaim their resources through a popular, liberal democratic movement, which was crushed by the CIA (similar stories can be found in many countries around the world).
When I was banned I migrated to Hexbear (yes, I'm from there). I was still very skeptical of states like China and the USSR, but my opinion of America had plummetted in 2016, and I saw them as acting as a counterbalance to US hegemony. I took a perspective of being system-agnostic, that non-aligned nations ought to have as much flexibility as possible in regards to their economic situation so that they can experiment and get it right, and then that system can spread out of that. When there's just a single hegemon, it can exert too much control, but in a multipolar world there are more options. I was reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and watching his lectures, as well as some snippets of theory.
But probably the thing that really pushed me beyond that was Covid-19. In the US, they lied to us, telling us masks don't work, and then sent us all back to work with no protections. Up until that point, I at least had trust in US scientific institutions, but that lie completely broke my trust, and it really sank in as real that the government does not give a single shit about protecting the people, and that my interests are completely in conflict with those of the state. Meanwhile, China actually listened to the science, they never told people not to wear masks, they did lockdowns, I even saw in Vietnam where the government delivered groceries right to people's homes so they'd stay inside, while in the US everyone was scrambling over each other to buy toilet paper. I had to quit my job because the situation was so bad, I lived in the south and we had no protections at all.
And yet, as usual, nobody was held accountable for the failure, and the government's mistakes were swept under the rug while the media blamed China and spread rumors that it was some sort of bioweapon. Naturally, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed because of that bullshit. You can actually see very clearly where most people were fairly ambivalent to China before 2019, and then there was a major shift, coinciding with a propaganda campaign. The goal, of course, is to sow fears of China in order to justify more funding to the military. It's no coincidence that China suddenly became a military threat the moment the war in Afghanistan started to wind down, always gotta have an enemy to justify why we're building bombs instead of healthcare. And if some random people get hate crimed, the government doesn't give a shit.
Ultimately, I'd love to return to my initial dream of setting aside politics and pursuing science to build a better world for all. But how can I do that when you have cases like Jane Y. Wu, a distinguished neuroscientist who committed suicide after the US government shut down her lab for the sin of being born Chinese? How can I pretend that I'm a global citizen when the government shuts down innocent intercultural programs like the Confucious Institutes? I never signed up for this shit. I'm in this for humanity, not the United States, and the United States government is making it increasingly clear that it's an enemy to the common cause of humanity.
So there's my life story. None of us are "Russian bots," we're mostly just downwardly-mobile disillusioned intellectuals.
Thanks, this was a great answer. I really enjoyed reading it. I was dead serious about wondering about how you all got to where you are. It wasn't just a glib statement. I'll look into those books, thanks.
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FOSS isn't Soviet style state capitalism / socialism either.
Ok man, you do you.
I checked you profile, in 4 months you have 3 times the comments I wrote in 3 years and you answered my comment within 1 minute.
I strongly suggest a healthy cure of touching grass. -
I've seen a few. They are mostly just anti American (fair enough). They often miss the point that something being anti American doesn't mean they are not their own empire with its own problematic takes.
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Just say you're fine with bigotry as long as white dudes benefit in the way you want, it's a lot faster and more intellectually honest.
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I’m quite left of center myself
lol, every time.
I'm aware that to the far left everyone who doesn't want to abolish capitalism is considered right wing. I mean the normal (Dutch) political spectrum. Social democratic
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I'm aware that to the far left everyone who doesn't want to abolish capitalism is considered right wing. I mean the normal (Dutch) political spectrum. Social democratic
normal (white, western, neoliberal) political spectrum.
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Stop with your moral grandstanding. Harm reduction is a thing. Both are bad options, but even assuming she wouldn't have been swayed things would still have been better than they are now. You can do your protest vote in the primary if you want, but those short-sighted actions in the general is how fascism has won.
Regardless, it really just feels like you decided to fuck over minority groups in the US while also making things worse for the Palestinians. Trump is gearing up to start WW3 and the only reason I think they aren't going to nuke Gaza is because they want the land. Not that conventional weapons can't do the same amount of damage.
Meanwhile, you throw women, immigrants, and trans people under the bus because you wanted to feel smug about something. Between wondering if I will be able to maintain rights, or even life, in the next 4 years on top of them literally tearing the government apart and doing damage that will take decades to fix, if it even can be fixed, I don't see things getting back to even how they were a year ago in my lifetime, even if I manage to get to an old age.
I can only do what I can, and I can't fight for people in another country when I'm worried about what is happening domestically. My focus has to be making sure my friends and I are safe. I am exhausted and have no energy left to spare for the Palestinians.
I hate that I have to make that decision, but people like you forced it on me. We told all of you this would happen, and you did not care. I can't help Palestinians if I get arrested for existing or just murdered in the street.
They want to classify all trans people as porn, just for existing in public, and then execute "pornographers", which will largely just be queer people they just arbitrarily classified as porn. It's literally what the Nazis did.
So I really have no sympathy left. Honestly, I'm pretty sure much of the people who refused to vote over Gaza likely just fell for a right wing campaign to split the left. If so, it worked and you fell for it. The people who aren't Trump supporters and didn't vote for Harris are short sighted fucking idiots.
I have no more energy to coddle people like you and if me calling you out for stupidity for letting fascism win "pushes" you to the far right, then you never actually had any principals.
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Then why choose to believe what those same human rights abusers tell you is true about another country?
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Denying propaganda the CIA is selling you about China is not the same thing as denying everything the CCP has ever done wrong. Especially when even the CIA has backtracked their claims, and you religiously stick to it.
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Okay, what about Pol Pot?
Okay, what about ...
Look, I know you're in your young 20's, almost definitely white, definitely a man, and I was once each of those things, too.
You've gone down the Right-wing pipeline, you've nodded along, you've downed the kool-aid. From the sounds of it a light sprinkling of an extremely flawed, right-wing education system.
You are not experiencing your own thoughts. You're regurgitating arguments you've heard online; over and over again, you say the same things, respond in the same way, make the same mistakes. You hamfistedly wave at anyone who ever called themselves socialist and go 'see! look at these mistakes! They're all the same!' When in reality:
Although the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally socialist state led to widespread association of socialism with the Soviet economic model, it has since shifted in favour of democratic socialism. Academics recognised the mixed economies of several Western European and Nordic countries as "democratic socialist".[34][35] Following the revolutions of 1989, many of these countries moved away from socialism as a neoliberal consensus replaced the social democratic consensus in the advanced capitalist world.[36] In parallel, many former socialist politicians and political parties embraced "Third Way" politics, remaining committed to equality and welfare while abandoning public ownership and class-based politics.[37] Socialism experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 2010s.
Let's look at Pol Pot, to go back to your whataboutism:
Ideologically a Maoist and a Khmer ethnonationalist...
Seriously, it's on his goddamn wikipedia page, dude. This, what you're doing here? It's embarrassing. You think you're standing up to those meany evil 'left-wingers' when in reality you're a Toy Poodle for fascism, yapping at what you're told to, always waiting for another head pat from your online friends that never quite comes, never quite seems to make you feel like you feel it should.
Conservative parties began because aristocrats felt they had lost too much power, and wanted into the parliamentary system. It's oligarchs now. Is that really who has your best interest? Do you think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Trump care about you? That they will ever do something for you, at the expense of themselves?
Because over on the socialist side we're at the protests, we're at the strikes, we're demanding change, we're helping the poor, we're punching up at authority. You're ideologically marching alongside cops, brown shirts, Nazi's, and you what, think they'll spare you? At best you're meat for the grinder when the fighting starts.
Look into all of this. Really dive into what Conservatism is, why it was created, how it's been opposed to every advancement in society that you enjoy: shorter work weeks, shorter work days, actual safety for workers, workers compensation, paternity leave, health care, freedom to strike, etc. All of those are socialist-won, often through literal bloodshed.
What have wealthy billionaires done to make your life better? Why do you think they're so invested in keeping you angry at visible minorities, women, 'the left', the 2% of the planet who are transgendered, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community? Why is it your enemies are all exactly strong enough to scare you, yet so weak you can insult them for it? Why do you have to punch down to hit these terrifying enemies of whatever it is you hold dear?
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"Tankie Triad?" Really? This is just McCarthyian LARPing, you don't have to constantly saber-rattle towards the Marxist-friendly instances, USAID is being defunded lol
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Ah! Yeah, that's true
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]"){kind=avatar}
