news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
view the rest of the comments
I'd say our lack of experience entirely disqualifies any of us from having any real kind of opinion on this. This is basic Maoist bullshit. We are getting all of our opinions in the situation through whatever journalists are willing and able to publish.
This is not real knowledge of a situation. This is a spectacle of a situation. We don't know where the wind is blowing, we can only get an abstract sense of it. There is nothing scientific about anything we are doing here.
Stop making predictions and proclamations and sit, wait and listen. This isn't sports.
Then why the hell do you get to be the one to tell others to shut up and stop complaining? If none of us know, then neither do you.
If you really do think that literally all of us should just "shut up and listen" without pushing your own opinion (an insistence that everything happening is obviously great and for the best) as the only Correct and True Materialist Analysis, then you are in the minority of the clique that usually tells anyone concerned about what's happening in and with Venezuela that they're ignorant ultras, or worse.
I am not the one making predictions! I am not claiming to know what is going on!
Don't just spout 'one true materialist' memes at me. That is absolutely reductive and reactionary. You aren't an ultra.
Look at what I have said on this topic elsewhere. This is a critical junction point for this government. We will have to see and wait for what happens. Not what is said, what actually happens. We cannot be proclaiming that the sky is falling and socialism is doomed because of a speech. Socialism is not made from public addresses.
no one is saying that!! maybe try to actually listen
It seems like the natural extension of existing problems in the community's ability to assess geopolitics that it would decay into standpoint epistemology but for Gorbachev.
Comrade, Gorbachev isn't a good comparison. Venezuela has never been socialist, it has never completed its revolution. Reformism has hard limits. The commune movement in Venezuela is best compared to a still-developing dual-power movement, and is where the revolution actually lies. Protecting the budding dual-power movement and preventing fascists from retaking the state is what's unfortunately necessary when you do not smash the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and replace it outright.
If the PSUV takes aim against the communes, then we know for a fact that it's indeed a failed revolution, not merely one struggling for sovereignty with the Empire on its neck. Framing this as "standpoint epistemology" is reductive. Further, this has never been an ideologically consistent website. Doomerism and superficial understandings of Marxism, anarchism, and geopolitics plague this site, and of course I count myself as guilty of this as well. This is not a party, there is no democratic centralism here. This is a necessary consequence of being a shitposting site, for better and worse.
Demcent or lack thereof isn't especially relevant to the issue here. The issue is radlib bullshit masquerading as enlightened radicalism. I do I guess need to agree that there actually is consistency rather than "decay" as I put it, with HBs being able to correctly identify some backwards policy while doing endless apologia for whatever revisionist bullshit is comfortable for maintaining broad support for their preferred sports team (state-level actor), but we used to have more people who pushed back on it and were better received, like XHS.
The entire debate is clearly not just standpoint epistemology, but many of the arguments being made very clearly are. They provide no basis for criticism, no threshold for falsifiability, they just tell you to "sit and listen". It literally is that you are not allowed to contradict it because you are the wrong type of person to be able to say anything, so no I am not being reductive.
Comrade, with all due respect, by painting all of the analysis as merely "standpoint epistemology," you collapse genuine points while not providing any counter-analysis. I fail to see how that's particularly productive. If you want to oppose what you see as a problem in Hexbear, then you need to actually do what you believe to be necessary, not just sit on the sidelines.
I went against the grain on this thread, gave my own analysis (which did involve some degree of "listen to the chavistas," to be fair), and gave an example for what I believed would spell an actual point at which we can definitively say the Venezuelan revolution is over. Is it perfect analysis? No. Am I perfect? Absolutely not, far from it. I am still a beginner in my own view, and I don't mean that out of false humility. My point is that I didn't like how the thread was going, so I did my best to show an active example of what I believe to be a better way to contribute, and I believe you are more than capable of doing the same or better.
I was not accusing you of anything, I was talking about replies like this one:
https://hexbear.net/comment/7484530
If you are saying that in order to metaconversationally reject this kind of rhetoric as not being a valid or productive objection, I also need to provide a detailed and compelling case in support of one conclusion or another in the conversation itself, then I can't really help you.
The vast majority of the time I deliberately try to stick to very narrow claims that I think are clearly provable or else are so one-sided that there is no meaningful counterargument because, among several other things, I actually don't like the idea of being on here all day writing essays about stuff that I'm not very certain about, and furthermore I believe that an individual claim can stand on its own merits without some sort of social performativity about how to be a Good Communist. No one in the fucking world should take how to be a Good Communist from me "modeling" it, and I'll leave the "why" up to the reader, but I still have the ability to argue on the merits of a specific point and so that's what I do. This is likewise not false humility but an earnest belief.
Insofar as you presented actual arguments, I respect your position even if I don't share your optimism, and what you said falls outside of the scope of my objection. If I miscommunicated on this point, I apologize.
Please, I have spent more time responding to comments genuinely explaining my positions and showing the evidence that supports them more than I have been condescending. The difference is in the way people speak about it, plenty of people express concern about what they are hearing without jumping to conclusions based on nothing material. Every time I have questioned people's positions they produce nothing but allusions and vibes. Every time I provide my analysis, rebuttal, or follow up questions, they are ignored. This has been going on for months and now I feel totally validated in pushing back against those same people who still refuse to engage with the points that many people have brought up, but still repeat their same baseless accusations. At this point they are openly erasing the lives of millions of chavistas and saying they literally don't exist as an organized movement because of what they are perceiving to be unilateral comprador in delcy Rodriguez. this is white supremacy, preemptively justifying the deaths of the people who they think should have been sacrificed if they were really revolutionary. It is wholly manufacturing conset for the abandonment of people who need our support and it is disgusting and deserves pushback
And how has this community done previously on the whole geopolitical spectrum? There hasn't been a decay. It was always a vibes based crap shoot, our percentages were just slightly better than the liberals are because we aren't literally just slurping the English media propaganda.
Pretending this is a decay into standpoint theory is absolutely hilarious, as if this community ever had any kind of consistency in theoretical application and understanding. It's a shit posting forum.
And even then, we lost big on not betting that Russia would invade Ukraine while the Anglo-media slurping libs did.
People just need to relax. You're not going to get every prediction right. You're not the head of an intelligence agency with field agents nor an international news media conglomerate with undercover reporters. You should expect to be wrong most of the time frankly. The fact that the new mega overall outperforms Western MSM is a mark against Western MSM, not a mark for the news mega. It's "wow, how can Western media be this fucking stupid" not "wow, the news mega is filled with super geniuses who can see the future with dialectical materialism."
The certainty people have that she's betrayed the revolution reminds me of the certainty hexbear users had that Russia was not about to invade Ukraine the night before they did.
Sure, they could gave guessed correctly about Venezuela this time, but there's no analysis or evidence backing it, it's embarrassing to see so much doomerist grandstanding crowding out any actual analysis.
I'm fine with that it could go either way and waiting to find out, I don't need to pretend like I know something that nobody knows.
We always had fools like you and I describe, but I feel like there was a stronger minority presence before of people opposing those stances with some degree of popular approval.