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Welcome again to everybody, and happy anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam . Make yourself at home and pay your respects to Ho Chi Minh. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Europeans are awfully loud about ICE and Trump while Frontex exists
The grim reality is that most politically active Westerners you see are just following social media trends. If Frontex was making headlines you'd see protests for it also.
Like the average politically minded person (Liberal, but most of Europeans who are politically active are libs) is operating at a level that if they see something on the News they think it's important, because it's on the News.
It won't surprise any latino that has been abroad but as it turns out, the ICE goons that murdered Alex Pretti last names, allegedly, were Ochoa and Gutierrez. Gusanos being the boots on the ground for gringo fascists as always.
Have a good week, everyone! Remember that we live in an era of imperialist decline, where the international dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the US Empire, is on its last legs.
As always, communism will win. We will win.
I think we are in an era of imperialist decline, but look, the Soviet Union said the same thing 40 years or so ago and everyone thought the defeat of the United States was inevitable. Seriously, people thought that back then; I read about it and it's astonishing. They were making a few similar arguments to today's arguments too.
We must NOT let our guard down for one second and press the attack forward while also not expecting China to swoop in and save us.
We should not let our guard down, no, but we do need to maintain revolutionary optimism.
I have been very loosely keeping up with the news these days, and have been skimming through the new Epstein stuff. It's got me wondering, has anyone here elaborated on why these files are being released to begin with?
If they have to release something, just to keep some sort of legitimacy, what is the benefit of releasing so many files?
I read that some of the files got taken down at some point, but why were they published in the first place?
If someone wrote a comment or post on this before, I'd appreciate a link.
I’m officially done with Reddit. I’m sure I’m late to this party but apparently saying “I hope the flu finishes him [Mitch McConnell] off” is a threat of violence that is ban worthy
But people can post actual Nazi memes all over the site and its totally fine
Oh I recognize this style of moderation. Not punishing the hateful people but punishing the people who call out the hateful people. It's such backwards shit, but is probably intentional on some level since liberalism is more aligned with nazis and the like than they are anywhere near aligned with liberation. Liberalism loves to weaponize decorum selectively to punish people who try to speak truth to power.
From Mexico! We keep raising our voice for our Venezuelan comrades!
The way American's talk about regime change is so insane. Random people with little to no geopolitical knowledge and absolutely no political experience, will flippantly say, "This is a great opportunity for regime change in Iran, we can't pass this up." Or, "I would love to see the Cuban regime toppled."
They talk as if they are strategizing military generals, in on the plan. Like bro, you are just some random American, how would any of this even benefit you?
Having a reasonable conversation on the topic can feel like a Sisyphean task.
It's literally all they talk about all the time in mainstream media, just drooling and drooling about regime change.
I don't really know where to put this, it's tangential to the Epstein case. So I'm spoilering it, but feel free to remove it.
I just thought someone might want some ammo if they ever run int one of those people from the Baltics.
spoiler
(hypnotic voice) you WILL stop getting disappointed by impotent liberalism 2 minutes before bed <- speaking from experience
(edited comment for ridiculousness)
(hypnotic voice) you will sleep at appropriate times
(comment was edited for similar reasons)
I recommend just using YouTube anonymously anyways.
oh i forgot last night :( HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF VIETNAM!!!
well, of course stuff’s been happening there with tô lâm + gaza 'board of peace' bullshit but let’s stay positive and focus on their history for bit. thank you for driving out the usamerican soldiers and winning, CPV! thank u for serving the vietnamese people. thank you to ho chih minh for his socialist writings/legacy and let’s hope for some course correction in the new yr(?)
So Tallinn was great despite the relentless cold. It was so cold that the sea froze for up to like 400 m off the coast so I got to walk across a frozen sea, which was dope. I visited a museum that had portraits of Lenin and Stalin to my surprise and it was 't overly negative of the Soviet Union.
I did notice that I got a lot of pro EU ads on my social media feed while being here so I wonder if the EU has got a campaign going over here. Lots of Ukraine flags everywhere too. The Russian embassy here was plastered with it. There was also a poster of the socialist heads with Putin next to it saying something like 'no more communism again' which was just hilariously shitty. I started to wonder if their support for Ukraine only comes from a deep hatred of Russians. Which is weird because like 1 in 4 people in Tallinn is Russian. Never heard this much Russian spoken anywhere.
Billie Eilish dropping the US is a settler genocidal state on thr grammys was not on my bingo card but it is pleasant surprise.
I have received a new job; very well-paying with great benefits. However, if you're a marxist, it really blows your mind.
They make medical devices. These medical devices cost roughly 20-30 dollars to manufacture; with the equipment being at most a half a decade old, already paid off. Each one of these medical devices can cost up to 200-500 dollars at purchase. There is legit just a 300-400 dollar profit margin on each medical device (over a thousand made and shipped a day) while people are getting paid 17-19 an hour.
Crazy stuff!
I feel like everyone (and maybe Marxists especially) should get a manufacturing job at one point to see how outrageous some companies' profit margins are. I used to be a carpenter making doors. I'd make probably around 8 or so doors and hour at 13 euro an hour. Each door would sell for around 300 euro. Sure, you need some wood for that but I'd guess the average door cost around 50 euro including salary to make. It's insanity to realize that for every 13 euro you receive you make the company like 1800 euro.
the classic "it would cost me an entire day's pay to buy one of the widgets that my line makes a thousand of an hour"
I'm having difficulty defending ML ideas when talking with people. The biggest issues being "if communism is so great why did it fail everywhere", "Communist were just authoritarian", "China is just as bad as the US". I just don't know how to defend these points properly tbh, I just don't present the ideas clearly enough.
They may be gish galloping you:
Gish gallop (sometimes gish gallop or Gish/gish galloping) refers to a rhetorical technique or strategy by which a debater puts forth too many false arguments for their opponent to be able to refute in the allotted amount of time.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/gish-gallop
The important thing to remember is that outside of strict debate club rules or something, there aren't really any rules of debate. You aren't obligated to respond to any given claim/point a person makes, much less take it seriously. Some people will try to use this against you, as in, "You're ignoring what I said, you refuse to, blah blah" but too bad. They're just trying to get you to adhere to an invisible scheme of debate rules that are to their advantage.
So for example, when they say "if communism is so great why did it fail everywhere", you can shrug and continue to talk about ML ideas. Or you can go "idk what you're talking about. anyway..." Or you can flip it around on them and go "according to what sources? the nazis? or perhaps the people who were barely through with owning slaves when they started saying communism is evil?"
In other words, set the terms you are willing to tolerate. People like this are leveraging talking points they (usually) don't even understand that are designed to put you on the defensive for explaining things the average person would have a hard time being an expert in. So, figuratively speaking, recognize the CIA propagandist behind their words and argue with them rather than the propagandist.
I think one thing that helps is studying more yourself, and only speaking on subjects you're confident in your own understanding. For example:
if communism is so great why did it fail everywhere
By what metrics? Socialist China is rising rapidly, and socialist countries do better than peer countries when it comes to quality of life metrics like life expectancy, despite increased international strain. I also recommend reading about some of the problems with the USSR and how it was dissolved, so you can prove that it wasn't simply because they were socialist.
Communist were just authoritarian
Ask them to define this! What tends to help is highlighting how the communists, when in power, asserted the authority of the working classes. This is in stark contrast to capitalist systems, where capitalists assert authority.
China is just as bad as the US
Again, how? China has much higher approval rates, engages in win-win economic cooperation instead of naked imperialism, only has a couple overseas millitary bases while the US Empire has hundreds, and maintains a defensive millitary instead of offensive. Plenty to show!
People often focus on argument before becoming confident in study. The rest, like learning how to engage and reach people, comes with practice and time.
honestly i think these are fairly easy!!!! like we can get into nuance and parts to critique about AES but youre talking about people who literally cannot fathom getting to a place where they can talk about AES like they're actual things and not just the embodiment of evil or sin
constant siege/sanctions/blockades. even if they cite dissolution of ussr it's simpler at this point (before getting into things like revisionists) just to say, china IS a communist state that has survived till now, compliant to socialist theory. they'll be like BUT IT HAS MARKETS at which point you can tell them that it's not just communist button/egalitarianism/any similar vulgar mischaracterization or simplification and then you can explain what ML theory actually entails. you could also get to other AES but china is the easiest gate as an undeniably successful project at this point
so what? i mean, that's reductive, but first of all they probably mean stalin era ussr, dprk, etc. or any other example that's usually been mythologized. hell, people dont even think dprk is a place that exists in reality, only in a far off universe that produces fantasy stories for westerners to jerk off to.
it's been very clear since october 7 that all pretense of free speech in the west is farcical, but regardless let's look at the situations for each. ussr was literally under siege by nazis who wanted to exterminate all slavs and then colonize the region, THEN found itself in a cold war with the west who both absorbed a bunch of nazis + had crazy espionage campaigns that honestly even as a lib little kid i knew about. they were proclaimed ideological enemies of the ussr! they were of course going to be on their guard, only so long after the war and with such suspicious people being pardoned by other remaining world power. (this is again excluding the fact that capitalism naturally goes forward to fascism inexorably). again if u get them to this level u have a chance to explain capitalism and fascism being an integral part of it but youre focusing on the most blatant historical myths, this at least helps contextualize this before u can introduce theory
and there have been marked examples of color revolutions that destabilize + harm regions in long run, usamerican plants (they will scoff at you as conspiratorial but beg them to look past their blindness that they have gotten from believing they are the only ones free of all propaganda [which isnt ontologically good or bad]) that have existed and we have SEEN!!! like that one girl begging for an invasion of iraq!!!!!!!!!!!!!! theyve been saying the arabs kill babies for forever!!!!!
of course there is going to be censorship! there have been people that speak out 'on behalf of the country' that beg for regime change!! so censorship then occurs to protect the country!! is it ideal? fuck no!! is it what other states (like DOTBs) do? yes!! does this equate them morally to DOTBs? no because measure the results first!! two countries can use the same means for different ends, like how a gun in the hand of a nazi was not the same as a gun in the hand of a red army soldier!! if you want to eliminate censorship still first you must remove those who place them under siege + endanger them. if they're like 'all censorship is ontologically bad' you simply must just question this the same way you question the idea that all hierarchies are ontologically evil and not just natural!!! ask them how they think things like CSAM should be cracked down on!!! how they probably would and SHOULD endorse censorship in many fields!! free exchange of ideas should preclude totally nonsensical and antisocial and evil ideologies like fascism/racial ideology!!!!!!
for many this will be backbreaking since they worship the ideas of rights that can never be infringed, but it honestly turned around for me just thinking about the alternatives, connected to the previous point. yes i could finally admit to myself censorship was needed in spaces, even in conjunction with restorative justice! things should be taken down and some evil things that can harm a country should be repressed lest they turn out inciting violence or causing a deeply detrimental regime change as so many of these people fiend for!!!
how many in collapsed socialist states have suffered more under new neolib regime?? we know this!! looking at russia alone post-ussr dissolution is proof of that but i digress!! how many eastern europeans prostituted themselves, children, the tweet 'sadness in his eyes you can only see in eastern european gay porn' is not that funny when you realize it's fucking coercive by nature otherwise he'll fucking STARVE. that may be too much humanization of evil eurasian orcs for one day, though!!!! don't scare them away by asking them to please imagine russians/slavs (well chinese and dprkoreans too but i truly ardently believe china is now an easier sell) as humans and not drones!!!!!!
that assertion is still half untrue, honestly, it's simply thought-termination and undying loyalty to western bourgeois rags under the impression this somehow passes as free press. first of all, on the purely global level?? never has china invaded another country since that minor fiasco with vietnam and since mao their foreign policy has been (to the point of criticism for many MLs/leftists) very lenient. they have never been particularly violent or exploitative, and again if we're comparing to the satanic state of the usa it still isn't a comparison to anyone remotely aware of what usamerikkka has even done, iraq war, afghanistan, vietnam, backing israel, etc. etc., and most allusions to this are myths that are beyond the pale (fucking go to xizang! they must look at what xizang was before the war instead of reading pedophile theocrats whine about how they cant enslave/skin women and kids anymore!! or xinjiang it's fucking crazy!!!) or misconstruing real foreign policy that actually benefits people (so called debt trap diplomacy is as flimsy as paper) i just!!!! IT'S FUCKING USA!! as soon as u show them what USA DOES this point is toilet paper!!
I had a dream where Zelenski, frustrated with waning western support, went full mask off and did a nazi salute. It was only when I saw an article about him a few days later I realized this didn't actually happen.
100 million views in 9 days. For comparison Japan's population is around 120 million
Pro-Elon Conservatives have officially lost their fucking mind. They're going all in on the "He's just autistic, he didn't know any better" excuse. As if he's not a grown man with over 10 children and mutiple wives.
learning about ukraine from non bourgeois western rags/corepig sources is so scary genuinely what the fuck. like what the fuck. this is a terrible war for all involved yes and i wish it wasn't happening and that it wasn't basically sending ukrainians off to die, but also, what the fuck? what the fuck??? keep in mind this is my first taste of just parsing the sources of the post on genzhou/death to nato (also seeing one blogger from russia i kept up with share posts about the topic/donbass) but like, what the fuck
when al-aqsa flood started i immediately learned and became an adamant defender of palestine and their armed resistance (and it was so easy, really, like, genuinely so easy, retrospectively i'm awed by the abundance of pro palestine information on social media counter to the mainstream narratives), and it was kind of surreal watching many people, even those who weren't aware prior, shed off the endless barrage of misinformation about palestine despite how much hasbara tried. that was a triumph over factual reality over deeply evil sludge, but even till now, ukraine war to me has been a simplified conflict because every source has been correctly like it's bad people are dying, yes yes i know, but then i find something out about nato, or about ukraine far-right, etc. etc., the donbass, and i feel incredibly fucking sick. what the hell
Took up sketching again. I liked to draw when I was a kid and figured it could be a creative outlet for now. Went to Reddit to look up inspo or tips but ten seconds in the sketching sub I found Harry Potter shit and bounced. If anyone has some useful tips or cool people to follow, let me know.
Cato did not just attack the Roman turn toward ostentatious consumption. Another feature of Roman life in the early second century BC also attracted his ire. Cato saw Rome’s growing engagement with the Greek world as a threat to the Roman and Latin culture he idealized.
His xenophobic attacks greatly exaggerated the impact of Greeks in Rome. Most Greeks would have come as slaves following a series of second-century Roman victories in the East. Relatively small numbers of free Greek philosophers, teachers of rhetoric, and doctors had come to Rome, but it was precisely these high-status, high-visibility Greeks whom Cato targeted. Cato said that Greeks “will corrupt everything” in Rome and predicted that the Romans would lose their empire when they began to be “infected with Greek literature.”²⁰
Cato used this malignant rhetoric to support a series of reactionary policies. When he campaigned for election as censor for 184 BC, he “proclaimed that the city needed a drastic purification” through which he could “cut away and cauterize the luxury and degeneracy of the age.”²¹ This message of moral decline and the promise of a radical return to a more virtuous Roman past propelled Cato into office.
(Source.)
Huh… interesting.
So, how’s everybody doing?
I had a dream (literally) that I was talking to someone and saying how the financialization of the US is correlated with the rise in "influencers" who don't really do anything other than market product and opinions (or words to that effect). As dreams go, it may be one of the most coherent dream thoughts I've had and I'm like... "was I onto something??" Like I guess the general idea was this type of influencer role exemplifies the hollowness resulting from financialization.
I'll have refresh my knowledge on it, this is a good reminder.
Have a great week comrades!
🫵 You WILL have hope, comrade.
My Spanish is getting better every day, and I'm grateful for it. It's mainly because I'm consuming a lot of Spanish language content. I'm watching Pablo Escobar: el patrón del mal on Netflix (which is a good show), and get a lot of Spanish Instagram reels on my feed lately. And because of this, I catch myself thinking in Spanish more. The key to language learning is to expose yourself to the language daily. It's the same way a lot of us learned English.
I'm starting to think Trump's main strategic goal is to personally give me anxiety by always making it seem like we'll finally get to see XXI century weaponry live-tested against aircraft carriers, but never following through.
Anyways, some OSINT chatter has been indicating materiel transfers directly from China to Iran, so China seems to be holding to their word on mutual defense. Some Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles have been launched at Ukraine today and CENTCOM deployment remains at full readiness. But eh, nothing ever happens.
Gotta love airplane travel and people who are sick but cannot be arsed to wear a mask for an hour or two because I will be spending my week sick
it's day nine hundred thousand of the rage. i'm certain it will end tomorrow (liar)
