CindyTheSkull
joined 3 years ago
It's from the TriggerNometry podcast (no idea if it's a good podcast overall. Edit to add: It's not, at least one of the hosts is a complete dipshit).
Israel/Palestine: Asking The Questions No One Else Will | Norman Finkelstein | Triggernometry: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/triggernometry/israel-palestine-asking-the-questions-no-one-else-/
Summary of the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va257BZvAj4
You:
Eh, fuck em. It's killing somebody's families either way, might as well be theirs.
Also you:
Save your indignation for those who deserve it.
lol. 
If we're just talking hypotheticals here, why is it so hard for you to say that it would be bad, hypothetically, to kill a 3 year old with white phosphorus?
What you're apparently trying to say is that your comments advocating for killing entire families based on the crimes of one of their members is that you're posing this hypothetical situation to people here on lemmy who are in a position to target/profit from/earn a living from white phosphorus. And that doing so will perhaps get them to imagine the horrors and change their ways. Really? K. Keep fighting that good fight then. As a final note, believe me, those who deserve my indignation aren't getting any less of it just because I took a moment to call out a chuddy comment.
Disgusting. The problem is the torture and murder of people who don't deserve it. If "their family" only consists of WP provider's cousins who condone the business then fine, good riddence. But you're saying their 3 year old niece who knows nothing about any of this should be killed by slowly burning to death from chemical weapons? Nah, fuck off with the "children are valid targets" bait.
"Go touch grass!" they keep telling me. Now I know they're just trying to get me killed.
I mean, that is their dream, that is indeed the ultimate capitalist goal that you're right they have largely achieved. But an important aspect of that capitalist dream world would be to do that in perpetuity, with all this kept in a stable balance they forever control from the top. That is where the dream can never be truly realized. They do have to struggle to maintain it, and while they have been doing an astoundingly good job of that for the most part (despite how well all of us here can see the gaping contradictions, we also rightly lament how communists are an insignificant minority in the west/core and how captured by capital nearly every institution is), that struggle still demands they have to keep inventing increasingly complex and stratified apparatus to keep their contradiction-riddled structure of exploitation afloat.
And that's what we're really talking about here. At what point does that corrosion from the countless contradictions become so extensive that maintenance of the structure becomes a truly lost cause? Where is the point where the downward slide back out of their capitalist dreamworld (the proletarian nightmare) accelerate into the certainty of waking up from it? The answer is necessarily subjective, since we can all pin different moments where we think this has or will happen. But it is an inevitability.
You were asking about the shifting nature of the meaning of the term whiteness. Go up and read your own comment to see how you related that to authoritarianism. If you can't follow your own train of thought, then I can't help you because it makes it apparent you're not asking in good faith.
You're saying "authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc"
What I'm trying to explain to you is that "we" are not saying that. The people who use whiteness to justify their actions and otherize their enemies are saying that. This isn't difficult.
Why not skip the middle step?
Go ask the NATO bloc and their supporters. The obvious and surface answer is that it has to do with making for an easy "us-vs-them" identifier. "Of course they're bad, they aren't white like us good wholesome folk are, who are inherently good and wholesome because we're white, and being good and wholesome makes us right and correct in what we do and you can tell because we're white. The ones who are bad clearly aren't like us. They're not white!" Yes, it is circular reasoning and garbage logic. But I don't know why you're getting pissy at us for that instead of the dipshits white people who keep moving the goalposts on the meaning of whiteness, as they always have done to suit their agenda. Take it up with them.
No one is making anything "sound easy," we're just pointing out the fact that education is not and never has been a prerequisite for revolution. It's ignorant, ahistortical, and bordering on chauvinism to say that's the reason "all the poor countries" haven't had revolutions. It's ridiculous on it's face when you actually look at history and see that almost all successful revolutions that became AES countries did so with the support and participation of their largely uneducated populous. Or no, I guess the masses of peasantry in rural China all went to uni otherwise the Chinese revolution could never have happened. 🙄
Not true. You may need an educated vanguard party, but not an educated population. Even then, the vanguard need only be "educated" in legitimate theory. An "educated population" that has been educated mostly in capitalist propaganda like in the US is a hindrance to revolution, definitely not a requirement. "Uneducated" people aren't dumb, they can still recognize inequality and the injustice of not being able to eat while a small elite wallows in the wealth made off their labor.
Or Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf.
When Naomi Klein Realized People Regularly Confused Her With Naomi Wolf, She Went Down a Rabbit Hole
This is the right answer. Most of the the comments I've read in this thread so far have mentioned climate change, but it seems like they aren't recognizing how much of an accelerant for revolution it really is. Maybe revolution is not the perfect term here so much as radical and extreme political change because as you say, it can go in the direction of communism or fascism depending as always on the material conditions. Either way, the current status quo for every nation on the planet doesn't have long left, and its death is going to happen faster and faster in the coming few decades.