FunkyStuff

It's not just a TikTok thing, though. And isn't the fact that TikTok has gotten as large as it has (despite its current status of being run under US oligarchs for US users), and how many USAmericans decided to start using RedNote when it initially was banned in the US, also evidence to the claim that China is having a big cultural moment?

I can at least say anecdotally that random people I've met who aren't politically involved have been getting more into specifically Chinese cultural products. Games, movies, etc. And among my inner friend group (who, admittedly, are definitely much more inclined to support China politically, not just culturally) we make jokes about Chinamaxxing too.

Also, there is no equivalence between the relationship between TikTok and Chinese culture as a whole versus YouTube and Google products. "TikTok is to China as YouTube is to Google products" is not valid because TikTok is to China as YouTube is to the United States. And while checking how people feel about a country based on trends on social media wouldn't be the ideal way to gauge things (polls are obviously better) it still seems reasonable.

Yeah you're exactly right, as I said we live in completely different and irreconcilable realities. The fact of the matter is, given the option between sitting down with people like myself (Hexbear user) who have extremely different views, or just hitting the button that makes us all go away, the vast majority of people will just hit the button. It's not really even a liberal thing, people behave that way regardless of ideology (although I think there's something particular about how atomized and depersonalizing the current state of social media is that makes that kind of behavior more common).

But you see my point — you're perfectly within your rights to think that everyone who's a socialist/Marxist/whatever has gone too far or whatever, and not wish to interact with them. Replicate similar preferences across a whole community, though, and it ends up isolating them and creating the situation that the root comment of this thread is lamenting. We're just little echo chambers siloed off from each other because the cognitive dissonance of experiencing each other's versions of reality is too much.

It’d also be nice to see a few more viewpoints.

Unfortunately, hasty defederation has made this impossible. It's too easy for people in a community to ask for defederation instead of confronting other people's viewpoints. Not to mention that when very contentious topics are brought up and there are whole communities full of people who dedicate a lot of time to reading about and thinking about those topics, it can create a poor situation where that community suddenly starts an outburst of too many disagreeing viewpoints. Compound that with the extremely fractured state of information and media where people live in completely different realities. It gets to be too much, and it's exceedingly difficult to have a civil conversation when the gulf between 2 communities is so large.

I mean, yeah

but I didn’t have the secret police disappearing people off the street during the last Democratic presidency

It wasn't as broad as what's happening with ICE right now but some student protesters in encampments for Palestine in 2024 were arrested in unmarked vehicles.

For what it's worth, what's the ratio of dead and arrested Americans to Palestinians that makes voting for the party that will kill the same number of Palestinians but fewer Americans acceptable?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf

https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf

tldr build parallel power structures under the purview of a revolutionary socialist organization outside of the current bourgeois democracy. Strengthen them and grow them out as long as the bourgeois state allows, then in a moment of crisis seize state power to oversee a transition from capitalism to socialism.

There's also the anarchist strategy which is similar in essence but with the crucial difference of laying out the parallel power structures horizontally such that no central power nor state organs exist.

Bernie is a Zionist and not a socialist at all. He sucks and if he was in a general election in 2028 I probably would still vote for the PSL candidate because I don't live in a swing state.

But he absolutely was screwed out of the 2020 nomination in a concerted effort from the Democratic Party establishment to get anyone but Bernie to win.

Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race until Super Tuesday to act as a spoiler while all the other moderate candidates dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. The media consistently downplayed Bernie's early lead.

Pete Buttigieg had shady connections to the owners of the app used to conduct the Iowa Caucus. That same Iowa Caucus held "votes" that were based on how loud the audience's cheers for each candidate were.

The media buried the Tara Reade story (CNN even took down an old episode of their radio show where Tara Reade's mother called asking for help because her daughter had been assaulted by her boss who was a politician in DC).

Recognizing the reality of the situation, calling it out as a shit sandwich, and encouraging others to act in the way that reduces harm the most with an actual chance to succeed

Yeah I agree, more people gotta join Hamas

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-comes-to-power

There are some misconceptions about how Hitler came to power. It is important to understand that:

Hitler did not seize power in a coup; and Hitler was not directly elected to power.

Rather, Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power through Germany’s legal political processes. According to the 1919 German constitution, the position of chancellor was appointed by the president.

Guess Germans should've voted harder then. Oh wait, there was a Communist Party who attempted a revolution before Hitler came to power and they failed because the Freikorps killed them? Well I wonder who started the Freikorps...

Yes, that's right, and Kamala promised she wouldn't change anything about what Biden was doing too (i.e. exactly the same thing).

I don't understand why the gaudy Trump Gaza real estate deal is supposed to be a point in favor of Biden or Kamala, either. Would it be any better if after exterminating the same number of Palestinians, Kamala did a land acknowledgement in Gaza instead of building a Trump Tower? The reality is that if Israel is capable of seizing land in Gaza to build a riviera they'd do it regardless of which party is in power in Washington DC. Their strategy hasn't changed at all since Jan 2025 when Trump stepped in.

Oh I guess Dr German History decided to show up and teach us all a lesson about how voting against Hitler would have stopped Hitler. Because Hitler definitely got into power because he won a democratic election, right?

She promised nothing with regards to Palestine. She said she would not be fundamentally different from Joe Biden in any way. Joe Biden always granted Israel unconditional and full support. There is nothing Israel asked for during the Biden administration that they didn't get; and I don't think there's any reason to think a Harris administration would change on that end.

So why shouldn't we believe that Kamala would kill just as many people as Trump? Because she isn't an old decrepit white dude like the other 2 guys?