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Heaven on earth = Communism
imagine saying this about 9/11 hijackers -- they're just fighting for their country, don't blame them, blame Bin Laden!
If I'm trying to make a point, I try to substantiate it with evidence, not just generalizing about how I imagine the conversation is going to go. I've never talked with anyone from the USSR, but have known some from Cuba (as well as researchers who've worked there for an interval). There's some variety in the perspectives, some are more negative, but there's a clear throughline: even where the state takes a repressive position, these socialist countries are miles ahead of their comparable Western counterparts in all areas of social development. There's a reason that after the fall of the USSR, there was a marked decrease in women's rights, acceptance of queer people, and the safety of ethnic or racial minorities in the region. We can talk about the USSR's shortcomings at serving these groups' needs, but the myth of the USSR as a monolithic, socially conservative "redfash" state is laughable. It is simply untrue and any conversation with people who resided in the USSR or any socialist state, or just picking up a book by someone who isn't sponsored by the Victims of Communism organization, should show that these minorities have benefitted from the proactive socialist state's initiatives for their benefit much more than they've been held back by certain missteps (to be clear, there have been missteps).
I wanna add that the way I formulated it is incomplete, or at least too partial to the functional perspective that someone who wishes to preserve the status quo would have. Obviously trans people don't just "choose" their gender, it's much more complicated than that. But I think it's worth looking at things from this lens to understand why the billionaires in particular are recalcitrant about gender.
Gender is a load bearing brainworm for capitalist society. Capitalists need stratification, having a gradient of various degrees of precariousness for workers to experience that would push them into accepting a worse deal for selling their labor. Gender is clearly one of the primary ways to achieve this: an absolutely incredible amount of domestic labor is performed without compensation by women every day, and society would fall apart if it wasn't. The rigid structure of the patriarchy is a key feature of this system, which means that trans people represent a clear break in that logic; if AFAB individuals can just choose not to be subjected to gender-based exploitation, it starts to rip the whole thing apart. Equally, transfeminine people represent another break in the opposite direction. The patriarchy is more or less incompatible with the existence of trans people, at least without significantly transforming itself.
The students in Tiananmen Square did get exactly what they deserved. A safe evacuation after the fighting in the streets surrounding the square got too intense.
Black people started using the n word among themselves casually, doesn't mean other people can just copy it and shield themselves from accusations of racism by saying Black people were doing it first.
What did you watch, Innuendo Studios' How to Radicalize a Normie series or something? I find it kinda funny that you're being so vague about what exactly it is that bothers you about 'tankies' as opposed to other leftists because I'm pretty sure a lot of the people you're arguing with aren't Marxist-Leninists or anything. It's giving shadowboxing vibes.
A tankie is literally someone who believes in authoritarian communism
How could you achieve communism or socialism without authoritarianism? Do you believe in revolution? Is a revolution not the most authoritarian process imaginable, the forced imposition of a new reality by one class unto another?
can you explain what you actually disagree with? and are the tactics in question just using wojaks and being a little rude sometimes?
Buddy you're the one comparing my personal friend Xi Jinping to a yellow bear, how do you not see how close to blackface that is
Dutch guy getting beat up after doing blackface: "Waah! It's a important cultural practice! You don't understand, it has nothing to do with race, Dutch people just have folklore stories about dark skinned fantasy creatures coming and stealing our stuff! You're the ones making it about race!"
If you never leave the online world then the only oppression you can know is being called mean words. That's the only way these people can justify what they're saying. Dang, someone called you a cissy and you don't get a little 'straight' title in a game? Awesome! Hope this brutal oppression keeps going!
Look, just phrasing any of this in terms of 'biological males' indicates his knowledge of the transgender rights movement is very outdated (use the term Assigned Male at Birth! gender isn't biological and sex doesn't work like that!) or he's using explicitly transphobic terminology. Either way, it reflects that he holds a position that trans people and their advocates are 100% in the right to revoke support over. AOC will always take any opportunity to attack the Greens, she's an opportunist. That doesn't mean that what he said is acceptable.
What's your preferred term for "not trans"?
I'm mostly just going to disengage because I think we're really on the same side here and I'm just being a pedant on a thread about an innocent man being murdered, but I think you're kinda missing the point too. Social murder happens literally everywhere constantly, even socialist countries.
However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there's a pretty obvious skew in terms of who's getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn't executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I'm not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim folks awfully often. Really makes you think, right?
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don't, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don't trust what the courts say) and the isn't really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we're just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren't ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. "Oh, I can't support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn't happen for no reason either" is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.
It's weird that boomers tend to strawman us as responding to criticisms of AES with "that's not true socialism." Maybe socdems who think Norway is socialist but Cuba isn't would say that, but anyone who's reading Marx and is actively participating in discussions about socialism above a high school level probably understands that real socialism has been tried and has succeeded.
Which brings me to my next point: Socialism's biggest success story is China. It defies every trope yet it looks like most Western leftists are too afraid to claim it as the success it is, evidence that without sanctions, coups, and blockades socialism is a system that can take us to the future capitalism is currently killing. For every rags to riches story in America, there are thousands of people who received dignity, employment, and an economy that worked in their favor thanks to Chinese socialism. It's the best example of what socialism can achieve without being sabotaged, a country that went from a feudal backwater with tyrannical landlords, where the local warlords could claim the peasants' daughters as their property, where famines would routinely come and kill several million people, to the largest and most advanced economy in the world in less than a century. And they accomplished this by taking on Western capital and beating them at their own game.
Shoutout to my boy Camilo Torres who famously said, "If Jesus was alive today he'd be a guerrillero."