Responding to a response to my take on Xinjiang
MarxMadness @ MarxMadness @lemmygrad.ml Posts 0Comments 382Joined 2 yr. ago
MarxMadness @ MarxMadness @lemmygrad.ml
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“passivity equals complicity” has been a hotly debated philosophical topic as long as philosophy has existed, so you will never reach a broad concensus on the point
They’re saying that there is no third camp you are either building consent for the empire or not building consent for the empire.
This is the same exact reasoning as "you're with us or with the terrorists," which is why I brought it up. It's a direct critique of passivity by arguing that there is no such thing as passivity -- "you are either building consent for the empire or not building consent for the empire."
"You're either with us, or with the terrorists."
It's bad analysis and worse politics, and least for trying to grow a leftist mass movement. It's bad analysis because one of the most defining features of the American political system is widespread disengagement, and one of the other most defining features is deep-rooted institutional resistance to radical change. So the argument boils down to "passivity equals complicity, even when the deck is heavily stacked against any meaningful form of opposition."
It's worse politics because "passivity equals complicity" has been a hotly debated philosophical topic as long as philosophy has existed, so you will never reach a broad concensus on the point. And that's setting aside the infinite rabbit holes surrounding questions like "what kind of actions do you need to take to not be complicit?," and the fact that "passivity equals complicity" is an attack on the very people we are trying to win over.
The better framing is: "You know imperialism is evil. Don't you want to be someone who helps create a better world?"
this guy pointed out trump would be worse for Palestineans
You realize Trump has already pushed Israel to accept a ceasefire/prisoner exchange, right? That's an actual, material improvement in the situation in Gaza compared to Biden. Democrats who are still trotting out "Trump will somehow do an even worse genocide" are giving away they game that they don't even care enough to keep up on the news.
I say this as someone who think Trump should be in prison, too.
It’s functionally no different than a dollar bill.
In the case of communist ‘money’, I think we would cease using money to kill our neighbor.
Seems like a big difference to me
Nonsense -- people frequently help others even during disasters, wars, and other precarious times.
Doesn't sound like they live in a bubble, then.
the Republicans fixed the DMV here by running it like a business
Any details?
They could barely penetrate a Ukraine with its pants down
The rest of your comment is spot-on, but this isn't a good assessment of the Russian invasion. They're very clearly fighting a limited war (i.e., they don't want to occupy the whole of Ukraine, they just don't want a U.S. puppet and NATO member as a neighbor) and it's possible-to-likely that their initial sprint to Kyiv was only withdrawn due to the early peace talks that the UK and US scuttled.
literal children, or Russian bots
"I'm so fucking smart, no reasonable person could possibly disagree with my flawless takes"
This is the "freedom" you want to return to:
Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” ...
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation--including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation--were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.
I like the comparison to measuring physical attributes, but I think a better analogy for IQ testing would be "trying to measure athleticism by trying to measure who's best at playing basketball."
Defining "athleticism" itself is hard. It might include reaction time, coordination, strength, speed, flexibility, etc. There are some naturally occurring differences in those attributes, but to a degree they are also changeable. Any bottom-line, all-in measure is going to include some arbitrary decisions about the relative value of each attribute.
Trying to measure athleticism by who's best at basketball adds another layer of problems. Basketball (analogous to test taking, cultural context, etc.) involves skills that are separate from whatever you're calling athleticism. It's also a game where a big factor in success -- height -- is also probably something a lot of people would consider separate from athleticism.
I think it's not as clumsy in the real world (most people aren't redditors), but there's still plenty of ambient negativity that is not even remotely challenged. A statement as benign as "the Chinese government is doing a lot of good things" will usually invite a bunch of the standard propaganda as pushback.
I didn't downvote you for your comment, I downvoted you for whining and trotting out "anyone who disagrees with me is a bot."
Russia isn’t going to split again from China... why would he? What benefit would Russia possibly derive from this?
It's not just this -- it's also that Russia tried for 30 years to either partner with the U.S. or at least negotiate with them, and the end result was the Ukraine War. And on top of that total lack of trust lands Trump, who is both individually untrustworthy and who also happens to be someone even a lot of Republicans are trying to subvert. There's no guarantee a deal with Trump lasts even the end of his term, and even less assurance that whoever follows won't simply discard it.
What's disgusting about China's government?
Every national economy has some planned parts (utilities and ag in the U.S., for example). Most less-planned capitalist economies don't work, either -- what has capitalism done for the vast majority of people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa?
China is a major example of a more-planned economy working as well as any economy in recorded history. About two-thirds of the economy is in the form of state-owned enterprises, the rest of the economy is firmly answerable to the government, and there's top-down economic planning at regular intervals. In 75 years this has taken China from a mostly feudal society that had been carved up by various invaders for the previous century to a country with modern living standards and technology on par with anyone in the world.
Central planning is also at the core of the largest companies in the world, even ones that operate outside of significant state economic planning. Apple and Microsoft don't have internal divisions operate on market principles; they plan and direct resource and labor distribution from the top down. The People's Republic of Walmart is great reading on this last topic.
go outside and die for the state
At least three incarcerated fireghters died between 2017 and 2020. That same article says there were 1,760 incarcerated firefighters working in July 2023. Non-incarcerated firefighters also risk death; here's two firefighters and a pilot who died in a helicopter crash, also from 2023. Quadrupling the known death rate among incarcerated workers gets us to 170 deaths per 100,000 workers. That's well below everything on this table besides "office and administrative support."
We rightly clown on cops for exaggerating how dangerous their jobs are. We are doing the same thing when we characterize this program as "go out and die for the state" or (as another commenter said) compare it to gladiators.
We don't need exaggerations to make the case for socialism, and exaggerating only hurts us. We're seeing that in this thread, where we're dogpiling people for agreeing that prison slavery exists in the U.S. but arguing that we are stretching that definition to the breaking point. Why are we fighting people who largely agree with us already?
Another point here is that a statement against one's interest is more reliable than a statement in one's interest. People lie to benefit themselves all the time; they are more careful about lying in ways that embarrass or implicate them.