![SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/81a6b56e-f126-4c1c-b80d-fcb93f996b66.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
how often do you encounter doublespeak?
who has donated a lot of money to charity
where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don't magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it's necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn't do the labor to get that much money - it's literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.
it's akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity
there are people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc who still believe this
Winter offensive is very likely because the Grande Armée is getting French winter gear and Russians are getting... whatever they get, so they'll probably freeze.
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Yes, they love to talk about how their governments failing are the fault of everyone else
Alright, here's a fun experiment we should try: you know what America did to North Korea? Let's allow, say, China, do the same thing to America. That includes:
- Destroy almost literally every single building in the country, including factories, hospitals, and schools.
- Kill 15-20% of the entire American population.
- Destroying all the irrigation dams and other structures so that farming is made incredibly difficult.
- Bombard the country with so many bombs that the people are forced to live underground and only farm at night.
I think this will be a fair experiment to see if American capitalism can compare with socialism when the rubber meets the road.
Old people aren't really the problem, capitalists are
I'm going to assume that you're being facetious when you talk about "culling" them (otherwise that's pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.
Of course Russia should get special treatment! They were America's greatest foe in the Cold War!
The US not letting Russia into NATO might be their single greatest error. Ever.
I personally can't think of anything that's happened with NATO since 2002, so you might have a point here
I've seen this on reddit and other hellholes from time to time
most people tend to have a degree of separation from it, like early on in the war when people were calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine (which would have necessarily meant NATO strikes into Ukraine or Russian territory, which would put us at the closest humanity has ever been to a nuclear exchange); about mid-way through the war when some countries were trying to form a "coalition of the willing" (article is more recent than when I was thinking though) to enter Ukraine that wasn't technically NATO forces but like, my god, you're really cutting it fucking close there; and some people nowadays are musing if F-16s could be used from NATO territory
there's also been some vague threats from time to time over Kaliningrad but luckily that's never escalated to outright military rhetoric, at least not yet.
I don't even get how this one is a whataboutism to be honest, you literally stated that war criminals can't celebrate with Nobel Prize winners and then somebody pointed out that there will be in fact be representatives from countries that have committed war crimes, or more accurately, have fulfilled every qualification for being war criminals but haven't been sentenced or punished because they control the institutions.
if you'd have said "Russian, Iranian, and Belarusian war criminals can't celebrate..." then you'd still be a complete fucking dipshit but at least you wouldn't be totally incorrect in your accusation.
idk, I think I prefer the constant fear, at least compared to the bloodthirsty calls for nuclear war to begin over Ukraine because ackstually Russia's nukes don't work anymore, and also nuclear war isn't really that bad anyway
I have secret intelligence that the actual reason Putin didn't join NATO is because he was angry that Romania joined first because he wanted to be the first country starting with R in NATO. NATO officials begged, pleaded with him to join the organization, but he's just such a petty man.
Don't you dare call me a fucking liberal.
By and large, we are only hostile to those who are hostile to us first. Perhaps the onus is on you to stop spewing hyperreactionary sewage onto the internet that is easily disproven by even 10 minutes of research, rather than expecting us not to respond when you say that shit and then acting like "Oh, golly gee, golly me! I could not have foreseen that people would have been angry at me when I stated this godawful take!"
Starting out conversations by calling us genocide-denying fascists who are only pretending to be LGBTQIA+ for plausible deniability is obviously going to get you fucking swarmed in return, don't act like you didn't do anything and you're just a poor little meow meow trying to have civil discussions
they have no idea how anything works, they can't downvote, they're easy to ban, and they are so damn fun to troll.
ironically enough, this was a large portion of the reason why we federated with you - fascists like you haven't read a book or essay since high school and so fucking easy to dunk on, so we wanted to have some fun with you. it's almost like shooting fish in a barrel, you make it too straightforward.
unfortunately the only line you can say is "buuuhhhh Xinjiang Xi Jinping genocide?!?!!" so there's no real constructive discussion happening anywhere here, we can write pages and pages of well-referenced prose in response and all we'll get is "
How's the weather in Beijing, Chinese bot?" so it's like, what are we even doing anymore.but, despite that fact, I vote Nay, because dunking on you is extremely entertaining and a learning experience for everybody
literally 95% of my interactions with other instances' liberals have been them saying something absurdly reactionary and not expecting to receive any pushback for having dogshit takes, and then going
"Ohoho, the Hexbear tankie redfash have arrived to defend the CCP and Putler's regime! Why am I not surprised!" without offering even the slightest counterargument because they know they have nonewe have cultivated a community of genuine good-faith discussion on Hexbear over the last three years and we aren't about to lose it
North Korea’s considerable economic achievements since liberation were all but completely wiped out by the war. By 1949, after two years of a planned economy, North Korea had recovery from the post-liberation chaos, and economic output had reached the level of the colonial period. Plans for 1950 were to increase output again by a third in the North, and the DPRK leadership had expected further economic gains following integration with the agriculturally more productive South after unification. According to DPRK figures, the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Most of the destruction occurred in 1950 and 1951. To escape the bombing, entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, government offices, and much of the population. Agriculture was devastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hid underground during the day and came out to farm at night. Destruction of livestock, shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer, and loss of manpower reduced agricultural production to the level of bare subsistence at best. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” a phrase revived in the famine years of the 1990s. Worse was yet to come. By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans. Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.
usually how conversations go is this
- I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk
- to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect
- they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like "Oh, so you've come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it's much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you're wrong because of [link to wikipedia]"
- we then start dunking given that they aren't operating in good faith
perhaps reddit's typical style of "debate", where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of "You're wrong, here's why you're wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don't then you'll start screeching 'CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH' at us"
additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven't for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I've seen arguments become people just saying quotes like "Well, communism works on paper but not in practice" and "If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither" or "Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?" and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily "when you have elections" or if there's something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner's knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I'll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.
no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don't "contribute to the discussion", no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into "I dislike you and/or the point you're making and I'm not going to explain why. fuck you." disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or "struggle sessions") rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. it's also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of "if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can't downvote" means that we're all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.
In the broad sense of "using euphemistic language", obviously quite often, and it's not always intended to be bad even if it is obfuscating the truth - but only really when doing things like explaining complicated topics to a very young child, or when both people in the conversation know that doublespeak is being used (e.g. saying "he's in a better place now", which is technically hiding the truth with something more pallatable if you didn't already know that that phrase is synonymous with "he died".)
In politics, which is the most appropriate place to use the term, I would argue it's a standard, even characteristic, part of capitalist politics and economics, because the actual truth of the matter is directly opposed to the interests of the working class, and you do not want to anger them or encourage them to organize in opposition.
"Increasing efficiency in X sector" simply means "We're going to fire a bunch of people and reduce the money we spend on it with no increase in quality of service."
"We should cut social security spending and stop giving handouts so people work harder" simply means "We need to increase the profits of the capitalist class, and so hundreds, thousands or even millions of people will have to suffer and die."
"We should restore freedom and democracy in X country" simply means "This country is opposed to our capitalists in one way or another and we should kill their leaders stopping us from having greater market access, even if that plunges that country into years of suffering" for example in Libya. Countries with dictatorships and monarchies that are subservient to American rule are rarely targetted - if anything, several of them were put there by America itself (e.g. Pinochet).
Hell, the words "market access" in that previous one is just doublespeak for "widespread exploitation of that country's resources and institutions", like how the ex-Soviet states were massively privatized under the Shock Doctrine and their resources harvested for Western capitalists.
One of the important first steps for any leftist is seeing these phrases for what they actually are, because otherwise you just continue to exist in the dreamy world of capitalism where actions are disconnected from consequences, and the problems and what caused those problems are shrouded in fog and confusion and become difficult to discuss. For example:
"Wow, cool, we should definitely increase efficiencies in the healthcare sector! Efficiency is a good word that means good things!" -> five years later -> "Dang, it sucks how our healthcare sector is in such dire straits, look at these long waiting lists, look at these burned-out nurses, how could this have possibly happened? Perhaps we didn't increase efficiences enough! As efficiency is a good word that means good things, it is inconceivable to me that it might have done something bad!" -> read a post online from a leftist -> "This person is saying that we should hire more nurses and doctors and give them free degrees and training and lower housing/rent prices! Don't they know that this will decrease efficiency and lead to - gasp! - bloating in the healthcare sector? That's how we got into this bad situation in the first place! Socialists are so ridiculous, they need to read a book on the subject because they clearly don't see what is patently obvious to people like me, who can see common sense without even needing to have read a book on it, I'm just that smart and read all the articles! (most of which are owned by the people trying to privatize healthcare)"
It's likely that at no point have the people arguing for "increasing efficiency" actually laid out exactly what they mean by that word, or if they have then it's couched in further doublespeak ("incentivizing hard work" = "increase hours without a meaningful pay rise so we can fire people and save labor costs"), whereas because left-wingers are too honest to come up with their own doublespeak phrase for what we propose, we have to lay it out bare.