TheOubliette @ TheOubliette @lemmy.ml

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Yes, and I didn't label you as any of those things. I sharee that the first two points overlap with some communist ways of thinking, which I view as a positive. I list the third point as food for thought and I was fairly qualified in how I described your politics so as to match what you had said and no more.

This question is difficult to correctly answer, as anyone can define their own political boundaries. They can be wrong about those boundaries and they can define many different ones that are all valid. Is my "political creed" to be a communist? Which subset might that mean? Am I friendly with certain subsets despite disagreeing with them (yes) and if so would they potentially count as the majority? Am I a (de)famed Western leftist or part of a worldwide effort in terms of having a less popular view of a subject?

I would say that among the people with whom I have the most general agreement, my least popular opinion is the potential for imperial core workers to become radicalized and organized for the left. A very large amount of organized resources is constantly poured into efforts to prevent this from happening, including those that reinforce settler, white supremacist, and chauvinist attitudes that permeate our cultures. That means that our struggle is very challenging right now but also means that if those flows are ever cut off or undermined, there will be immense opportunity and we have to be ready to channel the inevitable accompaniment to the conditions (austerity) that got us to that place away from neoliberal fascistic movements.

Basically, there is a common pathway in understanding that goes from hope for revolution from within the imperial core (no successful precedents) to attempts to understand this and explain why it's least likely to happen there. This can lead to a self-defeating cynicism towards all imperial core organizing or to curb vision. But I think it is our duty to continually reformulate as needed to discovery organizable enclaves, to grow with current and upcoming conditions. We owe that to each other.

Are you active in any socialist parties?

Dawkins' anti-theist works and his reactionary views are related to one another. As with Hitchens and Sam Harris, their work was poorly researched and was forwarded because their real agendas were based on chauvinist attitudes, particularly against muslims.

Dennett was the only good one and unfortunately he passed away. PZ Myers is less knowm but also didn't bite on the islamophobia bait.

Based on the various accounts, Gaiman is a cruel and explpitative rapist and I find it difficult to appreciate words about charm or love from such a source.

Do you have any other examples of people who should not be rejected by the left? Who was the podcaster?

PS always kill your heroes. Being of the left means doing work and building organizations that (in addition to trying to prevent) withstand the inevitable failures of prominent figures.

The first point is a fairly common opinion among communists, who understand "DEI" to be a liberal cooption of liberationist language and thought that tokenizes identities and reworks the concepts in favor of exploiters (and was doomed to be shed the moment it was less profitable for exploiters).

It may be beneficial to consider the second point with some nuance that is often neglected in order to agitate. Again with communists, you will find many that hate their country's cops but acknowledge the necessity in a post-revolutionary framework, either in their own visions for their own revolution or in defending the actions taken by their comrades that rapidly discover the need for some form of organized enforcement. One way to think about this is that the police are an arm of the state, and who that state serves via its structures and nature changes how they operate. In OECD countries, cops primarily serve capital. They protect profits based on shop owner complaints, shut down capital-inconvenient demonstrations, etc, and spend little time helping average people. In many capitalist countries, cops are underpaid and openly corrupt, so they do the same things while being more obvious bribes. In countries run by socialists, cops of course still do many cop things, but you will find them spending more of their time on other tasks, there are fewer per capita, and the job of being a cop in capitalist counties has been split into many different jobs that don't involve having a gun or otherwise carrying out the worst actions taken by cops. So, in short, it is entirely coherent to hate your local cops as an arm of capital that will beat you for protesting while not condemning the mere existence of cops in other countries while also understanding that we want to create a society free of them.

For the third point, it really depends on what you mean by accepting. Socialists need to educate people where they are, warts and all, but you also cannot be taillist and morph your work into accepting reactionary positions. That defeats the entire point of rejecting reactionary positions. Patience in explaining is valuable, tacit agreement with racism/xenophobia/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/etc is counterproductive. In addition, getting dunked on can and does create results. Despite growing up conservative and getting dunked on by those to your left, you now think of yourself as non-conservative. Are you sure none of those dunks ever led you to question your positions?

Democratic politicians tend to be cynical more than ignorant, friend. They feign incompetence because taking actions is against their larger strategy of holding to whatever the current status quo is or whatever pleases donors (these are usually the same).

We're talking about a group that acts like it can't deliver on basic platform promises because of a parliamentarian they can just fire and replace like the GOP has done reoeatedly and then turns around and breaks plenty of its own rules when a SocDem grandpa (Bernie) gives people some hope for positive change.

The party relishes in scapegoats for inaction because they do not, in actuality, oppose the status quo nor even most of the changes made by e.g. Trump. Their opposition is performative, it is meant to get someone to do that 99% voting for them thing and then call it a day politically. Their main agenda is to say there is no acceptable alternative beyond their controlled neoliberal duopoly.

"Make politics boring again" simply means you have no connection to the immense violences carried out by that status quo, or do not recognize them as such. Tell me, for which period of time was US politics boring? During slavery? Settler colonial genocide of the people who lived here? Jim Crow? Labor fights? Imperial conquests throughout the Americas, Hawaii, The Philippines? Both World Wars? The Great Depression? The Cold War and its many sponsored coups and genocides? The forced unequal exchange for the countries it dominates? The frequent hot wars it begets around the world?

Supporting UBI is not really a leftist thing. It was promoted by laissez-faire economists as a way to kill the welfare state (universal services) and is still formulated as such by its prominant proponents.

Why do you believe you are leftist rather than simply a fairly mainstream liberal? Liberals have pivoted to being openly in favor of immigration crackdowns in the US over the last few years.

Wut? Germany was a singular country until the Soviet Union occupied half of it.

This is a non-sequitor, it does not change whether West Germany illegally annexed East Germany, which it did. Germany included parts of what are now Poland prior to the Nazis' invasions. Would you also write off Germany illegally annexing them as a righteous revanchism?

Re-uniting the occupied territories with the rest of the country is literally the opposite of an illegal annexation.

You should learn your basic history before trying to lecture others. Germany was cut down and the remaining pieces split into regions governed by 4 countries (France, UK, USA, USSR). With the rise of the US the first 3 of course rapidly became de facto one region and the legal mumbo jumbo followed to create West Germany.

West Germany was created from this as an "independent" country, still under the thumb of the US, excluding East Germany. The USSR proposed full reintegration of Germany as a neutral country, but the US had already committed to a policy of isolation, preferring their NATO-pushing givernors of West Germany.

Regarding illegal annexation of East Germany, it was done against the consent of the people who lived there and against their own supposed legal framework.

In cases like these, the friendly fire is basically intentional. "Israel" constantly bombed residential areas and basic service centers like hospitals and schools, places where it's going to be all civilians (they of course lie and say everything they bomb is Hamas). If some "Israeli" prisoners are also hit, they don't really care. They are always ready to deploy the Hannibal Doctrine, so what are a few who are collaterally damaged? Plus the prisoners that were released constantly speak kindly of their jailors, that's just bad for settler propaganda.

The East is in a poor state because The West illegally annexed it, threw away their welfare state, outlawed the communist party, and gave all of its industry to exploitative West German companies. Indicators of quality of life plummeted after the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall. The West also trashed East Germany's liberating policies towards women and LGBTQ+ people. East Germans that were older have nostalgia for the better times. Patronizing and ignorant liberals, rather than understand the truth in their experiences, have invented a fantasy called Ostolgie to explain this away, doing their best to pretend that this is just old people being silly rather than remembering tangibly better experiences.

This fictionalization is a necessary part of anticommunist thinking: no aspects of "the enemy" can ever be good or beneficial for anyone. All seemingly good things done by that enemy must either be attributed to a "brainwashed" population or a devious plot to appear better than they really are for propaganda purposes. It is important to recognize that these patterns of thought are not usually effectively exported and are instead intended for a domestic audience to make sure they don't actually understand and sympathize with the designated enemy.

If you think of history as often involving opposing material and social forces, then patterns will emerge. We are constrained by the material in what actions we can take to resolve a major conflict in interests, often escalating to, for example, war. So war has happened repeatedly. That's not quite history repeating itself so much as a consequence of historically common conditions.

Under this way of thinking, you could expect conditions that are even more similar to one another to lead to similar outcomes - though not necessarily identical. For example, the revolution in Russia that led to the first sustained socialist revolution had precedent in similar conditions jn the few decades prior, and for the same basic reasons (driving material forces): a rising but weak bourgeoisie, unpopular war foisted on the population, frustrations at capitalist oppression at home, and various unpopular domestic policies that were a holdover from monarchist ways of thinkinh that liberalism had made unpopular. During the prior revolution, the masses (and representative organizations) were too idealistic and believed establishing a Duma and some reforms would address these problems. They were wrong: the Tsar simply reversed most of the policy concessions once the people went home and were no longer organized, dragged his feet on the Duma, and eventually established one that was purely representative of ruling class interests. At the same time, the Tsar went after the organizations that had participated in the failed revolution, banning them and jailing their members.

And when similar conditions occurred and people became again colocated and agitated by these conditions, those organizations were back in force, grew rapidly, and learned their lessons. The group that won, the communists, correctly identified that even the current offered concessions were similarly false and that the defeat of the Tsarist-bourgeois ruling class required them to be fully deposed and that the time to do so was ripe.

So, the similar conditions led to a similar culmination (mass action, strikes, etc) but had a different outcome due to their differences (learning the lessons of the previous failure).

He let them do it. Put up no protest and then gave them his support after they fought him with their whole apparatus.

He's also a Zionist, weak tea when it comes to policy, and completely incapable as an organizer, throwing away his network twice after losing. He was always a compromise candidate at best from a left perspective and is only perceived as particularly left wing in comparison to the duopoly status quo of proud neoliberal racist vs. false pretense neoliberal racist.

Everything I Don't Like is a Russian Plot: A Baby's Guide to Geopolitics

Ukraine’s strategy is to expel the invader and ask for any and all assistance in the defense of their country from Russia’s war of conquest.

Ukraine is not a sovereign country. Its affairs are dictated by the Western countries that pushed Euromaidan, selected its subsequent president, ensured the failure of Minsk II, and now support endless war to the last Ukrainian. So far as I can tell, there is not much strategy to Ukraine outside of "keep fighting", and their overall strategy has been absolutely desolating for the population, throwing people into meat grinder after meat grinder, which Russia finds an acceptable status quo.

All of the help from Poland, the UK, the US, Baltics, Germany, and other European countries is massively appreciated.

Is it appreciated by those being forcefully conscripted? What about the majorities who want a negotiated peace? Perhaps they do, but don't let this get in the way of understanding that endless escalation and war is not popular, and this is nevertheless what is happening.

More is requested and it’s good to see the UK is stepping up in a much bigger way to assist in their defense.

If you had read the article, you would know that it's about (1) austerity cuts justified by (2) general fund increased "defense" spending, not specifically for Ukraine-based arms. The only mention of Ukraine is Starmer's unhinged comments about potentially sending troops to Ukraine, i.e. NATO member troops to Ukraine, which is, again, only an escalation.

As I already mentioned, the goal of endless arms to Ukraine is one of escalation and using Ukrainians as fodder against Russia, not actually helping the country. The country is already ruined, it has been sold off to these OECD countries for a song (or for "defense", as the propaganda term would put it). Some "aid", getting UA's land and industries in return! Some "aid", i.e. loans with interest!

The UK intervened to stop peace negotiations early on and was complicit in undermining the implementation of Minsk II.

Like other OECD countries, the UK was and is happy to use Ukraine as a weapon against Russia, no matter how many Ukrainians die. Their strategy is to escalate, not defend.

The UK should be abolished.

"Defense".

Funny how that translates into bombs against brown people in their own country.

It doesn't. It only requires summarizing, which he is already doing. The problem is not that he's oversimplifying for brevity, it is that his analysis is ignorant and incorrect.

Yes but he's doing it in a way that is not a threat to the ruling class and arguably even helps it. They like it when people that would otherwise radicalize adopt a false catharsis of arriving at nice-sounding conclusions with no concrete actions to take. They also like the implicit nationalism in his selective telling of history. They will also like his hand-waving away of "left vs. right" about anything that isn't explicitly labeled economic, as rather than forcing a focus on the political economic basis of oppression and poverty, it lends itself to a liberal class reductionism where you cannot align your thoughts and demands with those marginalized and oppressed at the behest of the ruling class. "The culture war" is not just distracting rhetoric, it directs violence and oppression. It is a false consciousness for those who follow it and do the oppressing, e.g. racists, but it is generally not that for the oppressed, it is, for example, poverty and alienation and exclusion and internalized racism.

Presenting it like Gary has done fails to reach the correct synthesis, again likely because of his poor understanding of history, politics, and economics, and it creates a choice for the marginalized who listen. Do they:

• Just try to look past it, seeing yet another guy that mostly doesn't get it but has useful tidbits?
• Buy in and begin denying their own experiences and robbing their politics of oppression that is not explicitly economic?
• Reject him as someone dismissive of oppression and their experience?

I am normally pretty charitable with people trying to spread even vague class consciousness but Gary's ignorant, liberal, and reductionist form tends to backfire on top of being incorrect.

The core motivation is more or less correct, as is the base of the analysis: the political duopolies in the UK and US are a reflection of ruling class interests and preside over policies that pick your pocket.

But it is robbed of its essential political economic essence via an anemic look at history and politics, and the biggest indicator of this is that the only "solution" provided suggests a liberal policy outcome ("tax the rich") without any vehicle for doing so. You can also see how detached this is from the actusl mechanisms of struggle and geopolitics, as he describes your great-great grandparents as being poor and the only reason things got better was that people voted for taxing the rich and voting for the NIH, etc. Were the politicians of yore not beholden to ruling class interests? If not, why not? It is easy to say, "oh they just had different opinions" without questioning why they carried weight or why ruling class politicians would capitulate or why there were parties not fully aligned with the immediare interests of the ruling class that were permitted to exist. There was no discussion of colonialism or neocolonialism, imperialism, the primary source of differential wealth for the OECD countries. There was no discussion of the historical development of the welfare state and what powers were at play, the role played by labor, the role played by imperialists getting shamed by socialist-run countries and made to fear their iwn workers doing the same.

There was no real discussion of what Starmer and his faction represent, which is not "sensibilism", they are just a bulwark against the left. Starmer is the punch left, he does not have any real policy changes outside of placating his TERF base and he will turn (and increasingly has) turned on immigrants. Starmer is in power because ruling class interests aligned with taking down Corbyn and his faction. They threw their entire media apparatus at him with bullshit accusations of antisemitism and turned this into a loss and a purge if the left, such as it is, from labour. Starmer's faction led that charge internally. How would "vote to tax the rich" ever contend with that? Your votes are fptp and subject to a duopoly. You at least require the death or subjugation of labour by a new party, something that requires much more than voting. It requires organizing an institution not beholden to ruling class interestd, an organization that will oppose them, and that requires having an anti-capitalist program, not a "tax the rich" slogan.