amemorablename @ amemorablename @lemmygrad.ml

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2 yr. ago

Just crystallized for me that I have a tendency to retreat into myself when I'm stressed and it makes it harder to be friends with people because 1) it means time that I'm less interested in spending with them / getting to know them / etc. for no apparent reason and 2) I miss out on bonding that I could be doing by telling them what my stresses are. Probably made worse, too, by the fact that my beliefs aren't exactly mainstream in the US / western sphere, so when the stress is induced by things relating to that, even if I did try to share my stresses, a lot of people would probably just not really get quite what it is that I'm stressed about.

Even in the context of Trump being in charge of the US right now, I still feel somewhat alone when talking to liberal-resistance-minded people about it because it's like they're approaching it from another universe of belief about how things work. Like with USAID, trying to explain my not exactly being shock and horror that it's facing problems. Some of the stuff I think is funny or borderline funny, they think is super serious and some of the stuff they think is funny I think is missing the mark. But that's just an example of where it's worse, I think. My problems with it go beyond politics.

Oh ok, that would explain not being able to find it then. Thanks for the info.

How do you directly/privately message the mods of a community? Or do you have to DM a specific mod? I know of the report feature for specific posts, but thinking of broader message than that.

I can't speak for the intended point by cfgaussian. However, in context, I think an underlying point here is that, at least for westerners, most of their distrust of Russia comes from US imperialist lies, so it is an important contrast to bring up the lies of the US empire. In other words, if it were the case that most things the west has said about Russia are false, what is there left as far as automatically distrusting their word goes? There are undoubtedly fair and reasonable ideological disagreements with modern day Russia from a communist standpoint, considering they are a far cry from USSR days now (thus "critical support" for them insofar as they are anti-imperialist). But in terms of speaking truthfully, I've not come across major reasons to think they have a habit of spinning elaborate lies. This isn't to say they aren't biased (all sources are to an extent) but there's a distinction between that and going to great lengths to fabricate entire narratives in great detail. So whether they are de facto trustworthy is sort of beside the point. The point is that (again, at least for westerners, can't speak for elsewhere) it would seem most of the reason to assume dishonesty from them comes from western imperialist lies about them. Westerners would not tend to make the same assumptions about, for example, a French documentary, in spite of its colonial history and part in imperialism.

In addition, he seems to have a scandal following him around about DMs with minors.

Do you have any sources on this?

Exactly and I would say, both of the following can be true at the same time and the second part is maybe where some people get caught up in believing the "blame the voters" narrative:

• The US is not a people's democracy. If it is democracy in any meaning, it's "democracy for the rich."
• The US contains a not-insignificant number of people who hold little to no power over the direction of the country as a whole, but are still deeply racist and/or colonial in their thinking, whether they exercise that in the day to day or not. These are dangerous people who those in power no doubt try to pull from for the footsoldiers of continuing the status quo, but it does not mean that a car mechanic who's a bit reactionary or whatever, is deciding the fate of the country.

And if we look at how people act when they have accurate information (such as in the case of Palestine), there's quite a lot of sincere sympathy and will for a humanitarian cause. Which is something the empire historically tries to take advantage of, such as in branding its agenda as "spreading democracy" and trying to repress accurate information about the goings on in the world. There's sincere care to be found, in other words, that doesn't even have to be nurtured much, but sometimes the challenge is getting lies out of the way, so that people can see the US for what it is as an entity and understand how their care gets used to manufacture consent for atrocities.

I'm sorry. I hope I don't come across like I'm trying to tell people how they should feel about it. People's feelings are their own. And FWIW, as USian culture goes, I don't see it as something that can survive if the region is to be decolonized. Some form of mass cultural reformation would probably need to happen alongside a new system of power that is in partnership with (not dominion over) fully sovereign indigenous nations, in order to get past all the deeply embedded colonizer thinking and behavior, including all the racism and so on. It's a really messy situation and sometimes I wish I had been born somewhere I had an actual ethnic heritage and culture, instead of "blend of european whose ancestors came over to join in the colonization at some point." :/

Also, these are the kind of people who suffer most at the hands of the empire, both at its height and in its decline, not the ones the most petty feelings would wish will suffer most: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7011701

Once again, it is the most marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering. You have to create consequences for the colonizers, not sit around and hope some votes that are part of their own machine will boomerang consequences back on them.

America deserves trump.

The colonial entity that has terrorized the world for decades and prior to that did genocide to create itself, used slavery, etc., deserves Trump making a mockery of their propaganda? Yes.

Some random people in appalachia dealing with hurricane fallout or in california dealing with wildfires "deserve Trump"? No. Don't play into the democrats' "blame the voters" narrative. The US does have a not-insignificant number of people with reactionary, shitty views and behavior, but the amount of power regular people have over any of the broader decisions is wildly exaggerated by those in power, in order to redirect blame from themselves. The most recent election, for example, was effectively between two candidates and no one else presented as viable, both of whom supported/support genocide. There was no outcome there through voting that was going to be fundamentally better, short of pulling off a third party upset like PSL and they were struggling just to get on the ballot in some states. Hell, as far as I can tell about the US, a lot of people are less bloodthirsty and are more just "don't even know what the hell is going on" because of how effective the propaganda has been. Sometimes I'll hear from someone I know who is more of a liberal on an issue that has been ongoing, but they're acting like it's suddenly new because they're now hearing about it under Trump. I'm pretty sure there's even stuff on occasion that I missed because it was obfuscated under a democrat president and I'd like to think I pay attention pretty well, overall.

There are components of US society that need to be confronted beyond just class, that is 100% for sure. But it's also more complicated than just "the US is bloodthirsty white settlers", especially with all the intermixing of various ethnic groups that are considered non-white, including the partial (I say partial cause of still existing systemic racism) integration of black people into "regular" US life. And including the indigenous nations who still exist and are going to be affected by what happens in the region because of how all-encompassing the US state's presence is in the region it covers.

If you don't live in the US, this may not matter as much as a distinction. But for those of us who are here, it's important that we're not prematurely throwing under the bus anyone and everyone we could organize with, because of some narratives that people basically suck and don't want to do good things.

Edit: Also, I will remind people, if you're trying to be communist, your priorities are allegedly supposed to be about caring what happens to other people. We all have moments we want to let off steam and of course you don't need to try to organize with nazis or the like, but if you're more interested in watching the world burn than helping people who are in need, then you are just continuing the mindset of the colonizer, not dismantling it. Liberals don't get flack for being compassionate, that's not the problem with the ones who sincerely are. They get flack for false compassion and feckless pacifism in the face of systemic exploitation. Compassion is the thing that some of them actually get right, they just often aren't applying it politically in a way that does much of anything.

Oh interesting, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!

Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I'm curious and admittedly, when I read "crypto", I think of big tech grifters, but I know that's not all of cryptography as a field.

Thanks for sharing this and your analysis on it in such depth. It is interesting and insightful.

This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. And by accountability I don't even mean about bad actors, necessarily, more just not being able to hold someone to anything. Being hyperdependent on one or a few people continuing to show up and keep at what they were doing for stuff that can impact hundreds, thousands, or more. I don't know what the answer is there because it's hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.

Someone (who is kinda liberal) suggested I watch the superbowl halftime show, in part cause of its politics is the impression I got from them, so I watched a recording of it and I didn't understand it. Some of the lyrics I was not even catching or seemed like the typical self-talking-up of rap and the whole bit with Sam Jackson being Uncle Sam was like ??? what message are they going for here. The best part I could find on it was the unplanned part with the person who waved the Palestinian/Sudanese flag, but I didn't even see that in the video itself that I watched. Am I just not the target audience or needed captions? My instincts say "it's resistance liberal politics", but maybe I'm being unfair and I need to look more closely at the lyrics.

Good thread on it here: https://x.com/UsaKfl/status/1887881223873147327

I'm not a professional in this stuff or anything, so take this with a grain of salt, but it sounds to me like the two of you need to sit down and have some heart to heart talks about your feelings. Like what you feel about these things, what she feels about them, etc. And I don't mean "feelings" as in "I think the dems are awful" or "I hate Stalin"; those are more like beliefs/worldview. I mean drilling down to the raw emotion of it, as isolated as possible from judgments/descriptions of the other. For example "I feel scared when I think about communism" or "I feel alone when you say I'm a 'Stalin worshiping tankie'."

Communism has a lot of fear-mongering baked into it in the US, so it's easy to have people who on the one hand feel abandoned by everyone else in their life for believing in it and on the other hand, have people who are terrified of the implications of anyone in their life who does believe in it. Once you know how each other feels, then you can get into dealing with it. For example, if she's scared of you being communist, you could explain what communism means to you and talk in more detail about what you do in the day to day of volunteering. Or if you feel isolated by her acting this way, she could try to make sure it's clear that she appreciates you in spite of any fears she might have about your political beliefs.

What the feelings would look like for each of you is something only you know. The examples are just to help illustrate what I mean.

Good points. My mind has been on this exact subject recently and I've been trying to work out what it is I'm trying to say, though I think you said some of it. Regardless, I will attempt to put into words some of what's on my mind about it.

Namely that there is this moralizing view (that in my case, I see most coming from catholic upbringing, but it may be from western media as well) where the focus is on this idea that everyone is sort of at risk of becoming morally corrupt. And so there is this undue focus on the morality of an action in isolation and whether it moves the needle on driving you toward corruption, sometimes leading to a pathology associated with what we call "harm OCD", but more often probably just causing people to be a bit warped in their thinking and attention paid.

The moralizing view, rather than looking at what is effective toward the goal and the benefit and harm contained in it, it tends to look for purity very much so. The action that contains both benefit and harm is considered corrupted (which doesn't make sense, as it's virtually impossible for any action to contain only one or the other, purely) and must be faced with guilt and reassurance that it has no broader implications of the person becoming a corrupted being.

Ironically, the moralizing view is more apt to cause you to have a mismatch in intent and result. Because you are viewing people as good or bad. So you are both unfairly accommodating and forgiving of the people in the "good" group and you are unfairly combative and unforgiving of the people in the "bad" group.

As communists, this kind of thinking is impossible to work with and at odds with dialectics. We have to be able to do principled criticism of our own and we have to be understanding of the masses who are not communist, just as we work against the colonizer/imperialist and look out for those in need (which often go hand in hand). What is most effective is the order of the day and the moralizing view would tend to think this is somehow unfeeling and corruptive, that by focusing on what is effective over what is "the right thing to do," you are losing sight of your moral center and becoming one of the "bad" ones. I think the mistake here, though this I admit is a component of it I'm less clear on because of the internalized strength of that moralizing thought process, is in thinking that being effectiveness focused means lacking compassion. Compassion is a critical element for us as communists and we have to figure out how to reduce harm with compassion at the helm, which leads us to scientific socialism theory and practice. The moralizing view, by contrast, is all about fear of the "animalistic nature" (a bizarre view of humans and animals as something only a few steps removed from brutality at all times); and it is focused on running from a negative rather than evaluating how to reach a positive.

Curious to know if that makes sense. This is so long cause I'm thinking some of this through as I type.

It is strange to contend with for sure. People are actually facing up to an ongoing genocide and using language like (and I am not exaggerating here based on what I've seen) "Trump would make it a thousand times worse." It is a claim that has no grounding in a reality that we can contend with. Genocide is about as bad as you can get. There is no "turbo genocide."

What that kind of language tells me is that the people peddling it either: 1) don't believe there is a genocide going on or 2) don't care very much that it's happening because it doesn't affect them personally.

I don't know how else one could arrive at such an absurd position. I expect revulsion, disgust, outrage, at what is being backed by the US state and in spite of the horror, it is heartening how many people seem to get that aspect of it (I will take the positives where I can find them). But when it comes to the liberals who somehow bypass all of that and say "but Trump," I do not trust their understanding of the world or their capability to empathize. I find it difficult to see them as substantially different from reactionaries who fear scapegoated specters.

I was thinking along similar lines. Liberals were terrified when Trump was in office. Under Biden, they seem mostly terrified of Trump being in office again. In spite of the material differences between the two presidencies being not that substantial; I say not that substantial in the meaning that most US presidents are not that substantially different. They do a handful of things differently, but they all continue the same colonial/imperialist agenda.

The only substantial difference I see between the two is that the brand of rightism behind Trump seems to want to formalize a totalitarian state. This is where, and I am open to disagreement if anyone thinks I'm falling for liberal narratives here, that the argument of similarity to the formation of nazi germany has some legitimacy. But the part liberals don't get is that the US is already obscenely, systematically and systemically awful and has been for the entirety of its existence. It arguably can be worse, but it's not as though the formation of a different brand of fascism is the end of a people's democracy; it would be more like finally taking the mask off in full, shredding the thin veneer of "freedom" that the US clings to in its constitutional fetishizing and branding. The more immediate harm that could arguably occur from such is serious, but liberals also have a tendency to drastically misunderstand and downplay the harm that is already occurring now and has been occurring throughout US history.

But because they downplay, misunderstand, and trivialize, liberals' fear of Trump more resembles fear of a specter than fear of deteriorating conditions of safety and security for regular people, which are happening regardless of who is in office and which have been preceded by a variety of horrific conditions already.

I think I get what you mean especially with the part about, "It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year." I'm not familiar with that term itself, but the notion of history stopping for some people, I think, is an important point and relates to the larger point you're making about China's current state as well as about those who fetishize theory. I want to choose my words carefully lest I sound like someone who is saying the history does not matter or that we can just abandon all past experiences and methods and pretend they're irrelevant (an equally silly notion in its own right) but it does appear like some people are effectively stopping after a certain point in history and saying, "This is where socialism [or communism, whichever you prefer to call it for the sake of this example] was halted and from here on out, it has been a failure." A notion that appears to happen both in the kind of instance you're describing and in other instances, such as people who are getting their feet wet in theory and who say AES states are "not real socialism/communism." I'm not sure the motives are the same in every case (I think for the people getting their feet wet, for example, there is a real fear of supporting existing socialist projects because they're still in this place of viewing them through the lens of imperialist vilification).

Either way, we come back to what you say about "start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit", whether it is for China or another country. I know in my own case, I've adopted a stance that goes something like: "I don't know and until I do, I will not act like I do." So when someone comes to me with empire news perspectives on a historically vilified country, rather than saying "it's a perfect place, don't question it" or saying "yeah, real socialism hasn't been tried" or saying "it was good and then revisionists ruined it," I will say, "I don't know." If I get to a point I understand enough about the details of its conditions through sources I can trust, then I can begin to grapple with the day to day realities of it and I can talk to people about those realities rather than through generalizations that obscure the conditions. But reaching that point is, I think, especially for those of us who live immersed in empire news locales, a difficult thing to do. And it is very easy for us to instead go by the western chauvinist mindset of, "I understand the 'lesser' country better than they understand themselves." That is what those of us growing up in the imperial core have been socialized to do.