Doubling down on feigned obtuseness, I see.

You can take the girl out of Reddit, but can’t take the Reddit out of the girl.

The same numerically. You’re not that obtuse, so is this a joke or are you a cringey debatelord?

social justice warriors

Okay boomer.

Not sure—I haven’t read any fascist manifestos. Maybe Blackshirts and Reds.

Dugin isn’t “Putin’s Brain” any more than Navalny was, but he is popular with some US & European fascists.

• https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin
• 📺 Caleb Maupin speaks next to Aleksandr Dugin at Alternatives To Globalization Conference in 2018

There are already dozens of decent feed aggregators, and I’m not interested in Lemmy tacking on functionality that’s superfluous to social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators

Or do you mean follow or block posted links to sites? That functionality already partially exists at the admin level. We can block posts of URLs to specific domains. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4514

There’s already a ticket for per-user URL blocklists: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4689

I believe we need dedicated spaces for political discussion that are not based on algorithms optimized for engagement (aka outrage).

So do we, which is one of the reasons why Lemmy was created, and why Lemmy does not have algorithms for rage engagement. Lemmy is all cost and no revenue, so there is no financial incentive for it to “maximize ‘engagement.’”

The first is a way to limit bots or bad actors from participating in discussions.

Where are the actually-existing the “bot problems” on Lemmy? While it could happen, I don’t think it actually is happening to any significant extent presently.

Reappropriation is a thing.

So on the one side I will talk about how renting is not bad when the person who “owns” property lives there and get a lot of flak.

I’m a former owner-occupant of a multi-unit property. This is a textbook petit bourgeois assertion, the kind of thing that Bernie Sanders might say. He’ll rail against crony capitalism and über capitalism but not per se capitalism. Petit capitalism as a treat inevitably leads to the haute capitalism and oligarchy we suffer under today.

How do you propose we get rid of them? Because that is our end goal, which we make our plans toward reaching.

A big problem with most other leftists’ plans are their prefigurative politics. “Be the change you want to see in the world” doesn’t cut it while the world is significantly controlled by imperialist states. Until those capitalist states are dispensed with, socialist states don’t have the luxury of prefiguration, or they go the way of Allende’s Chile.

A (long) excerpt from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds: Anticommunism & Wonderland. Here’s a snippet:

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism — not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience — could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? … Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life.

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe — and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them — all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. …

These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make].

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta);” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency — which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

BTW, the Soviet Union wasn’t a nation-state and neither is China, but rather multinational states.

Tankies are Authoritarian communist, as opposed to democratic or liberal communism

All states are authoritarian; all communist states to date have followed a form of democratic centralism; and “liberal communism” is an oxymoron because liberalism is founded on private ownership of the means of production.

It refers to when the soviet union put down rebellion in Hungry and Czechoslovakia by rolling in the tanks.

Neither of which were proletarian rebellions. Both were bourgeois counterrevolutions backed by western imperialist states. They were color revolutions, and these kinds of regime change operations are still happening today.

• JFK Files Reveal CIA Role in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising The tankies were right
• The 1968 Prague Spring — Counterrevolution as the “Trojan Horse” of Imperialism
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent

 
https://redsails.org/tankies/

Large Language Models (LLMs) aren’t truth machines. They’re garbage in, garbage out. The input to English-language models is largely English-language texts from Five Eyes countries, with all the disinformation and bias that that entails. This is an especially poor topic to engage LLMs with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedNote

First of all there is no slave labor in China. Second of all it hasn’t been kept quiet, or else people wouldn’t be posting about it. And third of all the US is not benefiting from any labor in Xinjiang because it has banned imports from the region in order to cause unemployment in the hopes of rekindling its failed terrorism campaign.

And what can we know about the region in the current time, like can a random tourist go and see with their own eyes the truth, and maybe film it ?

Yes, you can go there and film it, which plenty of people have done and posted them on RedNote, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

China and the Marxist forums deny anything harmful

We don’t deny anything harmful for which there is actual evidence. The US-backed Salafi/Wahhabi extremist terrorist attacks certainly were harmful[1][2], and if you would consider the prosecution of said terrorists to be harmful, then okay.

Or a PieFed user or an Mbin user. The threadiverse isn’t only Lemmy.

Lemmy users

Not everyone here is on Lemmy, and this is a Redditism that I wish we’d leave behind.

And all the fundamenta of capitalism and imperalism are consequences of how we humans are our own wolves.

• It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. — Frederic Jameson
• It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of imperialism. — Daniel Bessner

 
Genetic determinism was historically grossly over-applied and is still over-applied in popular (pseudo-)science and in far-right politics.

Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, and the debates around the heritability of IQ, the basis of sexual orientation, and evolutionary foundations of cooperation in sociobiology.

You’re hastily jumping to the conclusion that the new thing is the same as the old thing just because it has some similarities.

Capitalist realism & imperialist realism and their consequences.