Jonathan12345

joined 4 years ago
[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 days ago

Yeah, that's why learning history and having a bigger global and historical context is so important, it just opens your worldview up so far beyond the basic liberal narrow worldview.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's precisely it! I feel material conditions showing liberalism's failures are a big part of this move towards apologetics/attempted salvations of liberalism, and as those too crumble we have a good opportunity to educate people we should take advantage of.

 

I think at some point, most of us have been liberals. From a young age, most in the west (or at least the US) have grown up with a liberal view of the world instilled into them: people have power by voting; therefore, society is good because good people will vote for good people, and good people will do good things to make society better. A relatively well-off liberal will spend the first decade or so in ignorant bliss, not aware of the world around them. It is not until the liberal begins to realize that the world is not so perfect after all that they come to doubt things.

If voting will lead to good people in power and lead to a world where politicians do good things... why isn't the world good?

The liberal stands at a crossroads.

There is a single, very simple option--that things actually are good. Liberals who believe this are often the ones that turn into ghoulish social darwinist hacks, arguing that inequality, oppression and such don't really matter, and it's all a matter of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, that some are just naturally lazy, etc.... it's a very naive way of looking at things, and the people who subscribe to this tendency tend to be quite naive and privileged as well.

However, especially in today's world, such ignorant bliss is becoming increasingly less viable. So, which way, liberal?

There is of course the option to reject liberalism's framework entirely. It's an ideology of weakness, of women in videogames... that path doesn't lead to more liberalism and it's been discussed thoroughly, so I won't go into it.

The liberals who no longer buy into the success of their ideology must come to a new conclusion: that liberalism has been betrayed, stabbed in the back, even. The most important part of a liberal's political development comes from who exactly they believe betrayed liberalism.

A quite simple, establishment friendly answer is: foreign actors. Russians, Chinese, the communists, whatever... they're influencing our elections, they're buying out our politicians. The advantage of this approach is a form of clean-wehrmacht maneuver, where they can acknowledge the failure of liberalism while at the same time absolving themselves of all moral responsibility: it's the dirty racist/homophobic/authoritarian foreigners responsible for everything wrong, if it weren't for them we'd be living in a democratic utopia! This kind of western exceptionalism, as you might imagine, often backslides into eurolib-style liberal fascism when things really hit the fan.

Other liberals, who examine the world a bit more closely, may conclude that capitalism is the problem. With all the problems in the world today, it's hard not to. They see how much influence the rich have over political processes, and conclude that they are causing bad things. However, while this form of liberalism seems more aligned with leftism, it does contain one crucial flaw: it does not recognize that liberal democracy upholds capitalism by nature, but rather views western political structures as inherently apolitical and natural. This may be why they cling to reformism, as they naively believe that capitalist institutions can be peacefully reformed away from destructive capitalism, just as a gambler believes with skillful maneuvering they may be able to strike it rich gambling.

That's the end of my writeup about liberals, I was gonna write more but I got bored and didn't know what to write thanks for reading everyone

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago

Anarchism is completely incompatible with communism because from their point of view, states are bad because they are states, and there are no differences between feudal, capitalist, or socialist states because states are hierarchy and hierarchy is bad. Deeply unmaterialistic and unserious ideology.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago

Congratulations! I'm happy to hear that it worked out, and I wish you more and more success in the future!

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago

Whatever occurs, I wish you the best of luck going forward. You've done well already.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago

Like, mutually assured destruction, as in if they try to use this against you you can threaten to blow this up and create a ton of bad press and a huge headache for everyone involved. I'm not exactly sure how that could be done, though.

If you do plan on going that route, though, I think something like this could blow up on social media. If you feel that it's reached that stage, it might be worth a shot to try to create some social media attention/outrage. if you'd like you could dm me any materials on social media your group has about the situation, and I could try to get some friends to post it on instagram/twitter whatever for visibility, but there's no guarantee it could work.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago (6 children)

This might be a bad idea, but I do think if they tried to weaponize your past SA against you it'd look really, really bad for them if word got out, to the point of national embarrassment. So it might be possible to set up a kind of MAD like that, if they don't try to force you out of negotiating?

still, you should prioritize your own mental health/safety.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago

My history teacher is pretty vocally anti-trump, but bought the anti-communist kool-aid hard. I was cringing through her entire lecture about how the soviet union hated religion and people getting together to oppose the government, and the cold war unit is just getting started...

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago (8 children)

First I want to say that you're not a failure!

You're already extremely brave for being willing to put yourself out there like that, organizing a movement and clashing with authority head on. I think that you're also being unfair to yourself, since the things that are going on in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon etc aren't under our direct control, and they're not things that we can fix with our own efforts easily. You're doing more than the vast majority of people, and you should be proud of that.

As for what you should do... I think at this point you kind of have three options. The first is to completely burn bridges and announce that you're going ahead with the walkout anyways, and to organize it. The downside for this is that you'll draw more fire from the administration, and possibly they'll try to take you down or get you expelled somehow. If you can gain more visibility for yourself, you might be able to make this a bigger fight, but it is pretty risky.

Another option would be for you to publicly announce that you'll no longer be hosting the walkout, but imply that others can still do it spontaneously, if they'd like, essentially detaching it from yourself, while also making it clear you're under pressure. And finally, you could completely acquiesce, keep your head down, and hope they don't come after you any more.

Personally, I feel 1 or 2 would be better, but you've more than earned your right to choose what to do from this point on.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 month ago

Apparently he didn't rig them, they were against opponents/set up in a way to ensure he'd always have a huge advantage, which is arguably worse and somewhat similar to how the US does things.

[–] Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've been browsing SLS on reddit lately, and the condescending, aggressive finger wagging tone of libs there really, really pisses me off. You'd think for all the 'lesser evil' shit they're on about, they would at least acknowledge the 'evil' part a year after they lost the election instead of being fuming mad at leftists and minorities...

 

I'm sure we have all heard that quote about the goal of fascists being to waste your time. While normally it is expected of us to engage in good faith and to attempt to educate those who are ignorant, even if they come off as standoffish, there comes a point where we can see the exception in the making. We will say, "this person means to anger us and nothing more". And in these situations, there is not much more to do except to ridicule them and wait for the inevitable ban, praise our diligent moderators.

Except that even these snarky responses or attempted debunks are wasting our time. To be sure, we may inadvertently educate lurkers, which is good. However, there comes a certain point when it is clear explaining further will have no positive consequences for any involved party except perhaps the time-wasting fascist.

This is where I propose the use of the soyjak. This is not a joke. There is something beautiful in the succinctness of depicting your opponent as an angry, hysterical, frothing-at-the-mouth soyjak; there is an absurdity in it all that pulls back the layers of smugness from the fascist and reveals them for the clown they are. What clever response will they have, when they are depicted as the virgin soyboy and us as the enlightened chad?

It may seem lazy, to be sure, but laziness is subjective. We must use all the tools we have at our disposal; despite negative sentiments surrounding ai it is nonetheless a great tool for us, especially our more tech-oriented comrades. For the more absurdist among us, the soyjak is our weapon. It is a lazy answer to a lazy question; it is fighting fire with fire. This is our way of telling them that we will not be playing their games.

bonus: Chinese brainrot ideologies tierlist. I made this the day of that post but never got around to uploading until now.

 

So with all the stuff going on recently in Gaza and Iran, and with all the islamophobic comments I've been seeing recently on youtube, I realized I really didn't know as much about middle eastern history as I'd like to. I did learn some in history class, which was decent enough and fortunately lacked chuddish overtones, but I'd like to know much more since there was so much they could fit into the course. Does anyone have good suggestions? Doesn't have to be explicitly communist, but I would prefer if the author wasn't a raging midwest armybro pro-iraq war chud.

Thanks in advance!

 

So last year while I was in China, all my vpns were super busted, so I spent a long time watching bilibili. And I was able to soak up quite a bit of knowledge about the average user there by doomscrolling the comments.

Contrary to what one might think, the average Chinese person isn't actually an expert in Marxism-Leninism and dialectical materialism. Most people, as in the west, don't care much about coherent ideology and just go off vibes. And as anywhere, that can lead to some pretty wacky beliefs. In this tierlist, I'll go over some of the more common ones I've seen/heard about, and rank them based on their wackiness and stupidity, and place them in a tier. Keep in mind I'm approaching this mostly as an outsider, and apologize in advance for any mistakes or oversights, and welcome any corrections. With that being said, let's get into it.

F tier

First we have the conservative westhaters. As you might imagine, these people hate the west, which is good. They also hate gay people, trans people, feminism, etc., which is... not good. Despite the existence of the firewall they seem to have somehow gained access to jordan peterson, and proceeded to mental gymnastics themselves into a maga position, but from the standpoint that America is bad precisely because of 'wokeness'. Granted, they're not as hyperfixated on minorities as western rightoids are; it's more of a casual thing, but can still be annoying. They get a 7 in stupidity, and 1 in wackiness. Pretty basic stuff.

D tier

D tier is where things get a bit more interesting. We start off with a kind of lib that may be familiar to many of us, of the thermonuclear variety. Chinese ultras are every bit as insufferable as western ones, and pretty common. They cite statistics such as the top 2% in China owning 98% of the wealth, without ever giving a source. Quite convenient how 98 and 2 add up to 100 for the dramatic effect, doesn't it? In contrast to western ultras, these don't really fixate on Albania or Catalonia as much. Mostly they just bash China and talk about how shit it is for the poor farmers in the desert and how everything the government does is just self-interest of capital. I hate them so fucking much but they're pretty boring honestly. I give them an 8 in stupidity and 3 in wackiness.

Next we have western bootlickers. Now believe it or not these are actually quite rare; I've almost never seen one in the wild. These people are basically run-of-the-mill bootlickers who say that the west is great, china bad, in the most generic sense. They seemingly mostly died out a decade back and have never recovered since. Good riddance. 6 in stupidity, 0 in wackiness.

C tier

The first entry in C tier are mingcels. These people love history, kind of like western crusadebros. Similar to crusadebros, mingcels love the Ming empire and think it was the best thing ever, and they hate the Qing dynasty for ending it and, in their opinion, ruining China. Unable to let go of beef that's almost 400 years old, you can still find them angrily screeching in comment sections of any qing-related content to this day. 5 in stupidity, 7 in wackiness.

The second entry for C tier are professional Japan haters. In China, the public consciousness of the European holocaust and Japan's crimes are flipped, so while many understandably harbor a distaste for Japan given its history with China and refusal to offer any sort of apology, some take it a step further and essentially make hating Japan their entire personality. The closest analogy I can think of is professional pedophile haters. Obviously, pedophiles and japan are bad, but... dial it down a bit, geez. These people support showing nsfl war crime documentaries to children in order to ingrain hatred for Japan (and ptsd) into the next generation so they can nuke it to dust. I get the idea but the execution here is just... not great. Stupidity 5, wackiness 0.

B tier

Finally, B tier, where things really get going. All of these are super funny, so I had a hard time ranking, but I had to make a decision in the end.

First entry in B tier are the conspiracybros. While some conspiracies are mostly apolitical, such as brains being extraterrestrial parasites, others are significantly more out there. For instance, the existence of japanese technical schools in China is irrefutable evidence to these people that there's some sort of Japanese Great Replacement plan to... replace Chinese people with Japanese people? Yeah it doesn't make that much sense to me either. They also may believe that GMOs are a western plot to poison Chinese people. Honestly this is just generic conspiracyslop with an anti-west spin, and it's really just sad once you get past the novelty. 7 stupidity, 6 in wackiness.

Next we have han nationalists. While pretty rare, I have seen one in the wild. There are some truly bizarre flavors of ethnonationalism given the sheer volume of internet-using people in China, and these are perhaps exemplified by the very real belief that China should like, un-annex every territory that's not a han homeland. This is so unfathomably stupid I can't even put it into words. They don't seem to rag on about minorities as much as save europebros do, but they do really hate black people for some reason. 9 stupidity, 7 wackiness.

A tier

We start off A tier with one of my personal favorites, sarcasmbros. I've never really known a counterpart in the west to these people, and while they're pretty far from being an 'ideology' per se, they're definitely noteworthy enough to be included here. If I had to say, they're like personifications of the 'erm akshuwually' soyjak. I'm not even kidding, they talk exactly like the stereotype, but in Chinese. They also really love using the doge emoji, though not related to musk as far as I'm aware. They generally don't seem to like China very much, and they make this clear to everyone by sarcastically hinting at how China is actually terrible because of [insert nonissue here]. They're super super insufferable and have the most milquetoast ultra takes. It's like if anarchists spent way too long moderating discord and reddit and tried to model themselves after the strawman smugjack, I really don't know how else to describe it. They get an 8 in stupidity, and a 4 in wackiness.

S tier

Finally, S tier. We have the king of all wacky ideologies, the undisputed most moronic and absurd of them all: Chinese fascism.

Remember when I said in China, public consciousness of the Holocaust and Japanese atrocities are flipped compared to in the west? And you know how some people in the west will simp for imperial Japan and overlook or even glorify their crimes?

Yeah.

Chinese fascists, disturbingly common (though still very minute in quantity), slurp up 1930s German propaganda about price-inflating Jews in complete earnestness, and still believe the US is controlled by the Israeli Jewish shadow government. They also came up this bizarre fanfiction about Hitler where he was saved from drowning by a Chinese guy, and he then vowed to share the world with China after he finished conquering it because he loved Chinese people so much and owed them such a great debt. They actually believe this stuff, too, which is just...

Don't write wet dream fantasies about your favorite fascist dictators please...

They also think that Japan somehow loved Jews and wanted to make part of China into a Jewish homeland, which doesn't make sense even in the context of their ideology. Is the axis your brave anti-semitic vanguard or is it a Jewish shadow plot? And the answer is neither, because their entire worldview is just nazi fanfiction they made up in their head while gooning to fascist boat women in azur lane. Needless to say, these people get 10 in stupidity and 10 in wackiness as well.

That's all for this tier list. Again, please correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

 

I have little doubt that we have all heard the line that transphobes use, that your gender is what you're born with, you can't change it, etc, and needless to say this is stupid, almost as stupid as the time I saw someone on reddit trying to convince someone diagnosed with NPD they didn't actually have it (the stigma surrounding that condition is absurd). But while I'm assured most of us know that this is wrong, I still think it's important to know why, and what better way to do this than by using the very same 'basic biology' these people try to uphold?

To begin with, it's quite easy to see that the very concepts of 'male' and 'female are vague when you get into the specifics. As I have mentioned several times in the past, 'maleness' as we usually think of it is not in fact determined by the entire y chromosome, but by only a segment of it. If that segment is lost, as it sometimes is, the person in question develops as female but is chromosomally 'male', by the definitions of transphobes. So are they actually male or not? Either way, their criteria are completely broken down. And this problem isn't just limited to the Y chromosome; what about XXY men? They bear some female secondary sexual characteristics, but they are undoubtedly recognizably developmentally male. And X, XXX, and XXX+ women do exist. What about them? Should XYY men be banned from sports as well due to their supposed heightened testosterone?

To make matters more complicated, development of sexual characteristics is more complicated than just one gene. If anything downstream malfunctions, someone can end up with both male and female reproductive structures, also known as intersex people. What about them? Are they supposed to play male sports half the time and female sports the other half?

Even ignoring all this, the very conclusion that the existence of trans people is 'unscientific' is false. The consensus in the scientific community is that sex and gender are indeed separate, and can be misaligned for an individual. If they're willing to deny what actual scientists are saying for their own ideology, they're free to do that, but they have no excuse to pretend to uphold science. How do I know what scientists agree on? My anatomy and physiology textbook. From 2006.

An entire decade before the whole wokemongering bullshit started. It's not as if the authors are particularly progressive either; several other textbooks I own from the early 2000s to a few years back agree on this.

I think it's quite clear that anything transphobes say isn't based in fact, but only their own delusions. They can't deny that they don't give a shit about biology at all, which is perfectly fine to me. However, they shouldn't go around masquerading as triumphant 'experts' when they don't understand what they're trying to use as a cudgel. The sad thing is, many uninformed people will see their rhetoric online and fall for their bad faith arguments, and I think it's the responsibility of those who know better to not only tell them not only that they are wrong, but also why they are wrong.

I apologize for the terrible structure and awkward phrasing.

 

Can't make this shit up

 

I burst out laughing when I read this sentence

 

I'm not quite sure what to think of this yet. A few months back I remember there was talk about a marxist winning an election in Sri Lanka, but now it looks like things are a lot more complicated than I'd thought. What do we think about this?

 
 
 

Personally I'm not that good at countering liberal comments on our posts, which seems to be happening more and more frequently with any posts relating to China. It'd be a lot easier if we could have a big pinned post with all the materials we need so we can just link to it whenever we need to.

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