IIRC, Sri Lanka has been flipflopping between different presidents and parties over the last few years as the same economic hardship is hitting them as everywhere else, but even the “good” presidents are totally unwilling to resist IMF austerity, and even the most principled and well-intentioned communists just cannot get anything done if they aren’t willing to tell the World Bank to fuck off. I’m unsure whether this is a corruption/morality thing or if it’s because Sri Lanka genuinely is in such a shitty place that it would be provably worse for them to stop taking loans (i.e. they might be well and truly debt-trapped and only foreign help from China and friends could save them), because Sri Lanka has had such a complex history that I just haven’t had the time to look deeply into it with ~200 other countries also taking up my attention span.

I lurked on the subreddit, I lurked on the discord lifeboat (and left it as soon as the site went up) and then started posting occasionally. went through a few accounts with a dozen or so comments on each and then stuck with this one just in time for the Ukraine War to start

my upbringing in relative poverty primed me to accept genuinely left-wing ideas but remained in the liberal bubble until Corbyn and the movement that brought him to power came around and exposed me to the concept that ideas left of Obama existed. I was still kind of in that I’m-a-very-smart-and-respectable-and-civil-politics-understander zone but all it would take is a push, and that push came from the subreddit. I didn’t really have any background or knowledge of anarchism nor possessed any particular drive to distrust authority as a general concept so I slid pretty easily into Marxism-Leninism (though I do definitely like and respect anarchists and don’t really have any reason or background to be sectarian against them, so this website’s non-sectarianism fit me quite well).

I think the biggest part that attracted me was that people actually gave a shit about politics, there was actual passionate energy there, after years of lukewarm boring shit about how we just need to gradually introduce ranked-choice voting and shift taxes around and we’d create the perfect society. The only people I’d heard yelling about politics before was people yelling in support of reactionary policies, or sort of just yelling into the void about how they wished things could be better but offering no solution, but hearing people yell in support of policies that would help people was this big moment where my latent frustrations felt validated. Hearing somebody say something like “LET’S JUST GIVE HOMELESS PEOPLE HOUSES!” instead of liberals going “Hm, well, first we need to introduce a means-tested system of soup kitchens that utilize tax breaks to attract social workers…” was just one of those moments where you realize that problems can actually have (relatively) simple solutions and not everything has to be this stupid fucking 53-stage system which inevitably fails at stage 11 when a new president takes over and the parliamentarian says that there isn’t enough money or whatever.

also, I hate to say that the chapo podcast was a big part of my left-wing turn as much as the subreddit was, but it kinda was, so I’ll always have a spot in my heart for Felix and Matt even though I’ve outgrown them politically and don’t listen to it anymore. It did kinda Americanize me but I made up for it by becoming the Ultimate Geopolitics Understander Who Knows Something About Most Countries later on once the Ukraine War started.

“There are 80 million Germans in our glorious Fatherland. There are only 16 million Jews. It’s actually pretty selfish to choose the Jews over ourselves.”

denial of LTV is where the whole “paying somebody to dig a ditch and then fill it back in again is a refutation of Marx because there’s no value created there and yet labor was done” thing comes from, which is really a sign that these people haven’t read a single word of Marx

The reason this person is a cop is that they have totally, utterly internalized the ideals of totally, utterly atomized hyper-individualism, severed from all community, culture, and context, that modern capitalism demands of us. This person has made themselves in to the perfect capitalist singleton, the perfect consumer. They exist only as an indvidual organism that eats and shits, having no relationships of any kind with anyone. The only things they are capable of are labor, consumption, and death. The perfect capitalist robot clothed in the language of anarchism fascism.

It’s what happens when all you know is liberalism, and then you try and create an alternative political ideology which (usually unknowingly) uses the same building blocks as liberalism hoping that you’ll find The One True Ideology To Overthrow Capitalism, but then - oh no - at the end of the process, you just have a slightly different form of liberalism!

You see the above Nietzchean bullshit so many times in manifestos by mass shooters and other “radicals” that it’s just rather boring at this point. Oh, yet another alienated 20-40 year old white guy who believes that we have to rise up and act like hyperindividualist passionate revolutionaries to overthrow the weak woke/feminist/Jewish/Islamic/Chinese/etc capitalist regime that we all willingly tolerate and live under like emaciated brainwashed sheep? Wow, what’s next, are you gonna say that all authority is inherently tyrannical but single out those “dictators” that the US State Department specifically hates? I can’t wait to hear your opinion on cryptocurrency.

There are some (initially) uncomfortable truths in Marxism that liberals either have to digest or reject, but it provably produces an ideology which has generated revolutions against liberalism and capitalism, around the world and in many different situations.

I forget the quote and who said it, but there’s a line out there about how merely declaring that you or your comrades are now free in a revolutionary way is totally meaningless, as is “acting revolutionary” - the material conditions must be changed in order for you to achieve actual freedom.

The History Expansion Packs dropped in April and now a week ago as Iran was obviously not responding to any prior events and was merely attacking for no reason because history wasn’t there yet

as somebody who upbears everything they see before I even read it (and then removes it if I dislike what the person is saying) whenever I get into mini-debates on here and the other person doesn’t upbear my comment before replying, for about five seconds I perceive that as “fuck you, 72T.” before I then realize that many people are like you and just don’t upbear things that often.

I guess it’s just a holdover from reddit culture where you’ll see a comment thread 50 comments deep where both commenters have 0 votes on each comment because they’re both downvoting each other, and on here, not voting is the closest thing you have to a downvote

No worries, his other videos are fairly good and if you have free time then I’d recommend giving a few of their videos a spin, I just think this one sucks. It starts strong but then fails to create a big hammer-blow critique of liberalism and how it’s been an ideology for justifying slavery and imperialism and genocide around the world to this day and we must break free of the two-party system, and instead he heads into philosophical ennui

I totally agree with you; I watched this yesterday just after it released because I tend to enjoy Alexander’s videos though I have issues with most of them, and I came away from this very unhappy and have since unsubbed and made the algorithm stop recommending their stuff. Like, I don’t wanna be the guy to be like “Oh, you forgot to discuss X!” when X is only tangentially related and the post/video is already hours long, but holy fucking shit, there is almost zero discussion of anything outside of America in this video, which is a massively critical aspect of how liberalism and capitalism functions (i.e. imperialism). I’m not sure how you could talk about Alexander Hamilton without discussing his contribution to the creation of financial institutions which are now oppressing billions and destroying the planet. Nothing at all about the contradiction between Hamilton’s protectionism and the propaganda that America has been a champion of free markets for its entire existence?

This is the most well-articulated video exploring the “Western leftist” position I’ve ever seen, and it’s very ugly because of that. Marx isn’t dismissed per se, but he does the whole “Marx didn’t consider X” by stating that class conflict isn’t the only conflict in world history - which Marxist feminists and many others have already explored in great depth! It reads like he received this viewpoint from a Marx-sympathetic university course that nonetheless could not fully endorse Marxism for fear of people complaining that they’re turning people into commies; countervailing and ultimately useless ideological frameworks are therefore forced in to provide “balance”, like teaching that antibiotics and magical crystals could help treat the sick, and we have to keep an open mind! The tacit assumption is that Marxism is a dead-end ideology with many good ideas, instead of like, the guiding ideological framework of many if not most communist parties and communist states around the world (and most particularly the non-white world!) The unironic acceptance (though not endorsement) that liberalism stood victorious over the “totalitarian” ideologies of fascism and communism is incoherent in the current environment where a communist China is ascending past the United States. If he made this video in 2010, I’d understand; but this laziness no longer slides in 2024. Despite - and maybe even because of - the milquetoast calls to action and logging off that he does at the end, it leaves the viewer more muddled and confused than when they began. This isn’t always a bad thing, so long as it is part of a grander project to then elucidate the way forward after having dismantled previous conceptions of where society should be headed. This is not that. This is somebody upset at liberalism but so drenched in capitalist realism that they are unable to shift away from it to genuinely revolutionary internationalist thinking, and so they end up doing liberalism again but from a different perspective.

The end of the video is where I was forced to give up on him as a video essayist. I’m not sure if it’s the massive success of his youtube channel making him no longer connect as much with those in poverty (both inside and outside America); his university education in sociology (I think?) turning him into a PMC, or perhaps his background in some way. But saying that half the people telling you not to vote for Kamala are Russian bots is just peak radlib Tumblr/Reddit, and is disconnected from reality. The deaths of hundreds of thousands/millions of Palestinians, Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Vietnamese, Koreans, Cambodians, Filipinos, and many others is insufficient to move even the most “radical” of western leftists into working towards the dissolution of American fascist empire. They are the Nazi Germans who refused to fight against Hitler. They are hiding behind their media and will blame it, Nuremburg-style, when the forces of reaction are defeated and anti-imperialism triumphs. Their children and grandchildren will suffer under their weight of their parents and grandparent’s unwillingness to fight the status quo, questioning why they voted for a genocidal empress instead of working to dismantle the death machine. This video convinced me - they are not brainwashed, they know full-well what they are doing, and I can only hope that the oppressed peoples of the world grant them more forgiveness than they deserve.

From Gramsci:

source

the US maintains its relevance by portraying the DPRK as the rogue “other” that its puppet needs protection from

it’s the liberal contradictory nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. the DPRK is a dangerous totalitarian communist terrorist state that will destroy other nations around it if the pressure is given up for even a moment; it’s also simultaneously a weak, delusional, poverty-stricken kingdom ruled by a corrupt and incompetent ruler which would crumble in hours in a war as the people inside rebelled.

both things cannot be true at the same time but western populations (most especially those in the ROK) must be propagandized to believe it or the US strategy around the DPRK looks nonsensical.

To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

in totalitarian communist North Korea, the regime disseminates propaganda assuring their brainwashed citizens that being hungry is actually beneficial due to their failed communist agrarian policies

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.

So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how “owned” Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What’s really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. “Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!” Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they’re just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they’re forgotten in a week.

Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn’t understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn’t understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.

In short, if you’re going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don’t believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my ‘extremely good reason’ to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.

It’s the classic argument path:

Liberals: “I hate [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] for [usually somewhat justifiable reason in a vacuum]!”

Communists: “Okay, sure, but [Western government/country/corporation/person/etc] does that same thing but much, much worse! Why aren’t you talking about them?”

Liberals: “Oh, I hate it when they do that too! We’re just talking about this particular [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] right now! Why are you deflecting? Are you trying to defend them? Whataboutism!”

Communists: go to their profile; literally no evidence that they have ever complained about a single Western entity in their lifetime, and may even have expressed support for Western entities that do even worse things

Even the “left-wing” of the 2016-2020 period was literally just “Hmm, what if we combined both capitalism and socialism in a big pot to get the best of both!” It was that level of just having absolutely no fucking clue about anything in politics, political theory, economics, etc, you just wanted free healthcare and reasonable rent/housing prices.

It must be very strange having a reasonably large section of Lemmy (by posting power if nothing else) that explicitly rejects the entire capitalist neoliberal paradigm and way of thinking which is the only thing that they’ve been exposed to in their entire lives, aside from the spooky bedtime stories that the government has told them about the USSR or China hiding in their closet, ready to pounce out and eat them. If you’re exposed to an entirely different system of thinking and are unable to even really comprehend it because you refuse to read, then what else are you meant to do other than accusing them of trolling, or of simply being Evil People?

The best you can do is use the talismans that the government and media have bestowed upon you, the good old “But human nature…” charm, the “Works on paper, doesn’t in practice” amulet, and the “100 trillion dead in gulags” enchanted ring. You don’t even really know why you’re saying this stuff, it’s just an automatic response programmed into you, and receiving an effortpost in response which debunks those things just leads you to spew out more talismanic responses. You’re a defender of an ideology that you aren’t even aware that you have, so when somebody comes at you with a different ideology, all you can do is just say shit like “Oh, yeah, those people over there are horrific genocide apologists. Yeah, they aren’t even really trans, it’s just a whole site that’s trolling the rest of lemmy. They’re so idiotic that they can’t even see that competition and markets and democracy (as we conceive it) obviously get the best results - don’t they know that the USSR’s fall totally demolishes the argument of central planning? Just don’t even engage with them.”

all the while, we’re over here debating the finer points of Chinese economic policy in the Deng era and how it compares to the USSR under Lenin and Stalin; the foundations of neoclassical economics and the people who invented the idea of austerity; various obscure countries and conflicts around the world; and, well, having struggle sessions about sillier things too.

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says “Idiocracy is a documentary!!!” and invoke Hanlon’s Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

Russia, China, and Iran (the last of which isn’t even on that image) have hypersonic missiles, which effectively mean that aircraft carriers are now pre-sunk artificial coral reefs in a direct conflict with those countries. America does not have hypersonic missiles and keeps failing their prototype tests.