• axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    us-foreign-policy

    Westerners deciding who's doing real socialism or not. Westerners expressing their most vile sentiment for foreign countries rather than their own imperialism. Westerners praising the words of their own imperialist intelligence agencies. Westerners unironically praising their own nations for civil liberties like the freedom of fascists to assemble, freedom of racists to express themselves, freedom of parents to own their children, and freedom of school districts to continue racial segregation. Westerners praising imperialist nations like Norway as socialist while using bold language like fascism to describe places under that same exact threat of imperialism, like Cuba and Vietnam.

    Westerners claiming foreign governments are merely pretending to be socialist, while claiming unorganized misinformed chauvinistic westerners are the true heirs to socialism, despite all they do is post online and complain about foreign nations.

    Westerners praising anarchist movements from 100 years ago despite having no common cause with those movements, no connection to the circumstances within them, and probably no actual admiration of them. Westerners praising a bastardized, sectarian, perverse form of anarchism rather than attempting unity with organizations in their areas. Westerners refusing to speak with actual anarchists in their area, who by and large don't give a shit and just want to hand out food or help at shelters. If Buenaventura Durruti were alive today he'd be regarded with scorn by western chauvinists.

    Westerners continuing to bring up Trotsky of all people, who wasn't relevant to world affairs for the last 15 years of his life and certainly not the past 80 years. Westerners not reading a single word of Trotsky's work, westerners focusing entirely on Trotsky's feud with Stalin, westerners not knowing that Trotsky was a literal military commander. Westerners calling themselves Trotskyists in 2023 for some reason. Westerners deciding they have a feud with Joseph Stalin, a man who died in 1953.

    Westerners attempting to praise their own socialist leadership, who happen to be a scattered group of imperialist-aligned social democrats, Twitch streamers, and actual antisemitic grifters such as in the case of Caleb Maupin.

      • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        You gish galloped, you ad homin-ed, you no true scotsman-ed, you one true scotsman-ed, and then you mot and bailey-ed.

        Checkmate sir smuglord

        • PatFusty@lemm.ee
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I dont want to be a victim of hexbear road rage thanks. You guys just vomit out material in hopes that you can string it together to form a cogent argument. Then you come back smug as ever asking why i didnt respond to the 10k talking points as if I was a human encyclopedia.

          • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            How would I distinguish you, based only on your reply, from someone who took one look at two whole paragraphs and decided you weren't going to read that but had to keep arguing no matter what and spewed out some sour grape nonsense?

              • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Why did you bother learning the phrase "gish gallop" but not how to respond to it. Isn't that the whole point of studying this shit?

              • raven [he/him]
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                How should we frame our arguments in response to a meme that paints every single prominent socialist and socialist country as fascist without addressing each one?
                Really the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim, shouldn't it?

                • Apollo@sh.itjust.works
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  People confuse facism and authoritarianism all the time, and people respond to this as if they've never figured this out.

                  So instead of anything productive these threads churn out:

                  Omg communist countries are fascist!

                  actually no socialist!

                  lol oppression

                  Vs

                  hey why do so many socialist states end up being super authoritarian?

                  hey yeah thats a huge problem, but lets ignore it because west bad

                  • raven [he/him]
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    What is authoritarian exactly? Is that when you steppy snek just for fun?

                    🐍gayroller-2000
                    Because I'm all about that shit.

                  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    We don't ignore it when a socialist country takes security measures, we say they're an unfortunate reality of steps a country has to take in order to defend itself against external and internal aggression. Having your country go socialist earns you a lot of enemies and having a lot of enemies means you have to build up things like intelligence agencies, military apparatuses, and centralized agencies for combating sabotage and spying. These are things every country does, but western nations like to paint the security measures that socialist nations take as purely authoritarian, or needlessly tyrannical, or whatever other word gets thrown around. The nations yelling at socialist countries to change their domestic policies are usually the most imperialist and have the most to gain from socialist states being dismantled.

                    When your enemies are the global capitalists who operate global finance and industry, you should probably build up something to defend against it. Nukes tend to work as a deterrent, but they only go so far when you've also got an internal population that can present a security problem.

                    China's taken the smartest strategy of all honestly. They've intertwined their economy with the imperial powers to the point it's impossible to disentangle. The west can't take violent action against China, since that's where the industry is.

                    Also, so called authoritarian measures against our enemies are a good thing. It's good when fascists, racists, and imperialists lose civil liberties like the freedom to express themselves, organize, fund politicians, or operate businesses.

                • PatFusty@lemm.ee
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  You dont need to address each one. Pick one. I dont need proof to see that its too much information

                  • raven [he/him]
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    No one is forcing you to respond to anything, let alone everything. Why don't you pick one?

              • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                How do you feel about essays and books in general?

                Their comment was 337 words long. According to google the average reader can do 238 words in a minute. 90 seconds.

      • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        If their post is short, accuse them of not engaging properly.

        If their post is long, accuse them of gish gallop.

        • BigNote@lemm.ee
          ·
          1 year ago

          Said no one. Except you. You either know what a Gish gallop is, or you don't. A long comment is not necessarily a Gish gallop. In this case the charge is entirely accurate.

          • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Oh spare me, we both know full well that there was no long comment they could have posted that wouldn't have been called gish gallop.

            • BigNote@lemm.ee
              ·
              1 year ago

              As if it's somehow impossible to make a long comment in support of a single argument? As if Gish galloping comments don't actually exist? Do I follow your logic properly? What part about this do I not understand?

              • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
                ·
                1 year ago

                Accusations of gish gallop are almost always just a bad faith way of dismissing an argument without bothering to address it.

                • BigNote@lemm.ee
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  What argument? 20+ arguments were made. Which one am I meant to address?

                  If I focus on one you'll jump on me for not addressing the 19 others, which is why it's a bullshit tactic.

                  • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Their argument was that so called Western socialists are mostly just Western chauvinists who make their determination on what movements are "real socialists" based on how closely they align, racially and culturally, to the West.

                    There, that's their argument.

      • raven [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        We're talking about 6 countries and at least 5 people in the first place, and that's only the ones named. Sorry, reality is complicated like that.

      • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Nobody's interested in becoming an anti-communist. It's you who must change your opinions because they are wrong

          • BigNote@lemm.ee
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes, because engaging with hexbears is a waste of time. They are not here in good faith. Either that or they don't know any better, which in practice amounts to the same thing.

            • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              1 year ago

              My post was an inside joke based on that users previous posts on our instance.

              Have you engaged with a hexbear in good faith?

              • BigNote@lemm.ee
                ·
                1 year ago

                That's a fair question and in all honesty the answer is no, because based on what I can easily see and understand of hexbears, they aren't intellectually serious people and to the contrary are more akin to a kind of 4-chan trolling community than anything worth actual intellectual engagement.

                I could be wrong, but so far I have yet to see any evidence as such.

                  • BigNote@lemm.ee
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Yes. That's correct.

                    I choose not to waste my time. What do you do when dealing with bad-faith actors?

      • BigNote@lemm.ee
        ·
        1 year ago

        That's precisely the point. These guys have a toolbox of fallacious arguments and techniques that they regularly trot out. The Gish gallop is one of them. Another, that you see being put to wide use in this thread, is redefining words and terms to fit their narrative.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The people who hate America the most are probably Iraqis with dead children, or American indigenous people kept in poverty.

        I know there are westerners who have a better conception of socialism and are more amenable to international working class efforts. I know a lot of them. I'm from Texas lol. I don't like it when westerners, like fellow Americans, look down their nose at other countries. Calling a nation fascist because it doesn't meet your western ideas of what socialist utopia is supposed to be? It's bizarre to me. It always seems racist.

        Westerners have a strong tendency towards national chauvinism and it's rare to meet someone more internationally minded unless you go looking for them. You can probably agree with that.

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I dont think you could find someone who hates America more than an American

        If your hypothetical American had a button that would sink the entire country to the bottom of the ocean, would they press it without a moment's hesitation?

        If not, then they do not hate America more than me.

      • somename [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I bet the people who had their families killed by American death squads probably hate the country more.

      • Annakah69 [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        That is a wild take. People have seen there kids burned to death in an American drone strike. Or had their family executed in front of them by special forces death squads.