I love how liberals can't separate performance from activism because they can't think in terms in structures. Screaming "your a mango mr. drumphf" into the void is allowed dissent because it means nothing and achieves nothing. A bunch of hippies are allowed to surround the pentagon and try to levitate it because it channels their anger into a meaningless drama kid tantrum. But threaten any structure, say black people shouldn't be indiscriminately murdered by police or that oil pipelines shouldn't poison communities or that forests shouldn't be cut down, and you're beaten down or assassinated.
Just absolute fucking children.
Exactly. It's idealism in the most literal sense of the word. Try starting a union or do basically any sort of direct action materially and just fucking watch how quickly the hammer of 'freedom' comes down on you.
This person also speaks like somebody who has zero personal experience with the oppression trans people face. "Oh but people called me gay for reading Harry Potter, i know what queerphobia is like!" No, you don't, go fuck yourself, shitlib. Our rights are actively stripped away in the US as we speak, stop ignoring this because you live in your brunchlib juste millieu where empty plattitudes of performative pseudo-support are still acceptable.
Not to mention that it's entirely possible that some states will make yelling "trans rights" in the streets a felony within this decade. These dinguses do not get this because liberals live in a world of unquestionable ideology that knows no alternatives. They still think we're at the end of history. They fail to understand that making progress on such issues does not create a permanent new default state of the world, but that such advances can be rolled back and that the Republican party wanting to roll them back is a serious, realistic threat. They especially do not understand that such a rollback will not lead back to the status quo ante where you got jumped for being perceived as gay, but to a point where being perceived as gay may get you deported to a camp.
I can say "gay" on twitter and only be singled out by the wealthiest man on the planet, his army of bigot nerds, the far-right propagandists he's given backend access to, the world's largest intelligence apparatus, and the DHS that was just revealed to be part of the far-right militia that just tried to overthrow the government. :wholesome:
social progress can and has been achieved without political violence
:huey-wut:
For the past few years I've been finding new favorites from The Coup, Dead Prez and whoever they collabed with. Propaganda has been getting steady repeat value for a few months now. :party-parenti:
I guess that's technically true.
It can also be achieved through threat of political violence.
I called Trump [an asshole] to his face on twitter pretty frequently
to his face
on twitter
In democratic America you call your leaders mango drumpf on twitter
In evil communist China you must use inferior WeChat to say thank you to mr xi
They also came for the LGBT community, but Niemöller didn't speak up because he largely agreed with the Nazis
First they came for the communists, but I did not speak up because
I was still allowed to call Trump “Dump” on twitterthose damn tankies had it coming
"there are stil people alive who lived under segregation"..."We're absolutely taking steps, but"
https://www.brookings.edu/essay/trend-1-separate-and-unequal-neighborhoods-are-sustaining-racial-and-economic-injustice-in-the-us/
Radlib idealist utopianism: "History was bad, but things are better now! (they can't give actual evidence)"
Right? 2020 was only two years ago and a couple of million people spent months on the streets with cops pointing machine guns at them, firing various types of grenades and chemical weapons, killing several people every day, and doing all kinds of shit in flagrant violation of the law. it was only two years ago. Biggest protests in US history. Massive police repression at all levels. The only resulting "Social change" was massive funding increases for cops.
Well, yea. You could call Biden an asshole, but if you make a YouTube video talking about American exploitation and their system. State department would knock on your door immediately, and there’s a precedent
Black people, as a group, lost more of a share of the wealth in the U.S. under Obama than at any other time in the last 50 years. But they do have more media consumption options, so that's cool I guess.
Efficiency is just not a factor for these people. Social stuff matters, sure, but ultimately it means fuckall if the planet and population are destroyed in wars for resources because capitalism was never curbed.
And fuck the billions dead & immiserated by Capital plundering the planet to fuel that unlimited growth, of course. They were just impatient, if they only realized that you have to wait for the neocolonial empires to first elect one of each type of person to their highest office, and then you have to wait for ...
"Wowee we've made so much social progress!"
Anyway here's 71 year old Stevie Wonder with an open letter to MLK saying that zero progress has been made in his lifetime.
my 2 comrades got thrown to the ground and hospitalized by the pigs for yelling "black lives matter" and their crime was they did so without a permit
2 hours before that the cops let unpermitted white supremacists march down that same street unopposed
Yeah dumbass you can do whatever you want as long as you're by yourself (and by virtue of that unable to change anything). Get ten people on a street yelling "trans rights" and see how quickly the cops cart you off for not having a permit (in a country where speech and assembly are very specifically not supposed to be regulated no less)
Everyone who says this thinks media consumption and praxis are the same thing. They believe saying something on social media is going to do something. They also believe the highest exercise of one's own desires is to say stuff, simply state an opinion as an individual and then leave it there. They can't conceive of even starting a newspaper. Try explaining to a liberal that "free speech" becomes tightly restricted once you get a few thousand leftists speaking in unison.
Sometimes I try to walk libs through what would happen if a communist party gained enough strength and numbers to do something outside of simply saying things and started doing them. Things like blocking roads, mass general strikes, coordinated boycotts like refusing to pay rent. Things that go outside the standard liberal mindset of simply being a consumer in certain ways. Their answer? That it simply wouldn't happen. They believe in no such world do coordinated socialist movements occur, so even if there would be government suppression of an otherwise "peaceful" leftist movement, it's unworthy of consideration because no such movement would happen, therefore no violent government suppression, therefore you can say and believe whatever you want. We live in a perfect country then.
They're also usually mistaken about how socialist countries deal with dissent. You can criticize the government in places like China and Cuba, you do it at meetings or you exercise democracy and vote in certain ways on referendums.
But road blockades are happening right now in Peru and were also used successfully in Bolivia recently. How do liberals respond if/when you bring that up?
"America is different" coupled with western chauvinism in my experience.
Liberals won’t even talk with me anymore, but if they said this to me, I would say that Trump / 1/6 / whatever libs are freaking out about at the moment proves that America isn’t different.
I'm mostly talking about white liberals in America, I'm not sure how liberals elsewhere talk. I imagine they're also horrible.
The liberals I know would either ignore other countries entirely or they'd gesture towards some idyllic concept of freedom, democracy, or bravery. They regard mass politics as possible in the face of how they view tyranny, but they'll mainly treat other nations as a performance piece for themselves. The people living in other places might as well be fictional characters treated on the same level as events from Star Wars. Everything is performance.
Liberals present as a good person because they have a Hong Kong or Ukraine flag on their car. They're a good person because they call Maduro a dictator. That's as far as their thought goes.
well you could tell them that road blockages are used by climate change activists in imperial core countries like Germany right now as a regular form of protest, and that the state responds by persecuting these activists as a criminal organization or even locking activists up pre-emptively for two weeks without trial because they may take part in such protests.
you could point them to :cool-zone: having happened less than three years ago, maybe then at least you could explain to them what it means when an event gets memory holed.
Everyone who says this thinks media consumption and praxis are the same thing. They believe saying something on social media is going to do something.
Reducing it down even more, it's the highest form of mystification. The idea that magic incantations affect the physical world. If you say the magic words, then the world changes.
Despite all the technology we have, most people still live in a world of magic. We all live in a world of magic whether we like it or not. Because magical thinking is part of the system's superstructure that it uses to obfuscate the causal relation between action and results. It redefines politics as not something you actively do, but a wish in your heart and a prayer on your tongue.
This is why our job is so hard. At the most basic level we are supposed to disillusion everyone around us by exposing the magic of capitalism as charlatanism. The science of history shows that capitalism will do this slowly itself over long periods of time. But the only way disillusionment works is by upsetting people in a specific way. We must also do this very quickly, over a short time period (ie our lifetimes). This is hard to do effectively.
"Vanguardism" is one of the more annoying buzzwords Western "leftists" seem to be infatuated with. It's meant to be a snarl term for Communists informed by both their early programming as well as radlib influences (Kaiserreich and its consequences...).
Most (actual) socialist tendencies understand the concept of the Vanguard. It literally just means the most politically-advanced sections of the working class. The idea that they ought to set the example for the rest of the people is something that isn't uncommon even among "Libertarian Socialists". Of course, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks were these elitists who never consulted with the working class ever in your mind (lol), then it's only natural.
