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?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.