Your answer was more run around still without an answer to the question I asked in the first place and I thought it was disingenuous to point out that question/discussion communities exist as an answer to me asking why the only reply to my honest question was a wisecrack
"I honestly can’t tell if this is satire. Do you really think ‘choosing’ an unrelated empty track is some kind of moral high ground?"
It's making fun of electoral politics. Satire in one way, but a sad truth in another. The moral high-ground has been us and anarchists organizing and trying to push for actual change.
General hostility/passive-aggressiveness. The track isn't "unrelated", it's a direct reference to voting third party and/or not voting at all in the election cycle that just happened. So, it's unclear if you were specifically invalidating that on purpose or just didn't understand it, hence the admittedly rude comment on media literacy. I perhaps thought you commented on the wrong instance, which I was mistaken.
Us communists accurately predicted how this election would go, where Kamala has gone wrong and have been desperately pleading liberals to take a stand. Instead, we get treated to liberals going full posting "What if I reported my Trump neighbor's family to ICE" on /r/unethicallifetips and berating us for not kowtowing their dying neoliberal empire and shifting right with them.
But in general, you imitated a hostile attitude/tone. No one here has time to be belittled by liberals or centrists (not saying you are one but other user might have assumed) because that's why; amongst many more important reasons; this space was created. I've been learning to try to not flame as much as I lost quite a bit of control in the past two days; watching most of the country embrace red-fascism openly and being surrounded by smoldering liberals from "both sides" will do that to you. It's why us communists are so hostile, wise-cracking and jaded sometimes. Most of the time, we just don't get listened to or actually taken seriously unless we directly threaten the interests of the ruling class. Then people get shot, like Fred Hampton. So yes, a general flavor of cynicism exists. It isn't unjustified, though; if over-zealous at times.
I broke it down as constructively and communicated with you as clearly as possible. If you'd have anything else you'd like to ask or know, feel free to ask. I don't carry any hostility towards you; even if you feel otherwise.
I've been learning to try to not flame as much as I lost quite a bit of control in the past two days
You're doing good, thanks for taking the time to write this and sorry for assuming you were being hostile too. OP posted the original version of this meme in he other thread, which apparently didn't have a text bubble for the above guy. It makes a bit more sense that this didn't originate here.
I wasn't trying to invalidate the meme referencing voting third party, it just seemed very much like a satirical mockery of doing so. I was confused why such a meme would be posted here, and if it wasn't satire why op would make the bottom left guy's speech so on the nose.
This being a criticism of us electoral system works, but even with the added nazi its other message also works for me ("not participating in electoral system wouldn't be morally superior on its own even if the electoral system didn't do anything [and was in the hands of nazis]"). But I think I'm overthinking it and this was supposed to be a low overhead 'look how ridiculous their memes about us are' post.
Expecting you or other communists here to spend all your mental bandwidth trying to be kind to strangers isn't reasonable but I can't but think if it would be better if this was a kinder place and didn't get blocked by seemingly the most of lemmy users.
One thing I wanted to add is that, believe it or not, defederation happened to us; not the other way around. Before we even were that big a lot of instances weren't happy with a communist space. Even when we did act civil; it would be met with things like "OH OKAY TANKIE, I DON'T LISTEN TO CCP PROPAGANDA; ENJOY YOUR XIBUCKS!"
Now that you mention it, I'm not quite sure. Originally, I thought the meme was just making fun of the American electorate for being blood-thirsty and accepting that the only path forward is gunning down civilians abroad and at home while decent progressives (rare, I know) and actual communists/anarchists are ignored. My mind went to how a lot of Americans went after Trump won; red-liberals doing the Beer Hall Dance and blue-liberals going full "enemy is weak and strong" shit on everyone but themselves.
You may be right, there was another meme edit about third-party voters that some libshit made showing that our vote meant nothing and that the genocide party won by a brief margin. Someone adjusted it to show that republicans would have won anyways and made the guy wear a commie shirt and both sides say "genocide". It might be lower overhead, but honestly, some of these libshits only think in memes and the memes tend to draw more hogs out rather than densely packed summaries of the Weimar Republic and what went wrong. We have those too, it's just not what pisses people off. What pisses people off is our critical support of Russia, our support of China, DPRK, etc. State Department has trained these people well. Has been the reason for defederation before.
My final take on the meme is that it seems to be a maoist-third-worldist style. American system is only trained to run over and destroy marginalized communities at home and abroad and purposefully, other methods of "changing it" and "reforming the system" are met with no tracks at all as the system is designed to be this way. I don't think it's making fun or being satirical of non-voters, but rather making a point of how bloodthirsty and set Americans can be on these things (genocide).
I mean in California they literally voted not to abolish prison slavery, so maybe that's where some inspiration came from?
We have those too, it's just not what pisses people off. What pisses people off is our critical support of Russia, our support of China, DPRK, etc.
Might be true for lemmygrad, but for hexbear I've seen more people complaining about 'trolls' or 'edgy teens' than just communists. And the unwavering support from both these instances for the 2nd world makes me distrustful as well. Many people here seem more driven by 2nd world nationalism rather than just communism or anti imperialism
making a point of how bloodthirsty and set Americans can be on these things (genocide)
I guess it's a good time as any to ask, do you (and other people here) really mean it when you say things like this or are they understood as hyperboles? "never attribute to malice what can be to incompetence" applies commonly in politics (as evidenced by that post about has Joe Biden dropped out Google trend) and is especially the case of Palestine imo. You could say regardless of if it's hate or ignorance the result doesn't change and I'd agree but it still doesn't feel right to straight up call them bloodthirsty
I explained to you why hexbear users can be so hostile. Dismissing our arguments entirely (with no sources or citation and if they exist it's shit like Zenz or U.S state dept) and constantly suggesting we're bots. In my opinion, the defederations are simply a side-effect, we actually attract quite a few disenchanted people that way when libs try to do the whole hostile actor and smug, ignorant "adults in the room" attitude they have and we just respond to it with a picture of a pig pooping on its balls. They check out who we are, what are beliefs are and they are either disgusted or interested in the community. If we tried to suppress that under a banner of civility, we'd attract more people that likely wouldn't mesh or understand our beliefs or understand the "internet community" that we have. It's not a communist organizing hot-spot...it's simply just a web-board that's very political.
The original space they had on reddit was far, far worse with a larger more "wider" community. I'm not as well read and educated on the history of this website, but I know a few things and if you're curious on more of that you can likely find a thread on it or use AskChapo. But in general, Chapo was even more aggressive and meme-like. It was a shitposting board mixed with hard-left themes. A bit cleaner than leftypol though. A lot of those traditions carried on. It does work for recruiting people, seeing that people are done hearing the same excuses for austerity and deteriorating conditions globally and in climate. They like seeing people get mad at it, but we do take it too far certainly. Combine that with the fact how hostile people can be right at us, it certainly paints an image of us being combative. In my opinion, it's just more insular.
Communists don't have necessarily a bad opinion on nationalism, all though we likely view it differently than the typical view same as with imperialism. All though, we aren't "nationalists" because a good chunk of our base is certainly not from Iran, Russia, etc. All though, we do have a few from the "second world" and a few posters from China/live in China as well. Marxism and the National Question by Stalin goes right into this, e.g-
"A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
It goes without saying that a nation, like every historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end.
It must be emphasized that none of the above characteristics taken separately is sufficient to define a nation. More than that, it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be lacking and the nation ceases to be a nation.
It is possible to conceive of people possessing a common "national character" who, nevertheless, cannot be said to constitute a single nation if they are economically disunited, inhabit different territories, speak different languages, and so forth. Such, for instance, are the Russian, Galician, American, Georgian and Caucasian Highland Jews, who, in our opinion, do not constitute a single nation.
It is possible to conceive of people with a common territory and economic life who nevertheless would not constitute a single nation because they have no common language and no common "national character." Such, for instance, are the Germans and Letts in the Baltic region.
Finally, the Norwegians and the Danes speak one language, but they do not constitute a single nation owing to the absence of the other characteristics.
It is only when all these characteristics are present together that we have a nation.
It might appear that "national character" is not one of the characteristics but the sole essential characteristic of a nation, and that all the other characteristics are, properly speaking, only conditions for the development of a nation, rather than its characteristics."
That's one excerpt. Further elaboration on each of these is had earlier in the book, but I posted the one that first came to mind. Nationalism can be a good thing when used as a tool for the proletariat to work towards liberation or socialism. It also can be used by reactionaries, however, so it is best to be careful.
What about it makes you distrustful? It goes without saying that support for these nations is a part of being anti-imperialist. It should be apparent too that a good chunk of what we hear about "hostile nations" is shit spun up by the N.E.D or State Department. Is all of it? No, of course not, that's what "critical support" means when we use it. No one, nation or entity/thing is perfect. Propaganda on these things and in general from the cold-war has warped the mentality of the American psyche when discussing these things. Something you can likely see from a lot of liberals.
Depends on the person you ask in terms of what we mean by that. A lot of Americans truly are ignorant in bliss and comfortable with the fact that they have an economic hegemony over the entire world and use it to extract wealth (with other nations like France, U.K, etc) and resources from third world countries while keeping them poor via the IMF and other mechanisms (like interventions, see how many there are in Latin America from America alone.) to keep the standard of living high enough and to extract the rest towards the top. You try to make Americans aware of this, there are a good few who get disgusted by it. Otherwise, most plug their ears and worse try to justify it. A good chunk of conservative thought is "fuck you, got mine" and general ignorant bliss. A good chunk of neoliberalism is justifying this via "creating opportunities and jobs in foreign nations, expanding their economies" while also ignoring the fact that the nations they're extracting from are growing poorer and poorer. When they do try to break away, like Allende for example, they are killed or deposed. So, yes. A chunk of American politics and the standard of living for the average western person is made incredibly high by our control of global economy and IMF. Not as many as their should be decide to actually work towards changing that.
But, there is also the fact more and more Americans are just apathetic and have been subject to cold-war propaganda since time immemorial. A lot of politics and law is built by the wealthy to defend and justify their extraction and a lot of Americans believe it. There could be a point in time where that changes. Some think accelerationism and think simply material conditions need to worsen. There are a few who think that we just need to be able to get a proper workers/vanguard party/political movement when the current political scene in the United States is shattered by an increasingly multi-polar world.
I also did just give you an example with Americans voting to keep punishing prisoners with slave labor. Proposition 6. So, a little bit of truth there for a uncomfortably large amount of Americans.
Your answer was more run around still without an answer to the question I asked in the first place and I thought it was disingenuous to point out that question/discussion communities exist as an answer to me asking why the only reply to my honest question was a wisecrack
"I honestly can’t tell if this is satire. Do you really think ‘choosing’ an unrelated empty track is some kind of moral high ground?"
It's making fun of electoral politics. Satire in one way, but a sad truth in another. The moral high-ground has been us and anarchists organizing and trying to push for actual change.
General hostility/passive-aggressiveness. The track isn't "unrelated", it's a direct reference to voting third party and/or not voting at all in the election cycle that just happened. So, it's unclear if you were specifically invalidating that on purpose or just didn't understand it, hence the admittedly rude comment on media literacy. I perhaps thought you commented on the wrong instance, which I was mistaken.
Us communists accurately predicted how this election would go, where Kamala has gone wrong and have been desperately pleading liberals to take a stand. Instead, we get treated to liberals going full posting "What if I reported my Trump neighbor's family to ICE" on /r/unethicallifetips and berating us for not kowtowing their dying neoliberal empire and shifting right with them.
But in general, you imitated a hostile attitude/tone. No one here has time to be belittled by liberals or centrists (not saying you are one but other user might have assumed) because that's why; amongst many more important reasons; this space was created. I've been learning to try to not flame as much as I lost quite a bit of control in the past two days; watching most of the country embrace red-fascism openly and being surrounded by smoldering liberals from "both sides" will do that to you. It's why us communists are so hostile, wise-cracking and jaded sometimes. Most of the time, we just don't get listened to or actually taken seriously unless we directly threaten the interests of the ruling class. Then people get shot, like Fred Hampton. So yes, a general flavor of cynicism exists. It isn't unjustified, though; if over-zealous at times.
I broke it down as constructively and communicated with you as clearly as possible. If you'd have anything else you'd like to ask or know, feel free to ask. I don't carry any hostility towards you; even if you feel otherwise.
You're doing good, thanks for taking the time to write this and sorry for assuming you were being hostile too. OP posted the original version of this meme in he other thread, which apparently didn't have a text bubble for the above guy. It makes a bit more sense that this didn't originate here.
I wasn't trying to invalidate the meme referencing voting third party, it just seemed very much like a satirical mockery of doing so. I was confused why such a meme would be posted here, and if it wasn't satire why op would make the bottom left guy's speech so on the nose.
This being a criticism of us electoral system works, but even with the added nazi its other message also works for me ("not participating in electoral system wouldn't be morally superior on its own even if the electoral system didn't do anything [and was in the hands of nazis]"). But I think I'm overthinking it and this was supposed to be a low overhead 'look how ridiculous their memes about us are' post.
Expecting you or other communists here to spend all your mental bandwidth trying to be kind to strangers isn't reasonable but I can't but think if it would be better if this was a kinder place and didn't get blocked by seemingly the most of lemmy users.
One thing I wanted to add is that, believe it or not, defederation happened to us; not the other way around. Before we even were that big a lot of instances weren't happy with a communist space. Even when we did act civil; it would be met with things like "OH OKAY TANKIE, I DON'T LISTEN TO CCP PROPAGANDA; ENJOY YOUR XIBUCKS!"
Now that you mention it, I'm not quite sure. Originally, I thought the meme was just making fun of the American electorate for being blood-thirsty and accepting that the only path forward is gunning down civilians abroad and at home while decent progressives (rare, I know) and actual communists/anarchists are ignored. My mind went to how a lot of Americans went after Trump won; red-liberals doing the Beer Hall Dance and blue-liberals going full "enemy is weak and strong" shit on everyone but themselves.
You may be right, there was another meme edit about third-party voters that some libshit made showing that our vote meant nothing and that the genocide party won by a brief margin. Someone adjusted it to show that republicans would have won anyways and made the guy wear a commie shirt and both sides say "genocide". It might be lower overhead, but honestly, some of these libshits only think in memes and the memes tend to draw more hogs out rather than densely packed summaries of the Weimar Republic and what went wrong. We have those too, it's just not what pisses people off. What pisses people off is our critical support of Russia, our support of China, DPRK, etc. State Department has trained these people well. Has been the reason for defederation before.
My final take on the meme is that it seems to be a maoist-third-worldist style. American system is only trained to run over and destroy marginalized communities at home and abroad and purposefully, other methods of "changing it" and "reforming the system" are met with no tracks at all as the system is designed to be this way. I don't think it's making fun or being satirical of non-voters, but rather making a point of how bloodthirsty and set Americans can be on these things (genocide).
I mean in California they literally voted not to abolish prison slavery, so maybe that's where some inspiration came from?
Might be true for lemmygrad, but for hexbear I've seen more people complaining about 'trolls' or 'edgy teens' than just communists. And the unwavering support from both these instances for the 2nd world makes me distrustful as well. Many people here seem more driven by 2nd world nationalism rather than just communism or anti imperialism
I guess it's a good time as any to ask, do you (and other people here) really mean it when you say things like this or are they understood as hyperboles? "never attribute to malice what can be to incompetence" applies commonly in politics (as evidenced by that post about has Joe Biden dropped out Google trend) and is especially the case of Palestine imo. You could say regardless of if it's hate or ignorance the result doesn't change and I'd agree but it still doesn't feel right to straight up call them bloodthirsty
I explained to you why hexbear users can be so hostile. Dismissing our arguments entirely (with no sources or citation and if they exist it's shit like Zenz or U.S state dept) and constantly suggesting we're bots. In my opinion, the defederations are simply a side-effect, we actually attract quite a few disenchanted people that way when libs try to do the whole hostile actor and smug, ignorant "adults in the room" attitude they have and we just respond to it with a picture of a pig pooping on its balls. They check out who we are, what are beliefs are and they are either disgusted or interested in the community. If we tried to suppress that under a banner of civility, we'd attract more people that likely wouldn't mesh or understand our beliefs or understand the "internet community" that we have. It's not a communist organizing hot-spot...it's simply just a web-board that's very political.
The original space they had on reddit was far, far worse with a larger more "wider" community. I'm not as well read and educated on the history of this website, but I know a few things and if you're curious on more of that you can likely find a thread on it or use AskChapo. But in general, Chapo was even more aggressive and meme-like. It was a shitposting board mixed with hard-left themes. A bit cleaner than leftypol though. A lot of those traditions carried on. It does work for recruiting people, seeing that people are done hearing the same excuses for austerity and deteriorating conditions globally and in climate. They like seeing people get mad at it, but we do take it too far certainly. Combine that with the fact how hostile people can be right at us, it certainly paints an image of us being combative. In my opinion, it's just more insular.
Communists don't have necessarily a bad opinion on nationalism, all though we likely view it differently than the typical view same as with imperialism. All though, we aren't "nationalists" because a good chunk of our base is certainly not from Iran, Russia, etc. All though, we do have a few from the "second world" and a few posters from China/live in China as well. Marxism and the National Question by Stalin goes right into this, e.g-
"A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
It goes without saying that a nation, like every historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end.
It must be emphasized that none of the above characteristics taken separately is sufficient to define a nation. More than that, it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be lacking and the nation ceases to be a nation.
It is possible to conceive of people possessing a common "national character" who, nevertheless, cannot be said to constitute a single nation if they are economically disunited, inhabit different territories, speak different languages, and so forth. Such, for instance, are the Russian, Galician, American, Georgian and Caucasian Highland Jews, who, in our opinion, do not constitute a single nation.
It is possible to conceive of people with a common territory and economic life who nevertheless would not constitute a single nation because they have no common language and no common "national character." Such, for instance, are the Germans and Letts in the Baltic region.
Finally, the Norwegians and the Danes speak one language, but they do not constitute a single nation owing to the absence of the other characteristics.
It is only when all these characteristics are present together that we have a nation.
It might appear that "national character" is not one of the characteristics but the sole essential characteristic of a nation, and that all the other characteristics are, properly speaking, only conditions for the development of a nation, rather than its characteristics."
That's one excerpt. Further elaboration on each of these is had earlier in the book, but I posted the one that first came to mind. Nationalism can be a good thing when used as a tool for the proletariat to work towards liberation or socialism. It also can be used by reactionaries, however, so it is best to be careful.
What about it makes you distrustful? It goes without saying that support for these nations is a part of being anti-imperialist. It should be apparent too that a good chunk of what we hear about "hostile nations" is shit spun up by the N.E.D or State Department. Is all of it? No, of course not, that's what "critical support" means when we use it. No one, nation or entity/thing is perfect. Propaganda on these things and in general from the cold-war has warped the mentality of the American psyche when discussing these things. Something you can likely see from a lot of liberals.
Depends on the person you ask in terms of what we mean by that. A lot of Americans truly are ignorant in bliss and comfortable with the fact that they have an economic hegemony over the entire world and use it to extract wealth (with other nations like France, U.K, etc) and resources from third world countries while keeping them poor via the IMF and other mechanisms (like interventions, see how many there are in Latin America from America alone.) to keep the standard of living high enough and to extract the rest towards the top. You try to make Americans aware of this, there are a good few who get disgusted by it. Otherwise, most plug their ears and worse try to justify it. A good chunk of conservative thought is "fuck you, got mine" and general ignorant bliss. A good chunk of neoliberalism is justifying this via "creating opportunities and jobs in foreign nations, expanding their economies" while also ignoring the fact that the nations they're extracting from are growing poorer and poorer. When they do try to break away, like Allende for example, they are killed or deposed. So, yes. A chunk of American politics and the standard of living for the average western person is made incredibly high by our control of global economy and IMF. Not as many as their should be decide to actually work towards changing that.
But, there is also the fact more and more Americans are just apathetic and have been subject to cold-war propaganda since time immemorial. A lot of politics and law is built by the wealthy to defend and justify their extraction and a lot of Americans believe it. There could be a point in time where that changes. Some think accelerationism and think simply material conditions need to worsen. There are a few who think that we just need to be able to get a proper workers/vanguard party/political movement when the current political scene in the United States is shattered by an increasingly multi-polar world.
I also did just give you an example with Americans voting to keep punishing prisoners with slave labor. Proposition 6. So, a little bit of truth there for a uncomfortably large amount of Americans.
Wow that California vote is atrocious. Thanks for your time