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"leftist wall of text incoming"
the first sentence is the most unimaginable liberal nonsense you've ever read
also rookie hours, real leftist walls of texts involve 7000+ comments and edits
And 500 citations each pointing to a more obscure work than the last.
fr i got in a text joust with someone the other day over marxist interpretations of confucius and whether it can be called liberation theology, citing shit ripped off of baidu
Something left out of that conversation (last I checked) is that Confucianism is pretty clearly not a religion by any recognizable standard, but a collection of texts, attitudes, and social practices. It is connected to religious ideas about ancestors and such, but they aren't the same.Forgot your conversation was on a tangent about Taoism, which is popularly religious.Also creating a third term to describe the broader genre instead of slapping the Christian name on everything is probably a good call.
Real leftist walls of text also don't have italicised interjections to announce it's anecdote time
it feels simultaneously very dire and also very funny how this person's worldview is very directly informed by a single Twitch streamer. Is that how you kids absorb politics these days? This person made a huge post about how Marxists develop political awareness and didn't use the words Marx, Lenin, Mao, didn't mention specific policies. They just mention a Twitch streamer and discord channels
glass houses and everything, since I know we're a terminally online forum, but this whole thesis seems terminally online. Politics as posting styles
I can only speak for myself but I think this community skews a bit older than the new median lemmy age established by the reddit exodus/migration.
So many of the most out there takes I have seen could only have come from a literal high school student, and an incurious one at that.
yeah it's just inscrutable to me and unlike any of my experiences but maybe I'm just getting old. I became a socialist because I had a minimum wage job at a grocery store and I was watching how evil the Iraq War was. It all seemed very direct to me. America's evil and committing warcrimes, my boss wants my paycheck as low as possible, might as well listen to what these commies are saying.
Internet commentators back then were on Myspace and blogs, there wasn't as much of a weird parasocial connection going on. Not even saying this was better, because it was dire back then too, but this seems so different and weird. It's like internet cliques or fandoms.
I know this comment is a few days old at this point and the conversation is dead, but is it really true that reddit users skew younger?
Like, I was a teen when I made a reddit account over a decade ago, but I feel like reddit isn't the cool thing for high schoolers to sign up for anymore. If feels more like legacy social media with very outdated design sensibilities even if you're using new reddit.
I think reddit's userbase is certainly more immature in the way that being a semi-anonymous user in an endless sea of throw-away accounts tends to foster. That kind of design creates an environment where people feel comfortable putting less care and thought into the views that they share because whatever bullshit they wrote will get buried when the thread dies, and most communities aren't small enough for individual users to develop a persistent reputation in a community based on their previous comments, so every interaction starts off as a fresh slate with little/no stakes. And people are less likely to mature if they never have any accountability to the things they say/believe.
I don't think the quality/maturity of posters on Hexbear vs reddit and the "reddit diaspora" on Lemmy can be explained by the age demographics of those groups. I think it has more to do with the quality of moderation here filtering out people with "reddit-brain," as well as simply having a more well defined community where you can somewhat expect other people to recognize your username and therefore care about the impression you leave on people as a result.
I don't think it's that scary, more just kind of bleak. I don't think these very online younger people are doing a lot of organizing or IRL work, are they? What do they even do except post?
Like the hippies of the past, these fuckers are going to one day be condescendingly telling us "I had a communist phase too" when for them "communist" means watching streams and caping for the streamer on a forum.
Maybe 10 years ago it was youtube videos. 20 years ago the blogosphere was still a thing and it was still common to not own a cellphone.
I just hope one day every communist in China can realize they've got some growing up to do and should start watching Vaush play video games
Oh, come on, that's not fair, he also said a lot of stuff about horse porn.
would not leave any horses to the care of that man, that's for sure
Actually, I wouldnt even leave the head of a sledgehammer to be cared for by this man. He would find a way to break it or have sex with it some way.
probably both, and then he'd do a slur-filled on-stream rant against sledgehammers being tankies
Even when you corner them with - HEAVY NSFL
spoiler
He threatened to SA a girl who refused to fuck him KNOWING she had been a prior victim of SA and then bad mouthed her to his fanbase so she was hounded constantly and had to scrub her presence off the internet to make it stop
The ones that are well aware of this will say "Well he apologized" (he made a weasely video and never actually spoke to the woman he threatened) like it makes it totally fine to keep hanging on his every word.
IT WAS A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT BRO BRO BELIEVE ME ITS OK IT WAS JUST HYPOTEHTICAL BRO
Excuse me this is actually anchoring yourself in facts, which is somehow a bad thing. Real leftism is vibes based only, and I like Vaush's vibes, so we're going to completely ignore the fact that he is a pedo because that doesn't match the vibes. Only tankies ignore the vibes
When you shortcut yourself into following the data uncritically, you inexplicably end up following the narrative of the US empire. I'm sorry sweaty, but data is not unbiased and free from manipulation.
Also, "when I was becoming a tankie", if you ain't one now you weren't one then mate. Read some Lenin and become a proper leftist and not some lackey for the American empire. Gee, what a fucking idiot.
when I was
becoming a tankiedeciding whether to read a book or watch YouTube, I decided to watch YouTube and here I am. Don't fall into their trap of reading a book. They all have shares in second hand bookshops and leftwing publishers.communism is actually a trick by the corporate bookstores to sell little red books (low material usage) at high markups.
hey there are audio books of Lenin Marx and co. on youtube.
And they're great! Have you seen Dessalines' channel? Fantastic selection there.
Somehow I doubt that's what Paris was looking at on yt.
Betcha 500 kroner that when this guy was a "Tankie" he thought it was a whole separate ideology and put on the entire twitter "ML aesthetic" for a month before getting bored. They usually go from the most annoying communist in the room to thinking communism itself is annoying - whole time it was just them and their personality complexes
following the data uncritically, you inexplicably end up following the narrative of the US empire. I'm sorry sweaty, but data is not unbiased and free from manipulation.
fascinating who gave you the data
This is too easy they literally admitted their own projections like 4 times
"shortcut"
SHUT UUUUUP!
OH MY FUCKING GOD!
It's not a fucking shortcut you fucking dorknob.
It's a lens of materialist analysis honed over a century before us and for a decade at least by many of us, personally speaking at least.
"Anti-Tankie" tendencies are so obviously the fucking shortcut here, you get to just not engage with the largest chunk of revolutionary socialist history and theory because you declare it illegitimate and politically insincere, as well as frame things in matters of immaterial ideals and black and white principles that just do not survive the translation into real world practice and experience!
Like how is it not a fucking shortcut if your ideology lets you declare countries that survived for over half a century and beyond complete failures, while parties and organizations that couldn't make it out of their periods of civil war are outstanding successes due to how they represent pure ideals and principles while the former failed to be that pure?
Literally "I used to care about people and realised core fundamentals about the mechanisms of world politics and money, but then someone was mean to me online"
Well goddamn I've wasted nearly a decade reading political theory and supporting local organizing efforts. Little did I know that the key to achieving true leftism was getting mad that a discord server called my favorite streamer a nonce. Shame on me for taking a shortcut.
The sino-soviet split famously occurred after Mao unfollowed Khrushchev's twitch channel
former conservative? i have always been a communist. i did have a period of apathy when i was a rebellious teenager that hated everyone cause of dysphoria. then i went 'back' to being a communist when my skull stopped being a frying pan
also the idea that communism is a shortcut is absurd. you can have a surface level understanding and be a communist, but i am still learning things and improving my understanding of communism even after decades of being a communist. if you ever stop learning it is time for you to shut up and let the younger people cook.
Holy shit it never ends. I remember hearing similar bullshit in the 90's. Just replace Vaush with Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman. This guy is projecting hard with the "most tankies are former Evangelicals." Wasn't aware that the local Communists in my overwhelmingly Catholic country were fundies all along. Most of them follow Liberation Theory. This asshole probably isn't even aware of what that is because Vaush hasn't read the Wikipedia article on it for him.
Vaushites love pulling the "America bad" whiny shit but will do the same with "Russia/China" bad without a shred of irony.
I do worry about the future of leftists in NATO countries that do everything online. Why bother reading a boring ass book when I can watch a Twitch streamer give me theory in a fun and entertaining way? He sounds intelligent and is so sophisticated. Definitely not a geographic dumbfuck who thinks Portugal is in South America.
The only thing that gives me a little hope is knowing Vaush is disproportionately represented online. Hasan has over three times the popularity of him and is more well known among "normies." I know Hasan fans and have met a few in person. I've never met a Vaush fan outside of an online forum. Maybe they're more common in NATO countries that lap his shit up.
Even if he's not that big he's clearly being groomed to be some figurehead of the "libs who think they're socialists cuz they want free weed and legal college" movement.
The groomer becomes the groomed.
And how many people watched it? It doesn't matter how much they prop him up if barely anyone outside of niche lanyard circles pays any attention.
I never wanna hear the word "cognitive dissonance" again. It is literally exclusively used to say "How can people have other beliefs than me? Could they have reasons? No, it must be this fancy word I saw in a twitter post one time. I am the protagonist of reality surrounded by cognitively dissonant NPCs."
Then I'll need a better phrase to describe the psychological tension between two of a person's beliefs or experiences that each imply a mutually exclusive set of facts to the other, because that does not roll off the tongue
An example I see regularly is in parents who have Dobsonoid views on parenting. They believe that all disobedience must be painfully corrected to make what they see as a good person, and then they watch it just not work that way. Their resolution of the tension between their belief and their experience is usually a rationalization that an outside influence, particularly schooling, must have corrupted their child
I know it's a real phenomenon, the term has just been abused into meaninglessness. Kinda like how "psyop" has just become the new word for "conspiracy" or how the internet villain of the week apparently is always a "textbook narcissist" now.
I agree, and it's frustrating. I'm open to running on a terminology treadmill, and I've never understood why some people hate that idea so much, but it seems like new or presently-unused concise terms don't surface quickly enough to keep up with how quickly they get debased
i'm with you, it's completely futile to make a stand on some word until you've got an alternative to shill. i resent the idea someone's going to make the most uncharitable interpretation of a wordchoice when if you skirted around it, they wouldn't even get what you're talking about
I'm a Reform Jewish woman who was a liberal who had a brainbreak moment when visiting 
and having the cognitive dissonance too apparent to ignore when they showed us literal minefields and tried to justify them. None of this screed applies to me."You can't just say America always bad, what about when they're on the good side?"
Well what makes them on the good side?
"They're fighting against the bad guys like Russia/China"
Okay, well you can't just always say Russia Bad China Bad, what about when they're on the good side?
"Well what makes them on the good side?"
Well weakening the global military empire of the US is a good start, since that global military empire currently is the primary mechanism through which global capitalist imperialism is enforced onto the world at gunpoint, and anything that breaks the hegemonic control of that global military empire gives breathing room to liberation struggles around the world.
"Okay, but you can't support dictators just because they weaken America"
Why not?
"Because what if America is on the good side?"
What makes them on the good side?
"Because they're fighting against the bad guys."
Repeat Ad Infinitum.
They're just hiding racism and they can't admit it to themselves or others. That's 90% of this. They want a leftist movement that caters specifically to their narrow racial and cultural interests. Everything else is frighting to them and forces them to admit they're from the imperial core.
