I led you right to the fucking point and you're still staring up your own asshole.

No one cares about you, or who you are, or what you believe. This conversation is not a moral judgment on anyone or anything. It is an attempt to reckon with a kind of reasoning that is a dead fucking end in the current moment.

If you believe in material politics, you will attempt to do anything and everything necessary to organize your class and overthrow your oppressors.

That's literally all there is to it.

Imagining scenarios where others are morally compromised, and thus unworthy to participate, is the delusion of someone who thinks they have the power to enact their moral judgment on the world.

Do you think our descendants, living in neo Feudalism in the post industrial world with less than a hundred thousand people in it, would give a fuck about the moral character of people who could have stopped this, but chose not to?

This is my last response because jfc you've demonstrated no ability to think critically or actually listen to what I'm saying.

"I'm such a good person," I say, as I am marched to the gas chambers by my undivided enemies.

Are you willing to put members of the “Will Destroy Life Boats for My Own Lifejacket” committee into your lifeboat?

If I'm in the fucking lifeboat, the ship has sunk, idiot. If I'm in that situation, I've failed so badly, that I no longer care.

This is the answer I was expecting though.

Matt is right about Leftist online discourse. It really is a place for the self consciously left to congratulate themselves for thinking the correct things and to purge imaginary enemies rather than live their actual politics.

John Brown was an abolitionist. Almost everyone else was a poseur.

The same is true of us.

The thing that's supposed to be fucking clarifying about material politics is to not get lost in the weeds of idealist horseshit.

You must fix systemic problems. You must do this by acquiring power, and empowering the working class to reorganize society for its material benefit. Nothing can change until we do this. Every other question is secondary to the practical question of how we can accomplish this.

Asking what is or isn't "moral," or who is or isn't your comrade, assumes some kind of inevitable victory that you've already achieved, but don't want to be sullied.

It's like the people designing communist American flags, you're describing a place that will never fucking exist.

Until we have some movement that has leverage to move this fucking world, psyching ourselves out about problematic aspects of something that is currently fucking fictional is beyond self defeating.

How about this, when there's 500,000 of us, angry, armed, agitated, and organized, we can revisit this question.

Otherwise, it is, quite literally, inventing something to be mad about so you have something to talk about.

Don't have a strong opinion either direction.

But it's just a simple statement of fact that if the left is more concerned with moral judgment than strategic paths to victory, then this situation will never change, and it doesn't matter what you think. Because it will keep happening.

Are you trying to be a "good person," or are you trying to win? And end this nightmare?

Because it isn't like you can't just replace the text in this image with "I just wanted to end capitalism, I'm not a bad guy." You don't think a civil war or balkanization or a revolution isn't going to kill the parents of people who basically don't deserve it? Hell, won't kill children themselves?

Getting into moral arguments is the domain of people who think their souls are going to be judged when this is all over. As if the goal of any left wing movement is to be "good" in the way liberals understand the meaning of the word.

If you understand the stakes of what's in front of us, you'll understand that almost any price is worth paying to avoid the trajectory we're currently on.

Is your goal is to change that trajectory, or to fill your lifeboat with the people who participated in it the least?

And if you answer moralistically, then you've missed the entire point of this mental exercise.

It just sounds cooler to say 50 caliber than 12.7mm or whatever.

But .3008 or whatever the fuck can piss off. Max of 3 numbers in my bullet please.

Isn't caliber an imperial form of measurement?

Setting aside the fact that he was a hyper reactionary fuckhead, Bismarck actually was what this system pretends most of its leaders are. A hyper competent technocrat.

It legitimately could be that a lot of people running the world today are completely fucking delusional and stupid. Or have some vague conception of the damage they're doing, but no true awareness.

Even back then, Bismarck saw it coming, but the Kaiser didn't.

I wouldn't either except he had that take the other day where he was mad about fucking student debt relief.

He's taking an incoherent category and letting it actually impact his political opinions.

If your argument is that communism doesn't work, you have to contend with the fact that it took a deindustrialized country with a 75% illiteracy rate to space in roughly 40 years.

Libs choose not to do this.

The fact that the US is a decaying empire really has nothing to do with it.

The dumbest shit about this lib narrative is that it completely contradicts the Cold War narrative that they simultaneously will switch to without blinking an eye.

The Soviet Union was a backwards, 1984 hellscape with no food and comical mismanagement. It also, somehow, was a world bestriding evil empire superpower with advanced technology that was trying to militarize space and dominate the world and the whole free world needs to be mobilized against its unstoppable might.

The thing about Matt's categorizations is that it's just objectively, demonstrably wrong.

Like, it would be very clear if college educated people were so stridently different. But they're not. We have a ton of data on this.

I get what he's trying to say, there is a kind of distinct cultural difference between people who see the hypocrisy of liberals and/or just want to enjoy the cruelty and be "left alone" (enjoy Imperialism and private hierarchies without interference), and the self obsessed virtue politics of people who want to feel better about injustice, but don't want to fix it (or secretly think it's necessary and good).

But that dividing line doesn't fall on just one variable. Not race, not religion, not income. If you want to pick the biggest one, it's urban vs rural vs suburb, where the data does show gigantic divides. But even then, it's like 70/30 at best.

It's probably best described as people with petite bourgeois morality, vs people that have to fit into corporate culture that dominates economic centers.

In either case, what it represents is an inability for the electorate to believe in change. Despite the crises surrounding it, Neoliberalism has not loosed its grip on most people yet.

No one will ever be the party of working people.

The entire point of Neoliberalism was to crush that concept. And it's economic consensus among both parties.

Current programmer, it's really not hard work, and doesn't take "a certain kind of person." What this guy is saying is beyond service workers isn't even programming, and could literally be done by anyone.

Sure, there are some jobs where you legit need to be a fucking genius, like something in defense or 3d rendering or advanced algorithms or whatever, but the vast majority of the jobs out there range between tortuously banal to active waste of everyone's time.

Almost anyone can do it at the level most jobs require. No one wants to do it, because it's skull crushingly tedious as a profession unless you get very lucky.

Part of what pushed me so hard left is the vast chasm between how little work I actually do and my compensation, especially compared to my peers, who work ten times as hard for less than half the pay in fields people actually need.

Setting everything else aside, it really is wild how lost in the woods these people are.

Being a leftist might be a Cassandra-esque mind curse, but it is at least clarifying.

The US is now running a Black Lodge version of Chinese State Capitalism.

Whereas the CCP actually has centralized planning, and a goal, the US is just shoving money into the pockets of the ruling class for as long as they can.

But I don't know if we'll actually hit a crisis if they keep doing this. It's transparently corrupt, and is the end of markets. But if no one cares, this can presumably go on for a long time.

It's stable, so long as you do it correctly.

His thought process is identical.

Right wingers are against the state when they're not in charge of it. But they're for maximal state violence when they are and it's used against their enemies.

Chuds are bullies and libs are mean girl fake friends.

You're always going to be more mad at person who pretends to be on your side but secretly talks shit about you than the one that's openly hostile to you.

I've yelled this before at Nazis or their adjacents when they seemed receptive. Especially when they're being really dumb and citing their own arrests as "evidence" of them being the real threat to power.

This is already a white supremacist system. It's just not run by mask off idiots who don't know how to keep it under control.

And they don't let peasants into the castle. That's the only "threat" you are, being trashy, wannabe competition.

This can also be effective against idpol libs. You can point out that POC can assist, and even run, a white supremacist system. The people it benefits couldn't care less. Obama sided with the cops in Ferguson, started the Yemeni genocide, the Guatemalan coup, etc.

So it makes perfect sense to me that fash would go neoliberal. To the monsters that run this system, it's essentially all the same things they believe.

Honestly, it's inevitable.

The word Socialist used to be just as scary. And there are some places with communist parties that are basically just succdems.

If you're not a revolutionary organization, you will be coopted or destroyed eventually.

I don't think it's so much that it's not real, it's just a symptom of a human being recognizing the false meritocracy.

Like, yeah, the hierarchy is bullshit. There probably is someone who could do your job much better, and they were never given a chance.

You just have to confront that reality and internalize it. You don't "deserve" what you have, no one does, or can. The entire idea runs contrary to all human nature.

What turns people into monsters is trying to convince themselves that they do deserve it, that the filthy people beneath them deserve everything they get, because they didn't work hard enough. Nothing is more toxic to class solidarity, and it's where PMC psychos come from.

If you're being affected by imposter syndrome, look at the former president and his fail children. This system doesn't reward people based on "merit."