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trying to push back against the obvious cia-backed media skewering China for anything it does by going too far in the other direction and excusing extremely bad stuff, basically
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May 13, 2020 00:21
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Dreylad posted:trying to push back against the obvious cia-backed media skewering China for anything it does by going too far in the other direction and excusing extremely bad stuff, basically Yeah it's a combination of "enemy of my enemy" and desperately wanting there to be a good guy in global politics
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May 13, 2020 00:27
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ToxicAcne posted:What's with Western leftists unironic support for the Chinese government? Some posters on r/chapotraphouse stated that the Uighur concentration camps were really vocational and reeducation camps and that it was the Uighur's fault for not assimilating and learning Mandarin. Does this kind of thinking come from some misplaced defence of "actually existing socialism"? 1: almost every source of news we receive about xinjiang in the news is filtered and boosted through the us state dept.. either directly through operations like voice of america or through 'intelligence sources' cited in new york times' articles. like if i remember right one of the main uighur translators for voa helped administrate guantanamo bay under the bush administration. those aren't credentials you can trust. western marxists, most of whom aren't connected to any kind of work or party and wear their ideology as fashion, fall into the trap of thinking that because the information sources are tainted everything they're saying MUST be a lie. then they feel compelled to come up with a counter-narrative that absolves the prc of any moral blame -- the camps aren't bad (detainment), they're actually good (education)!, etc. the xinjiang camps almost certainly aren't ostfront style 'exhaust and slaughter' concentration camps like we associate with the term, but they also almost certainly aren't 'voluntary vocational camps' or whatever. figuring out what exactly they are would require a lot of work -- finding a variety of sources, translating stories directly from chinese, collaborating stories between themselves, separating information from gossip, etc. and basically no one wants to actually do this work. because the two sides of the argument can't even agree on what is being discussed the conversation becomes wholly divorced from material reality and is rendered into purely moral terms. tensions are flared and meaning is lost. this is not a flaw but a function of social media. god is in his heaven, all is right with the world. 2: never go to reddit.
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May 13, 2020 00:32
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Reminds me of the handful of anarchists I've met who are convinced 9/11 was an inside job purely on the basis of "america bad" and ignoring the ways america is actually bad in a way that extremely understandably created a retaliatory terrorist movement.
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May 13, 2020 00:38
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Tiger King is exhausting to watch because there's no one to root for and that's also global news
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May 13, 2020 00:38
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:i saw the headline and length of the video and decided to click back to this red letter media review of independence day (1996). i probably already have the gist of it. I think your point about the cargo cult is v on point. When I speak disparagingly of "idpol" I'm talking what I see as an overinvestment in the power of words, ie making an instagram story saying "non-black people shouldn't say boi" or (in the case of this video) apologizing in the description of your video for saying "republic of Korea" because this does violence to the DPRK. I don't think things like that significantly alter the material conditions of any oppressed group. These types of groups seem to be creating some sort of Utopian ML, divorced from actual historical context, which ties in with what you said about it partly being a fashion statement. I am reminded of Bookchin's lifestylists. I've also seen a self-identified ML try to cancel "the dirtbag left" for being fatphobic In the video the speaker repeats stuff I've heard elsewhere about the DPRK: that the Kim's aren't heads of state because the office of the president was abolished after the death of Kim Il-Sung, and Kim Jong-Un is just the chairmen of the committee, and that the DPRK is a democracy because they have elections. This feels like part of an effort to prove the DPRK is good through a liberal lens, which I find eerie.
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May 13, 2020 00:56
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ToxicAcne posted:What's with Western leftists unironic support for the Chinese government? Some posters on r/chapotraphouse stated that the Uighur concentration camps were really vocational and reeducation camps and that it was the Uighur's fault for not assimilating and learning Mandarin. Does this kind of thinking come from some misplaced defence of "actually existing socialism"? They do? I identify as maoist and I don’t. A4R8 fucked around with this message at 04:15 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 01:22
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LittleBlackCloud posted:
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May 13, 2020 01:24
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LittleBlackCloud posted:In the video the speaker repeats stuff I've heard elsewhere about the DPRK: that the Kim's aren't heads of state because the office of the president was abolished after the death of Kim Il-Sung, and Kim Jong-Un is just the chairmen of the committee, and that the DPRK is a democracy because they have elections. This feels like part of an effort to prove the DPRK is good through a liberal lens, which I find eerie. Not necessarily wrong, but the fact that there are more political parties in the north korean parliament than in the us house of representatives is, in the abstract, quite funny
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May 13, 2020 01:26
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ToxicAcne posted:Some posters on r/chapotraphouse
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May 13, 2020 01:47
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LittleBlackCloud posted:In the video the speaker repeats stuff I've heard elsewhere about the DPRK: that the Kim's aren't heads of state because the office of the president was abolished after the death of Kim Il-Sung, and Kim Jong-Un is just the chairmen of the committee, and that the DPRK is a democracy because they have elections. This feels like part of an effort to prove the DPRK is good through a liberal lens, which I find eerie. Without commenting on anything else, it is a pretty bog standard communist talking point to say workers' democracy is more democratic than bourgeois democracy. Are Lenin and Mao being liberals when they say this? Is it liberal to have institutions, or to articulate a defense of those institutions?
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May 13, 2020 02:18
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ToxicAcne posted:What's with Western leftists unironic support for the Chinese government? Some posters on r/chapotraphouse stated that the Uighur concentration camps were really vocational and reeducation camps and that it was the Uighur's fault for not assimilating and learning Mandarin. Does this kind of thinking come from some misplaced defence of "actually existing socialism"? there's bipartisan support in the US for increased aggression against China. If you're a Western leftist, being overly supportive of China is a smaller mistake than playing into the current demonization campaign. Even if you don't believe that China is socialist, its posing a huge threat to the neoliberal Western governments, especially during this pandemic. China being able to contain COVID-19 with shutdowns while supporting people's needs shows that the mass death we're having in the US was avoidable. China wasn't the only country to do this, but it is certainly the biggest. There's also the previously existing tension the West has with China emerging as one of the biggest global powers. I think all this is important when struggling for reforms at home and opposing Western imperialism. China isn't normally a place I look to when trying to explain to people how certain reforms are possible, but their response to the pandemic is a big exception. It's also increasingly necessary to argue that the US military isn't necessary to oppose some evil Chinese empire.
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May 13, 2020 02:21
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ToxicAcne posted:What's with Western leftists unironic support for the Chinese government? Some posters on r/chapotraphouse stated that the Uighur concentration camps were really vocational and reeducation camps and that it was the Uighur's fault for not assimilating and learning Mandarin. Does this kind of thinking come from some misplaced defence of "actually existing socialism"? Leftists should be supporting the Chinese government, because it is actually existing socialism. This is like asking "what's with Western leftists unironic support for the USSR?". Duh?
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May 13, 2020 02:47
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i say swears online posted:I've had the same offputting feeling listen to someone run through those talking points, thanks for articulating that Some young communists will defend the DPRK in liberal terms, because they're former liberals themselves, but while some slanders of the DPRK will assume liberal premises, it's not necessarily liberal to point out their basic errors of fact.
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May 13, 2020 02:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:"what's with Western leftists unironic support for the USSR?". not enough of it in my opinion
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May 13, 2020 03:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:Leftists should be supporting the Chinese government, because it is actually existing socialism. Nobody’s doubting Chinese socialism and infrastructure as revealed by the pandemic compared to ours, but Jinping... can be improved.
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May 13, 2020 03:15
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A4R8 posted:Nobody’s doubting Chinese socialism and infrastructure as revealed by the pandemic compared to ours, but Jinping... can be improved. Is it Jinping so much, but that China is like any other superpower with its own dark sides? They are preferable to the wreck US has become, but that doesn't mean they need to given carte blanche. I mean look at Venezuela, you can legitimately say there were were many gently caress ups on the part of the PSUV and at the same time the US has done everything it can to bring misery to the Venezuelan people (including trying to install a puppet). Ardennes fucked around with this message at 07:29 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 04:39
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What was Eurocommunism and why did it collapse after 1991? I read an essay by Milliband on the topic and he keeps reiterating that while it tries to work within the means of the bourgeois state it isn't social democracy, but social democratic parties- at least on paper- also claimed that they wanted to get rid of capitalism, within the means of bourgeois politics. Parties like Labour and the NDP had this in their constitution until the 1990s. Eurocommunists also seem to have distanced themselves from the Soviet Union just like the SocDems. Link to the article: https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1978/xx/eurocomm.htm
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May 13, 2020 06:36
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Ardennes posted:Is it Jinping so much, but rather than China is like any other superpower with its own dark sides? They are preferable to the wreck US has become, but that doesn't mean they necessarily need to given carte blanche. learn the and unironically apply the term: "critical support for x"
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May 13, 2020 07:12
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ToxicAcne posted:What was Eurocommunism and why did it collapse after 1991? I read an essay by Milliband on the topic and he keeps reiterating that while it tries to work within the means of the bourgeois state it isn't social democracy, but social democratic parties- at least on paper- also claimed that they wanted to get rid of capitalism, within the means of bourgeois politics. Parties like Labour and the NDP had this in their constitution until the 1990s. Eurocommunists also seem to have distanced themselves from the Soviet Union just like the SocDems. They had made themselves redundant. They had fought tooth and nail against the only could that could stand against the West and were promptly thrown in the bin once the West had won. The hegemony of the West is antithetical to the development of socialism. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 07:36 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 07:32
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LittleBlackCloud posted:I think your point about the cargo cult is v on point. the last thing, yeah, that reminds me of how people once said "ah, well, the soviet constitution guarantees all of these things," on paper, but that doesn't reflect the actual situation on the ground. or like "stalin was asked to resign 10 times and the people said no every time, and then everyone said, 'wow, comrade stalin you're so great, you really do deserve to be our leader." and then everyone stood up and cheered and even people's pets grew fatter and happier. i think north korea in actual practice though is probably pretty similar to, say, cuba in terms of how the inner workings of the government function. i think kim jong un is probably not as powerful as he is portrayed, in reality. like, he's kind of goober... doesn't exercise... is a heavy smoker and probably needs a lot of naps. and i don't think he alone could hold it all together -- it does take a big effort involving the active participation of a lot of people. and if he died, his sister would take over, but not because she's exceptionally ruthless or the biggest badass or whatever people like to think, but she would just take over a particular function in the machine. Scrree posted:the xinjiang camps almost certainly aren't ostfront style 'exhaust and slaughter' concentration camps like we associate with the term, but they also almost certainly aren't 'voluntary vocational camps' or whatever. figuring out what exactly they are would require a lot of work -- finding a variety of sources, translating stories directly from chinese, collaborating stories between themselves, separating information from gossip, etc. and basically no one wants to actually do this work. because the two sides of the argument can't even agree on what is being discussed the conversation becomes wholly divorced from material reality and is rendered into purely moral terms. tensions are flared and meaning is lost. this is not a flaw but a function of social media. god is in his heaven, all is right with the world. also, if you got rid of the CCP, it's not like the people who would replace it would be liberals. the idea that everyone (or even most people) in the world want to be good, american-style liberals is just bogus. there's a solid chance the people who would take over would be even more illiberal in some respects. BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 07:56 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 07:34
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at least with the NDP (assuming you mean the Canadian party), there was a shift away from its agricultural supporter roots and the radicalism found among early-mid century farmers, who were a pretty big voting bloc because of the prevalence of farming in Canada, to an alliance with urban and northern industrial workers. The NDP maintained a pretty strong foothold in those places, but as Canada deindustralized the NDP decided to hold on to those ridings which became increasingly populated by new left activists and academics. anti-communism was particularly virulent in Canada so as far as I know the NDP were never friendly with the USSR, save for a brief period during the Second World War.
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May 13, 2020 07:40
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Do you have any good reading on the NDP/CCF and it's history? I am Canadian but I unfortunately don't know much about Canadian History especially on the left. Also how was communism perceived in Quebec where politics are much different? Edit: Also why didn't the NDP replace the liberals like Labour did in the UK? and were the Waffle anti USSR as well? ToxicAcne fucked around with this message at 08:25 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 08:21
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:well i think the party really does believe in reeducation and they mean that literally, and it is mandatory. i imagine there is vocational training at these camps, except this is not voluntary. and there's a heavy ideological component interweaved throughout. like "we're going to make you better." and you'll be happier and have new skills and then jump out of bed in the morning when you go to work while birds sing the praises of xj jinping and flowers bloom in springtime. now, i don't defend this, because if the U.S. government came and ordered me to go to a FEMA camp where you listen to patriotic songs every day and take classes on donald trump thought, even if they teach me how to operate a forklift while i'm there, i'm going to be like wtf. but the comparisons to the nazis just doesn't strike me as true watching chinese official propaganda, the big state parades and so forth, which puts an emphasis on heavy multiculturalism, like "we are the world," that's at that level of cheesy. like lionel hutz, the lawyer in the simpsons imagining a world without lawyers, and it's all these different cultures holding hands and dancing around a rainbow. it is authoritarian and illiberal but that's just so far removed from nazism that people who make those comparisons are getting some bad information somewhere. The ccp isn't stupid, they want their citizens to be loyal members of the PRC. Of course " loyal member of the PRC" necessarily implies the acceptance of the communist party's leadership. To that end they want every ethnic group in China to feel like they are a part of China, in a very literal sense. This is why the ccp censors han nationalist publications with one hand while attempting to reeducate xinjiang with the other.
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May 13, 2020 16:34
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NO LISTEN TO ME posted:Reminds me of the handful of anarchists I've met who are convinced 9/11 was an inside job purely on the basis of "america bad" and ignoring the ways america is actually bad in a way that extremely understandably created a retaliatory terrorist movement. 9/11 was a utherfuckin inside job https://news.yahoo.com/in-court-fil...-224555851.html
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May 13, 2020 17:28
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:also, if you got rid of the CCP, it's not like the people who would replace it would be liberals. the idea that everyone (or even most people) in the world want to be good, american-style liberals is just bogus. there's a solid chance the people who would take over would be even more illiberal in some respects. american-style liberals helped create the world's biggest prison system, which locks up oppressed groups in disproportionate numbers. they slashed the small US welfare state explicitly because it helped Black women too much. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but even leftists seem to forget how terrible liberals can be when it comes to discussing how "illiberal" formerly colonized countries might be.
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May 13, 2020 18:10
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Suddenly remembering the very big brain take that Critical Support for AES countries is "first world privilege" because supposedly it implies thinking that people in those countries don't deserve the good life available in the capitalist world... as if that good life were on offer for them, as if it were something universally enjoyed even in the capitalist countries.
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May 13, 2020 18:19
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NO LISTEN TO ME posted:Reminds me of the handful of anarchists I've met who are convinced 9/11 was an inside job purely on the basis of "america bad" and ignoring the ways america is actually bad in a way that extremely understandably created a retaliatory terrorist movement. Google 9/11 put options
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May 13, 2020 18:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:Google 9/11 put options It’s nuts how people can correctly infer JFK’s murder was inside job, but once you mention anything like that with 9/11...
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May 13, 2020 18:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:Google 9/11 put options My policy vis a vis most conspiracy theories is "who cares?", not only is so much of this stuff explainable, but it really has no bearing on my opinion of the US government. I already know the US government is guilty of horrific crimes. Going down these weird rabbit holes can be fun(?), but ultimately it's a waste of time that helps make you feel powerless. I kind of like the Saudi angle though.
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May 13, 2020 18:43
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A4R8 posted:It’s nuts how people can correctly infer JFK’s murder was inside job, but once you mention anything like that with 9/11... a) Killing one man is a lot less complicated than a series of simultaneous hijackings with multiple targets. b) It's a lot easier for some people to accept that an alphabet agency did something bad than essentially a significant portion of the government killed its own citizens.
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May 13, 2020 18:45
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the US supported al-Qaeda before 9/11 and supported al-Qaeda after 9/11. The US empire doesn't care if it has to bomb reactionary forces once in a while, as long as they keep down socialist movements and attack states seeking an independent path of development. 9/11 was even used to justify destroying Iraq, a state that was hostile to al-Qaeda!
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May 13, 2020 18:52
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it’s me, i’m the ML and/or anarchist who isn’t quite convinced the us govt is bad
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May 13, 2020 18:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:Google 9/11 put options Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded. These investors netted a profit of at least $5 million after the September 11 attacks. Interestingly, the names of the investors remain undisclosed and the $5 million remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account. lmao what the gently caress
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May 13, 2020 19:04
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ToxicAcne posted:Do you have any good reading on the NDP/CCF and it's history? I am Canadian but I unfortunately don't know much about Canadian History especially on the left. Also how was communism perceived in Quebec where politics are much different? Ian McKay has some good books about the left in Canada. But they are very historian-history books, keep in mind. "Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History" is a good place to start. "The Prairie Agrarian Movement Revisited" gives you a good history of where the CCF/NDP came from and why. I don't know if there's a good history of the NDP from a historian, honestly! I would pop into one of the CanPol threads and ask, people might be able to help you a bit more there. Quebec until the 1960s was deeply Catholic, to the point where its anti-communism was only matched by its antisemitism. There were strikes and labour unrest, but it was a lot more restrained in Quebec than it was elsewhere. After the Quiet Revolution, it shifted hard to the left in its attempts to modernize the province. The NDP never replaced the Liberals like Labour did because the CCF/early NDP fundamentally drew its support from a different constituency than the Liberals. That's a very simple answer to a pretty complicated question, but the Liberals never really lost power for any substantial period of time during the 20th century in Canada. It is the dominant political party in this country, to the point where Ian McKay (historian I mentioned above) has argued that the unifying narrative in Canadian history really is that the nation is the site of a liberal project of rule. I'm not sure how convinced I am of this argument, but you do see that liberalism has long been the dominant ideology in Canada to the point where any successful Liberal or Conservative tend to reflect the same values but traced along different electoral fault lines.
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May 13, 2020 19:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:Google 9/11 put options nice try mcconnell
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May 13, 2020 21:32
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Ardennes posted:They had made themselves redundant. They had fought tooth and nail against the only could that could stand against the West and were promptly thrown in the bin once the West had won. The hegemony of the West is antithetical to the development of socialism. Setting yourself up as a socialist force independent of Moscow ceased to be relevant once Moscow was mostly concerned with securing loans to rig their own elections, is pretty much it. They weren't disposed of or whatever, they realised there was no reason to exist.
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May 13, 2020 21:47
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded. These investors netted a profit of at least $5 million after the September 11 attacks. Interestingly, the names of the investors remain undisclosed and the $5 million remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account. see, it's a shame reactionary conspiracy theories muddied the waters with improbable "planted explosives tower 7" poo poo, when there is a pretty reasonable argument that "bush admin knew, didn't want to rock the boat with the saudis, and profited from it personally"
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May 13, 2020 21:48
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A4R8 posted:It’s nuts how people can correctly infer JFK’s murder was inside job, but once you mention anything like that with 9/11... idk if it was an inside job as much as it was along the lines of Pearl Harbor, where they almost certainly knew but allowed it to happen e: what's a good leftist nonfiction book I should read that's available on Kindle
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May 13, 2020 21:49
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indigi posted:idk if it was an inside job as much as it was along the lines of Pearl Harbor, where they almost certainly knew but allowed it to happen http://readsettlers.org/ edit: should say, if you want to read something that will make you stop and feel very uncomfortable, but in an illuminating way. Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 21:52
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