Barx [none/use name]

What does Stirner think?

Thanks!

Focus on organizing and socialism and let any friendships be natural. It’s not practical to completely separate one’s social life and political life.

Friendship doesn’t always stay that, though. Be careful and modest and never let it become a dating scene. Lefties will date but there is a huge difference between those who happen to date vs. an organization that allows or even promotes harassment, which is unfortunately very common. Similarly, nobody should be put in situations in a lefty organization where they are being sexualized or where there can be any perception of favoritism or discrimination. These should be places where one’s political contributions are what are valued.

If these things aren’t taken seriously then the org will eventually implode from not handling abusive situations appropriately and instead relying on however the current leadership team (usually defensively) responds to complaints. This is one of the worst and unfortunately common scenarios in political organizations and is a much greater threat to your organization (and people that want to work within it) than any feds or cops. The Best rule of thumb is to be humble and empathetic and plan for how you are going to handle situations with social fallout.

As a different example, you may also have people in your organization that do not get along and begin fighting. Sometimes it’s even pretty clear when one person is in the wrong and the other is not. But even then, the person that is in the wrong may weaponize anything they perceive to have caché in your organization. For example, race or gender or sexual orientation, etc. I’ve seen it happen many times. A harasser wraps themselves in an identity to deflect from their own behavior. So as an organization, you want to prepare for these scenarios because it is part of promoting comradely behavior and being a space where people actually want to be and work. And you need to develop strategies by which you will discriminate between true and false claims and reach reasonable conclusions to protect the members of your organization. Don’t worry about the image of the organization itself because if you act correctly in individual cases to protect the members of the org you can always explain what happened and why. In contrast, many lefties make the mistake of trying to protect the org over its members and this nearly always backfires.

Anyways this is how I recommend approaching the building of a space where commies can be friends. Keep the focus on organizing, education, and being a place where people can safely be. Plan for the worst so you can head it off before things get too far and so that you have tools to handle negative situations correctly.

The moderate wing of fascism as one very smart guy once said

Example 64581 of why it’s not okay to be French

Duterte was getting closer with China. Marcos represents a reversal, or maybe more accurately a return to complete submission to the United States.

Check out my new ultralight loadout

The US has already been doing that, of course. They’ll do whatever they can regardless of China’s posturing. Though material engagements do absolutely have costs, so actually participating in a resistance movement is far from nothing. At the same time it does align more or less perfectly with their massive industrial capacity. The key is to choose the right battles, e.g. Palestine, where participation is does not translate into, “China is going to fund revolutionaries in my country so I’ll prop up these right wing paramilitaries and get even more US bases”, as would definitely happen in India or The Philippines. Leading the charge on Palestine would probably improve China’s international position. Even just in their neighborhood this would be very popular in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Of course, this is just expressing a frustration from a Western person in the imperial core. We should remind ourselves that when thinking about the possibility for even better outcomes by states controlled by communist parties, we are literally in the states fighting to ensure the imperialist system and the genocide of Palestine. We should spend most of our time thinking about how to position ourselves to best fight that system and that genocide, not nag about states for not doing enough.

Yes this aligns with my general understanding as well. China’s relative passivity is part of a long game and is entirely intentional, considering very real failures of other states run by communist parties. I do think it can do more, as an important lesson is that capitalist countries, particularly the primary seats of capitalist empire, do not differentiate between real and imagined justifications for isolation. They will simply do it when they want to. I think there is more they could “get away” with, but I do understand and appreciate their more conservative commie perspective.

Depending on what you mean by ‘fighting the system’ I think we’re saying roughly the same thing. Electoral politics is upon us right now though, and in truth is always there to be dealt with, so needs to be engaged with constantly.

I’m saying the exact opposite. Electoral politics is something to spend something like 1% of your political thoughts on unless you are personally running or supporting an electoral anti-capitalist campaign. It is a distraction that gives you the false impression that your lone vote or nagging people to vote for capitalist politicians is doing anything good, let alone worth spending any real time on. If you’re spending much of your political focus on this you’re just a dancing monkey for the ruling class. This includes local campaigns. If you deviate from this line you’ll actually be working against the oppressed and marginalized people around you and in other countries.

Make sure your representative knows your name and what you stand for.

A complete waste of time. You do not matter, politically, as an individual. The other people who have their ear have tens of thousands of dollars to drop on them. You think you’re going to compete with that by having the super smartest arguments and “a relationship” with this stooge that knows exactly who butters their bread? At most they will use you as a prop for their own ends. And if they are a capitalist politician, which is nearly all of them, you will be speaking to a brick wall that will never do what is necessary for justice.

From what I can see they mostly don’t get that much input from voters, so your voice is louder when you talk directly to them.

Bruh liberals are constantly organizing letter writing campaigns and calling offices and trying to get meetings with their reps. They are routinely ignored. Only organized actions with leverage ever do anything and again, it’s only within very limited confines of capitalist discourse.

In contrast, donors get to go to special events at the mansions of party insiders where they get to tell the candidate all about their latest Brown Child Exploder 3000 and how important it is that they don’t get in the way of its sales and hey here’s $30,000 from all of our executives that just happen to be donating to you as individual private citizens.

You do not register on their radar. You’re the goofball they make fun of to their sides later. At most they will use you as practice for how to handle people that want things they will never be provided with.

The electoral system can be changed, but as you say, it’ll take fighting for that.

In your mind, what does it mean to change the electoral system and how does it compare to what is necessary to undo the intrinsic violence and disposession of the capitalist system?

Fighting the system directly won’t gain much as it’s just that, a system.

Why not?

It’ll have to be a ‘hearts and minds’ job amongst the electorate to show people there is a better way and get them to vote for candidates who support that.

You do need to communicate with the public but feeding into the false notion that you’re just going to vote out capitalism will lead to almost immediate distrust because you will fail right away.

It can work, that’s ultimately how things have drifted to the right over time, people believe that’s the ‘better’ way.

You think people have drifted to the right because they were offered a better future by politicians that had personal relationships with random right wing constituents?

I think it is very frustrating but I do appreciate China’s complete commitment to its own development to the point where it will be able to dictate terms to the imperialists.

So many other socialist countries crumbled after the fall of the USSR. While on one hand this demonstrates how supportive the USSR was of their projects, it also demonstrates a key weakness, as it means they were unable to provide an alternative model for trade and development. A single partner goes down and suddenly North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe all go to shit. If they were robust and developed and had consistent trading partners they would be in a much better position today. Yugoslavia might still exist if it hadn’t tried to play both sides and depend on both the USSR and the IMF.

China offers a path forward that I think is more robust, even though it has contradictions. When the imperialists try to fuck you, China will be there to trade. This is, by far, imperialists’ most powerful weapon and China is destroying it more and more every day. It is the only reason we can see pink movements in Latin America, the establishment of AES in the Sahel, of Russia (not socialist, but an opponent to Western imperialists) not immediately collapsing in response to getting cut off from the USD banking system.

There’s a point missing from this, though. Why couldn’t China just do that and support revolution elsewhere? In my opinion… it could. It really could do more. I think a lot of this is a holdover from China considering itself to be in a very weak position (and it does still have many weaknesses) where it cannot take the anti-imperialist lead in a new cold war. It doesn’t want to take lead in a new cold war, it wants to develop itself as much as possible first, to weaken the imperialist empire and build its alternative (China-led multipolarity).

I think it is reasonably perceived that stronger moves against imperialists will further the creation of two blocs that crystallize current geopolitical alignments. I think it is also reasonably perceived that the trend of those alignments is favorable towards China, so the more time before crystallization, the better. Maybe it will just be, literally, NATO vs. everyone else some day.

I think that it is likely that we will see foreign policy change from China over the next few decades. Not necessarily into a firebrand supporter of revolution on ML principals, but I do think they’ll start to more openly flex muscle around arms shipments, sanctions, national sovereignty, etc. I think the policy of “we will trade with everyone” will begin to have exceptions. A lot of it will be prompted by an imperialist West looking to crystallize those blocs in their favor.

Anyways I do also find their strategy frustrating even though I do see the value in it. I see a large nation led by a communist party that allows and even participates in the genocide of Gaza by trading with Israel and not rallying any kind of coercive international resistance. I see a large nation led by a communist party that fails to consistently ally with communist movements in neighboring countries and even generates opposition to China within them, as China makes deals with their oppressors. These are missed opportunities to forward our cause and they are missed due to highly sophisticated but still disappointing strategies developed in an era where China was a minor power.

Bernie Bros were telling you Biden was senile in 2019 lmao

You’ll notice that this is a city council run by Democrats.

The dehumanization and abuse of the homeless is a bipartisan position. This is because it is a fundamental product of capitalism, where those most impoverished do not have any humane guaranteed place to live. Compounding this, business owners, through the process of becoming more interested in their own profits than in the well-being of their business’ community, treat those who live on the streets near their businesses as merely a threat to their incomes.

Those business owners are who actually control your city councils and your presidencies and your frocked-up supreme court. They also fund the party and PACs and PR firms that are telling you this highly non-strategic advice of “just support this party it’s the good guys and very smart”. This is an example of why they are in power and you are not - they control your actual political brain.

In reality, you should join us in fighting against the system itself, as it will never deliver what is necessary, and it will actually fight against it instead. This does not mean never engaging in electoral politics, but it does mean actually understanding it and putting energy into that which actually builds our cause and helps our neighbors.

And they’re all crackers

For additional context, the MK-84 is manufactured by General Dynamics and the JDAM systems they are usually retrofitted with are always manufactured by Boeing.

Both companies are weapons manufacturers for this genocide. Both are also unionized “good job” companies. It’s very important to not be knee-jerk pro-union, but to understand how one’s own participation in their country’s economy impacts everyone else. Say no to bomb manufacturers. If you work for a weapons manufacturer, change jobs as soon as you can. If you work somewhere that does business with Israel or weapons contractors, consider organizing your workplace against that (you may get fired but Palestine is more important).

With Lemmy, entire instances can be more like a single subreddit or a small set of them. Comms often lack clear distinctions in topic or focus and this is particularly true for small instances. They look more like the old-school forums that Reddit replaced but with better tooling and interfaces and ways to discover them.

Some of the large instances, by contrast, have complete Le Reddit brain and constantly want to speak to the manager about you daring to contradict them. That’s not the curated liberal echo chamber they signed up for! Nor what the admins nor their mods signed up for! They just wanted another Reddit with some vague nonsense about open APIs and they are, predictably, constantly shedding users back to Reddit.

Kurzweil is a “futurologist” crackpot that just makes shit up and is constantly wrong.

They shouldn’t even store a root password let alone send it over email. This means they really don’t know what they’re doing and you should assume everything you do there is extremely vulnerable and might as well be public knowledge.

That’s extremely bad