SixSidedUrsine [comrade/them]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2022

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  • Nah, Marxist-Leninist analysis of the 30’s is deep and paints an accurate picture of what was actually going down at that time based on material reality instead of… you know, vibes that help prop up the idealist liberal’s flawed worldview. But to the contrary, the NATO sycophants’ history books that just straight make shit up throughout the 20th century have an almost complete amnesia regarding many 21st century and especially recent events leading up to the current situation now. That way, they can just assign motivations willy nilly to the current actors involved, no matter how arbitrary or nonsensical so long as, again, it supports their worldview, as Marvel movie-like it may be, and even as untenable as it is in the face of any actual historical context. Kinda sad.


  • You can’t argue with these NATO shills. They’ll just deny history or try to rewrite it in such a way as so as to also deny the current inconvenient reality, move goalpoasts, and accuse anyone with any sense as being on “Putin’s payroll.” If you use a material analysis of the situation, they screech about how talking about realpolitik is… bad somehow or something? It’s a mess. Look at this /u/maynarkh@feddit.nl loser right here in this very thread exemplifying what I’m talking about. They’re… equating “wokism” as a term with the concept of “escalation” (simply a thing that any sane person would agree does happen) and saying we use the latter the way chuds use the former. wut? lol. Lost the fucking plot. It’s nonsensical.

    These kind of people can’t be reasoned with. They just regurgitate the propaganda they know, no matter how many times it’s been easily and thoroughly debunked. And to claim we’re the ones that sound like CIA ops when they’re the ones spouting the US state department lines like the good little sycophantic useful idiots that they are and carrying water for open, proud, admitted Nazi fascists while they call us “tankie red fash.” The projection is so painfully obvious it’s literally embarrassing.

    I guess it could be a self defense mechanism for when one knows in the back of their mind that everything they’re saying is just pure ahistorical often chauvinist horseshit but they know their worldview would come crashing down if they didn’t do everything in their power to keep tilling it and shoveling it, so till it and shovel it they must. Truly, it’s… pathetic.



  • It has nothing to do with where I personally draw the line, asshole. It has everything to do with the scientifically established reality about who is capable of suffering. Rocks can’t. Cows, pigs, etc. can. Just because your sphere of empathy is arbitrarily drawn to reinforce what’s convenient for you doesn’t mean that by necessity everyone else is so shallow, cruel, and morally inconsistent.


  • Do you also need someone to explain to you why Patsoc’s don’t fall under the nonsectarian rule too? What about Va*shites? They’re real leftists, according to themselves, so not letting them run rampant here is just blatant sectarianism, you’re so right! The non-sectarianism rule should also extend to the Pro-Palestine gatekeeper users, always arrogantly telling Zionists that they’re not real leftists just because they support a racist apartheid state conducting genocide. This all makes perfect sense.




  • Same vibes as supposed progressives who are sharing pro-Israel PragerU vids after criticizing PragerU on other topics.

    Ideally every comrade is vegan, but if for whatever reason you cannot be or are working towards it then at the absolute least you can support those who are and accept that it is the morally correct position instead of all this hoop jumping

    this

    Sorry for the cliche response, but really. This.

    order-of-lenin



  • I agree, non-vegans (or certainly at least anti-vegans, even in this thread) can only operate by avoiding facing their cognitive dissonance through child-like abstractions. But a puerile affection for a stuffed animal has zilch to do with the material basis behind veganism and the very real suffering on an unimaginable scale that carnists subject sentient life to for profit and treats.



  • i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.

    You think “we” do that? I don’t. I make it a point to carefully consider who should be given my empathy or condemnation based on material reality.

    I’m not entirely sure what your point is to be honest. Yeah, unfortunately there are plenty of people who base their sphere of empathy not on a materialist examination of the world but on societal norms, and that’s the problem here (along many of the problems we rightly rail about as leftists). It’s what I mean when I talk about arbitrary lines differentiating the human animal from all others to justify the way some humans treat all others.

    Are you equating pets to children’s toys? margot-disgust Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.

    You can call it person-hood if you like, but that just obsfucates things because people tend to think of “person” as “human” and what we’re talking about here is the capacity to suffer and to experience, which is not exclusive to humanity. It’s just another example of using the bias that’s already built in to language as a means to prove a point through circular reasoning, something we should be familiar with and wary of as leftists.

    A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.

    How is that less circle-jerking? Why is this version “circle-jerking” at all? The difference in either version is a lever to choose between something that can experience and suffer and something that can’t.


  • Pigs could well be sapient too. It really depends on where you draw the line for “sapience.” If you mean “able to think” or even “self aware” then pigs almost certainly are sapient. If by sapient you mean “of or relating to the human species” then obviously they aren’t, but that latter definition has no bearing or point in this discussion. You bloodmouths (that’s your wording!) keep trying to find some line you can draw in the sand that makes the torture of non-humans acceptable, but every time that line is examined it turns out it doesn’t exist, or at best, it turns out to be such a fuzzy boundary that it consigns tonnes of humans to the same status that’s used to justify the treatment of the beings tortured and killed as treats for carnists.


  • All you’ve done is admit that you think the suffering of others is fine and “worth it” for the tasty results, so long as those who are suffering are sufficiently different than you.

    The question is if animals should be emoathized with in the same way historical slaves are.

    That’s a slimy phrasing the question in a way that immediately lets you off the hook for your choice to ignore and perpetuate suffering because it makes it seem like the question of non-human suffering hinges on non-humans being “the same as” human slaves. It’s the old “well, obviously pigs and cows aren’t quite as intellectually complex as humans therefore anything we do to them for the sake of humans enjoying treats is fine. What, do you think pigs and cows should be able to vote or learn to read?

    In other words, the answer to your question about whether we should empathize “in the same way” is no, not the “same way,” but we absolutely should and must empathize with them as fellow sentient beings capable of emotions, joy, suffering, pleasure, pain just like humans, and recognize that the way we torture and murder billions of them every year for profit (and “taste”) is one of the greatest crimes in the history of our species.

    Your entire premise of who deserves your empathy is still based on how much someone is “like you” in whatever arbitrary ways that allow you to maintain the distinctions you’ve already made based on your comfort and convenience. And that part is the same as slave owners who would make similar arbitrary distinctions about how “different from themselves” their victims are.

    Yes, sentient beings deserve your empathy. It’s not at all a difficult conclusion to reach if you have any interest in being honest with yourself.




  • I think it’s a fair assumption, considering it was announced that was the team the US was sending in (or at least it was announced that a teams from “Joint Special Operations Command” were being sent to support Israel, and Delta Force is one of the two main groups in that). Also, it was members of that delta death squad that the white house laughably put up images on instagram with their faces showing before realizing their mistake and deleting them.

    Anyway, it could well be a false or incorrect report that they’re fighting right now, just saying that there’s good reason to say Delta, and that it’s not just some random generic thing.



  • Oh no, not this again. If that’s what you see, then you aren’t really looking.

    Reposting something again, but putting it below a spoiler tag because it’s not relevant to what’s happening right now in Gaza - much more pressing atm.

    spoiler

    I didn’t write the following, but I think it is an excellent summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia specifically with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone saying they just didn’t like the war in general and that it’s just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another, similar to what you’re saying. While it’s understandable to feel that way, it is not materialist and it is failing to see the bigger picture. At the very least, I just think it’s something you might consider. The person who wrote that response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net, but they’re apparently gone now or maybe using a new name.

    and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning

    I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.

    This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?

    To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:

    For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.

    Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.

    In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.

    We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.

    For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.

    Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.

    And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).

    We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?

    Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.

    After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.


  • But I am mostly interested in making sure we handle the revolution of the future as correctly as possible.

    That is the important part. And if we’re talking defenseless kids (that is, they’re not aiming a gun at you, they don’t have the code to the bomb like on an episode of 24, they’re literally your prisoners) then it would take a truly tortured form of logic along with some insane scenario to find some utilitarian instance where killing them is wholly justified.

    The main problem with that as well as the main problem with talking about the Romanovs of history is that the whole thing about how not killing them “would have ended up killing x-hundred/thousand/million/whatever more” is all just speculation. ImOnADiet correctly put the question as you being omniscient - yeah, if you’re omniscient (more to the point, prescient) then it’s an easy choice. If not executing the kid really truly did undeniably and unavoidably, as shown in the magic crystal ball, causes so much more death and misery, then killing them probably would be the deeply unfortunate but correct choice. The thing is, no one is omniscient or prescient. There are countless ways, countless likely ways it could well have gone where they survived and the revolution was better for it, not worse off. And so too is any future situation where you have children as your prisoners. The perpetrators of crimes against the people get the wall, zero qualms there. But the kids in your custody, at your mercy who were guilty of no such crimes except to have been born to ghouls deserve profound consideration before you put them against the wall next to fascists. You had better be fucking sure these children are beyond all doubt going to be responsible for future mass death, somehow, with your crystal ball.

    For the record, I don’t think you’re being a debate pervert at all, and feeling strongly about this is not “a weak point,” it’s quite the opposite. I for one am grateful that you’re here and you’re asking these questions. I’m appalled by the few people here who think it’s like some kind of badge that makes them a serious~tm communist and that no one can accuse them of being a lib for proclaiming how righteous they think the execution of historic children is, or something. So actually seeing someone give a little pushback on that deserves gratitude and appreciation. heart-sickle