Idk if this is me going conspiracybrained but it feels to me like socdem anticommunism.
Like if you hear this you would in your gut feel "Oh socialism is still bad but the rich corporations are hypocrites now too for getting a piece of it".
Especially when it's easy and true to say "corporate welfare" or "corporate handouts".
Welfare is good too though but has the same problem of being a dirty word because of Reagan's "welfare queens"
I guess handouts would be a decent one because it implies it being undeserved. Or maybe just corporate rigging/cheating. The SEC exists so clearly there's some rules of capitalism that exist at least for the rest of us.
Yes, you are right, but still an easy formular. Alternative formulation could be socialism for the poor, consequences for the companies.
We need people to actually understand what socialism is (I find that it's already plenty easy to explain as just economic democracy), and we definitely shouldn't be associating it with bad things.
This. I hate it when I see people say "it's ok to muddle the meaning of socialism if it is associated with something positive." Literally had someone say that socialism being associated with a non problematic country like Switzerland is a good thing. In here.
we definitely shouldn’t be associating it with bad things.
Sure we should tell what socialism is - and communism for that matter, which is precisely the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence - but we can be aware of context and that not at any time the most precise academic Marxist definition is needed, but in communicative processes often that which connects to the other or the audience.
I also believe that action and collective action and the theory circles within those movements are what gives people words for what they experience in the workforce. There is the place in my opinion - in those different social relations - to find clarity that you don't find or strive for in most online posts or arguments. As nothing radicalizes as much as work and collective action which creates an actor in a conflict that is powerful.
"it can't be a genocide because the population is increasing" is imo a weak argument because genocide doesn't require killing and I think the argument from no refugees is orders of magnitude stronger
the argument from no refugees is orders of magnitude stronger
100%, I'm pretty sure it's actually literally impossible to have a genocide with no refugees.
What is the no refugees point? Just that there aren't any Muslims fleeing China? Tia
Genocides usually cause refugee crises, and there hasn't been one from Xinjiang. What do you mean by "Tia"?
On this note, people argue that there are many Muslim countries that have the diplomatic position that there is not issue with PRC treatment of Uyghur people. I think that this is a reasonable argument against "genocide", however I don't see this as a strong argument that "there are no human rights abuses happening here, nothing to see at all".
I agree that implying no mass death = no genocide is wrong, but it's important to note that various sinophobic narratives around the treatment of Uyghurs (which I assume you're referencing) are baiting in that direction already, pointing to birth rates and contraceptives as evidence of genocidal policies.
There's a tendency for AES-bashers to retreat to a lesser accusation multiple times. Genocide, cultural genocide, human rights abuses, repression, etc. Just retreat to the next accusation every time contrary evidence is presented.
This post was a reply I accidentally made to the wrong comment, and several people seem to have upbeared it after I deleted it lmao.
deleted by creator is apparently a popular take.
when they bring up the gazillion death by communism ,... they mostly argue the Number not the Narrative...
better would be " its wierd how famineis the communist fault , but never the Capitalists that blockade them "
Honestly though...isn't that the conversation you want to have? I know its an absolutely exhausting one to deal with but that really does cut to the heart of everything and especially now in our current era in a way I think people can kinda see almost day to day.
"Capitalism is an economic system, but communism is also a political system."
"If capitalism has nothing to do with our political system then why is everyone so concerned with campaign finance in elections? Why are people so concerned with corporate bailouts?"
Even better, if capitalism is not political then how come capitalist governments keep interfering with and invading/couping communist countries?
It's impossible for me to talk about the US and South America without sounding like a conspiracy theorist tbh.
The US overthrowing a government for cheap bananas just sounds too ridiculous
Yes, but much like the government spying Snowden uncovered, if someone doesn't already know about it you sound like a crazy person if you aren't careful
People don't even believe that the DoD directly funds/gives resources to movies with the military in them propaganda reasons because it's not overt enough for them to realize since they've been exposed to that all their lives.
This is honestly one of the best arguments. No surprise the underdeveloped, under-industrialized countries had famines. The fact is that socialism ended the pattern of famines.
Every argument about the uyghurs.
“Adrian ZoopZoop bad”
Ad hominem, and not persuasive. Of course you don’t like your political opponents, why would anyone ever be convinced by you criticizing him for his weird evangelism when you say little about his actual academic work.
“Nitpicking over definitions of genocide”
Obviously dumb.
Just read the fucking papers. They’re not complicated, find the evidence backing up the claims they’re making and figure out how it poorly supports the claims made. Same thing with the organ harvesting stuff. When you actually read the original stuff you can readily take apart the arguments being used there.
I saw someone link an article they claimed was about Chinese troll farms to support a claim about Reddit being astroturfed. One of you fuckers probably just called him a CIA asset as if that’s not the exact same stupid argument but this time without a supporting source. All you had to do was read the abstract of it to learn that the actual conclusions of the paper were that there weren’t any actual “farms”, just people posting after work to Chinese social media, not reddit or any western social media. It was literally the easiest dunk in the world but they couldn’t be bothered to read anything that isn’t 100+ Year old pamphlets. I used to be much more critical of China, but I shifted on it by reading the sources supporting the critical claims and finding them worthless. Meanwhile most tankie China posts are just masturbatory bad faith in-group circlejerks. The western propaganda is not hard to dismantle if you’d just fucking try. But no, just use fallacious arguments for the 1,000,000th time and enjoy trolling the libs.
Ad hominem, and not persuasive.
Libs love ad hominem and are often persuaded by it. This is why negative campaigning can work, for example. Adrian Zenz is very useful for making them question theiredia sources.
“Nitpicking over definitions of genocide”
This is usually a topic introduced by the lib. Sometimes they really want to talk about cultural genocide. Sometimes they're making claims of genocide and you need to remind them of the miraculous transformation of the cultural genocide claim into a straight-up genocide claim and that this happened through Mike Pompeo and a right wing foreign policy think tank - how loosey-goosey this is and that, again, the media has happily played along and unquestioningly repeated both narratives.
I've de-sinophobified 6+ people irl with these counternarratives and I'm not exactly canvassing on them, just talking to people in lib social circles.
Not just libs. Someone in here argued with me last month or earlier this month that something happened in Uyghur and CCP is covering it. It was on the post about some radlib quote tweeting "we did it" to the AP article about Uyghur. It ended with them saying that "neither you nor I know Chinese or have been there but something did happened". Idk how you can convince yourself to find "truth" in a right wing propaganda while posting on a leftist website.
Everyone loves ad hominem, it’s fucking fun to use. Doesn’t make it a valid argument.
These argument approaches sometimes work, for sure. But if the public consensus is anything to go by, there’s limited fucking reach for them. Sure they’ll work socially, but no institution is going to amplify those messages, and it fails whenever you encounter someone who knows to be rightly skeptical of ad hominem arguments.
Everyone loves ad hominem, it’s fucking fun to use. Doesn’t make it a valid argument.
Define validity. Topics like journalism fundamentally depend on trust, so attacking sources is 100% valid. The only source for many claims is going to be dubious and there will often be no other context to invoke because it's just what some prick in a think tank pulled out of their ass. The only option is to point at the source as being ridiculous and untrustworthy.
These argument approaches sometimes work, for sure. But if the public consensus is anything to go by, there’s limited fucking reach for them.
It definitely works better than sticking to some decontextualized platonic ideal of what arguments follow, which is my overly detailed guess at the alternative you're thinking of. The problem with ad hominem is that it's an entry under "fallacies" in Wikipedia, yes?
Sure they’ll work socially, but no institution is going to amplify those messages,
This is a problem for anything outside of the current ruling class's status quo, though it's not a 100% effective filter. The system will try to co-opt or villify grassroots narratives and can end up amplifying messages that way, with varying levels of success at deranging the ideas in question.
and it fails whenever you encounter someone who knows to be rightly skeptical of ad hominem arguments.
I've never seen it fail. Even the people who think they care about ad hominem use it constantly because authority is (1) a necessary aspect of non-deductive logic and (2) just plain part of how we rationalize our current positions. That person will discount something if Trump says it if they think Trump is a joke. That person will discount anything said by AOC if they think she's an agent of Satan. That person will discount something said by a scientist that believes the earth is round - because they're a flat-earther and such a person must be part of a cabal.
It's easy to deal with: you just start asking them how they know anything about the topic that doesn't come from an untrustworthy source and whether they just believe claims from charlatans by default or increase their standard of evidence for incompetents and liars.
This isn't entirely fair to the people pushing back, though I agree sometimes people choose the wrong arguments. There are better arguments that are commonly used, however: see explanations of why Zenz's work is lacking, "there is no refugee crisis", and "Muslim-majority countries do not support America in this" for three.
Also, the Zenz thing actually does convince people. The guy is fucking crazy, demonstrating that does make people more hesitant to trust his "research".
yeah especially since in articles he's usually just cited as "an expert" and that is enough to convince libs
See I don’t find any of those arguments persuasive, and if someone is genuinely looking for rigorous critique they shouldn’t either.
The existence or non-existence of a refugee crisis is probably the strongest argument, but is easily challenged. “China’s control is just that powerful”, “The genocide is through authoritarian control and only limited state violence. So refugees aren’t necessarily present.”
As for the Muslim countries claim, there’s a lot of weird assumptions there. Primarily that state actors would give a shit about human rights abuses when it goes against their national interests to complain.
And finally, Zenz is a creep. Yeah some folks will find this persuasive, but it’s still a bad argument. A fallacy is a fallacy, if you’re talking to someone who cares about the weight of evidence they (and I) won’t give a shit about who he is unless you can demonstrate how his others beliefs affect how he interprets his research.
What weight of evidence? The studies use flawed methodology, the people involved have shown their bad faith. You can't prove a negative, all you can do is discredit the evidence. People are always going to have a rejoinder which amounts to "I just know in my heart that China is evil".
unless you can demonstrate how his others beliefs affect how he interprets his research.
He believes god sent him on a quest to destroy China, I'm pretty sure it affects how he interprets his research. He also works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, known CIA cutout IIRC.
He can believe all these things and still have a correct methodology with accurate data.
Yeah, but the methodology isn't correct. For instance, there was a study that involved a lot of extrapolation from a small number of interviews, and people were regularly bringing that up as a criticism.
Also, regardless of what you think, Zenz being a nutcase does cast doubt on what he says and is a very convincing argument for many people.
Just to add: I know his methodology is flawed and the data is poor. Because I read his fucking papers. That is what allows me to talk intelligently about it, and then go on to explain that he is likely motivated by ideological reasons. This is far more effective.
Yeah, you're right that that's a better approach in some contexts, especially (as you say) more serious ones.
See that’s a real argument though.
“The methodology is flawed in these ways which invalidate the conclusions.”
Not ad hominem.
Ad hominem on the other hand: It’s persuasive some of the time, but it leaves you with nothing if the source is anyone but Zenz. Also it’s still fallacious. I mean, I find Zenz fucking abhorrent and am highly confident that his wacko religious views motivate his work, but if I tried to argue that in any kind of intellectually serious sphere I’d be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
but it leaves you with nothing if the source is anyone but Zenz
Yeah, this is the real problem with the Zenz stuff. It's not really an "intellectually serious" setting in, say, a Reddit thread, so it can convince people. But if it's not Zenz then it's useless - though it's Zenz a surprising amount of the time.
Unless you can demonstrate how his work is flawed I don’t find it persuasive.
Just read the fucking papers. They’re not complicated, find the evidence backing up the claims they’re making and figure out how it poorly supports the claims made. Same thing with the organ harvesting stuff. When you actually read the original stuff you can readily take apart the arguments being used there.
You're right because most of the time these propagandists rely on their audience not doing the investigation. Personally, I find your prescribed method the most persuasive. I'll use this example link here.
What I admire about this specific example of your method is that it simultaneously establishes one's credibility (it makes people want to listen to you, want to come to your side) by demonstrating intellectual rigour and also puts the claimant on the defensive by asking them to justify every claim, big or small. I included the whole comment chain to show the claim being defeated (then deleted) and the comments of the lurkers praising it. This is the exact phenomenon we want to see replicated everywhere on whatever internet forum.
Having said that though, I think we should understand that it's not about what any individual here finds persuasive. If there's a method people find effective in their circles, I say go ahead.
Ad hominem, and not persuasive.
Just because it's an ad hominem attack doesn't mean it's a fallacy. If people were saying "Zenz has never bowled a 300 in his life, and you trust him about China??" then it would be, but Zenz's history is relevant to describe his motivations, especially given that he is often the sole source of the accusations.
The difficulty with anything around the Uyghurs is that leftists are tasked with proving a negative; we can point to the lack of direct evidence (no bodies or refugees, even), but libs just use this as evidence of China's oppression (parenti_quote.jpg). I think a better strategy than just "read the fucking papers" is to relate this to the WMDs in Iraq. There, we had a complicit media reporting on completely fabricated information about one of America's enemies - it even includes a Pulitzer-winning expose where reporters annotate a bunch of blurry satellite images as evidence.
Yes it’s an ad hominem. You’re saying he’s an untrustworthy source without examining any of his arguments, that the definition of ad hominem. And it’s lazy.
Your example is a non sequitur, not ad hominem.
You don’t have to prove a negative, just demonstrate that the evidence for the affirmative is insufficient. But that means reading so it’s hard I guess.
I don't think it's ad hominem to point out that a source is flawed, Adrian Zenz himself says he's on a holy crusade against China and is the primary source of many Ughyur related claims. Yes it's not going to convince anyone who already believes his shit surely, but it's the same way I'd go "It's fucking Tucker Carlson who cares what he thinks about the Covid vaccines, he's a known liar" for that topic.
I personally like to bring up Zenz before saying what research he's known for to people I know unquestionably believe the genocide narrative. They'll usually agree this guy is a nut and nothing he says should be instantly believed.
Then I hit them with the information.
Did you address the content of the argument, or did you say the source is untrustworthy? The latter is ad hominem and it’s fallacious. Talk about why he’s wrong. People can be circumstantially correct even if they’re creeps. These arguments are only persuasive to people who either don’t know the weaknesses of them or are already on your team. Besides, there are other sources on China besides Zenz. If all you know how to do is tell me Zenz is bad you’re going to fall on your face in every other scenario. Which is exactly what is see happen in the wild.
The difference to me is that from a known liar, expecting a higher burden of proof is the only reasonable outcome. Of course, to dismiss all evidence would be wrong but enacting higher standards is only fair.
An anti vaxxer might give good medical advice about a boil that a doctor gave suboptimal advice for, sure that scenario can happen, but absent anything else it's completely rational to disregard the anti vaxxers advice and follow the doctors instead. The amount of evidence that the anti vaxxer would have to supply is much more intensive than the amount the doctor has to bring before I would flip to the anti vaxxers boil advice.
Just read the fucking papers. They’re not complicated,
They are intentionally complicated. I’ve read dozens of articles on the subject that just cyclically reference eachother with zero primary sources
find the evidence backing up the claims they’re making and figure out how it poorly supports the claims madeThere often times is no evidence or its entirely in Chinese. You tell a lib that their article has no evidence and they completely ignore you. That’s all they ever do.
This subject in particularly is annoying as fuck. The only big repositories debunking this stuff are ML subs and grayzone articles and a lib will immediately discount those two sources. Best way to counter Zenz shit is to point out he’s a bigoted zealot to tarnish his word. Libs eyes gloss otherwise.
This is all ignoring the fact that Zenz is paid to write this bullshit and I am paid to do 40hrs a week of physical labor. I do not have time to go through every Zenz article and write up counter points with sources. Memes are a much better value proposition.
A common pitfall I've seen is the tendency to describe some utopian future when people start asking what communism means. Like the whole moneyless, classless society where no one really knows the specifics of how that would operate. You get curious people asking about how that's possible and rather than just directly say political goals are inexorably linked to capital, states, and the division of labor, they get into fantasy talking about hypothetical social organizations or completely automated factories or any number of things that simply do not exist currently. Not only is it unconvincing, but I really think it confuses the hell out of the average person when they have to square this concept of hypothetical classless society with currently existing communist projects and they have to do it without a good basis in theory or historical understanding.
Also yes, I do believe a moneyless, classless, stateless future is possible and inevitable but hell if I know how we get there from here other than the eventually victory of socialist countries worldwide and continual advocacy for my own immediate class interests.
Counterpoint: right libertarians have somehow convinced a lot of people that a stateless capitalist society can exist while money and private property (as we understand it today) are still a thing, so clearly people aren't all that critical of utopian shit.
Actual historical materialism: any post-capitalist society will produce its own contradictions and future comrades will need to find a way to square that circle. But that's not an argument you have with a clueless lib.
Counterpoint: right libertarians have somehow convinced a lot of people that a stateless capitalist society can exist while money and private property (as we understand it today) are still a thing, so clearly people aren’t all that critical of utopian shit.
Right libertarians usually just argue for a "small state", but you're right that people often aren't that skeptical. Unfortunately, usually it's "good thing = utopia", so they're still unlikely to be convinced by talk of far-off communist society.
I was being mostly facetious. Of course we need to make strong arguments for the world we want to live in. That said, we shouldn't fall into the debate bro trap and leave out ideas that may seem wildly hopeful right now.
The far off hypothetical society stuff is so unconvincing that I regularly see folks on our side get blindsided when liberals start poking holes in it. Granted, liberals critique it from the framework of "you can't possibly fix every single problem so we shouldn't even try" but our side falls into the trap and tries to go after "actually we can fix every problem." It's such a misstep we should avoid and it should be obvious we can't promise utopia, we can offer concrete direct political goals right now. Probably mixed in with optimistic hopeful rhetoric too.
Seriously, nothing more really needs to be said (at least for Marxists) than "it's far in the future and we don't know how we'll address all these problems yet. The important part is the transitional state, which can take care of people while working towards communism."
What I've fallen back on is the idea that even if some hypothetical communist future never comes, at the very least we can liquidate landlords and leash the bourgeoisie, because those are proven methods of increasing quality of life. The mere act of chasing a communist future grants the population a better present. So why not chase after it?
Exactly. Even if communism never is achieved, practically speaking worldwide socialism would be so many orders of magnitude better than we have now.
The mere act of chasing a communist future grants the population a better present. So why not chase after it?
Anarchists call this "prefiguration" and it's great and people should do more of it.
Right libertarians don't occupy a very stable political niche in America and I don't think the average person gives them much credence or had even heard of them. I'd wager they also come across as utopian cranks to most people, perhaps less than us because "communist" carries more connotations.
I think you're right about this one. There is a time and place for imagining a far away utopian future but the left should never lose sight of the concrete struggles workers face and we should always be able to give good believable answers to what we would do to improve conditions for the working class here and now. Organising mutual aid and solidarity networks in the community does more to convince people you are on the side of the workers than dreaming of a perfect world 100 years in the future.
Mutual aid and direct organization strategies are in fact the way to get our feet in the door. The different meanings of the word "communist" must sound like nerd pedant shit on the outside. Like "actually there's a difference between a communist country building socialism and a stateless communist society" might as well be verbal quaaludes to the average person. Absolute snore and it makes us sound nuts.
a passage i like, from anarchy by malatesta:
spoiler
That’s all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don’t want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us therefore in detail how your society will be organised. And there follows a whole series of questions, which are very interesting if we were involved in studying the problems that will impose themselves on the liberated society, but which are useless, or absurd, even ridiculous, if we are expected to provide definitive solutions. What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organised? Will there still be large cities, or will the population be evenly distributed over the whole surface of the earth? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spend the winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge and drink wine from the Chianti district? And who will do a miner’s job or be a seaman? And who will empty the privies? And will sick people be treated at home or in hospital? And who will establish the railway timetable? And what will be done if an engine-driver has a stomach-ache while the train is moving? … And so on to the point of assuming that we have all the knowledge and experience of the unknown future, and that in the name of anarchy, we should prescribe for future generations at what time they must go to bed, and on what days they must pare their corns.
If indeed our readers expect a reply from us to these questions, or at least to those which are really serious and important, which is more than our personal opinion at this particular moment, it means that we have failed in our attempt to explain to them what anarchism is about.
We are no more prophets than anyone else; and if we claimed to be able to give an official solution to all the problems that will arise in the course of the daily life of a future society, then what we meant by the abolition of government would be curious to say the least. For we would be declaring ourselves the government and would be prescribing, as do the religious legislators, a universal code for present and future generations. It is just as well that not having the stake or prisons with which to impose our bible, mankind would be free to laugh at us and at our pretensions with impunity!
We are very concerned with all the problems of social life, both in the interest of science, and because we reckon to see anarchy realised and to take part as best we can in the organisation of the new society. Therefore we do have our solutions which, depending on the circumstances, appear to us either definitive or transitory — and but for space considerations we would say something on this here. But the fact that because today, with the evidence we have, we think in a certain way on a given problem does not mean that this is how it must be dealt with in the future. Who can foresee the activities which will grow when mankind is freed from poverty and oppression, when there will no longer be either slaves or masters, and when the struggle between peoples, and the hatred and bitterness that are engendered as a result, will no longer be an essential part of existence? Who can predict the progress in science and in the means of production, of communication and so on?
What is important is that a society should be brought into being in which the exploitation and domination of man by man is not possible; in which everybody has free access to the means of life, of development and of work, and that all can participate, as they wish and know how, in the organisation of social life. In such a society obviously all will be done to best satisfy the needs of everybody within the framework of existing knowledge and conditions; and all will change for the better with the growth of knowledge and the means.
I've never read this person but I really should. Seems like what I've observed isn't a new thing.
relatively short and i personally think its a much better introduction to anarchism than the bread book
I usually just offer up Star Trek as an example of a communist society. Seems to work most of the time.
that does work sometimes to some audiences but even though I really love star trek, I feel like I'd come across as the biggest nerd if I attached the show to my political values
Actively trying to tell people voting doesn't matter (which, yes, we all know is true). It puts sympathetic libs off. It's frankly bad messaging. Also. If it doesn't matter why do you care if someone votes?
:geordi-no: voting doesn't matter
:geordi-yes: voting isn't nearly enough, organize!
Yup. My favorite variant of this line:
"Voting is not enough. It is also necessary."
I think expressing the idea that both sides are the same and that no matter what big business always wins is a pretty valid argument that even a lot of libs are starting to agree with. That said, you're right about the fact that we shouldn't be pushy about it or try to get people not to vote because it will only alienate the average person.
i also think "both sides are the same" is a poor argument that puts people off. the easy responses are to call you an enlightened centrist (yeah, i know, but people do it all the time), or just to point to some small differences between the parties as if these are major ideological divides, and ultimately its easy for people to dismiss you
"they are both ultimately in service to the same interests" seems to me a much better argument
they are both ultimately in service to the same interests
That is what I'm trying to say but your phrasing probably expresses the idea more clearly.
I mean getting people not to vote quite literally only helps the fash, of course the left shouldn't be doing it. The left should be pushing people to do more than vote, not less.
"Your boss does more than vote, your landlord does more than vote, your insurance company does more than vote, and you need to as well if you want to beat them."
The left needs to push "both sides are bad" (which is true), not "both sides are the same (which is false).
Pushing people to do more is absolutely good but first you have to get them to believe that's there is a reason they should. Pushing people not to vote isn't going to help but clearly stating that no matter who's in charge the government doesn't care about them is an important first step to getting them to see the need for more direct action. "Fortunately" Biden is really helping on that front.
Don't push people not to vote, push them to end their belief that you can accomplish anything good through voting.
Both sides are bad is true but shallow. "Neither side will give you what you need to live and thrive. Alone you are powerless, together we can demand and not beg" is much more powerful. Getting into the details of what we should demand is best kept for more committed comrades. (it's communism)
I've always phrased these things as "voting is important but insufficient" and "dems might be less actively hateful but they ultimately answer to the rich too" and [insert that chart of rich vs poor getting their favored policies passed]
Voting takes like an hour tops for most people and does have effects, what you want is for people to start thinking of voting as the bare minimum of political acts instead of the pinnacle.
Local politics are one place where voting can actually matter quite a bit.
Hate to burst your bubble here but local politics are just as hopeless as national politics. The same structures are still in place (exhausted workers trapped in ideological prison / good old boys network / who’s counting the votes? / omnipresence of police and heavily armed reactionaries / threat of lawsuits or capital flight if any reforms actually go through) and quite effectively prevent things from changing. Source: am recovering local politician. If this were untrue, some leftwing reforms at least would have succeeded somewhere, but I can’t think of any (correct me if I’m wrong).
Yeah, local politics aren't going to change the world. I just mean that in some places, local politics can be changed more easily than national, and are likely to have a more immediate and direct effect on your life.
It's still a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of course.
I have won local elections. I recently quit an elected position I had because I was tired of watching the chummy libs and chuds vote more money for the Nazi police force and I also had zero support (there isn’t even a DSA here). We need armed organizations if we’re going to get anywhere.
We need armed organizations if we’re going to get anywhere.
100%. :bpp:
Getting small wins is also motivating and tells people the next step is possible. Even draws or well-spun losses can attract more people for the next/other actions.
I mean this is an example of that. Voting does matter, it's just that it can't be the end-all, be-all of your politics. Most politics takes places outside of the ballot box and most of our work should too, but the "voting doesn't matter" left sound like idiots because people experience material differences in their lives depending on their elected officials.
Leftists who believe voting does not matter are to the right of leftists that understand it does.
Leftists who believe voting does not matter are to the right of leftists that understand it does.
I don't really think right/left are the right terms for this, tbh.
Voting doesn't matter in some places, depending on how the votes are counted. If you're in an area where one party always wins, your vote will achieve exactly nothing, and voting can actually be significantly difficult (especially for lower-income people). Other than that, agreed.
Does voting matter when the available choices are different flavours of right wingers?
How is voting for a neoliberal against another neoliberal matter in parliamentary elections? Especially when looking at a bigger historical perspective? How is this different from liberal lesser evilism? Leftists should draw lines in the sand. If there's no candidates on the left side of that line, I will skip this election. Simple as that.
I thought this had been argued to death last year.
I think it's worse than bad argumentation, there's an attitude online that not voting is a kind of praxis, as if getting voter participation rates low enough in itself will have some kind of effect on the electoral system.
The real pill is that obsession with electoral politics is like putting a muzzle on your brain, it makes you ideologically unequipped to engage in effective political action. If instead of arguing online about who to vote for, you argue online about whether to vote, you've only experienced a surface-level shift in your thinking.
"X is theft" is a strange one, since stealing is a very common example of a thing that is morally ok in some circumstances, and the people making that argument on the left are usually pretty pro-theft.
"Property is theft" was an argument by Proudhon against the institution of property itself which holds that each concept is only coherent in the presence of the other. Separated from that specifically anarchist critique, it's very easy to misrepresent.
Prison abolition/Police abolition/defunding the police.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an argument that goes into what happens after abolition. Like are we aiming for the Scandinavian model of prisons, community policing, or what? When you say abolition and don’t offer any concrete solutions people will end up voting for the former cop in NYC.
there's resources for this but we can't write 18 paragraphs on every goddamn sign
and libs refuse to read anyway
we dont scrap 'down with capitalism' because people are baffled at how a noncapitalist society functions, we shouldn't capitulate on this either
I don’t care about slogans on signs. I was listening to a talk by Angela Davis involving prison abolition and she never brought up what replaces it. That’s the time I want to hear solutions.
In addition, I think that a lot of the arguments I have heard at least end up sounding like slapping a new name along with some fundamental reforms onto it, which is fine I guess if thats the intention but it gets confusing when combined with the slogan of abolition.
Make it obligatory community policing service everyone has to do one month a year, unless they fucked up last time, then they have to clean the sewers. Easy
any participation on a policing force (even good post win of communism community policing) should require months and months (years probably) or experience and training , psychological and background investigation. Having random people doing for an arbitrary amount of time every arbitrary amount of time (unless they fucked up last time oopsie lol) sounds like a recipe for disaster on so many levels
It literally couldn't be worse than what we have now. The bar is set so low
The best proposal I've heard argues for splitting up the role of police into two parts, one of which is emergency response, and one of which is violence work- doing violence on people who are an imminent threat to others.
The emergency response would be more like a cross between handymen and social workers. Programs like CAHOOTS in Eugene, OR are already remarkably successful at relieving the police force of 50% of their calls.
Violence workers shouldn't come out until someone is threatening another person's life. And they shouldn't be the first line of response; no one should just be able to basically SWAT somebody else. The lesson from the death penalty should be better internalized: if it is wrong for individuals to kill, it is wrong for the state to kill, unless the threat is severe and persistent.
There's a video from England of an erratic person brandishing a long knife, and the police draw him into a sort of impasse until they get a delivery of riot shields and knock him to the ground and box him in. That is exactly how it should end, with the dangerous person disarmed and no one hurt.
This is what’s lacking in getting the messaging out. Thank you for being too the point and simple.
I got a spicy one.
Killing "babies" (fetuses, they aren't fucking babies) is ok solely because women have a right to choose.
Like yeah, it's 100% true that women have the right, but I guarantee you,
I guarantee you,
If an actual 6 year old child was super glued to your stomach, and tearing them off them would kill them, literally everyone would be against killing them. You would have to wait for it to unstick, or get careful surgery.
It would be completely completely unconvincing to me if you said that medical autonomy says you can do whatever you want with your body in that instance. Even if there was a surgeon backlog for 9 months to safely separate the skin.
Because obviously if the other entity is a person, they have their own rights!
The real difference is that embryos and fetuses arent goddamn people, they are a convenient tool used by the right to dominate women's lives.
If you concede the point that embryos and fetuses are the same as actual people, then you are literally just telling chuds that you would kill other people too. That's part of why nothing productive ever comes out of that.
I don't agree with this - you can win the argument even if you admit the premise that it is a person.
The government can't force you to give blood, even if it would save a life, right? It can't arrest you and harvest your second kidney or your bone marrow to keep someone else alive even though you could absolutely survive the process, and it would be terrible if they could, everyone agrees with that. Hell, they can't even take it out of your corpse without your expressed permission. This is because your right to bodily autonomy supercedes someone else's right to life. So if you can't be forced to let another human being use your blood, you can't be forced to let another human being use your uterus either.
I think there's an obvious unavoidable difference here however in that conception (outside of assault and other things) is a known and directly caused outcome of intercourse. This isn't a person across the street that you had no impact on, but one whose reliance on you was generated by you.
Of course, this particular problem isn't even a major point for many anti abortion people because they also refuse to provide birth control/condoms/etc that would prevent this direct cause but assuming a hypothetical person with rational and consistent moral beliefs on abortion by itself, they could easily hold a distinction between the two scenarios.
Ironically such a principled stance could end up where removing the 6 year old (assuming it occured through no fault of your own) is fine but abortion would not be.
This isn’t a person across the street that you had no impact on, but one whose reliance on you was generated by you.
By this reasoning if an EMT saves your life then they're obligated to give you a kidney if you need it
Not really because your need of a kidney doesn't exist because of them. However it would create an interesting situation where if you crash into someone, you would be obligated to donate your organs to them.
But that's a lot different from "you wouldn't need the kidney if they didn't steal your kidney"
Most legal remedies involve someone losing some right due to their actions, so that another person can have their rights restored
your right to bodily autonomy supercedes someone else’s right to life
I think /u/SerLava's point about the 6 year old child was meant to illustrate that most people are not absolutists about this. It's easy to construct scenarios where most people would choose one person's life over another's bodily autonomy.
My example is pretty good- if someone, especially you yourself, attached an actual person to your body, you're SOL and have to deal with it.
Interestingly enough, it actually becomes a murkier question if someone else forces that super glue situation on you. That's basically equivalent to the "sexual assault exception".
I don't think it's a very good analogy because the super-glued person is not dependent on you to continue their vital functions. A better analogy would be whether you are responsible for the survival of the person behind you in the human centipede.
They depend on you not ripping them off. Doesn't really matter if that's internal or external biology.
then you are literally just telling chuds that you would kill other people too.
:yes-comm: :gui-better:
yeah they just respond with moral outrage/shock if you go this route, chuds don't buy in to the logic like libs already have about "choice". Not sure what's better though, fuck it might be some shit along the lines of family planning = family values or something. I try not to talk to chuds about abortion often because it's literally harder than defending Mao Zedong lol
I haven't gotten into an argument about this for some time, but I realized something
Sperm having less body parts than a single cell embryo doesn't make it any less "human" in any concrete moral way. A sperm or egg is a lot closer to an embryo than a full person is.
Oh it doesn't have all the DNA? Who cares, embryos also don't have almost anything I have. Sperm has half the DNA and a lot more of the other stuff that an embryo has. DNA is nerd shit anyway, does god make souls out of DNA??
So if embryos are sacred, then Every Sperm is Sacred.
What are the implications of this.
Well, sperm constantly die in men's balls. Just having balls is genocide.
We have to act fast.
Cut off everyone's balls RIGHT NOW and freeze them. Cut off everyone's balls before they hit puberty, and use the pre-existing stocks of frozen sperm to fertilize eggs for thousands upon thousands of years.
Same with ovaries, they gotta go. Anyone even delaying this procedure will be imprisoned at the Hague for genocide.
It's the only way to save the babies.
Honestly I think some Americans value personal autonomy to such a degree that it is possible that the fetus = baby argument could possibly convince a few people. One hypothetical scenario could be this: there's two identical twins, and Twin A needs a kidney from Twin B to survive. If, for whatever reason, Twin B refuses to donate one kidney, knowing that Twin A will die, is that tantamount to murder? If the answer is yes, then the fetus = baby argument won't work, but if the answer is no, then the fetus = baby argument could still convince them abortion is morally okay.
Of course, most people don't choose their morality from thought experiments, so I think your point is better anyways
The detail that is often lacking here is that people have faces, voices, birth dates, memories, recognition of others, explicit aspirations, all sorts of things that unborn human beings and various nonhuman animal life do not have.
Placing the fetus in a category of "prospective human" would probably go a long way. The difference between a prospective human and an actual human is why one person's bodily autonomy trumps the right of a fetus to develop.
Won’t someone think of the poor exploiters and billionaires and wage slavery owners?!
Do people make this argument while accepting the fetus as a person/has bodily autonomy? I thought the argument was implicitly based on the obvious knowledge that a fetus wasn't developed enough to be considered a person?
If you accept that a fetus is a person then it comes way too close to a mother choosing to kill their kid but being ok with it for ethical "bodily autonomy". But that's arguing against chuds within their own mental gymnastics gym.
In my experience, pro-choice arguers don't address fetal personhood at all, and simply respond to the cries of "but you're killing BAYBIES" with "a woman has a right to choose"
Which is just saying they can kill "babies" which is incredibly unconvincing... like, that's what murder is. It's choosing to kill a person
Ah right, yea I haven't really ever met a "pro-life" person tbf. But agreed, that's an unconvincing line of argument given you're basically accepting their premise.
Interesting how this ties into vaccine mandates. People that are anti-abortion are almost certainly anti-mandate, because it violates their autonomy, even though it saves the lives of others around them and themselves. Kind of the opposite of their notion of abortion, but I suppose pointing out the hypocrisy of reactionaries is just wasted breath.
I've always thought that the violin player essay was completely insane, despite being adamantly pro-abortion.
violin player essay
Yeah I think I've seen that before, and they literally never ask, what if you literally are the person doing the weird kidney hookup shit to yourself?
A lot of anti-abortion freaks still support a "rape exception" because actually, if you do assume fetuses are the same as the violinist, yeah, that exception becomes pretty evident.
it doesn't help that Marx himself delineated several types of value and then explicitly just said "uh this gets weird let's just treat all of these as the same for the next few tomes"
I like to explain what a social construct is by saying that law and money are social constructs. They may not be things that naturally exist and are purely artificial, but they both have very real impact on everyone's lives.
I prefer to use the phrase "X is socially constructed" over "X is a social construct" because it implies human action is responsible and is ongoing
Yeah the terminology is rough. Trying to define words while at the same time explaining concepts just muddles the whole argument. I think there is a strong case to be made for Capital and The Conquest of Bread to be revised into modern terminology/concepts and lay speak.
We really need to perma-pin a thread full of good, modern theory. Stuff that's still truly radical, but easier to digest than eight thousand pages about linen.
Strong agree with that, I have some friends that are baby leftist but getting them to read hundred year old books isn't going to happen. If you have some recommendations that would be great.
The Jakarta Method, The Divide, People's Republic of Walmart, Blackshirts & Reds, The New Jim Crow, Bullshit Jobs
Thanks! I've read blacks shirts and reds, and have been meaning to read bullshit jobs for a while. The rest of these I hadn't even heard of.
The Divide is all about the historical and current reasons for the gap between the first and third world, goes into how the Global South develops the imperial core countries and how they are prevented from escaping that trap. It's a short and easy read and also goes into how the Neoliberal proclamations of poverty reduction are all hot air.
People's Republic of Walmart is also a short and easy read, and goes into how centrally planned most of the economy is even in the US, and how extensive it is in companies like Walmart and Amazon.
The New Jim Crow talks about the systemic racism in our prison system and how even more entrenched it is than Jim Crow in the past because of how difficult it is to even advocate for basic prison reforms because of how politically toxic it is to show even the smallest compassion for the plight of prisoners or ex-cons.
The Jakarta Method is about the slaughter of over a million communists in Indonesia under General Suharto and how the CIA was closely involved with the entire thing. It's completely heartbreaking and a perfect book to show how America has never cared about human rights and how communists are never allowed to just exist peacefully.
Maybe something like Jason Hickel's The Divide? It's a relatively short read, it's not difficult, and it does a great job of explaining why the current divide between the first and third world exists and has some possible and not entirely unrealistic but still radical solutions for it.
I gotta say that Matt Christman's style of offering opaque counternarratives to explain everything is probably the least effective form of leftist argumentation outside of just insulting people. Even when I can parse it and think he's right, I don't think he's getting through to more than a handful of people. It's the kind of thing you should say when stoned among five comrades in a basement but it won't have wider reach.
I don't think he's trying to have a giant reach lol the vlogs are brainwormed af
Not just the vlogs, this is the pattern he's adopted in all media since Bernie lost the first time.
Defending Stalin.
EDIT: You all make great points, but I try not to fuck with Great Man Theory.
Seriously depends on the context, and what you mean by defending. "The Soviets are the reason WW2 was won" and "Churchill was awful but doesn't get nearly as much scrutiny" are more lib-friendly defenses, for instance.
Also the fact that more or less all the world leaders of the western countries were massive Nazi sympathizers.
The opposite is 1000x more unconvincing.
Oh I'm a Socialist but every attempt to do Socialism has led to Evil Authoritarianism.
It would be ludicrous to get on board with that project.
Nah, that is a hill we have to die on. Iberals care about that kind of thing. We have to say "stalin did nothing wrong", so they instinctively compromise with us and end up at "comunism can do good stuff"
We have to say “stalin did nothing wrong”, so they instinctively compromise with us and end up at “comunism can do good stuff”
the_marketplace_of_ideas.png
I like to go further and I say I wish Stalin had killed more kulaks
This is actually the power move because it:
- Forces them to reconcile what they "know" about Stalin with what actually happened.
- Allows you to show that the body count for famine should be applied to capitalists and not Stalin
- Shifts the conversation out of intangible "he was bad and mean" to "what would you have done here"
Remind them: Those "peasants" that "Stalin killed" were setting their own crops on fire to deny their countrymen food.
I feel like there's probably a way to start from those infamous pics of farmers dumping tanks of milk down the drain, and get to "destroying the country's most important crop during a shortage to own the libs"
No, really, many years ago I understood change in society can only be achieved thanks to radicals pushing furiously in one direction. Milquetoast acchieve nothing.
I agree that while framing your message in a certain way for your audience can be helpful, compromising it and conceding incorrect points can only be harmful. You don't need to fly into your local community center like a wrecking ball with "Stalin did nothing wrong", but you shouldn't agree with the western view of Stalin just to keep the peace in debates.
There's ways to argue over these things that frame it so people are more receptive, and that's what should be done, without compromising your principles.
It depends. Some people simply do not consider things like we do. The approach you describe is correct for some situations. There are others where it is not. Where people are emotially motivated a forceful argument is better than a well reasoned one. Since most people didn't reason themselves into their current ideology it would be silly to try to reason them out of it.
70% good, 30% bad. That's the official Chinese stance on Stalin and it's a great way to get libs to think more critically about him. The guy made mistakes and he even acknowledged some of them ("dizzy with success" for example) but still lead the Soviet Union to great victory and successful economic industrialization. In Russia and former USSR he is far more often remembered and appreciated for these things than the times he had his political rivals shot or ate all the grain.
After Stalin's death Khrushchev dumped literally everything wrong with the USSR on to Stalin for political gain (bruh you were literally First Secretary of Ukraine I think you would also bare some responsibility) and finally people are starting to recognize that it was just a heated Corn Lord Moment and his claims should not be taken seriously.
have you read https://redsails.org/tankies/ I think it makes a good case for it
I will read this because I would love to rub Stalin into my lib friend's faces.
Eh, it needs to be addressed eventually (and we definitely shouldn't be feeding into the myths), but I do think it shouldn't be frontloaded. Definitely off-putting and the people treating it like the most important thing, like it needs to be front and center at all times, are very disconnected from where most people are at.
Big ole :fidel-salute-big: to comrade u/CthulusIntern for the excellent thread, this was great to read through
:avoheart:
People who argue with conservatives about immigration by saying that white people are foreign colonizers of america, and that's why immigration is good. Colonizers and immigrants are not the same thing, and supporting immigration by comparing it to genocide isn't exactly a great argument.
Basically any of the top 10 hits from stupidpol belong in this thread.
Edit: forgot the premise lol stupidpol isn't right about anything either
Not really, because of the phrasing of the thread's title. I feel like a lot of people are forgetting the "while you don't disagree with them" part, lol.
Wait, are you saying that you think the BLM uprisings were a distraction?
