I think everyone who's been here more than a week or two has had multiple negative interactions with them.
Awful, reactionary posters. We might as well start advertising on red website if we stay fedded with them.
I think everyone who's been here more than a week or two has had multiple negative interactions with them.
Awful, reactionary posters. We might as well start advertising on red website if we stay fedded with them.
Michael Parenti's Blackshirts & Reds - this book is an excellent initial starting point because it functions to help deprogram a lot of propaganda that has crept into people's minds about communism over many years and waves of Red Scares.
Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution - an extremely good book that was written for the german conditions of 1900 but is extremely relevant to getting people to understand the differences between these two strategies and why the latter should be performed rather than the former. Luxemburg was unfortunately assassinated at an extremely important moment in history, had she not been killed the German revolution may very well have succeeded and europe would have gone entirely red. Instead of ww2 playing out with the nazis as the primary evil it would have been a war between capitalism outside of europe and a communist europe.
Lenin's State and Revolution - exceptional book that teaches most principles of what communists consider to be the "state" and why it is essential to take and use the state for our goals.
I would also strongly recommend just about any of Parenti's lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_iYfBlflip57tLSR3VXepi5dNJR7qUot
The second one in that playlist "yellow parenti" is very famous and you will see it memed about a lot here.
I can also discuss just about anything you want to discuss.
That may have been a lot of effort to ask, sorry, but i appreciate it. I'll look into all of that when i get the chance.
I've noticed major hate on the democrats here, which is completely justified, they're not doing shit to help anything, but iv'e also seen it horseshoe around to being almost pro trump, which is what kept me apprehensive to join conversations. I don't like biden, but i decided after living through bush and trump to do anything possible to stop republicans from ever holding any office.
Is the "both sides are the same" rhetoric i see just because they're both capitalists? I have a hard time believing a commumity of queer folks wouldn't think repunlicans would actibely make their lives worse.
Is the point that worse is closer to spurring action? Or is trump viewed as actually a better candidate?
When?
Nobody, and I say that without generalising, literally nobody here is pro trump. People find him funny, that's not the same as being pro trump at all though. The main difference here is simply that people find laughing at the pathetic collapse of america amusing and Trump is a source of that entertainment, it's not support for him, he is a joke. One factor to keep in mind however is that many here do look at the history of american presidents at see a lot of men that were considerably more evil than him.
The point is that the Democrats and the Republicans are both parties that represent the ruling class. There are no parties that represent the working class. The Democrats and the Republicans are collaborators, not enemies.
Ask yourself why Nancy Pelosi cites Reagan as her favourite president.
The democrats have actively made lgbt lives worse by being a non-opposition. Every single anti-trans bill is happening under the democrats. Are they stopping it? Have they done anything to protect trans lives? They have a shit load of federal powers but they're not using them. Same goes for abortion. Every single abortion clinic could have been made federal land and thus outside the jurisdiction of states. Did they do it? No. They do not actually oppose these changes. They put up a fake performative opposition and then use no actual powers.
Does that mean republicans will be better? Fuck no it doesn't. The point here isn't that it's between democrats and republicans though. There is NO HOPE for lgbt people with either of these. Just a slow inexorable decline to everything. The only thing that can be pursued is power outside of electoralism that can force the hand of the ruling class to provide concessions. This power is created in the streets, through organising and through blood the very same way this power was built in the first place since stonewall. LGBT rights and normalisation weren't given willingly because we voooooooooted, they were taken and fought for until their hand was forced, today is no different.
I may have been misenterpreting jokes in that case.
Why the hate for bernie? He seems to be ad close to a socialist candidate that our system would allow?
Bernie isn't a socialist, Bernie is a social imperialist. The left did support him in the last election as a compromise candidate and the ruling class wouldn't even accept that, fucking him over in the primaries.
When I say "social imperialist" what I mean is that domestically he wants to improve peoples lives, but internationally he is an imperialist like the rest of them. He's not a socialist he just coopted the language for his campaigns as part of convincing the left to support him (which the left did).
He often gets compared to Corbyn (I reside in Britain), this is a mistake though. Corbyn in a committed lifelong socialist and was pursued with considerably more brutality by the ruling class. They threatened to coup him. You would see a lot of differences between the UK left and the US left if you paid attention, Corbyn for example dogwhistles regularly:
In this video, take a look at what's displayed in the bottom right corner @ 2:09 https://youtu.be/kmFGS7TyBPk?t=129
That video also promotes the Black Panthers, a marxist-leninist party (like much of the ideology on hexbear).
Diane Abbott, another elected MP we have here, took a principled position on defending Mao on national TV, keep in mind that she's surrounded by tory ghouls here: https://youtu.be/uB4o5n2EGyA
John Mcdonnell, calls his job overthrowing capitalism: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-44189922
John Mcdonnell calls for
direct actioninsurrection: https://youtu.be/za5GYbfRmWoMy point here is that this, in our elected MPs that only have social-democracy as their pursued electoral goals, is the kind of radicalism that is required to be a barely surviving welfare capitalist state that maintains various safety nets of the working class. I think you can see from these how different actual socialists pursuing electoral goals sound compared to Bernie as a social imperialist.
So why not support Bernie? Because he would be doing exactly the same thing as Biden abroad right now. He would be providing Israel with bombs. He would be continuing the war in Ukraine. He would be getting tens of thousands killed for the pursuit of american global power and domination. He'd just be doing it while also trying to make american lives better. That's not our goal, we are not nationalists and we're certainly not all americans, we are internationalists. We fight for the global working class, not just the working class of one set of national borders.
I've been rather defeatist when it comes to american imperialism. I assume that anyone not helping arms companies would be removed from politics through some means before they ever had the chance to get into any real position. I've been hoping the dems can wipe the republicans out of existance with social issues so a truly left party can form, forcing the dems to become the conservative party and pushing the left/right divide closer to the center. It seems like there will always be a (fabricated) reason to send weapons somewhere and keep upping the military budget, so it hasn't really been a view i've paid much attention to since there are no current politicians that would oppose the military industry. I don't see anyone in the system trying to change it, regardless of platform.
So i get it. It just sucks.
What news sources would you consider trustworthy? I don't trust anything by default, but npr was my go to before the political fatigue got me in 2021.
CBC? BBC? Al Jazeera? Hell i don't even know if NPR has it together still.
Also again, thank you for your time and effort. My business trip had me in florida, and i didn't get a sunburn, but still managed to come back red.
What incentive do either of the existing parties have to make that come about?
The dems have no incentive to destroy their opponent and empower the working class. They want to balance the situation and keep it going indefinitely.
With news you have to apply critical thinking and view it through a lens of "who wrote this and for what purpose?" Liberals view their own media as some apolitical moral arbiter of truth and fact when in reality their news has a specific interest and it is in pandering to liberals while advancing american imperialist interests. BBC advances the goals of the british state (and we in the left fucking despise it here in the UK). Al Jazeera is actually ok but it does advance the interests of its arabic owners in Qatar. It finds itself heavily pressure by needing to be popular among the populations across the middle east though which leads it to doing a lot of anti-imperialist reporting.
I use socialist news sources, but these are again going to be biased, they seek to advance the interests of socialism. Ben Norton probably does some of the best investigative journalism in the left these days. I keep an eye on CGTN, Jacobin, Double Down News, Mintpress News, Declassified UK, Telesur, among others I'm probably forgeting right now. CGTN i find too dry and professional though tbh it's boring, I think I like Mintpress and Telesur the best, several of these others I've named are very UK-focused so won't be much good to you on international news. I'm probably forgetting a bunch of things I like tbh it's hard to remember. At the end of the day you get an eye for biases after you learn all the different political ideologies that exist out there, you can understand much more about media when you understand the ideology the writer has, you can practically write any article on any topic if you do "from the perspective of [insert ideology here]".
Haha that's neat. There's a loooong way to go though and some of it will feel overwhelming to learn. If I can offer one piece of advice to anyone dipping their feet into the left it's to never go in with the mindset of believing you've ever finished developing politically. There is always more to learn, forever. None of us know everything and all of us are in a constant state of change. Be open minded and learn from all areas. Once you pick up the general concept of how to do marxist analysis and dialectics it becomes very easy to add new information to old information and build a cohesive picture of the way the world actually works instead of just.... Noise. Like the liberals seem to think.
@CARCOSA@hexbear.net see the result of the conversation above for my argument on why we shouldn't defed dbzer0
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Ye that was a good thread. If only more interactions weren't always like this.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3: