Lenins2ndCat

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Eugene V Debs. The best president the US never had.

o7

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/67f5715f-88a6-4a36-be04-8cc803f9b17c.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/48cff841-6458-4f36-96f9-d43692f5c2a4.pnghttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8580e56d-a310-48d6-bf6a-9ee6acee4902.png

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Eugene V Debs, a communist that ran for US president from his prison cell, securing 3.4% of the vote. Also the former state representative of Indiana.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

This instance hasn’t defederated from lemmygrad, which is by far much more of a hardline community when it comes to ideological position. Hexbear is softer than lemmygrad, its members are a mixture of ideologies of the left - democratic-socialists, anarchists and communists. It makes no sense to defederate from Hexbear before lemmygrad.

In terms of hatespeech and marginalised people it is by far the strongest and most iron-fisted instance on the lemmyverse. Having no-tolerance policy to it that goes well beyond that of anywhere else.

It’s the only instance on lemmyverse that enforces visible pronouns, without cowardly forcing people to put it in hidden profile pages. If I recall correctly the last poll that was taken showed nearly 30% of its users are trans? Maybe 20%? I can’t remember.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

This instance is federated with Lemmygrad which is considerably more hardline. Hexbear is softer and full of demsocs and anarchists, there’s no justification for Hexbear not being allowed while Lemmygrad is.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

It’s definitely not fascist lmao

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Lmao not the wording I’d use but I agree in spirit.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

It’s literally just anti-socialism. I have no other explanation for it.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

The fork was a while back now, it moved back to regular lemmy these days after a lot of work in order to make it ready for federation.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Gonna be a laugh

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Seems like you’re not very confident in your ideology then.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

They’re defending Hexbear and lemmy.ml by calling them woke. And is proud of being woke.

Woke isn’t a word that belongs to fascists.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

I think it’s a bit different to not tolerate people that ideologically want the extermination of others for their immutable characteristics, compared to people that are working towards achieving a different economic and political system.

Not only that, but in discussion the fascists do not participate in good-faith whereas those of us on the left certainly do. I tend to find less good-faith participation from neoliberals compared to other communists actually, the softer liberals that seem more like fence sitters tend to be alright to talk to though.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Hexbear has existed on lemmy for 3 years. It’s just a socialist instance, originally it was /r/chapotraphouse on reddit until Spez banned it for its userbase saying things like “slaveowners should be killed” (because he is a prepper who has said he will own slaves after the collapse).

Chapotraphouse is a socialist podcast, it was also the #1 highest donated thing on Patreon for a good while. These days it’s #2.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Truuuue

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Ok can you define tankie for me?

I’m trying to understand which communists don’t fall into whatever your definition of tankie is, and that’s pretty hard without understanding what you actually mean by that. If I were to assume that you mean something like “people that defend authoritarians” or something:

Trots: Defend and venerate lenin. Hate marxist-leninists. Support Trotsky killing off all the anarchists though. And support the USSR pre-Stalin. Trotsky’s own book basically says he would have done most of what Stalin did too?

Marxist-leninists: Defend and support Lenin, Stalin, Mao, among others.

Maoists: Defend and support Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Mostly oppose Deng reforms.

So uhh… Which communists would you not include in your definition of “tankies” ? These are like the three main largest groups of communists.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

I think so too, it’s just a bit muddled.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

No they’re not lmao.

It’s literally just “be nice to people when visiting other instances, don’t behave like a dirtbag leftist unless you’re actually on Hexbear”. Because the culture of Hexbear is… Dirtbag left. Making sure that the userbase doesn’t behave that way off Hexbear is pretty important. Hexbear users are lovely most of the time but get vicious with each other and are prone to extremely hostile fighting over topics they disagree on, this would be a massive shock to most normal people off-Hexbear. They’re just trying to mitigate that.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Ya I agree. Harmless enough. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Replace with lemmy or w/e

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d644370e-d38a-40bb-ba8e-3df5fd35703f.png

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Their first rule is that you can’t criticize communism…

No it isn’t. That’s literaly not Hexbear’s rules. The closest thing to that in Hexbear’s rules would be this one:

We are a platform that welcomes anyone who wants to be here in good faith. With that said, we are also an intentionally leftist platform; conservative and reactionary ideologies will not be tolerated here.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

That won’t happen and you know it. Once this is established there will never be any movement on it. Your position just functionally means it’ll always be defederated.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

“Authoritarian” is fairly meaningless in this context. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents. What is the difference between a tax collector and an armed robber? Both demand money from you and threaten violence if you don’t give it to them. The main (and some would say only) difference is in authority. The tax collector has authority, the robber does not.

Where does liberal “democracy” derive its authority from? Most liberals will claim that it comes from the approval of the people or the democratic mandate (same thing, really). Why then do studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy? Why do the majority of Americans want public health care and yet it never passes?

There is no democratic mandate in liberal democracy, it certainly doesn’t result in policy that represents the real will of the people. The people can vote a guy out? And what? Replace him with a different dude who won’t do what the people want?

What happens if someone picks up a gun and tries to oppose the “democratic” consensus anyway in a liberal democracy? Do you just sit by and let the state be destroyed? No, the democratic state uses its own authority to oppress this opposition.

There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarian”. It’s a meaningless buzzword. The opposite of a democracy is an autocracy or an oligarchy, not “authoritarian”. That’s just something westerners fling at other people’s democracies which they don’t like for daring to vote for something against US interests and want to see them blown up and millions killed and displaced. Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Yeah that’s fair. I work with some trots myself over union efforts, kinda impossible not to in the UK. I am perhaps overselling the position by overemphasising the historic conflict between the two. With that said I’m still baffled by the “I only mean tankies not communists” point. I can only imagine it comes from a place of not really understanding communists, or being deliberately misleading in that what they actually mean by “communist” is “anarchist” and that’s why there has been no further response.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Just ban the individuals that do end up being a problem it’s not fucking hard. Christ. Lemmyverse is fucking tiny I moderate bigger individual subreddits than lemmy has registered total users, with fewer mods. Handling the load from a few problem individuals is a non-issue.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

That’s not really a good-faith response. You’re not engaging with what “authority” actually means, or why one state that murders and imprisons people for trying to overthrow the state is different to another state that murders and imprisons people for trying to overthrow the state, these happen under both. What is the country with the largest prison population in the world? Do you not consider that authoritarian? Why not? The US operates Guantanamo on land that Cuba doesn’t want it on, and refuses to close Guantanamo and return the land to the Cuban people, is that not authoritarian? Why not?

What specific part of Cuba’s electoral system is authoritarian?

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Putinistas

Please don’t give the libs new words.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Stop calling it a troll instance ffs. It’s been here for 3 fucking years and as of like one week ago represents 25% of all content ever posted from a lemmy platform. It has a culture and community that exists for far more than that and is far more established and unique than a bunch of redditors that are mad at reddit and can’t stop posting about reddit instead of actually making this place somewhere unique and fucking interesting with its own cultural stamp and reasons to be here.

What you’re doing is just slander and it’s going to make me very hostile very fucking soon. You are throwing insults at not just me but at thousands of people that I like very very much.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Whether I agree with the narrative or not, forced narratives and censoring dissenting discussion is bad for communities and breeds extremism and echo-chamers.

You are advocating for doing that by advocating for defederation. This completely lacks any self awareness.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

These days I’m not sure how much they’ve dropped off in popularity or not. A lot of people recommend /r/TrueAnon or /r/TheDeprogram, I hear CitationsNeeded mentioned quite often as well. If you’re looking for more leftist pods with varying styles/seriousness. Pretty much all of them crossover with Hexbear and the former userbase of the CTH sub.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.

And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.

Individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority in ALL states. Your liberty ends exactly where it harms the ability of the state to exert its authority. The perceived liberty you believe any state gives only exists within strict boundaries where the use of that liberty does not threaten the state, as soon as it does threaten the state you become the subject of repression. This is true of all states, socialist or liberal.

Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?

We’re talking about liberal democracy because the implication you made was that “authoritarian” states should be opposed whereas the status quo should be maintained. The implication you made was not between anarchism and socialism, it was between what currently exists and what MLs would like to replace it with. You were placing yourself in defence of liberalism when you did this, not anarchism.

Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).

In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.

In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.

What system? You’re not naming a system, you’re vaguely saying “authoritarian system” with no real definition. Describe the authoritarian system. How do their elections work? What is its structure? How do their votes work? How do their courts interact? What is their constitution? Etc etc.

This vague “authoritarian system” is the culprit here for the problems. It’s “bad country” with no real material description or understanding of how “bad country” functions. This is the very point I tried to raise in my first comment, that this wordplay is used to denote “bad country” whenever it has chosen to do something that opposes US (or generally western) interests.

Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.

That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.

Sure. I was an anarchist until not too long ago so I don’t actually disagree with you. States are bad. There’s a reason we all want to achieve their eventual abolishment, whether or not we disagree on how to get there. We generally agree that states do bad things. The liberal state does bad things in service of defending the liberal state and maintaining the status quo, the socialist state does bad things in service of defending the socialist state.

This reads like classic projection.

Pointing out the capitalist state does exactly everything that the socialist state does in one way or another is not projection. Come on now you’re better than this you don’t need to go to bat for liberalism as part of your opposition to socialism.

And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.

My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.

So do you believe in using authority to kill fascists? Do you believe in using authority to prevent liberals from rebuilding a capitalist state in your newly stateless anarchist collective? What are you going to do when one part of the population decides to start a state? Let them or fight them? As an anarchist my understanding of authority was significantly more fleshed out than this, I knew full well that as anarchists we would be exerting authority on some part of the population during and after revolution until achieving what we wanted, and that we would then violently prevent its destruction. Are you opposed to Mahkno and his army violently overthrowing and instilling their ideology on their opposition? Are you opposed to the Spanish anarchists of revolutionary Catalonia violently fighting a civil war for their ideology? Why do you not consider these actions of violence to be the violent use of authority by one part of the population upon another? You can not be a revolutionary and also be against the use of authority, they are strictly in conflict, even as an anarchist if you ever see or take part in an anarchist revolution you will be directly oppressing the opposition through use of force at some stage or another.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Hexbear? Yes after the ban a lifeboat discord was set up, then a week or so later the site Chapo.Chat was born after rushed dev work. It later rebranded to Hexbear because various socialist groups didn’t want to work with a site associated with the chapo podcast for a variety of minor mostly unimportant reasons, things like believing they’re grifters just seeking money or w/e.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

I’m literally not reading anything from you anymore so as not to pop off. You’re full of shit and I have no interest in engaging with a bare faced liar spreading garbage for the quite obvious reason that you don’t want the socialists to be federated.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c800ef8f-2ded-45ba-baa4-73ad30b5f99e.png

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Digg poweruser, joined reddit in the digg exodus, spent many years pissing off redditors through various projects, ShitRedditSays, HailCorporate, GamingCirclejerk, the fun ones come and go in waves of interest as the zeitgeist moves along.

Been on lemmy for 3 years already now.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

That is not what has ever happened at any point in time historically, I actually can’t think of a single example. When war is on the doorstep support for your own side typically hardens massively.

The times where populations have turned against wars have always been when the troops are fighting far away from home in lands that the home population feels they shouldn’t be dying in.

This will only make people cling to support for the military because they rely on it for personal safety.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Mate you’re advocating for a genocide against civilians. That’s not acceptable, and all you’re doing by writing this stuff online is creating content that Russians read and think to themselves “wow, the west really are fascists that want to murder us all”. It doesn’t help, it ends up getting used to reinforce the propaganda.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Yes I absolutely would have wrung hands at the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. I also absolutely oppose the nukes that were dropped, completely unnecessary and monstrous loss of life. I don’t quite know what you’re getting at with Poland, that could have been prevented if the French and English had accepted the Soviet offer to stop it pre-emptively.

We don’t need to advocate for the murder of civilians. It’s just obscene barbarism, and all it will lead to is more murder of civilians in response.

I joined the strategic nuclear fleet as an SSBN sailor

Ahh I see. That adequately explains bloodthirsty fashy barbarism and desire to murder civilians then.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Mahkno? I’m fairly sure they walked under a very pirate-ey black flag back then. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e2344f21-c86f-4db2-a110-1c89a062b54e.png

Worth noting that the actual origin of the bisected red/black flag is the First International in 1864, which was both anarchist+communist before the split occurred between Marx and Bakunin. Anarchists would be banned from the future ones as a result of the split and disagreements that occurred. They flew the red flag alone from that point onwards.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

I didn’t say either of those things. It’s wild how much this community rags on twitter for outrage and assuming the worst possible position of anyone that is responding while that seems to be what this community does constantly.

Sometimes the only way to get a fascist nation to stop is to bomb the ever living shit out of them until they stand the fuck down.

Murdering civilians is not in fact how the nazis were stopped. Vastly out-producing them and outnumbering them in terms of armour was. I don’t know why you think killing civilians is in any way strategically beneficial. Its main effective use is as a terror action against an occupied population.

This is just really disgusting bloodthirsty shit. The civilians have no less choice in this war than you did in Iraq or Afghanistan. But judging by your character I reckon I can assume you’re actually proud of the 2million you killed there.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Civilians do not decide whether to surrender or not. Militaries and leadership do.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Oh of course there’s not many reading here. But the point is that this behaviour should be opposed because its normalisation here means that the users go elsewhere and normalise it there too. This is prevalent all over the place because nobody bothers to call it out and point out how unhelpful it is.

Even Navalny’s team, who I despise as the man’s a fascist, has said the same thing I’m currently saying.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8883a1d9-7022-45bc-9423-0e8fbff6cac6.png

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Do you want to give some examples?

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

as well as the primary purpose that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the list of targets.

No it fucking wasn’t lmao.

The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan were pointless.

“Were”, maybe wanna check on that whole past tense thing because you’re still there. Against the will of the people.

Pretending not to be in Syria while still being in Syria too… Stealing the oil.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

That’s a no then

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Time for the floodgates to open.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Is this a render? How is the writing floating in mid air?

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

Bougie is just shorthand for bourgeoisie you think I want to type that out every fucking time? Half the time I have to double take just to be sure I’m not spelling it wrong even after the 500,000th time writing it.

Lenins2ndCat, 10 months ago

You’re skipping the 11 other parties that are banned. Very free.