Only one of the countries you listed is a socialist country that “tankies” defend.

I listed countries that the people who accuse of being “tankies” defend. So-called tankies do not defend any of the countries you listed barring China, although we have plenty of criticisms of China as well. The only defence of Russia that we put up is that the conflict that is currently ongoing was caused by nato, and that no amount of pouring weapons into the country will save any lives, on the contrary it will in fact kill many more people. This is spun into “you support russia” by many but is an unfair characterisations of what those on the left actually believe. Yes you can probably find Z people to refute this but they are a minority. Russia is a capitalist shithole and we want to change that in the longterm just as we want to change it in every capitalist country.

Alright well I tried. You’re the one that’s avoiding learning literally anything at all. Gonna go ahead and block as this is very clearly a waste of time, take care.

Mate if you’ve got no counterpoint that’s on you.

I have done no whataboutism. What are you on about? Can you stick to the fucking topic?

If you don’t want to engage that’s on you. I told you I’m willing to, one at a time. That way we can get into each topic individually and give it the due care, research and understanding that it needs.

You are the ones avoiding engagement by demanding a 10,000 character response on every single topic simultaneously, which we all know that you will not read.

I’ve never even said I’m anti-communist ever

You don’t need to say it, you display it in all of your actions. What do you do? What orgs are you in? What have you ever contributed to anti-capitalism other than spending all of your time on the internet shitting on every socialist project that has ever existed with absolutely no critical analysis of their rights and wrongs? I’m perfectly willing to get into the wrongs, there have been plenty of wrongs in the strategies of past projects or else we would’ve beaten capitalism already. The issue is that people like yourself tend towards only seeing and talking about wrongs, because you’ve created an identity for yourself around punching left and thusly preventing socialism instead of actually doing anything to construct it.

Of course you implied that - you WROTE IT.

You are now backtracking instead of admitting wrong, what you should be saying “you know what, you’re right I actually don’t know anything about it but I regurgitate this because I’ve seen other anti-communists regurgitate a thousand times with literally no opposition so I’ve never taken any time to properly examine events, learn about them, or critically analyse whether the accusations have weight or not”… A response that would be mature, laudable, and the sign of a person who actually wants to grow as a human being. Instead what you seem to be doing is deflecting from this and trying to segue into something else. I am asking you to properly learn about this specific event first, if you want to talk about other events then I am fine with doing that… But one at a time. This practice of bombarding people with dozens of different things at once is called Gish Gallop as is a tactic used in bad-faith to avoid any real critical engagement with the events.

I mean, you used that reference because you are implying that shutting down those pro-capitalist counter-revolutions by literal fascists using force was a bad thing, that’s why you said “leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist”.

You’re just demonstrating that you have never actually engaged with learning about any of these events. You have the vagueist knowledge about them and only understand them within the lens of “tankies bad” instead of what actually happened during those events, why certain decisions were made, and what we have learned in the decades since they occurred that proved the supporters to be on the right side of the decisions.

Huh? I asked you a real question. You’re dodging answering it?

This is not rhetorical, I want to know whether there is any kind of marxist (those of us waving red flags and organising the trade union movement) that you do not call a fascist and whether you include all of the above countries in your assessment of “red fascism” or whether you leave any of them out. Let’s put Nicaragua and Angola in there too although I would call them quite flawed in a number of ways myself. Also the Kerala district of India, do you call that fascist?

I’m dead serious. I’m trying to understand what you are.

Development of the platform itself has nothing to do with what anyone on it actually does though. That’s the entire point. Reddit is a problem because the control is centralised in the admins who can unilaterally make mods on the site do whatever they want. Fediverse by-design is decentralised and absolutely nobody can be told what to do or forced into anything by any centralised power because none exists.

red fascist authoritarian regimes

Do you include Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, etc in that? Is there a type of “red” (marxist) that you don’t call a fascist?

It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s.

And history proved that support to be 100% correct given what those uprisings were. Have you ever actually looked at who was riling it up (gladio implanted fascists), who backed them and who was coordinating it? The US and CIA played a huge role.

It’s fucking weird that this gets brought up as some huge gotcha thing by people when the supporters have been shown to have been historically correct in their decision. It was unpopular and split a lot of parties but they were on the right side ffs read a book.

Same thing “woke” means to conservatives, except it’s used by liberals instead - absolutely anything they want it to mean in any given situation.

It’s deployed by people generally referring to any kind of marxists that have anti-imperialist politics, but I frequently see it used by liberals against even anarchists if they’re not pro-nato.

It is complete garbage, should be ignored, and the people using the word derided as cranks. Once you start to realise that their behaviour is exactly the same as the people that scream about the “woke” all the time you realise how ridiculous it is, they filter EVERYTHING through hating the “tankies” (which can mean anything in different situations remember) in exactly the same way.

Lib: What assumptions do you refer to? Officials get away with incredibly terrible programs like MKULTRA which mind you, are INDIVIDUAL DEPARTMENTS, they have nothing to do with other departments.

Same argument as defending cops with “bad apples”.

There are certain formats like discord and twitter, that bring out the worst in people. Those platforms bank on angry, non-stop-repyling and “engagement”, because they know it drives up the amount of time people spend on the site.

I’ve raised something like this several times on several platforms. I was a particular proponent of killing the downvote on Hexbear, which had very split opinions on the site when it was implemented but the community now prefers it massively.

One of the issues of social media is that the systems design in a competitive win/loss mindset in people’s engagement(winning getting upvotes and losing getting ratio’d or downvoted or whatever). The person you’re talking to isn’t the person that matters when you’re having an interaction, what matters is the audience reading.

This creates a scenario in where people don’t actually have honest interactions with each other, they are having an interaction to sway the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people reading instead. They are seeking the Likes, Hearts, Upvotes, whatever. And not only that but they are also seeking that the person they disagree with get downvotes or ratio’d, etc.

The systems of social media depersonalise the interaction between 2 people and make it about writing for an audience of people who decide the “winner” and the “loser” instead. This is the driving force of some of the shittiest behaviour out there. We desperately need a different style of gameification that does not produce this outcome and shifts the focus of people’s behaviour to a different mindset.

A moment of silence for many of the fallen comrades that also helped along the way.

I miss Bay’s work, I hope he’s doing well in whatever he decided to put his hand to instead. I don’t think anything else he might be up to will have the kind of impact he was able to have in video format though and we need more at this level.