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Cake day: September 7th, 2024

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  • What does that have to do with the internal collapse of the USSR?

    you’ve still not made any actual assertions. “The internal collapse of the USSR” makes it seem like you’re gesturing toward having some actual knowledge, which you’re refusing to disclose, instead making smug assertions that this hidden vague knowledge that you refuse to declare means you’re right. So, what does “the internal collapse of the USSR” actually mean to you? What are you imagining (the pictures and words in your brain) when you say “the internal collapse of the USSR,” and what were the causes in your opinion for whatever you’re imagining?

    It doesn’t seem like you actually know what you’re talking about, because you’re desperately avoiding making real substantive statements in any of these comments, instead throwing tantrums when pressed on what you actually think. Tell us your actual positions, without petulant ‘McCarthy-if-he-was-a-redditor’ tantrums, or otherwise stop pretending to have any.


  • But we both know that’s not why it collapsed.

    okay, then tell us why you think it collapsed? These vague insinuations and gesturing don’t prove your point, they make it seem like you’re unsure of the basis of your own assertions.

    Edit: And for the record, the first ever experiment of a modern socialist country in history, with no earlier examples to work off of, succumbing to a series of both external and internal contradictions doesn’t say anything concretely about the viability of socialism as a whole. In fact, their massively successful strides toward constructing new relations of society, and the betterment of living standards for the vast masses of its people, and the provided security of housing, employment, nutrition, community, and healthcare which was established after fully collectivizing and industrializing (industrializing in 1/10 of the time it took the west to industrialize, without the fundamental basis of primitive accumulation through global colonialism, settler-colonialism, genocide, chattel slavery, child labor, aggressive wars, and malthusian sanitation practices that under-girded the western industrial revolution; and doing so after suffering such destruction in WWI and the civil and counter-revolutionary-interventionist war no less) proves there are extremely strong cases for it being a model of success to learn from and build off of, while learning from its shortcomings and mistakes.


  • As far as I know it’s because both sides had pretty banal low-level and straightforward stated goals that were all “met” so there wasn’t a clear “winner” and a “loser” in those strategic goals. It was really more of a 3 week skirmish than a full war. Vietnam obviously wanted to force China out of their country, and China said they wanted to bat Vietnam on the nose and force them to pull out of and not occupy Cambodia, or Laos or Thailand.

    Which China left meaning Vietnamese succeeded in their strategic goals, and the Vietnamese diverted major resources and pulled out of Cambodia and didn’t occupy Thailand and Laos meaning the Chinese succeeded. There weren’t really any major strategic goals that were stated by either side that showed blatant failure; like China never said they intended to fully occupy Hanoi and create a Chinese puppet state and failed. Vietnam as far as I know never said they intended to continue occupying Cambodia or occupy Thailand and then failed to. So in a way they both got what they wanted and it was a status quo antebellum situation. Thus indecisive in the context of if it weren’t ‘indecisive’ there would have been a winner or loser.

    Thailand and Laos were under multi-factional civil wars whose royal governments were also US proxies; so the Vietnamese were also involved there (and involved with their local communist parties), prompting Sino-Soviet-split-related concerns with China since even though both China and USSR provided support to Vietnamese communists; the USSR became the dominant supporter and ally of Vietnam and continued to be. China also had an alliance with Cambodia dating before Khmer Rouge even; which was in part because Cambodia wanted assurance against the larger Vietnam and Thailand. The split in the Chinese Cultural Revolution era between the ultra-lefts and others had half of the CPC supporting the Prince and half of it supporting the Khmer Rouge against the prince. North Vietnam and Khmer Rouge provided support for each other for a while too. The politics were a mess. No idea what other involvements China had with Thailand and Laos other than Sino-Soviet fears.

    People overstate the significance of Chinese casualties as meaning a loss when that’s not how war works. Strategic objectives are all that matter. The losses (if you average the wildly disproportionate claims from all sides; impossible to actually know when you look at it) were more even than something like The Winter War between USSR-Finland; and though that war had the Soviets suffer disproportionate losses, it was still a complete strategic victory for the Soviets; they got everything they were after which had refused by Finland in previous requested land-swaps, namely gaining the Karelia buffer region.



  • anarcho_blinkenist@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlD) all of the above
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    1 month ago

    The “middle class” never existed. The “middle class” is an invented wedge to split the working class and try to turn segments of itself, against itself. It has no material basis. It is the ‘myth of upward mobility under capitalism’ distilled into a propaganda phrase to obscure the dualistic and antagonistic class relations in capitalist society between the PROPERTIED and UNPROPERTIED (those who own capital and those who do not), and the contradictions and conflicts therein.

    It is false consciousness; personified by and in the ‘middle manager’ who is PROPERTYLESS (proletarian), but paid more and promised the “opportunity of more to come” to align themselves with the interests of the PROPERTIED, and take on the role of a low-level overseer – to function as both a compliance enforcer and a mediative focus-dulling pain-sponge standing in the middle of, and soaking up the conflict between, the ONLY REAL TWO CLASSES IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY: The Worker, and the Capitalist.

    “Middle class” is liberal sleight-of-hand in its core and conception, and a term to be derided and discarded in all use, except as a magnifying glass to show the ways capitalism distorts and deceives about the real nature of its own properties and relations; and how the ruling class generates and contributes to the development of false consciousness through their reframing of production’s own characteristics, in order to reify into political “identities” to be captured and capitalized upon those roles which naturally manifest out of the laws of functional industrial-productive logistics, ie. the need for ‘managers’ to administrate complex or large-scale productive and distributive tasks. This serves double roles in the laws of colonial and imperial relations in places like the USA, as this distinction is also in practice highly racialized and rooted in the ongoing historical unfolding of these basal-and-superstructural systems of exploitation.

    Make note of the conspicuous absences and obfuscations when duopolist-exploiter X or Y says they “fight for the middle class;” that they are not fighting for you or me in the working class, but pandering to those “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” that they’ve bought off enough or otherwise tricked into this false consciousness, to give them their ever-shrinking electoral margins they require and fight each other over so they don’t have to pay any mind to the working class masses who make up the majority; because they in reality work for the big bourgeois, the capitalists, and the petty-bourgeois “small business tyrants” who think of themselves as capitalists — all at the expense of the working class domestically and abroad.



  • I’ve come to realize that a significant portion of people just think other people should die and that’s fair and they’re OK with being the ones to do it.

    It has always been this way. Particularly because there are people and groups who actively materially benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery and oppression of other people and groups within the social organization of our societies. The enforced poverty/slavery will never stop without sufficient and sufficiently organized, centralized, disciplined violence to overcome those who actively benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery by means of the same; and then maintaining that authority over the exploiters until their interest and strength are no more.

    It’s the same reason why there’s never been a “peaceful bloodless decolonization.” Why would the colonizer ever willingly permit that? They would be, from a standpoint of their own material interest as a societal class, complete morons to do so and make such a willing choice. Which is why (and this is historically borne out) they must be not given a choice by an organized militant anti-colonial resistance. This is also why the “authoritarianism” criticism of the doctrine and practice of revolutionary groups like Castro’s revolutionaries or Lenin’s Bolsheviks is laughable; the liberal peanut gallery can only have that criticism because they succeeded and survived to be criticized; having overcome the oppressors who, in the event of the revolutionaries’ failure (historically borne out in how every failed revolution played out including the previous ones in those countries); would show the truth of themselves as 1000x more vicious, having honed that capability for 100x longer.

    Look up any countries’ “Red Terror” in history, then look up their corresponding “White Terror.” You will see [wiki:NSFW images if you click on them]. Or read about any decolonization struggle. Like in Algeria, where every uprising that killed 10 Frenchmen resulted in a colonial reprisal with hundreds of butchered Algerians.

    We live in a material reality with material interests which are enforced by people who will use your pacifism as a means to exploit you easier, and kill you easier if you even are seen as inconvenient or ‘in the way’ of those interests, let alone if you resist and struggle against them. And that argument has been happening since Marx and Engels’ time in the framework of materialism; and was exactly the realm of rationale behind the policy of terror with the Jacobins before that in the French Revolution; from which many later revolutionaries took lessons and learned from the mistakes and refined within their contemporary material conditions and circumstances.


  • I’d rather be dead

    hey cool, then you can request the judge for the death penalty instead of life (people have done that before). But you don’t get to make that decision for other people. And to do it over your tax money? (which by the way, is a fraction that your employer steals from the value you produce for them every day)? it’s a misanthropic and myopic selfish callousness; whether or not you have struggled it is a sign of insularity to ascribe your experiences to others and how it “should be”, and to do it in such a transactional way is even more disturbing.

    I’d like to know how much you can cope with…

    unclench your jaw and breathe friend, this is unreasonable




  • You don’t seem to allow yourself to be a very deep thinker when it comes to your electoral “team.” Have you considered maybe that communists are anti-genocide and anti-fascist? Are anti-colonialism? Are anti-imperialism and anti-death-merchantry from these private arms manufacturers? All of which happens with open handshakes and benefits and with the eager help of the majority of establishment Democrats? That communists criticize the Democrats who participate in these things, for their active participation in these things?

    Unlike Liberals who can only think in abstract ideals and empty rhetoric to then be indignant and status-quo defending at being confronted with reality, or can only see things in terms of individual identity politics instead of material class relations and material historical context, Marxists have a scientific methodology for approaching politics, events, information, etc. which is rooted in class interest and material conditions. These are criticisms based on their material actions, and when a politician’s material actions are good — are against these bad things; when their actions are anti-genocide, anti-imperialism, anti-war, anti-arming extremists in proxy wars, anti-nuclear brinksmanship etc. (Almost as rare for Democrats as it is for Republicans), then those actions are said to be good, but there are held no other illusions or delusions or weird idealist or identity fixations like Liberals have — like you clearly have.

    Communists are against these bad things — are against genocide, imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, war and proxy war, etc.; but and also realize that all of these things are inherently and inexorably linked to the growth of the capitalist system and the interests and needs of its ruling class for defending markets and cheap sources of labor and resources for capitalists to exploit, and control and crush competition or resistance to that expansion and theft; and that these things arise due to the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of the capitalist system (which the bourgeois politicians depend and defend and are agents of; and whose police and army are the enforcers of) and the capitalist social relations; such as the need for constant growth to stave off crises and collapse even if all markets are saturated by capitalists; the need for profits necessarily maximized and costs necessarily forced (often through direct or indirect socio-economic systemic violence) to minimum in order that the capitalist can extract as much surplus value to make active as capital as possible in order to reproduce capital and expand their capital and markets in order to not “lose” in competition and be cannibalized by other capitalists; that this capital which is inherently concentrating in the hands of the few and the most vicious and the most cost-suppressing due to the private extraction of the surplus value provided by socialized labor and the ‘jungle-law’ of capitalist competition.

    Communists have also been vehemently anti-Obama and anti-Clinton and anti-Kerry, not because they “are Democrat” but because they, as Democrats, used their mandate to for instance utterly destroy Libya — previously the richest country in Africa, instigating multiple ethnic cleansing campaigns and turning it into an open air-slave market; and trying to do the same in Syria, even allowing ISIS to take root and grow and capture cities to use as proxy warriors and turning both of these regions into an Al Qaeda and ISIS playground which was supplied by US weapons rubber-stamped by the Democrat president and most Democrats in congress.

    Communists have hated Obama and Trump both for being nearly indistinguishable in their barbarity toward immigrants, just as communists see as an enemy Biden for continuing to do the same and worse. Communists also hate Obama and Trump for their indistinguishable bipartisan also-genocidal arming and funding and participating in slowly genociding Yemenis for a decade, one hospital, wedding, and schoolbus full of children at a time.

    Communists pointed out that Obama’s cabinet was hand-picked by Citigroup and his bailing out the banks was not an anomoly, not because “Democrat,” but because of the material interests that, in material reality, Obama shamelessly represented and furthered; regardless of any advertising rhetoric out of his and his supporters’ mouths – it was and is his actions that matter. Same when communists point out that Biden brought into his administration a bunch of the most bloodthirsty neo-cons he could find like Nuland and Blinken; and that he reappointed a Trump-admin judge who was Chevron lawyer who defended destroying the Amazon and poisoning Indigenous people and jailing their most prominent vocal opponent. Same when communists point out that Biden went around congress twice to ship guns and bombs to the Zionist occupation faster than even they were already bipartisanly moving toward hoping they’d would wipe Gaza’s inhabitants off the map before election time so they wouldn’t face such ongoing political consequences and the mass-defections from their party and mass protests demanding an end to this genocidal atrocity they support.

    I’ve seen many of your comments, and you’re remarkably bad-faith when it comes to politics. It often comes across as petulant. And it is very telling and indicative of where your values and interests actually lie that you spend more time and energy lashing out at those who criticize the Democrats for their participation in genocide, neo-colonialism, imperialist nuclear brinksmanship sponsored by arms-manufacturers, and far right and mass-murderous economic and immigration polices, and who advocate for starving them of the working class margins that they take for granted and rely on for a mandate; than you ever spend advocating for the sufficiently-near-unanimous-to-just-say-Democrats Democrats to stop this genocide which they could with a phone call.

    Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are anomolies, exceptions to the rule in these kinds of cases, and communists support their (and any) action against exploitation, imperialism, genocide, colonialism, war, etc. But they stand and have stood alone in a party of vampires, and for taking these stands they’ve faced endless persecution and betrayal and slander and maligning and sidelining by ‘their own’ party, including even their former allies of the “Progressives” (don’t laugh!) of “the squad.”

    When a 3rd party rises, with my and others’ support, Ilhan and Tlaib would probably abandon the Democrats like ‘rats from a sinking ship,’ along with every other progressive-minded individual communist-or-not who haven’t already (which many have over the years, me included, and will continue to). Stop lashing out at the 3rd party voters and critics who have a conscience, and a material understanding, and a memory longer than that of a goldfish; and instead force your own ‘team’ to reckon with what they are and became; or otherwise admit you’re a nationalist that likes these terrible things being this way because you benefit; or otherwise admit that the critics are right and join them.



  • anarcho_blinkenist@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlGetting very close to the GIMP 3.0 RC1!
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    1 month ago

    God idk what version I’m even using. I never update programs like this unless I have to. From breaking things, to confusing my workflow and moving things around; I’ve always been more frustrated than thankful. I haven’t updated Reaper in ages too and I’m certain they’re better about keeping continuity than anyone.

    Edit: lol people are mad about my own software updating habits? why and how are .worlders this way? I can’t imagine the realities they live in, and am glad so




  • It’s very weird having scrolled in my feed toward the world stuff. It almost seems artificial, like the redditors all collected here with all the hivemind weirdness and astroturfing.

    and yeah, Democrats would rather send their dark-money and ‘venture-capitalist’-funded PAC lawyers to purge 3rd parties from ballots (really democratic, Democrat party; I’m writing in PSL regardless if they can’t get back on and telling everyone I know to) than make themselves appealing at all to the people abandoning their moribund and redundant party ‘like rats from a sinking ship’.

    They would rather fight with the Republicans over the (shrinking) voter base of rich and upper ‘middle class’ petty bourgeois rightwingers, and alienate all of their leftwing base, and continue abandoning the 35-50% that straight up don’t vote for either of these duopoly-of-exploiters in this fascist-and-vampire show, than reorient toward positions of “not genocide” or “not nuclear-brinksmanship forever-war proxy-wars” or “not-constantly bipartisanly increasing and expanding the US military and neo-colonial racketeer system which is incidentally one of the leading contributors to climate change.”

    or “not continuing filling the world with CIA torture camps” or "not being just as or in some ways more right wing than trump on immigration somehow

    It’s telling that they refuse to do any of these things a large portion of the population wants; to the point where Muslim groups are advocating voting for 3rd parties who aren’t for drinking the blood of Palestinians (apparently a tall order for US politicians), and instead would rather put so much effort into demonizing and crushing 3rd parties who do advocate against these things.

    I don’t even know if they’re capable of not flying to the right and pandering to right wingers more and more due to their donor base. Their structure is inherently based on funding and campaigning and working for the worst billionaire imperialists and arms-dealer death-merchants in the world and AIPAC and tech monopolies etc. If we all pushed up the PSL to hold their working class margins hostage that they (unlike republicans) actually rely on and take for granted, they might break in half trying to reorient. Maybe they’d float a reformist party to prevent everyone going socialist against the open-fanged republicans who nobody ever had any illusions about and half the dems who are basically republicans will join them, and the other half will flee to the new reformist party (probably alienating their “left wing” into more radical politics because that party would become democrat-ified)

    People just want to be lied to about the Democrats that they’re different and ‘acting resistance’ at all to the republicans, when they’re really not that different — and where they (barely) are different, they just capitulate and help the Republicans do whatever they were going to do, in the name of “bipartisanship” and “reaching across the aisle”. Like when Obama had both houses of congress and refused to enshrine women’s bodily autonomy and LGBTQ civil rights into law. And then gave away a free Supreme Court seat in capitulation. Then Biden denounces the idea of pushing to expand and pack the court because it’ll “politicize the court” as if that ship isn’t gone past the horizon forever, while doing nothing as women’s and LGBTQ rights are torn down throughout the country, even with a Democrat president. It’s almost like they don’t actually care, or even like when women’s rights and LGBTQ rights are under attack because they can drum up fear about the republicans and look ‘better’ by comparison after creating the problem in the first place, and keep the vampire-and-fascist (dog-and-pony) show going, and get all the gullible liberal votes that “they’ll vote for us anyway — we’re not the republicans” Which circles back to why they’re so scared of and pushing demonization and repression of 3rd parties I guess. That’s a pretty sweet cruise-control-deal they have hoodwinking the populace in a sort of face/heel drama for their ‘audience’



  • No, I’m saying make noises in rooms where you can be heard.

    I agree. And if you seriously wish this then you will agree with us that we must all vote PSL, (or Green if you’re a liberal, and your state is strong for it) to visibly starve the democrats of the working class margins that they actually rely on (unlike the Republicans) — that they have forsaken; instead choosing to fight over the (shrinking) bourgeois and petty-bourgeois voter-base on the right with the Republicans and accepting for granted the working class margin they NEED for a mandate.

    The way to be heard by the Democrats is to starve the Democrats of the votes they rely on, and instead giving them to organizations which deserve them; while and in doing so visibly elevating and joining with the socialists and throwing our weight behind them and continuing to throw our weight behind them; so that if the Democrats ever want power again, they are FORCED to reorient; and if they don’t (and they might break in half if they tried — a good thing for democracy and workers, breaking the duopoly from the ground up in light of a rising Socialist party), the masses who never held any illusions about the Republicans in the first place will become increasingly radical; and the PSL elevated by us will be there to brief them and into the wings bring them, and the revolutionary moment comes all the sooner. And the further-elevated a real left party is, that both is elevated in elections and on-the-ground with our help organizing working people around material issues like the PSL does; the more those 35-50%, who have stopped voting entirely because of how betrayed and disaffected and abandoned they’ve been by the vampire-and-fascist show of the single-party-with-two-faces-duopoly, will be reactivated; and reactivated with purpose and direction under a banner of Socialism and Liberation. If you’re actually interested in building revolution, and/or you’re actually interested in “making noises in rooms where you can be heard” and/or you’re actually interested in taking the most intelligent decisive steps toward breaking up the dupoly and progressing the standing of the socialist movement and the working classes of the world and alleviating suffering of those under imperialism; this is not only the best option — it is the only option.

    Because right now, the democrats have ZERO reason to not totally disregard any and all of these demands or desires or criticisms (as they have been doing) because “they’ll vote for us anyway — we’re not the Republicans!” and you are standing as an active agent to defend that and further that for them so they can continue all of this with your mandate and all those you mislead. Which is exactly how and why things got to this point and the Democrat party has become so right wing. As it stands The Dems are sending PAC-lawyers to purge 3rd parties from ballots because they’re scared. And we have watched them utterly disregarding and talking down to and violently repressing large portions of their own constituency on the left making demands on them, such as to end the murderous nuclear-brinksmanship and arms-dealer and billionaire-imperialist financed proxy wars, and to STOP THIS GENOCIDE; and the same bad-faith slanders are used to malign them.

    The genocide that Biden sidestepped around congress twice to shovel guns and bombs to execute faster than even the imperialists and zionists in Congress could — who were already themselves bi-partisanly moving to do the same; meanwhile the Dems and their obedient college-liberal footsoldiers are browbeating Palestinian rights groups and leftists and people who are sick of facilitating this crap by shaming them for wanting to vote their conscience or politics, through pretending Trump is worse rather than the same, and we need to vote for Democrats “for the Palestinians” who themselves have told us that both parties are the same to them and whose biggest representative base in the US are, as per the article in the OP, TELLING US NOT TO VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATS; And how is Trump worse for Palestinians one might ask them? Only because Trump is telling the TRUTH about what he wants. He’s OPEN about it. The “harm reduction” they’re advocating — you’re advocating — is doing the same harm as, while somehow managing to be more duplicitous and dishonest about it than Donald Trump. That’s the state of things, that the “lesser evil” is lying more than Trump about Palestine.

    Biden wanted Gazans wiped off the face of the earth before the elections hit because he wanted to avoid exactly this; and now they haven’t; and to not push for there be electoral consequences is a shameless opportunist dereliction of democratic duty. It would be too a callous disregard for the suffering of those Palestinians if we allow this cynical ploy to work and let their martyrdom be in vain, that we do not allow it to help us break apart the bipartisan genocide machine step-by-step in the most effective ways we can. The Palestinians have said that there is no difference between the duopoly candidates for them, and Muslims in the US are also saying this as linked above. The Democrat wing of the ruling class NEED TO BE REMINDED of who gives them their mandate; by punishing them for actively continuing this and stating in published statements it’s going to continue and nothing policy-wise will change while at the same time lying to our faces in vague gestures during speeches about how ‘we need a ceasefire in gaza!’ when they could pick up the phone and make that happen, and don’t and we know they won’t.

    This exact delusion that you hold regarding the duopoly-of-exploiters (many of whom donate to the Democrats and then vote republican, and win either way) is exactly how the Democrats have flown rightward for decades, because “they’ll vote for us anyway.” Without any actual reason to fear being starved of their working class margin, they can continue to have outright anti-human policies and become more and more indistinguishable from the Republicans, and where they are still vaguely distinguishable constantly capitulate in the name of “reaching across the aisle” to the Republicans anyway, furthering all of the same policies.

    They can continue to be no different than the Republicans on increasing the funding and expanding the planet-destroying global-militarism. No different on financing, growing, and supporting the fascistic and bipartisanly-militarized police state. No different on increasing the funding and power of surveillance, intelligence, and gestapo agencies in the US and using them to COINTELPRO anyone who challenges them; including Black radicals who’ve been in the struggle for decades with more bad faith slanders, and the old “outside agitators” schtick and dogwhistle (just like Walz used when sending in an army to repress an uprising in Minneapolis) while pretending to be a friend to any minority. No different on the global racketeering of neo-colonialism and using asset theft and sanctions as a genocidal weapon to mass-murder children.

    They can keep doing this because they have no reason to stop, they get in power anyway because of this mindset they’ve conditioned in you. They can work to continue to outflank the Republicans on the right on immigration like they’ve been doing, continuing the rightward-slide legacy of Obama the “Deporter-in-Chief” and his border cages and draconian policies —where Biden not only didn’t close the concentration camps he said he was going to, but actually deregulated them and opened them up for (and advertised for) private subcontracting of the border concentration camps for profit. Which is somehow worse than Trump was. And he even did things like an executive order to totally shut down the border, a far right action that was blocked by the courts when Trump tried the same thing.