If so, was it polled somewhere?

  • NormalC [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    90
    arrow-down
    58
    ·
    1 year ago

    Wannabe communists

    There’s a lot to unpack in that one. First of all, how do you even gatekeep being a communist? Surely you don’t hold a degree in Marxist-Leninist thought? Nor are you a hexbear yourself.

    Or perhaps since you have this perception that we are all petite bourgeoisie (mostly white) in the imperialist core that we can’t actually be communists (ignoring how paradoxical that is)

    Perhaps communism in your mind is only for the “orient” and global south. Those in the “West” must just be play acting.

    • Gsus4@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      When you guys mention the imperial core, what are you talking about? DC? Hollywood? Wall Street? Brussels? London? Paris? Berlin? The Hague? Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?

      • SpookyGenderCommunist [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        66
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        “imperial core” isn’t a phrase we made up. It refers to World Systems Theory, a theory of international relations invented by a guy named Immanuel Wallerstein which argues that imperial “Core” countries (think the traditional “developed” or “first world” countries. Mainly the US and Europe) have a particular extractive, colonial relationship with “Periphery” countries (think poor, raw material exporting, rentier states like Kyrgyzstan or Nigeria).

        Then there are semi-periphery countries which are still tied into the imperial core in some way, but have enough sway economically and geopolitically to kind of stand on their own. They have a different kind of relationship to the imperial core, compared to the periphery (these would be the BRICS countries, largely).

        That’s a gross over simplification, but hopefully that answers your question.

        Edit: Here’s a really good explanation of World Systems Theory that goes into more depth

        • Gsus4@feddit.nl
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          34
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Wasn’t aware of this framework, thank you for taking the time to explain it :)

        • PutangInaMo@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          To be fair, colonialism is a human trait and it’s been proven in every large society time and time again. You think the current US/UK empire is bad but if you look in your own back yard it’s the same thing with a different spin.

          It is inevitable, humans are destined for this. It’s unfortunate but it’s what we do.

              • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                37
                arrow-down
                4
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Lmao no they’re not. Humans are a communal species, it’s literally what we’ve evolved to be.

                However acting as if behavioral (or even worse evolutionary) psychology can in any way give a definite answer on what is human nature and what is learnt behaviour, is ridiculous.
                There are no factual answers to the question “what is human nature?”

                • PutangInaMo@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  4
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  If you look at human history, every civilization has eventually pretty much done the same thing just at different scales.

                  At some point humans do in general attain that trait, in larger societies.

                  Keep the group small, it’ll eventually grow larger. It literally all happened throughout human history, there are physical artifacts across the globe, all before globalization and communication technologies, and they all generally did the same thing. Or they were one of your “communal” societies that no longer exist because…

                  • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    23
                    arrow-down
                    3
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Like a Christian deep in the closet talking about how gay people just need to suppress the natural urge all men feel to engage in gay sex, you believe that your internal experiences are universally shared across humanity. Because you are a selfish, deeply evil person, you refuse to believe that there is actually any such thing as a good person at all. You feel smugly superior to the rest of us who refuse to admit we’re all evil, without realizing that not everyone thinks like you.

          • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            31
            arrow-down
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            yeah but the thing is other countries’ policies didn’t inspire apartied and the nazis and their holocaust.

            the US’s exterminationist and segregationalist The US did those thing

            Hitler wrote in his diary how good america was at genociding its undesireables, and took it and ran with it

            The United States: world leader in being the absolute fucking worst thing in human history since 1619

            • PutangInaMo@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              But that’s kind of my point. The CCP engages in almost identical policies and political strategy. It’s just under a different banner with a different mascot.

                • PutangInaMo@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  If somebody looks at you and likes a thing you do, and then goes and commits genocide because they liked that you liked their favorite potato chip, does not make you connected to their genocide.

                  You are fabricating connections while denying reality.

                  • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    26
                    arrow-down
                    5
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    Hitler literally wrote in his diary how good the US policies of extermination and land settling were, and, quite famously, his basis for Lebensraum: the material basis for the holocaust

                    Get the fuck out of here nazi apologist

          • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            28
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            You think the current US/UK empire is bad but if you look in your own back yard it’s the same thing with a different spin.

            I don’t think any non-Western country has enslaved a continent, refused to pay reparations for enslaving an entire continent, and continue to plunder an entire continent of its resources.

            • PutangInaMo@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              ·
              1 year ago

              Japan, China, Persian empire, Egypt, Spain, US, UK, Cambodia, et al.

              History is nasty, our goal should be to learn from it and not repeat it.

              • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                27
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                I’m going to make the bold claim that the Tang dynasty and the Achaemenid empire was nowhere near as bad as the Spanish empire or the British empire and unlike the first two, the second two are still relevant in modern times.

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                7
                ·
                1 year ago

                Do you seriously think Cambodia “enslaved a continent”? Like, I think Pol Pot was one of the more destructive leaders in human history, but you’re being silly.

                Japan was working on it but only partially did it. China didn’t. Persia? uh . . . I don’t think so. Egypt? No. Spain was part of the overall effort that the US and UK were part of.

        • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          33
          ·
          1 year ago

          I genuinely would like to understand what you guys at hexbear are about but every time I poke my head into that instance you guys are “dunking” every other instance with language nobody else understands. It’s very alienating.

          • dolphin [he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            51
            arrow-down
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            Lol that’s fair. We’ve developed a pretty insular culture over the past three years and I can see how it’s hard to decipher.

            • yuri@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              12
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              you guys are also like, just huge dicks without provocation. like all the fucken time. 99% of what i see from hexbear users is either condescension or outright hostility.

              • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                33
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                usually how conversations go is this

                1. I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk

                2. to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect

                3. they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like “Oh, so you’ve come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it’s much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you’re wrong because of [link to wikipedia]”

                4. we then start dunking given that they aren’t operating in good faith

                perhaps reddit’s typical style of “debate”, where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of “You’re wrong, here’s why you’re wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don’t then you’ll start screeching ‘CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH’ at us”

                additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven’t for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I’ve seen arguments become people just saying quotes like “Well, communism works on paper but not in practice” and “If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither” or “Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?” and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily “when you have elections” or if there’s something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner’s knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I’ll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.

                no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don’t “contribute to the discussion”, no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into “I dislike you and/or the point you’re making and I’m not going to explain why. fuck you.” disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or “struggle sessions”) rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it’s by far the healthiest online community I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. it’s also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of “if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can’t downvote” means that we’re all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.

              • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                34
                arrow-down
                6
                ·
                1 year ago

                honestly it’s a pretty friendly instance all told, we just have p strong feelings about politics and bigotry

                and admittedly a lot of us have little patience for the worst among you bc we deal with that shit permeating society at every level on a constant basis

                • yuri@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  hey ditto! i have very little patience for the worst among you, because when i look through comment sections looking for discourse i instead see you fuckers starting the same 5 arguments.

                  also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty. it’s hard to respect what you say your motives are when your camp is acting like it is.

                  • sharedburdens [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    35
                    arrow-down
                    3
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    Really? cause when I look through comment sections it’s always liberals spewing the same fucking lines, and acting like everyone they disagree with can’t possibly also be from marginalized groups. (In fact most seem to take the fact that you disagree with them as prima facie evidence that you can’t be from a marginalized group!)

                    The amount of casual misogyny, racism, and generally sickening comments I’ve seen has shot through the roof since we federated, and it’s exclusively been coming from lemmitors.

                  • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    25
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    hey ditto! i have very little patience for the worst among you, because when i look through comment sections looking for discourse i instead see you fuckers starting the same 5 arguments.

                    If this is how you initiate discussion - with hostility - then that experience does not surprise me. Consider being less shitty yourself.

                    also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty. it’s hard to respect what you say your motives are when your camp is acting like it is.

                    I find that very hard to believe. The websites modteam is majority LGBTQ+ we have a diverse group of users, and this is because the mod team takes bigotry very seriously. If you see any bigoted takes please report them, and also please give me some examples of this from hexbear users.

                  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    21
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty.

                    Now that’s a lie if I ever saw one lmao

              • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                25
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                I see a lot of hexbear users be provocative, but I’ve yet to see it without reason. It’s in response to someone else acting in bad faith. When you see someone act rude, take a step back and consider why they are acting rude.
                Not to say we don’t have users that are too quick on the draw of the ppb, but your website certainly has cantankerous assholes as well. Every site has.
                Hexbear just has an incredibly low tolerance of debatebros, smuglords and bigotry, which I would say has fostered a site culture that allows for a wide variety of opinions to be shared, a deep analysis of current event and which is a safe space for LGBTQ+ members - our modteam is majority LGBTQ+.

              • Staines [they/them]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                15
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Hexbear - “that’s true, I see how our culture can be hard to decipher”

                Lemmylib - “you guys are huge dicks without provocation”

                Hexbear - oh well fuck you then :)

                Lemmylib - “see, so hostile!”

                If we respond to people being needlessly aggro with quip derision it’s “so uncivil!” If we respond to people in good faith by trying to explain our differing views it’s “wow im not going to read that!”

                So what should we do?

          • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            46
            arrow-down
            9
            ·
            1 year ago

            Honestly your best bet is probably to do some reading first, unfortunately. A lot of Hexbear dialect is that way because it’s tied to concepts that come from books and thinkers we’re broadly familiar with.

            If you’re more into video stuff you could try this guy. I think he’s pretty approachable.

            Actually if you went into the megathreads and asked most people would probably give you suggestions too. We are fiesty but in my experience we also like to be helpful to people with questions.

          • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            42
            arrow-down
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            We’re literally just communists. Read any introductory text to communism and 99% of what we say will make sense in context.

              • Nama [he/him]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                48
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                1 year ago

                I’ll oversimplify a bit, but here you go. In economic terms, liberalism is a market oriented economy, and the current iteration of neoliberalism is marked by social welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich with “trickle down” effect in mind (allegedly). That ideology is shared by both the democratic and republican parties. The difference between communists and liberals in the sense the word is most often used, is that economic approach, and from that perspective both liberals and conservatives are “liberal”.

                Now the common use of the word is a bit different, but that’s almost exclusively US from what I can tell. Hexbear is also international though, and liberal is a common term for right wingers where I’m from for example.

                Hope I could help.

                • YeetPics@mander.xyz
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  3
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  “The colloquialisms from the place I am directly talking about don’t matter as much as this one I am using, everyone who disagrees is propagandized”

                  This is what I’m seeing when I read your comment. I can call the sky green all damn day, that doesn’t make it green, you dip.

                  • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    36
                    arrow-down
                    2
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Wow what an insightful response to a user answering your question in good faith! I cannot imagine why you would ever be treated with derision or condescention

                  • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    25
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Exactly the same as a chud saying college biology is fake pseudoscience because of the biology they were taught in 5th grade.

                    In any decent political science education in the states you will also see these definitions. You can stop having a tantrum about it.

                  • sawne128 [he/him]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    20
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Let me oversimplify even more. Donald Trump upholds the American Revolution which turned British America into a liberal republic.

                  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    12
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    This isn’t a colloquialism. This is a basic definition used within political science.

                    If you’re going to talk politics on a serious level then using the terminology of political science matters and, if that’s too much of a stretch, then at least avoid colloquial terms which contradict the terms used in political science.

                  • Staines [they/them]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    12
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Americans can call the sky green as much as they want. In the rest of the world, Liberalism = Liberalism, not “democrat”.

                    Liberals are people that believe in liberalism, which can be summed up as “everyone has the individual right to be an asshole, even if it fucks everyone else over”.

              • SpookyGenderCommunist [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                40
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Liberalism has a couple of different definitions. The one you’re thinking of is the one in US politics where “Liberal” is synonymous with "Left’. This isn’t how it’s being used here though.

                Liberalism, as a broad ideological trend that came out of the enlightenment, contains within it, Conservatism. Conservatism was theorized by people like Edmund Burke who, seeing that the previous feudal hierarchy was dying off, sought to preserve it, at least as much as was possible, by accepting Liberal notions of property rights and capitalism.

                So, instead of a social hierarchy being ordained by God, it’s decided by the market, and social conflict is meditated through the liberal, Lockean, Republic.

                So when we call Trump a liberal, we mean it in this broad sense. He’s still a conservative, but conservatism is a subset of capital L Liberalism.

                This is in contrast to Leftism, which also contains a lot of things within it, but breaks from a lot of the philosophical assumptions that undergird Liberalism.

                • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  22
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Yes, otherwise they would not have asked it. We all learn something new everyday, and what’s old for you is novel for others. We cannot expect everyone to be well-versed in theory that was once new to us as well

          • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            34
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            If you ask good faith questions and give context for why “Hey, I’m a liberal and I don’t understand X could you explain what you mean?”

            You WILL get excellent engagement and people will give you very good answers

            its easy, and if you genuinely want to learn give it a shot

          • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            31
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            New tagline dropped @CARCOSA@hexbear.net

            Seriously though you are more than welcome to ask, I would recommend the news mega. If you ask questions in gold faith there’s a wealth of users willing to interact with you

          • epicspongee [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            12
            ·
            1 year ago

            To be clear in the dunking threads folks are not usually engaging in good faith with us. When I was on another server and replied with actual questions to stuff everyone was incredibly nice to me and explained stuff super well. Can agree though that folks can see dunking as alientating. I promise though if you can get past that it’s one of the friendliest communities I’ve found on the web.

      • HornyOnMain [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        56
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        The imperial core is the countries that have been most involved in the imperialist plunder of other nations, so that would be the US, Canada, UK, France, Belgium, Germany, etcetera

                  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    13
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    If you want information about Tibet, let me know.

                    I am a westerner who was raised Tibetan Buddhist so I’m pretty familiar with Tibetan history and… it’s really not the country which gets painted as this peaceful utopia free from political intrigue or human rights abuses that was all about enacting and embodying compassion.

                    There’s contemporary examples of this, and perhaps the most obvious example is the Karmapa controversy (try figuring that little doozy on your own without being steeped in Tibetan history lol) which often overlooks significant issues such as the struggle over who would hold the seat of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim and lay claim to the considerable amount held in trust for the Karmapa (which featured a wealthy patron, at one point, stationing a small private military to prevent one of the Karmapas from entering the monastery) along with suspicious death of Jamgon Kongtrol Rinpoche and his delegation in a car accident when he was instructed to “test the brakes” on a newly serviced car (BMW? Mercedes? I forget…) or the historical significance of the then-Dalai Lama outlawing the recognition of the Tai Situpa lineage (and liquidating his monastic holdings and forcibly converting the Kagyu monks under his tutelage to the Gelug school) and the current Dalai Lama lifting this centuries-long ban and the implications this would have on the recognition of the current Karmapa(s).

                    Then there’s historical examples of this, like the famous example of the politically-influential polymath Lungshar, whose son was considered for being a reincarnation of the next Karmapa (this process of recognising reincarnations, strangely enough, tended to exclusively occur to children within wealthy and politically influential families such as Lungshar’s) who was sent as part of a delegation to Europe by the British who were courting Tibet at the time as they sought to expand their colonial holdings from India up into Tibet. Lungshar was smitten by western political systems and he sought to bring about reforms to democratise the Tibetan theocracy.

                    Unfortunately for Lungshar, his son died under suspicious circumstances around the time that his agenda for political reforms was running into direct opposition by the conservative political powerbrokers in Tibet (monks/lamas and aristocrats) and, in a surprising turn of events, Lungshar was “discovered” to have been practising black magic (they found a piece of paper with someone’s name on it inside his shoe which was considered black magic - this name happened to be of the aristocrat Timon who held high offices in the Tibetan theocracy and who happened to be a conservative and the main figure who openly opposed Lungshar’s reform agenda. How they knew to check Lungshar’s shoes is a matter for speculation…) and so, as punishment, Lungshar had his eyes gouged out on Timon’s order and Lungshar lost his political influence and the movement supporting the liberalisation of the Tibetan theocracy was effectively extinguished by this act.

                    There’s this extremely romanticised, idyllic notion that westerners tend to have about Tibet (and the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is something treasured by westerners rather than being looked at with a skeptical eye for all of its overt orientalism, to me, speaks volumes about just how canonised this notion is) but history paints a markedly different picture than the one we tend to have.

        • YeetPics@mander.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          China (see taiwan, tibet)

          Russia (see crimea/ukraine)

          Wow you just got dunked on.

          Seethe

      • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        38
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        You know how any time there’s a map where it colors countries who vote on UN resolutions, or countries where you can be thrown in jail for being poor, etc etc etc etc, you know how its usually a very similar map with US Europe and western allies on one side, and the entire rest of the world (the other 6.5 billion people) on the other?

        Yeah, that teeny group that seems to always get its way controlling global politics is the imperial core.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Another user already explained world systems theory, but there’s also the school of global historical materialism, that analyses the relationship and structure of the imperial core/triad and the periphery/global south. Samir Amin was a leading figure in that, he also coined the term “Eurocentrism”. You can find quite a few recordings of his lectures for free on YouTube, or pirate his books (he’s dead now, so it’s not like he’d get the money anyways).

    • UnknownQuantity@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’ve grown up under a communist government in a socialist republic. So while I have no degree in Marxism-Leninism, I can assure you that all of my schooling was infused with it. Same goes for most of popular culture. I don’t despise communism, as is often the case with people like me, the idea is noble, if utopian. The ideology, like all ideologies, is scary for its intolerance and disregard of human nature. I will therefore gatekeep any pure ideolog, just to save my own faith in humanity.

      • NormalC [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve grown up under a communist government in a socialist republic…

        Huh? That’s a very roundabout way of describing a communist state. Where do you come from specifically? You can count communist states on your fingertips.

        ideology, like all ideologies, is scary for its intolerance and disregard of human nature…

        I don’t think that’s what the word “ideology” means. Also it’s dangerous and unproductive to off-handedly remark on “human nature.” It’s a bad faith psuedoscientific buzzword that’s rooted in uncontextualized historical analysis. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

        I will therefore gatekeep any pure ideolog, just to save my own faith in humanity.

        Again, I’m not quite sure what this means. I think you’re conflating a lot of things here that just don’t make sense and I dont want to make any assumptions about you. No community can ever be immune to reactionary politics, but thats not the same as rejecting “pure ideology”

        • UnknownQuantity@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          If you put down the thesaurus and actually think about things you will perhaps start to understand. I grew up in former Czechoslovakia until my adulthood under the rule of the communist party until we overthrew them in 1989. The effects of that time are still with me. The human nature that came to light during communist rule would make your hair stand on end. All in pursuit of ideology. You can’t comprehend what you’re advocating for further than some utopian theory you read.

        • UnknownQuantity@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          What? You have nothing to say now? I would appreciate if you stated your position to my replies to you.