I just read through the thread and tried to mentally filter for people saying it’s a common thing. Didn’t find anything particularly overt in that way. Don’t think anyone was making claims as to how common it is either way, but I guess I could have missed it.

It’s telling to me how fragile the gender binary is when people feel the need to police attraction lines based on such arbitrary physical characteristics as how much someone does bodybuilding or fitness.

It’s part of the cycle of blame. Liberals can’t take responsibility for failing cause that’d mean they have to actually do something more than whine about what the rightists are doing; they would have to both obtain power and leverage the organized violence of that power in order to suppress any and all rightist influence. But they don’t and in practice, often ally with and enable them instead. That leaves them blaming the nebulous, shifting, ill-defined entity “the left”. An entity which is portrayed as both weak and strong; on the one hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as an inconsequential sample of the population and thus something that should be ignored when it comes time to legislate or court votes. On the other hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as a serious threat that undermines their ability to win elections by refusing to support them and carrying water for what they label rightist talking points, such as (at this point, with the vote blue no matter who nonsense) criticizing anything a liberal in charge is doing.

If they took responsibility, they would have to admit that the liberal order they idealize is impossible to manage or sustain or implement meaningfully much at all without the contradictions building over time rather than lessening. They would have to admit that where they stand isn’t in any kind of middle, but is in direct opposition to the marginalized, the colonized, the working class. And the best they can ever do as liberals is the political worldview equivalent of Scrooge voluntarily becoming a good guy in A Christmas Carol. They can’t take it further than charity unless they take power seriously and for them to take power seriously, they either end up aligning with the rightists or they figure out they’ve got to reject liberalism and embrace a dialectical liberation as laid out by communists.

As tempting as it is sometimes, doomerism is counter revolutionary. Not to be confused with being down sometimes or contending with depression. Taking a stance, even if meant in jest (and doomerism does go for dark humor sometimes) that suggests there is no hope is a problem. That’s not even getting into the problems with feeding narratives about exaggerated differences between generations, which is a divide and conquer thing, and doesn’t help us build solidarity with anyone.

There are observable differences between generations in culture and conditions they face, to a certain extent, but exaggerated statements about them that suggest helplessness or a fixed, doomed state of being is not a good idea. And the liberation cause is one where people have more in common, usually, than they have differences.

Good god. That is… a lot to deal with.

Great point and healthy reminder that the practice part in theory and practice is critical to get anywhere.

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

So, thanks for the back and forth on this. I ended up updating and it seems to be working again now. Since you figure it’s not using new functionality, my best guess is something old got deprecated in a way that my version was depending on in some part of the process.

Either way, working now, so yay.

Hi, I’m on desktop, Firefox browser. Though now I’m thinking about it, maybe I do need to look into updating my browser. I might have disabled updates at some point in order to keep things the same, but that might mess with it if depends on something newer? Hmm.

Barring any info that it might be something else, I might look into browser update later today to see if that makes any difference.

As of, I can’t recall exactly, a couple of days ago? The “Next” button at the bottom of the feed page just takes me to the same first page of results. Is anyone else experiencing this?

That’s awesome, well done!

I kinda hate it, but I also don’t tend to like “prankster” type of humor in general. In spite of that, it’s hard for me to think it’s valid to be opposed to it generally if the people involved are all okay with it. So like, two friends “roasting” each other, okay, I guess none of my business if they are truly fine with it and enjoy it. But even then, are they doing stuff similar to “aftercare”? Where they reaffirm they really do love and appreciate each other after any digging is done. Because if not, it seems like an easy way for people to be in an unhealthy dynamic, where one of them is crying inside and just going along with it to get along.

And in the context of a sub like roastme, there’s nothing close to “aftercare”, no real off button on it, and it’s complete strangers. So it seems like a horrible setup for doing it in a way that is at all healthy.

I can try to get into more detail on this another time (I need to wind down for sleep) but I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that when you point at basically all states thought of as AES (maybe I missed one?) and call them revisionist in one form or another, it can end up sounding exactly like the “that wasn’t real communism” trope or in another way, end up sounding like “that was real communism and see how it sucks and fails actually in practice.” I’m trying to word this carefully because it could go in the other direction too if presented thoughtlessly, where it sounds like I’m saying that criticisms of AES projects are bad (criticism is important). The point that I hang on is, making sure we’re not de-legitimizing the theory and practice as a whole by being unfairly dismissive of how closely practice aligns with the goal, where it is on the developing path. And also just making sure we are clear on tactics vs. corruption mindset. That to use a rough war analogy, sometimes you have to retreat in order to regroup, but that doesn’t mean your army has taken a step backward in its ideological goals. Retreating has the risk of leading to giving up and compromising on what you intend, but the one doesn’t automatically follow from the other. So making sure in the weeds of it, we are clear on when something is dangerous compromising on an ideological center and when something is a more complicated tactical development that undoubtedly contains some risk of losing the ideological center, but still has that center and has a specific plan in mind for how to develop past the “retreating” into an advance.

Edit: wording

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems like the term “revisionist” becomes all but meaningless when you apply it in this way, like a sort of “no true scotsman” style analysis. I’m not sure I understand what your expectation is for AES states.

(by smart contract, if I’m not mistaken)

No investigation, no right to speak and all that.

You don’t sound very confident on the details. I do appreciate the explanation and I am not trying to be snarky or dismissive here. But if you are trying to hold people to a standard of no investigation, no right to speak, I would expect a little more than this for being the one who has done investigation.

Here is part of the quote:

You can’t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to “find solution” or “evolve an idea” without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a wrong idea.

There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make a mess of things, lose the confidence of the masses and prove incapable of solving any problem at all.

The full thing can be found here for discussion: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm

My takeaway as relevant to this is that it’s more about people who hypothesize and invent wildly from nothing and resist going among the masses to learn what they need and how it can be done rather than being about people who are skeptical in the year 2024 in encountering anonymous claims made to them about technology on the internet.

I’ve been in situations before of having investigated something quite a bit and facing stubbornness from people who haven’t. I can empathize on that level. It’s frustrating when you’ve done the work to learn and people act like their knowledge is equal to yours in spite of having spent little to no time on it at all. But I think there is a line we can cross where it’s going to sound like we’re saying “turn your brain off and take my word for it” instead of “let’s educate the masses so they are better informed.”

In this context, for example, how are we defining what “within reason” is for skepticism? Skepticism is more or less a kind of wariness. I’m having trouble working out where you’d draw the line for reasonable or unreasonable skepticism if we’re starting from the premise that the whole reason a person is being skeptical is because they lack the information to confidently draw a conclusion.

I don’t ask a detailed reply here, just consider it as food for thought and if you want to dig into it, you’re welcome to of course.

Would be helpful to explain why you think deception is impossible in that context. Crypto and NFTs have a lot of con artistry going on and it’s reasonable for people to be skeptical.

That sucks to hear. The day I can’t block ads on youtube will be the day I stop using it. It is just not worth the psychological damage of having that garbage blasted at me.

More than that, I think western arrogance just has a hard time admitting to losing in general. That whole capitalistic + supremacy thing of “winning means you have value and losing means you’re worthless.” They can’t simultaneously dehumanize and value their entity as more than conquest. If the western empire cared about human life, it’d also be more secure in how it acts and what it can admit. But then it wouldn’t be doing the violence it has done to so many peoples.

So I guess what I’m driving at here, is I think this sort of duplicitous language comes with the territory.