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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

Great points!

Sounds similar to some stuff I’ve been trying to make more conscious and confront, which is to do with the expectations I have of myself and how realistic or healthy they are. A big one for me is social expectations I impose on myself. I tend to have this nebulous image in my head of a smooth, effective socializer that I sort of implicitly believe is what “most people” are and then I get upset with myself when I can’t live up to that, or I avoid social situations so that I can’t fail to live up to it since I’m not trying.

But this image is unhealthy, it’s unrealistic, and quite honestly, it’s not even what most people are. If I actually look at my observations of how others socialize without the lens of assuming they have some special knowledge or skill that I don’t, they’re kinda all over the place and some of them even make me look more like the smooth image I have by pure contrast of how awkward they are. But ultimately, it’s not healthy to view it as a ranking of skill anyway. Because, and this is important, socializing is not a competition.

Whether most of your problems of comparison and expectations for yourself are socializing or something else, you can apply similar understanding. For example, capitalism tends to get us thinking our competency in the workplace is a ranked system of value. But in practice, it’s not even truly a meritocracy. They just preach like it is to get people clawing over each other for personal gain. In practice, it’s generally wealth and power passed on from rich families to rich families and anybody beyond that is like a lotto player trying to get ahead.

You are not weak. You are struggling, as many struggle. Where communists, where the masses find the most strength is in each other, not from a special potential unlocked from within. You can find ways to try to maximize your potential in different contexts, but that’s still relative to you and your limits and it’s not gonna be a thing that’s the same maximum every day, or even every hour. A person who is sick has a much lower maximum than the same person when they are healthy. Same with a person who is burned out vs. not. Having a disability like ADHD changes what your potential looks like vs. being neurotypical, as well as being medicated ADHD vs. not medicated.

I will reiterate: It’s not a competition and unlearning the idea that’s been shoved into our heads all our lives that it is, is important. They try to make it into a competition, but it’s mostly only an actual competition in the sense of who among the lotto ticket buyers will be the winner. In other words, the forced competition of capitalism is more rigged and random than it is a real ladder that rewards you for being “better.”

You are not your contributions. You are valuable and important beyond that. We have to take that mentality seriously; otherwise, we’d be implying that the most disabled and dependent people aren’t important, you know? You can take pride in what you do when you do it, but if you view your value as hinging on how competent of a revolutionary you are, you’re still spinning on individualist, capitalist thinking. Don’t let capitalism devalue human life. Sometimes it can help put it in perspective to look at how you view others vs. how you view yourself. For example, if you would oppose it devaluing the life of a Palestinian in Gaza, why would you be okay with it devaluing your own life?

I have had conversations with self described communists who don’t care at all about minorities.

There are those who co-opt, historically. And in modern day, in the US, there’s patsoc MAGA communists (though I’m not sure how much they actually exist beyond online bullshitting).

But I would also ask what you mean by “don’t care at all about minorities,” like if they have actually expressed such things to you and in what way, or if you’re inferring that from something and from what. Because sometimes there are disagreements on what is actually going to make a difference and that is taken as a lack of interest in caring what happens, in bad faith. For example, democrats in the US who shame people on “the left” for not supporting their blue ghoul because the red ghoul might get in, citing that their disinterest in validating the blue ghoul as a candidate means they don’t care about XYZ issue minorities have that the blue ghoul pays lip service to.

Too many people believe western media uncritically when it comes to international stuff. The contradictory part is they’ll sometimes have skepticism, distrust, or even hatred for one or more major news sources that’s focused on their own country’s affairs. But when it comes to news about other countries, the same skepticism can be missing.

Before I learned about ML and all that, I was in that place to some extent, I think. But now that I have some idea of what to look for and know a bit more about international affairs and history, it’s really obvious how western media narratives about “human rights” are just narratives of convenience. The formula goes something like: “Is X country somewhere we want to prop up against Y country? If yes, X country is a bastion of human rights and Y country eats babies. Does X country actively oppose us? If yes, X country eats turbo evil cereal as mandatory breakfast meals in every citizen’s state-mandated bowl.”

It’s very cartoonish. And I mean I’m not even exaggerating to say it’s cartoonish. I think of this video, which was from decades ago, yet is still so on point for the style of propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1tfkESPVY

But one thing I’m not sure how to contend with is when people are deep in paranoia about “foreign agents” and “foreign propaganda” kind of thing. I recall one time online trying to show someone that video to make a point about western propaganda and they straight up refused to watch it. IIRC, they were also someone who had come into the convo thinking I was a Chinese shill or something, but weren’t open about thinking that right away, so I naively attempted some good faith stuff at first.

The kind of thinking where anything that contradicts the existing narrative must be coming from “the enemy” “in secret” is such a disturbing thing. I think, would hope, most of us here don’t fall into that trap of thinking. For example, even something as straightforward as anti-imperialism is not binary good/evil; there can be countries run by factions that are not empowering the working class, the marginalized among their people as a system of power, but are nevertheless an important force of opposition against the western empire, against foreign capital and its exploitation.

I relate too much to Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place.

I need to reread State and Revolution, cause I want to say Lenin distinguishes between the two there as OP replied, where one is transition state and the other is after the state has “withered away” but now I can’t recall exactly if he used that specific terminology. Either way, the phrasing I tend to see used is that there is a socialist worker state with a vanguard party who suppresses the capitalist class and has a dictatorship of the working class, or proletariat. And then there is communism, which is the end goal to transition to. But the party itself is communist.

So something like:

• People doing socialist worker state: communists heading up a communist vanguard party that focuses on the needs of the masses and on educating them in communist principles and methods of analysis (such as dialectical materialism), and guards against the reaction
• The state power model: dictatorship of the proletariat in order to suppress the capitalist class and empower the proletariat
• Goals: to create and maintain a socialist state along the lines of “to each according to their contribution” and transition to a communist “to each according to their needs” as the need for the state “withers away,” and maintain the revolution which is an ongoing process of transition and guarding against the reaction, not something that ends as soon as you have state power.

If anyone thinks I’m oversimplifying, am open to correction. (Is worth noting that the details of this will vary some in practice because of the conditions unique to the socialist project and what they have developed and so on.)

In my experience, it was more atomized, which isn’t necessarily good or bad, but was certainly different. It wasn’t consumed by algorithms at that point, so in that way, probably healthier. But it could also vary quite a bit based on where you went and how it was moderated. One of the first forums I ever hung out on was very small and niche compared to what a lot of forum stuff is now, so it was much more of a “everybody knows each other” feel than I experience with most of the internet now. And the few mods had a whole infraction system and were pretty tempered about stuff, which was probably more realistic to do with a group of that scale.

Some of the problems I see with the internet now are unresolved problems of scale and capitalism being a terrible fit for doing anything meaningful about them. For example, youtube algos that demonetizing people with false positives on stuff. On the one hand, how are they supposed to moderate the site reasonably at all? With the absurd rate of content being generated. On the other hand, capitalism would sooner fire every worker and make a robot run the site than payroll lots of human moderators, so even if the problem is hard regardless, they don’t even want to engage with it meaningfully beyond slapdash solutions that make life harder for people who are doing nothing wrong. There is also the fact that the upload rate would likely be considerably lower, if the site wasn’t designed to make regular uploads the main feasible way to get views. And getting views wouldn’t be so critical if people weren’t desperate for money. So that part does come back to capitalism. Panicking on content moderation because of where ads show up is also a capitalistic thing, only caring when the advertisers get upset about their product reputation.

Or another example, a popular thread on reddit in a large sub can get hundreds or thousands of responses. Most of these responses won’t get read or engaged with by anyone. So what exactly is even the point there? For people to scream into the void? Websites like that value engagement numbers intrinsically, but aren’t structured to consider the human side of what the engagement is even supposed to be for or how it will serve human needs.

I’ve not researched this piece extensively, but I am remembering now this piece on Jonestown: http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=78282#p8

The narrative associated with Jonestown of people being misguided in their thinking and so “drinking the Kool-Aid” may have been a major distortion. It’s been some time since I read through the article in full. I’ll try to see about re-reading it later, so I’m more clear on that point.

edit: wording

Love this one, really puts into perspective how ridiculous the trolley problem stuff is.

Well said!

Thinking more about this and these articles come to mind about the US military and the general unsustainability of how things are being run in terms of infrastructure:

https://indi.ca/nothing-to-see-here-just-the-wheels-falling-off-empire/

https://indi.ca/how-americas-military-has-fallen-apart/

If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it and I don’t see people having enough loyalty to the country to fight such a thing meaningfully. Already, we know how the public feels and what gets implemented as policy has little connection. We are seeing right now people being willing to risk their futures or even lives now to protest genocide in another country, similar to the actions during the US violence against Vietnam. An encounter that the US ultimately lost, even if it did inflict barbaric harm on the Vietnamese people in the process.

Now China with BRICS is rising in influence, anti-imperialism appears to be overall strengthening and western imperialism weakening even if it is not always a straightforward “win” because even under the best conditions, it will not always go the way we want it to for the colonized.

And then there is climate change to contend with too, as well as the US’s general poor handling of covid, where it sacrificed its own people in order to push for faster re-opening and just sort of say “the pandemic is over.” That kind of cynically evil approach might work some of the time at a small scale, but the displacement climate change could cause is not going to be small and ignorable, and there will be no “just wait on a vaccine” moment for it.

All of this is to say that there is a lot levied against the US and western imperialism as a whole, both now and going forward, some of it plain old nature coming home with the consequences of mass ecological destruction.

And if the US loses its hold, I don’t see what other wing of western imperialism would be strong enough to take its place. I hesitate to make any personal predictions on time, but I don’t see western imperialism having any meaningful capability to navigate the consequences of climate change as a power figure, so I can’t see it lasting as a global power beyond that getting bad. If we take covid as a preview, it’s more likely for the violence to turn inward and deteriorate the conditions of the US further and China to be the one leading in acting pragmatically on a large scale.

It’s okay, I apparently made a faux pas trying to engage to learn here on this issue but this community is clearly more for comradeship like its name suggests rather than outreach.

You have received a lot of attention and information. What do you expect, for people to bend over backwards to talk to you about this on your terms? What person who takes learning seriously does this? Do you show up to a classroom and leave if the teacher does not re-frame their lecture on physics into the trolley problem? “Outreach” does not mean you change nothing about yourself and everyone else changes what they’re doing for you. You could receive the ideal maximum of compassion, patience, and clarity of thought and word, but if you are only willing to approach it on your terms, then no matter what you tell yourself about your intent, the substance of your actions is that of reinforcing what you already believe, not learning.

And I am speaking from some experience here. I did not always have the views that I do and one of the most important things in changing that was doing more listening to people who are better informed. Philosophical questions like the trolley problem gives people a false sense of competence in understanding a given issue; that as long as you can abstract a problem to its component parts, you can overcome any ignorance of it and arrive at the correct position. This is not so. You must understand what is happening correctly, so that you can properly generalize. If your information on the fundamentals is incorrect, attempting to generalize will only obfuscate rather than clarify and give a false sense of confidence in your position.