I hate it when every candidate except myself threatens democracy by participating in elections

1990: Don’t worry, the free market will save us!

2000: Sure it’s a slow start but we’ll get there eventually.

2010: It’s going to be hard but if we all work together and take drastic measures right now we can still stop this!

2020: Okay, this is getting kind of scary guys. I don’t care how you do it but please hurry up…

2030: The world is doomed. Here’s why it’s all Stalin’s fault.

I don’t think he’s particularly well versed on politics. iirc he has a bachelors in Latin American history but otherwise he’s essentially just a shitposter with common sense like most of us here and admits as much. Not an intellectual by any means.

If Xi sent the balloons it’s proof of his evil schemes. If Xi didn’t send the balloons it’s because he failed to keep his regime in line. He can’t win no matter what he does lol

wait, so you’re saying that even the fascist states (e.g. the nazis) were only trying to defend themselves against foreign powers trying to destabilize their state? or am i misinterpreting you?

I was referencing socialist states, but yes they do both resist political pressure. The difference is fascist states are a minority class resisting domestic dissent by the majority class. It’s a forced ideology undermining a natural uprising, which is why it draws so many parallels with socialism in its revolutionary anti-establishment sentiment but is as a result lacking in internal consistency. In other words it’s reactionary.

The post WW1 German government was resisting political pressure from socialist factions that were especially dominant in Germany due to the aftermath of the war. There was constant turmoil including insurgencies, massacres, executions and of course the massive surge of the KPD into electoral politics that lead capitalists to fund the staunchly anti-communist Nazi party (read “Who Financed Hitler” by James Pool) and subsequently purged communist thought.

a state doesn’t have a mind of its own, it consists of people

The state is the monopoly of power in the hands of one class; they’re a state because the interests of the people in it align. Though it can, the state doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. What capitalists believe or think about on a personal level is irrelevant, their material interests lead them to support the same thing.

those people are often power-hungry

They’re power hungry, so they appeal to the interests of the most powerless class in defiance of the most powerful class, only to then alienate the powerless class as well? They’re power hungry so they isolate their state from the world stage and reduce themselves to running an impoverished nation? I think your view of ‘authoritarianism’ is shaped by the misconceptions about the cause of Nazi Germany addressed above.

Even if we assume this is true, it’s not a useful observation. It avoids pinpointing the conditions we need to address. There isn’t much we can do about an ‘evil’ dormant in an undefined subset of the population. You’re just fingerpointing, which is a primer for fascism.

by placing a powerful leader without accountability on the top you have undermined the whole concept

First, there’s no lack of accountability. Socialist parties consist of MILLIONS in members and hundreds to thousands in parliament, which is much larger than all parties in liberal democracies combined. Socialist countries don’t have singular dictators but operate through massive debate and cooperation. What they lack are people promoting goals contrary to socialism (and yes this does lead to wrongful punishment, that’s par for the course given the chaotic nature of covert war). Accountability and dissent are WILDLY different things that can’t be conflated. Every state is accountable to the material interests it serves.

Second, the concept of socialism is abolition of the state. There’s no ‘rule’ or empirical justification prescribing socialism to be an erratic transition rather than gradual. The point of communism isn’t just electing different leaders. Where you think socialism must come from tolerance to an undefined time of unchecked capitalist rule before an abstract ‘mass revolution’ ushers in socialism, communists simply think socialism must come from intolerance to capitalist rule but concrete tolerance to state functions that can resist capitalist subjugation until they aren’t needed anymore.

By tolerating the bureaucracy of capitalism for the sake of awaiting ‘principled’ instantaneous global revolution, you’re already admitting you’re willing to compromise for the goal of socialism. So it doesn’t make sense to pretend your aversion to socialist states has anything to do with principled opposition to a similar bureaucratic structure serving the working class(by providing housing, education, healthcare and food) instead of elites.

You can believe Leninism is a flawed way to achieve socialism and maybe even doomed to fail, but if you can’t even appreciate it as better than capitalism, you’re just not a socialist.

maybe cia actions were what caused them to be authoritarian, but that doesn’t excuse their actions in any way. the moment they became authoritarian, cia had already defeated socialism

‘Authoritarian’ is just a state, no more powerful than any other, at war. I don’t understand what you mean by ‘excusing actions’ when you admit it’s caused by US intervention. You’re saying their actions aren’t excusable while personally providing the excuse.

And what’s the point in a ‘principled stance’ when this stance consists of letting your own people be massacred and condemning billions of people to extreme poverty? What’s the point of ‘principles’ when it consists of tolerating the mass genocide of the entire planet? You tolerate the obscenely rich and ‘peaceful’ because dominant tyranny of capitalism, but the minority socialist states that always form in the countries with the worst conditions must be flawless and overcome hurdles with complete ethical perfection.

You don’t seem to appreciate that the struggle for socialism is a war, not civil debate. You demand people meet artillery fire with a cool headed essay recital and wonder why anarchist communes are nowhere to be found.

Authoritarianism isn’t a thing. No state wants to suppress dissent.

Dissent is suppressed when it needs to be because there’s foreign powers trying to destabilize your state. Like when the most powerful country in the world creates a Central Intelligence Agency with the overt purpose of eradicating communism. Which they did covertly through the funding of internal dissent, terrorism and sabotage of infrastructure.

Unless you think the CIA just twiddled their thumbs for 70 years, of course. In that case I recommend reading the book ‘Killing Hope’ by William Blum.

Intelligence and political awareness aren’t correlated. Confrontation with politics in everyday life and political awareness are.

Maybe a hot take, but we really shouldn’t be glorifying intelligence the way we do, it has a lot of resemblance to fascist ideology.

The spread in intelligence really isn’t that wide. People without clinical impairments or other disorders can specialize in practically whatever field they like. It’s primarily just a function of wealth and mental health. What distinguishes ‘intelligent’ people’ from the less intelligent is that, for whatever reason, they have an edge in learning speed. That’s it. They’re not transcendental beings who somehow have more access to ‘the truth’ of the universe.

Of course, on the very rare occasion, there are people who excel at very specific tasks but even then that says nothing about their ability to do anything else.

I mean the Azov Batallion is a nazi organization. This is commonly accepted knowledge and a result of Stepan Bandera (a nazi who wanted independence from the Soviet Union) being the primary driver of nationalist sentiment in Ukraine. The western media just want to pretend like the fact that they ‘only’ run the propaganda for the National Guard isn’t bad enough to make every soldier a nazi.

…And that’s a fair point but irrelevant to whether the Ukrainian military has fascist sympathies. Imperialist wars are always motivated by capitalist interests and fought with the blood of workers. The question is who’s material interests those workers are serving, wittingly or no. The Ukrainian ministry is giving a lot of power very specifically to the tiny militia of Azov Batallion which I think answers that question.

Finally, yes it’s also Russian propaganda but that says more about the west than Russia. If the Kremlin can invade a country and make itself look like it has the moral highground while doing it using commonly accepted facts you really fucked up. They might not be on the right side of history, but you are on the really really far outer edge of the wrong side of it.

the only kind of politics that are banned here are those which enable hate speech such as fascism

What’s with all the backlash? They just announced they’re banning anything promoting the US state (ergo CIA) or NATO. Sounds like a W to me.

Jokes aside and at the risk of sounding like an armchair intellectual, this is sort of a small scale experiment proving why liberals make peaceful progress impossible. Dating back to the colonial era, they love writing walls and walls of vague idealist text (especially the part about the psychology of internet users reads like a middle schooler padding out an essay) about the moral virtue of their actions to distract from the fact they are shamelessly plundering, murdering and exploiting others. In this relatively harmless case, exploiting the devs ideological conviction and choice to show vulnerability. Using their resources to take the platform for their own, despite quite ironically being in direct in violation of their own conceptions of intellectual property that are supposed to be so non-negotiable.

Maybe that’s why liberals are such firm believers in private property to begin with. Not due to principle, but because they project their shameless opportunism on us all; they fear others will do to them what they have done and continue to do to their vulnerable targets of choice.

Yes, but that doesn’t make them more authoritarian or oppressive because no matter what every state is using what it deems the most effective path to enforcing its will and if that means violence it will always resort to violence. It makes them bad communists.

It’s not a matter of oppression or no oppression but a matter of oppressing the right people. If the USSR and PRC were perfect they would be a contradiction to their own purpose, no?

But the terminology ‘authoritarian and oppressive’ doesn’t really make sense in leftist circles where all states are understood to be just that by definition. I mean, that’s why people are socialists. Tankie is lib terminology referencing anything that undermines liberal democracy. It only makes sense when coming from anarchists.

The right to be airstriked by NATO peacekeepers, duh