👀

Let's not pretend that your politics aren't inherently authoritarian as well.

Either you support capitalism (or worse), which is grossly authoritarian as it inflicts massive violence not only via warfare but through mass starvation and deprivation, or you support socialism, in which case you have two options:

1. The violent overthrow of the current system (spoiler alert: that's a very authoritarian thing to do!)

2. The gradual reform of the current system, meaning maintaining the status quo for an exceptionally long time as we ever so slowly creep our way to a more just economic system while countless people starve, go homeless, die without healthcare, end up in yet-another war and so on (which is a very authoritarian proposition, just throwing away the lives of the poor in your own country—not to mention those in the developing world—just so you can have a neat and tidy reformist approach that doesn't rock the boat.)

"Your side isn't entitled to my vote. If your side wants my vote, they have to earn it."

This came through on my news feed today with the headline "Is this the turning point? War in Ukraine"

Here's the turning point:

If you can't spot it, it's that tiny blue area in the zaporizhzhia oblast, on the border of the red area.

This is very reminiscent of Gore Vidal's quote, which happens to make a better case imo:

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties

Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided

I, too, do not have a smartphone or an internet connection 😔

NAFO and its consequences have been a disaster for the online discourse.

Imagine having the confidence to make ahistorical claims that are this outrageous. Either you're duped or you're an op.

Actually it's from page 45 of The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath by Dan Stone if anybody is interested

This is even funnier if you assume that those messages were sent at 3am

I personally have been preoccupied with the concern of the stay-behind networkification or the brownshirtification of the ultranationalist (para-/)militaries in the Ukraine.

I think there's a serious risk of these groups deciding that the situation is lost and turning their interest and their weapons westward to destabilise other regions or even countries.

I worry that Azov et al. could become the nucleus for a European style ISIS. This would absolutely be in the interests of the US as it would reduce their near-peer competition in the EU and it would push them into the arms of the US military-industrial complex (pun absolutely intended.)

I make intentional reference to the stay-behind networks because this is really relevant to how I would see the role of these veterans and their influence/actions in Europe especially and potentially even beyond.

Libs:

"Chiner killed a bunch of its own people and that's how they lifted themselves out of extreme poverty!!"

Also libs:

"Chiner is sitting on a demographic timebomb [which is false, btw] which will cause their population to crash and it will tank their economy!!"

But how will they confirm that it's him when Prigozhin is such a cunning master of disguise?

Slava Ukraini

Yikes!

NAFO

Yikes!

When your ideology is primarily individualist and largely aesthetic, you end up with a ton of people who treat their political orientation as a fashion statement.

Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's a massive trend in anarchism to not be focused on the ideological distinctions between the plethora of anarchist subtypes but instead to align oneself to a flavour of anarchism which is most appealing.

In communist thought you have very clear distinctions which are based on theoretical and practical disagreements (practical in the sense of socialism being put into practice); you have leftcoms and Trotskyists and council communists and MLs and MLMs etc. All of whom you can trace out their positions and their ideological stances from.

In anarchism it's much more about what the individual is most attracted to as a cause than this. Sure there are platformists, DeLeonists, and egoists, for example, which fit what I've mentioned above about disagreements on theory and practice but you're more likely to find an anarcha-feminist or an eco-anarchist than you will a DeLeonist or a platformist imo.

With that in mind it should come as no surprise that so much of anarchism is focused on fashion.

mrw

(That's Jin Xing btw)

"Fellas, is it possible that [disastrous historical event] was actually a conspiracy caused by [this week's villainous country]?"

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There's so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It's idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It's absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson's was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson's exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the "white liberal" (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they'll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I'll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don't trust them, I don't like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

Oh that's really weird, it's not showing up for me when I go into that thread? (Hence why I had to paste a screenshot of my comment and edit it into the image.)

Looks like you're in a dum millenial contest but your opponent is me 💀

Edit: If I type the hyperlink in your screenshot into my browser, I can access the comment - but it looks like it's only visible from the lemmygrad end or something? I wonder if federation works bi-directionally and one side has defederated but lemmygrad hasn't or something like that? Weird.

Edit 2: Damn, this gets weirder. Different instances show different comments — some comments are consistently shown across instances, some comments only appear on certain instances, and the up/downvote counts are wildly different across the instances too. One comment will be at -5 on one instance and yet it will be at +7 on another.

Wait until you learn about the ties between the defense establishment and the advent of the counterculture music scene...

Which podcasts are you referring to btw?