If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
Chiang Kai-Shek was kidnapped by his own guards because he was too preoccupied on hunting down the communists to the ends of the earth to stop the Japanese from running rampant.
I’d love to hear your explanation of how 8000 people hiding in one of the most remote regions of China came to win the civil war, if not through widespread popular support.
As near as I can tell, advocating for peaceful, dovish, isolationist policies is enough for someone to be considered a tankie (ironically enough). WWI era socialists who did not fall in line behind their governments certainly faced similar accusations.
It’s kinda unavoidable that if one major power loses influence, another will benefit from the vacuum. You can’t really oppose your own country’s imperialism without making the case that other countries taking advantage is an acceptable risk.
This is more or less the story of WWI. With the increasing tensions and military buildup, socialists of countries across Europe formed the Second International and agreed in the Basel Declaration, which said that they would use the crisis to rise up simultaneously against every imperialist power and put an end to both the war and to capitalism:
If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
But once the war actually broke out, most of them found reasons to rally around their country’s flag. German socialists pointed to the conditions of serfdom under the Tsar and pointed to the massive colonial empires of Britain and France, while British and French socialists argued that Germany undemocratic under the Kaiser and had more responsibility for starting the war. They mostly agreed that both sides were bad, but they said they were only fighting to safeguard their countries “against defeat” rather than for victory, but regardless, for all intents and purposes it was the same thing. Of course, in all of these countries, there was considerable political pressure and propaganda pushing them to fall in line and to regard the enemy as worse, and many people did what was personally advantageous regardless of what they had said previously.
There was only one exception, where the socialists took advantage of the war to overthrow their government, without regard for the possibility that it could help the other side, and they did end up ceding a fair bit of land too, but they were able to put a stop that that theater of the meat grinder everyone was being fed into.
As a vegan tankie, I’m more than happy to welcome anyone who is passionate about justice and equality. If you think for yourself rather than just following and upholding arbitrary social norms, you’re going to get pushback from the people who believe in those norms. Whether the norms in question are the needless industrialized mass slaughter of animals, or the needless industrialized mass slaughter of the victims of US imperialism. And it’s much easier to have meaningful, higher level discussions among people who share certain common values, so you’re not having to constantly refute the same shitty low effort talking points over and over.
Please, keep pushing your vegan users our way.
Well, I guess I’m just not sure why you’re trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you don’t actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you’re just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you’re talking about at best, and realistically, you don’t even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
That’s called Reductio Ad Absurdum and is a valid, classic form of argumentation. If you take their premises to their logical conclusion, the result is absurd, so their premises must be false.
You don’t get to arbitrarily limit where a premise gets applied in order to pick and choose which conclusions to stand by. It isn’t a strawman to show that someone’s premises lead to conclusions that they would disagree with, that’s literally the point.
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
This logic doesn’t make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize it.
I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I’m doing animal abuse, don’t worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I’m not abusing them.
Seriously though, I do not understand how non-vegans are all getting on their high horse about “animal abuse” when their preferred course of action is just abusing different animals. Cats do not hold a higher moral standing than other animals just because they look cute. You know they feed cows literal shit? Do you think that’s part of their “natural diet?”
I don’t have any cats or other pets, but even if the worst claims are true, the people doing it would be no worse than what carnists do every day. It’s simply that abuse against certain categories of sentient beings is so normalized that people don’t even recognize it as abuse, no matter how bad it is.
Thank you for filtering out the irrelevant information and editorializing in the opinion piece.
I’ll concede that there is some evidence to support your position, but I would still argue against it. Much of the data used in these studies comes from a different political landscape than what we’re dealing with today. There are many studies that show increasing political polarization over time, and I would argue that that reduces the fluidity of voter choices. Republican voters now are less likely to vote for a Democrat now than they were in the 90’s, when, for example, Bill Clinton won Louisiana and Tennessee. I would also point out that this conventional wisdom failed to account for Trump’s 2016 victory and the fact that the Republican party remains strong despite becoming increasingly extremist.
I don’t have time to read through all of your studies but I did read through the first. Something I found notable, which I expected, was that while the study found that extremism was correlated with general election losses in both parties, the effect was significantly more pronounced in the Republican party. This makes the successful rise of right-wing extremism even less coherent with your point of view. But from my perspective, it makes perfect sense - in the current polarized environment, mobilizing one’s own base is more effective than appealing to the center, so much so that even if you’re promoting broadly unpopular policies, it can still win against someone who has failed to adapt.
For that evidence they’d need to look to Congressional downballot races which are more fluid and open to experimentation. The evidence of progressive voter mobilization doesn’t show up there either.
I disagree. This is from the 2020 election:
Funny enough, the two Florida democrats who lost in blue districts also specifically distanced themselves from a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage on the basis that it was too progressive - both they and Biden lost in Florida while the ballot measure passed.
Progressive policies are broadly popular. Running on things that are popular tend to get you more votes. People like it when you do stuff for them.
The only evidence I’ve seen to the contrary is a NYT opinion piece that cites centrist think tanks and random people’s opinions. I didn’t see anything in there that looked reliable or compelling.
The data [from Pew] suggests that the progressive vision of winning a presidential election simply by mobilizing strong support from Democratic constituencies simply did not materialize for Mr. Biden.
Wtf did I just read? The idea is to mobilize strong support from Democratic constituencies by running a progressive candidate who supports progressive causes. Obviously, if you run a right-winger like Biden, he’ll draw more support from the right and fail to mobilize the left. Are they trying to pretend that Biden was a progressive or something? What an incredible take.
So why then did that system not last forever? Why did capitalists emerge in the first place? Drag is treating them like some kind of external force, as if they were aliens dropped into societies across the globe.
The material conditions of what Marx called primitive communism naturally caused society to develop into the hierarchical structures of early civilization. The development of agriculture created incentives for the division of labor, for states with static borders and organized defenses, and for class structure and involuntary servitude. In a hunter-gatherer society, it’s far more efficient to treat everyone (mostly) equally, because either they’re going off on their own to hunt or forage or they’re coordinating with a group and need to be armed and trusted - but this is no longer the case with agriculture. The people who responded to these (unfortunate) incentives were able to become dominant.
It doesn’t actually matter that much how humans “naturally think.” If you put a bunch of robots or aliens or whatever into a situation where there’s an incentive to do something, then provided they have the ability to innovate, experiment, and try new things, someone will eventually discover the incentive and reap the benefits of it and others will follow, either because they see the benefits or because the benefits strengthen the beneficiaries to the point that they can force everyone else to go along with it.
This whole idea of, “Well Marx said indigenous people were communists so it’s trivial to just get rid of the capitalists and go back to that,” makes it very clear that Drag hasn’t actually read Marx and is just proof-texting, picking out random bits and pieces to support Drag’s pre-existing beliefs without actually understanding anything he said. A communist society in the modern day, with technology and capital, would look drastically different from hunter-gatherer societies. There are aspects of hunter-gatherer societies which we can point to as worthy of emulation, but we can’t return to a hunter-gatherer economic system (or lack thereof) without the mass starvation of the vast majority of humanity.