Socialism betrayed is a good book, sometimes falls into “Great Man Theory”, but it’s overall a good analysis

It’s correct to claim that Russia counters some expressions of US imperialism… But to call it “anti-imperialist” altogether is a big stretch…

It surely is not the case for someone going vegan or eating fast food. The only legitimate reasons to not eat meat or fast food is your own individual health, because your individual choices will only affect your individual outcomes. It’s idealist to believe choosing a different source of consumption will have an impact over the industry. For instance, McDonald’s main source of income is not even selling food, it’s rent and royalties from franchises all over the world.

The liberal part of this idea is restricting political protest or activity to what you consume, basically transforming action into another individual form of consumerism.

Boycotting is a liberal form of struggle, if you can even call it that. Because it believes that your individual choice will have an impact on the outcome of a company.

Going vegan won’t stop the meat industry from murdering millions of animals. You deciding you won’t eat from fast food companies will not affect their profits, because they exploit people internationally, and it’s unfeasible to organize a boycott in this scale.

Honestly, just eat it, let it out of your system. You will probably be disappointed at how the taste became worse over time haha. For me, it’s better to do it than keep repressing yourself, which at least for me, only makes the desire stronger

You only fear death because your mind is attached to your self, your memories, your experiences, your subjective perceptions… As an exercise, try to the remember the time before you were born. You can’t really remember anything, but you know, you can even feel it, there was just total emptiness, no subjective experience, nothing. There is nothing to be afraid of, it’s just emptiness. This, to me, was the first step in pacifying my mind in relation to death.

wholesome to see this 4chan meme from my teenage years

vagueposting

Hahaha never heard that before. I loved it

not allowing obvious liberals to run rampant in lemmygrad is easily recognized as a political outcome focus

I don’t know what you mean by this paragraph comrade, and I have trouble following your reasoning. But I’ll comment about this. The liberal propagandists should definitely be extracted from our community, but the honest liberals should definitely be heard and honestly debated. On our part, trying as much as possible to ignore provocations and try our best to dismantle their arguments in few words. I see a few reasons why:

1. liberals have common misunderstandings which are useful to debunk. Some of us are well read (most of us aren’t), so the thinking you had when you were a conservative, liberal or “apolitical” has been lost. You cannot empathize to how liberals think now. Alas, comes a liberal, with doubts, silly mistakes, but they are prevalent in political discourse and thinking. A lurker on the website may be presented with arguments dismantling the same silly mistakes they may have. So in terms of political education this is useful;
2. we learn to deal with those who think differently. We need to learn to treat a right-winger well and learn how to defuse a tense situation IRL. Not always we manage to do this, often we manage to hurt others from our own camp, but we aspire to do it. We need to learn how to deal with Nazi provocations both online and personally, physically. We need to learn how to deal emotionally with the situation, train ourselves to not be affected by this interaction. You do this by understanding how your opponents think, and respecting as much as possible their identity. So you do not focus on their religion, their political affiliations, their moral stances on subjects, etc. These are divisive points which separates us from these politically alienated people. We cannot change a person’s identity through force or imposition, it only changes socially and historically.

We need to learn to treat a right-winger well and learn how to defuse a tense situation IRL.

A comment on this, about treating well right-wing colleagues, etc. (unless they are awful people of course, besides their shitty foolish worldview). Of course a Nazi provocateur should be harassed or physically assaulted until they stop their provocation, because it is ethical to do so. It is ethical to repress genocidal ideologies because you’re saving lives by punishing some. But notice a liberal surely would equate us with genociders! They are indoctrinated by bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology needs to accuse communists of what they do so that they feel at least “equal” in comparison, and thus, shielded from criticism. At least you’re doing genocide for a just cause! Not the communists, they genocide for evil!

Bourgeois ideology is hegemonic. You should already expect people to be right-wing. You need to learn to accept this fact so that you’re able to be friendly with right-wingers and not be affected by their provocations. Because you understand their worldview is not their fault, they are too distracted to realize the facts, and we need to reach them somehow. How would you achieve this person to eventually learn the facts if you’re provoking the person, teasing them, insulting them, questioning their sanity, their ability to think, mocking them, etc. Practice shows us that these behaviors tend to alienate these people even further, and even worse, alienate yourself from others.

Left-wingers tend to be more critical of certain expressions of authority, whereas sometimes this in excess can be destructive.

Side note on this.

Many leaders and progressive thinkers were awful in their personal lives, especially with relatives or spouses, like comrade Stalin, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, etc. This is because humans make grave mistakes all the time, irrespective of how correct they are. Except Lenin, perhaps, he was both an impeccable human being and very often correct. Look at your own lives, have you not hurt someone? Were you never selfish, arrogant, insensible? People make those mistakes all the time, to a greater or lesser extent. Why should our leaderships be different? Should we disregard historical figures in the past because of their personal mistakes? Should we disregard current leaderships for that?

I think this is a case by case thing, but sometimes we simply cannot afford to be too much critical. Think of an actual communist, politically isolated, representing a small city in the bourgeois state, or something. If the opposition found out bad stuff about that guy’s past, of course the bourgeois media would create a campaign to hunt them down. In such cases should we join the hunt? This is the challenge of having the correct historical understanding of your time and place, so these choices become clearer. Over the time you start acting based on the political outcome, instead of an abstract moral value which you do not adopt yourself in your life. Then you criticize any mistake in private if possible, outside the eyes of the opposition.

The article was written by Timofei Sergeitsev, a Russian “philosopher” with no direct link to the government. The article in the website you linked was written in early April 2022, very early after the war, when no one knew what to expect. It was claimed it was “proof” the Russians was intending to genocide Ukrainians.

More than a year later, have we seen anything like it? Have we seen active actions from the Russians to consistently destroy civilian buildings and systematically cause civilian casualties on purpose? I at least haven’t, unless we are talking about a completely different war which I’m not aware. I don’t excuse the Russians of anything, I’m sticking with the facts. The Russians have been very careful not to cause non-military casualties, which is extremely odd for a genocidal regime.

So, in short, it’s your article written by a guy with no links to the government vs. what the actual war itself shows in practice. I prefer to see what practice shows us.

Yes, Marxism is based on a scientific methodology called historical materialism. It’s too complex to be explained in a single comment, but it has an internal logic and methodology which proposes to analyze social systems in general, but especially capitalist societies in particular.

You can’t use the scientific method used in the natural sciences because you can’t put a society in a lab to study it. Social sciences require a methodology apart from the natural sciences, and Marxism has proposed historical materialism, which is very consistent and coherent approach, based on the Hegelian dialectical logic with materialism as a principle.

How ironic! Let’s see if it fits for the “genocide” position:

• Closed Ideological Systems: Whether those who defend the idea of “genocide” in Xinjiang are aware or not, the sources used to claim there is a genocide in Xinjiang is usually Adrian Zenz, a German white supremacist and Christian fundamentalist who claimed in his book Worthy to Escape that “other belief systems are ultimately inspired by Satan” and justifies “eternal punishment” for those who refuse to believe in Jesus.

• Immunity to Facts: Every time one tries to argue that Xinjiang faced a policy of de-radicalization of terrorists who led many attacks against the province, those who claim there is a genocide there say they are “genocide deniers.” I’ve even seen people saying those who don’t agree with the “genocide” position are paid by the Chinese.

• Enemy Construction: I can’t even count the number of times people have called those who don’t promote the “genocide” propaganda “tankies” and dismissing them instead of engaging with arguments.

• Adaptability: The “genocide” propaganda claims there is a genocide there, and then when presented with the fact that even those who were put in the re-education facilities were allowed to express their culture with dances and art on video, the “genocide” conspiracy theorists say that it was a fake, an act, that it was a spectacle organized by the Chinese to hide the genocide. Just to give you an example.

It does match the “genocide” position very well. I’ve yet to see a genocide which preserves the language, the culture, the customs and the places of worship of a people. Another thing, notice the reaction of Muslim countries to the actual genocide being perpetrated by Israel. They are firmly condemning it through all channels. In contrast, the policies of de-radicalization by the Chinese were unanimously well-received by Muslim countries.

Israel has killed more civilians (mostly children and women) in a month of war than Russia has killed in almost two years. The Russians actually target almost exclusively military infrastructure, they have preserved electrical grids, water stations, communications infrastructure, etc… Not because they are “good guys”, obviously, but it’s a part of their strategy. But it shows genocide is not a part of this strategy.

I don’t think you even know what “totalitarianism” is. You know why? Because that term doesn’t mean anything. It was popularized by Hannah Arendt, an academic author indirectly associated with the CIA (as thoroughly discussed by Frances Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War). The term was used in the context of the Cold War to promote the idea that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were the same thing or very similar. It served the interests of the US and Western European countries.

Now to call our userbase racist, I would expect at least further explanation. We have very strict moderation, and racist garbage is severely dealt with. So if you seen someone being racist in Lemmygrad, please let me know. I’m an admin there, and we could quickly resolve this. If you haven’t, then you should quietly think with yourself why you are lying to others here. You hate us based on a lie?

their users deny genocides

If you are referring to the Xinjiang issue, then it just reaffirms what @davel@lemmy.ml just said:

it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives

Because the “Uyghur genocide” in Xinjiang is another example of propaganda. Or do you really think the West cares about Muslims and want to protect their “freedom”?

call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis

I don’t see anyone in Lemmygrad calling other people “Nazis” because they disagree with someone in a discussion. I usually see them criticizing others as “liberals.” This is either a misrepresentation of leftists in general, very common among conservatives, or you are frequently being called a Nazi. I don’t know, maybe that’s on you? 🤔

end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks

That’s so specific you should give at least one example of this. We have very strict moderation against any bigotry, so I challenge you to link any “racist” attitude or comment you have seen in Lemmygrad. I will give you 24 hours, and if you don’t reply with an example, I will edit this comment saying you chickened out.

EDIT: They chickened out, as expected.

COVID was lab-produced by the United States and the Pentagon. The US has historically used bioweapons both through wars (Korean War) and covertly (Cuba dengue epidemic) [those are just two examples].

In its desperate drive to compete against a fast rising China, the United States (DoS + Pentagon + CIA) preferred to sabotage world economy and hurt the two countries through a global pandemic than to let China outlast them very quickly. They could be seeking for more time to react to the rise of China.

The Foreign Ministry of China called in 2021 for investigations in the United States biological weapon facility Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina, to which the United States never gave a response.

From January to August 2019, a few months before the pandemic, the United States ran a joint exercise called Crimson Contagion to test the capacity of the federal government to respond to a pandemic from China. It described the virus as a “respiratory virus [that] began in China”. The Times of Israel reported that the CIA alerted Israeli and NATO officials of a pandemic in China in November 2019, a month before China fist detected the virus and sent the information to the WHO (end of December 2019).

Seja bem-vindo, camarada!

Remember that our communist social network also has a Matrix chat available

@Mad_Raccoon@lemmygrad.ml

Yes. I organize with PCB here in Brazil.