Fine print: But only if the USA had a regime that was in opposition to the USA exploiting its citizens, land, resources, indigenous and otherwise marginalized groups. And then the USA would use a color revolution to justify couping the USA and create a brutal and suppressive government that was far worse than anything previous.

Surreal. This while Columbia University students protesting genocide are facing threat of the national guard being brought in, while students at University of Austin Texas are dealing with violent cops just for peacefully demonstrating.

So let me get this straight, your family bribed your way into owning a factory and you want sympathy because you had to give it up? Meanwhile, in the US, the supreme court is going to be ruling on whether states can fine people for sleeping outdoors, while homelessness gets worse. It might be the case that had your family done the same in the US, you'd still have that factory and be wealthy too. That's not a good thing. The dictatorship of capital in the US comes at the cost of everyone else.

In the US, cities have been known to bulldoze homeless encampments: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db7qb/dc-bulldozed-a-homeless-persons-tent-while-they-were-still-inside

And you're saying "China bad, US good" because you lost control of a factory.

"Condemn in the strongest possible terms" makes me think of that line from A Few Good Men:

"I strenuously object?" Is that how it's done? Hm? "Objection, your Honor." "Overruled" "No, no. I STRENUOUSLY object." "Oh. You strenuously object. Then I'll take some time and reconsider."

Also, he calls it "Iran's attacks", but considering what Iran did was 100% self defense after a loathsome attack done to them, it can be taken to mean that he is saying he "condemns in the strongest possible terms" any right for Iran to defend itself, i.e. he views the fake settler state of israel as being a legitimate state and doesn't see Iran as a legitimate state or even as actual people who have a right to defend themselves. Which tells you all you need to know about how these white supremacists view the region.

Then there's the part where they are so deep in paranoia and racism they think you are a foreign spy if you say anything sympathetic about the country. (I actually had this happen to me once online.)

Good points. My mind has been on this exact subject recently and I've been trying to work out what it is I'm trying to say, though I think you said some of it. Regardless, I will attempt to put into words some of what's on my mind about it.

Namely that there is this moralizing view (that in my case, I see most coming from catholic upbringing, but it may be from western media as well) where the focus is on this idea that everyone is sort of at risk of becoming morally corrupt. And so there is this undue focus on the morality of an action in isolation and whether it moves the needle on driving you toward corruption, sometimes leading to a pathology associated with what we call "harm OCD", but more often probably just causing people to be a bit warped in their thinking and attention paid.

The moralizing view, rather than looking at what is effective toward the goal and the benefit and harm contained in it, it tends to look for purity very much so. The action that contains both benefit and harm is considered corrupted (which doesn't make sense, as it's virtually impossible for any action to contain only one or the other, purely) and must be faced with guilt and reassurance that it has no broader implications of the person becoming a corrupted being.

Ironically, the moralizing view is more apt to cause you to have a mismatch in intent and result. Because you are viewing people as good or bad. So you are both unfairly accommodating and forgiving of the people in the "good" group and you are unfairly combative and unforgiving of the people in the "bad" group.

As communists, this kind of thinking is impossible to work with and at odds with dialectics. We have to be able to do principled criticism of our own and we have to be understanding of the masses who are not communist, just as we work against the colonizer/imperialist and look out for those in need (which often go hand in hand). What is most effective is the order of the day and the moralizing view would tend to think this is somehow unfeeling and corruptive, that by focusing on what is effective over what is "the right thing to do," you are losing sight of your moral center and becoming one of the "bad" ones. I think the mistake here, though this I admit is a component of it I'm less clear on because of the internalized strength of that moralizing thought process, is in thinking that being effectiveness focused means lacking compassion. Compassion is a critical element for us as communists and we have to figure out how to reduce harm with compassion at the helm, which leads us to scientific socialism theory and practice. The moralizing view, by contrast, is all about fear of the "animalistic nature" (a bizarre view of humans and animals as something only a few steps removed from brutality at all times); and it is focused on running from a negative rather than evaluating how to reach a positive.

Curious to know if that makes sense. This is so long cause I'm thinking some of this through as I type.

Reminds me of that quote, IIRC from Capitalist Realism, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." The way it's ingrained in some people goes very deep. When their view is that it's capitalism or nothing, it sort of makes sense their only view of an alternative is running away from it rather than confronting it.

It is strange to contend with for sure. People are actually facing up to an ongoing genocide and using language like (and I am not exaggerating here based on what I've seen) "Trump would make it a thousand times worse." It is a claim that has no grounding in a reality that we can contend with. Genocide is about as bad as you can get. There is no "turbo genocide."

What that kind of language tells me is that the people peddling it either: 1) don't believe there is a genocide going on or 2) don't care very much that it's happening because it doesn't affect them personally.

I don't know how else one could arrive at such an absurd position. I expect revulsion, disgust, outrage, at what is being backed by the US state and in spite of the horror, it is heartening how many people seem to get that aspect of it (I will take the positives where I can find them). But when it comes to the liberals who somehow bypass all of that and say "but Trump," I do not trust their understanding of the world or their capability to empathize. I find it difficult to see them as substantially different from reactionaries who fear scapegoated specters.

I was thinking along similar lines. Liberals were terrified when Trump was in office. Under Biden, they seem mostly terrified of Trump being in office again. In spite of the material differences between the two presidencies being not that substantial; I say not that substantial in the meaning that most US presidents are not that substantially different. They do a handful of things differently, but they all continue the same colonial/imperialist agenda.

The only substantial difference I see between the two is that the brand of rightism behind Trump seems to want to formalize a totalitarian state. This is where, and I am open to disagreement if anyone thinks I'm falling for liberal narratives here, that the argument of similarity to the formation of nazi germany has some legitimacy. But the part liberals don't get is that the US is already obscenely, systematically and systemically awful and has been for the entirety of its existence. It arguably can be worse, but it's not as though the formation of a different brand of fascism is the end of a people's democracy; it would be more like finally taking the mask off in full, shredding the thin veneer of "freedom" that the US clings to in its constitutional fetishizing and branding. The more immediate harm that could arguably occur from such is serious, but liberals also have a tendency to drastically misunderstand and downplay the harm that is already occurring now and has been occurring throughout US history.

But because they downplay, misunderstand, and trivialize, liberals' fear of Trump more resembles fear of a specter than fear of deteriorating conditions of safety and security for regular people, which are happening regardless of who is in office and which have been preceded by a variety of horrific conditions already.

I think I get what you mean especially with the part about, "It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year." I'm not familiar with that term itself, but the notion of history stopping for some people, I think, is an important point and relates to the larger point you're making about China's current state as well as about those who fetishize theory. I want to choose my words carefully lest I sound like someone who is saying the history does not matter or that we can just abandon all past experiences and methods and pretend they're irrelevant (an equally silly notion in its own right) but it does appear like some people are effectively stopping after a certain point in history and saying, "This is where socialism [or communism, whichever you prefer to call it for the sake of this example] was halted and from here on out, it has been a failure." A notion that appears to happen both in the kind of instance you're describing and in other instances, such as people who are getting their feet wet in theory and who say AES states are "not real socialism/communism." I'm not sure the motives are the same in every case (I think for the people getting their feet wet, for example, there is a real fear of supporting existing socialist projects because they're still in this place of viewing them through the lens of imperialist vilification).

Either way, we come back to what you say about "start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit", whether it is for China or another country. I know in my own case, I've adopted a stance that goes something like: "I don't know and until I do, I will not act like I do." So when someone comes to me with empire news perspectives on a historically vilified country, rather than saying "it's a perfect place, don't question it" or saying "yeah, real socialism hasn't been tried" or saying "it was good and then revisionists ruined it," I will say, "I don't know." If I get to a point I understand enough about the details of its conditions through sources I can trust, then I can begin to grapple with the day to day realities of it and I can talk to people about those realities rather than through generalizations that obscure the conditions. But reaching that point is, I think, especially for those of us who live immersed in empire news locales, a difficult thing to do. And it is very easy for us to instead go by the western chauvinist mindset of, "I understand the 'lesser' country better than they understand themselves." That is what those of us growing up in the imperial core have been socialized to do.

So I was reflecting on this and tying it into something I was reflecting on in relation to liberalism and the individualist way in which fields like mental health get handled. And you can tell me if this matches the picture of what you describe as ultras at all, I'm curious to know, but my thought can be summarized as something like this: They don't view themselves as a participant in the development of theory. They view it as a fixed entity that exists beyond them - or in some cases, an entity that can handle change, but whose change is only ever orchestrated by trusted figures that are not them. And so, this is where dogma and inflexibility enters in.

Whereas when people are viewing it in a more dialectical way, when they are viewing the development of theory as an organized exchange between theory and practice, not only one or the other imposing itself, it simply fits better with an understanding of matters like these as gains and setbacks, as successes and excesses, as genuine exercises in the people's will and rightists co-opting the same language. Those who view it as static only, or only defined by key figures, as something that demands to be imposed upon all others without their consent or understanding (as opposed to something imposed by one class on another), never to be considered as something with any exchange between conditions and theory, are forever stuck in cycles of impotent frustration or fatalistic defeatism, coming to similar endpoint beliefs: that the failure of implementation of the theory is a failure of the individual to accept its benefit. In other words, they are still stuck in individualist idealism, where the imposition of change is a battle of wills between individuals rather than an organized struggle of contradictions.

I hope that makes some sense. I may be overgeneralizing a bit, but I do think there is something in here that is a repeating theme.

I would encourage a thread that is framed as educational, rather than framed as "debate" or "discourse." Along the lines of, "You have a question you've been wanting to ask, ask it and those with more understanding will try to answer and walk you through the reasoning/sources/etc." If it's framed as debate or discourse, my concern would be that liberals would just use it as a platform to debate what shouldn't be platformed in the first place. Hope that makes sense. Seems like kind of a fine line to walk. It's important to get through to people, but also, some people could just view it as an intellectual challenge instead of serious stakes and muddy the waters.

Been into Civ 6 lately. Sometimes I kind of have to go like "ok, this is a strategy game and that's what I'm treating it as" because the way they portray civilization can be a bit... I think maybe colonial-centric is the phrasing I'm looking for. I feel it's very in need of a win condition that comes from deep alliances and not just faux forced diplomacy "only one person can be the winner" kind of thing. But if I treat it as a competitive strategy game with a civilization-based outfit on and don't take the cultural influences too seriously, it's fun enough and has a lot of depth to it for improving at the strategic elements over time. So I can really sink a lot of hours into it, if I let myself.

Nothing to make flying feel safe like an airplane quality whistleblower being unalived.

Re: debate, it certainly gets tiresome when you sink hours into reading, research, and sometimes having to go through the pain of reevaluating a significant part of your worldview (cause of indoctrination) which is no small feat and no small ask of time and energy - and then deal with stubborn, smug liberals who dismiss what you say out of hand and repeat the same few talking points yet view themselves as "independent thinkers." 😩

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it. I'm happy to hear it resonates. :)

This reminds me of a thought I had the other day, which went something like: some people (seems to be a US thing, can't speak for elsewhere) are so stuck with the mindset of approaching politics as, "I am on equal footing with you in terms of knowledge and understanding" that it's virtually impossible to get through on the information you give them alone. They have to first confront their socialized arrogance about knowledge and start to unlearn the idea that politics is some kind of easily universalized, mostly opinion-based entity.

Like if I look at my own progression of views, a significant difference in me being a "leftist" vs. being a "ML" (or thereabouts) was consciously trying to unlearn elitism and consciously trying to listen more (to marginalized people especially, but more importantly, to marginalized people who have theory/practice knowledge to impart, even if I didn't know it in those terms right away) and talk less (resist the urge to comment "because I can" and try to be more conscious of why I'm reacting the way I am if someone's take gets under my skin). This shift in mindset and attitude coupled with some partly guided exposure to theory was pivotal for me. I had a significant amount of "I can think smart so I can work this out just as well as you can" arrogance socializing to get through and a significant amount of viewing politics as overly simplistic in nature, and I see that same kind of attitude play out in other people, talking like their takes on politics have weight just because they are allowed to have one. When it's like no, halt the universalizing, you need a framework to work from with a conscious motive behind it and that is found in sincerely caring about the plight of working class people, the marginalized, the colonized, and applying what liberators have observed about it who came before and who still exist now in developing socialist projects. It is humbling to get a glimpse of the depth of combined theory and practice that exists and has existed, and I would say it's a good sign for people in the situation described if it is humbling because they are so often socialized to put their own intellect on a personal and cultural pedestal.

If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.

There are some paranoid levels of thinking in some of that stuff. Like when a person thinks someone is a "x foreign country spy" because they disagree. It's possible for people to break out of that mode of thinking, but when they are in that mode, it's next to impossible to get through because everything you say that is in disagreement is "because you are trying to deceive them."

Liberals claiming someone is doing whataboutism seems like a component of this thinking, with a belief that the one doing the "whataboutism" is attempting to deceive. But although it's (probably? I haven't analyzed it in enough depth to say with certainty) possible for someone to deceive in that way, it's also possible to compare two things for a variety of rhetorical purposes that have nothing to do with dishonesty. Such as pointing out the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world if someone tries to say x foreign country is "authoritarian" in contrast to the US being "free"; that's not whataboutism, it's a factual point that undermines the narrative of the US having some kind of greater moral standing from which it can properly judge other countries.

If anything, I would say imperialists, liberals, tend to be more engaged in actual whataboutism, even if unconsciously. Like if you try to point out something fundamentally wrong with the US, claiming that alternatives are way worse. Which in that regard also seems to be in bed with doomerism (or more formally maybe, capitalist realism).