Picking up an AR15 is just a last resort when, literally, all else fails

On the other hand, how late is too late? The later you leave it, the more innocent people might be imprisoned, exiled or killed, so I’d say we’re obliged to draw a balance somewhere sooner than literally all else.

Let’s consider the rise of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in Germany - when is the point where that level of physical violence became appropriate? Try picking a specific year or event. Try doing the same with other fascist regimes, like Italy’s fascist party.

Using this knowledge, where is the red line with the current US regime? Innocent people are already being repressed, imprisoned and exiled.

When the Nazis came for the communists,

I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.

---

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;

I wasn’t a trade unionist.

---

When they locked up the Social Democrats, I kept quiet;

I wasn’t a social democrat.

---

When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;

I wasn’t a Jew.

---

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

---

• Translation of Lutherian Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem.

The same principle applies for physical resistance. Divide and conquer is an effective strategy and already in the fascist playbook.

“You only attack liberals, what about the other side?!?!”

I haven’t heard this (strawman quote?) myself, but my answer is I rarely think people further "right" than liberals are worth discussing politics with. Outside of special circumstances, I skip arguing with anti-liberal “conservatives” and neo-nazis and go straight to denying speech (both peacefully, and where appropriate, forcefully). They generally have no interest in good faith or truthfulness, those concepts are silly, idealist and weak self-restrictions to them.

“Never argue with an idiot, they will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience,” - Mark Twain.

Captain Smith, Triangle of Sadness ;)

Liberals, on the other hand, sometimes value other people, the search for truth and a better society as much as us. So it makes sense to discuss our disagreements so long as each side reciprocates that respect. We can actually learn from each other.

Relevant quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on antisemites (1946):

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

And a point of notice: it’s worth acknowledging that some people share worker-class values but have adopted the language or even talking points of mass-media bigotry. I’ve even seen this in some unions, for example. I don’t automatically consider them a lost cause like I do with nazi scum, even if their ignorance or careless word choice suggests they’re “the other side” - the sides are drawn by the class war, not a culture war.

It does, and especially removes the spoiler effect, where voting for a US “third party” is seen as talking a vote away from the for favorable of the only two viable parties, leading to garbage coping mechanisms like “vote blue no matter who”, saying you should vote for a candidate who doesn’t represent you just because they’re a lesser evil.

In those preferential systems, you can vote for the most trivial perfect candidate, even if you know they’ll only get a few thousand votes, and it will still flow up to your preferred of the major parties. And I’m guessing that’s a part of their steady rise of their middle crossbench they’ve been mentioning, meaning neither the Labor Party nor the Liberal/National Coalition have a full majority and must appeal to the smaller parties to pass any legislation they can’t agree on (e.g. in their Senate, the Greens Party can demand progressive concessions because Labor+Greens+like-minded independents are enough to gain a majority, from what I understand). Their minor parties are growing and their big two are overall shrinking, it will be interesting to see what happens since the US election took some wind out of their conservative coalition’s sails, similarly to Canada.

Provided you say that russia / china are in fact not communist

The capitalist Russian Federation was formed in the 90s (leading to the economic disaster and the desperation that allowed Putin to rise to power). Russia is literally not, in any way, a socialist state for 35 years now.

The former Soviet Union, similarly to China today, was ruled by a communist party. This means the government is trying to move towards socialism, but it does not imply they’ve established a socialist mode of production - the goal of the socialist movement. This is a big source of ambiguity and confusion when people try to argue if countries “are/aren’t socialist”, that’s too vague, and even then you can’t just tell by the current situation - a government or society can follow a school or thought or ideology (socialist theory) before it achieves its goals (a socialist mode of production). “Communist” can refer to either the social movement (SU and PRC were obviously that) or the politico-economic reality (obviously neither has achieved that, let alone a socialist MoP),

Economies like China’s are a big source of debates among socialist theorists about whether it’s state capitalist, communist, or some mixed hybrid economy. Their economy has departed from capitalism-as-we-know-it, but still have the core features (capital, private property). But, regardless of their economy, they’re clearly a party trying to achieve communism, and therefore the PRC is a communist state that hasn’t achieved a communist mode of production.

TL;DR: Until we ask more specific questions, someone can say these countries are communist, someone else can say they’re not, and both are correct answers.

There are pre-industrial societies (including some like Zapatista territory in Chiapas, Mexico with 300,000 people) which some would call socialist or even communist, but I don’t think they’re worth bringing up when discussing whole modern countries - their situations aren’t as applicable to our conditions.

That author was so dubious that even two other co-authors of the book later denounced it.

We also know that the Black Book of Communism has long been debunked

According to Wikipedia, even a few of its own co-authors have denounced it, saying the main author was obsessed with inflating the numbers.

Anyone who saw the Lemmyvision competition, aussie.zone used a ranked choice voting method which was fun to see. (Even if their winning song won outright, it was interesting to see the host explain the insight ranking gave)

I liked this interactive explanation they linked: https://ncase.me/ballot

fascist (might as well just call them what they are)

Whether you hate them or not, the term ‘fascist’ just doesn’t apply to either of them. Fascism is a school of thought with specific ideas and behaviors which is borne out of specific conditions (consider WWI’s effect on Europe and the failure of liberalism in the Weimar Republic).

Communists take ideological analysis seriously, fascism is a real and re-emerging trend, not just some namecalling buzzword.

One of my sites was close to being DoS’d by openAI’s crawler along with a couple of other crawlers. Blocking them made the site much faster.

I’d admit the software design offering search suggestions as HTML links didn’t exactly help (this is a FOSS software used for hundreds of sites, and this issue likely applies to similar sites) but their rapid speed of requests turned this from pointless queries into a negligent security threat.

The amount of voter suppression, the broken FPTP system and mass media influence over the US electoral system, means that for all intents and purposes, the USA federal election is just picking your favourite of the two viable owning-class-endorsed candidates. “The people” never had a realistic chance of representation or empowerment. This is not a new critique, it’s been discussed for at least a century and a half.

There is simply no real value in calling the USA a democracy at any point during our lifetimes, regardless of whether you are allowed to vote or even write-in candidates, regardless of the two-party system, because the power imbalance between the working class and the owning class surrounding that vote makes it as much a sham election as Russia’s sham elections. But even compared to other (until recently) close allies, the US implementation of federal voting has long been an absolute circus.

im sorry Carl Marcos is too advanced.

they keep saying 'In one word; ’ and then writing a whole paragraph. and why do they keep making economics all political?

What part of communism relys on everyone being on the same page?

Hopefully no-one:

It’s funny to me how often we (I’ve been guilty of this) look at satire and think how amazingly they predicted the future, when they were really just commenting on their present and maybe extrapolating a little bit.

I wonder if Wag the Dog nearly mirroring the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal one month later counts.

Sure, but we must also remember not to pretend progressive liberals are enough, and make sure to engage in politics beyond the election cycle if we want any real power.

I gotta say, the English translator for that edition of the party manifesto keeps saying “In one word,” instead of “In a sentence,”

Although perhaps, given how compound words work in German, I wouldn’t be surprised if those sentences were just one word in the original copy.

One aspect is that mass media is overall owned by those people and is propaganda. If you don’t have ways of seeing what’s happening on the ground, you miss a lot of the good news. Even your twitter/bs/mastodon feeds won’t give you the full story, you have to (where possible) get involved in a real community organization.

People are saying it is Bad News

So, uhh, you want to tell us who is saying it’s bad news?

higher resolution version