Would

What do my YouTube recommendations say about me?

Dictators don’t just pop into existence with total authoritarian control, it takes the support of already powerful people to erode the checks on their power bit by bit, which Donald Trump has been doing with the support of his billionaire donors. Fascism emerges out of capitalist republics and has to overcome various obstacles to achieve total authority for the leader. Trump does not yet have total dictatorial power because there are still checks on the presidency that he and his movement have not yet succeeded in eroding.

It’s to help them feel smug and superior.

In your hypnagogic state you experienced extremely short-term source amnesia.

You can have my ternary operator when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Weed reduces the quality of your sleep by shortening the length of REM sleep. If you regularly use weed to help you sleep you may be getting more sleep but you’ll still be tired.

Well, it is a story about God flooding the entire earth and sparing only one family because humanity was too sinful. A bit less Disney and a bit more brothers’ Grimm.

Or they’re bi. I grew up ultra religious and the choice explanation made more sense to me because I had both homo and hetero urges, and I assumed it was the same for everyone (I thought of people who claimed otherwise as self-righteous). In my mind at the time homosexual urges were just part of people’s sinful nature they had to overcome. The whole thing only seems so incoherent from an outside perspective, which I was fortunately able to arrive at after experiencing the world more.

They’re not the same, but it’s easy to see how people become too jaded and cynical to vote.

There is no such thing.

In the sense that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is visible from every point in space. No matter where you are you can determine your position relative to the CMB, making it a common reference point for the entire universe.

I get what you’re doing and that’s totally your right to do whatever with your body, but you shouldn’t go around saying it’s completely safe. You’re taking a risk with your health that others should be made aware of when you choose to share advice.

Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use.

That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.

Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.

It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.

However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed.

Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.

Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.

Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.

Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.

I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.

Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all.

Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.

What people tend not to realize is they don’t support Russia because they think it’s still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I’ve been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they’re coming from.

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Man, reading a Robert Evans Cracked article from 2016 takes me back.

If you’re going to do business with someone it’s completely reasonable that they set their own terms. Elon Musk does not have the right to force his business on a country that does not want to do business with him, no matter the reason. South Africa’s BEE regulations are intended to re-balance the scales after decades of brutal apartheid and oppression. People like Elon Musk notice the loss of privileges they once enjoyed and interpret it as an infringement on their rights equivalent to or worse than historically oppressed (because disadvantaged does not do justice to what they suffered) groups.

And let’s be very clear, if he wants to do business in South Africa he should comply with the regulations and grant a 30% ownership stake to historically oppressed groups. He is not compelled to do so just as South Africa is not compelled to grant him a license.

This is nothing more than a feeling that you have, and has no basis in fact. All the worst atrocities committed in the name of communism throughout history cannot possibly compare in scale or cruelty to the actions of even a single fascist state.

In addition to the difference in scale there is a difference in motive. Communists have noble goals, but atrocities result from threat-induced paranoia and selfish opportunists co-opting revolutionary fervor. The atrocities of fascism are pure evil in both motive and action. Fascists seek to eliminate those that they deem inferior, and they carry this out with unimaginable cruelty and glee.