Every service member who was permitted to “ask Trump a question” at the Armed Services Ball says, “I just want to congratulate you, sir.” pic.twitter.com/7ymenToQF6

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) January 21, 2017

solzhesnitchin posted:

i'll defend them to non-leftists, but i also have a pretty strong distaste for anarchists and that whole adbusters vein of protest culture

i don't really find these images of individual acts of protest cathartic. to me it looks like the ineffectual flailing of an extremely weak left... just depressing and embarrassing. my gut feeling is that it plays the same role in radical circles as the hillary clinton harry potter fanfic or woke toddler stuff does for liberals. i'm all for torching limos or punching nazis but something about treating the images as a "balm", "solace" or "moment of zen" is just pathetic.

idk maybe it is harmless or even necessary - and i am struggling to explain my vague intuitions here - but i can't shake the feeling that there's something toxic about it. losing to the right sucks, but creating a loser culture to comfort yourself just makes things worse

IMO, alt-right dorks like Spencer have gained more and more currency as a radical wing of ascendant white supremacy in the US, and have helped to normalize overt white nationalism for their slightly less extreme and far more dangerous friends on the right. They've done all this with virtual impunity, since they're wimps whose political activity mostly amounts to posting online. Rather than simply a sign of the left's weakness (the weaknesses of the American left will persist regardless of hilarious nazi punching youtubes) I think seeing high profile nazis like Spencer get their shit kicked in has some symbolic value, demonstrating the weakness and fragility of their movement, and shows both us and them that we need not accept the inviolability and ascendancy of nazis just because they limit their current activity to memes and white papers.

There's a salient difference between appreciating that and retreating into childhood fantasy. Obviously, fixating on symbolism to the exclusion of action is always a danger, but rallying around a video of Spencer eating shit for a day isn't comparable to spending months or years sublimating all your political energies into a story about wizards.

Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:

solzhesnitchin posted:

i'll defend them to non-leftists, but i also have a pretty strong distaste for anarchists and that whole adbusters vein of protest culture

i don't really find these images of individual acts of protest cathartic. to me it looks like the ineffectual flailing of an extremely weak left... just depressing and embarrassing. my gut feeling is that it plays the same role in radical circles as the hillary clinton harry potter fanfic or woke toddler stuff does for liberals. i'm all for torching limos or punching nazis but something about treating the images as a "balm", "solace" or "moment of zen" is just pathetic.

idk maybe it is harmless or even necessary - and i am struggling to explain my vague intuitions here - but i can't shake the feeling that there's something toxic about it. losing to the right sucks, but creating a loser culture to comfort yourself just makes things worse

IMO, alt-right dorks like Spencer have gained more and more currency as a radical wing of ascendant white supremacy in the US, and have helped to normalize overt white nationalism for their slightly less extreme and far more dangerous friends on the right. They've done all this with virtual impunity, since they're wimps whose political activity mostly amounts to posting online. Rather than simply a sign of the left's weakness (the weaknesses of the American left will persist regardless of hilarious nazi punching youtubes) I think seeing high profile nazis like Spencer get their shit kicked in has some symbolic value, demonstrating the weakness and fragility of their movement, and shows both us and them that we need not accept the inviolability and ascendancy of nazis just because they limit their current activity to memes and white papers.

There's a salient difference between appreciating that and retreating into childhood fantasy. Obviously, fixating on symbolism to the exclusion of action is always a danger, but rallying around a video of Spencer eating shit for a day isn't comparable to spending months or years sublimating all your political energies into a story about wizards.

Next time, this nazi will probably show up with a gang of bodyguards, whose personal qualities I am eager to critique.

88888 posted:

Hijab is beautiful.

FAILAIDS posted:

there are many like it but this one is mine

that ones good!!

groundservices posted:

mugabe_glasses posted:
ah, i see we probably know different anarchists, the ones I know are extremely mindful of these things, but I am starting to meet more of the ones you're talking about and: yeah, that's a problem


This is probably more due to individual political development than specific praxis/ analysis imo. Ive met foolish and gullible communists. I post on Reddit still, in a couple of pan- left subs, and recently had some debates with anarchists on the nature of power and authority. Standard 150 year old arguments, but I think I actually got a through to a couple of them.

I was saying that portraying Marxists as powermad brutes is as much of a disservice as saying anarchists just like breaking windows, and it's not that all Marxists are just hardheaded and can't admit we're wrong about things like Kronstadt.

If anarchists can prove in Marxists own terms and analysis that the suppression of Kronstadt (or any traditional point of contention) was a detriment to the existence of the revolution and not simply a betrayal of ideology (communists must defend gains hitherto made vs communists must always support an uprising as a matter of principle) , then any Marxist worth their salt would immediately submit to the proof that the anarchists were right and Marxists were wrong. I also pointed out that Marxists respect discipline and continuing analysis before following an ideological blueprint of what a revolution "should do." I also stressed that any revolution is subject to overthrow and stalling, and losing ground.

Also I tend to point out that Marxists focus on material stuff--so you're a vanguard by virture of being a worker with radical consciousness who goes out their way to radicalize other workers. You're a state as long as you enforce one class's interests over another. Marxists would prefer to formalize these phenomena rather than ignore them, because they are crucuial to understand if you're concerned about abuses of power and destroying the state. Marxist analysis belongs to everyone, not just us tank crew.

It's telling to me that simply wanting to come to any kind of nuanced understanding of 20th century socialism is treated as blanket acceptance of whatever bad things were done, that this indelibly taints you're moral character and inevitably leads to the same problems. Anarchists' general lack of understanding of material factors here is really bad for them.

I think it's good to be skeptical of power and authority and if you've got anti communist ideological baggage then complete opposition to actually existing socialism makes sense, even if it's objectively wrong. So this makes honest rehabilitation of previous socialist experiments important, as all here know. We all claim the Paris Commune, so that's a start for the deconstruction of subsequent myths and mid characterization of subsequent DoPs, since we can find parallels in anticommunist criticism of the Paris Commune applied to the USSR and so on. Also, drawing parallels based on good DiaMet analysis between the Commune, USSR etc, and anarchist projects like Spain or anarchist-claimed projects like EZLN in an even handed manner is also a good idea imo.

The frustrating thing was when I was tying to extend olive branches over strategies I figured anarchists would like, things like Duel Power and Mass Line, and have them rejected because they were used by Marxists. That kind of magical thinking doesn't work for organizers and activists in the long term.

I gotta admit that I skimmed over a lot of this because I'm pretty high right now but also a lot of it seems kinda like stuff I don't care about. historical analysis is important and i care about it but I have zero interest in arguing about a lot of this ideological shit, I think marxism is good and helpful even.
and also some of it is just extremely jargon heavy so i don't know what you're saying.

but from what I did read/understand:
I think the kind of material analyses you're talking about are good and important and even critical. I am fine with that. I am probably closest to anarcho-commie or syndicalist i GUESS if I had to try to suss out some sort of ideological utopia or whatever. but I am more ideologically agnostic about most of those questions right now because I feel like this political landscape, while having some clearly detectable patterns, is shifting so fucking fast and hard and in a lot of unpredictable ways, and I don't know what the hell is going to actually stick. maybe the socialists will win and implement a powerful centralized state and I'll try to figure out ways to work in that that align with my values. or maybe we'll end up in a nuclear war leading to the total breakdown of civilization, and the few who survive will have to figure out how to rebuild from the wreckage. until then, I'mma try to focus on trying to build from the ground up to better deal with whatever ends up being the case

also I looked up dual power and that sounds interesting af and whatever anarchists you were talking to were jabronis imo

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— Operation Daddy-O (@HenryKrinkIe) January 25, 2017