tears posted:

they represent something really unique - a fusion of "marxism-leninism" with conspiracy thinking - and all the corruption that comes with trying to do that.

yeah, it's a lot of what leads me to seeing it in a glass half full way as a mystery cult, as someone who can't really sustain the sort of sadistic interest in it that would keep me trying to figure out all the convoluted mythology and backstory. but it's still a mystery cult where i can't see myself wanting to really know that much more about it, if there are even a set of beliefs there that aren't just vague insinuations in a certain cadence with certain code words to indicate loyalty. that's something found in a lot of social groups but usually red-aligned political groups, however loose, have at least a notion of a conceptual meeting place where they can (or feel they should) sit down and settle things when it's needed. without that it's genuinely depressing to me, to see even a small group of people walking on eggshells around each other all the time and that's their whole deal.

but the esotericism parallels are kind of fun to think about. like there's the thing they have where any good publicity for communism or the political left, no matter the event or its nature as accident or incident, well, we know about it, so it came through compromised channels, so it has to be fake, and not only fake but malicious and calculated. all good publicity is a conspiracy to attack. all good publicity is always already revealed as bad publicity.

what's interesting is that from what little i've seen of the way they express that whole deal, i feel like that POV is impregnable, and in a way that stands out even among conspiracy theorists. without some big break from the group and the comfort zones of conversations in it, it would maintain itself in a way that would be impervious to outside change and in a manner that's maybe a step further than the usual ad hoc reasoning of conspiracy theorists in the West.

like... it's often in the form of "everyone's talking about that story, so that story is the psy op, because there's this other story going on, that's the real thing the distraction is designed to obscure." but then if people they don't like who ostensibly share their politics start picking up on that other, "real" story, well then, that story is suspect now, and fake, and malicious, because people have heard about it, and that's always because the bad people want everyone to pay attention to it, no exceptions.

so there is never an Alex Jones/Trump moment, the sort of thing you see in a lot of right-wing and even "centrist", single-personality-oriented conspiracy groups, where the issue or issues the conspiracy-oriented group have been insisting are important recently finally make it minor-leagues big in public awareness, even if it's in the sense of news outlet stories about "what a bunch of clowns, aren't people stupid", or half-hearted pandering like the Trump people do at the bare minimum level required to keep one sliver of their coalition around, the "finally" moment that fills the conspiracy theorist with false hope and redoubled energy because they think their decayed version of a revolutionary situation is at hand.

instead, in this sort of marx-mystery-cult fusion, if people are paying attention to it, it's already been perverted and sullied and was always cooked up to fool people, so victory is literally impossible to imagine, even small victories, if they make any progress or they're even noticed by any sizable number of people. which is odd because i imagine it's also very, very, very hard for anyone to admit they changed their mind recently on any topic in that group because then you're probably a secret T-800 or whatever they think people are.

cars posted:

the place is pretty small, right? so... just set it on fire and stop complaining!!

the ranch, or all of new zealand?

littlegreenpills posted:

yasha levine from the exile crew has just written an entire book about this

One of the few times we've had gun control legislation in this country was when the Black Panthers began legally arming themselves.

So if we wanna motivate the Right into banning AR-15s... who can demonstrate the completely legal means a left activist group could obtain them?

— Carl Garcia (@carlinspace) February 16, 2018

shriekingviolet posted:

what just happened cars. regale us with the Twitter Anecdote

teh sexcopter crashed into my w00tle mill

babyhueypnewton posted:

Not twitter but communist reddit goes through waves. The latest wave is Dengism, used to be ultraleftist Maoism.

you know when marx said 'first as tragedy then as farce' i don't think he had in mind a web site for computer science majors replicating china's turn to revisionism

babyhueypnewton posted:

I'm not even opposed to arguing China is socialist (crow rip)

still pissed at crow for stopping posting here after i killed my facebook, thus severing our contact with each other. et tu, corvus?