#401
I also read this

Immigration Policies, Discourses, and the Politics of Local Belonging in Hong Kong (1950-1980): https://www.jstor.org/stable/3181313

Which basically goes into the specific radicalized discourses that were created to turn a porous border with Chinese people flowing in and out to a racially separate territory

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/06/28/hongkongers-identifying-chinese-record-low-10-youth-proud-citizens-poll/

And this

Hong kong working class and union organization: A historical glimpse: https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/1733

Which talks about the "embourgeoisment" of the Hong Kong working class which is a lame academic way to talk about labor aristocracy without having to mention imperialism (instead a Weberian cultural approach supstitutes for real analysis but the data is still fine).

Though all the necessary information is in the first article I posted. Thought about making a proper post but too lazy.
#402
Thank you, will read.
#403

icon posted:

ive been lurking for a million years but just wanted to say hello to another survivor of red deer’s gaetz avenue massacre


the secret to the strict selection process for registering new rhizzone accounts is that we all went to the same orphanage

#404
[account deactivated]
#405

Fayafi posted:

Of course they didn't learn anything and their only takeaway was "there's nothing wrong about what I believed because I was lied to so its not my fault! Its the tankies faults for siding with the tyrants when the situation was so murky to us all!"



every baby anti-imperialist eventually undergoes the experience where they correctly outline the particulars of a scenario, get called genocide-mongers by sneering think-tank jockeys and their hangers-on, and eventually gets proven incontrovertibly correct. but rather than get any sort of mea culpa, or even the slightest bit of self-reflection, their opponents just ignore everything and move on to the next case. no one ever gets to feel the slightest bit of shame for calling for airstrikes on children's hospitals. nobody's career trajectory suffers the the slightest setback for supporting groups whose mission statement include rape and sex slavery.

30 years later, a FOIA gets all the CIA papers on that operation released, and, in a final indignity, those same opponents proclaim that OF COURSE everyone knew all this all along, there's nothing new in this, this is old news and unimportant.

the cycle repeats itself ad nauseum, to the point where you feel like you're stuck in a nauseating reoccurring dream

#406
anyone remember where to find that shitty thinkpiece that went something like "Communists keep correctly predicting global politics: Here's why they're still wrong anyways"
#407
yeah its here: goatse.cx
#408
the groundhog day loop of nonspecific "leftists" falling for ridiculous regime change bullshit is number one cause of my feelings of political hopelessness. even going i told you so is just whooping and hollering on top of the falling bomb

what the fuck do we even do
#409

Horselord posted:

. . . whooping and hollering on top of the falling bomb

what the fuck do we even do
________________________________________

piss


#410

shriekingviolet posted:

anyone remember where to find that shitty thinkpiece that went something like "Communists keep correctly predicting global politics: Here's why they're still wrong anyways"



it was by Freddie Deboer and after that you’re on your own, never going back to that mess again.

#411

Horselord posted:

the groundhog day loop of nonspecific "leftists" falling for ridiculous regime change bullshit is number one cause of my feelings of political hopelessness. even going i told you so is just whooping and hollering on top of the falling bomb

what the fuck do we even do



Mostly you keep doing what you should already be doing, you keep active, you keep talking to people, you don’t use it to encourage a collective renunciation of all hope among any group discussing the topic whatsoever, and so on

#412

Fayafi posted:

When in doubt fall back to the record - rhizzone was right about Syria and EuroMaidan when anarchists and radlibs - invariably complaining about "authoritarianism" as if liberal democracy were any more legitimate - were handwringing and giving bleeding-heart renouncments of communists, and making vague appeals to "the people" and "self-determination" of places they could barely point out on the map, and when we revealed to them what a sham it was, they clogged their ears for years and then became totally silent on it when the Western media machine pulled the brakes on the propaganda, amd they looked to the right and left and saw they were aligned with fascists, imperialists, sectarians and zionists. Of course they didn't learn anything and their only takeaway was "there's nothing wrong about what I believed because I was lied to so its not my fault! Its the tankies faults for siding with the tyrants when the situation was so murky to us all!"



Maoists saw through all that as well, but here we are. I resent being accused of supporting a color revolution. I don't support american meddling or any of the gene sharp shit. I just think people should consider why one might support an independent communist movement despite the problems. I'm repeating myself here but, I think China is secure and doesn't need our defending. One can be happy about that and recognize that it opens new opportunities for criticism.

#413
Look at it this way: your politics should inoculate you from the idea that you and a plucky team of fellow superheroes are going to save the world all by yourselves.
#414
do you think that's what maoism is cars
#415

marimite posted:

do you think that's what maoism is cars



No, I think I’m following up my post, not yours that you happened to post in between the two. Chill out

#416
ah my bad. sorry.
#417

Horselord posted:

the groundhog day loop of nonspecific "leftists" falling for ridiculous regime change bullshit is number one cause of my feelings of political hopelessness. even going i told you so is just whooping and hollering on top of the falling bomb

what the fuck do we even do



I've been reading a lot lately about the suppression of western leftist movements during the cold war era, which in a way we are still in because the three letter agencies are still pretending all political dissent is due to mystical russian mind hacking, and it has been reinforcing my understanding of a continuity of tactics and failures of political control. It truly is demoralizing here in the imperial core where things haven't changed so much: we still have the trot to neocon pipeline, the declawing and suborning of spontaneous political movements (or their outright assassination,) Noam Chomsky continuing to show up a decade too late to acknowledge atrocities after it's no longer politically inconvenient.

This is kind of taking the long winded way back around to MTW boilerplate, I have the flu and my feverish brain is cooking itself, but I think it's important to take hope from how much of the rest of the globe does not buy in to this shit. We are seeing an increasing rise in political consciousness and solidarity among the victims of imperialism, the fall of the Soviets could only send things into chaos for so long, the US has squandered the deathgrip it gained on the world in the 90s. While some folks may still be drinking the amnesiac koolaid, remember that the regime change agenda has failed in Syria and Venezuela, the cracks are showing and while there is still important political work for us where we are I think our true greatest hope is for the rest of the world which can and will shake off the shackles under its own power, even if we get stuck here at home tilting at windmills of killer cops and obstinate lib warhawks with goldfish memories.

And the more I think about the thing with Chomsky, who will only come out and condemn genocidal violence after all the chips have fallen, the damage is done, the graves are dug and we have perfect information to look back and say beyond a shadow of a doubt "Boy was that bad, if only we knew then what we know now!" The more that I think that's part of what the fight in this thread is about: it's about taking a chance on the rest of the world, on betting on the people of Venezuela and Syria, on the BLM activists who were murdered by cops while people wrung their hands about whether their politics are good enough, betting on the people of China even though it's so huge and complicated and hard to see the whole picture or get the facts straight, on taking a risk that we could be disastrously wrong but still betting on the team that's resisting the US while everything remains muddy and unclear. Liberalism makes a virtue of patient inaction, waiting for all the dust to settle to eventually make the right choice every time too late for it to actually matter because it is an ideology of narcissism, about what my politics say about me, and as long as I'm white and well off I can afford to sit it out refusing to take that risk on behalf of the rest of the world while the ball is still in the air because in the long run I am safe and these events won't adversely affect me, except for that whole part where the planet's dyin' Cloud and time is running out and we are the complicit beneficiaries of genocide. Bourgeois democracy wants us to believe this is wisdom, and in a way it is, the wisdom of the oppressor who is safe at the top of the pile. It is smug paternalistic cowardice and it works because it is the dominant power structure working as intended.

And here of all places we do know all too well what can happen when you do take that risk, take a stand on behalf of the people resisting imperialist violence in the immediate now, you get called tankie, ostracized and labelled as the crazy authoritarian, Buzzfeed writes a hit piece on you and your professional career is systematically destroyed. It's awful and it's hard, I've only had the lightest brushes with that kind of terror and still barely a week goes by that I don't think about how easily my world could be suddenly collapsed by political fallout. But believe in your comrades, believe in yourself, trust in your friends, explain yourself gently and thoroughly. Even if they don't come around, even if they think you're wrong, if you're compassionate and kind they won't throw you out on your ass, they'll know their friend isn't a vicious authoritarian monster but just a person who cares, deeply, and is willing now to risk that catastrophic fall as they reach for a better tomorrow.

#418

cars posted:

Mostly you keep doing what you should already be doing, you keep active, you keep talking to people, you don’t use it to encourage a collective renunciation of all hope among any group discussing the topic whatsoever, and so on



in the video game thread you denounced debates with twitch people. which groups do you consider worth talking to vs a hopeless waste of time?
reactionary whites? the service sector? labor aristocracy? minorities only? this is a genuine question

#419

Synergy posted:

in the video game thread you denounced debates with twitch people. which groups do you consider worth talking to vs a hopeless waste of time?
reactionary whites? the service sector? labor aristocracy? minorities only? this is a genuine question


this one time i was out drinking with the trots (the only way to even barely tolerate the company of trots is copious amounts of alcohol) and while i was talking shop with their local leader the other table was talking about the urgent need to appeal to Gamers, I couldn't help laughing at them and he gave me the best helpless Seinfeld shrug I've ever seen

#420
as a gamer i
#421
well i mean appealing to gamers has gotten the nazis a lot of new recruits
#422

Synergy posted:

cars posted:


Mostly you keep doing what you should already be doing, you keep active, you keep talking to people, you don’t use it to encourage a collective renunciation of all hope among any group discussing the topic whatsoever, and so on




in the video game thread you denounced debates with twitch people. which groups do you consider worth talking to vs a hopeless waste of time?
reactionary whites? the service sector? labor aristocracy? minorities only? this is a genuine question



Oppressed people probably maybe given that they have less of a stake in the reproduction of the existing order. Using categories like minorities or the service sector includes people of differing classes

#423

Synergy posted:

cars posted:

Mostly you keep doing what you should already be doing, you keep active, you keep talking to people, you don’t use it to encourage a collective renunciation of all hope among any group discussing the topic whatsoever, and so on

in the video game thread you denounced debates with twitch people. which groups do you consider worth talking to vs a hopeless waste of time?
reactionary whites? the service sector? labor aristocracy? minorities only? this is a genuine question


Answering the "debate me" cry legitimizes the nazi propaganda by placing it on a platform and giving it equal weight to the science of Marxism. The "debate" isnt the point. The point is to develop and expand the audience for nazi propaganda. Anyone signing up to such a thing is functionally collaborating in the dissemination of nazi propaganda. Nazi arguments are simple and reinforced by centuries and fortunes worth of capitalist and white supremacist programming. Do not engage with nazi propaganda in the arena of the nazis choosing. You can sit there trying to explain the principles of surplus value extraction and they'll just hit you with an american flagpole and scream "freedom!"

The belief that there will be any other outcome is the result of that same propaganda and programming campaign in which you have been conditioned to believe on some level that political theories are just about people talking out their differences or some kind of sports game in a different arena, as the US political parties entire existence depends on.

Those who can* should educate and radicalize whoever they can. But the only platform anyone should be giving nazis should have hinges. Mock them, ignore them, suppress them, censor them by any means by which you are able. Do not place any stamp of legitimacy on their shit by pretending like they're people acting in good faith. The goal is to educate and inform and organize the people, not get points in a game show.

#424
maybe all of that is true--it sure doesn't seem like it--but it's not obvious why putting marxism on the same platform as nazism would give nazism more weight. the one that nobody gives a shit about is marxism
#425
maybe its time to accept that prevalent political ideologies wherever you find them are not actually the result of "programming" and propaganda and other forms of mind control, but rather just sort of connect logically to the tabs provided by time and place. this lets you off the hook for debating anyone ever (good), and i guess organizing or doing anything else (bad), but its prevents this kind of misanthropic screed about all the dumbshit freedom lovers out there too stupid to be swayed by appeals to reason
#426
these debates, and by extension the whole project of consciousness-raising politics, can either matter or not matter but they can't possibly matter so much that no one should do them, right? what can possibly happen here that won't already happen in the case of total abstention? your assignment this week is to pick a fight with a twitch man... and lose. let's find out where that needle goes
#427
I think you should get your opinions out there however you can but if we're talking about Nazis then I think your starting point should be to understand at a very deep level that they're dangerous criminals and whackjobs who lie about everything and want to hurt people -- everything they do and say has that one goal in mind.

A little history lesson here and a warning. Back in 2012 Liana Kanelli of the KKE debated a newly-elected Golden Dawn MP on television after that mafia gang entered parliament, and her command of Marxist science got under his skin so bad he jumped up and violently attacked her. Did this hurt the Golden Dawn? What happened is the Greek press then debated whether the Nazi had been provoked or not as if that was even a matter of debate, and the guy who assaulted her became a hero to Golden Dawn's hardcore members and was re-elected in a second round of elections a few days later.
#428
In this analogy Krusty is a naive talk show host and the handlers are three-letter intelligence agencies. The animals are fascists:

#429

kamelred posted:

maybe its time to accept that prevalent political ideologies wherever you find them are not actually the result of "programming" and propaganda and other forms of mind control, but rather just sort of connect logically to the tabs provided by time and place. this lets you off the hook for debating anyone ever (good), and i guess organizing or doing anything else (bad), but its prevents this kind of misanthropic screed about all the dumbshit freedom lovers out there too stupid to be swayed by appeals to reason


Theres like 7 billion openly homo sapiens running around out in the world, many of which are not even nazis at all. So whats the value of debating with nazis and giving a shit about their worthless opinions over doing literally anything else?

Do you think you would learn biology better from an educated person explaining things with science books and answering your questions, or on a game show with someone from Alabama screaming that mitochondria is a satanic lie and mugging for applause?

#430
7 billion potential nazis.
#431
Dude this forum really does follow the law of the quality of the OP being inversely related to the quality and/or the length of the ensuing discussion

Gonna post a thread about goatse’s potential to convert nazis to Christian socialism and spawn an epic thread brb
#432

dimashq posted:

Gonna post a thread about goatse’s potential to convert nazis to Christian socialism


this is genuinely a better tactic than debating Twitch streamers

#433

MarxUltor posted:

Theres like 7 billion openly homo sapiens running around out in the world, many of which are not even nazis at all. So whats the value of debating with nazis and giving a shit about their worthless opinions over doing literally anything else?

Do you think you would learn biology better from an educated person explaining things with science books and answering your questions, or on a game show with someone from Alabama screaming that mitochondria is a satanic lie and mugging for applause?



people are probably being hyperbolic here but i doubt the majority of twitch streamers are nazis. yeah some of them may be reactionary or overly privileged but you can find those kinds of characteristics all over settler society. there are hundreds of millions of people who play video games, so this isn't just some fringe group that can be ignored. i just don't know where this Marxist education is going to come from. you're not going to find it in the school system or on mainstream TV so that just leaves convincing your 5 liberal friends somehow to lead a mass revolutionary movement. the twitch and youtube community will continue to exist and grow whether we're present or not, i see it as more of a numbers game. if we can sway the minds of 200 out of 5,000 people, that's still better than zero or even in the negative from completely abandoning them altogether. you know who fills that space from "the left"? soc dems and trots.

#434
[account deactivated]
#435

Horselord posted:

well i mean appealing to gamers has gotten the nazis a lot of new recruits



politics and class... possibly some sort of relationship exists here.

#436
A lot of this comes down, as mentioned above, to the erroneous belief that far-right politics and communism are competing products selling themselves to a base that’s equally receptive to either. This is not Marxist and consistently erases class. It’s often what you’ll find behind “socialist” proposals of crypto-fash appeals to right-wingers as well.
#437
I agree with everything that's being said about gamers being first world labor aristocrats with fascism as organic ideology, but as a gamer teen in the early 2000s I'm pretty sure I was radicalized by reading the Maoist Internationalist Movement's videogame reviews online (https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/vgames/ ), so there might be exceptions, I don't know.
Also I sell my labor as a game developer so if I want to organize my workplace and industry I have no choice, I pretty much have to talk to gamers. I can confirm first-hand that they have petit bourgeois brain and it's very frustrating, but I'm gonna keep pushing.
#438
The largest fan community on the Paradox Interactive forums by membership is the Red Paradoxians.
#439
Don’t debate just play that hate amerikkka beat!
#440
someone ifap synergy for his own benefit, this "debating marxism on twitch" thing is clearly self-harm