JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
communism is dead as a political force
Nazism has been dead as a political force for much longer. And was active as a political force for much shorter period. And "the handful of self-identified Nazis" most definitely are "LARPers with no aspirations to power" (if by "aspirations" one means serious possibility and not wet dreams under the influence of drugs) - while communists are plentiful in our academic institutions, can easily find themselves at positions of power in smaller local governments, and that is without even peeling the veil under which DSA is hiding. Short of violent overthrowing of the government, if a politician supports virtually any part of Communist program, she may be considered a bit of a radical but not completely out of the acceptable in the polite society. If you can shut up about the glorious revolution for a bit, there's no barrier for a communist to participate in modern politics. You may not win the presidency (though watch AOC, who knows?) but you won't also be kicked out. Is it really dead or just temporarily laying in wait?
whereas fascist sympathizers keep surfacing in positions of influence inside right-wing populist movements
Here we have not one rhetoric tricks but several:
- "Sympathizers" - we move from self-identified Nazis to nebulous "fascist" (on the left, anybody to the right of Bernie is damn "fascist", including one's own landlord who demands paying rent with the delay of no more than three months!) and then from that to even more nebulous "sympathizer" - which is pure mind-reading.
- What is "position of influence"? A blog on instagram is a "position of influence". A soapbox in the middle of the street is a "position of influence". Is professor in the university a "position of influence"? We have a ton of communist professors, find me one self-identified Nazi professor. We have school teachers parading in shirts with the portrait of Gevara (notorious communist mass murderer) - can you point any teachers parading in a shirt with a portrait of Hitler? Or even Eichmann? What would happen if a prominent movie star declares herself a communist and what would happen if she declares herself a Nazi? Where are "positions of influence" here?
- Which "movements"? Are "groypers" a movement? Are 4chan trolls a "movement"? Are Andrew Tate followers a "movement"? Who knows, maybe. None of those has serious participation in national politics. Which "populist movements" under the serious ideological influence of Nazis can you name? Can they take over and burn down a whole city, and repeat it for months? Because I know movements on the left that can, and did.
but there just isn't the kind of symmetry they're looking for.
True, there isn't. "Neo-nazi problem" exists almost exclusively as a thing to accuse everybody on the right in, not as stand-alone political movement that is capable of anything more than moving the stale tiki torch inventory in the local hardware store. Violent leftist movement are capable of much, much more. And their political wing controls a lot of society's cultural and educational institutions. It's not even close to symmetry. That's why a former communist terrorist can be a respected professor and a mentor to the US President, and a former Nazi never could. Former KKK member probably could (did Byrd mentor anyone? don't remember) but he would end up in the same party as the Communist one.
The closest you get are pro-palestinian activists, who rather famously don't get along with mainstream left-wing politicians
The not getting along is rather one sided though. The militant left doesn't like the polite left, because they consider the latters to be wusses, hipocrites and pretenders (in which they might even be correct, even if for the wrong reasons) but the polite left would always cover for, enable and defend the militant left. And the antisemitism is just the "current thing" in fashion today (though antisemitism is never truly out of fashion on the left) but there's always some cause where violence, especially deniable violence, would be very useful to the Party. Be it protecting the Gaia, enforcing DEI, suppressing enemy speech or impeding enforcement of the laws the left doesn't like, there's always enough reason for political violence. And those who deploy this violence look very much like those whose existence you deny.
There's no equivalent neo-stalinist movement
Why it has to be Uncle Joe? Neo-Nazis have no choice, they had only one prominent figure. Communism has so many bloodthirsty tyrants or wannabe tyrants on record, one could choose freely among them, or proclaim all of those weren't true Communism, which has never been tried, and thus it all doesn't count.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
If somebody says "anybody who does X is a psychopath" while doing X, then I think we have the right to treat him as if he said "I am a psychopath". Not if he said "anybody is doing X, including me, but I think it would be morally superior to do Y, and since I want to be morally superior, I invite you to do Y with me" that would shield him from the same line of criticism, but that's not what happened. If you call everybody around a psychopath, then that's the line of argument you opened, and should expect the same kind of argument in return.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Are there any left wingers at all that aren't comfortable working with communists? I mean, a while ago, there were real flaming anti-communists, even among prominent democrats. But among modern prominent democrats - are there any anti-communists at all? Are there any that at least are able to give proper recognition to the crimes committed by communist regimes in the last century and not just treat as "it was long time ago, let's not talk about it"?
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I think that you are defining "the right" in a way which means anyone who is a reliable ally against Nazis doesn't qualify
This is quite misleading - since there aren't any proper right-wing movements available in Germany, except maybe AfD, and AfD can not be a "reliable ally" to any other party due to the consistent policy of those parties to reject any cooperation with it, then it may be vacuously true, but that's exactly my point. Your explanation is "the right you're talking about are essentially Nazis and that's why there's no proper right in Germany" (which btw doesn't explain what happens with the rest of Europe?) - but that's completely untrue. It is possible to have a right-wing movement that does not include Nazis (at least not in any political way - an individual Nazi sympathizer of course can join any movement and it's impossible to prevent it in a free country) - it's just that in Europe there's a distinct lack of such movements that have any power or serious influence on the current politics. And this has nothing to do with Nazis or my definition of the right converging to Nazis (it does not). It's just that the population of Europe seems to be fine with the soft-left policies they are getting. They probably wouldn't be fine with full-scale hard-left communism, but the center of mass for the modern Left is not there, it's more around big-government woke welfare open-borders state with heavily regulated economy, still nominally allowing private ownership but within tightly controlled boundaries (and private speech and political participation within tightly controlled boundaries too). Europeans have the full right to like this package, but that's exactly why I am saying "the right is over" - because there are no serious offering outside this package on the political scene. And no, "that's because you want Nazis" is not a good answer to it - there can be a lot of potential offerings outside this package that do not include Nazis. They are just not available on the European political market.
nobody paying attention to British politics thinks that Reform UK is "over"
They are not "over" as the party still exists, but they don't have any power, so it's not "over" because it never was actually "in". Britain is a bit different case because it does have a functioning conservative party that is not in name only, and sometimes can implement policies - even though in many important aspects, again, there's not much departure from the same package there either.
I was referring to Kiev, the first capital of the original Rus state from which modern Russia claims cultural, linguistic, and religious continuity.
That is an extremely tortured argument. Like claiming US must invade and annex Italy because our culture has so much connections to Romans. Kiev, as you know, is the capital of Ukraine, and not Russia, and while it is true that Kiev, at certain times, was the center of the civilizational entity which gave birth to many other that eventually become modern entities including Russia, treating this as a claim that "Ukraine was an ancient part of Russia" makes as much sense as claiming "Rome is an ancient part of the US". It's just ahistorical nonsense based on shallow TV-news-level knowledge - which is exactly why Putin is using it btw, his target audience knows "there was something with the name vaguely resembling "Russia" in Kiev at one time, so that means Kiev always belonged to Russia".
despite having been easier for them to conquer in the current war on account of their terrain and their population not having gone through the cultural separation from Moscow and St. Petersburg that the rest of Ukraine has.
This has nothing to do with the population or what they would want or not want. Pre-2022, the territories were mostly conquered by using Ukrainian internal turmoil and weakness to capture control. The population wishes had precisely little to do with it - it's not like Russia is a democracy or cares what the population thinks - people that think wrong just get jailed (or die of mysterious illnesses, or fall out of windows, you get the idea). Once they expanded their interest to the territories which couldn't be easily grabbed, the default mode became just bomb the shit out of it until nothing but barren scorched earth is left. Again, nothing to do with "cultural separation". It's not like Civilization games when there's a "cultural vote" among the population and if the culture of other country wins, this city joins it. What actually happens Russian just bomb this city into dust, and it matters preciously little what the former occupants of the former city thought about St. Peterburg's culture.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
the way Ukraine is an ancient part of Russia
What's "ancient" for you? Ukraine was incorporated in Russian Empire in late 18 century. That's not something people really call "ancient" usually - that's like saying "Texas is one of the ancient states of the US" or "Lincoln's Gettysburg address is one of the great ancient speeches". Surely there's no strict definition of "ancient" but that's not the usage most of people would be comfortable with.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
conservative parties like the German CDU
They present as "conservative" but from their actions it doesn't seem like they actually are. It looks more like what is called the Uniparty in the US context - parties that pretend to provide alternative solutions but once elected fall back into the same set of policies no matter which label is on them currently.
The point @Tree is making is that functional political parties adjust their positioning in order to chase votes.
Sure, I do not disagree with this. And that's exactly my point - if you instantly add a California-worth of leftist voters, the political parties will have to shift left, or go extinct and be replaced by the left-shifted ones. And if your politics is based on principles and not on whether "our team" or "their team" wins, and your political principles happen to be on the right, then it would be a disaster for you, because no political party - however it would be called - would be willing to adhere to your principles and provide any policies according to them.
then it was all over for the right in 1945
If you mean the German National-Socialist party, calling them "the right" was a propaganda trick in 1930s and will remain so in 2030s. Mentioning them in the broader political context as the valid definition of the whole term raises from a trick to a libelous smear. A behavior one would be ashamed of if there were any decency left, but we all know that ship has sailed long time ago.
And if @JarJarJedi thinks that Meloni and Farage are insufficiently right-wing to count, then for him it probably was.
I never mentioned Farage (for the simple reason that his political power right now is microscopic, 4 seats out of 650?). But I would like to hear in plain speak what you mean by this, because it certainly sounds like you're calling me a Nazi. Which would be nothing new - it is basically a propaganda tick of the left since, again, 1930s, but I'd like a clarification this this particular case - what do you mean by this?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
It has been over in Europe for a long time, for the right. True, there's AfD in Germany (shut out of "polite society" but still alive) and LePen (here the establishment succeeded to do the same they failed to do to Trump) but there's no movements comparable to MAGA (or even Tea Party) and no powers comparable to Republicans on the right in Europe. I don't see why America must be any different and why, if the circumstances allow, Republicans couldn't be turned into AfD-like permanent opposition, useful for scaring the voters into compliance but powerless otherwise. Of course, there still be politicians competing, just like there are politicians competing in San Francisco or Chicago, but that would be like watching which Politburo member is elected into the Central Committee - whoever it is, it's still a Politburo member. There's no real alternative.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Annexing Canada would be a disaster for US politics. We'd get a large influx of left-leaning population who are already culturally desensitized to the right's worst nightmares (no weapons, no free speech, rampant multiculturalism, full DEI, nationalized medicine, etc.), which would essentially make it California-but-Cold and ensure permanent domination of Democrats in both House and Senate, and probably enough to also ensure Presidency goes to Democrats permanently. I don't think getting a dozen or so of heroic truckers and whoever else on the right side that is in Canada is going to change that. So I don't think anybody entertains this as a serious possibility. If we're talking about piecemeal arrangement, it might be less of a disaster but I don't think it's possible to pull it off in 3 years.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
"I just declared 10000 years of humans are all dumbasses and couldn't see obvious problems that I could see in ten minutes. Who is with me to spend the next ten minutes figuring out how to manage the affairs of humankind correctly? It can't be that hard..."
Sorry, not my cup of tea. Feel free though.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
So question to people who know Canadian politics better: how much Trump's "51 state" shenanigans mattered? In my opinion - which, me not being a Canadian, together with $5 gives you a cup of coffee - Trudeau was a disaster. It looks like Canadians, however, want more of the same. Is it because they really like what Canada is becoming under Trudeau? Would like to hear opinions from people with good background in Canadian politics, especially Canadians themselves.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
not long after 25 your brain starts un-developing
I think treating it as any kind of unary scalar variable is just wrong. Yes, young brains may be more agile, but that's not the only metric that matters. E.g. kids are awesome at learning new stuff, especially stuff like languages, but their brains are a disaster (from adult's perspective) in many other regards. I don't think there is also an objective metric for this possible - it is rooted very deep in the culture. You can't just treat an outcome of several layers of cultural trends as a free parameter that you could move around at will, this will get you a lot of angry people who would (somewhat deservedly) think you're messing with the basic foundations of their world view just out of pure satanic contrarianism.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
But is it untrue? We are seeing people who, outside of illegal migration context, are considered lowest of the low - child molesters, drug dealers, domestic abusers, violent gangsters, robbers, rapists, etc. - are protected and defended by the establishment figures as soon as the removal is concerned. Up to personally obstructing immigration officials, sometimes. Where is the bar where they'd say "no, that's enough, we agree this person needs to be removed from our country"? I don't know, but certainly it is so low that at least anybody who is not engaged in active combat against the Americans at this particular moment seems to be easily clearing it.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Pakistan's best friend (China)
Why is China Pakistan's best friend? They oppress their own Muslims quite brutally, and generally have zero tolerance to any ideology that can compete with the Party. Do they just think they own Pakistan as a counterweight to India and a stepping stone to dominating Asia, and Pakistan is happy to be owned?
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Karmelo is suspected of stabbing a young white boy to death
And by "suspected" you mean he definitely did it, it is known he did it, he himself admitted he did it and there's absolutely no doubt possible that he did it. So the donors can't say "we thought he's innocent" - they know perfectly well he did it, and they donate explicitly because he did it.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Looks like it didn't because people kept smoking anyway and the ban for smoking in church led to people going in and out of the service to smoke, which caused much more disruption so the church gave in. A number of popes preferred sniffing to smoking though.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
If that's your goal, you need to last just two weeks to beat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_VII - he ruled for 13 days, dying of malaria before he could even be officially crowned. He did manage to ban smoking in his short reign, try to achieve something of similar magnitude if you want to get ahead.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
So it could also be a C (cannibas), or P (pot), or W (weed), or even L (leaf), or any number of other things
I'd assume you would need to use Spanish for that. I also have been told by reliable sources that using the word "marijuana" is racist, so not sure it can be even mentioned by a proper expert.
you need to find a qualified expert to testify that these are actually MS-33 gang tattoos,
I would assume the guys who made the photo that Trump showed around would be called "experts" at least by the current administration and would gladly testify that these signs mean MS-13 (I assume 33 is a typo here). After all, they told so to the president, if they aren't sure that's what it is they would be majorly screwed. The problem is the other side could claim those people know nothing and they are lying and they have got their own experts that are ready to testify that these tattoos actually mean "universal peace and love" and has absolutely no relationship to any gangs and anybody who is not a racist fascist knows that. I'm not sure where in our days it is still possible to find experts that haven't been claimed by any sides are would be universally acceptable.
For me personally, absence of alternative explanations and the fact that his wife insists on hiding the tattoos on all photos explains enough, but I'm not an expert, just a random dude on the internet.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
This attempt to force the executive to (presumably, temporarily) return one particular illegal comes across as political theater and legal chicanery.
You see, you do understand. But that's not the only goal. The other goal is to establish the supremacy of the federal judiciary (where the Left is still enjoying a lot of power) over the actions of the federal executive. The strategy is death by the thousand of TROs. If the admin is forced to ask consent of every leftist federal judge for every action, not a lot of actions can be performed - even if SCOTUS works overtime to shut down all the overreaches (which is in no way guaranteed), it will still take time, and if every action that could take a day takes months instead and costs a lot of paperwork and lawyertime, which is limited even for the feds, then doing things becomes much harder. In the first Trump admin, the Left managed to neutralize a lot of his agenda by putting him under the shadow of suspicion of being the Russian agent. Now this does not exist anymore, so they need another leverage. Making everybody in the admin constantly look over the shoulder for a federal judge to intervene in their actions is a good leverage.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Second this, and despite them addressing a lot of topics that would be classified as "social justice" and "woke", it does not give off the impression of being a woke product. I have very low tolerance for "agenda" productions, and I quite enjoyed it (I'm Jewish though so there's that). It has an nice setting, masterful execution, and also Tony Shaloub who is, as expected, great, and got an Emmy for this work.
JarJarJedi
13d ago
I applied to major corps (FAANG, MS, etc.) several times over the years, and I knew I am at least qualified enough to get the interview (I think qualified enough to do like 90% of tech jobs they have, but that's just my opinion) but the only time I ever got a call back was when it was a referral through a specific person to a specific team (not that it always worked - I had several referrals that led to nothing at all). I got an offer then, decided not to go for it, no regrets about it - but I am just wondering, how do they actually source? Is that just random luck? Is there a secret code? Is there some criteria I miss? I mean I'd be fine if they talked to me and said no thanks. But there's never even a call back, ever. Not that I really need it - of the FAANG five I probably would only consider Netflix - but I'd like to understand the process.
JarJarJedi
15d ago
Reading this and then seeing how the same corps fire people by the thousand without any fault of theirs, and also knowing if I sent them the resume they'd probably not even notice it (not that I actually want to work at any of them but maybe Netflix, but still), gives me really eerie impression. I'm old enough to be fine with a lot of things in life making no sense. But this involves a lot of obviously very smart people, who control trillions of dollars, and yet it all makes so little sense... Why must it be so wrong?
JarJarJedi
15d ago
because this sounds to me more like a fever dream than any description of reality
This is because you choose to ignore the reality for ideological reasons. People do that all the time, nothing surprising.
I live in a border state and haven’t any kind of “invasion” like you’re describing.
People lived in the Soviet Union and didn't see any lack of freedoms that the lying Western press was talking about. Moreover, I am sure there are a lot of people of North Korea which don't see any totalitarian regime, just the glorious rule of the Beloved Chairman. The key difference is: this has been largely done to them by somebody else, and they'd risk severe consequences if they waked up. You do it to yourself willingly and risk nothing but feeling a little silly. And yet...
In 2015, there was about 300K illegal migrant encounters on the southern border. In 2023, there were over 3.2 million. That doesn't count people being literally brought in the country by the planeload and released in random communities - without any vetting, proper immigration process (I know something about that, being a legal immigrant myself) or sensible oversight. That doesn't account for complete refusal of the collective left to acknowledge there even exists such a thing as immigration law anymore (just listen how Dem politicians spoke about illegal migration some 10-15 years ago - they were proper firebrands, nobody is above the law! Now they only remember this when they need to cook up another investigation against Trump).
But I don’t understand the point you’re making
I think my very first sentence was clear enough? We are already living in the catastrophical environment. The catastrope - at least for those people who are not willingly blind, like you are - has already very evidently happened and very perceivable. All that have been happening for the last decade-and-a-half is not normal. It is not what should be happening in a proper country, regardless of ideological differences.
those are in a separate category from the excesses and extremism coming from the President of the United States.
Nope. To fix the catastrophe, you need to act unlike you'd act in a normal situation. If your neighbor parks their car somewhere that inconveniences you, the right way is to politely ask them to move their car. If your neighbor parks in front of a fire hydrant while your house is on fire, then the firemen would break the car's windows and run the hose through. Impolite, but necessary. Now imagine this neighbor actively impedes the firemen from extinguishing the fire, runs around spilling gasoline and brags about it because you are, in his eyes, an evil person whose house deserves to burn, and also there's nothing bad in a good fire, as long as the right people are getting burned. Would you try to handle this the most polite way possible? Likely not. What has been happening is not normal, and thus we get somebody who is not acting in a usual way to fix it. Because fixing it in normal ways has been tried and failed, many times over. So yes, these "excesses" are very much the same category - it's these excesses, continuing and multiplying for decades, what convinced people (including myself) that what has been done before - nominating and electing polite, smooth talking, consensus-seeking people who would try to solve things in polite, consensual, mutually beneficial ways - is not working, and actually threatening the society's very existence.
JarJarJedi
15d ago
When the catastrophe actually happens
The catastrophe has already happened. Nobody knows how big exactly the Biden cross-border invasion has been, but it probably will have effects for decades down the line. We've got literally violent foreign gangs taking over neighborhoods in the US. We've got tens of thousands of migrants sent to tiny towns where there's no chance they can be properly assimilated. We've got one of the major parties not only completely normalizing ignoring the law and brazenly bragging about "resisting" the law enforcement, but actively working to make the maximum amount of foreign violent criminals and sociopaths to stay on US territory, and willing to destroy any institution in the nation that stands in the way. We've got higher education institutions taken over by people openly advocating genocide, violently rioting without any consequences and physically attacking anybody who looks like a Jew. And that's only a small sample of the political violence we're seeing right now. That sounds a lot like something that I'd call a catastrophe.
Thanks, the first one looks good, even though I don't see a single D cosponsor, but at least the majority of Dems voted for it. One has to wonder though if it were about denouncing Nazis, would there be 86 congressmen saying "nah" and another 14 saying "I don't care so much I can't even form an opinion on this".
For the second one, it sounds like communism is so much dead the Congress feels they need to pass federal legislation to counter its influence in the schools (despite school programs traditionally being a local matter and not the federal Congressional matter). If it's politically dead the politicians certainly don't think so. But again, it is encouraging to see the majority of Dems voting for it.
More options
Context Copy link