Which we should see as an excellent radicalization and growth opportunity!
It can be exhausting explaining ourselves again and again, always met with the same accusations and assumptions born from the mythos spun by our enemies.
However, we must remember these people are people, and many people change their minds given enough information, delivered with firm respect. For every belligerent person who appears like they wouldn’t change their mind for anything, there are 10 people quietly lurking who are more on-the-fence. Even those who regurgitate insults and contempt may change their mind when the stars align!
These people are not our enemies, they are victims to the greatest campaign of dishonesty in human history! It is our duty to draw out the poison and deliver the medicine!
I know many comrades here have very difficult lives and do not have the patience or energy to deal with such people. Please do not exhaust yourself interacting with liberals, and allow comrades with more energy to deal with them.
Radicalizing online is not the end-all be-all, but at this point in the psychological war for those within the Anglosphere, every victory is invaluable!!!
While you were away, reddit made a big fuckup by charging a fortune to use their APIs, killing third party apps. This caused many redditors to jump ship to other platforms, and lemmy was the biggest alternative.
Hence all the libs.
I heard about that, I should have figured the consequence.
Well, it’s like old GenZedong days, only we can’t get quarantined 😈😈😈😈
Hexbear is also federated now, so we have r/chapotraphouse veterans here now too.
lol libs on from lemmy.ee and lemmy.world are having a complete meltdown over that, for a while they were big enough to run around and brigade things they didn’t like and all of a sudden the floodgate opened on the left 😂
I completely agree with that. I find the trick is recognizing whether a person disagrees, but wants to have a genuine discussion to understand where you’re coming from or just trolling. I think we can give people the benefit of the doubt, but as the discussion progresses it’s important to watch for signs such as the person ignoring or misrepresenting the points you’re making, talking past you, using tropes, etc. At that point it’s best to just leave a note pointing that out for people reading the thread and disengage.
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Getting people to explain their own positions is the best way to get people to change their positions because it forces them to do some introspection on why they believe something. When ideas come from outside they’re rejected much easier. So, definitely agree with the approach of just asking questions and steering people towards making their own realizations.
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I mean if people started actually thinking about causes of their circumstances then the system wouldn’t last very long.
You have the patience of a saint for continuing to debate them after the Reddit influx. I’ve completely stopped trying to debate the libs on Lemmy because it ruins my mood and mental health more than it has hope of convincing them or even starting a productive conversation where either one of us stand to learn from the other. I still make it a point to expose myself to all dissenting views because I feel that as a socialist I should at least be aware of all the viewpoints, but I don’t care enough to actually engage with them anymore.
I usually just hope that other people reading learn something. I’m trying to engage less with them less as well, blocking a few really prolific trolls definitely helped. I gotta say though, with hexbear federating the vibes got so much better.
Hexbear provides balance for sure.
Hey this is about me!
I probably don’t know the right words to use and I don’t know my history or theory and couldn’t hold my own in a real debate but I sure am learning a lot from you all when I find your posts on All and your comments all over the place.
Realizing that, I don’t exactly know where I fall politically. Previously I would say I am left, but seeing conversations I realize that I don’t even know where Left-land is. At the moment I don’t see myself agreeing with a lot of stuff posted by hexbear/lemmygrad users, but I’m open to learn, and, more importantly, have a fuller understanding of your perspective(s).
Coming from Reddit I’m not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view, nor the intense levels of trolling/sarcasm/dunking that you all seem to love so much. So it’s hard to navigate conversations sometimes, and figure out what is a joke and what is serious. And even if I personally don’t engage in the conversation, usually someone with a similar mindset to me will do so, and I appreciate it when you folks take the time to soften your words/message to
actually(edit to cross out judgy word) explain your position.Additionally I hope we can see and treat each other as individuals and not our instance names when traversing the fediverse (honestly this is more about non-hexbear/lemmygrad users, but felt I should say it anyway). It certainly is a shame that some instances choose to defed you. I hope mine doesn’t, but I’m prepared to move if mine gets overly censor-y, though my understanding is that sdf is unlikely to do so.
Anyway, keep it up, there are absolutely people out there lurking and reading what you all write, and occasionally learning something.
Stuff like this is why I loved the internet so much long ago (near 30 years, wow) and I’m really happy to see it hasn’t gone anywhere, I just lost track of it.
Cheers!
Honestly, if nothing else, I hope liberals are learning how to actually phrase questions in a good faith manner. As a former liberal myself, so many of my questions in the beginning were phrased in such an anglocentric way that just assumed Western ideals as the default and it put everyone else on the defensive. So of course I got dunked on or people assumed I was trolling. Really, I was just ignorant af.
Me too, but it did help me learn. Though I would imagine some might double down due to the insult, learning that some ideas people in the west just take for granted have their roots in anglocentrism and white supremacy does help some people really reflect on everything they’ve just assumed about the world for most of their life.
I recently hung out with friends that I hadnt seen in a while and they were saying some of the most ignorant, chauvanistic shit. Really nice people who consider themselves progressive. They just lack the information to understand why a thought of theirs is just a racist regurgitation that they picked up from a source they can’t even remember. They can’t remember the context of how those beliefs entered their worldview.
It was a startling reminder of just how big the task is of educating people out of a colonizers mindset. We can’t get tired of it.
Thank you for posting this. It’s pretty valuable for me. I remember when I was in your position. I got banned from multiple communist communities because I was engaging the way I was taught to engage in university. There, I was allowed to just posit bullshit and get argued with. I thought it was the normal way of doing things. Getting slammed by commies over a couple of years made me realize that I was putting a ton of intellectual and emotional burden on them and instead what I needed to do was to become more curious than I knew how. As I finally developed that sort of curiosity, I suddenly started to learn more (go figure) and then I became one of those people who didn’t want to deal with the same liberal arguments against communism that come up thousands of times a day.
So, good on you for starting to navigate this. I’m fairly confident that the reason you don’t see yourself agreeing with the revolutionary communist left is because you’re “not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view”. Once you get enough of the historical context behind this position, you’ll start to really ask questions about how we solve it and why we can’t solve it in other ways. And then you’ll find that there’s historical context to those answers as well, and the long and the short of it ends up being, you’re not entering in a brave new world where people are just starting to come to consciousness. You’re a Westerner who is just starting to come to consciousness in a world that has been working through this dynamic for well over a century now.
Stay curious!
Major cheers! I can’t speak for everyone here but don’t hesitste to ask for clarificatiom and hopefully someone who isn’t too cranky will be able to explain anything and everything. Bless
Good point. I’ve probably been too short and snarky with them.
It’s just frustrating to explain something only for them to deliberately ignore your argument in favour of pretending you just said something “uncivil” so they can dismiss you. Especially if American politics is involved (or Trump or Putin, my god, it’s like their brains just short circuit when someone mentions “Orange man.”
A primer on how to deal with libs would be extremely helpful. I can talk to people in person fine, but I just have no clue how to reach Americans, it’s like their national pastimes are arrogance and ignorance.
I can say from a lot of experience that you have to swallow a lot of well-justified irritation. You have to be prepared for childish insults, wildly bad faith assumptions, bratty refusal to engage with you like how a toddler refuses to eat vegetables. They will call you a Nazi and you will get ratioed. If you can accept this and still play the “bigger person,” though, sometimes magic happens, and when it does it’s often outside of your line of sight; victories in radicalization are often invisible to us.
Huh? I Wonder what happened in 1942? Probably nothing, the USSR was probably developing exactly as planned…
I have absolutely zero patience for anti-communism
um…you should try to be torlerant…
Mind clarifying what you mean, or giving a little more context?
like…in response to Rasm653u
Yes, because how I read it was "be tolerant to anti-communest reaction, be tollerant to potentially even fascists and Nazis
Be tolerant to anti-commies. Do NOT be tolerant to facists and Nazis.
Fascists are the prime spreaders of anti-communism. Many of the myths about Soviet atrocities or Russian supremacy in the Soviet Union originated in Nazi propaganda. The most vicious anti-communists are usually fascists and the most principled anti-fascists are usually communists. The fascist blackshirt gangs rose in Italy as a counter force to the rise of communism, killing communists and labor organizers. The first people the Nazis killed were communists. Communist parties and the red army were the first to rise up and defend against fascism. US installed Fascist/neoliberal (what’s the difference?) dictators like Suharto and Pinochet genocided communists. Where were Nazis effectively cracked down on? Socialist countries like the USSR.
Where’s the liberal anti-fascism? Liberals always defend fascists’ “free speech” and condemn the suppression of reactionary views. They think you can “debate them in the market place of ideas,” but you can’t. The liberal United States allowed most medium to high ranking Nazi party members to keep their position in West Germany. East Germany effectively de-nazified. The US nuked Japan to make them surrender on their conditions so they could keep the same fascists in power to be an anti-communist beacon, just be under the US’s thumb. If they surrendered to the then invading Red Army (like they almost did) they would have had to Denazify and the on-the-ground Communists who were gaining traction might have gotten power. Today it is the Liberal democrats that support flag waving fascists in Ukraine and their banning of all opposition (especially left-parties and trade unions).
By the way, this is the first time I’ve seen you off matrix, welcome. I hope you learn a few things while you’re here.
Liberals always defend fascists’ “free speech” and condemn the suppression of reactionary views.
You forgot the part where they suppress communist views
Oh hey, QueerCommie! Nice to see you! But, um, sorry, I didn’t know nazis were the biggest anti-commies. Most of my friends are anti-commies.
Seriously tho what’s the difference between a Soviet gulag and a Western prison? Any society that still has crime requires correctional facilities, the USSR is no different. Why do libs insist on Soviet ones being called gulags? If you want to criticize their prison system just call it that. I know it’s a Russian word but we’re speaking English here which already has a word for prisons, and to me the Soviet system really does not seem different or unique enough to warrant its own word as a proper noun. (I-it’s not just to make the Soviet system seem more evil by distancing it from their own Western prison systems right? I-it’s not that right?)
Often gulag is used for working prison, including those outside the Soviet Union. And very serious crimes in the Soviet Union would have prison time, not gulag time.
TIL that it’s referring to that. Wait so basically US private prisons are gulags?
Yup.
Is this what the Golden Gulag is about?
Gulags were used to try and rehabilitate dangerous people back into society, which is in theory what American prisons do too. But in practice American prisons are where the poor are tortured, raped, beaten, branded with second-class citizenry and commited to a lifetime of hellish punishment, especially for crimes of poverty.
Why do libs insist on Soviet ones being called gulags?
Because GULAG is a Russian acronym (Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps). They were literally called gulags. They are corrective labor camps, not storage containers for human. Granted, most US prisons are labor camps as well.
Gulag = scary Russian acronym
Prisons = too normal in the most incarcerated state in the world
Just like how that add the word “camp” when they talk about evil north korean prisons (that are probably no worse than western ones).
From my understanding, the application of the word “gulag” to a prison is to indicate there is strenuous forced labor in harsh conditions in a distant location free from public scrutiny. The implication is that people die from being overworked or due to exposure and the government is able to cover up these deaths because of the remoteness of these facilities. Likely, this implication is meant to harken back to the labor camps of Nazi Germany.
This is irrespective of whether or not Soviet labor camps should be characterized this way or whether US prisons are inherently more humane. If anything, I highly advocate for referring to US prisons by a more pejorative name to indicate their cruel nature. I would use the term “gulag”, but I think what makes US prisons cruel is different from a labor camp and deserves a different name.
Private prisons is a pretty good term IMO. Private, as in the purpose of them is not to rehabilitate, but to generate profit for the bourgeoisie under the guise of rehabilitation. The inmates are private property.
However, we must remember these people are people
Correction: these people are proletariat. We have the same enemy. Mostly, the only difference between us and them is that we’re a little better at identifying the enemy than they are.
If they have read and understand the theory, then that’s already better than most people.
Can someone actually link to those sources though?
Which sources?The ones in the image. I see now.
Quite frankly, the term liberal refers to Democrats and Republicans not Conservatives and Centralists. I’m a Centralist and its sometimes weird when people outright call me a liberal. I don’t pay attention it though.
Centralist?
neutral. Not left or right. Well…kinda right…
I would recommend actually learning about what you support. You don’t seem overtly hostile, but remember you are on the same end of the scale with people who have decided that my ethnic group has no right to exist.
You might say “Those guys are evil! I would never support that!” You don’t need to support it directly, anyone who is even complacent is supporting those people.
That’s just one out hundreds of possible problems with being a “Centralist”. They simply don’t exist. You have those fighting oppression, and those oppressing. Being neutral means you have picked your side.
wait…what is your ethic group? (btw, I don’t discrimate cuz I’m not racist -_-)
Honestly, it doesn’t even fully matter. I could be Jewish, Romani, Slavic, Black. Other then ethnic groups, I could be handicapped, gay, Catholic, elderly, poor, chronically ill, and so on.
It doesn’t matter, because all those groups and many more deserve extermination, slavery, to be experimented on, starvation, and death.
I hope you understand the point I am trying to make. But my personal ethnic group is Slavic. We were labelled as little better then rats, abominations, and racially unfit to exist as a people. We needed to be exterminated so that our land could be taken and used properly for expanding the Aryan race in “General Plan Ost”. We were an disease, not people to them.
There are only those who support the oppressed, and those that support the oppressor. You cannot be both. Make your choice.
Oh. I like slavic music. You guys are cool tbh.
Those on the right don’t think so at all.
To a lesser degree, neither do liberals as they despise the Bolshevik Revolution.
The choice is yours. Who do you want to associate with?
Liberal = supporter of capitalism. I suggest reading lots and lots on liberal and especially marxist theory, I used to be a centrist like you, because I only trusted what was trusted by liberal media, because ofc I wantdd to be correct, and it took years to realize they were lying and acting in bad faith. I was also hardcore falling for the golden mean fallacy
No one has suggested any readings yet (being a marxist is 50% reading and learning 50% trying to organize), so I’m recommending On Authority by Engels (this is a page long but very necessary, I highly suggest reading this future comrade!) After that dive in to State and Revolution by Lenin or Kapital by Marx, depending on how skeptical you are on supporting capitalism
On Authority, which is only a page long!
Lemme know if you have any questions too
I’m not THAT supportive of Capitalism. I just…go with it. Cuz I’m raised that way.
We all did. It’s just what happens when we’re raised in a system that teaches us that it is the “best” system to ever exist. It’s always important to keep learning, and challenging our preconceived notions about the world.
Yeah. However, I do sometimes wonder what went wrong to bring me here. About what exactly led me to be curious about ideas that I’ve been taught to dislike.
Just sounds like regular self-reflection to me. Always a good idea to challenge ourselves. Life is empty and meaningless if you never consider anything new or challenge yourself.