GarbageShoot [he/him]

The hand has cyan in it

The US military throughout East Asia is notorious for doing sex crimes

That’s just called using heuristics, friend, though if ADHD impeded their progress in math, maybe ADHD people rely more on heuristics than neurotypicals do.

NK isn’t telling South Koreans that they must leave their homes for being the wrong ethnicity.

I think it depends heavily on where you are, since there is at least one dedicated transitioning institution and other institutions that support transitioning, but then there are other places with virtually no support. It’s definitely something Cuba is better about.

You can split hairs and say that it’s a bureaucratic state, but all you’d be doing is splitting hairs. It’s still fundamentally oriented around commodities being sold for profit, a common definition of capitalism.

Deng was definitely playing with fire, though as you suggest the PRC was much more in control of the burn than the other capitalist powers. Had I come into communism about 5-10 years earlier than I did my position would be much closer to yours. However, it seems to me the Xi administration has been doing a good job cutting the excesses and purging capitalist roaders. They have a lot more work to do, but they seem best equipped to fight the class struggle, both domestically and internationally, of any country.

I suppose then the question is if it’s just a very-disciplined capitalist power or a socialist one, because Xi is doing a great job of maintaining and developing the state, but I don’t think anything he is doing is incompatible with just being a responsible capitalist politician running a tight ship.

There’s should never be shame about ruthless criticism of all that exists.

Yeah, I just wanted to make it clear that it’s not a “the authoritarian mods are silencing me” issue and just that I don’t feel like arguing about this most of the time, though I decided to here.

The rightly-praised train system is not for-profit, but they make a killing on oil, for example.

I’m not an economist, I can’t really tell you why that’s what they do, but I’m pretty confident they do it.

That there would be some amount of revisionism is precisely my expectation of AES states. It’s not like I said they weren’t socialist – and from a practical standpoint we can say pretty confidently that they all are, most especially the DPRK and Cuba.

“Revisionist” is basically shorthand for “deviating in some way from fundamental Marxist principles” which is a subset of “erroneous from a Marxist perspective”.

“No true scotsman” isn’t just a vibe, it’s a specific type of fallacy. If I say that “No X is Y” and you say “I know John, he’s an X and he is Y” and I reply "He’s not really X then, because no true X is Y," I am performing the fallacy in its most archetypal form. Basically, it is asserting that no member of a group has some (usually negative) trait and, when confronted with a counterexample, saying that the presence of the trait in that example means the example wasn’t really a member of the group.

Dumb college kids do indeed do “no true scotsman” all the time when reactionaries say “reds killed trillions” and they say “but that wasn’t real communism, man” to preserve their ignorant idealization without really understanding either Marxist theory or the actual evidence around AES history.

I don’t have anything that I’m trying to disavow, and in fact am making claims of various kinds against these states (though I might have been unfair to Cuba, admittedly) without any interest in protecting some group of “true scotsman”.

It certainly is not a liberal capitalist state as such, though the bourgeoisie represent a real force as you imply, but there is also capitalism in state industries when they are run for profit, which currently is the bulk of China’s economy.

China is plainly revisionist since the Deng reforms, it went from a uniquely (sometimes chaotically) democratic ML state to a capitalist state run with some amount of propriety and discipline (perhaps owing to both its Marxist immediate past and its Confucian past before that) and that unusually “adult” behavior for such a powerful country I think contributes to confusion, because people expect capitalist states to be rotten from skin to core like the US or Occupied Korea or something.

I still think, mainly for reasons already expressed, that China is the biggest historically progressive force in the world right now (the most progressive force among established countries is Cuba, of course), the average westerner knows nothing but lies about it, etc.

But I basically think every AES state is revisionist in some respect – Vietnam is similar to China here, Cuba is on the road to joining them, the DPRK has reactionary nationalism, Laos is just a fucking mess – but I still support them all, not just on anti-imperial grounds but also because this isn’t all-or-nothing, you can be revisionist in some respects and correct in others, and even massive revisionists in this backward word can still be historically progressive forces.

This isn’t me mindlessly lionizing Mao either, I think he was (by the end of his life) a left deviationist who nonetheless failed to pull the trigger on Deng, but his ideas were definitely more sincere in their aspirations Marxism over economism or however you’d like to characterize Deng.

It might be nice to have better discussions on these topics, but I’m not going to pretend its a George Orwell 1909043 wrongthink issue, I mostly come here for the news aggregation and comments thereon, not to refine the new vanguard.

Are quips like this really what it has come to?

What sense of “Maoist” do you mean here? Like Shining Path or just anti-Deng?

Strictly speaking, the most common sentiment in GZD and HB is highly revisionist. I don’t really mind since it’s still progressive and splitting over that would be absurd, but their claim of deviation makes enough sense to be comprehended if they’re a hardliner in the vein of either Mao or Hoxha.

One is a country, one is an individual, to say that any individual is more important to the war than the United States is the literal definition of Great Man Theory (i.e. childish nonsense).

This is without getting into other considerations like how Netanyahu is a scapegoat for faux-progressives who want to deflect away from how this genocide has enthusiastic support from many powerful institutions within Israel. It is an Israeli project much more than Netanyahu’s personal project.

P.S. Assassinating Putin wouldn’t end the war in Ukraine either (nor would assassinating Zelensky or Biden)

The NED is notorious for basically being a CIA cut-out

Tibet was de facto independent for a while, but it re-joined China voluntarily circa 1950. About 10 years later, with some help from western agitation and assets, the theocratic ruling class felt too threatened by development empowering their serf population and sought to secede in order to maintain their fiefdom. Mao sent in the PLA and crushed the secessionist revolt.

You really can’t “no u” this one because of Imperial China, the PRC’s claim to Tibet is completely valid. You’d probably have more luck trying with Xinjiang, though evidently that is viewed as slightly played-out now.

Yeah, like I said in another comment it’s just textbook tailism the way they did it, and if we assume they aren’t revisionists it would have been better strategy to just ignore the topic completely.

I think the only rhetorical hope that doesn’t rely on deception (and we should not deceive!) focuses on the fact that Ukraine has no realistic hope of triumphing militarily, so what is the fighting actually for? Ukronazis love to pretend Russia wants to genocide them, but that’s not the case, so the biggest danger to the Ukrainian population is not caving to the invasion but fighting it militarily in the vain hope of winning. Holding Russia off in the early stages while negotiating a conditional surrender would have been infinitely better for the average Ukrainian, even completely excluding those who live in Donbas and Crimea.

If you approach the topic from that angle without any polarizing language then it can be hard to call someone a Putin-simp or whatever.

This is categorically false and I would encourage you to make a single post on .world to see how it is so. They will call you all sorts of things because the view you’re espousing is one they are hostile to, any question of presentation is secondary. Most dedicatedly-political spheres (and many besides) are like that.

I think since his channels are more directed at libs it took a very “centrist” stance trying to avoid controversy

Do you know what this is called? Tailism! To follow behind popular opinion in a condescending effort to “meet it where its at” even when “where its at” is backward, misinformed, and reactionary is literally the exact definition of tailism!

If he was actually doing Marxist agitation and not whatever miserable opportunist bullshit he’s evidently on, he would be trying to raise people’s consciousness instead of act as another mouthpiece on the thousand-tongued devil-spawn that is the MSM.

If JT “can’t” speak properly on Russia-Ukraine, better to not speak on it at all and focus on what he can address with truth, instead of this nonsense.

The current state of affairs is unacceptable. He must be either corrected or abandoned.