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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettomemes@lemmy.worldHope you like socialism
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    18 days ago

    If you’ve had bad experiences with anarchists before I’m sorry, but in my experience anarchists have been much kinder and more welcoming than marxist-leninists, especially in person. Characterizing anarchists as the angsty atheists of the political world is a bit hurtful, but I can see where you’re coming from. In the same way atheists sometimes lash out against religious folks, anarchists sometimes lash out against marxist-leninists because of bad experiences in the past. A lot of anarchists I know went through a similar political development where they started being curious about socialism and were met with pretty harsh responses to questions about the more authoritarian aspects of marxism-leninism.


  • Point taken, but although it may not have ended well for the anarchists I believe their involvement in the Russian revolution was for the better since it could easily have gone in a much worse direction without them. Anarchists are always putting themselves in harm’s way to make this world a better place.


  • I appreciate that you don’t, I even have you tagged as “a polite marxist” so I must have had a positive interaction with you before, but many MLs I’ve debated before have downplayed anarchist contributions to the Russian revolution. I can understand how you might not encounter that very often since you’re not putting yourself out there as an anarchist.


  • I’ll admit my perspective may be skewed because I spend a good amount of time debating marxist-leninists, but I really don’t like arguing semantics unless it’s important to the discussion at large. For that reason I’ll often avoid using words in a way that will start semantics arguments that derail the discussion.

    It’s also why I typically avoid calling people I’m currently debating tankies, because I think that makes them defensive and is bad for outreach. Maybe I’m wasting my time trying to change people’s minds, but if that’s the case then people who argue aggressively are definitely wasting their time.


  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettomemes@lemmy.worldHope you like socialism
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    18 days ago

    I’m an anarchist and I agree with what you’re trying to say, but marxist-leninists are going to jump all over you with semantics arguments because of your unorthodox use of the word socialist.

    Edit: I should mention you would be welcome in slrpnk communities. We’re primarily anarchist and have hexbear blocked for the aforementioned brigading, but we are welcoming to everyone so long as they behave themselves.



  • a fair amount of American sociological and economic standards are already steeped in socialist services

    If you believe this to be true then you don’t understand what socialism actually is. You seem to be of the mind that any publicly funded service or welfare is socialist, and I don’t blame you for thinking this since it is what the mainstream American political discourse would have you believe.

    In short, nine times out of ten, a socialist has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about, but just parroting smug bullshit that they think makes them look edgy and educated.

    When you say this immediately after demonstrating that you actually have no idea what you’re talking about it’s a pretty bad look. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.


  • his solution (for a class of “intellectuals” like him to take charge) however, are just neoliberal swill

    This is such a common pitfall that even self-described communists fall into it as well. When you hear people talk about a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” what they’re describing tends to devolve into “a class of intellectuals needs to guide the working class to the correct decisions” when questioned about what a “dictatorship of the proletariat” actually entails. Often they’ll try to justify it by saying it’s only temporary, but we all know how that pans out (see the USSR). This is why I consider myself an anarchist rather than a communist and regularly critique marxism-leninism.


  • Whose propaganda did you suck down blindly?

    Chill out a bit, my comment could not have possibly given you the impression that I’m a supporter of capitalism if you had read it carefully. I began my comment by putting forward the capitalist argument for copyright - a steel-man argument - and ended it by debunking it.

    Copyright is meant to foster and improve the commons and public domain

    You said yourself that copyright establishes art as private property (or “intellectual property” if we’re being more precise). That does the opposite of fostering and improving the commons and public domain.

    If copyright was not tradeable or transferable

    Then it wouldn’t be copyright. Copyright is a capitalist construct, not a public good corrupted by capital.



  • At the root of this cognitive dissonance is who benefits and who doesn’t. Copyright law is selectively applied in a way that protects the powerful and exploits the powerless. In a capitalist economy copyright is meant to protect people’s livelihoods by ensuring they are compensated for their labor, but due to the power imbalance inherent to capitalism it is instead used only to protect the interests of capital. The fact that AI companies are granted full impunity to violate the copyright of millions is evidence that copyright law is ineffective at the task for which it was purportedly created.


  • It’s because this isn’t about privacy at all, it’s about a popular social media platform being outside the control of domestic intelligence agencies. The US is unable to control the narrative on TikTok the way they do on American social media, which allowed pro-palestinian sentiment to spread there unhindered. It had a huge effect on the politics of the younger generation (IMO a positive one) by showing them news and first hand accounts they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

    Edit: And yes, China is able to control the narrative on TikTok and that is a potential problem, but so far they’ve had a fairly hands-off approach to US TikTok aside from basic language censorship. I figure the way China sees it is that an unmoderated free-for-all will do more to sow divisions in the US than a carefully controlled (and therefore obvious) pro-China narrative ever could.