queermunist she/her

They aren’t winning in Iran. Why is that?

I can only think- “Chocolate? I remember when they first invented chocolate. Sweet, sweet chocolate… I always hated it!”

In addition to the older generations thinking queerness is yucky, there’s also the problem of the West using our rights as a bludgeon to justify sanctions and wars. I’ve seen Westerners try to justify the genocide in Gaza because “they’d throw you off a roof for being queer!” As if Israel isn’t actively blackmailing us into being informants by threatening to out us to our families.

This is all to say that anti-queer sentiment has become deeply rooted among the masses, themselves.

Recession.

The violence requires death, is the thing. People don’t just allow themselves to be forcibly relocated (as per your example), they will fight to stay on their land unless they face the threat of death (and many do stay, and die). Behind every “nonlethal” process is a death machine that makes it possible in the first place. That’s why colonization is always accomplished through mass death.

We don’t understand the brain enough to control it with chips either. In the near-term the biggest danger would be a bad actor using the chip to torture people for ransom money or a hacker just bricking it. Anything more sophisticated is still scifi.

China isn’t preventing or discouraging intermarrying or intermixing with Uighurs, which is a key feature of apartheid. Neither do they have to use separate lanes of the road, carry special IDs marking their ethnicity, or forced to use different emergency shelters.

I use those examples because the real-world example of apartheid, Israel, is currently doing all of those things today.

When we look at how colonization in the real world happens we see it is accomplished, again, through mass death.

See: Israel

In the real world there hasn’t been a genocide that didn’t involve mass death. 3, 4, and 5 all require a lot of killing to actually work.

Downplay what? A reeducation/deradicalization program isn’t fucking genocide on its own, it has to be accompanied by mass death, and when you say it is you are the one that’s donwplaying the crime of genocide as a concept. Even the boarding schools they used in the genocide in North America had mass graves, because genocide is always accompanied by mass death and to claim otherwise is whitewashing.

It’s the crime of crimes because it’s the worst violence that can be inflicted on a group.

You are doing genocide denial when you claim that genocide can happen without being accompanied by mass death. Genocide is the crime of crimes because it always involves mass slaughter of innocent people, to bring about their end. The invention of “”“cultural genocide”“” without any of the accompanying mass violence effectively whitewashes genocide as a concept.

The thing about propaganda is it works on the leadership, too. Eventually the fascists always take the mask off because they forget why they were wearing it in the first place.

So you’re the reason they haven’t gone out of business.

Yeah dude, the country brutalized by economic sanctions with its currency in free-fall can afford better PR than the richest country on Earth. 🤡

A seig heil is an open declaration. That was a clear, mask-off moment and denying it is a joke. You’re moving the goal posts.

And sure, they’ll deny it, but that’s because they’re lying liars who love to lie. They don’t lie because they think anyone will believe them, they lie because they think it’s funny. They love to make people mad by lying to their faces. It’s like the Sartre quote:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play."

The denial is literally a joke. The joke is serious too, of course, because that’s how Nazis always are. They’re always joking and serious at the same time, and they can freely switch between being serious and joking around as it pleases them. They take the mask off and put it back on for fun.

But they aren’t being censored. Wasn’t that your original point? That censorship makes them stronger? But, they aren’t censored.

Elon Musk did a seig heil on stage to a roaring crowd for Trump’s inauguration. He did it twice. His punishment? They appointed him the head of a government task force and then he wrecked a bunch of agencies in the name of “”“efficiency”“”

Did you forget? It’s only been a year.

Nazism is a stupid ideology that would not stand its ground were its mask to fall.

Explain the US, where there is no censorship of pro-Nazi opinions and yet mask-off pro-Nazi ideology made it into the government.

Your thesis, that censorship just makes ideology stronger, isn’t borne out by how Nazis are coming to power in the real world.

Do you think Japan should have continued to attack the US after the H bomb?

Categorically different situation, that was before the US empire was firmly established as the hegemon.

The US isn’t specifically just an evil bad guy country, it’s the imperial core in the current world system.

And sacrificing sovereignty to let the empire win is always bad, 100% of the time, no question.

This is not what I was contesting, even the most authoritative and controlling state can “do fine” and get 90% approval. But by principle, controlling and manipulating the working class is against the idea of letting the working class be the ones, in community, who decide their own destiny.

Right, you’re an idealist. You prefer the idea of not having censorship, and are not confronting the consequences of this idea.

I’m not an idealist, my politics are not based in ideas but on history and my understanding of the current historical moment. I understand that, without censorship, you get counterrevolution and imperial domination and slavery and death. If Cuba falls to US aggression, things will get much worse. My hope is that Cuba can survive long enough for us on the outside to provide a more global / international solution. They need censorship for that.

Is it better for the working class to starve/defend against the outside factor or to capitulate to the outside invader?

I think history can conclusively answer this for us - it’s always better to repel the US. No one benefits when the US comes bringing “”“freedom”“”. All levels of society must be mobilized to repel the invasion or risk being enslaved to the empire.

Anyone who sides with the US in their invasion is the enemy, and I’d prefer my enemies to be censored.

Yes, I explicitly said “undercover” because the minute the censorship is exposed then it becomes counterproductive. China has made censorship “business as usual”, you have a whole system of public officials doing the work without it being at all something that is “undercover”.

And China is doing fine, what are you talking about? It’s certainly effective to keep the censorship hidden, but it’s hardly necessary. I think you’re wish-casting, you wish that open censorship would make people rise up. It doesn’t. Censorship is an effective tool whether it is hidden or blatant. If censorship didn’t work, no one would do it.

This is exactly the problem. Fascism can only rise in situations where people have a need that has enough importance to silence reason.

But this can be imposed from the outside by factors outside of the system’s control, such as if there’s a global hegemon that can blockade the economy and make people suffer. There’s no populist answer for the oil blockade against Cuba, all the “anti-system” speech can do there is help the US siege war. I, for one, don’t want the US to win in Cuba.

If you silence them they will recruit in the shadows and now with an extra argument, since them being silenced is gonna reaffirm their position about the state being open to taking people’s points seriously

You’re contradicting yourself. By your logic the “undercover censorship the existing system is exerting” should actually make anti-system reforms from a left-wing perspective easier to push for, because by your logic the censorship should be helping. It should be easier to recruit from the shadows with an extra argument, we should celebrate being censored!

Except, that’s not how it works in the real world is it? In the real world, censorship works.