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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 21st, 2024

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  • I disagree. Scaled down to small and harmless it’s like handling kids. You explain what you don’t want them to do and what happens/you’re going to do if they continue. Now it’s crucial you go through with what you threatened them with.

    If you either don’t deliver on the “threat” or don’t act as you said you would, guess what happens? They just continue or it even gets worse.

    Of course it’s more delicate/difficult when handling with powerful and intelligent adults but it’s at least similar. Not issuing threats is just not communicating. If you then just act (violently), things are more likely to escalate.

    Edit: or back to the kids analogy: don’t tell them anything but smack them once they went too far: may help in that instance but they’ll just learn to better avoid you and do shit behind your back.




  • It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.

    That’s the gist. Then he goes on with another paragraph of whataboutism but of course not a single mention of the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.

    Of course he’s also an western armchair socialist. People that actually lived in the Sowjet Union (and not in today’s Russia) draw quite a different picture.