To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It’s the classic argument path:

Liberals: “I hate [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] for [usually somewhat justifiable reason in a vacuum]!”

Communists: “Okay, sure, but [Western government/country/corporation/person/etc] does that same thing but much, much worse! Why aren’t you talking about them?”

Liberals: “Oh, I hate it when they do that too! We’re just talking about this particular [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] right now! Why are you deflecting? Are you trying to defend them? Whataboutism!”

Communists: go to their profile; literally no evidence that they have ever complained about a single Western entity in their lifetime, and may even have expressed support for Western entities that do even worse things

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says “Idiocracy is a documentary!!!” and invoke Hanlon’s Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

Because arriving at a party when there’s not many people around can be awkward especially if you aren’t already friends with the host. So you wait for more people to arrive first.

I’ve accepted at this point that I have to make notes in order to remember things from books. Not just textbooks but theory as well. I think “reading without understanding/memorizing” can still be a nice activity if it’s something unimportant like fiction where the point is just the activity of doing it without necessarily needing to remember any of the detail.

I think there’s (at least) two factors here: the first being that western leftists in general (it’s not even necessarily based on sect, I’ve seen this in most major tendencies) still have brainworms from the (capital-L) Liberal society they grew up in and so have weird views on certain issues (I won’t even deny that I don’t still). I mean, truthfully, most leftists around the world have weird views on certain subjects, not just western ones, but the West has absolutely astounding propaganda networks and techniques, so much so that most don’t even think that they could be propagandized - that’s a thing that non-democratic countries do, and we live in democracies!

And second, there’s can be a tightrope to walk on some scientific issues. Like, take the coronavirus vaccines for instance - there are people who argued, from the left, that because all these massive pharmaceutical industries are only interested in profit and not really for curing anybody of anything, that we therefore should oppose the vaccines. This is obviously a harmful, crank belief, but one can see how by opposing everything a giant corporation and the imperialist and racist etc American government tells you to do, that you might consider yourself “more of a leftist” regardless of what that thing actually is. In that case, you might even try and adopt crank scientific positions by only paying attention to papers that suggest that vaccines don’t do anything, or even harm people, while ignoring the vast majority that correctly claim that they are beneficial to take and that people should take them. If you’re that person, you might think “Oh, I believe the scientists on all these other issues, but on THIS one I think the influence by X corporation is just so high that all of these papers are biased in favor of vaccines; if anything, I’M the one who’s more strictly obeying the scientific method!” Again, they’re obviously wrong, but if you already disregard (as many of us should) the findings of very official-sounding thinktanks that are actually funded and staffed by capitalist ghouls, then disregarding actual science might be an easy jump to make for some “leftists”.

Well I guess I should apologize

Apology accepted.

removed externally hosted image

I can’t see your image over on Hexbear.

In the broad sense of “using euphemistic language”, obviously quite often, and it’s not always intended to be bad even if it is obfuscating the truth - but only really when doing things like explaining complicated topics to a very young child, or when both people in the conversation know that doublespeak is being used (e.g. saying “he’s in a better place now”, which is technically hiding the truth with something more pallatable if you didn’t already know that that phrase is synonymous with “he died”.)

In politics, which is the most appropriate place to use the term, I would argue it’s a standard, even characteristic, part of capitalist politics and economics, because the actual truth of the matter is directly opposed to the interests of the working class, and you do not want to anger them or encourage them to organize in opposition.

“Increasing efficiency in X sector” simply means “We’re going to fire a bunch of people and reduce the money we spend on it with no increase in quality of service.”

“We should cut social security spending and stop giving handouts so people work harder” simply means “We need to increase the profits of the capitalist class, and so hundreds, thousands or even millions of people will have to suffer and die.”

“We should restore freedom and democracy in X country” simply means “This country is opposed to our capitalists in one way or another and we should kill their leaders stopping us from having greater market access, even if that plunges that country into years of suffering” for example in Libya. Countries with dictatorships and monarchies that are subservient to American rule are rarely targetted - if anything, several of them were put there by America itself (e.g. Pinochet).

Hell, the words “market access” in that previous one is just doublespeak for “widespread exploitation of that country’s resources and institutions”, like how the ex-Soviet states were massively privatized under the Shock Doctrine and their resources harvested for Western capitalists.

One of the important first steps for any leftist is seeing these phrases for what they actually are, because otherwise you just continue to exist in the dreamy world of capitalism where actions are disconnected from consequences, and the problems and what caused those problems are shrouded in fog and confusion and become difficult to discuss. For example:

“Wow, cool, we should definitely increase efficiencies in the healthcare sector! Efficiency is a good word that means good things!” -> five years later -> “Dang, it sucks how our healthcare sector is in such dire straits, look at these long waiting lists, look at these burned-out nurses, how could this have possibly happened? Perhaps we didn’t increase efficiences enough! As efficiency is a good word that means good things, it is inconceivable to me that it might have done something bad!” -> read a post online from a leftist -> “This person is saying that we should hire more nurses and doctors and give them free degrees and training and lower housing/rent prices! Don’t they know that this will decrease efficiency and lead to - gasp! - bloating in the healthcare sector? That’s how we got into this bad situation in the first place! Socialists are so ridiculous, they need to read a book on the subject because they clearly don’t see what is patently obvious to people like me, who can see common sense without even needing to have read a book on it, I’m just that smart and read all the articles! (most of which are owned by the people trying to privatize healthcare)”

It’s likely that at no point have the people arguing for “increasing efficiency” actually laid out exactly what they mean by that word, or if they have then it’s couched in further doublespeak (“incentivizing hard work” = “increase hours without a meaningful pay rise so we can fire people and save labor costs”), whereas because left-wingers are too honest to come up with their own doublespeak phrase for what we propose, we have to lay it out bare.

As a moderator of Hexbear, I would like to formally apologize for our users committing the Preconceived Prejudice Bias, link if you’re unfamiliar.

As we all know, multi-billionaires do not have control of our media institutions and are unable to shut down, directly or indirectly, research and investigations into their activities. They do not have the ability to portray themselves in an extremely positive light. Therefore, you are quite right to assume that all these rumors that they are committing acts like our other users implied are frankly entirely false.

I generally take a similar tack when arguing against conspiracists in Russia who argue in the Russian media that Russian oligarchs are committing evil acts in support of the war - this is obviously untrue, as if they were, they would surely be reported in reputable journals and peer-reviewed as you rightfully point out must be done before putting ANY information onto the internet. Any accusations against Putin himself are, similarly, completely bizarre - the Russian media rightfully portrays him as a shining beacon of light. All other “accusations” are from discredited media and crank Telegram and Facebook groups that oppose Putin and the oligarchs, and I am working to try and get them shut down. It’s a similar situation in China, as far as I can tell.

Have a great day, and stay classy, my good friend!

who has donated a lot of money to charity

where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don’t magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it’s necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn’t do the labor to get that much money - it’s literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.

it’s akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity

there are people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc who still believe this

Old people aren’t really the problem, capitalists are

I’m going to assume that you’re being facetious when you talk about “culling” them (otherwise that’s pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.

liberals have universally allied with fascists over communists. the liberals in the Weimer Republic put Hitler in power, to give but one example. Churchill admired Hitler.

Both liberals and fascists agree that capitalism is the bee’s knees, they agree that most things should be privatized, they agree that people must be exploited by an elite. There’s a common saying - “If you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds,” meaning that the second you exert even the slightest violence towards liberals or threaten to do so, they suddenly turn into fascist monsters, seemingly out of nowhere! Macron in France is a good current-day example - the riots have prompted him to turn France into ever more of a police state in which the pigs have unbelievable powers and surveillance. When America has been provoked by actions (many of which didn’t even actually happen, e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin, the Nayirah testimony, etc (or those that did happen but didn’t need to provoke an entire invasion in response, like 9/11) they start wars that kill hundreds of thousands, even millions.

It’s actually hard to describe exactly where liberals and fascists have opposing beliefs sometimes. I suppose where they differ is whether the cruelty should be more obscured or more out in the open? But you have to understand, the political dichotomy isn’t and has never been “liberal vs conservative”, because of those are on the side of the bourgeoisie in the class war. It’s communists vs capitalists, and liberal, conservatives, fascists, even the more left-wing people in the American establishment like Warren and Bernie are on the side of the capitalists. We hold fundamental political beliefs that differ from liberals. Liberals do not differ in fundamental political beliefs from fascists. It’s also why accusations of “horseshoe theory” are so hilarious to us.

Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.

In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.

In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.

people like the hexbear news threads I guess

Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool