LiberalSoCalist

  • 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • couldn’t help to find Hitler unlikable

    I think you meant, to quote Orwell himself:

    I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler.

    More on the list in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell's_list

    There is a notable and obvious overlap in Orwell’s notebook between many of 1940s London’s prominent gay, Jewish and anti-colonial public figures and the accused “cryptos.” Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook. Jews are clearly labeled (“Polish Jew,” “English Jew,” “Jewess”) whilst others were mislabeled (“Charlie Chaplin — Jewish?”). The African-American bass singer and future civil rights activist Paul Robeson finds himself in Orwell’s list with the note “very anti-white,” whilst the half-Jewish poet Stephen Spender is damned as a “sentimental sympathiser… tendency towards homosexuality.”

    It’ll always be funny that the dude who wrote something like 1984 was such an eager proto-McCarthyite snitch for the propaganda unit of the British Foreign Office.



  • snarky know-it-alls that believe that they possess the most advanced political analysis derived almost exclusively from parroting reddit comments which have slowly turned their brains into velveeta

    but anyway, enough about Lemmitors.

    Hexbears are actually a nice bunch if you read through the comments on the current megathread. They just have very little tolerance for self-satisfied libs that congratulate themselves for thumping the Washington consensus-approved ideologies that most of hexbear graduated from years ago. Even I find it difficult to read lemmy comments because they’re legitimately what I would’ve written as a teenage redditor in the late 2000s.





  • The Divide by Jason Hickel is a good short read on global inequality.

    The Making of Global Capitalism by Panitch and Gindin goes into historical detail on the emergence of the modern financial/trade system, but it’s fairly academic and not super exciting.

    Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis is an account of the famines and mass social murder overseen by colonial governance in the 19th century.

    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States is self explanatory.

    For books on America’s commitment to defending democracy around the world, pick any one of:

    • Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad
    • The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
    • The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
    • Killing Hope by William Blum

  • This is the thing about people that aren’t used to engaging with hexbear - they aren’t used to holding minority viewpoints. They liked that on other platforms (and IRL) they could just throw around the weight of institutional orthodoxy and “common sense” and be validated by crowd affirmation without having to really explain themselves, so when they’re made to show their work, their argumentation really pales in comparison to users on hexbear who have spent years arguing in favor of some the most suppressed political ideologies in the West.


  • I get your gripes. For the longest time The Devil and Karl Marx was one of only a handful of Communist related books in my local library system (and by far the most checked out). The city council and board of trustees even made successful efforts to censor Black History and Pride Month events and displays this past year.

    That being said, we do have allies and even comrades working within the system as librarians and aides. The ones in my city managed to help me get Blackshirts and Reds and The Jakarta Method onto the shelves.

    Libraries being one of the last remaining third spaces of public life will definitely be a zone of struggle as market interests seek to hollow out and privatize the ever diminishing Commons, but there’s solidarity to be found despite how bleak the situation seems.


  • not the person you replied to, but

    as a lemmy.world user, I can’t tell you all enough about how much our quality of life has improved since we defederated form hexbear.net. far less moderation is necessary and general browsing is far more pleasant not having to constantly be bombarded by those awful stickers and brigades of trolls with their endless baiting and attacks

    “they just recalled incorrectly” is quite a charitable interpretation