It’s not really about defending the bad stuff. It’s about trying to get some more nuance on perhaps the most propagandized topic of the 20th century.

There are all sorts of interesting discussions to have about the various failings of these countries amongst other leftists who have the relevant context as a starting point for a reasonable discussion.

But when talking to libs/conservatives, they’re coming into the conversation with an already extremely warped, un-nuanced perspective. “These are all evil dictatorships that were also super incompetent and that shows why communism is bad.”

Some of the stuff they base this on is either exaggerated or just straight up wrong. Some of it is completely valid criticism, but without the context to understand the issue or provide a useful critique.

How do you have any meaningful conversation about these countries without acknowledging things like:

• All of these countries were previously agrarian, un-democratic societies.
• Most of them were formerly exploited colonies who had to fight fairly brutal wars for their independence.
• Even after leaving, the imperialists kept messing with them through economic and diplomatic isolation and espionage including supporting right wing coups.

We don’t have the counterfactual where we see what these countries would have turned out like without these challenges, but it’s an incomplete analysis to not at least consider the ways which they impacted both their economic success and their political developments. Maybe you could argue there were better ways to respond to all of this, but hindsight is 20-20.

No actual leftists want to have to argue “authoritarianism was good actually.” But it’s hard for the conversation not to appear that way when we’re arguing with people who’ve been conditioned to think they’re somehow as bad or worse than Nazis and ending the thought there.

I’m not talking about personal actions. I personally believe in equality and I wish I could do more about that even if there are all sorts of personal reasons that’s difficult for me.

Corporations don’t believe anything. They’re just profit optimizing machines. They were doing rainbow capitalism when they thought it would be more profitable and now that they think the opposite is more profitable, they’ll do that. It’s as simple as that and hoping corporations would be allies in a fight for equality was always based on a misunderstanding about power.

It’s not like corporations don’t have power that can resist government action. Look at how effectively they’ve evaded taxes and regulations. The big international ones can threaten to take their ball and leave if they don’t like a country’s policies. And that’s when they don’t just bribe politicians to change them.

The workers at those companies are people though. Labor organizing was always going to be necessary to build up power for change. Not saying it’s easy and I can’t fault someone for worrying about losing their job, but if resistance was going to happen anywhere that’s where it would be. Not in boardrooms or alone in a booth.

But there’s the difference. It’s one thing to have convictions but not the means or courage to act on them. It’s another thing to have power, but lack convictions beyond whatever is currently convenient. The former could overcome those obstacles given the right circumstances. The latter never will.

It’s almost like their support for these issues was never genuine to begin with.

For leaks there is rarely going to be a way to know for sure. So you have to evaluate whether or not you think it’s reasonable given what you do know. We do know that they’ve done this kind of thing in other races. We do know that the party is funded by capitalist interests. We do know that the campaign didn’t really put forward a positive agenda and therefore had to look for other ways to gain advantages. As far as the character of the people/party involved, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt knowing all the awful things they’ve been complicit in. Lastly it doesn’t seem like it’s some crazy infeasible or irrational thing to do. We’re not talking about demonic sex cults or mind control or some nonsense. We’re talking about political maneuvering through media strategy during a campaign. The objective was rational even if it was unconscionable.

As you said, they thought it was a good strategy to optimize their chances at winning. Not only did they turn out to be wrong, but the act of trying to instigate one of the only two political parties we’re stuck with to take further right positions and possibly nominate a very right wing candidate is not an acceptable byproduct of the strategy.

Do I think we were headed in that direction anyway? Probably. As long as the parties aren’t willing to address the fundamental problems with capitalism, the door will always be open to a right wing demagogue who knows the right things to say. But spending your effort to speed that along instead of, idk, working on actually popular social programs, certainly didn’t help.

Did you not read about the part where their plan was to boost the more extreme candidates in the primary to try to get the rest of them to move further right in hopes that it would make an easier opponent for them?

That they realized they screwed up after the fact doesn’t change that.

Yeah you’re right, it’s nothing compared to helping Trump get elected.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/missteps-doomed-clinton-campaign/story?id=43422676

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

Yeah look how well it’s worked. Far right nutjobs have totally not been normalized. Nope.

Ah yes. Give money to the “progressive party” so it can do progressive things like funding ads for far right republicans in primaries:

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1106859552/primary-illinois-colorado-republican-candidate-democrats-ads

Or backing “centrist” primary candidates against progressive candidates.

Very progressive. This amalgamation of rich people’s money and consultants is a great political ally.

Yeah I’ve yet to get this with Ublock. It warms my heart to know that the professional coders at a multi-billion dollar company can’t outfox some open source devs who are just really determined to not have to look at ads. lol

idk. If western governments had any ability to learn or care, WWII surely would have been that moment. But after beating the endpoint of imperialism, they without irony or self awareness, just kept doing imperialism. I’m not holding my breath.

Even if it would, how would it ever get passed when the people who would need to pass it are the ones who are only in office because the system works the way it currently does?

This is just a recurring theme I’ve found when talking with liberals. They like to think about and suggest all sorts of policy ideas as though all we’re missing are some smart ideas nobody has thought of. It’s one thing to say we should have this, but it’s another to have any idea of how it’d be possible to do. Since they have no actual analysis of the system, they’ll just turn around and tell you to vote or call your representative. “We should get money out of politics!” “Yeah, well we checked with the people giving us money and they said no. So…”

You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don’t even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that’s already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it’s had.

That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.

Oh. Yeah. Maybe he just meant “last” as in the one prior and not last as in final? Idk.

Idk if this distinction works for anyone else, but in my mind places like Reddit or Lemmy aren’t the same thing as “social media” because they maintained the anonymous forum structure. The activity on the site isn’t centered around people and personalities, it’s the content being discussed.

I’m sure he would have appreciated some AC though.

I’d fund some dream MMO. Those things are bottomless money pits.

That’s super dumb. Also, I thought there weren’t 3rd party Reddit apps anymore? Do you not still have to pay for the API?

It’s like everyone forgot about the Patriot Act and NSA stuff. This shit has been going on through at least 4 different presidents. And that’s just the modern surveillance state.

Continue writing “2024” for the date for at least a week or so.

It probably depends on the accent, but we say “Double U”.