Although Invidious is now broken due to recent youtube changes, that always happens tho. Cat and mouse game
Yeah I really needed it tonight and it was a major disappointment that all of the public instances are broken with no ETA on being fixed. As I mentioned in another thread, I love invidious, I'm deeply grateful to the devs an those who run the public instances, I deeply mourn piped, but I fear for invidious' future. It already seems like a once much more thriving community has been struggling to keep going. Like, it was sad to see ggtyler leave the scene, though I get why and can't blame him.
I know it's self hostable of course but I don't think most people are willing to do that, tbh I'm not even sure I am. But I guess I'd have no other choice if the public instances all went kaput because I will not be using that disgusting site youtube and giving them more traffic. I'd be too bitter to be able to enjoy or even focus on any of the videos.
oh yeah, reddit even banned the sub for it, r/invidious. What fuckin' bullshit is that, you know?
I do too. Like, exactly - I use LibRedirect to make sure I never end up at youtube but only an invidious instance, and I run ublock origin religiously everywhere (even though it's thankfully not needed on invidious).
But I really do fear for invidious's future. Like right now it's totally borked because of more youtube fucking around with them. I'm sure they will get it working again soon, but there are only 3 public instances now, they're doing it just because they're cool, but it's not easy to constantly be fighting against youtube's changes, they have to pay for servers and don't get enough in donations to make up for it, so I couldn't blame those last 3 for burning out at some point, like ggtyler did. And that's even if youtube doesn't finally do something that breaks invidious for good, like how pipe is now completely broken. Sorry if I'm dooming a bit, but it does sometimes look pretty bleak.
No. Most of what Russia does on the world stage is good, it is one of the biggest supporters of many global south countries and one of the few remaining bulwarks preventing US imperialism from running completely roughshod over the global south. For example right now, see Cuba and how Russia is providing support and oil as the US tries to starve them of energy and starve them to death. You may have been taught Putler=Voldemort, but no, Russia at this point is acting largely as a force for good in the world.
Ah ok, my mistake. I saw you comment "Hey everyone, it’s time to come discuss Capital again!" on that reading group's first gathering for Volume 1 Chapter 1 and so assumed that meant it wasn't your "first rodeo."
Lol, this just gets better and better. The person you're responding to and accusing of not understanding economics is someone who literally hosts the reading groups for books on economics, arguably the most definitive books on economics ever written, as well as scientific socialism and socioeconomic theory, who has read Kapital multiple times, maintains the active reading list for multiple lemmy communities, and has doubtless read more about economics this year than you have read on any topic (from See Spot Run to Harry Potter), in your entire life. But you're telling him he doesn't understand basic economics.
Seriously, if you actually have any interest in pulling your head out of your ignorant ass and maybe growing the fuck up a little bit, go look at his reading course suggestions on economics, it's section 3, and get to reading. Twerp.
Wait, is this a bit and someone is actually playing the role of dipshit liberal know-it-all? This must be a bit and I fell for it.
A BigBrain with a 5th grader's (at best) understanding of economics who has never even been exposed to the labor theory of value and who literally doesn't even know what Socialism is (confusing it with some form of Social Democracy) bursts into a room full of people who have been studying economics for years and starts explaining to them his ever so smart 5th grader's version of economics. It's so on the nose it's like a badly put together meme.
Part of being a communist is recognizing what it means to even be "authoritarian." It means (among many other things) that you have examined that word and it's various meanings and how it holds up to what's really happening in the material world, and how it relates to the way societies actually work. Not just some nebulous "vibes" regarding what kind of images float around in our heads when the word is spoken. In other words, materialism vs idealism.
Being a communist does not imply supporting Russia, because Russia is not communist in any way, it’s a dictatorship.
I doubt you could find a single communist who believes that modern Russia is communist because it isn't. We all can agree that it is not. Likewise I think every communist you could find would say that modern Russia is at best a disgusting capitalist disgrace to its Soviet history. But to call it a "dictatorship" especially without also recognizing other capitalist nations similarly as "dictatorships" is just a failure of understanding of what that word means, but I won't say more on it because ordnance_qf already did. So let's move on to "support" of Russia. As a communist (Marxist Leninist, aka "tankie") I do NOT support Russia in its capitalist endeavors. Again, I doubt you can find a communist who does. But I can still look at Russia's position on the world stage at this time and see that because of its material interests (and not because it's "the good guy" - it isn't, and not because it's current government has noble intentions - they don't), it is supporting the global south in the latter's struggle against imperialism. And it is US imperialism that is the boot on the neck of the peoples of the Global South. For liberatory revolutions to be able to survive before being strangled in their nascency, the pressure of that boot must be reduced or better yet removed. What I support is Russia's undeniable help in facilitating that. Which is what we as communists mean by "critical support." We highly criticize Russia, but we support it in it's primary fight against the US, NATO, and Western Imperialism (which are all aspects of essentially the same thing) for the sake of revolutionary movements that would thrive were it not for western suppression.
Being a communist also does not mean being pro China, because even if China implements parts of communism, communism does not imply eradicating the identity of minorities and censoring whatever the party does not like - i think communism, free speech and a multicultural society do not exclude each other.
I would agree with you that support of China is not a prerequisite of being a communist and there are many communists who do not (including many communists who the anticommunists on this instance would still call "tankies"). China doesn't "implement parts of communism" but China is a Socialist project (where the word "socialism" refers to the transitional stage away from capitalism and towards communism, since unfortunately communism cannot spring fully formed into place). You can be highly critical of China's socialism as many are, but at the very least capital does not enjoy a dictatorship in China as it does in so-called "liberal democracies." However, when you go on to say things like China is eradicating the identity of minorities or the implication that it is not a profoundly multicultural society, that is where I just have to firmly disagree and call "BS." Of course communism and a multicultural society do not exclude each other - they can't exclude each other, by definition. China is very far away from perfect, but to say it is against multiculturalism or worse that it is "eradicating the identity of minorities" is simply the repetition of lies that you were told, lies originating from a state that considers China its arch nemesis and despises it. It's propaganda. This can be confirmed even by going there. So by all means, criticize China, call it out for its actual faults, but find out first what they really are and do not perpetuate demonization, literal sinophobic falsehoods.
I went into a lot of detail in this response because I think that you and I (and therefore many "tankies") are not actually on very dissimilar tracks, and likewise I suspect with a lot of other people reading this thread. But there is just so much bad faith I see in threads like this, it makes it all but impossible to see the similar tracks. And I think that is often by design. Like another comment I responded to (and tons more I didn't) that just want to smear and demonize without even a hint of a desire to understand, but your comment clearly wasn't like that, and you expressed honest, valid (though towards the end, I would say gravely misled) concerns. I'd bet there are a lot of people who listen to the "tankies are evil red fash" noise and just assume that must be the case without any actual engagement and never actually take the chance to understand the actual position. Those of us who genuinely want sincere, unselfish human flourishing, should be able to find that common ground to actually suss out our positions and learn. But the smarmy and smug anti-tankie crowd do not want to learn and they do not want others to learn. Fortunately many still will, despite them.
Death to America is a saying that goes back much further than Bin Laden, and there have been many good reasons for many people to say it. I'm sure many of the people indigenous to the land (that wasn't "America" to them) had a probably rather similar phrase and said it probably rather often as that entity commenced with their genocide. And since that time, it's not as if there hasn't been a lack of good reasons to call for the destruction of the settler-colonial project responsible for the worst imperialist cruelties since the British Empire (the immediate ancestor). But you might consider questioning why you seem to only associate the phrase with that one particular person.
It's such an irony to me that people who call us "tankies" and say that we are somehow caricatures of communists, always make such caricatures out of themselves. Like, instead of engaging with any of FunkyStuff's very reasonable, calmly stated questions, you go off about how we ("tankies") just decided to be evil, and calling us ridiculous while behaving in such a ridiculous, blatantly and needlessly antagonistic way yourself. It's over the top.
Paraphrasing:
FunkyStuff: asks a calm, concise series of questions that are meant to help clarify the issue.
lunnrais: "See?! Look how frothing these evil, ridiculous lunatic tankies are!!"
And this after correctly recognizing that the red scare was a terrible witch hunt? But it was people like us, people who believe what we believe, that were the "witches" of that particular persecution. We are simply what most communists in the world look like, we believe what most communists in the world believe, people who have very clear and consistent views. But instead of honestly trying to engage or actually understand why "tankies" believe the things they do, you just smear us with lies and pretend that the position of Marxist-Leninist communists is just some bananas, made-up-on-the-fly, contrarian position, rather than one with deep foundations that have been developed over decades of intense thought and practice including by people fighting in the trenches for their own and others liberation. To you, were the Black Panthers "tankies"? Do you know about their mutual support of and with North Korea, or did they just decide to be "evil" to pwn the libs? Was Che Guevara a "tankie"? Is Michael Parenti? Were they all just ridiculous contrarians who liked the picture that reactionaries ("republicans") painted of them?
Is this sarcasm? The venn diagram that represents overlap of what nazis believe & value vs what the CIA believes & values may not be a perfect circle, but it's fairly close.
And just to add, if you somehow missed it like I did (until just a minute ago), @davel@lemmy.ml provided a ton of information debunking the Uyghur "genocide" myth right here in this very thread. He just did a great favor for any well-meaning liberals who actually want to find out more about what the situation really is in Xinjiang, he basically did yall's homework for you.
But it’s a natural state of existence to exist within a broader, hostile context.
No it's not. A commune within a communist society would not at all exist within a hostile context but in one that nurtures it. Likewise a billionaire's corporation like Bezos' amazon dot com does not exist in a naturally hostile context under capitalism, it exists in a context that literally would not allow it to fail, propping it up at all costs. The banks that should have gone under and been utterly annihilated in 2008 were instead propped up and rewarded for their complete failure and sheer incompetence to the extent that mass amounts of wealth were siphoned away from working class to keep them afloat.
Civilization, at all levels, has always been that. Competition is everywhere.
Civilization at all levels has always required profound amounts of cooperation to come into being, to continue to exist, and to thrive. Civilization exists only because of cooperation, not because of competition. Competition has always existed too, but has been more of a hindrance than a benefit to civilization and certainly not a requirement like cooperation is. The cult-like worship of competition is something that the capitalists have fostered and spread for the obvious reason that widespread belief in this lie is beneficial to them. I would urge you not to fall for a very obvious and simple-minded ploy.
If a system requires nothing else to be competing with it, in order to work, then it’s not viable.
Well, the most serious lie fortunately has the most material that thoroughly proves its falsehood. The following link contains more links to many such resources: https://xinjiangahr.carrd.co/ It's a place to start, both if you want just immediate proof that there is no genocide as well as if you want to learn more about what really has been going on in Xinjiang.
Even though they still are obligated to call it a spy balloon because The Narrative is still officially that it was, even western media have quietly admitted that despite flying across the continent, the balloon did absolutely no spying and actually appeared to be utterly incapable of doing any spying. Weird, how inefficient! And seriously, anyone who has even a passing knowledge of weather balloons or spycraft would have told you this from the beginning, as many did.
https://xcancel.com/Reuters/status/1674507379306557462
No, Winnie the Pooh is not banned in China and simply looking around a bit for things that exist in China confirms this. Telling people who live in China that people in the US believe Pooh is banned will result in laughter. This is in China, does it look banned? https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/attractions/adventures-winnie-pooh/ There was a racist caricature image/meme that along with portraying Xi as Pooh also portrayed Obama as the Tigger character. (I would hope no one here would need explaining why both of those are extremely racist). That specific racist image was officially censored online, but censoring racism is a good thing, and again, Pooh the character, the franchise, or anything else like that, none of it banned. That it was is just another silly lie. Though the whole of reddit (for example) believes the lie because it aligns with the rest of the bullshit they think they know about China which is just straight up false.
China's infamous "Social Credit Score" also isn't real: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/ There is a kind of rating system of businesses that allows people to score them based on how well they are a service to the community they're in, but seeing as most people would recognize that as a good thing, the sinophobic propagandists won't tell you that, but instead fabricate yet another bogus story to paint China as a boogeyman. This one is especially galling because all the scary things they made up with this one actually has a much worse version that is reality in the west. It's such a blatant case of projection it's jokerifying.
If .worlders could see hexbear and lemmygrad, they'd have an aneurysm. But then some of them would recover and look further into it and realize the commies are right. But that is of course why they're not allowed to see it, as you said.
https://tankie.tube/
Yeah I really needed it tonight and it was a major disappointment that all of the public instances are broken with no ETA on being fixed. As I mentioned in another thread, I love invidious, I'm deeply grateful to the devs an those who run the public instances, I deeply mourn piped, but I fear for invidious' future. It already seems like a once much more thriving community has been struggling to keep going. Like, it was sad to see ggtyler leave the scene, though I get why and can't blame him.
I know it's self hostable of course but I don't think most people are willing to do that, tbh I'm not even sure I am. But I guess I'd have no other choice if the public instances all went kaput because I will not be using that disgusting site youtube and giving them more traffic. I'd be too bitter to be able to enjoy or even focus on any of the videos.
oh yeah, reddit even banned the sub for it, r/invidious. What fuckin' bullshit is that, you know?
I do too. Like, exactly - I use LibRedirect to make sure I never end up at youtube but only an invidious instance, and I run ublock origin religiously everywhere (even though it's thankfully not needed on invidious).
But I really do fear for invidious's future. Like right now it's totally borked because of more youtube fucking around with them. I'm sure they will get it working again soon, but there are only 3 public instances now, they're doing it just because they're cool, but it's not easy to constantly be fighting against youtube's changes, they have to pay for servers and don't get enough in donations to make up for it, so I couldn't blame those last 3 for burning out at some point, like ggtyler did. And that's even if youtube doesn't finally do something that breaks invidious for good, like how pipe is now completely broken. Sorry if I'm dooming a bit, but it does sometimes look pretty bleak.
No. Most of what Russia does on the world stage is good, it is one of the biggest supporters of many global south countries and one of the few remaining bulwarks preventing US imperialism from running completely roughshod over the global south. For example right now, see Cuba and how Russia is providing support and oil as the US tries to starve them of energy and starve them to death. You may have been taught Putler=Voldemort, but no, Russia at this point is acting largely as a force for good in the world.
Ah ok, my mistake. I saw you comment "Hey everyone, it’s time to come discuss Capital again!" on that reading group's first gathering for Volume 1 Chapter 1 and so assumed that meant it wasn't your "first rodeo."
Lol, this just gets better and better. The person you're responding to and accusing of not understanding economics is someone who literally hosts the reading groups for books on economics, arguably the most definitive books on economics ever written, as well as scientific socialism and socioeconomic theory, who has read Kapital
multiple times, maintains the active reading list for multiple lemmy communities, and has doubtless read more about economics this year than you have read on any topic (from See Spot Run to Harry Potter), in your entire life. But you're telling him he doesn't understand basic economics.Seriously, if you actually have any interest in pulling your head out of your ignorant ass and maybe growing the fuck up a little bit, go look at his reading course suggestions on economics, it's section 3, and get to reading. Twerp.
Wait, is this a bit and someone is actually playing the role of dipshit liberal know-it-all? This must be a bit and I fell for it.
And now an "I know you are what am I!" comeback attempt?
Are you actually in grade school?
Also I'm a She not a he, "buddy."
Part of being a communist is recognizing what it means to even be "authoritarian." It means (among many other things) that you have examined that word and it's various meanings and how it holds up to what's really happening in the material world, and how it relates to the way societies actually work. Not just some nebulous "vibes" regarding what kind of images float around in our heads when the word is spoken. In other words, materialism vs idealism.
I doubt you could find a single communist who believes that modern Russia is communist because it isn't. We all can agree that it is not. Likewise I think every communist you could find would say that modern Russia is at best a disgusting capitalist disgrace to its Soviet history. But to call it a "dictatorship" especially without also recognizing other capitalist nations similarly as "dictatorships" is just a failure of understanding of what that word means, but I won't say more on it because ordnance_qf already did. So let's move on to "support" of Russia. As a communist (Marxist Leninist, aka "tankie") I do NOT support Russia in its capitalist endeavors. Again, I doubt you can find a communist who does. But I can still look at Russia's position on the world stage at this time and see that because of its material interests (and not because it's "the good guy" - it isn't, and not because it's current government has noble intentions - they don't), it is supporting the global south in the latter's struggle against imperialism. And it is US imperialism that is the boot on the neck of the peoples of the Global South. For liberatory revolutions to be able to survive before being strangled in their nascency, the pressure of that boot must be reduced or better yet removed. What I support is Russia's undeniable help in facilitating that. Which is what we as communists mean by "critical support." We highly criticize Russia, but we support it in it's primary fight against the US, NATO, and Western Imperialism (which are all aspects of essentially the same thing) for the sake of revolutionary movements that would thrive were it not for western suppression.
I would agree with you that support of China is not a prerequisite of being a communist and there are many communists who do not (including many communists who the anticommunists on this instance would still call "tankies"). China doesn't "implement parts of communism" but China is a Socialist project (where the word "socialism" refers to the transitional stage away from capitalism and towards communism, since unfortunately communism cannot spring fully formed into place). You can be highly critical of China's socialism as many are, but at the very least capital does not enjoy a dictatorship in China as it does in so-called "liberal democracies." However, when you go on to say things like China is eradicating the identity of minorities or the implication that it is not a profoundly multicultural society, that is where I just have to firmly disagree and call "BS." Of course communism and a multicultural society do not exclude each other - they can't exclude each other, by definition. China is very far away from perfect, but to say it is against multiculturalism or worse that it is "eradicating the identity of minorities" is simply the repetition of lies that you were told, lies originating from a state that considers China its arch nemesis and despises it. It's propaganda. This can be confirmed even by going there. So by all means, criticize China, call it out for its actual faults, but find out first what they really are and do not perpetuate demonization, literal sinophobic falsehoods.
I went into a lot of detail in this response because I think that you and I (and therefore many "tankies") are not actually on very dissimilar tracks, and likewise I suspect with a lot of other people reading this thread. But there is just so much bad faith I see in threads like this, it makes it all but impossible to see the similar tracks. And I think that is often by design. Like another comment I responded to (and tons more I didn't) that just want to smear and demonize without even a hint of a desire to understand, but your comment clearly wasn't like that, and you expressed honest, valid (though towards the end, I would say gravely misled) concerns. I'd bet there are a lot of people who listen to the "tankies are evil red fash" noise and just assume that must be the case without any actual engagement and never actually take the chance to understand the actual position. Those of us who genuinely want sincere, unselfish human flourishing, should be able to find that common ground to actually suss out our positions and learn. But the smarmy and smug anti-tankie crowd do not want to learn and they do not want others to learn. Fortunately many still will, despite them.
Death to America is a saying that goes back much further than Bin Laden, and there have been many good reasons for many people to say it. I'm sure many of the people indigenous to the land (that wasn't "America" to them) had a probably rather similar phrase and said it probably rather often as that entity commenced with their genocide. And since that time, it's not as if there hasn't been a lack of good reasons to call for the destruction of the settler-colonial project responsible for the worst imperialist cruelties since the British Empire (the immediate ancestor). But you might consider questioning why you seem to only associate the phrase with that one particular person.
edit: removing duplicate comment.
It's such an irony to me that people who call us "tankies" and say that we are somehow caricatures of communists, always make such caricatures out of themselves. Like, instead of engaging with any of FunkyStuff's very reasonable, calmly stated questions, you go off about how we ("tankies") just decided to be evil, and calling us ridiculous while behaving in such a ridiculous, blatantly and needlessly antagonistic way yourself. It's over the top.
Paraphrasing:
FunkyStuff: asks a calm, concise series of questions that are meant to help clarify the issue.
lunnrais: "See?! Look how frothing these evil, ridiculous lunatic tankies are!!"
And this after correctly recognizing that the red scare was a terrible witch hunt? But it was people like us, people who believe what we believe, that were the "witches" of that particular persecution. We are simply what most communists in the world look like, we believe what most communists in the world believe, people who have very clear and consistent views. But instead of honestly trying to engage or actually understand why "tankies" believe the things they do, you just smear us with lies and pretend that the position of Marxist-Leninist communists is just some bananas, made-up-on-the-fly, contrarian position, rather than one with deep foundations that have been developed over decades of intense thought and practice including by people fighting in the trenches for their own and others liberation. To you, were the Black Panthers "tankies"? Do you know about their mutual support of and with North Korea, or did they just decide to be "evil" to pwn the libs? Was Che Guevara a "tankie"? Is Michael Parenti? Were they all just ridiculous contrarians who liked the picture that reactionaries ("republicans") painted of them?
Is this sarcasm? The venn diagram that represents overlap of what nazis believe & value vs what the CIA believes & values may not be a perfect circle, but it's fairly close.
When a person sees no value in challenging their misconceptions, but only a threat to be shunned, it makes sense they would say that, yeah.
And just to add, if you somehow missed it like I did (until just a minute ago), @davel@lemmy.ml provided a ton of information debunking the Uyghur "genocide" myth right here in this very thread. He just did a great favor for any well-meaning liberals who actually want to find out more about what the situation really is in Xinjiang, he basically did yall's homework for you.
No it's not. A commune within a communist society would not at all exist within a hostile context but in one that nurtures it. Likewise a billionaire's corporation like Bezos' amazon dot com does not exist in a naturally hostile context under capitalism, it exists in a context that literally would not allow it to fail, propping it up at all costs. The banks that should have gone under and been utterly annihilated in 2008 were instead propped up and rewarded for their complete failure and sheer incompetence to the extent that mass amounts of wealth were siphoned away from working class to keep them afloat.
Civilization at all levels has always required profound amounts of cooperation to come into being, to continue to exist, and to thrive. Civilization exists only because of cooperation, not because of competition. Competition has always existed too, but has been more of a hindrance than a benefit to civilization and certainly not a requirement like cooperation is. The cult-like worship of competition is something that the capitalists have fostered and spread for the obvious reason that widespread belief in this lie is beneficial to them. I would urge you not to fall for a very obvious and simple-minded ploy.
Gibberish.
Well, the most serious lie fortunately has the most material that thoroughly proves its falsehood. The following link contains more links to many such resources: https://xinjiangahr.carrd.co/ It's a place to start, both if you want just immediate proof that there is no genocide as well as if you want to learn more about what really has been going on in Xinjiang.
Even though they still are obligated to call it a spy balloon because The Narrative is still officially that it was, even western media have quietly admitted that despite flying across the continent, the balloon did absolutely no spying and actually appeared to be utterly incapable of doing any spying. Weird, how inefficient! And seriously, anyone who has even a passing knowledge of weather balloons or spycraft would have told you this from the beginning, as many did. https://xcancel.com/Reuters/status/1674507379306557462
No, Winnie the Pooh is not banned in China and simply looking around a bit for things that exist in China confirms this. Telling people who live in China that people in the US believe Pooh is banned will result in laughter. This is in China, does it look banned? https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/attractions/adventures-winnie-pooh/ There was a racist caricature image/meme that along with portraying Xi as Pooh also portrayed Obama as the Tigger character. (I would hope no one here would need explaining why both of those are extremely racist). That specific racist image was officially censored online, but censoring racism is a good thing, and again, Pooh the character, the franchise, or anything else like that, none of it banned. That it was is just another silly lie. Though the whole of reddit (for example) believes the lie because it aligns with the rest of the bullshit they think they know about China which is just straight up false.
China's infamous "Social Credit Score" also isn't real: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/ There is a kind of rating system of businesses that allows people to score them based on how well they are a service to the community they're in, but seeing as most people would recognize that as a good thing, the sinophobic propagandists won't tell you that, but instead fabricate yet another bogus story to paint China as a boogeyman. This one is especially galling because all the scary things they made up with this one actually has a much worse version that is reality in the west. It's such a blatant case of projection it's jokerifying.
If .worlders could see hexbear and lemmygrad, they'd have an aneurysm. But then some of them would recover and look further into it and realize the commies are right. But that is of course why they're not allowed to see it, as you said.
That's expecting too much from a capitalism defender, I'm afraid.