i have never owned a vehicle that was manufactured more recently than 2009 so I didn’t even know this was a thing that existed

also I like how the only legible bumper sticker on the liberal car is 26.2, which means the driver is an accomplished marathon runner. Was the prompt just something like “a prius with a bunch of liberal stickers” and somehow marathons are woke?

what amazes me is that Marx always seems to have a response to any criticism. But maybe that just means no one has changed their criticisms in over 150 years. I still hear liberals misunderstand the labor theory of value even though Marx describes it in the first 5 pages of Capital.

i had the same thing happen to me. I asked them whose theory I should read instead and they said Thomas Jefferson. Ok so an even deader guy and also he owned slaves.

one time a liberal told me that Marx and Lenin were outdated because they wrote in a time where everything was made in factories by factory workers

I like how sometimes you can only tell which Yakuza game is which based on the differences in the healthbar

What we need is a healthy balance and there’s no better example than the greatest country of America. We have capitalism, like my dad’s balloon factory. And we have socialism, like the Pentagon.

My experience lines up with yours. No one in real life cares.

Just now? Am I somehow posting in the 1960s?

I would say that a left space doesn’t need to specifically be ML or whatever, but it does need to be able to function without endless meaningless arguments about China and the USSR. If more than even 1% of a left space is dedicated to relitigating socialist movements from a century ago, then the plot has been lost. Or if people are quoting Adrian Zenz, or throwing around the word tankie, or bringing up Tiananmen square over and over.

There’s probably good discussion about those topics that can be productive, but none of it is very relevant to leftist movements in the west among English speaking people. If a leftist space can’t get over that, then it’s gonna fall apart

Yeah like does he mean identity theft or fraud or something? Although this is Scott Adams so I could imagine him keeping his money in big sacks with a dollar sign.

there’s people in that thread saying every single thing I heard from people in real life when I finally came out as ace. Like that I simply have a personality disorder, that I should see a doctor, that I’m simply latching onto an identity to seem quirky. I’m nonbinary too (amab, kinda androgynous, leaning agender) so that makes it even more of a thing to scoff at for a lot of supposed allies I’ve had. Like yeah I know that my queerness is kinda invisible and that I don’t go through the same issues as someone who’s estranged from their parents for being gay, and I don’t have to deal with a heteronormative medical industry that acts as a barrier to transitioning. I know I don’t face the same kind of bigotry but for me that just means I should be an even stronger ally and support queer people even more, right? Not question everyone’s credentials for not being queer enough

Like I think asexuality is probably the most socially accepted queer identity because I think most people just assume ace folk are straight. Is that really acceptance though?

The assumption is ace-ness is heterosexuality waiting to be unfurled or something, it’s really gross. Or that you’re just a damaged straight. I’ve only been openly ace for like 2 years now and even the minor amounts of social tension I’ve gotten have been enough for me to start feeling uneasy around cishet folk.

yeah so I love my queer comrades and I hope y’all can stay strong. I got a lil emotional reading that thread since it’s like a confluence of every person I’ve encountered after coming out as ace. If you relate to anything I said just know you’re valuable and you’re not alone. I love my hexbear y’all

places like totse exemplify just how wild the early web was. Openly available instructions on how to hack an ATM or whatever, right there on a public forum. Coordination on what sort of crimes they’d commit too, like there was just open talk about drug trafficking. I don’t think anyone from totse was ever arrested but i wouldn’t be surprised

I don’t remember the first website, but I do remember my grandpa sitting at his desk showing me usenet. My grandpa was really cool and loved technology, he had a prodigy connection at home as far back as the 80s. I remember he had one of those cradles that you’d put a phone headset into and it would play dial tones, and that’s how you’d connect to the internet. He would even work from home using it sometimes, like sending emails and stuff. Grandpa was really cool, he had a Sputnik watchers badge too and apparently listened to it beeping as it passed overhead on his radio. He was just so different than most other older folks, he was very online and capable at using computers. He knew about software and kept up to date on innovations. Just a cool guy. Also he bowled 299 twice in his life, one of those times after he had part of his heart removed. He ruled.

I don’t even remember what he showed me on usenet. I was too young to read very well, but I was really impressed by it. It was those old monochrome CRT screens with the white text on black backgrounds. Yeah, he had Oregon Trail too lol.

If I had to guess the first actual website I used, it was probably during school? Probably the netscape homepage. Macs were ubiquitous in schools back then, or at least my school had them.

japanese people have been completely checked out on politics since the 90s recession but I really don’t blame them. There’s nothing to hope for. The LDP has had such a stranglehold on governance that opposition parties effectively act in coordination with them. The opposition parties have long since been little vassals with the strongest disagreement usually coming from the centrists and centrist leaning social democrats. So while I am disappointed seeing younger japanese people leap headfirst into crypto-fascist nationalism, I mean I can’t say I’m too surprised given the landscape. Younger people aren’t offered anything else and have been told to eat shit, go to work, keep your head down, never retire. Like the closest thing to grassroots political organizing that Japan has had in decades was Shinzo Abe getting ventilated.

There was some amount of interest in the whole Chuudou Kaikaku thing, the merger with CDP and Komeito, but that seems like it was just cobbling together any sort of response to how popular Takaichi is. She’s got a genuine fandom in Japan in a grim sort of mirror to Trump’s popularity. This is one of the first times I’ve seen younger people give a shit about the national diet. I know there are cool Japanese people, like they do have (comparatively) strong labor protections largely due to union activity. And yeah this was bound to happen because there’s a lot more immigration into Japan in recent years, and the yen is floundering with inflation. This was bound to result in a reactionary resurgence if there wasn’t a viable left wing opposition, which there never really has been. I think this should be a lesson that in the absence of anything else, absence of viable working class organization, that western-aligned liberal democracies will naturally gravitate towards reaction when there are economic issues such as labor shortages and inflation.

I mean furthermore the western powers want someone like Takaichi because they want someone to be a bullwark against China, and she’s a fascist lunatic so I guess she works

this is spiritually correct but Hokkaido is only similar to Scotland in reality based on their alcoholic consumption and weather. Well I suppose they also speak an incomprehensible dialect and eat entrails. Actually this is correct, nevermind. Hokkaido is Scotland.

I’m at a point where I don’t even think communists need to be more specific unless they are actively a member of an organization that follows a particular strategy deliberately aligned with whatever tendency. As in, unless a person is physically performing leftist action in the real world I don’t see major distinctions between disparate groups of people in the west based on vague affinity for certain political philosophies.

Like what even is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist if it’s a person whose primary affiliation with like minded people is a discord channel or a sub reddit? Is it just a posting style or something you can announce affiliation with all willy nilly. Like I’m reminded of the libertarians who have all these goofy subgroups like ancaps, argorists, minarchists, etc and yet these groups have no consequence outside of forum arguments.

I’m not excluding myself in this by the way. I haven’t done proper work in a few years, and even when I did I floated through both Marxist and anarchist groups so the specific ideological label thing never sat right with me. I’m just communist. Theory is fun to talk about and argue over but like we’re all in the same boat here

You forgot the most important cohort of this coalition, which are billionaire pedophiles who believe in nothing. Those are the most important ones to keep happy, the other parts of the coalition you mentioned are rabid dogs whose purpose is to disrupt any attempt at forming a viable left-wing opposition

this man is Canadian

How pudding headed is a person if their political deal breaker, aside from everything else, is trans people existing. How is it that important to anyone who’s cis?

“I want a more equal society and wanna end fascism but my most important issue regardless of anything else, including my own livelihood, is ensuring trans people are never accepted or allowed to live. Thus I am forced to endorse every fascist position that actively harms me and everyone around me.”

Honestly the transphobia thing seems like some chuds are just embarrassed about how chud they are, so they focus on one of the more socially accepted forms of bigotry to carry water for how they don’t actually care about ICE or abortion or whatever.

Yeah you’re getting at why I’m confused too. The PSL has been against the TPLF, or at least certain members have criticized them and Zenawi, but I don’t see how that connects to denying the Tigray genocide of the 2020s. The article summarizes Puryear’s statements like this:

Gliding past all this background, Puryear insinuates that TPLF arose, not from decades of Tigrayan struggle, or from a decade-plus of theorization, by Ethiopians, of their own country’s characteristics; but as a recent and erroneous byproduct of the ‘pro-socialist’ revolution of ’74, led by blameless army officials. This way, he can make a few idealistic students, naive enough to take Lenin serious about self-determination, into the sole efficient cause of a nationwide movement. Not the people themselves — the wrong-headed leadership.

I have no idea how wrong or right that is since I’m not very knowledgeable about Ethiopian history but I didn’t see anything in the Anarchist Library article that denies or supports Tigray genocide. Just that Eugene Puryear doubts the efficacy and intentions of the TPLF. Furthermore Puryear said this in 2012, whereas the Tigray genocide is regarded as occurring years later, starting in 2020. It seems like such a stretch to go from criticizing a party to denying genocide.