purpleworm [none/use name]

Even the adults cannot resist its siren song for even a day, it turns out

I don’t get how you can have this pretense of political seriousness after immediately using the term “masses of NPCs.”

I feel like it could be a joke about Klan robes (which is also meant to look like a ghost, so I guess it’s what you said).

I don’t even understand what you’re insinuating. The DPRK’s goal is to be sanctioned? They wouldn’t be doing things differently if they weren’t sanctioned? You know they violate the sanctions constantly, and often it’s just to do some small amount of normal trade, right?

I don’t like Juche, but the point of it in this context isn’t to avoid trading with countries, and indeed to considers it better to be able to trade with countries. The goal is to be able to survive not being able to trade in the case where that’s the unfortunate reality, something that was only solidified by the experience of the Arduous March. Strategically, it is obviously something they should be maintaining and one of the main reasons they survived.

A) If Le Monde is RT, NYT is Hamas

B) Yeah, the US military is full of disgusting fascists. Do you think that the leftist response to that fact is “Oh, well if the US military does it, that must mean it’s cool for other people to do it too, because we believe the US military is a legitimate thing that should continue to exists and not be ripped to atoms”?

Of course, your equivalence isn’t that strong when you consider that groups like Azov, which were full of open pogromists (see the origin of the “orc” meme) went from being an openly and doctrinally fash paramilitary to formally folded into the military, where their influence was allowed to spread and members were even tasked with doing things like representing Ukraine to the Greek parliament for some reason.

When some barrack-room boys’ club has a picture leaked of them brandishing Swastikas in the US, there’s a scandal and sometimes people are fired or there is at least some formal apology as a garbage cover-story is offered. In Ukraine, it’s not a leak, it’s every other picture that is high enough resolution to make out what that funny patch is (spoiler, it’s a totenkopf or lightning bolts or something), or at least that had been true for some time into the war. Even their original logo that they partially rebranded from well into the war was more fascist iconography. But, like, what do you expect? Banderism is popular and has faced almost no challenge, down to that slogan, “slava ukra’ini!” which was another chestnut for OUN-B enjoyers passed right down from their father.

But let’s say that it was just like the US military socially. Any leftist should conclude that it should also be like the US military in terms of the prescription: disassembled with prejudice. Bringing the US up here serves no purpose, unless you want to say that their destruction is more urgent because it would do more good for the world, where I would agree with you, but the Nazi symbology has very, very little to do with it.

He’s a sick mafioso who wields reaction at his convenience, but what would you guess to be Contra’s stance on Navalny was to anyone who didn’t bring up Navalny’s actual politics? My guess is that she’d to like the other libs and call him a hero who was too brave for this world.

You joke but it seriously might take longer

I am not familiar with this part of the lore. Who does she support and what does she say about them? I assume you’re not just talking about the usual people like that transmasc porn actor.

I once went through my stance on this issue and got a very sincere response that what I said “sounds like Kremlin talking points.” I asked the person if they’ve ever actually listened to or read a translation of what the Kremlin says beyond the extremely clipped paraphrasings on NPR and such, and they said no. It’s impressive that they could recognize the sound of something they had never heard.

Fortunately for me, I have actually read and listened to speeches by Putin, and could explain to them some of what Russia says regarding Ukraine and the US and the degree to which I think they are correct or incorrect (e.g. Putin does like using revanchist rhetoric and I deeply despise that, and we don’t need to talk about his social views).

Anyway, I think the place to start with such people if you’re going to talk to them again is to say that reactionaries can and do opportunistically tell the truth. If you’re speaking to an American, ou can use any number of things they’d probably be familiar with from Presidential campaigns in the US, where Republican called Biden a senile old fool and they were completely right (but were not speaking from any sort of principled objection). Reactionaries have platforms based on lies that require them to lie a lot, but that doesn’t mean that they are devils who are forced to speak only in lies.

So like when Putin says he wants to get rid of Ukro-Nazis, he is almost certainly telling the truth. He doesn’t have any problem with fascists, but in Ukraine overwhelmingly the most dedicated enemies of Russia are going to be the hardline nationalists, including the Banderites. That doesn’t mean he has any interest in stopping Russo-Nazis, though clearly he also can find them to be a problem for political reasons, from Navalny to Wagner (eventually, after far too long).

You are right. In her most recent video she calls herself a liberal and this time she seems to mean it, even if she can’t fully remove the smirk from her face as she says it. And she keeps punching left for no reason and in ways that shouldn’t even make sense to a liberal who has, like, actually talked to a Marxist before, even for one tweet.

She supports the only opposition that matters: democrats and socdem video essayists

Trotsky, the inventor of the term “campist”, thought that the trial in the process of decapitating the CPUSA would be a great platform to offer testimony to warn the world of the evils of Stalinism and tried to work with the US government to testify. It only fell through because they decided they had no use for him.

It’s my favorite thing when neoliberal slime appropriate the stupidest elements of Trotskyism.

Also, I have no respect for anyone who uses the word “oligarch” to mean “Asiatic-style capitalist” and I struggle to conceive how professed anticapitalists can still like her. Well, of course I can, she’s part of their consumer lifestyle brand, she’s an affectation of quippy, artsy, intellectualism that is so much more effective at bringing about real change by punching left over and over and over.

As far as I know, the stigma within some Jewish cultures against intermarriage (“shiksa,” etc.) has been provably relatively “successful,” but that doesn’t make it not an antisemitic trope, and indeed it’s one fash love to use. It still is one and I’d say you just shouldn’t call a Jewish person inbred unless they were doing racial purity politics which, well, actually you could still call the bulk of hardline zionists inbred by that metric, so I guess it’s a wash.

That said, I think he has only actually applied it to what amount to a particular subcultural strain of hog in Israel (where he is using it to mean chauvinist hick) and the IDF like you said, where I don’t remember the context. There was another time where he laughed at some Jewish students reporting on Fox that they were called inbred by campus protesters, but Hasan said it was because of the absurdity of the interview (which I think is fair, it was very mellow dramatic for zero evidence or corroboration of an event that “happened” in broad daylight in a busy space with cameras around).

But yeah, there’s a repeated issue with reporting on him using the Destiny wiki/subreddit as a source, which tells you about how much real research his right-opposition tends to do.

As in it would take a posture like China if it wasn’t sanctioned? Mostly, yeah, but I can’t imagine them playing nice even in word with all of the RoK, RoC, and Japan (though their hostility would be less materially substantial because they’d surely try to maintain trade, so like the US to China pre-Trump 2). I think they would still (correctly) call them imperial running-dogs. They’d probably take China’s attitude toward states like Israel, though.

Yes, but because it doesn’t substantively have diplomatic relations with most of the world, it has very little incentive to do anything but swing at opponents (speaking truth the vast majority of the time, granted). I don’t think anyone could seriously assert that in a world where it wasn’t sanctioned it would remotely resemble its current position in terms of presenting geopolitical philippics, and would probably be “stern condemnation” this and that action at best toward anything but its enemies in East Asia (who it might retain this same fury toward), and would often be more conciliatory.

It’s definitely nice that someone is saying it who isn’t directly embroiled in the conflict, though.

I appreciate your vigilance, but this is an alt for a different user. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than exist in prolewiki/lemmygrad drama.

I’m not like a Hoxhaist or anything, unlike Bland. I wasn’t linking the article for the cursory defense of Albania, but the collection of direct quotes from official DPRK publications that directly contradict the most basic ideas of Marxism. Maybe I should have specified, but it just seemed to me like that aspect was obviously irrelevant.

I’m probably not helping your view of me, but I don’t think the DPRK even counts as revisionist, because a revisionist is someone who claims the mantle of Marxism and involves specifically Marxist concepts, but also warps or contradicts basic premises of it. The DPRK more or less stopped claiming to be Marxist in the '90s and it’s also very difficult to identify anything about them that is specifically Marxist (or even socialist, since they explicitly support the permanent perpetuation of class society) rather than a more generic national liberation project with certain strong progressive elements. The article goes over all of this in a way that is, as far as I can tell, pretty irrefutable.

It’s not like I don’t support them; I think that if they are able to keep surviving and their bellicose turn over the last few years (relative to the RoK, not Ukraine, though obviously the latter is motivated by the former) doesn’t spell their destruction, they will probably represent a historically progressive force for the rest of my life, though that recent turn is kind of a distressing deviation from their entire previous history since the unofficial end of the Korean War. I could also make harsher criticisms, but they are off-topic because the subject at hand is materialism, and I only intended to address an inaccuracy and not disparage people who have been fighting for their lives as a geopolitically progressive force for 70+ years. If someone was repeating reactionary myths about them (for example, about Laura Ling or any of the ~5 American so-called “hostages” arrested since the war – all blatant criminals) I would refute them just as readily, if not more so.

If you can educate me on this subject and show me the error of my ways, I would truly love to be incorrect. That said, I do have a real interest in the DPRK and am not just mouthing off because the Kims won’t press the communism button.

Thank you for your service o7

A big company doing basic customer support via discord is wild. Talk about offloading expenses.

I think at that point in the Cold War, with the power of the global socialist movements, it would have been incorrect to basically kamikaze into (adequately strategic targets in) America, but it’s not as unreasonable as it sounds out of context, and certainly not as senseless as the ideas of post-being-tortured-out-of-his-mind Posadas. If it actually worked, that’s NATO being nearly caved in without a strong causus belli against the rest of the socialist world. The main issue is that it probably would not work.

I have no idea if he actually believed either version of what we said, I just think it would be more forgivable than it might sound, though still incorrect.