Jones Manoel’s essay is so good on this: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Western_Marxism,_the_fetish_for_defeat,_and_Christian_culture

There really is a fetishization of defending “the underdog”. So like, David in David and Goliath is somebody to look up to not because of what he’s fighting for, but because he’s so weak and Goliath is so strong and he’s trying anyway.

Another example of this is the contrast in how the People’s Republic of Korea is treated compared to Palestine. Both nations engaged in the same struggle — the anti-colonial fight for national independence. In the case of Korea, the struggle was made from a socialist perspective. Korea succeeded, despite being a country that is fractured by imperialism. It has an economy that is relatively strong, with a reasonably high level of industrialization, a very strong national army and capacity to launch nuclear weapons. So, Korea is not a defenseless nation. Palestinians are a people who are deeply oppressed, in a situation of extreme poverty, that don’t have a national economy because they don’t have a national state. They don’t have an army or military or economic power. Therefore, Palestine is the total incarnation of the metaphor of David vs. Goliath, except that this David doesn’t have a chance of beating Goliath in political and military conflict. Therefore, almost everyone in the international left likes Palestine. People become ecstatic looking at those images — which I don’t think are very fantastic — of a child or teenager using a sling to launch a rock at a tank. Look, this is a clear example of heroism but it is also a symbol of barbarism. This is a people who do not have the capacity to defend themselves facing an imperialist colonial power that is armed to the teeth. They do not have an equal capacity of resistance, but this is romanticized. Western leftists like this situation of oppression, suffering and martyrdom.

I’m not looking forward to living through the empire nosediving into the concrete, but I am looking forward to it being dead so that something better can be made.

Oh, phew, okay. ❤️

bring this up everytime

Before it was X, I use to hang out on Twitter. It was (to the credit of some of the people there) a significant help for educating me further left. However, I did sometimes see things that in retrospect, I’m not sure I’d align with even now, as an intentional marxist-leninist. The way people sometimes approached dialogue on gender was one of them, but I pretty much never commented on it on Twitter, that I can recall. Partly because it seemed to be a very charged thing with people who had high follower counts ready to weaponize retweets, ratio’ing, and so on, to undermine any attempt at discussion into a heated dunking session. And partly because I was trying to shut my mouth more and learn and not be the “um ackshully” guy.

By this point, I feel a fair bit more confident in the views that I have. I was still nervous of posting what I did with how upvoted this thread is and it probably coming across as challenging it in some way, but I figured that with how this place is historically and the interest in serious analysis, maybe deeper discussion can be safely and calmly had. It was a genuine challenge putting into words what my concern is, I’m still not sure I explained it very well, and it comes from far more than just this thread (but as I alluded to - my main experience with this kind of thing was on Twitter, not here).

So you can see it as “bring this up everytime” if you want, but that’s far from the truth of what I’m doing here. I tried really hard to bring up what I wanted to say while making it abundantly clear how important it is to challenge and dismantle patriarchy. And when I said what I did about husbands and wives, it came from a real place of pain of seeing up close how a woman can, despite encouragement from her grown kids to the contrary, cling to an unhealthy relationship dynamic rooted in patriarchal teaching, even when she chronically has clear issues with it.

Are you saying my post made you uncomfortable?

Just remember that Cuba endured even when the USSR fell. They have been through a lot and survived. And the empire right now is more desperate than ever to reassert itself while also being weaker than in the past. A reminder on the empire being a paper tiger from Mao:

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10400266/7611152

When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.

Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.

It seems that the countries of the Americas, Asia and Africa will have to go on quarrelling with the United States till the very end, till the paper tiger is destroyed by the wind and the rain.

That was back when the US was a lot stronger than it is now. It still has claws and fangs, but they are growing weaker and the anti-imperialist alternatives are growing stronger.

So as Mao says, we should take the threats seriously from a tactical standpoint. But in the long-term view, the empire has no future and the state of things now shows how Mao’s prediction is increasingly becoming a reality, as a result of the careful struggle and tactics of anti-imperialist forces over decades.

I feel like this misses the point of what I was saying, so I’m not really sure what to say to it.

I assume this is supposed to be a jokey thing, but I’m gonna say, I’ve never quite understood this approach to feminist / anti-patriarchal thought and there are times people are more serious about it (though this is one of the only times I can recall seeing it come up on here - mainly I remember it as a Twitter thing).

Like there is a lot of damage done by men under patriarchy and patriarchy needs to be dismantled, but patriarchy isn’t quite like white supremacy, for example, where the idea of whiteness is made up purely to do a racial hierarchy. There’d still be some concept of gender even without patriarchy. So it’s more like conceptions of gender become very distorted and narrowed under patriarchy (like erasure of nonbinary people). Taken in this context, the “haha, don’t men suck?” online stuff can look a bit strange to me. Because “men” isn’t the suck inherently; patriarchal men is. And beyond that, the broader system/culture of patriarchy, not just how individual men behave. It’s also a thing that women can be enablers of patriarchy / help reproduce it, such as in how they raise kids, how they encourage or discourage other women to act, etc.

The complexity of it, and the multi-pronged reproduction of it, is probably one of the reasons it seems so hard to get past. I wonder about how much it really furthers the cause when there’s a pretense of “women venting about men” being the same thing as promoting feminism / anti-patriarchy. That’s the best way I can think to put it at the moment anyway. I mean, there are standup comics who do bits that say men this and women that, and roast both, but it seems to only entrench status quo ideas of gender roles rather than challenge them.

Men need to see it as possible to be something different than the patriarchal role. Women need to see it as possible to liberate from the role patriarchy thrusts upon them. I’m not gonna be naive and say they can just organize with each other on this; women’s organizations are needed because men as a whole are not going to voluntarily give up on patriarchy. The occasional man who is trying to be better is not enough.

But I guess my concern boils down to that stuff like this is little different than the standup comic roasting X gender and it’s not really going anywhere beyond that. There are wives who complain about their husbands for decades but still cling to a patriarchal “man in charge” dynamic that is part of the source of their complaints in the first place; I’m not saying it’s their fault, but is a thing like this going to lead them more toward liberation or just give them a brief catharsis like their complaining does?

I guess Trump wants more US bases destroyed.

So what were US business people doing in Kenya with Ecuadorian intelligence. 🤔 Surely nothing untoward, the empire would never…

The fact that one of the top comments is:

If this were mainstream media the title would be: “China quietly saved the world last month… but at what cost?”

with 45k likes, is refreshing to see.

That said, I watched it through and I’m not sure I think any of the possible “theories for why” that he came up with are all that solid. I think he is looking at it too much from the assumption that China is behaving like a cynical hegemon (the west) would.

I think a 5th explanation is that China’s international policy is more about stability than anything else and watching the world come apart is not in alignment with that. And though the cynical business view might argue that’s because of how China is “the factory of the world”, how tied up its economy is in producing stuff that other countries buy, China is also (in my estimation of how they function, though I am open to correction if somebody has data that would suggest otherwise) one of the countries most prepared/equipped to weather crisis. So if they were thinking about it cynically (for example, as an imperialist would), wouldn’t it benefit them more to watch a global oil crisis happen and then swoop in to take advantage of the chaos?

Whereas if they are viewing it from a pro-social standpoint, then stability is the largest benefit for everyone. And given their cultural tendency toward humility over boasting, naturally they wouldn’t want to be going around trying to brag about doing it.

Stability can also benefit them defensively. The imperialists are practiced at exploiting crises to instigate color revolutions and other such fuckery. Maintaining stability keeps them on a track of weaning the world off of dependency on the empire. Mass instability could create rapid changes in power structures in other countries, some of which may descend right into open fascism and go on the warpath, along with rupturing the global economy and putting China in a more tenuous position as to its influence.

If I were to put a name to it, I’d posit that their strategy is something like “weather the storm” (as a socialist fortress). The empire is already in the process of declining. The main question is how much damage it will do on the way out and how desperate it may get to reassert power. When China has more power over the levers of stability, that means there is less chaos the empire can directly cause in its desperation, which deprives the empire of one of its tools for regime change.

Makes sense.

While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”

I can’t help but wonder if he’s doing this out of pettiness because the president of Occupied Korea didn’t go along with everything he wanted. But the material analysis is probably the more accurate one and his petulant stuff is more for show in this case.

The dynamic sometimes reminds me of times being a customer dealing with greedy video game companies. Some of the customers act like they have power (“vote with your wallet”) even though they really don’t; some side with the company and insult the customers who have complaints; some keep their head down and just try to grin and bear it; and a few are quietly of the same, or similar, class interests as the company but act like they are just another customer (such as having a privileged insider view of new things coming, or being petite or regular bourgeoisie in their day to day).

Meanwhile the ones who consistently bring up issues are often: ignored, lose patience and quit, browbeaten by other cult-like players into quitting, or turn into a crank chronic complainer persona who is always unhappy but nevertheless keeps spending money on the game so is easily ignored by the company.

It’s not quite the same, but the underlying thread of “people speak about it like they have power when they don’t” is very similar. If someone did a study on video games and feedback, I bet they’d find that the majority of the time, decisions made have little to nothing to do with player feedback and that on occasions when they correlate, they are more about coincidental alignment of interests than a conscious effort on the part of the company to be guided by player desires. Nevertheless, some companies make a big marketing shtick about how good they are at listening to players. But I’ve yet to meet a game with regular updates that didn’t continuously piss off some segment of the playerbase, often by doing things that only make any sense as either greed or incompetence, as opposed to simply disagreements in the minutiae of gameplay design preference.

Hell, even single player games manage this sometimes. I remember The Outer Worlds, a game making mockery of the excesses of capitalism, with a parent company that produced a different, extra edition of the game a while after it had been out with a couple of DLCs too. This different edition was, on paper, going to have improvements compared to the original, but in practice, has major graphics/performance issues. It wasn’t even needed in the first place. The original was fine. But publishers, via the desires of investors, are allergic to viewing a game as “complete”.

I could probably ramble and rant for days about the asinine direction video games went in, brought on by our good friend capitalism, who somehow manages to suck the joy out of things that are explicitly designed to be joyful.

according to Tasnim News Agency, citing an informed military source.

This part:

Personnel have reportedly protested inadequate food supplies, with meals reduced to as little as half a cup of rice and two pieces of meat. The carrier’s laundry facilities have also been out of service for two weeks, while mold in shower areas has caused fungal infections among crew members.

Explains the violence. It’s kinda stunning to me. It feels like it shouldn’t surprise me, considering how the US tends to behave, historically. But like, this is a level of unsustainable that is so evident, you can see it from space and they’re just… they send a guy to go address the complaints with words??? Does the US have anyone left in charge who can think past the next financial quarter? Or are they all cowed by Trump and because he can’t think past the next happy meal, they just have to shovel his unsustainable whims?

I guess I am still learning what imperial “decline” means, as an existing phenomenon.

The off ramp is dead simple: leave the region.

But since they are dead set against doing that of their own volition, they act like it’s hypersonic missile science figuring out how to end the conflict.

It reminds me of when the Yankee capitalist media acts like economics is super hard and confusing when people want healthcare, and then the imperialists just press the big red Funding button when the Pentagon wants more money for war. (I know it’s a little more complicated than that, but the general idea of how priorities work.)

If you mean the emojis, probably meant to represent “um, actually” or “well, actually” - the thing where one person corrects another in a condescending or egotistical way, usually associated with people making a whole identity out of being the “smartest person in the room”.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with correcting something that is incorrect. But if you combine it with how smarmy and arrogant western chauvinists can get about their position in the world, it can get annoying.

Is Trump weighing his options for using up the rest of the US weapons stockpile attacking China?

Yeah, I’ve read Carl Marks, he was the guy who said we need to leave our mark in the world, thus the name.