So, additional thoughts, doing it as a general comment cause I don’t want to single anyone out and there are a number who are defending it as satire:

Problem is, it’s terrible at being satire because it’s not a fair representation of what people tend to say when they point at system level causes of things. The common point about systems isn’t “nobody who does wrong holds any responsibility for wrongdoing.” The point is more like that if you focus your energy more on hating a particular agent of imperialism than you do the imperialist organization they work for and the imperialist institutions that create and maintain it, then you are missing the point of where the problems come from and so will be unequipped to challenge power and will be easily led around from one controversy to the next. You will be able to rage at symptoms, without ever determining cause.

It’s also worth noting that narratives focusing on individual blame get used for racism and part of where focus on systemic problems comes from, is as a means of pushing back against racist narratives. It doesn’t always translate 1:1 in reverse, so you have to be careful of framing it too much as general principle. Emphasizing the oppressor as victim in their own way may come out sounding stupid if you’re trying to challenge power, but emphasizing the oppressed as victim is critical to recognizing their plight. OTOH, some people who act as oppressor at one point in their lives could go down a rung and end up more in the oppressed camp at another point. Whether because of a change in power or because they served their usefulness to the oppressor camp and are no longer needed.

Beware of universal principle thinking in general. Much of what western-influenced-thought takes as universal principle is simply an expression of the dominant ideology.

It’s only a matter of time until the irony poisoning is fatal and he becomes one of those “I left the left because they were mean to me” people.

I had this thought like “there isn’t an ounce of creativity left in this dying empire”. Bit hyperbolic on my part, but then I was like, wait, can this be an actual observed phenomenon. Obviously there’s some creativity left in the imperial core, but if we’re going with a dialectical materialist view rather than viewing creativity as some kind of magic well you tap into, it does seem possible that a whole state project and embedded culture could become largely stagnant, creatively.

Given that the empire has not been directly confronted yet (even if anti-imperialist efforts are making its power recede) why would it bother to change its ways? It’s using the same playbook that has worked for it for decades. And which was used similarly by colonialism for hundreds of years. If we look at creativity as a response to circumstances, it’s still in the stages of finding out the limits of its playbook. So even though people seem to be increasing in awareness of the playbook, in part due to it going more mask off about it, it hasn’t yet faced the kind of total defeat that would force it to reconsider.

I had no real idea about any of it until I listened to the Blowback podcast season on Korea. I’d heard inklings on Korea before that in commie circles, but nothing all that detailed. It really puts into context how much brutality Korea has faced, first at the hands of imperial Japan and then at the hands of US occupation.

Video games + audio book is absolutely goated combo

For sure. I’ve done this combo with theory in audio form sometimes, in order to help motivate me to do it / help with concentration. As long as it’s rote enough gameplay, it can actually help me take in the theory better. Though I only do it as an occasional thing because it makes what would normally be relaxing more like work.

Ever since reddit had the incident where they screwed over API / third party use and reddit mods tried to rally and protest it (and got shown how little power they hold over the website), it seems to have gone fast downhill toward the same sort of trajectory as Musk’s twitter: more openly reactionary/fash. My suspicion is that some of the mods who got axed by admins during that incident were mods who were at least mildly more true-believer liberal and so had some power of pushback. But with them in shambles, it left a power vacuum for opportunists to fill: the kind of opportunists who wouldn’t care much if they’re filling a role that’s only vacant because the admins are trash, so long as they can use it for narrative control.

Not to say it was good before then, any more than twitter was good before Musk. Just that it seems to have gotten more mask off, much like the administration of the US.

Video games have long been my go to for active relaxation (though the persistently obnoxious situation of the industry is part of what moved me politically >.<). For more passive chillout, ASMR. Fiction writing can be nice for creative expression.

I still want to learn knitting, but got stuck on technique the last time I tried. I just have to sit down with it for a while and be patient with myself about it.

Happy Birthday. Did I capitalize correctly? Oh god, I capitalized both words. I’m a liberal, aren’t I…

BDSM is an interesting one. I admit I don’t know enough about the actual practice of it. And by that, I don’t mean what people say is the ideal practice of it. I mean the actual practice of it in practice behind closed doors. How do you properly evaluate a thing like that when it’s behind closed doors in the first place? And when the privacy of sex is so important to so many people?

This is where I figure community (in the meaning of interdependence and accountability) can make a difference, insofar as people talking to each other and feeling safe saying stuff like “my partner isn’t being respectful enough or is being pushy, especially about dangerous acts” and having a process they can go through to try to improve it, or be advised to end the sexual partnership if necessary. But in the transition, not having that, I’m not sure what the answer is. What comes to mind is having public services for people to go to that act in a similar manner, but are a bit less personalized than community systems of accountability. Not only public services to go to about misconduct, but also for education.

Leaving it to liberal individualism definitely has its dangers. There are likely people who have been raped or abused in a context that they went into thinking of as BDSM but which did not actually follow proper BDSM practices. This is a kind of thing that needs to be addressed, regardless of BDSM, vanilla, or other. Part of the problem of the liberal capitalist system is it doesn’t tend to take any of it seriously, tends to treat things as a bothsidesism “one person’s word against the other”, and acts like promoting consent will be enough.

Were that same thinking applied to sports, we’d know immediately how absurd it looks when players are fouling each other and no one steps in to put a stop to it. Not to say sex is quite like competitive sports, but just to use it as an example since it’s something that is done as a public show. And even in public, with many eyes on it including cameras, people still misbehave. Sex may not be competitive, but it can easily have people wanting different things and it can easily have imbalances of power in a relationship, and so of course problems are going to arise some of the time. And that’s not even getting into when people want, or think they want, something that is fundamentally risky or dangerous to do and so needs more thought put into consideration of it than “horny brain go brrrrrr.”

I could go on, but the conditions required for things to change, are large, and one of them is breaking liberals of the idea that guns are evil, and not simply a tool for demanding and maintaining political agency.

I think another is about the nature of legality and the constitution that I alluded to here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10312486/7571460

It is a subject to be cautious about in how we discuss it, but it is nevertheless important. If people view morality/ethical action as something the constitution is capable of doing a fine job at as long it’s actualized in its written principles, where will they have the impetus to challenge the colonial roots of it and, by extension, colonialism as a whole? For example, if they see Trump only as someone who is breaking from the constitution rather than seeing him as someone who is behaving much like the genocidal “founding fathers” did: using legality mixed with narrative as a means of enacting their exploitative goals, not as a means of liberation.

Interesting. I wonder then what makes up such a dramatic difference in experience? In my experience with religion in the US, which is largely with Catholicism but somewhat with “protestant” Christianity too, it seems largely to be about what you’d expect for religion that is allowed to exist under a colonial project turned global empire: token liberalism in teachings here and there, maybe some stuff about charity, but largely devoid of any and all revolutionary potential (such as through liberation theology).

So you can see that anger of protests is not in itself a coherent political ideology with concrete demands, but you can’t see that raging at the people doing it in a fatalistic way that treats conditions and mindsets as static and inflexible is also not a coherent political ideology?

Is this is about the term puritan being misused to mean someone who is anti-sex when that’s not what it historically meant? I have a vague recollection of that being a thing, but I don’t know enough about it.

I’m going to say no but mainly because of how the question has been presented. I don’t like this framing of “largely responsible” because 1) it makes it sound like nazis don’t bear any significant responsibility for being nazis (it reads like it could be used to validate the rightist thing of “guess I have to go further to the right because the left is so annoying”), 2) it leaves out the material conditions that contribute to the development of fascism, nazism, etc., and 3) it lumps together liberals with “demsoc/anarchist” which can have meaningful distinctions to what they are in practice.

To say liberalism contributes now and historically, yes, but “largely responsible” is a mangled way to put it. I’m not sure in what regard anarchists would be contributing meaningfully, especially when considering how little power or influence they tend to have over anything. Liberalism has significant institutional power though.

Also, and this is something I have brought up before with other “questions” and will probably bring up again in the future because it continues to matter: This is worded like an unsupported claim rephrased as a question. A question way of putting it would be more like: “How much responsibility does X group bear for Y?”

you should give Mexican leadership a chance Unless you are yourself living in Mexico

That’s just not what I said though. The way you splice it gives it a different meaning than what I said. This is the reason I’m denying the framing that you’re using. Here is the exact phrasing I used:

I think you should give Mexican leadership a chance to react before you start flinging “I know better” insults. Unless you are yourself living in Mexico and believe you have a thorough enough understanding of its context to be weighing in, in this way.

I generally try to choose my words carefully (sometimes to an absurd degree, to be honest) and I won’t pretend I never mistakes in points of view or wording, but I couched it as I did for a reason.

The other parts of the sentences matter:

“I think you should give Mexican leadership a chance to react” (another way of saying this is, unless you are in a position to do organizational actions that can react to an anticipated full capitulation and try to head them off, what is to be gained from jumping to conclusions while events are in the middle of transpiring? what is lost from having some patience in observing before reacting if you don’t have the means to take advantage of a prediction?)

Then there is another component to it: “before you start flinging “I know better” insults.” (e.g. criticism based on what has occurred rather than what is anticipated to occur - how can you criticize a person or organization only for something they are predicted to do? again, what is to be gained from doing this?)

“Unless you are yourself living in Mexico and believe you have a thorough enough understanding of its context to be weighing in, in this way.” <- Again, this is the full sentence. For example, what if it’s the case that someone has seen Claudia Sheinbaum’s policies affect their life firsthand and part of where it’s coming from is anger from the impact of that? I don’t know this at the offset and as a westerner, I don’t want to be in the habit of jumping to conclusions about where people are from and why they are saying what they’re saying. It is an active effort to unlearn western chauvinist tendencies.

I’ll agree I could have worded it better (though I’m honestly not sure how at the moment), but your framing of it is also misleading in the way it chops it up into a meaning that it doesn’t otherwise represent. “You should give Mexican leadership a chance unless you are yourself living in Mexico” is a brand new sentence. And I don’t agree that saying “unless you have better information” would be an improvement because it doesn’t acknowledge bias to do with geography and lived experience. I was explicitly trying to acknowledge bias.

And no, acknowledging lived experience is not somehow anti-dialectical. It’s a part of material reality and a part of narrative, the same as many other things. Many things in life that we take for granted as true are derived in part from primary sources (people describing one thing or another happening). Science in general tries to get around the bias of this by cross-referencing sources, looking for commonalities and contradictions, where descriptions sync up with other information and where they don’t, etc.

But it is a major component of information gathering. It’s just not something to take for granted uncritically.

In a different setting I think it is fine to give critical support to Sheinbaum because she is much better than the alternatives. But this is Lemmygrad we don’t need to indulge in false hope that a bourgeoisie party will do anything other than capitulate to international capitalist interests.

I don’t see how waiting to see what happens before jumping to conclusions is false hope. I did not say “she’s going to save Mexico.”

Sheinbaum and her party are demsoc. Giving them a chance is giving demsocs a chance. She has been attempting to appease trump and expecting that to change is wishful thinking.

Russia is capitalist and yet is also anti-imperialist due to circumstances. We need to be looking at the contradictions, not single variables in isolation. But again, I did not say I “expect her to change”. What I do expect is that just because capitalists can be capitalists within one country does not always mean they will want to be subservient to capitalists from another country who want to take over and subjugate everybody there.

Maybe you will turn out to be right, but I will still maintain that it’s unwise to treat the future as already determined. There are situations (such as with weather predictions) where individuals and societies react to what is expected to occur, but this is in order to be able handle possible outcomes more effectively. It is not beneficial to go “I’m so mad that it snowed 12 inches” because there is a prediction a week from now for snow. However, being ready for the fact that it may snow is helpful.

I hope this clarifies sufficiently.

I think stink understood what I meant and it’s already resolved.

Are you really saying “give the dem-soc a chance”?

This is not what I said.

haven’t we seen this line enough from coup supporters to know it is cringe?

Also not what I said.

But for the sake of clarity, I will try to explain in context: This is a complicated situation as allying and interests go, and I believe solidarity in anti-imperialism should be more important than assuming the worst of those who are not ideal leaders. If the leadership of Mexico caves/capitulates to any and all demands the US has, including transparent invasion, then at that point, I think it’s safe to say they are little better than compradors. As far as I know / at the time of writing, there is not information that such has occurred. The line about where the person lives was because I don’t know where the person I was responding to lives and I wanted to allow for the fact that they could be closer to the situation than I realize and know things in detail about the leadership of Mexico that I don’t. It’s not that that would mean they are automatically more correct than others, but that the energy could be coming from something I don’t know. It doesn’t mean I will defer and capitulate to every point of view espoused by someone who allegedly lives in a country I don’t live. Nor does it mean I’d apply that understanding universally, knowing how anecdote gets used to push imperialist viewpoints.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it. I’ve read Jones Manoel’s essay before multiple times, but I’ll have to make a note to look into Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

The point about the power of negotiation, disruption, etc., I try to think of what signs there are left of this in the US and all I can think of that seems noteworthy is newer union efforts. (Older ones, to my understanding, often suffer from problems of diluted power/influence.) But then I also read stories about one business or another, where a union was being formed and the company shut down entirely the branch it was being formed at in order to stop the unionization.

In general, the modern USian “left” seems broadly mired in a mode of thinking and strategy that goes something like the following: “The constitution gives people certain legal human rights (at least in theory). Rather than challenging the validity of relying on an old document built out of a settler-colonial project that committed genocide and was built through slavery, we start with the belief that the constitution had the right idea but never actualized it. Therefore, to fix problems, we act within the framework of behaving in a way that is legal (as it pertains to theoretical rights provided by the constitution) and challenging what is illegal (as it pertains to theoretical rights provided by the constitution).”

In this way, “civil disobedience” (which often translates to the kind of protest we’re talking about) can be viewed as an actualization process of the constitution rather than a challenge to it. What little potentially “illegal” action people are willing to take becomes a validation of the state project and its origins rather than an invalidation of it. I’m not sure this is what the left wants to be doing as strategy, but it may be somewhat of a fear/survival response to the violence of imperial repression and the dismantling of more militant efforts. The general thought process being that by raising awareness, we can become strong enough to transform into the other, more militant form. The problem there, of course, is that transformation does not arise magically out of numbers. Raised awareness and outrage that is not organized and grounded in disciplined theory and practice leads to riot rather than sustained leverage. (Some of this may apply similarly to parts of the EU, but I don’t know enough about them to say with confidence one way or another.)

I think you should give Mexican leadership a chance to react before you start flinging “I know better” insults. Unless you are yourself living in Mexico and believe you have a thorough enough understanding of its context to be weighing in, in this way.

It is likely we are talking past each other to some extent. Though I am curious to ask, what forms of resistance in history you think are good examples of not falling prey to this kind of thing (beyond just principles we could state like “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun”); maybe you have studied it more detail than I have and can provide insight. One that comes to mind for me is the IRA in Ireland.

One thing that does strike me as odd about the US is how gun-happy the culture is on the whole, yet the gun-happy culture seems primarily centered around the “right”, with the “left” being more likely to be shy of it. But this may be due to militant left struggle facing assassination and imprisonment (ex: The Black Panther Party) and largely leaving behind liberal pacifists to dominate the narrative.