I think it’s normal to feel that way about it. The weird part is the notion pushed by liberalism that we’re supposed to look dehumanizing practices in the face and turn the other cheek (e.g. “rise above” like life is some kind of contest to see who can act more pious on the surface). I think there are various forms of this out there, like “don’t stoop to their level” that shame people just for having a human reaction to outrageously unjust circumstances. Obviously we don’t want to fight barbarism with barbarism, but what we call barbaric acts usually take a lot of conscious effort to put them into practice broadly. It isn’t something you accident your way into doing as a system. Liberal thinking would have us believing we must be hypervigilant about any desires to fight, lest we slip into “corruption” of intent and practice and “become what we sought out to destroy.” But history doesn’t really back up liberalism on this. For example, the AES states that get regularly vilified were/are closer to kind saviors than corrupted villains.

So basically, I would say what you feel is a desire to fight back against injustice and they’d have us fearing this basic desire in ourselves. Even the figure of Jesus, who I think is where some of this image of “turning the other cheek” comes from as culture, has a part in the bible where he whips the money changers in the temple, overturns their tables, and drives them out of it. Bit adventurist of him (😛 ), but I like to point at it as contradicting the narrative that he was just this “pacifist figure and people should be pacifist like him.” To what extent he was even a real person and matches any of the narrative, I don’t know, but the pacifist narrative has holes and reminds me a bit of the more modern thing that happened in the US with the civil rights movement and portraying MLK as “nonviolent” in order to be able to put him on a pedestal after assassinating him, while vilifying more “militant” aspects of the movement.

I don’t know if this matches the exact most up to date psychological definitions, but my understanding of it is:

• ASPD (Anti-Social Personality Disorder) is the main one where the diagnosis contains one of malignant intentions and behaviors.

• Psychopathy is a bit more murky and can have overlap with what gets defined as NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) but if the research of James Fallon is to be believed (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/ side note: I don’t vouch for this particular source, it’s a quick one I could find on his story for the moment), psychopaths can exist insofar as they are incapable of feeling empathy, but they can still intellectualize empathy and if raised in the right kind of environment, can behave in generally “pro social” ways.

From this and other things, I tend to extrapolate that people start with certain predispositions, but what is produced from these predispositions can vary quite a bit. I don’t have a source on it offhand, but I recall for example a story of someone in a more communal culture who had “voices in their head” (in the clinical meaning that people would associate with debilitating schizophrenia) but for them, these voices were actually friendly and supportive.

So I would say, as a general rule:

• In a long-term view of planning and building, we should expect that some people will have a different psychological starting point than the norm and account for that in how we think about systems and communities, especially when it comes to repeating issues that keep cropping up and make life harder for people (e.g. in the case of disabling conditions).

• However, we should avoid viewing predispositions as being behavior defining (rather than behavior influencing and even then, it can get into eugenics-adjacent territory and just kind of self-fulfilling prophecy nonsense fast focusing on what people are predisposed to if you start labeling it as leading to “good” or “bad” behaviors).

• For people who already have established behavioral patterns, communist vanguards have had to apply reeducation or force in some contexts, but I don’t think it’s particularly practical to get bogged down in fine psychological delineations in this process. It could be very wasteful and missing the forest for the trees to expend more energy on how people are different than how they are the same, when dealing with limited resources and difficult constraints (which is going to be a reality in any ongoing power struggle). The capitalists benefit from this focus because they can use it as a wedge to divide and individualize people, but we more so want the reverse, for people to relate and connect well. And for the most part, looking at the motives of a person’s material conditions is probably going to be more telling than any DSM chart will ever be.

This thought hasn’t fully crystallized, but it occurs to me that a reason capitalism can appear so resilient at absorbing and diluting social causes is because it actually wants social causes to exist and leverages them actively. Not just in the sense of tax breaks for charity, but also in the sense of soft power through “charitable donations”. Those who most fund an institution can also choose whether it’s able to continue, which means the institution will tend to bend to their requests out of self preservation if nothing else.

So like, capitalism doesn’t have some metaphysical power to absorb and dilute social causes (which is how it can feel at times when you watch how easily it can happen in real-time). It’s that there are processes of capital that are already directed toward making use of social causes for expanding power, so when a new one appears, all capital needs to do is evaluate if it can work for that and dilute it as needed to make it work if it doesn’t at the offset. Once it has latched on, it starts using its broader range of voice to try to take over what the conversation surrounding the cause sounds like. And it is the job of activists to dig their heels in with as clear and organized messaging as possible and shout out the capitalists on what the actual issue is; and build solutions that form socialist community power over the capitalist predatory charity model.

• Remove obstacles: don’t have a library card but it’s an option? get a library card; having too much trouble deciding what to read? find a recommended reading list and go from there
• Set up an environment for it if possible: ideally somewhere quiet with minimal distractions, where you can have good sitting posture and good lighting; if you’re reading digitally, see if you can get an e-ink device, which is more similar to reading from paper; make sure your internal state is ok too, e.g. hydrated, sleeping alright, have sufficient time to read so you won’t feel rushed etc.
• Read what’s more appealing first: too dense and melting your brain? try reading something else and see if it’s more engaging. use that to build motivation toward reading other things.

Remember, it’s not about willpower, it’s about transitioning to a way of doing things that better facilitates reading for longer and more consistently. Laziness points at willpower and implies you’re choosing not to use it. But you obviously have a desire to do it, so that can’t be the whole problem. Something, or things, are in the way.

A great example of this kind of thing which pertains to exercising, not reading, but is similar in spirit. I remember this streamer/youtuber who had a treadmill he could use while playing video games at his computer. By having the treadmill right there, he was far more likely to do exercise. Whereas if he had it off to the side, it was easy to not get around to it.

I started writing a couple different approaches to this, but they didn’t seem quite right. I’m going to try again and see if 3rd time is the charm.

An important thing to remember is that reactionary “questions” often carry with them assumptions or claims that aren’t necessarily true. It’s framed like a question, but structured like a statement.

And you aren’t owed them a serious response, in part for that reason.

Let’s go through these to demonstrate what I mean:

Why do we always have to put ourselves and our cultures last by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims

The implicit claim: “We [already doing a lot of bullshit with the assumed ‘we’] always [assumes this is something that is constantly happening and never goes another way] have to [implies the ‘we’ is disempowered and has no say] put ourselves and our cultures [doesn’t even get into what those cultures are but judging by what follows, the implication is ‘white’] last [so claiming that not only are people accommodating the priorities of another group, but that this puts their own priorities dead last] by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims [claiming not only that pork is not served in school canteens, which the question provides no evidence for, but also that it’s “because of Muslims” and it assumes that pork is some kind of pivotal culture thing that is being pushed aside].”

Phew, that’s a lot of horseshit in one small sentence. And it’s not a real question. It’s a form of rhetoric that is meant to evoke a response. The implication is that something is being taken from you and the expected response is, “I have to take it back.”

Oh but it goes on:

or allowing underage girls to wear a hijab in school, to let their families oppress them

Look at how fast the rhetoric has shifted. Before it was implying that the “we” is a disempowered group who “has to” do stuff. Now it implies that the “we” is actually the one in power, who is making the decisions, “allowing” the dress codes of girls to be determined by the girls’ families instead of by the “we”. So already we can see that hint of white supremacy doing its thing of pretending to not have power, even as it exercises it, and vilifying the non-white cultures.

Why do we let people immigrants live off our government benefits when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here

The implicit claim: "We [here we go again] let people immigrants [once again implying the ‘questioner’ is actually among the group that is in charge, after all] live off our government benefits [another unproven claim that in this case is likely absolute horseshit of exaggeration and distortion] when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here [this one straight up doesn’t make sense - how and why would you pay taxes before you come to a place? last I checked, taxes are based on a government taking a portion of what you make to go to funding. if you make nothing, a portion of 0 is 0].

A further point is that they are using the word immigrants, but I have to wonder if they are even actually referring to people who are all immigrants by choice or if some of them are refugees. And refugee is an even more vulnerable position to be in than somebody who really wanted to be, and planned to be, an immigrant.

So I mean, if you have to, you can look at them like the “Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about” meme.

It sounds like individualism brain. People who want others to be a particular thing, live a particular way, but express no interest in helping to build a world where that is actually the case.

So this is the “manufacturing consent” setup for legislating against China-originating LLMs, right? Or have they already been doing that?

It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual.

Yes and no. The problem is that what “winner” means in modern capitalist society is not proven to be anything at all universal and so we can’t rely on it as a word that is accurate and consistent in describing “competition” throughout history (“competition” being another word that has the same problems).

In trying to come up with a more universalized way it can be described, I would say: it is useful to have the concept of success and fail states (partial or total), of quantifiably better and quantifiably worse, and these things showing up in outcomes, in behavior, in skill levels, which are relative to specific contexts and goals.

But I don’t think this is intrinsically the same as the modern capitalist concept of winner and loser, which carries with it extra baggage of the valuation of a human life through the lens of capital.

A good example of the difference, even within capitalist society, is within the context of video games.

Some games are designed in a more “punishing” way; that is, failures come with overt penalties or require redoing a long stretch of the game just to get to the part you failed at. Instead of honing in on where and why you failed, with the focus being on fixing that problem, those games are more about proving some kind of mindless persistence in the face of adversity and can cause great frustration in players, some of whom will just quit and give up.

On the other hand, some games are designed to be more “forgiving”; they might have difficult challenges, but trying again at the part you failed at is easy. This makes it more feasible to hone in on where you are making mistakes and how to fix them.

The first one is closer to how capitalist society functions; you “lost” and it’s not necessarily clear why and you might just be significantly worse off now and have to “grind” just to get back to where you were before.

The second is more like what I’d expect from a healthy use of challenge directed toward improvement (albeit without mentorship in the picture in the case of a video game); the purpose is to hone your skill for a specific use and so the framework of it is centered around that, not around anything else.

Play is even broader and doesn’t necessarily need to be about success or fail states, or about challenge at all. It can simply be about engaging with the creative parts of the mind and entering a more open and relaxed state for a time, which can help with connection and rejuvenation and so on. Play can include friendly challenges, but doesn’t have to.

So we can probably say that play and challenges with success and fail states (partial or total) are universal concepts, but “winner and loser” is much more shaky ground, as is “competition” alongside it. An example to try to get at why this is not just semantics: If I were to play you in chess and you checkmated me, it would have a different connotation if we said “due to the way our differing strategies and choices collided, your side of the board reached the agreed upon success state and mine the agreed upon fail state; let’s examine why that happened and try different strategies this time” vs. “you won, I lost, which means you’re a better player and I need to suck less.” Setting aside how stiffly academic the first way sounds, the point is that it’s more impersonal and focused on the mechanics of it in context, and actively trying to learn from the experience together. The second one is making a whole assumption from one game, that you’re an overall better player and being so vague with its language that it could imply I suck as a person, not just as a chess player, and this has contributed to my “losing”. The second also puts the focus on the individual and their responsibility to work through challenges on their own, in isolation, and receive credit (for “win or loss”) in isolation.

Even in a team-based game, we could look at it similarly. The first version could be a statement that implies both teams contributed to the outcomes and can learn from each other. The second would more likely imply the “winning” team is superior, through almost metaphysical characteristics (such as the often lofty term that gets bandied about “talent”).

I am curious now to what extent there is historical evidence of such things in earlier communal societies in history and what form it would take. Because it’s one thing to think people will always test themselves and each other. It’s another thing to think they will always cling to the value of winner/loser dynamics in make-believe.

In my experience with the modern day capitalist framework, it’s very much based on individualist win/loss, in the sense that “my win is your loss” and this tends to pervade forms of play too (board games, video games, sports, etc.). The idea that we could both win or both lose is often not even allowed for. The closest equivalent is considered a “tie”, which essentially means limbo, undefined, it was never resolved who is “better”. But this way of thinking would be strange in a basic communal society and incompatible with its framework of viewing problems as a shared responsibility. I will caveat the following by saying I’m not the biggest fan of Kropotnik because he can sometimes get pointed to to prop up anarchist arguments about not needing a socialist transition state, but I recall him going into observations of nature (I think in Mutual Aid) and how much and often animals actually work together on things as opposed to the prevailing capitalist narrative that nature is a constant dynamic of predator and prey. I bring this up as a point against the implication that competition in the “win/loss” sense of things is some kind of inevitability of humanity or of nature.

Consider a thing like debate, for example. Here CriticalResist talks about the Aristotlean dialectic that precedes what we call dialectical materialism today: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9510488

in aristotle’s dialectic the synthesis is the third new thing, something new emerges which did not exist before. Therefore it cannot be the thesis because the thesis existed prior to the ‘debate’. it cannot be the antithesis for the same reason.

And you can perhaps see that the concept of debate as described in that cultural context is not one of “win/loss”, but rather one of synthesizing to discover new. The process that both participate in yields something that neither had before, which can then be to the benefit of both.

In the modern capitalist context (in my experience anyway) debate tends to take a much more demeaning turn. The implication is that there is a winner and loser of a debate and the loser “sucks” somehow compared to the winner. So people tend to get very defensive in debates, fearing damage to reputation or more.

So there is the combining of “yours and mine” process, which can take on different kinds of character. It can be more friendly and calm, or more lively and intense, but either way, the broader societal context influences what the end goal is and how one should feel about it. In capitalist sports, for example, part of the goal is to nurture/discover the most skilled players, who can then be offered lucrative contracts to play for an audience for even more lucrative payouts for the capitalist; this aim is not intrinsically about “improving society” or some such, as is commonly thought of as the “value” of competition, but is more just about making money and further validating the concept of society being based on one group beating another down and then reaping the benefits.

What does your picture of a valuable communist party look like?

Well said! I find that one of the few universal principles of scientific socialism is that things are rarely an easily applied universal principle. Which is a somewhat cheeky way of saying, there’s no “cheat code” for working out what’s going on in the world. Properly applied dialectical and historical materialism might at times feel like a cheat code in contrast to the wishy washy nature of metaphysics and idealism, but it’s still just contrast. There is no getting past the need to investigate conditions and context. Doesn’t mean we all have to each investigate the same stuff, but somebody’s gotta do the investigating. It is rare that a situation is so simplistic that it can be understood only by applying principles, without digging into the detail of it.

The US is allowed to have two jockeying parties vying for dominance to give the impression that fundamental change is possible through electoralism. But both are thoroughly controlled by bourgeoisie interests. It’s largely inconsequential if the occasional reformist slips through because the overall process and quantity of those who aren’t reformists will crowd out their influence into meaninglessness. And in the unlikely scenario that’s not enough to stop reformists from overwhelming the status quo, they can just call upon the police and military.

So yes, the democrat party is right-wing. But more than that, the system ensures it cannot get any further than mild reforms and that its policies will most represent the capitalist class.

It’s very P. T. Barnum? Something like that. Very much putting on a show, both parties. I think it’s part of why some USians have such a cynical view of politics and politicians. Their only experience with it is seeing a bunch of circus clowns pretend like they’re authentic tooth-and-nail fighters for the people. And no offense to actual circus clowns who are sincerely trying to entertain, rather than grift the populace.

Here you go: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"

Okay, start with holding the western empire accountable, including its decades of atrocity propaganda fabrications about the leaders of other countries. Then when you have some clarity from that and have consulted the regular people of a country in detail through sources that are trustworthy (rather than CIA-backed sources), you can begin to form a reasonable position toward holding the given country’s leader accountable.

Saying “the western empire is bad but also the people who it says are bad are bad too” is not a principled or consistent take. It’s a step toward understanding what is going wrong, but falls back on trusting in the western narratives.

NATO is on the way out (violently kicking and screaming the whole way).

BRICS is on the way in (building mutually beneficial ties with communist vanguard run states as part of the forefront).

Something something weeks where decades happen. I don’t expect it all to go down smoothly or feel bold enough to have a specific timeline in mind, but the world is growing ripe for communism to make a worldwide comeback from the barbaric repression of the post-WWII world order. People still have to make it happen though. It’s not an automatic process.

Inertia factors into things, systems of power and material conditions factors into things, but don’t take it for granted, either as especially strong in a desirable way or especially strong in an undesirable way. Imperialists are every bit as capable of shitting their pants as anyone else. Don’t be too intimidated by that which is fallible and decays, and remember we’re all factors in the state of the world, whether we want to be or not, and no matter how disempowered some of us are in relation to the levers of power. Still factors and still can effect change, including change that changes that relationship.

That’s fair.

I had an additional thought just now. I wonder how some LLMs would do at editing for such a communist slant title. I wouldn’t expect them to be reliable for doing it to an entire article without careful reading through of their output, but it might be an easier way to get better titles, since it wouldn’t require much proofreading.

It’s a valid concern, I think, especially if people read the headlines uncritically at a glance without reading the content of it. IIRC, I’ve mentioned such a concern in the past myself. One thing I’ve seen yogthos do sometimes is post articles like these but with a communist slant custom headline that differs from the source. In this case, the headline looks like the empire taking an L even at a glance, so I don’t think it needs communist editing. But I do like the practice as a general rule to help guard against people taking imperialist news at face value.

We aren’t analyzing these articles as a more formal group communist discussion (though maybe we should be doing some of that), which is more where I’d expect benefit of us reading it. And approaching it as individualistic capability to see through the imperialist BS has its risks. So I tend to have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, yes, we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand about it. On the other hand, we do have to consider the nature of how people engage with internet headlines and information in general.

I did have that thought, tbh, but wasn’t sure if that was being presumptuous about their culture. I’m not real familiar with face-saving culture in the specifics.

Yeah, in case it’s not clear, I’m not saying you should have “debated” the nazi or something. I’m not sure what would be the best approach in terms of direct confrontation when you can’t deal with them physically. Some of it may depend on what outcome you want and in the heat of the moment, seeing people say horrible shit and harass others, it may be whatever first thought comes to mind is what gets said (I know I have those moments myself). Something that does come to mind for me is that discord’s own community guidelines has a line about hate speech: https://discord.com/guidelines/

4. Do not use hate speech or engage in other hateful conduct. This includes the use of hate symbols, imagery, and claims that deny the history of mass human atrocities.

We consider hate speech to be any form of expression that either attacks other people or promotes hatred or violence against them based on their protected characteristics. (See our Hateful Conduct Policy Explainer for more.)

I fully expect discord to wield it in a liberal “both sidesism” corporate kind of way, but nevertheless, the reason I bring it up is you might have been able to report them straight to discord and gotten something to happen, while continuing to try to push back against the nazi garbage. Might still be able to now. And/or reminding the mods that their server is violating discord guidelines and could get banned for that reason.

Though I haven’t seen it directly happen, I have heard stories of discord servers get axed by discord moderation just for having the wrong kind of content on it and getting reported to discord. So going that route is not something I’d do lightly, but if you believe they’re just letting it fester as a hotbed of that shit, it might be worth trying.

In general, I think there are times it’s worth shamelessly tapping into liberal institutions to deplatform these fuckers, where possible. So long as there are institutions that at least pretend to care, might as well rather than having to carry out the whole fight ourselves when we’re not always well organized for it.

Either way, thank you for pushing back against it. We do need people who are doing that where they can.