Dammit, there’s a video I watched a while ago from a liberal who said something along the lines of “and America destroyed their chemical weapins” and then gave a very smarmy and smug “rebuttal” to people who asserted that wasn’t true. I wish i could shove this in their face but I dont feel like looking for it tbh

That’s not very good evidence. Many things can seem like other things without actually being the same.

The warring states during the first world War had very harsh media censorship because of…well the whole war thing. Ergo when Spanish coverage started popping up due to the lack of censorship there, people assumed it originated from Spain. To this day we don’t actually know where the flu came from specifically. Covid is harder to track, due to the long incubation period.

Not saying there can’t be discussion on the matter, it just requires more evidence to be considered is all.

I think Mao gets a bad rap for stuff that happened during his later years.

I’ve seen a lot of people who kinda just melancholically say he would’ve been remembered better had he not led China through the 50s and 60s. I guess I get it, but is that what we care about? Legacy? Everyone should just hang up their hats when they make a bad decision?

Additionally, i think in any case, it’s hard to blame Mao and Mao Zedong Thought for the problems that occurred specifically during the era. Establishing a new proletarian state us hard, establishing one of the first ones ever is even harder, establishing one in China was a miracle. The economy grew at similar rates before before reform and opening up as it did after, and without that initial foundation of independence there could never have been an independent reform and opening up. I also think the red book is one of the most important texts for beginners and should be one of the first reccomended.

Additionally, like I’ve said in other threads, I’m not one for discussions on morality. I think i got empathy overload [edit: more like empathy burnout] at some point and have just accepted bad things are going to happen no matter what when things get violent. If you just boil it down to “is hurting x necessary to establish socialism? Yes? Then it’s moral. If not then it’s immoral” then life becomes much simpler. I’d kill the entire Romanov family 20 times over personally if that was the decision that needed to be made to save the USSR. I would lie, cheat, and consort with the worst to establish socialism, and that’s the attitude that’s needed to do so. I will argue at length about what is necessary–materially–to establish socialism [I don’t think the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki were necessary, so they were immoral] but individual sob stories are pointless and I’m glad I’m becoming numb to them. Maybe your grandpa wasn’t a counter revolutionary, but the wider purge was necessary to save the people from the blackest era of reaction. So it was moral. Life is very much a play of averages and odds. Unfortunately it will be that way until the last capitalist is dissolved. Edit: However this also applies the other way. I don’t really care about justice if its unnecessary. It’s not about what people deserve, it’s about living, about science, and about the natural coarse of human events

Lastly, the Jacobins are more than just Bourgeois revolutionaries. I wouldn’t go as far as to describe them as proto-socialist or anything, but there was a difference between them, the Girondins, thermadorians, etc. The jacobins were the Bourgeoisie who aligned themselves with the journeyman proto-proletariat and the peasantry. This is opposed to people like Cromwell in Britain who aligned themselves with the lower landowners against the peasants. It’s why we appreciate Sun Yat-sen more than Chiang Kai-Shek, or Thomas Paine than George Washington, etc.

That’s the point, I think. Idk I’m tired.

The point from what I understand is that you dont want to teach kids those things because that would be wierd, gross, and probably not that productive anyway. Teaching children about proper body autonomy will help without having to explicitly describe sex and sexually abusive acts

I get what you’re saying I think. For me it’s hard to compare because I’m always unsure what’s natural and what’s instigated by my thoughts.

It’s like observing a quantum system. If I actively try to recognize my thoughts with XYZ behavior, often it’s hard to tell if they’re caused by a problem or by the act of thinking about them. [I.e, I can’t force intrusive thoughts with my OCD since they wouldn’t be intrusive anymore]. Unfortunately letting things happen and examining them afterwards usually hurts ):

As usual, please base your thinking in Marxist Dialectical materialism and not emotions and vibes.

At the very least try to explain things materially. Yes, all these bad things have happened and the US populace hasn’t rebelled. At the very least do some analysis instead of giving up. The fact that this has occurred is an indictment of liberalism and all its failures, the fact people haven’t rebelled is an ultimate prover of Marxist theory over all others. It is backwards to say otherwise.

Edit: I think the reason i hate these posts so much is that they lack all courage. They throw their hands up into the air and say “well, we’ve tried everything.” Marxists have not spent 200 years developing dialectical materialism as an analysis method just to give up. At least Sakai tried. I still disagree but I’ll respect him for giving me something to wrestle with and consider.

How many times have i heard about revisionists originating from a failed revolution? From Germans to French to whomever else. Their revolution did not come and so they gave up. They declared marxism dead because they thought marxism to be god. The hippy revolution didn’t come so they declared marxism dead. The USSR fell and the great Angela Davis herself fell to reformism. Why? Because they did the same thing.

Ultra leftists in western Europe constantly declared a revolution impossible everywhere because they weren’t courageous enough to fight for it.

Liberals constantly use the lack of revolution as an indictment against marxism. Perhaps it’s different words, but to declare the revolution dead is to commit suicide before the first shot is even fired.

Also a quick reminder that the bloody Sunday of 1905 was done not on Bolsheviks or Mesheviks or SRs or anarchists, but on conservative Tsarists who were pleading with the Tsar, singing patriotic hymns and had no wider political demands. They were certainly criticized for this by Bolsheviks and such but it was the ultra leftists who threw their hands up and said Russia was too backwards for revolution while the Bolsheviks kept trying. Need I remind everyone who succeeded in the end?

It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they won’t. I mean look at Amsterdam. It took protests and action and an oil crisis to get them to redesign the city [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422421000769]. If you leave the ruling class to their devices you end up with people like NYC’s Robert Moses

I seriously wish all of that social construct stuff was just dissolved and we could just be honest. Like “hey i wanna date you” “ok” or “hey i wanna date you” “no thank you” “alright it’s all good.”