Dirt_Possum [any, undecided]

Normalizing violence as political speech is a slippery slope,

Taking violence off the table only benefits the ones who already claim a monopoly on violence.

Violence is already completely normalized as political speech, but only in the direction of it being used by the state and against the people. It’s totally normalized for fascist ICE agents to brutally abduct people off the street, for cops to murder people (especially people of color) without consequence, or to go into homeless encampments beating and cracking the skulls of the people trying to survive there while torching their meager possessions, for small armies of militarized police to kettle and gas protesters (those people who aren’t even using violence themselves but are still doing what they can to oppose its use by the state to conduct genocide), and beating them until they’re literally blind. And this isn’t even beginning to get into the utter normalization of the unimpeded mass murder of people in the global south to more easily steal their resources.

What is not normalized is specifically the use of violence by regular people aimed at the state. That is the taboo. That is what the pearl-clutching liberals immediately denounce as dangerous to “democracy” (because it is a threat to bourgeois dictatorship). But it’s a taboo that has to be broken if there is to ever be any hope of positive change happening within the imperial core. If it’s a slippery slope to normalize violence against the state, then let’s get to sliding down it! The statistics presented in this article, if they’re to be believed, are a hopeful sign.

I want to agree with you, but I can’t shake the feeling that’s just cope. They never lost control over their narrative around eeevil communism. Just walk around and ask anyone on the street what communism even is. Look at how many even supposed radical leftists will still call anyone who knows a bit about history and geopolitics a “tankie.” They are losing the narrative on things like “actually Israel is defending itself” when there’s constant and endless videos of genocide happening in all its gory reality for anyone to see. It’s good that at least that they can’t completely control the narrative on, and it might be part of the reasoning behind this bill. But lying about the visible genocide in Gaza is a bit different than lying about history that can’t be seen as videos on social media and lying about geopolitics that are more complicated than images of murdered children. We’re in a new cold war that is only going to ramp up and this is the ideological conditioning they’ll be installing in the young population to help ensure they’ll be on board. As we know, propaganda works. You think it’s frustrating trying to reason with libs right now about the Uyghur “genocide,” the uphill battle of debunking those brainworms? Wait until that shit is basic curriculum and as common knowledge as “Stalin was a murderous dictator” is now.

public education in the capitalist west has never been anything else other than a means of indoctrination.

This is true, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get worse or that it can’t get modernized.

Cat? Cats can only hope to be so suave.

No, I should have known better. Spending too much time gawking at the .world libs has damaged my irony/sarcasm detector.

Where will they find all the gold needed to back the value of the US dollar?

They don’t need to. The US certainly doesn’t back it with gold anymore. Its value is in the fact that it’s what everyone uses and is largely forced to use because everyone else does. What the article called network effects.

Perhaps the US will end convertibility and move to some sort of free floating currency system, and will be able to freely create and destroy US dollars

The US already freely creates and destroys US dollars. And if they end all convertibility, that would completely undermine that network effect. The article addresses the same basic idea in the third to last OP paragraph starting with:

The US could also go for the “nuclear option” of restricting China’s ability to clear dollar transactions but this would effectively immediately fragment the global financial system, undermining the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency - exactly what the US wants to avoid.

Edit: unless your comment was a bit and I just ate your onion.

@xiaohongshu@hexbear.net Thoughts?

Edit: I see that a good portion of what this article says are things that you have discussed (and let all the air out of) here: https://hexbear.net/post/3920843/5657051
But it also seems like there are a number of things that this Bertrand article is saying that counters some of what you were saying in that thread. The cycle that this Bertrand article is talking about seems fairly air-tight which is why I was wondering what you would have to say about it in addition to what you were saying in that other thread.

At the risk of annoying everyone with users tags, I’m also curious what @BynarsAreOk@hexbear.net, @geikei@hexbear.net, and @AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net, @meth_dragon@hexbear.net, @Fishroot@hexbear.net, @griefstricken@lemmy.ml think. Sorry if you don’t want to be tagged like this, let me know and I’ll edit this comment and make sure not to do it again.

Oh there’s plenty of room for someone who is informed to get angry and rightly ridicule people who deserve it.

the opinion on the topic you are not informed about displays your values and having it might be beneficial to you.

And it might be detrimental to you just as easily. There’s no way to know which without being informed, but an ignorant opinion based on “values” (aka vibes and what you want to be true rather than what is true) is more likely to hurt you or others in the long run. Just as being a racist bigot who has a wrong opinion about people of color might find that holding their racist opinion is immediately beneficial to themselves if they’re in a similarly bigoted community, being a bigot is ultimately harmful for reasons I would hope wouldn’t need to be explained.

An example would be a parent who doesn’t want any gender-related issue to be discussed in the school.

Yet their uninformed opinion is harmful. Gender issues are inevitably part of our world and learning about them will not only prepare children to have an understanding of them that their ignorant parent lacks and help make the world safer and more livable for everyone as a result, but if that child themselves turns out to be gender stereotype non-conforming, then learning about those issues will help them better understand themselves and potentially save them from much of the misery inflicted on them by an ignorant populous.

I’m shocked that drug dealing is coming up here as an example of criminality in so many comments. It’s very literally only criminal behavior because the us made it criminal behavior to crush poor people, radicals, and minorities, and most people know that

I’m hoping that most people here understand that and are using it as an example of criminality only as a way to talk about lumpen as a class that relates to the means of production differently than most of the rest of the proletariat (but I don’t know, I also wouldn’t have thought there would be so many leftists who seem to think that sex work isn’t work or that no forms of it could possibly exist under communism). But either way, what I do find shocking about it is how many people here think that they have less revolutionary potential than the rest of the US proletariat which is extremely right wing. Like the comment “drug runners aren’t gonna help us do communism dude.” Well, they’re hell of a lot more likely to than all the reactionary regular proletarians who are Trump and Biden law and order supporters.

Even the so called criminal element isn’t properly considered in the traditional view of lumpen. At least from what I’ve seen, there is almost always a failure to understand that large swathes of the lumpenproletariat are simply parts of the proletariat that had no economic recourse, lacking even the ability to survive by legally selling their labor, and became lumpen by necessity. Consider redlined ethnic minorities who are denied even bare minimum legal employment and resort to drug dealing as the only means of survival. Many of them put the money they make directly back into their destitute communities. They absolutely have revolutionary potential and some of them have class consciousness on a level far beyond that of the vast majority of legal working proletariat.