Juche is definitely not materialist. I support the DPRK having nukes and have the strongest condemnation for anyone suggesting disarmament, but I think it comes down to factors other than materialism that they have maintained the correct approach here.
I usually don’t think this about footage from these rallies, but in this one in particular like half of the crowd looks distressed. Maybe it was from some element of social context that isn’t obvious.
A huge scandal among the GOP is a benefit and an opportunity, so I don’t think voting turned out to be a waste of time at all. Even if voting was all you did, you still helped.
The party line that is being objected to is that we shouldn’t participate, not that nothing will directly transpire from this. You’re shadowboxing while insinuating that I am.
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That’s honestly kind of hilarious. I guess someone was looking to make a career off of getting clout from this and didn’t realize how they come off when they just say that that’s what they’re doing.
I’m not saying don’t be an adventurist, I don’t give a shit. Read what I quoted, read what you actually said:
Anything that doesn’t lead to a direct physical confrontation of some kind is useless.
Can you not see how saying “Don’t bother doing anything that does lead to violence or destruction” is absolutely toxic? Go ahead and destroy things, I don’t care, but calling all other action useless is reprehensible and more damaging to socialism as a constructive cause than you seem to understand.
Even facing execution and met with reactionaries, John Brown used it as an opportunity to advocate for his beliefs, as he did in most cases. He knew well that a huge portion of the population would defend slavery with violence, and therefore that it must be opposed ultimately with violence, but he did not look at the overwhelming consensus in favor of slavery and say that it was no use talking to people, or do you think his comrades appeared out of thin air? Do you think every single one came from an existing abolitionist network, which itself must have come into existence ex-nihilo or get founded by a bunch of people who were born based? Was his project of rescuing slaves not itself also meant as a message to the wider country that slavery was intolerable and it could be opposed? One that helped to instigate a great shift in the popularity of abolition as well as galvanize existing supporters?
Yes, giving a little speech at a rally populated by liberals is not the same as being hanged for militant opposition to slavery, but we must acknowledge that people can be reached who once we might have considered our opposition, or else we have hallucinated the entire history of socialism and our cause is already lost regardless.
I agree but to imply that everyone has the same “starting point” and “capacity” for “change” is cope. We are animals just like Chickens, not some sort of magical existentialist soul-being that has unlimited capacity for change. Its just not a scientific perspective.
This pivot is genuinely obnoxious. We were talking about a skill that many people have and this one person does not. The chicken metaphor is implicitly in the context of other birds who can fly that far, because we aren’t talking about something that no one can do. That’s also why it’s a terrible metaphor, because it begs the question of people having wildly and fundamentally different innate potentials by casting them as species, as though someone is being asked to produce spider silk, breathe underwater, or survive while only weighing a few pounds.
We do not all have the same starting point, but that so many of us can do it proves that it is possible for most of us, and there’s is no indication that our comrade has some specific mental disability or something that prevent them from doing what most people can do. Yes, maybe they don’t have the same beneficial socialization that people-persons have, but that doesn’t preclude them from improving and it doesn’t preclude them from reaching the level of competence, of being mildly helpful rather than a hindrance. Maybe there is some factor we don’t know about that will prevent this, but we don’t know about it, so assuming that encouragement is a trap is complete ridiculous.
It’s so disgusting to pretend that it’s just science that people simply can’t improve even a little because, idk, they went to a bad school or something. Yes, real disadvantages exist and they can be catastrophic for people’s lives, but what you are describing is a bizarre essentialism that is more at home with aristocratic notions about the highborn just being superior to the rest of us. It has no place in science to say that someone cannot be habilitated to a relatively normal human skill because they currently happen to be bad at it and feel pessimistic about improving, because it has been shown to be empirically wrong countless times. “Scientific perspective” my ass.
confidence (being sufficiently intimidating/pretty)
Talk about having opinions that are downstream from absurd and antisocial ideals
Furthermore the article’s body of admitting that realizing one’s potential is ideally accomplished with strong external support from a “community of practice” contradicts its conclusion of how its up to the individual to adopt a “growth mindset”
Perhaps there is a deeper contradiction, but what you express here is no contradiction. Education (and habilitation generally) is a cooperative process. There is no set of material circumstances short of science fiction that would let you develop a skill if you are convinced you cannot develop it and therefore refuse to try. You probably aren’t going to be a good piano player if you can only practice on a severely broken piano, but even with the best piano in the world you probably aren’t going to be a good piano player if you aren’t diligently practicing and, perhaps just as importantly, critically thinking about how you can improve rather than bemoaning how hard it is to improve and how some jump is too far or your hands get sore.
Most importantly, that does not practically mean that you are bound to become a virtuoso with some “grit,” but there’s a massive difference between that and being a competent player, and that’s all that we’re talking about here, competence.
you can’t make a chicken to flap its wings and fly across the atlantic
Outside of disabilities and disorders, humans are not that different from each other in terms of their potential. Using a species that is incapable of a task is using the conceit of metaphor to beg the question. This is more like if there was one albatross in particular that was struggling to fly long distances like its albatross friends, with no particular reason for this problem being identified. The thing to do is investigate why, and the likely solution is just some process of habilitation, though it may turn out they are medically incapable. Nonetheless, that is not something that can just be assumed like if they were a chicken and therefore obviously incapable.
the No Kings protests are decentralized and will eventually fizzle out.
Obviously? No one thinks that the protest is going to itself lead to a revolution, the argument is simply that the protests are useful opportunities.
The protest is dumb and many people there are awful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t recruit people from them at minimum, and if you’re part of an org, that org can do much more by making use of the protest.
in my opinion many people do believe that not voting is “showing what they believe in”
It’s a fact that many people believe that, but communication isn’t just about how you feel, it’s about what the other person interprets. The popular opinion is that non-voters are jack-offs who just don’t care or are assuming Their Guy will win regardless (or in some cases that their vote was suppressed, like yours was). It is not that not voting is an act of protest, because it usually isn’t.
if the material result is the same anyway i can see where they’re coming from
This is vulgar materialism. Just because voting for Gloria de la Riva or whoever doesn’t mean that suddenly your neighborhood turns red does not mean nothing happened. Simply contributing to the voting record is doing something, it is showing something that people will always be able to point to to indicate the popularity of the socialist position over liberal positions among some people, and gives a more accurate estimation of how many people hold such a stance. I’m sorry it doesn’t grant you an AR-15 and license to assassinate one politician of your choice, but you can’t let your politics be decided by Pavlovian conditioning when you have the capacity to understand it in a higher-order way.
If you give a shit about what happened to your registration, find out why it was rendered invalid! If you are right about why and there is even a trace of evidence, there are civil rights groups who might take up your case for free and make a much greater positive impact than if you were able to vote in the first place. Even if the case was lost, if it’s for bullshit reasons, you have contributed to the record of evidence of direct and willful voter suppression by the state of Georgia, which is useful for organizers and agitators across the state and even country. You don’t need to do this, but don’t just sit at the first roadblock and say there’s nothing to do and it’s great for not just you but anyone encountering this situation to give up. Just say you personally don’t want to bother rather than frame it as an equally-effective course of political (in)action.
That’s not really stochastic if it’s a sustained campaign by you and others over the course of decades. Actual stochastic action is counter-productive (because it has no systemic backing, it’s just a blip) and you might give an unfamiliar audience the wrong idea about what you’re really advocating for.
Regardless, thank you for your service, and I mean that sincerely.
You misread at least the denotation of what they said, which is that there are problems with Hexbear’s culture including that, though since they are accusing you and Hexbear both of poor communication, I can see why you’d read the connotation that the other descriptor also applies to you. I think both are extremely true of Hexbear, but you haven’t demonstrated the “seeping anticipation” here, so I don’t think that’s what they meant.
and their head organizer literally ran screaming into the middle of our action, tried to interrupt a speaker with the siren mode on her megaphone,
What had her so upset? Calling for the destruction of the Democratic Party or something?
Your argument makes sense if the protest has no chance of really accomplishing something. If it does, you would be justified in spending more than that to support it.
I appreciate your vigilance, but this is an alt for a different user. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than exist in prolewiki/lemmygrad drama.
I’m not like a Hoxhaist or anything, unlike Bland. I wasn’t linking the article for the cursory defense of Albania, but the collection of direct quotes from official DPRK publications that directly contradict the most basic ideas of Marxism. Maybe I should have specified, but it just seemed to me like that aspect was obviously irrelevant.
I’m probably not helping your view of me, but I don’t think the DPRK even counts as revisionist, because a revisionist is someone who claims the mantle of Marxism and involves specifically Marxist concepts, but also warps or contradicts basic premises of it. The DPRK more or less stopped claiming to be Marxist in the '90s and it’s also very difficult to identify anything about them that is specifically Marxist (or even socialist, since they explicitly support the permanent perpetuation of class society) rather than a more generic national liberation project with certain strong progressive elements. The article goes over all of this in a way that is, as far as I can tell, pretty irrefutable.
It’s not like I don’t support them; I think that if they are able to keep surviving and their bellicose turn over the last few years (relative to the RoK, not Ukraine, though obviously the latter is motivated by the former) doesn’t spell their destruction, they will probably represent a historically progressive force for the rest of my life, though that recent turn is kind of a distressing deviation from their entire previous history since the unofficial end of the Korean War. I could also make harsher criticisms, but they are off-topic because the subject at hand is materialism, and I only intended to address an inaccuracy and not disparage people who have been fighting for their lives as a geopolitically progressive force for 70+ years. If someone was repeating reactionary myths about them (for example, about Laura Ling or any of the ~5 American so-called “hostages” arrested since the war – all blatant criminals) I would refute them just as readily, if not more so.
If you can educate me on this subject and show me the error of my ways, I would truly love to be incorrect. That said, I do have a real interest in the DPRK and am not just mouthing off because the Kims won’t press the communism button.