Excuse me this is actually anchoring yourself in facts, which is somehow a bad thing. Real leftism is vibes based only, and I like Vaush's vibes, so we're going to completely ignore the fact that he is a pedo because that doesn't match the vibes. Only tankies ignore the vibes
it feels simultaneously very dire and also very funny how this person's worldview is very directly informed by a single Twitch streamer. Is that how you kids absorb politics these days? This person made a huge post about how Marxists develop political awareness and didn't use the words Marx, Lenin, Mao, didn't mention specific policies. They just mention a Twitch streamer and discord channels
glass houses and everything, since I know we're a terminally online forum, but this whole thesis seems terminally online. Politics as posting styles
yeah it's just inscrutable to me and unlike any of my experiences but maybe I'm just getting old. I became a socialist because I had a minimum wage job at a grocery store and I was watching how evil the Iraq War was. It all seemed very direct to me. America's evil and committing warcrimes, my boss wants my paycheck as low as possible, might as well listen to what these commies are saying.
Internet commentators back then were on Myspace and blogs, there wasn't as much of a weird parasocial connection going on. Not even saying this was better, because it was dire back then too, but this seems so different and weird. It's like internet cliques or fandoms.
I know this comment is a few days old at this point and the conversation is dead, but is it really true that reddit users skew younger?
Like, I was a teen when I made a reddit account over a decade ago, but I feel like reddit isn't the cool thing for high schoolers to sign up for anymore. If feels more like legacy social media with very outdated design sensibilities even if you're using new reddit.
I think reddit's userbase is certainly more immature in the way that being a semi-anonymous user in an endless sea of throw-away accounts tends to foster. That kind of design creates an environment where people feel comfortable putting less care and thought into the views that they share because whatever bullshit they wrote will get buried when the thread dies, and most communities aren't small enough for individual users to develop a persistent reputation in a community based on their previous comments, so every interaction starts off as a fresh slate with little/no stakes. And people are less likely to mature if they never have any accountability to the things they say/believe.
I don't think the quality/maturity of posters on Hexbear vs reddit and the "reddit diaspora" on Lemmy can be explained by the age demographics of those groups. I think it has more to do with the quality of moderation here filtering out people with "reddit-brain," as well as simply having a more well defined community where you can somewhat expect other people to recognize your username and therefore care about the impression you leave on people as a result.
it feels simultaneously very dire and also very funny how this person's worldview is very directly informed by a single Twitch streamer.
That scares me, it really does. There's a lot of people, young people especially, getting their marching orders from some nepo baby asshole with a headset that tells them what to think and shapes their worldviews.
I don't think it's that scary, more just kind of bleak. I don't think these very online younger people are doing a lot of organizing or IRL work, are they? What do they even do except post?
When you shortcut yourself into following the data uncritically, you inexplicably end up following the narrative of the US empire. I'm sorry sweaty, but data is not unbiased and free from manipulation.
Also, "when I was becoming a tankie", if you ain't one now you weren't one then mate. Read some Lenin and become a proper leftist and not some lackey for the American empire. Gee, what a fucking idiot.
when I was becoming a tankie deciding whether to read a book or watch YouTube, I decided to watch YouTube and here I am. Don't fall into their trap of reading a book. They all have shares in second hand bookshops and leftwing publishers.
Betcha 500 kroner that when this guy was a "Tankie" he thought it was a whole separate ideology and put on the entire twitter "ML aesthetic" for a month before getting bored. They usually go from the most annoying communist in the room to thinking communism itself is annoying - whole time it was just them and their personality complexes
following the data uncritically, you inexplicably end up following the narrative of the US empire. I'm sorry sweaty, but data is not unbiased and free from manipulation.
"Anti-Tankie" tendencies are so obviously the fucking shortcut here, you get to just not engage with the largest chunk of revolutionary socialist history and theory because you declare it illegitimate and politically insincere, as well as frame things in matters of immaterial ideals and black and white principles that just do not survive the translation into real world practice and experience!
Like how is it not a fucking shortcut if your ideology lets you declare countries that survived for over half a century and beyond complete failures, while parties and organizations that couldn't make it out of their periods of civil war are outstanding successes due to how they represent pure ideals and principles while the former failed to be that pure?
Literally "I used to care about people and realised core fundamentals about the mechanisms of world politics and money, but then someone was mean to me online"
Well goddamn I've wasted nearly a decade reading political theory and supporting local organizing efforts. Little did I know that the key to achieving true leftism was getting mad that a discord server called my favorite streamer a nonce. Shame on me for taking a shortcut.
former conservative? i have always been a communist. i did have a period of apathy when i was a rebellious teenager that hated everyone cause of dysphoria. then i went 'back' to being a communist when my skull stopped being a frying pan
also the idea that communism is a shortcut is absurd. you can have a surface level understanding and be a communist, but i am still learning things and improving my understanding of communism even after decades of being a communist. if you ever stop learning it is time for you to shut up and let the younger people cook.
I never wanna hear the word "cognitive dissonance" again. It is literally exclusively used to say "How can people have other beliefs than me? Could they have reasons? No, it must be this fancy word I saw in a twitter post one time. I am the protagonist of reality surrounded by cognitively dissonant NPCs."
Then I'll need a better phrase to describe the psychological tension between two of a person's beliefs or experiences that each imply a mutually exclusive set of facts to the other, because that does not roll off the tongue
An example I see regularly is in parents who have Dobsonoid views on parenting. They believe that all disobedience must be painfully corrected to make what they see as a good person, and then they watch it just not work that way. Their resolution of the tension between their belief and their experience is usually a rationalization that an outside influence, particularly schooling, must have corrupted their child
I know it's a real phenomenon, the term has just been abused into meaninglessness. Kinda like how "psyop" has just become the new word for "conspiracy" or how the internet villain of the week apparently is always a "textbook narcissist" now.
I'm a Reform Jewish woman who was a liberal who had a brainbreak moment when visiting and having the cognitive dissonance too apparent to ignore when they showed us literal minefields and tried to justify them. None of this screed applies to me.
Holy shit it never ends. I remember hearing similar bullshit in the 90's. Just replace Vaush with Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman. This guy is projecting hard with the "most tankies are former Evangelicals." Wasn't aware that the local Communists in my overwhelmingly Catholic country were fundies all along. Most of them follow Liberation Theory. This asshole probably isn't even aware of what that is because Vaush hasn't read the Wikipedia article on it for him.
Vaushites love pulling the "America bad" whiny shit but will do the same with "Russia/China" bad without a shred of irony.
I do worry about the future of leftists in NATO countries that do everything online. Why bother reading a boring ass book when I can watch a Twitch streamer give me theory in a fun and entertaining way? He sounds intelligent and is so sophisticated. Definitely not a geographic dumbfuck who thinks Portugal is in South America.
The only thing that gives me a little hope is knowing Vaush is disproportionately represented online. Hasan has over three times the popularity of him and is more well known among "normies." I know Hasan fans and have met a few in person. I've never met a Vaush fan outside of an online forum. Maybe they're more common in NATO countries that lap his shit up.
Even if he's not that big he's clearly being groomed to be some figurehead of the "libs who think they're socialists cuz they want free weed and legal college" movement.
"You can't just say America always bad, what about when they're on the good side?"
Well what makes them on the good side?
"They're fighting against the bad guys like Russia/China"
Okay, well you can't just always say Russia Bad China Bad, what about when they're on the good side?
"Well what makes them on the good side?"
Well weakening the global military empire of the US is a good start, since that global military empire currently is the primary mechanism through which global capitalist imperialism is enforced onto the world at gunpoint, and anything that breaks the hegemonic control of that global military empire gives breathing room to liberation struggles around the world.
"Okay, but you can't support dictators just because they weaken America"
They're just hiding racism and they can't admit it to themselves or others. That's 90% of this. They want a leftist movement that caters specifically to their narrow racial and cultural interests. Everything else is frighting to them and forces them to admit they're from the imperial core.
How was I supposed to know I was supposed to be "following the data" and watching capitalist roader Youtubers instead of reading all the partial differential equations on these 1980s Gosplan documents
i want to bicycle kick this person in the face holy shit. what is wrong with them, why do they write in this condescending, annoying, redditoid manner? we need to figure out how to undo literacy skills so that we can stop vaushites from ever writing anything again
Let's try to think positively: they might also stop doing this if they develop some social and epistemological skills and thereby find some desire to actually investigate the issue instead of pontificating while declaring themselves as "following the data"
I actually blame Malcolm Gladwell and Matty Y. for a lot of this sort of rhetorical dogshit. This reeks of someone thinking to themselves "I know a ton about this really hard and complicated topic. I want to explain it, but these poor dumb peasants will never be able to follow my thinking. Let me write an "explainer" to help them understand the basics."
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with trying to explain complex stuff in an accessible way, but this condescending "golly gee isn't that somethin'!" way of doing that project is trash, and usually just hides the fact that the person writing it actually has nothing more than a surface level understanding of the topic. If all you understand are the basics, all you can write is a basic explanation.
Ahh yes apparently reading Marx and applying his law of value to the modern global imperialistic economy is a simplistic shortcut, who knew? Who knew that Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value is actually just a simplistic shortcut with no data analysis and that liberal ideals are actually true!
I have met a lot of 'tankies' over the decades. From committed communists in orgs, to elderly former diplomats and bureaucrats from the USSR, to political activists in Africa and the Middle East, Union guys hiding their power levels when organising at work, Irish Republicans, and one former Black Panther. Literally none of them were evangelicals, ever. At most they came from various strains of liberation theologies for thr most part. I've met evangelicals who did leave the church and move left, but they were mostly pacifist socialists and often Quakers.
The issue with this brain genius is that intellectually their a dog chasing cars. They have no analysis, they have no frame of reference, the fact that they keep saying brains just work like that like some sort of overheard pop science mantra is an example of how they clearly have a pattern on just latching onto whatever the loudest, most forcefully and confidently given view point is, regardless of its content, until a new one comes along.
They left an insular and all-encompassing religious community when it butted up against the status quo. They then found themselves drawn to an often isolated and often echo-chambered group of online 'tankies' (we often don't have a choice about that and some online aesthetic communist stuff is pretty insular). Note that they only even "listened" to these people, never met or discussed or organised with them. Which means they were consuming comments and media, not meeting an actual community. And when it butted up against the status quo, they bailed again. Now they've found Vaush and his ilk; an insular, exclusionary, morally superior online only in-group based primarily on black and white gandstanding and a fervent refusal to actually do any examination or self-examination, that runs on moral platitudes and gish galloped thought experiments which conveniently free them from actually having to do anything.
Honestly it just seems like they've gone back to being an evangelical, except evangelicals actually do engage in community action and events. If the bitcoin revolution wasn't a total scam they'd be an Effective Altruist. If they'd been a teenager in the early 2000s they'd have been a new-Atheist. In a few years as the West slides deeper, they'll probably be one of these 'rational Fascists'.
What exactly has the US done to earn cred for Ukraine? If someone could point to a single instance of well-placed, well-intentioned historical aide I could somewhat understand it. But when every historical example is just in service of capital interests and completely cynical, I just don't know what this type of lib is grasping at.
Why is this in the Dunk Tank? If Paris is wrong why do I have childhood memories of running through fields in Ohio with Xi, Castro, and millions of Communists from the global south? I vividly remember going to sermons with these guys and then one day we said, 'No, mom, no more,' and then we went our separate ways.