That only makes sense if you completely discount the husband as a moral patient. While I'm arguing that he's been slightly over-emphasized, I am by no means discounting him and in most possible scenarios believe he should be informed. If he has no history known to his wife of probably 4+ years of being an abuser to her or others as far as she knows, it's pretty unlikely that he is. Making the decision to not tell him anyway on the very, very unlikely chance that he, as a historically normal dude, snaps and blows her head off with a shotgun, is completely discounting the guaranteed outcome of him being wronged by being left in the dark about this.
Talking about this in terms of social contract theory is really sidestepping the morality of the issue. Would you say that her lying entitles OP to punch her in the face? Surely not, two wrongs don't make a right, punitive justice is bad, etc. What OP should do is investigate the issue with her not because she "gets to" tell her side or has a right to, but because he doesn't know what the consequences of telling the husband would be. For all he knows, the husband is abusive and would beat her for this transgression, transgression though it is. The most likely outcome is, of course, that the husband is not abusive, but the most likely outcome of a round of Russian roulette is that you go unharmed. In either case, there is a real risk that is severe enough that it's worth checking, even if it's substantially less likely.
As someone else mentioned, it probably would have been worth giving her an opportunity to give her perspective before deciding if and how to tell the husband. Most likely the final result is just telling him, but there are more marginal possibilities that it is worth accounting for and taking an extra couple of days wouldn't have harmed you or him (yours was already a dead relationship by virtue of your understandable disapproval of her cheating, so it's not like you'd be enabling her to cheat for longer unless you think she's managing to juggle even more guys along with young children and a marriage).
Assuming OP was right, I'd frame it more as his having an obligation to the husband as a human being making the choice correct rather than as a lack of obligation to the wife making the choice indifferent. We should be trying to make the world better, not carefully demarcating the bounds of social contracts so we can find out exactly where we're allowed to do as much harm as we feel like.
But I also think SadArtemis is right that OP, to put it charitably, got ahead of himself
I'd more say that the military occupation was done for the sake of confrontation (this is similar to the official Chinese line). It was a really senseless invasion, as far as I can tell (and I disagree with the Vietnamese line that the war was expansionist).
Come on, you're more well-read than this. You know that military occupation and annexation are not the same thing.
At least Mai is an adult
Just tell them she was designed with underage fanservice in mind (e.g. do a tatsumaki) and they'll pivot.
If I was just complaining about border skirmishes, then I'd mention India or something. The attack on Vietnam was more than just a "minor border skirmish".
This doesn't make sense, Tibet voluntarily re-joined China at the end of the civil war, and it was a decade later that they decided to secede again, prompting PLA occupation.
the map is far more accurate than it is not though
Come on, Yog, we can hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. It'd be so easy to just color in Vietnam and then you'd be set, but by posting it in its current form you are actively lying.
I dislike the meme for other inaccuracies, but Tibet had voluntarily re-joined China a decade prior, so calling that an "invasion and occupation" would be like saying the same of the US with the Confederacy
About diamat: Hmm I guess I never really understood the big deal about it, it just seems like the standard toolkit when trying to understand something.
If both are told to render them in plain language, a lot of the stated beliefs of a Marxist and a highly-secular liberal are going to be similar. From a certain perspective however, the Marxist seeks to take those truisms and push them to their logical extremes rather than just let them sit there as a meaningless token admission. Put a more palatable way, diamat and historical materialism are ways of taking the axioms that both parties (the Marxist and secular liberal) admit as being foundational to reality and systematize them. Vibes are not enough.
If you're interested in writing on the necessity of this approach, see Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which isn't bandied about like a meme in the manner that his three most popular works are, but is very philosophically interesting.
If you want meme texts, this is also covered in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and in Marx's The German Ideology. As others have noted, these things are fundamental to the nature of Marxism as "scientific socialism", so a shorter option is the very good essay This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Marxism as Science, which I think also exists in an audio form if you want me to dig that up.
In my opinion, understanding Diamat from the get-go is important
I think it's best to start with the history of socialist and political-theoretical ideas like Engels does so one can develop a gradual understanding and see how it fits within the landscape of political ideologies.
They don't need to be so expensive. Pirate them.
Or better yet, pick a better game than D&D, which is basically any modern one
I think the main things to understand are, first, that the SU was already mainly controlled by revisionists before Stalin even died, reducing Stalin to a borderline figurehead for revisionists to work under. Secondly, the Secret Speech included extensive deception in its accusations against Stalin and co., with a very long list of supposed crimes that were "not previously known" because they either didn't happen at all or didn't happen as Khrushchev depicted them, which contributed to making Stalin look monstrous and therefore make destalinization look appealing. Third, Khrushchev purged high-profile supporters of Stalin, most notably Beria, which really made it less viable and less appealing to oppose destalinization. Lastly he kind of did get pressured out of office eventually, not because of destalinization but for the adjacent reason that he just kind of didn't know what he was doing, which is only to be expected from someone like him.
guy appears (who signed orders as well, mind you) saying no more purges, you can do whatever ;) and thus cements his power
Except destalinization also included purges
A few months ago I was listening to a podcast, I remembered it as Citations Needed but it could have been another adjacent one, where they interviewed someone from Electronic Intifada about NYT's journalistic malfeasance around the article "Screams Without Words". I've been looking for it and can't find it.
The part that stuck out to me the most was the mother of a daughter who was used as a puppet for these lies saying "she was only killed" and talking about what a miserable situation it is to be saying such a thing.
After spending a couple days interacting with them, I have come to agree with the common sentiment hexbear already had that it's probably not worth trying to persuade a small number of steadfast neoliberals among those of us with limited patience, which includes myself.
If I'm a wimp and you still want to go buck wild, of course.
But the suggestion I got that .ee would probably be a better staging ground is at this point taken to heart. Since we are federated with them, I think the thing to do is make (appropriate, non-hostile) posts in .ee communities where the purpose of the comm adequately fits with topics that it would be useful to discuss.
As with my last post, which was misbegotten, it's just a thought I had
There are a bunch of sicko neoliberals and insufferable redditors there, yes, but there are also some normal libs and a few comrades, and it seems like a good way to encourage lemmy generally to re-embrace leftism.
I've been using an alt to talk on there and it's honestly not that bad. It's a little bad, but not that bad. I think if we just try to patiently explain ourselves, we have a reasonable chance of reaching people and shifting the general political alignment.
Those of us who aren't up to dealing with ghouls (I am frequently included in this group) can just stay at home here and that's just fine.
Anyway, just an idea. I would appreciate feedback.
idk, I was thinking about this a lot with the Chapo interview and how completely fraudulent the coverage of Israel was. It feels like we shouldn't let liberals get away with this shit by burying it in the past and pretending they always held more "moderate" beliefs. Even I had forgotten about the "putting Jewish babies in ovens" claim and I'm really fucking online about this mythbusting stuff (ask me about any story involving the DPRK). I think it got overshadowed by the "40 beheaded babies," which admittedly there is more memory of because the WH has struggled to get Biden to stop lying about it.
There are some rare cases of people remembering these hoaxes, probably the best example being "Saddam's human shredder," where there is memory of how there was this hoax that mainstream news pushed and libs completely bought, while the next closest example, WMDs, is something that Democrats kind of just pin on Republicans despite Dems also falling for it/perpetrating fraud for it (just not for quite as long).
I've got easily another dozen examples off the top of my head, but you get the idea. It's sort of the cousin of the retroactive invention of reality that we see with cases like MLK, how people pretend northern whites were broadly on his side and ridiculous shit like that, or even that he wasn't still hated by whites throughout the country at the time of his death, and it was the long-term impact of the campaigns lead by himself and others that ultimately forced even most of white culture to acknowledge his side as being that of justice.
No, it's not the one about how Democracy isn't Coca-Cola
The main phrase of it was something along the lines of "The Communist Party must follow the people into the fire", that is, it must defer to the outcome of votes and the popular will even when it believes the outcome will be for the worse (presumably while expressing its own view) so that it does not grow out of touch with the people and instead gains trust and credibility from them in the long term.
It's not on redsails, unfortunately, but I'm sure one of you all linked it to me in the first place.
From what I can gather, there's one Jew in the whole game (who I think is just called "Jew") and he ends up being a collaborator with a demon cult that seems to want to consume humanity. It doesn't seem like people really hold this against him long term, since he gets into more benign misadventures in the "where are they now?" montage at the end, but it seems like the most on-the-nose fash writing possible otherwise.
I haven't actually played the game, partly because I was put off by this element of the synopsis, so did I miss relevant context? Even just a "fuck you guys for making a leper of me and then demanding my loyalty" type line?
I've seen a few times people cite Furr while disavowing him in a more general sense, but I have never seen someone here talk about specific problems with him and his work.
I remembered this fact because I was looking up information on Losurdo and found a little eulogy Furr wrote for him (which incidentally had the answer I was looking for, that Losurdo did not speak Russian).
Furr seems like an absolute crank in terms of his general writing, see this text at the end of an article he wrote refuting a Current Affairs article:
>I have been studying the allegations of crimes against Joseph Stalin for many years. My intention is to research every one of them. > >When I began years ago I thought that it would be only a matter of time – perhaps a year or two – before I discovered that at least one of these allegations against Stalin was true, could be confirmed by primary-source evidence. I was wrong. So far, after several decades of searching, I have yet to evidence that Stalin committed even one crime, much less the myriad crimes that Trotsky, Khrushchev’s men, Gorbachev’s men, and academic researchers have confidently asserted. > >I intend to keep looking. Perhaps some day I will discover at least one genuine crime by Stalin that I can truthfully say is supported by the best evidence we have. If and when I do, I will publish it and the evidence to support it.
Which is just a villain origin story, though again I must say that every refutation I have personally seen from Furr (though few in number) made sense.
So I ask again, what is actually wrong with him? Or has he merely inherited his own "Black Legend"?
So I've been putting off writing this for a long time and it'll probably need to be a series, but I've had a difficult time answering challenges from my friends who assert that China is either a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie or of the Bureaucracy (i.e. state capitalists), and that it's a competing imperialist power along with America (and they also say Russia but I can answer that one being stupid on my own).
The problem with China Discourse is that there is a serious paucity of sources dealing with nuanced critiques rather than just "debt trap!" bullshit or whatever, since the objections of liberals and the objections of smarter ultras are very different. At the very least, the sources dealing with this Discourse are less accessible to me.
But now I'm extremely bored and also recently saw Comrade Queermmunist's excellent rebuttal against the claim of China doing imperialism in the DRC, which gave me some hope that Hexbear would be able to answer some of these claims with something at least plausible.
The main objects of concern are the for-profit national businesses causing bureacratic class antagonism, foreign policy in the form of UN peacekeeping contributions, and straightforward imperialism at the base of its supply chain, along with miscellany like this:
https://newworker.us/international/chinas-stock-market-a-lesson-on-what-socialism-is-not/
I don't know, it's all a mess and putting off ideological work causes problems. If nothing else, let this be a practical lesson to you:
>To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
It catches up with you and makes things worse in the end.
And they said we should just accept it on their credibility.
I had the occasion to look this up again, so I thought I should post it for more than the shitlib I got it for (so now it's also for the three of you sorting by new at this hour)
I know it's tired to post these but come on, let me have just this one. It's so fucking dumb.
https://hexbear.net/comment/3723348
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/863209 [https://lemmy.zip/post/863209] > Archived version: https://archive.ph/5Ok1c [https://archive.ph/5Ok1c] > Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230731013125/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-66337328 [https://web.archive.org/web/2023073101312...
If you participate, remember to be nice to the people who demonstrate good faith.