InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided] @ InappropriateEmote @hexbear.net

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1

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188

Joined

4 yr. ago

This trick ain't gonna work for everyone for the fourth time, it didn't even work for the second.

I think the trick will work just fine, and that it has been working just fine. Maybe not for everyone, but it's not meant to work for everyone. Look at how well they sold their proxy war in Ukraine back when they still wanted to. You're right that "anyone who is informed by analysis" will see through it immediately, but they're not the ones the propaganda drive is meant to convince reassure. I think it's pretty clear that most people in the west, even including a high percentage of those with real power, are informed much more by ideology and the prevailing paradigm in their circles than any kind of analytical or even honest reckoning of what's really happening. Or am I misunderstanding you?

The USA could (and possibly will) carpet bomb Tehran and the nation at large, reduce its state and people to a state of complete abjection.

Could it realistically do even that? It's one of the few countries with hypersonic missiles, superior to US tech. It manufactures drones (many of which Russia buys and use to great success in Ukraine) that could cheaply render enemy air bases and strips unusable making the touted air superiority of the US moot. Even the US knows they would get their asses handed to them if they ever attempted to militarily fuck with Iran. From my understanding, the only actual advantage that the US has over Iran is nukes.

Unless you're cleaning your cat's litter box on the counter you prepare your food, nope. Eating pork is the main way that people get infected.

we could potentially feed the country for free.

We could right now. Not potentially, but completely and easily. With the amount of food that is intentionally just destroyed to maintain profits, we could do it. That's not to mention all the food that even makes onto the market and gets distributed but is thrown out at grocery stores and restaurants because it didn't sell fast enough, then tossed into dumpsters with bleach poured on it so unhoused people can't even dumpster dive for subsistence. The amount of food is not the issue, not at all. As always, it's the system and the greed of capitalists that perpetuate it that is the problem.

That said, I don't mean to detract from anything in your comment because it's accurate and you're right.

indeed they are, and they're full of cringe.

Materialism is definitely when you do believe in literally anything you want especially when it's completely unscientific and divorced from material reality, then? Ok, got it! A real MArxist materialist just can't believe that it was fairies' and ghosts ideas that were the driving force in history. Makes sense. lol

Careful, talk like that around here and a bunch of Marxist ghost hunters will tell you that you don't understand what Marx meant by materialism, that he totally meant you could believe in ghosts and magic unicorns and telepathy, just not be one of those idealists! And then they'll say you're just a reddit atheist for claiming otherwise.

ITT several "communists" out themselves as being anti-materialists.

A price tag on anything in any store is a dare imo. You just have to weigh the likelihood of succeeding if you accept the dare and what the stakes are if you fail.

I agree with almost all of this, but I don't think most of it contradicts OP's premise (so long as we remove the word "literal" from the title). Like:

all those oppositions are the same impulse to keep capitalism chugging away to benefit the guys at the top.

Right. And each of them could be swapped out depending on whether or not they are convenient for capital to oppose or support at any given moment, with the issue of evangelicals and abortion that you pointed out being the perfect example of this in general, not an exception.

But for the most part, any heavy consumer of right-wing social media, conservative activist, or politician has or is coalescing a fairly consistent worldview and we can't beat them if we incorrectly think they're morons.

First of all, I would agree that their worldview can be called consistent in that it is comprised of positions that will always tend towards support for capital, the status quo, and existing hierarchical power structures. But that's a different thing from being inconsistent in terms of hypocrisy or what we might call "internal consistency," like not being totally contradictory. Example, claiming to stand for keeping politics out of games while holding up something like Call of Duty as being apolitical. Or referring to people who care about equality as being "special snowflakes" even as they themselves whinge and blubber about the oppression of whatever group they tie to their sense of identity (invariably the most privileged groups like white, cis-hetero, men, gamers, etc.) It's these kind of culture war issues that are the chips that can be swapped out that I think SFS was talking about and he is right.

Their political positions are not based on any kind of analysis or fundamental principles, but instead shift along with the status quo, which does change over time due to things like technology, even if the overarching deference to the owning class never changes in a capitalist society. These are politics of convenience in a way that communist politics are most definitely not. Maybe it's just semantics, but I would say right wing culture war politics are not arbitrary, but that they are inconistent.

Also, I don't think it's really accurate to lump the rank and file chuds (the larger mass of right wing social media) in with the politicians as a singular class with the same interests that align in support of capital. There are those that get the ball rolling and steer the culture war issues and those that unfortunately will just follow along and be outraged by whatever the fox news or youtube alt-right algorithm or evangelical church tells them is outrageous. Like has been pointed out before, many working class people who identify as right wing do correctly recognize there is something really fucking wrong with this shit society, but they are manipulated into looking in the exact opposite direction of where the problem actually lies. The capitalist class, in part via politicians, are the ones doing the manipulation after having murdered and demonized the left. I think it's fair to say that there are some people who hold and program the chips in OP's analogy, able to cynically swap them in and out to benefit their own ends, but a much larger set of people whose brains are the targets for those chips and who have been trained to accept the swapping without question.

It's not obvious? Because white males as a demographic are the most privileged people on the planet and not coincidentally also the ones most prone to petty, oblivious arrogance, tantrum-throwing, and egotistical man-splaining. The latter was demonstrated by the one in this NASA scientist's anecdote.

I had long hair in high school in the 90s and people would laugh at me and call me Fabio. It was meant as an insult and a dunk, but looking back, there are worse things to be called.

You just naturally achieve what so many glam rock musicians had to go to great lengths to cultivate.

just a friendly heads up, I think you misgendered the person you were referring to.

Why double down on this of all things? It's not even necessarily about a medical condition (but it's that too, for many of us it's not a skill issue but a heart and lung issue), it's about the fact that biking up a hill can be fucking hard and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for not wanting to do it all the time living in a hilly city, let alone if they're trying to get home after working all day and are dead tired. The person who you were first responding to, who was asking in good faith from everything I can tell, also said "how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?" You completely disregarded that. Would you tell your 80 year old grandparent just to bike harder in their hilly city? This is a totally legitimate concern and responding "skill issue, just bike harder" really is heading into some ableist territory.

Using an adblocker and a scriptblocker, I checked it out and it looks legit. It has the episode in question in OP as well as the Streets episode @BigHaas@hexbear.net mentioned in the comments.

At this point I kind of feel like just saying fuck The Deprogram. I used to really like it, as a fan of all three of their individual youtube channels I was a listener from the first episode all the way until like episode 90 or somewhere around there. There was some other stuff that got on my nerves over time, but this switch to paywalling some of their episodes is bullshit. I understand they deserve to be compensated for what they do with the podcast, and I thought it was a great model that non-patreon listeners had to wait a week to hear each episode and that they did live Q&A sessions only for patrons, etc. I'm all for that. But to lock people out of content if they don't pay a subscription fee is just fucking low imo. I realize other leftist podcasts do that too and I think that also fucking sucks. It is hypocritical of them, and it does make me lose respect for them.

Anyway yes, thanks ByteFoolish, the above link should be fine for listening to those payblocked "patron only" episodes.

I am totally with you in the broad sentiment you're expressing, but almost everything you said is ultimately just bandaids that still don't address the real deep, systemic problem, and this mode of production that will always reward greed. You were most onto something towards the end. But rather than a new French Revolution, which just sets things up for this to happen all over again, how about a new Bolshevik Revolution that aims not just to try to do capitalism more fairly, but reorganizes society in such a way as to eliminate poverty and all need in what is already a post-scarcity human epoch.

We the people have the power to seize the means of production. We the people can set society on the road to the complete abolition of class.

If only there was another country to blame it on

Russian disinformation and meddling is driving innocent Americans to suicide.

I couldn't agree more. About the importance of being able to read reviews of the vendors made by the community and how much of a boon that is for buyers and their well being, something that simply doesn't exist when it comes to buying from irl dealers. But also about how disappointing it is that so many hexbears not only don't understand this but are being really demeaning towards people who don't deserve it.

The whole "no investigation, no right to speak" thing doesn't just apply to the discussion of politics. And some of the attitudes here about people who use DNMs are almost bordering on victim-blaming. You're right, the ubiquitous use of cryptocurrency on the DNMs is not because the people who use them are the cryptobros we all know and hate, it's because that's literally the only safe way for any of this to work. Most people using the DNMs would rather not have to go through the hassle of having to learn to use crypto in the first place, or deal with the small loss of funds every time they convert their real money into it, or risk losing it because they messed up somehow with their wallet address or something. The use of crypto in this case is an unfortunate necessity most would avoid if they could.

I edited this comment for clarity and because I accidentally said something backwards initially:

Hmm, it should be plainly obvious if someone is encrypting their messages to you. Like, what I think you're describing couldn't even work by accident. Other people's keys can't be used. If someone wants to communicate with you, they need your public key to encrypt their message to you and only you can then decrypt that message with your private key. If you then want to respond, you need their public key to encrypt your response, which only they can decrypt.

Example: if a buyer contacts a vendor, the buyer is not using their (the buyer's) own key. The buyer must use the vendor's public key to encrypt a message that the vendor then decrypts locally (which only the vendor can do with their private key). If the buyer used any other key, the vendor couldn't decrypt the message and no transaction could proceed. If the vendor wants to then send a message to the buyer, that's when the vendor uses the buyer's public key to encrypt that message. If the buyer gave the vendor any public key that is not their own, that buyer then couldn't decrypt the message the vendor sent them. There's really no place in this process where the vendor wouldn't know if the buyer was using their own PGP key.

In my past experience, people would put their public keys in their profile. The auto-encryption doesn't even look like encryption, it just looks like sending messages normally, the same way it looks using any encrypted messenger service: you just accept and trust that the service really is encrypting and decrypting at both ends and all you see is the text that someone sends you. There are steps both you and the person you're talking to have to take when doing your own encryption. Even when you're using PGP, you're still sending text over the market messaging system, and the market is encrypting that, but the text you're sending will look like total gibberish to everyone. Not just to the market, but it will look like total gibberish even to you after you encrypted the text locally on your own device, and of course it will also look like total gibberish to the person you're sending it to until they decrypt it locally on their end. There really should be no room for confusing who's public key is being used, not even mistakenly because the decryption wouldn't work. Unless I'm still misunderstanding you, or unless communication methods on the DNMs have so drastically changed in recent years that they're incomparable, but I know that's not the case.