purpleworm [none/use name]

The liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.

China is a bad example since there’s no opposing party in Chinq.

The historical example they were giving is of China invading and annexing Tibet, wherein the vast majority of the population was brutally enslaved and a small class of theocrats lived on top of a huge and ever-expanding mountain of corpses, upon which they sexually abused and murdered countless serfs besides the ones being tortured and killed by the basic mechanisms of the system under which they lived.

So the “opposing party” in this context is the other side of the war, the western-backed theocrats who wanted to perpetuate their slave state.

For the sake of not completely spamming your inbox, I’ll just reply to a few more things within this comment if that’s alright:

Huh, I actually didn’t know that, point taken. I didn’t know China had elections in general

It’s only maybe half-true to say China internally has opposing parties. There are other parties and many of them are dedicated entirely to pulling the government onto a different path from the current one, but those parties also are constitutionally barred from controlling high offices.

However, China does have elections and those elections are meaningful, because you don’t need separate parties to have meaningful elections. You believe that primaries are meaningful, right? In many places (e.g. NYC), they are much more meaningful than the general. Intra-party elections are meaningful in the same way and for the same reason that primaries are, because there are still differences within a party, even more so in a country where there is only one full party and party membership is massive and pretty accessible.

I think it’s perfectly fair to criticize various aspects about Chinese democracy, but neoliberals characterize it in a hopelessly slanted way.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the senate controlled by the right? Wasn’t it them that pushed for mass deportations?

You are wrong, deportations picked up immediately and were high for his entire Presidency, especially his first term. Dems lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

Obama is significantly liable for those loses too, because he immediately revealed that he was a complete fucking liar and didn’t want to actually pursue a progressive agenda. Even if this scapegoating were true, I’d still blame Obama because he had every opportunity to keep control of Congress but didn’t, and then it’s not like he actually opposed mass deportations.

I suppose you do have a point though, Harris wouldn’t need to be the only one who wins to make an actual difference, even if she would have just upheld the status quo that led to the rise in fascism. Still would have preferred that over what Trump is doing atm

I would never vote for Trump and would strongly discourage others from doing so, but there’s a meaningful sense in which his winning is less bad. Bear with me for a second: If Trump loses, he’s not actually the anti-christ who is thwarted, banished to hell, and then the Unique Threat to Our Democracy is gone. There will be more reactionary leaders who are as bad and worse who will immediately take his place. Holding him off from reclaiming office for one more term on a platform of adopting his old policies is not the victory some people depict it as.

What we need if we are taking Trump-like threats seriously is not to bail water, but to smash the Republican Party to atoms and scatter it to the wind. The Democrats can never do this, and over and over again insist that the thing to do is to adopt further and further right positions, to the point that you had Kamala commending the idea of the border wall construction project, merely saying it was mismanaged but she believed we should do something like it. That’s not hard-nosed pragmatism, that’s throwing red meat to reactionaries and supporting the cult of xenophobia to try to be Republican-lite, or more accurately to compete with 2024 Trump by becoming 2016 Trump (in terms of actual policy).

Kamala winning would have been catastrophic, not because she would have implemented worse policies than Trump, but because it would be a complete defeat of even berniecrat left-opposition in favor of a race to the bottom with Republicans of who can be more bigoted, as they get worse and then Democrats move to take up their old positions. The canonical answer in American politics would be even more cemented as “We need to get Republicans to vote for us by being racist,” and freaks like Ezra Klein who say we need anti-abortion Democrats.

If this is what the Democratic Party is, then they need to be destroyed just as much as the Republicans, because all they do is redirect “resistance” to becoming Republican on a slightly slower timetable. We need an actual left opposition to destroy reaction and the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than be that opposition, so we should be allowing them to take us hostage like we could ever give into enough demands from them that they will release us.

If the system is demanding that you support concentration camps, your main concern should be the destruction of the system by any means necessary, not the reduction of harm within it, and any measure that could be directed to the former instead of the latter probably should be.

If, hypothetically, the government demands that you choose between Hitler and Mussolini, the correct measures to be taking are ones directed at toppling the government.

Yeah, some ethnically-Polish dirt farmers in western Ukraine were really helping the Nazis when the OUN-B rolled up and engaged in the morally neutral act of killing them and their children.

That’s a much lamer deflection than anything she said. Why not just post some racial caricatures? Why not deny the Holocaust? I promise you that would produce at least as much contempt (and probably more, due to personal proximity). I think the reason that you said one and not the other is pretty obvious, which is that you duly recognize that what I just mentioned is repugnant and inappropriate to do for the sake of “trolling” but bear no such consideration for the line that you ended up providing. I’d suggest that that’s why you offered it in such a generalized way, because when someone thinks for even a second about what you’re really saying, that you’re downplaying a massive genocidal campaign, not just owning teh Reds, then suddenly it doesn’t feel like fun and games anymore.

Get a fucking grip. Be anti-ML all you want, I don’t care, but if you’re resorting to sounding like an actual fascist to own the tankies, you clearly lack the moral high ground you imagine yourself to have.

You of course are the instance owner, but I think people who encourage such repugnant behaviors (like whoever that is in the screenshot) shouldn’t feel comfortable if that’s how they’re going to behave, and everyone else can simply not engage in genocide denial if they want to feel comfortable.

I agree they are still kind of deflecting, even accepting that they should out the other user.

Might be worth re-evaluating what sort of people and narratives you’re listening to if you recognize that the one post is genocide denial. I agree with the instance owner that one should take ownership of their actions, but I also very strongly believe that it’s worth outing people encouraging saying such repugnant things.

I’d also be a little concerned that there were people (“tankies”) who pretty calmly tried to explain this to you, you seemingly ignored it, but someone from your ingroup going “this is dumb and embarassing” shocks you awake.

That is the most “left” possible position they could be assigned with what they said. You need to be really fash to say “the Jews killed Kennedy and own the porn industry and that proves they run America” like people will just go “huh, never thought about it like that, guess you’re right!”

I feel like it could be a joke about Klan robes (which is also meant to look like a ghost, so I guess it’s what you said).

I don’t even understand what you’re insinuating. The DPRK’s goal is to be sanctioned? They wouldn’t be doing things differently if they weren’t sanctioned? You know they violate the sanctions constantly, and often it’s just to do some small amount of normal trade, right?

I don’t like Juche, but the point of it in this context isn’t to avoid trading with countries, and indeed to considers it better to be able to trade with countries. The goal is to be able to survive not being able to trade in the case where that’s the unfortunate reality, something that was only solidified by the experience of the Arduous March. Strategically, it is obviously something they should be maintaining and one of the main reasons they survived.