History Major. Cripple. Vaguely Left-Wing. In pain and constantly irritable.

  • 451 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: March 24th, 2025
  • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPtoMeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works•Today in "Tankies on .world's PoliticalMemes", Part 1English
    9·
    10 days ago

    But on the other hand, we had a pandemic where it seems like there was a point that even the normies started to figure out that money was just made up and pretty much the entire system is rigged… and then it all just immediately went back to status quo.

    I understand the frustration, but I also think you really overestimate how much of a change the expressions of discontent were during the pandemic, compared to the baseline understanding of Americans just turned up in volume. And skepticism of the system does not necessarily include a willingness to see it overturned. See: the Soviet Union and Russia.

    Shit, man, the biggest expressions of public discontent during COVID weren’t against the basic functioning of the economic system, but against inconveniences like masking or limited functioning of recreational institutions.

  • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPtoMeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works•"Ukraine's existence is a Zionist Plot" - Most Coherent TankieEnglish
    221·
    11 days ago

    tbf, one could theoretically have both. Nazis were down with Zionism insofar as it proposed to take all the Jews out of everywhere else and bring them to Palestine. Though they weren’t wedded to Palestine; the Nazis also proposed Madagascar.

    Politics, strange bedfellows, etc.

    The bit where it gets strange is when you accuse a Jewish man of being a Nazi for the crime of (checks notes) wanting to reside in a country that isn’t a Jewish ethnostate and has no plans to become one.

    The reason why they use ‘Nazi’ is either because Nazi has stronger genocidal connotations, or because Russian propaganda pushes that anyone who opposes Russia as a Nazi, as the great crime of the Nazis to Russian ultranationalists is neither fascism nor genocide (else they might have to give a stern look to Great Leader Stalin) but opposing Glorious Mother Russia.

  • PugJesus@piefed.socialOPtoMeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works•Today in "Tankies on .world's PoliticalMemes", Part 1English
    164·
    11 days ago

    Sure, except Biden was a piece of shit neoliberal that threw us back to the republicans.

    Sure, but he’s not “one of the most right-wing politicians in US History”

    He’s not even the most right-wing Democrat president in the past 30 years.

    Don’t pretend like this shit show on the democratic side is anything but controlled opposition.

    Controlled opposition is very different than kind of fuckery we see from the Dems. The Dems are a mixture of ideological neoliberals, shithead opportunists, and sane people. The thing is, even most (though not all) of the shithead opportunists are in it for the power; the money is just a nice bonus. They’ll sell out our lives for money, but not their own power, generally. Very few of them, even the shithead opportunists and most of the neolibs, would take the tack they did if they thought there was a serious chance of them losing an election because of it.

    The reason they continue as they do is not because they’re being puppeteered by corporations, but because not enough fucking people give enough of a shit to bother voting them out. And you can argue that that’s because the US electorate is puppeteered by corporations, but then we’re dealing with a very different issue than a few thousand party apparatchiks. They’re complacent and complicit, but not wedded to this state of affairs - the reason this shitshow continues is because there is no available alternative CONSENSUS amongst the non-Republican ELECTORATE.

    That’s a much more daunting task than dealing with a metaphorical handful of fuckwits, so most people prefer the fiction of a Dem party controlled in smoky rooms by cigar-puffing oligarchs in suits. Those oligarchs have outsized power compared to their actual numbers, but the core of the issue is that sanity doesn’t even have a majority inside the party electorate, much less a majority in the general electorate.

    That said, the tankies have the opinion that only revolution will suffice. Try to politik in the US? Fuck you die, they say. Like fuck all the way off from your workers paradises of Russia and China. The latter working 12-6’s, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for starvation wages, with unions outlawed. Gtfo. These people are cunts.

    Hell, man, I don’t even know that I disagree with them that revolution is needed to break at least the US out of this rut - though I certainly fucking hope it isn’t, as I am terrified of both the bloodshed that could entail, and the uncertainty of outcome that involves (anyone who thinks “It can’t get worse than this” lacks imagination - or awareness of current events outside of their comfortable suburban basement). But I do know three things that put me in opposition to tankie anti-electoralism:

    1. Making things worse helps no one. In addition to that moral concern, giving more power to fascists makes educating and organizing harder, thus making the eventual goal of revolution harder. In that vein, harm reduction, when sufficiently strong differences are presented (ie Republicans-as-a-fascist-party and Dems-as-a-spineless-neolib-party) is not optional, on both moral and practical grounds.

    2. Most people in the USA are not as far left as tankies, and even many non-tankie leftists, think. Which means our options are extremely limited for “Push through a socialist utopia platform”, even if we had an institutionally-clean-slate and no Citizens United to deal with in making a brand new “Near-50% Of The Electorate Party”.

    3. Electoral politics affects national political discourse and the Overton Window. You (generic you, I figure you aren’t a tankie, I’m just talking in the abstract here in general) think the Dems are never gonna move the Overton Window left? Fine, that’s not necessarily wrong. But I promise that the GOP continually moving it right (or rather, the failure of the milquetoast Dems to even slow that rightward movement) is not going to make people more receptive to ideas that they find abnormal. And, of course, that such lovely paradises as “North Korea” and “Thousands of years of brutal feudal-and-oligarchic-and-despotic regimes all across the world, unchallenged until modernity” show us that suffering is not what causes revolutions. Political consciousness is what causes revolutions.

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