Well history shows, that guillotining your ruling class, such as happened in France, leads to centuries of rational peace and prosperity. The French successfully ended all wars, and liberalism ushered in an instant and uninterrupted 250 year peace. Since they designed their guillotines not to cut the heads of any undeserving peasants who were caught in the political maelstrom, and enlightened the peasants so that every citizen was a productive and conscientious member of society, every French person and all of their descendants has become a productive civic philosopher. No despot ever managed to come to power in France ever again, and certainly not within 10-15 years.
Having successfully merged society with the Hegelian world spirit of human freedom, the rest of Europe gave up all colonies, freed the people, and helped them achieve a level of national and self actualization in line with the French wave of historic human transformation. No despot ever managed to come to power in Europe again.
Now, the world's children know no fear or hunger, only freedom and reason; and its all thanks to the fact that the French did such a good job chopping the heads off of exactly the right people.
I love how this whole premise never gets questioned. By anyone. None of the super smartest people in the movie were like, "no that won't work." The premise just gets accepted as true, but it would be bad.
"I'm going to eliminate half of all life in the universe" hey thanos did you know that scarcity in modern society isn't driven by population at all, and is in fact an artificial condition imposed on the lower classes by the ruling class that hoards those resources?
No its just like, "well killing people is wrong but it would probably work, people might be sad though." No Disney, fuck you. Don't let people believe this shit. Thanks for your endless support for cultural fascism, ya fucks
A wiggler? Did you learn that on the first day at sophistry class at fallacy school? Is that a technical term or are you completely, totally, irredeemably full of your own farts
Irish and Islamic Arab scholars were widely sought during medieval era because their countries contained the last surviving copies of the entire roman classical canon and before, locked up in monasteries with monks and scribes copying them by hand, in all different languages, since the fall of Rome and the spread of the catholic and islamic religion into those areas.
In the dark ages, they were the only people with any access to information about the past, they spoke and could read and write many languages. Advanced mathematics were developed in Iraq in the 9th century, or even earlier in the vedas, and made their way to Europe in the 12th century. Fibonacci made a name for himself in Italy through these discoveries, which had a thriving intellectual culture in various regions for the larger part of the feudal era.
So no I dont think its a recent idea. The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world. The formation of an educated middle class is fairly recent, but as the middle class gets squeezed harder, look how the first thing to go is quality public education.
A sharp, curious and questioning mind is route to whatever passes for freedom in any age. Whether or not that opportunity is available to everyone is a sure indicator of a whether a society is more free, or more repressive.
Well you see, I watched half of the yellow lecture and now good thing bad and bad thing good! Its Dialectical Materialism!
Neo-Stalinism is a meme ideology that produces radical liberal bureaucrats, not revolutionaries.
But principled MLs and Maoists are much better at decolonial struggles and centralization than most of the left. And they tend to be much better educated on history and theory than the based Stalinists, and certainly most ambient liberals.
The trick is to learn to tell the difference between aspirational leftists and real ones. The real movement, you can disagree but you have to prove yourself in action because in political struggle the stakes are real. And to be effective we have to work together in evaluating and acting on what is objectively real. But in the real movement, people come from all different backgrounds, and live in all different environments that affects the way they look at social problems.
The people you're arguing with don't understand that the most loyal supporters that Stalin enabled in those early days after the revolution, were later executed/purged on trumped (heh) up charges of anarchism and Trotskyism. They have memorized a few apologetics for why its good actually, or never really happened. Its because they want to be actual practical organizers, but they're still idealists who think repeating certain phrases legitimizes them. The older ML and Maoist organizers know this too, and try to educate where they can but any movement can become sectarian and self referential.
Don't take the bait, the history is deeply contradictory no one really understands how easily it breaks people's brains. Its better not to worry and focus on doing something real
Do you believe private property is a fundamental human right? If yes, Do you believe that people who own or run businesses should be able to pay a living wage?
Do you have a theory of political change? What is it?
Are you familiar with theories of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism? Are you pro-reparations?
Do you believe economic degrowth is necessary to avoid climate change?
Are you opposed to the genocide in Palestine? Do you support a one or two state solution?
Are you a British Green or an American Green?
I worry that by asking these questions directly it might affect any answers but these are "further left" than your stances.
Based on what you shared I'd say you're a "progressive liberal", which is a right-leaning moderate position. But that's where a lot of revolutionary leftists, including myself, started out.
What really matters to me when relating to progressive liberals is:
If you're willing to educate yourself, and getting involved in a political party like you're doing could help.if your positions are based on a real spiritual progressivism, or if someone acts fundamentally reformist/opportunist.
I bought my son a cheap little computer, basically a windows version of a Chromebook. When windows needed an update there wasn't enough memory to perform it, and the computer would no longer connect to WiFi. I thought this was very dumb so I figured out how to remove windows and install Mint. Was impressed by how well it worked.
When I needed a new computer I bought a $150 thinkpad and installed Fedora. Been a fedora main ever since
I see where you are coming from now, I misunderstood your intent. I took what you meant as "its good to use these buttons because that's why the platform has them," which I disagree with every which way!
But you were actually saying the design of the platform causes the behavior, the platforms hurt discourse more than individual users who's understanding (or misunderstanding) of how a vote button is supposed to be used is an ambiguity that is inherent to the platform. Which, yes I agree with that also, and it is a better point to make than which user is vicious or virtuous in using the platform.
I make similar criticisms often about structural basis for social movements, but admittedly I have a blind spot for tech platforms. Not because I'm bad with tech, but because I'm pretty good with it. I do tend to think of these platforms as neutral, but that's more of a bias than a product of analysis. I'd like to unlearn the bias.
You seem pretty advanced in your understanding, is this something that you've just thought about, or are you in community, or educating yourself by other means? I could use a little of that in my own work, as I am aware of this bias but still wasting time and energy because of it
Anyway, holy shit its a conversation if either of us had the attitude of "downvote and go" then I'd have missed your actual intention. Another tendency of online discourse is for people to take the dimmest possible interpretation of others opinions. I guess I also fall in this trap, at least around certain topics
He's a total ideologue.