China literally has state-mandated “affirmative action” for ethnic minorities

Oh, that’s good to know. Did not know that. I guess I assumed they wouldn’t have need for such a thing because they don’t have the same kind of racialized history that the US has. But given their interest in properly representing the people’s needs, it does make sense they’d want to make sure ethnic minorities don’t get ignored.

Presumably they mean Critical Race Theory because that’s the one that gets the backlash relating to the term “woke” (which as I understand it, originated as a positive term among black people in the US, as in becoming aware of systemic racism and how it works - then later became a derogatory term used by the right to describe anything and everything they don’t like*).

If CRT tries to be capitalism-friendly, I’ve never heard of such, but it wouldn’t shock me either. All I know is it has something to do with studying systemic racism in the US, which is enough to set off the racists. And from some cursory searching and reading just now to look for signs of things being off, it does get described in at least one place as criticizing liberalism for being unable to address racism properly, so that seems like a good sign to me. As someone else pointed out, it could get co-opted by western academia, which is no different than Marxism in general getting co-opted and diluted.

*For this reason, I don’t trust anyone at the offset who is anti-woke. Even in this context of saying to do ML instead of woke. Anti-racism is an important part of liberation and ML without it in the US context is gonna look something like patsoc horseshit. China doesn’t need CRT or things like it for domestic liberation efforts because they don’t have a systemic racism problem. The US needs it explicitly acknowledged and understood.

I had no real idea about any of it until I listened to the Blowback podcast season on Korea. I’d heard inklings on Korea before that in commie circles, but nothing all that detailed. It really puts into context how much brutality Korea has faced, first at the hands of imperial Japan and then at the hands of US occupation.

I’m going to say no but mainly because of how the question has been presented. I don’t like this framing of “largely responsible” because 1) it makes it sound like nazis don’t bear any significant responsibility for being nazis (it reads like it could be used to validate the rightist thing of “guess I have to go further to the right because the left is so annoying”), 2) it leaves out the material conditions that contribute to the development of fascism, nazism, etc., and 3) it lumps together liberals with “demsoc/anarchist” which can have meaningful distinctions to what they are in practice.

To say liberalism contributes now and historically, yes, but “largely responsible” is a mangled way to put it. I’m not sure in what regard anarchists would be contributing meaningfully, especially when considering how little power or influence they tend to have over anything. Liberalism has significant institutional power though.

Also, and this is something I have brought up before with other “questions” and will probably bring up again in the future because it continues to matter: This is worded like an unsupported claim rephrased as a question. A question way of putting it would be more like: “How much responsibility does X group bear for Y?”

I’m assuming this is asked in good faith out of curiosity, but I don’t like how it is phrased. It implies that it was easy to do for the US, which is not, as far as I’m aware, proven. It could have taken them months or years of probing, infiltration, and regional military preparation to get to the point where they could do this. I also don’t like how some people are replying as if it definitely was easy and they have the answer for why. The US power base is not god (in spite of it liking to act like it is) and given how much and often it has couped countries over decades, if it was easy for them to coup Venezuela, they would have done so long ago. This terrorist’s act of kidnapping the president looks more like desperation to me than a show of strength. Don’t give them credit for strength they are not proven to have.

In order to understand properly, I think we need to look at where and why colonialism originated and then proliferated. Not something I know enough about, admittedly. I more so know it’s a thing and that it has done unfathomable amounts of harm, less so why. But in the scientific socialist view, there should be material conditions that helped set the stage for colonialism to develop.

I don’t know if this matches the exact most up to date psychological definitions, but my understanding of it is:

• ASPD (Anti-Social Personality Disorder) is the main one where the diagnosis contains one of malignant intentions and behaviors.

• Psychopathy is a bit more murky and can have overlap with what gets defined as NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) but if the research of James Fallon is to be believed (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/ side note: I don’t vouch for this particular source, it’s a quick one I could find on his story for the moment), psychopaths can exist insofar as they are incapable of feeling empathy, but they can still intellectualize empathy and if raised in the right kind of environment, can behave in generally “pro social” ways.

From this and other things, I tend to extrapolate that people start with certain predispositions, but what is produced from these predispositions can vary quite a bit. I don’t have a source on it offhand, but I recall for example a story of someone in a more communal culture who had “voices in their head” (in the clinical meaning that people would associate with debilitating schizophrenia) but for them, these voices were actually friendly and supportive.

So I would say, as a general rule:

• In a long-term view of planning and building, we should expect that some people will have a different psychological starting point than the norm and account for that in how we think about systems and communities, especially when it comes to repeating issues that keep cropping up and make life harder for people (e.g. in the case of disabling conditions).

• However, we should avoid viewing predispositions as being behavior defining (rather than behavior influencing and even then, it can get into eugenics-adjacent territory and just kind of self-fulfilling prophecy nonsense fast focusing on what people are predisposed to if you start labeling it as leading to “good” or “bad” behaviors).

• For people who already have established behavioral patterns, communist vanguards have had to apply reeducation or force in some contexts, but I don’t think it’s particularly practical to get bogged down in fine psychological delineations in this process. It could be very wasteful and missing the forest for the trees to expend more energy on how people are different than how they are the same, when dealing with limited resources and difficult constraints (which is going to be a reality in any ongoing power struggle). The capitalists benefit from this focus because they can use it as a wedge to divide and individualize people, but we more so want the reverse, for people to relate and connect well. And for the most part, looking at the motives of a person’s material conditions is probably going to be more telling than any DSM chart will ever be.

• Remove obstacles: don’t have a library card but it’s an option? get a library card; having too much trouble deciding what to read? find a recommended reading list and go from there
• Set up an environment for it if possible: ideally somewhere quiet with minimal distractions, where you can have good sitting posture and good lighting; if you’re reading digitally, see if you can get an e-ink device, which is more similar to reading from paper; make sure your internal state is ok too, e.g. hydrated, sleeping alright, have sufficient time to read so you won’t feel rushed etc.
• Read what’s more appealing first: too dense and melting your brain? try reading something else and see if it’s more engaging. use that to build motivation toward reading other things.

Remember, it’s not about willpower, it’s about transitioning to a way of doing things that better facilitates reading for longer and more consistently. Laziness points at willpower and implies you’re choosing not to use it. But you obviously have a desire to do it, so that can’t be the whole problem. Something, or things, are in the way.

A great example of this kind of thing which pertains to exercising, not reading, but is similar in spirit. I remember this streamer/youtuber who had a treadmill he could use while playing video games at his computer. By having the treadmill right there, he was far more likely to do exercise. Whereas if he had it off to the side, it was easy to not get around to it.

I started writing a couple different approaches to this, but they didn’t seem quite right. I’m going to try again and see if 3rd time is the charm.

An important thing to remember is that reactionary “questions” often carry with them assumptions or claims that aren’t necessarily true. It’s framed like a question, but structured like a statement.

And you aren’t owed them a serious response, in part for that reason.

Let’s go through these to demonstrate what I mean:

Why do we always have to put ourselves and our cultures last by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims

The implicit claim: “We [already doing a lot of bullshit with the assumed ‘we’] always [assumes this is something that is constantly happening and never goes another way] have to [implies the ‘we’ is disempowered and has no say] put ourselves and our cultures [doesn’t even get into what those cultures are but judging by what follows, the implication is ‘white’] last [so claiming that not only are people accommodating the priorities of another group, but that this puts their own priorities dead last] by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims [claiming not only that pork is not served in school canteens, which the question provides no evidence for, but also that it’s “because of Muslims” and it assumes that pork is some kind of pivotal culture thing that is being pushed aside].”

Phew, that’s a lot of horseshit in one small sentence. And it’s not a real question. It’s a form of rhetoric that is meant to evoke a response. The implication is that something is being taken from you and the expected response is, “I have to take it back.”

Oh but it goes on:

or allowing underage girls to wear a hijab in school, to let their families oppress them

Look at how fast the rhetoric has shifted. Before it was implying that the “we” is a disempowered group who “has to” do stuff. Now it implies that the “we” is actually the one in power, who is making the decisions, “allowing” the dress codes of girls to be determined by the girls’ families instead of by the “we”. So already we can see that hint of white supremacy doing its thing of pretending to not have power, even as it exercises it, and vilifying the non-white cultures.

Why do we let people immigrants live off our government benefits when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here

The implicit claim: "We [here we go again] let people immigrants [once again implying the ‘questioner’ is actually among the group that is in charge, after all] live off our government benefits [another unproven claim that in this case is likely absolute horseshit of exaggeration and distortion] when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here [this one straight up doesn’t make sense - how and why would you pay taxes before you come to a place? last I checked, taxes are based on a government taking a portion of what you make to go to funding. if you make nothing, a portion of 0 is 0].

A further point is that they are using the word immigrants, but I have to wonder if they are even actually referring to people who are all immigrants by choice or if some of them are refugees. And refugee is an even more vulnerable position to be in than somebody who really wanted to be, and planned to be, an immigrant.

So I mean, if you have to, you can look at them like the “Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about” meme.

It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual.

Yes and no. The problem is that what “winner” means in modern capitalist society is not proven to be anything at all universal and so we can’t rely on it as a word that is accurate and consistent in describing “competition” throughout history (“competition” being another word that has the same problems).

In trying to come up with a more universalized way it can be described, I would say: it is useful to have the concept of success and fail states (partial or total), of quantifiably better and quantifiably worse, and these things showing up in outcomes, in behavior, in skill levels, which are relative to specific contexts and goals.

But I don’t think this is intrinsically the same as the modern capitalist concept of winner and loser, which carries with it extra baggage of the valuation of a human life through the lens of capital.

A good example of the difference, even within capitalist society, is within the context of video games.

Some games are designed in a more “punishing” way; that is, failures come with overt penalties or require redoing a long stretch of the game just to get to the part you failed at. Instead of honing in on where and why you failed, with the focus being on fixing that problem, those games are more about proving some kind of mindless persistence in the face of adversity and can cause great frustration in players, some of whom will just quit and give up.

On the other hand, some games are designed to be more “forgiving”; they might have difficult challenges, but trying again at the part you failed at is easy. This makes it more feasible to hone in on where you are making mistakes and how to fix them.

The first one is closer to how capitalist society functions; you “lost” and it’s not necessarily clear why and you might just be significantly worse off now and have to “grind” just to get back to where you were before.

The second is more like what I’d expect from a healthy use of challenge directed toward improvement (albeit without mentorship in the picture in the case of a video game); the purpose is to hone your skill for a specific use and so the framework of it is centered around that, not around anything else.

Play is even broader and doesn’t necessarily need to be about success or fail states, or about challenge at all. It can simply be about engaging with the creative parts of the mind and entering a more open and relaxed state for a time, which can help with connection and rejuvenation and so on. Play can include friendly challenges, but doesn’t have to.

So we can probably say that play and challenges with success and fail states (partial or total) are universal concepts, but “winner and loser” is much more shaky ground, as is “competition” alongside it. An example to try to get at why this is not just semantics: If I were to play you in chess and you checkmated me, it would have a different connotation if we said “due to the way our differing strategies and choices collided, your side of the board reached the agreed upon success state and mine the agreed upon fail state; let’s examine why that happened and try different strategies this time” vs. “you won, I lost, which means you’re a better player and I need to suck less.” Setting aside how stiffly academic the first way sounds, the point is that it’s more impersonal and focused on the mechanics of it in context, and actively trying to learn from the experience together. The second one is making a whole assumption from one game, that you’re an overall better player and being so vague with its language that it could imply I suck as a person, not just as a chess player, and this has contributed to my “losing”. The second also puts the focus on the individual and their responsibility to work through challenges on their own, in isolation, and receive credit (for “win or loss”) in isolation.

Even in a team-based game, we could look at it similarly. The first version could be a statement that implies both teams contributed to the outcomes and can learn from each other. The second would more likely imply the “winning” team is superior, through almost metaphysical characteristics (such as the often lofty term that gets bandied about “talent”).

I am curious now to what extent there is historical evidence of such things in earlier communal societies in history and what form it would take. Because it’s one thing to think people will always test themselves and each other. It’s another thing to think they will always cling to the value of winner/loser dynamics in make-believe.

In my experience with the modern day capitalist framework, it’s very much based on individualist win/loss, in the sense that “my win is your loss” and this tends to pervade forms of play too (board games, video games, sports, etc.). The idea that we could both win or both lose is often not even allowed for. The closest equivalent is considered a “tie”, which essentially means limbo, undefined, it was never resolved who is “better”. But this way of thinking would be strange in a basic communal society and incompatible with its framework of viewing problems as a shared responsibility. I will caveat the following by saying I’m not the biggest fan of Kropotnik because he can sometimes get pointed to to prop up anarchist arguments about not needing a socialist transition state, but I recall him going into observations of nature (I think in Mutual Aid) and how much and often animals actually work together on things as opposed to the prevailing capitalist narrative that nature is a constant dynamic of predator and prey. I bring this up as a point against the implication that competition in the “win/loss” sense of things is some kind of inevitability of humanity or of nature.

Consider a thing like debate, for example. Here CriticalResist talks about the Aristotlean dialectic that precedes what we call dialectical materialism today: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9510488

in aristotle’s dialectic the synthesis is the third new thing, something new emerges which did not exist before. Therefore it cannot be the thesis because the thesis existed prior to the ‘debate’. it cannot be the antithesis for the same reason.

And you can perhaps see that the concept of debate as described in that cultural context is not one of “win/loss”, but rather one of synthesizing to discover new. The process that both participate in yields something that neither had before, which can then be to the benefit of both.

In the modern capitalist context (in my experience anyway) debate tends to take a much more demeaning turn. The implication is that there is a winner and loser of a debate and the loser “sucks” somehow compared to the winner. So people tend to get very defensive in debates, fearing damage to reputation or more.

So there is the combining of “yours and mine” process, which can take on different kinds of character. It can be more friendly and calm, or more lively and intense, but either way, the broader societal context influences what the end goal is and how one should feel about it. In capitalist sports, for example, part of the goal is to nurture/discover the most skilled players, who can then be offered lucrative contracts to play for an audience for even more lucrative payouts for the capitalist; this aim is not intrinsically about “improving society” or some such, as is commonly thought of as the “value” of competition, but is more just about making money and further validating the concept of society being based on one group beating another down and then reaping the benefits.

NATO is on the way out (violently kicking and screaming the whole way).

BRICS is on the way in (building mutually beneficial ties with communist vanguard run states as part of the forefront).

Something something weeks where decades happen. I don’t expect it all to go down smoothly or feel bold enough to have a specific timeline in mind, but the world is growing ripe for communism to make a worldwide comeback from the barbaric repression of the post-WWII world order. People still have to make it happen though. It’s not an automatic process.

Inertia factors into things, systems of power and material conditions factors into things, but don’t take it for granted, either as especially strong in a desirable way or especially strong in an undesirable way. Imperialists are every bit as capable of shitting their pants as anyone else. Don’t be too intimidated by that which is fallible and decays, and remember we’re all factors in the state of the world, whether we want to be or not, and no matter how disempowered some of us are in relation to the levers of power. Still factors and still can effect change, including change that changes that relationship.

Sounds like something like:

“Reddit is too much of an echo chamber, I’m leaving.”

later

“I realized the problem. It’s not that Reddit was an echo chamber. It’s that it wasn’t my personal echo chamber.”

And it can be interesting to learn such things. I phrased it as I did to emphasize that liberation comes first; not with intent to shut down curiosity or investigation.

What’s your opinion on religion?

Largely irrelevant to what we get into here. At some point, I became conscious of how prominent western atheism gets used as another variation of racism and imperialism. So I try to look at the religions of colonized and imperialized peoples differently than I would the religions of the colonizer, for example. In other words, I say it is largely irrelevant because I’m not going to reject an anti-imperialist struggle because of its religiosity, but neither am I going to especially support it if it’s not. Liberation comes first and the form of religion is also impacted by the rest of society and politics, so a colonial society is going to warp religious practice and beliefs toward something more sociopathic than a liberated communal society.

I arrived at atheism through growing up USian catholic and gradually coming to reject it, and that is mainly where my knowledgeable criticisms of religion are confined to (that and western christianity more generally). I have retained some of the pro-social components of the religious mindset of caring about what happens to others, but I reject the gross the limitations of its solutions and find that many of its adherents seem less than committed to its pro-social teachings. Typically, its solutions amount to charity and individual piousness, which is obviously nonsense in practice. The catholic church demonstrated how pathetic of a conception of morality that is with the sexual abuse scandals of its own priests. They have since adopted more strict measures in their organization to try to prevent a repeat, but as far as I know, they still tend to preach the same individualistic, charity-based nonsense. For all the christians in the west fantasize about being persecuted, they sure do a great job of toeing the status quo line rather than challenging it on a systemic level with their teachings.

But it was not a dissatisfaction with religion alone that led me to atheism. The whole christian conception of an “all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving” being is riddled with excuses in order to justify how a being like this simultaneously exists, yet also doesn’t step in and stop atrocities from happening. The most common of these excuses is the “free will” argument that doing so would undermine people’s “free will”. But one human being senselessly murdering another also undermines that other human being’s “free will”, doesn’t it? And human societies generally criminalize and prosecute murder. They also generally have emergency services that try to resuscitate and rescue people who are in danger, rather than leaving them to the “free will” of their choices. This conception of a god essentially makes god look less moral than even some of the most imperialist, capitalist societies; that it can intervene in an instant, effortlessly, to end enormous amounts of trauma, suffering, and neglect, and does not do so.

However, this is not how all religions view god and some of them have multiple gods, so that’s why I emphasize that it is mainly a criticism of western christianity. I do not pretend to have studied most religions and so I try not to weigh in on them in this regard. And especially if they are a religion specific to colonized/imperialized peoples, I am extra wary of weighing in because doing so critically could easily take on the character of western Chauvinism and colonial racism.

I did not know that, but either way, what I meant by “started small” is more that Amazon was an operation he started with others. I remember researching in the past that he got significant financial help with it and that most, if not all, of the programming was done by others (I specifically remember researching it to debunk the pro-billionaire mythos that he bootstrapped his way to the top). But it did technically start out as a small business and then grow. As opposed to, like, if he’d simply been handed control over an existing family company or set up for a role in a major company through family connections and education.

Thanks for the replies. Don’t have followup to add for all of them, but I am reading it all and digesting. My general takeaway so far (welcome to further correction/commentary) is:

“Keep class interests in mind, but be careful of oversimplifying where people land in it and what that means for them, especially if they are a group that is closer to proletariat than to capitalist.”

Hmm, that makes sense to me.

Yeah, I think it’s more clear when you put it that way. I may not have a clear enough understanding of the layers of class dynamics. But I keep coming back to a point about small businesses and how they play into things, and trying to crystallize it more so. I notice there’s this narrative (not so much in our kind of circles, but more in people who are dissatisfied with capitalism to some degree and may not have much political clarity beyond that) of “supporting small businesses” and such as that, but it doesn’t seem to take into account what the interests of a small business are and how they can develop; instead, it often seems to treat them as a static form that will remain small and unmarred by the machinations of conglomerate level capital.

So would someone like Jeff Bezos be an example of that “luck” since he started out small? Or would he be more of a cross between “new money” and “old money”, since he also got financial help to do it?

That seems like (I am not entirely sure) the kind of distinction you’re talking about, is the difference of capital that comes from “old money” (power passed down) versus “new money” (a breakthrough pf petite bourgeoisie to bourgeoisie), with the first one being the norm and the second one being the oddity because of class antagonisms/interests largely keeping petite bourgeoisie from moving upward in class.