HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]

I have yet to see a single liberal on this Earth that isn’t also a Westophile

Lula da Silva?

thanks for the link

This is not in any way a justification, just my explanation of why it’s so pervasive and attractive

I see now. I wasn’t sure earlier if you were defending it or not. I think your earlier explanation as to why it appeals to people makes a lot of sense.

I agree with your assessment here about pseudoscience. Magical thinking is a product of alienation and can give people hope and reassurance, but there’s a fine line between self-soothing and denial of reality and necessity.

I think we have to be careful to disentangle our view of pseudoscience and magical thinking from judging the character of their adherents. I don’t think we can always ignore these beliefs as an issue for a later date. Addressing these beliefs now can and should be done with empathy. I think this counterreaction to “reddit atheism” has come about from conflating their belligerence, lack of respect, and laundering science for progressive-washed imperialism, with their ontology being incorrect. We have to make a positive case that confronting life’s problems without magical thinking gives people a more genuine agency and sense of agency, which is emotionally fulfilling too.

as always, Marx put it best:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

We shouldn’t be afraid to call on them, we just have to be careful and empathetic.

And thirdly, through the supposed ‘compatibility’ of different star signs, it gives people a guide to who they should try to form a relationship with. Statistically, by far the number one danger to women is their male romantic partners, both in terms of physical violence but also in terms of the possibility of psychic distress. Will he dump me? Will he cheat on me? Will he leave me to do all the house work? He seems like a good guy now, but is he just tricking me until he thinks I’m stuck with him? Does he secretly listen to Andrew Tate? Will he start doing that a year into our relationship and suddenly completely change?

What’s the point of a guide with an irrational basis? It seems deeply dangerous to me to try to answer these questions based on the timing of someone’s birth. Sure, there’s no 100% reliable way to answer these questions, but there have to be better methods than literal mysticism. Like say, investigating what his friends are like.

I understand that people find comfort in beliefs, but the idea that you can trust someone based on the alignments of stars and planets is so wild to me. And that goes for conventional religion too. I don’t think most Christians or Muslims feel these sorts of questions can be answered simply by knowing the other person is also a believer. If they did, I think they would be making a mistake. You can be hurt by people who fit the right “type”, or who share the same beliefs as you. Find comfort in what you want, I suppose, but basing trust in people off of spiritual belief can have catastrophic results. like abuse in cults

These responses describing astrology as just a psychological comfort or even as entertainment, equating it with using the internet or playing a game, seem to ignore that the repeated practice of a belief can instill that belief, and that true belief impels you to act based on that belief. Lots of people treat astrology as just a fun fantasy to discuss, and I really have no problem with that. But truly believing in it and acting on it seems not only not Marxist, but more importantly a risky and misleading way to live life. If we don’t embrace irrational reasons for making political decisions, why should they be embraced for making personal decisions?

China has been unwilling to challenge the dollar with yuan

IMO this is actually a good thing for socialism and potentially signals China’s long-term commitment to it. Of course it would also be great if the dollar were replaced, but replaced with what is very important.

If the yuan were internationalized, China couldn’t impose the kind of strong capital controls which have allowed it to develop the economy toward socialism while retaining markets to a (likely necessary) degree. Further, there would be much greater incentive to export capital internationally rather than use it domestically, which could lead to a kind of social imperialism.

The synthesis of maintaining capital controls and dehegemonizing the dollar IMO is that the dollar is replaced not by another single nation’s currency (which is just a different kind of unipolarity, after all), but instead by an international currency like the Bancor proposal.

(A dual-circuit thing like the USSR under Stalin would be better for transitioning away from money itself ofc, but I have no clue how that would work across borders and it seems impossible that any capitalist countries would accept such a system. If the world got to that point, socialism as a world-system would have practically already won)

Is this supposed to be a surprising secret? I was taught this in American public schools as the core reason.

The real wake-up call isn’t learning about the historical importance of expansion itself, but assigning a different moral value to it. It’s realizing Manifest Destiny is just Lebensraum that won, that there’s nothing morally justified about it.

At a party in a cabin in the woods

I don’t think Europe or the West as a geopolitical force is the same as the continent. There are other areas that are unambiguously in Europe that aren’t part of “Europe” similarly to how Russia isn’t. Are Belarus, Bosnia, Serbia, or Moldova really part of the club the way France and Germany are? Of course not. Greece or Hungary arguably aren’t either.

the names and boundaries of continents are arbitrary and don’t matter. that said, the most common definition, really more of a vibe, of a continent is size. Europe is 3 times larger than India. It’s twice as large as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan combined.

Keeping your youtube account’s recommendations

I know many here hate theirs, but I actually like my personal slop algorithm

I was very pro-Bernie in 2016 but also against the whole Bernie or Bust idea. Lesser evil-ism in general made sense to me, and the man himself endorsing Hillary on basically those grounds was enough for me to be vocally against Busters or people against voting in general. In my defense, I was a minor and couldn’t even vote at the time. By the time I could vote in 2020, my beliefs had shifted enough that I voted for Bernie in the primary but not for Biden in the general. I sure as shit won’t now, and not for state-level Dems either like I did in 2020.

I honestly am still not against lesser-evil thinking as much as most people on this site are, but for very different reasons than liberals. That kind of thinking really warmed me up to anti-imperialism. Once I got enough historical background on the death toll of America and colonialism and about how texts like the Black Book exaggerate and fabricate deaths under communism, comparison compelled me to realize that if I believed the lesser evil should be supported, then the DPRK, Iran, Syria, etc. (all the places I thought of as scary dictatorships before, essentially) are the morally superior side in geopolitics. On the basis of morbidity alone is enough to believe so, if nothing else

For that logic to work though, you need to believe people are of equal dignity no matter what part of the world they’re from. That every dead body is equal to every other dead body. So, I have also come to realize that the failure of other supposedly pro-“lesser evil” libs to be staunch anti-imperialists comes down to either racism or using the “lesser evil” argument as a rhetorical trick instead of an actual belief. Or worse yet, both!

One shouldn’t even need to be convinced of socialism or even social democracy to really follow this logic to its ultimate conclusions and support anti-colonial resistance, but apparently that’s too fucking much to ask.

On that basis, I commend Hamas. I think Olof Palme would’ve understood that. I wish the non-communist “”“left”“” today would have enough of a soul to follow the example of types like him.

I got a pair of timbs on sale for $90. They support my feet well and are perfect for snow, mud, rain, etc.

Thanks for the explanation. I didn’t mean to correct you, but I noticed you implicitly judged Mahayana in general as incompatible, so I was curious what sets Chan/Zen Buddhism (as a subset) apart from what you dislike.

Glowing was coined by Terry Davis, the same guy who made TempleOS. He used it in the sense of “CIA n***** glow in the dark”

Spook is way older as an antiblack slur, but that’s never been the primary meaning.

Isn’t Chan/Zen Buddhism a Mahayana (i.e. not Theravada) tradition?

It’s future fodder for libs to claim tankies are proud genocide deniers who use genocidal language in the same manner as Nazis.

I think it’s a lot more sus than “glowie” or “spook”, which have uses much more clearly divorced from their racist origins, but a lot of us have given those up regardless. (I don’t really care about using these either way, but I am not marginalized, so I avoid them. Not my call)

Not that I’m aware of. IMO, it’s not our best appropriation of fash memes when it comes to o p t i c s

is this Third Worldism?

Grapes of Wrath namedrops Marx and Lenin and one of the characters not only finds his own purpose as a union organizer, but becomes this Christlike figure who inspires and leads his community. How exactly does it not advocate a better system? It’s a work of fiction, it’s not going to lay out the nuts and bolts of an American gosplan or something.

Lookin like a Roald Dahl villain