QuietCupcake [any, they/them]

(it’s a vegan cupcake, in case you were wondering)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • As far as relating fascism specifically to the Neoliberalism of the US, here is an insightful comment by @Droplet@hexbear.net:

    Fascism is fundamentally characterized by 1) mass privatization and 2) vicious anti-communism.

    The fascist counter-revolution first saw its success in 1920 Italy when the post-WWI nationalized economy gave rise to a strong socialist movement that nearly overthrew the bourgeois government.

    WWI ended laissez faire capitalism when it found itself unable to ramp up war production and suffered from inefficient output, and this was a disadvantaged position during inter-imperialist warfare. Instead, state run capitalism became the norm as the imperialist powers were dragged into a protracted Great War during which vast resources and war production could only possibly be organized efficiently with state intervention. Such dramatic changes shifted the leverage to the working class, whom the ruling class became dependent on to win the war. The consequence of this was the explosion of labor and socialist movements throughout Europe, and culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that subsequently ended WWI.

    As they found themselves unable to resist against the tidal wave of workers movement, inspired by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Europe, the liberal capitalist class turned to fascism with the hopes that such extreme brutality could crush the seemingly unstoppable socialist movements. They succeeded, first in Italy in 1922, and then subsequently in Germany in the early 1930s.

    One of the first signs of a fascist regime was the mass privatization of the previously nationalized industries:

    Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister in October 1922. Nazis rose to power in 1933 in Germany. Mussolini convened a meeting of his cabinet and immediately decided to privatize all the public enterprises. On December 3, 1922, they passed a law where they promised to reduce the size and function of the government, reform tax laws and also reduce spending. This was followed by mass privatization. He privatized the post office, railroads, telephone companies, and even the state life insurance companies. Afterward, the two firms that had lobbied the hardest: Assicurazioni Generali (AG) and Adriatica di Sicurtà (AS), became a de-facto oligopoly. They became for-profit enterprises. The premiums increased, and poor people had their coverage removed.

    After the trains were privatized, the services became slower and more irregular, contrary to the popular myth.

    In January 1923, Mussolini eliminated rent-control laws. His reasoning ought to be familiar since that is the same reasoning used in many contemporary editorials against rent control laws. He claimed rent control laws prevent landlords from building new housing. When tenants protested, he eliminated tenants’ unions. As a result, rent prices increased wildly in Rome, and many families became homeless. Some went to live in caves.

    Once more, these policies allowed landlords to increase their profit and holdings while they severely hurt the poor.

    To remove “government waste,” Mussolini removed the federal government from remote areas in Italy. This meant that rural farmers, peasants, and workers no longer had the protection of the federal government against abuse from agribusiness. Instead, they were entirely under the mercy of big businesses.

    The austere economic policies in fascist Italy were studied closely by the British marginalists, who were the precursors to the neoclassical economists that eventually found the Chicago school and brought neoliberalism to the forefront of economics.

    As such, there is a direct connection where fascism and their austerity economics directly contributed to the development of neoliberalism. Combined with a vicious anti-labor and anti-communist thrust, the models of fascism being replicated in Indonesia in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s and Russia in the 1990s (Russia being a special case because they didn’t go all the way, as Putin re-nationalized a lot of the key industries since in the early 2000s) under the guise of neoliberalism, during which hundreds of thousands if not millions of communists and left wing activists were brutally murdered.

    Within Europe itself, mass privatization began in the UK as early as the 1960s, and began to become part of the European center left/social democratic platforms in the 1970s. Interestingly, most historical account of privatization in Europe conveniently left out the earliest forms of mass privatization that took place under the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

    In other words, neoliberalism is simply fascism rebranded. By all accounts, the neoliberal model of the United States is as close as you can get to fascism - what is missing here is that violence against communists, labor activists, minorities aren’t becoming prevalent yet due to the relatively high living standards of the US being sustained by its foreign imperialist policies.

    But don’t let that fool you, just like in the 1920s, they really can turn to fascism in an instant when the situation becomes dire enough to call for it. It took no effort at all in convincing an entire class of liberals in Italy and Germany to support Mussolini and Hitler.



  • It was not a “massacre.”

    Then post articles that say that and not articles that refute your own point.

    picard Even the title of the first article I posted is “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’” It’s in the url for chrissakes. This is beyond a failure of reading comprehension, it’s a failure to even look at words.

    It was not. a. massacre. It is not at all pedantic to point this fact out. Especially when people, following a blatantly propagandist narrative line, incorrectly call it that.

    My choosing those two sources specifically among the thousands of others that was to point out how ridiculous it is to ban someone for “denying a massacre” when even mainstream western news sources (in addition to the BBC as was mentioned in the comment that caught that user the ban lol), including one of the most famous mouthpieces for the U.S. government’s foreign policy, likewise “deny” that it was a massacre and likewise would have been banned according to the silly mod’s standards. Those articles did not at all refute my point, they clearly made it, as should be obvious to anyone able to follow this thread.


  • Well said.

    Another very illustrative example of this kind of deferral and obfuscation played by liberal democracies with their use of authoritarianism is the continued use of literal slave labor specifically in the US, which is even enshrined in the constitution. The sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) comes from shifting the term slavery into euphemisms for prison labor. A slave population of “prisoners,” the vast majority of whom are People of Color, mostly black people, as is the slavery tradition, who are actually pipelined from their schools to prison, and criminalized for engaging in the only means they have of economic independence. The authoritarian slave drivers will tell the general populace they are “bad people, felons” and deserve to be sequestered away from society to live solitary lives doing hard labor for no pay (2 cents an hour doesn’t count as pay.)

    There is nothing more “authoritarian” than having actual slaves, which is the major reason the prison-industrial complex exists in the US and has more prisoners (read: slaves) than any other country in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita by a ridiculously large margin. That is capitalist-style authoritarianism.



  • And there were many soldiers who were also killed as well, the first of which were not even armed but were lynched. There was absolutely fighting in the streets in the surrounding area, and no one denies that people did die. But it was a mutually armed struggle, not a massacre. Calling it a massacre distorts the reality and paints a distorted picture that is beneficial to the west and especially the current anti-China narrative.

    The fighting I mentioned above was also heavily instigated and pushed to happen by westerners with a vested interest in harming China who were there to rile up protesters and encourage them to do violence, but then left in helicopters when fighting did start. Some of these instigators have openly admitted this and now live happily in the US. It was not a “massacre.”

    Come on.




  • I loved loved the Pumpkins in the 90s. Certain eras of my youth were defined by their albums. I actually learned guitar mostly to play Nirvana songs, but soon after that when learning what Corgan wrote, that’s what got me to where I would consider myself a fairly decent guitarist and of course it heavily influenced my own style and the kind of stuff I liked to write. And actually Billy Corgan is still a fucking amazing guitarist, even if I think musically he had said all he was really gonna say by the time Machina came out and the song writing which had once been like you said, real masterpieces, fell off dramatically into the mediocre or worse range.

    I didn’t even think about Smashing Pumpkins for years, and was of course disappointed but not entirely shocked to learn how chud-adjacent he turned out to be, though I knew he had always been a dick at best. But just a few years back, I watched some videos of him just talking about gear and a few techniques to get certain sounds, fiddling around doing some demonstrations. The dude really is a virtuoso I think. Like in ways that I didn’t realize back when I was a big fan in my teens and early 20s. I also used to listen to a lot of Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, etc., and while Corgan may not be at quite that level, he’s closer to it than any other 90s popular rock or alternative guitarists I can think of. There are plenty of Pumpkins songs where that isn’t even evident, but of course certain other songs and their solos it does get revealed.






  • First of all, not everyone who views a communist channel is a communist. In fact, I would say that ideally (even if not realistically) there would be more non-communists seeing this stuff, the people who would learn something from it rather than just the choir who already knows. And that’s a big part of the problem: neither I or NoLeftWhereILive wants to send this to other people as a result of that ad.

    Also, I would certainly hope he doesn’t have a “passion for the product,” genuine or otherwise. If that were the case, he should be the one watching more communist-101 kind of vids lol. But it’s not about the “sanctity” of his channel… it’s about, like I said, having standards and respect for your audience. It’s not like he’s a starving artist. JT, with whom Hakim also shares a podcast, has said outright that the Patreon money he gets is enough to support him and his family (including the massive US Healthcare bills he had to pay after the birth of his daughter) and Hakim is a doctor on top of that. It’s not that I begrudge him making as much money as he wants, but I think it’s apparent that he is doing so at the cost of his integrity among his viewers, be they communists or not.


  • Yes! Instead of being a video I want to share with people who I’d like to inform about the topic, I feel like just giving up on even trying to watch the rest of it myself. (Memeification of the word aside) I actually cringed when it got to the ad. And like you said, no one seems to care because it’s so ubiquitous and normalized. To me, it’s all the more violating when it’s done by someone who really should know better, someone who I would think would have, I don’t know, higher standards? Not to mention having more respect for their audience.





  • Same goes for me. There have been months-old replies that I only happened to see when looking through past threads I posted in. A couple times I felt really guilty because it was something I would have responded to, and then was like “should I reply now and come across as a total weirdo by responding months later, or just let the person think I’m an ass for not answering their question?” sweat

    Either way, I am haunted by it. shrek-pixel-despair