axont [any, they/them]

All of these dorks are just auditioning for jobs in the Trump administration. They refuse to say anything bad about Trump even though they’re running in a race against him.

Except none of them will get jobs because Trump thinks they’re all dorks.

I’ll put it like this:

The external imperialism of western countries far outweighs the danger, threat, and damage to human life than even the most cartoonish and absurd claims about the alleged internal authoritarianism in countries like Cuba, China, and the DPRK. It’s such a massive disconnect and it’s also not even a dialectical comparison.

The external imperialism of western nations is precisely what generates the security apparatuses that are developed within modern socialist countries. Most of the time what you regard as gross and needless authoritarianism is in fact socialist states defending themselves from external aggression. Go listen to Parenti talking about the measures Nicaragua had to take in regards to capitalist encirclement.

And furthermore, the decision to not use the term authoritarian to describe western nations constantly confuses me. Is it because the term imperialism is more accurate? If you want my gut feeling on this: authoritarian, totalitarian, and related terms were all cooked up by liberal historians like Hannah Arendt to make the USSR sound like the same type of thing as Nazi Germany, which is frankly Holocaust trivialization.

Yeah they do fit the definition, because the distinction between external and international policy you’re making is arbitrary and meaningless. I’m a communist. My nation is the working class.

If invasions, sanctions, assassinations, and complete immiseration of other nations isn’t authoritarian then what is it? Why are we arbitrarily deciding there’s a distinction with how a country’s internal and external policies? These things inform one another. If a nation like America is doing far worse things than authoritarianism, except externally, why can’t we say that’s what it is?

Obviously killing people externally or internally is bad, but it’s more shocking in the same way that a parent murders their own child.

That makes no sense. Joseph Biden is not my dad and my shared nationality with him means nothing because he represents an economic class at war with my own. Was Hitler the father of German Jews? What the fuck are you talking about

You are however disregarding how a nation conducts itself internationally, instead focusing entirely on domestic policy. Should we not consider how a nation acts towards people outside of its own borders as this authoritarianism? If we include a country’s imperialism, you’ll find the overwhelmingly most violent, brutal and authoritarian nations are the USA, the EU, and the west in general.

Ok, but if that’s the case, why are we drawing a line at a nation’s internal population and disregarding their external policies? The USA killed three million people in the War in Iraq, including Iraqis who were very critical of the American presence. The USA has assassinated Latin American presidents for speaking out against the USA and replaced them with more America-friendly dictators. And yet everyone who talks about authoritarianism doesn’t include western nations in their discussion, they instead make up a cartoon idea of what countries outside the west are like. Your definition of what is or isn’t tankie/authoritarian has some kind of nationalist bias built into it.

Every time someone describes what authoritarianism is, it makes me think that America and the EU are the worst perpetrators of this behavior, but they mainly export all their violence rather than use the worst of it domestically. Domestically they use private sector means to distribute violence, such as poverty, prisons, and the facilitation of ambient racism.

This reminds me of the dividing line that liberals use, which is when they say things like “that dictator killed HIS OWN PEOPLE.” As if killing people externally is more excusable crime?

Something like half of Chinese people use a VPN and the state censoring western sites Facebook and Twitter is a good thing

Yeah you got it. American white bourgeois society is a virus. And you’re right, all the unique music that came out of the USA is a product of oppressed minorities. Even pasty white conservative country music is a perverse mockery of southern/appalachian folk music that has roots in African and Celtic traditions. The banjo is an African instrument for instance.

White suburbs are a genuine blight and their expansion is cooking the planet.

Trip could squeeze an extra warp speed out of an engine by wrapping the coils in baling wire then spitting on it

At-will worker here. One time I got fired for not remembering my boss’s son’s birthday (a son who I had never met and was also 6 years old)

I neither love America nor the government. Our culture is a disease, our cities need to be razed or entirely redesigned, and our land needs to be returned to natives, to Mexico, and to the descendants of slaves.

Our entire society is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

They can taste protein in a different way than we can though.

Well we’d hope the solution for Nazis is we only threaten to kill them first, before they get powerful enough to start organizing. And if they surrender and submit peacefully to re-education, maybe that’s ok in some rare instances

If they’re already organized I suggest cluster munitions or have them lined up against a nice brick wall

this kid is training to become every white guy at a party with a guitar

wow, I can’t believe someone would commit moral failures such as buying an iphone. the absolute outrage.

sounds like people shouldn’t be impoverished. that’s the conclusion you should be drawing, not this moral crusader thing of looking down your nose at impoverished people. If poor people are doing things you find distasteful, why not focus your energy on the people who create and spread poverty in the first place? and no, that’s not poor people. It’s the capitalists and their servants in the state

good post

I’ve come to realize I gotta preface a lot of what I say on other instances like this: Russia is an imperialist country and I’d laugh if Putin got forcibly removed from power. I’m a communist.

No, the EU should not exist either. No neoliberal institution should exist, including things like the IMF, World Bank, USMCA, NATO, the EU. Should all become memories. Yeah except that’s not the world we’ve got quite yet.

I can’t really talk much about what should happen. Money, bosses, landlords, and banks shouldn’t exist either, but too bad, right? And yeah we can say all day what would have happened had Ukraine become an EU member nearly a decade ago, but it didn’t happen and now we’re stuck in this situation. It’s all alternate history now. Best case scenario I see right at this moment is a ceasefire even if that means Ukraine loses territory.

Russia has no excuse and neither does NATO. The best case scenario is both countries lay down their arms and have socialists take power. Unfortunately we don’t live in that kind of situation, so the only thing I can advocate is both NATO and Russia cease fighting. Ukraine shouldn’t ally with NATO because NATO shouldn’t exist.

What negative effects would Russia be feeling? I don’t know, personally I thought Russia entering the war was a bad call and a strategic mistake. I can see the reason why it happened while still saying it’s an open act of aggression. Russia probably could have negotiated with Ukraine about Donbas/Luhansk through better oil deals or something, no idea. Possibly could have tried straight up purchasing the land that Russian separatists occupied?

But Russia probably had reason to distrust diplomacy with Ukraine ever since 2014. For context, I believe that 2014 happened specifically because Ukraine’s previous government was becoming too close to Russia and it made NATO nervous. I could easily ask, what negative effects would Ukraine be feeling if they hadn’t had a western backed coup? Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych floated membership in the Eurasian Economic Union, which set off protests that were capitalized upon by western nations. Would it had been so negative had Ukraine entered a formal economic alliance with some former Soviet states? Who knows now.

The new president, Porochenko, was much harsher on Russian separatists in the east than his predecessors, which started the Donbas war in earnest. That’s the moment above any I can point to that started all of this. Maybe if Yanumovych had remained president there could have been a more peaceful solution to Donbas. Who knows now

Yeah but this is all speculation and we live in reality. The reality is the war should cease immediately, for the benefit of people in Ukraine, Russia, and all refugees from the region. Only way I see that realistically happening is if NATO disengages and Ukraine loses territory.

Maybe once fighting finishes something new and better can get negotiated, but I’m not holding my breath that neoliberal countries like this know how to resolve long standing conflicts.

We believe the war was started by a quagmire of situations going back as far as 1991, including things like the 2014 NATO-backed coup of Ukraine and the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. This war wasn’t some random unprovoked territory grab dictated by Putin, it’s the resolution of western interference in the region for decades. Ukraine had been shelling Donbas and Luhansk for years. NATO brought this war upon themselves, basically. Instigating and prodding at the situation for years.

Also, Russia and Ukraine, near the start of the war, floated the possibility of a ceasefire and NATO pressured them out of it. The USA saw the possibility of a proxy war and started drooling.

We don’t support Russia so much as we see them as one unfortunate reality fighting another unfortunate reality. The war’s true culprit is capitalism, and as a leftist the only conclusion you should reach is wars like this are senseless and they should immediately stop. And the only way I see this war to stop is if Ukraine immediately surrenders and loses territory, otherwise we’d just be back in 2014 all over again and the situation would repeat. I can vaguely see how that could be construed as pro-Russia, but it’s more that I believe diplomacy with Russia is strained, Russia is volatile, and nothing is gained from open warfare with them. Everyone needs to stop fighting, whatever that takes, because the only winners in wars like this are wealthy capitalists, the rest of us lose.

Hey, Star Trek is good sometimes :(