1y ago

PSA: I noticed there's a lot of libs here lately,

Which we should see as an excellent radicalization and growth opportunity!

It can be exhausting explaining ourselves again and again, always met with the same accusations and assumptions born from the mythos spun by our enemies.

However, we must remember these people are people, and many people change their minds given enough information, delivered with firm respect. For every belligerent person who appears like they wouldn't change their mind for anything, there are 10 people quietly lurking who are more on-the-fence. Even those who regurgitate insults and contempt may change their mind when the stars align!

These people are not our enemies, they are victims to the greatest campaign of dishonesty in human history! It is our duty to draw out the poison and deliver the medicine!

I know many comrades here have very difficult lives and do not have the patience or energy to deal with such people. Please do not exhaust yourself interacting with liberals, and allow comrades with more energy to deal with them.

Radicalizing online is not the end-all be-all, but at this point in the psychological war for those within the Anglosphere, every victory is invaluable!!!

152 comments

While you were away, reddit made a big fuckup by charging a fortune to use their APIs, killing third party apps. This caused many redditors to jump ship to other platforms, and lemmy was the biggest alternative.
Hence all the libs.
- I heard about that, I should have figured the consequence.
  Well, it's like old GenZedong days, only we can't get quarantined 😈😈😈😈
  
  Hexbear is also federated now, so we have r/chapotraphouse veterans here now too.
- While you were away, reddit made a big fuckup by charging a fortune to use their APIs, killing third party apps. This caused many redditors to jump ship to other platforms, and lemmy was the biggest alternative.
  Hence all the libs.
  So many federated libs have a "fuck you, got mine" attitude and outright brag about throwing money at their corporate masters, so why did they leave Reddit in the first place?

Gotta say I was expecting some friction with ya’ll at lemmygrad after Federation (because we are all libs on hexbear) but so far you folks rock and I have been very pleased to see your high quality posts on my feed.
Loving to see posts like this. Can’t remember the Sankara quote but ya’ll know it. Cannot get tired of explaining ourselves because when the people understand us they will side with us.
Loving having new comrades in the posting trenches with us.

Hey this is about me!
I probably don't know the right words to use and I don't know my history or theory and couldn't hold my own in a real debate but I sure am learning a lot from you all when I find your posts on All and your comments all over the place.
Realizing that, I don't exactly know where I fall politically. Previously I would say I am left, but seeing conversations I realize that I don't even know where Left-land is. At the moment I don't see myself agreeing with a lot of stuff posted by hexbear/lemmygrad users, but I'm open to learn, and, more importantly, have a fuller understanding of your perspective(s).
Coming from Reddit I'm not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view, nor the intense levels of trolling/sarcasm/dunking that you all seem to love so much. So it's hard to navigate conversations sometimes, and figure out what is a joke and what is serious. And even if I personally don't engage in the conversation, usually someone with a similar mindset to me will do so, and I appreciate it when you folks take the time to soften your words/message to ~~actually~~ (edit to cross out judgy word) explain your position.
Additionally I hope we can see and treat each other as individuals and not our instance names when traversing the fediverse (honestly this is more about non-hexbear/lemmygrad users, but felt I should say it anyway). It certainly is a shame that some instances choose to defed you. I hope mine doesn't, but I'm prepared to move if mine gets overly censor-y, though my understanding is that sdf is unlikely to do so.
Anyway, keep it up, there are absolutely people out there lurking and reading what you all write, and occasionally learning something.
Stuff like this is why I loved the internet so much long ago (near 30 years, wow) and I'm really happy to see it hasn't gone anywhere, I just lost track of it.
Cheers!
- Honestly, if nothing else, I hope liberals are learning how to actually phrase questions in a good faith manner. As a former liberal myself, so many of my questions in the beginning were phrased in such an anglocentric way that just assumed Western ideals as the default and it put everyone else on the defensive. So of course I got dunked on or people assumed I was trolling. Really, I was just ignorant af.
  
  Me too, but it did help me learn. Though I would imagine some might double down due to the insult, learning that some ideas people in the west just take for granted have their roots in anglocentrism and white supremacy does help some people really reflect on everything they've just assumed about the world for most of their life.
- Welcome!
  The dunking culture is primarily useful as a tactic against bad faith actors, an attempt to alleviate the effort assymetry associated with engaging with them. It takes very little effort to spew nonsense and rile people up, and 10 times as much effort to kindly and carefully refute the nonsense.
  Especially in an ecosystem where accuracy and kindess is less important for "winning" an argument than coming off as more confident (see the effectiveness of wojack memes in calcifying opinion) or popular, it's a necessary evil to be able to respond to such actors without wasting too much time. Relevant is Sartre's analysis of antisemites:
  Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
  Now all that being said, not all of us are as good as "turning it off" as we need to be. But despite that my experience with Hexbear is that there's a ton of users there very capable of good faith disagreement and discussion.
  Generally if you engage in good faith, most of us should as well. Most of us were in a similar position to you at one point.
  
  Oh don't worry, I understand the dunking(*) culture, it's just that sometimes the barbs are so snide and buried beneath 3 layers of irony I literally don't know what the message is supposed to be. Maybe this isn't "dunking" how you guys mean it- more for me to figure out. But I refer to the trolling, biting, insincere remarks that are used as return fire to vitriolic remarks, events, or policies that you take offense to. All bad faith, as you say, or deserving of ridicule from your POV.
  (*) Edit to add: I do/did not understand the dunking culture, I should I have said I understand the trolling culture. I thought they were more synonymous, but now I know it is not a full venn diagram overlap. Dunking may or may not include trolling, and not all trolling by this community is considered dunking.
- When I first found my way to this corner of the internet and leftism in general, I was attracted at first by the truly caring priorities of leftism, taking care of people, not turning people into useful cogs.
  I was put off by all the talk of communism, the USSR, etc, but the more I interacted and spoke with people and read about what I was hearing, the more I realized I was taught to fear these topics, that I was conditioned to believe some things were right, natural, and obvious, and others were evil, unnatural, and sinister
  I kept looking into things, reading about what sounded like it couldn't be true (USA's activities meddling in every other nation, especially the ones trying to be socialist, was a big one, but also how they treated their own people like when they actually bombed a black neighborhood because they were becoming too affluent by relying on each other)
  Really, just keep doing what you're doing. The thing about leftists is we're correct, so I'm not worried about winning you over this second. As far as I'm concerned, now that you're realizing that maybe there's more to this whole "leftism" thing than youve been lead to believe, I know you're going to figure it out eventually.
  Godspeed comrade o7 o7 o7
  
  The thing about leftists is we're correct, so I'm not worried about winning you over this second. As far as I'm concerned, now that you're realizing that maybe there's more to this whole "leftism" thing than youve been lead to believe, I know you're going to figure it out eventually.
  Precisely. I don't stress over any interaction with anyone, because I know the truth always goes the distance.
  Lies have very short legs, and therefore do not go very far. Time and personal experience will take care of the seeds you have planted, so there's no need to chase after anyone.
- we're all libs in the end anyway
  
  Thank you for this. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves. It can be hard to hear. But we need to hear it.
- Do you have any theoretical or historical questions on your mind?
  People here are usually being pretty sincere unless they are doing a parody of a liberal. No one is ironically pretending to support the Khmer Rouge or Gonzolites, we either criticize them or say nothing. Support for the DPRK is sincere.
  
  Not at this time. Thank you for the offer. As I implied (or tried to?) I am mostly a lurker and generally only engage in serious threads when I have a question or viewpoint that I believe is outside the usual threads of discussion. I am happy to learn from you all through osmosis at this time. Maybe in the future, when I have intelligent questions to ask, I will take you (and others) up on the offer in the appropriate forum.
  Speaking of, I also believe in keeping threads mostly on-topic so wouldn't want to change the course of this post's discussion too drastically (though, it is happening naturally, and you offered, so certainly not strictly opposed to it. Just trying to keep the internet tidy, futile as that is).
  Once again, thanks for your earnest offer - and the detail you added.
- Thank you for posting this. It's pretty valuable for me. I remember when I was in your position. I got banned from multiple communist communities because I was engaging the way I was taught to engage in university. There, I was allowed to just posit bullshit and get argued with. I thought it was the normal way of doing things. Getting slammed by commies over a couple of years made me realize that I was putting a ton of intellectual and emotional burden on them and instead what I needed to do was to become more curious than I knew how. As I finally developed that sort of curiosity, I suddenly started to learn more (go figure) and then I became one of those people who didn't want to deal with the same liberal arguments against communism that come up thousands of times a day.
  So, good on you for starting to navigate this. I'm fairly confident that the reason you don't see yourself agreeing with the revolutionary communist left is because you're "not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view". Once you get enough of the historical context behind this position, you'll start to really ask questions about how we solve it and why we can't solve it in other ways. And then you'll find that there's historical context to those answers as well, and the long and the short of it ends up being, you're not entering in a brave new world where people are just starting to come to consciousness. You're a Westerner who is just starting to come to consciousness in a world that has been working through this dynamic for well over a century now.
  Stay curious!
- Coming from Reddit I'm not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view, nor the intense levels of trolling/sarcasm/dunking that you all seem to love so much.
  Because there was a concerted effort to remove us. Pre-2020 we were out there.
  
  I am aware of that, uh, "development" (was on reddit since... '07?), however I would also add that it seems much more common on Lemmy to "cross pollinate" communities at the moment, at least for me, my main view is the All feed, whereas on reddit it was more focused/curated to my interests and/or "mainstream" content.
  But yea, once the CTH purge happened obviously there was less of you all around...
- Major cheers! I can't speak for everyone here but don't hesitste to ask for clarificatiom and hopefully someone who isn't too cranky will be able to explain anything and everything. Bless

I completely agree with that. I find the trick is recognizing whether a person disagrees, but wants to have a genuine discussion to understand where you're coming from or just trolling. I think we can give people the benefit of the doubt, but as the discussion progresses it's important to watch for signs such as the person ignoring or misrepresenting the points you're making, talking past you, using tropes, etc. At that point it's best to just leave a note pointing that out for people reading the thread and disengage.
- You have the patience of a saint for continuing to debate them after the Reddit influx. I've completely stopped trying to debate the libs on Lemmy because it ruins my mood and mental health more than it has hope of convincing them or even starting a productive conversation where either one of us stand to learn from the other. I still make it a point to expose myself to all dissenting views because I feel that as a socialist I should at least be aware of all the viewpoints, but I don't care enough to actually engage with them anymore.
  
  I usually just hope that other people reading learn something. I'm trying to engage less with them less as well, blocking a few really prolific trolls definitely helped. I gotta say though, with hexbear federating the vibes got so much better.

Good point. I've probably been too short and snarky with them.
It's just frustrating to explain something only for them to deliberately ignore your argument in favour of pretending you just said something "uncivil" so they can dismiss you. Especially if American politics is involved (or Trump or Putin, my god, it's like their brains just short circuit when someone mentions "Orange man."
A primer on how to deal with libs would be extremely helpful. I can talk to people in person fine, but I just have no clue how to reach Americans, it's like their national pastimes are arrogance and ignorance.
- I can say from a lot of experience that you have to swallow a lot of well-justified irritation. You have to be prepared for childish insults, wildly bad faith assumptions, bratty refusal to engage with you like how a toddler refuses to eat vegetables. They will call you a Nazi and you will get ratioed. If you can accept this and still play the "bigger person," though, sometimes magic happens, and when it does it's often outside of your line of sight; victories in radicalization are often invisible to us.
- It’s difficult to get someone to reject something they’re actively profiting from, and the west profited from the abuses of capital for decades. That’s only slowly changing…

Hmm, I have another take on it.
Nobody wants to think they were "lied to", even if it's true. Westerners default to thinking of themselves as the main character of the story, and swallowing the idea of having been fooled is difficult, nearly impossible. You can't be a victim, can you? That doesn't fit the narrative arc at all.
Come at it from the other angle. Even those people deep in the shit pit of reaction can still FEEL when an atrocity is wrong, even if they twist it into blaming it on minorities or whatever. The right wing runs entirely on feeling, it's literally all they have. The other side of their knife is taking blame away from the self- it's never their own fault, and they never have to sacrifice anything. The other edge of their knife is the dulling and nullification of feeling.
When someone you know- someone shamelessly liberal- agrees with you that an atrocity is indeed wrong, embrace them and build on it. Not "No, but", but instead "Yes, and"! They're feeling something, and the people profiting from their suffering would prefer if they dull that feeling. Instead, link the feeling to facts- "Here is why the bad thing is indeed bad"- and turn that feeling into praxis- "You can fix it!".
- The problem is that a lot of libs don't recognise real atrocities (especially if committed by the US) while imagining all the "bad guy countries" commit a dozen atrocities every morning before breakfast.
  I'm just not sure how we can build on that without just confirming their worldview that the bad guy countries are the only ones doing bad things.
  
  Doesn't even have to be atrocities. Try policies. Privatisation of healthcare? Decaying and propagandization of school education? Crumbling infrastructure? The list goes on
- That goes both ways though. Each side thinking they are right, the main character, impervious to being lied to and definitely on the right side of history. Or can you not also be fooled? Cause I know I have been, by both sides...
  
  The difference between us and liberals is that we not only can admit to being fooled, we also actively seek out whether if we've been fooled.
  We realize no one is immune to propaganda and act accordingly. And we mean no one.
  
  I can't speak for all of us, but many of us probably did not come to communism as our first ideology once we became more political aware. Some did maybe, but a lot of us were liberals ourselves. We already came to terms with the fact we were lied to and are open to the possibility that we can and will be lied to again.
  Personally, I started as full fledged American democrat before I left the country where I moved to socdem. Started reading theory "to be educated even if I don't agree with it" and...found I agreed with it. A lot.
  I have gone through several stages of being lied to and am well aware I am not impervious to it and happy to be corrected when I am wrong.
  
  When you say "both sides" what you mean is "the same con artist wearing a new disguise."
  The "both sides" of capitalist, liberal "democracy" both work on behalf of the rich, not the people. That's why you've felt cheated by both, because both will work against you.
  Being aware of your own shortcomings is good though, it's always important to question whether you have been fooled or not. That's why us filthy dirty commies practice "self-crit" or "self-criticism" where we examine our ideas and try to challenge them scientifically, similar to peer review. Of course, we could still be wrong, but we can at least manage to be "less wrong" that way.

Huh? I Wonder what happened in 1942? Probably nothing, the USSR was probably developing exactly as planned…
- I wonder what happened in 1942?
  Gee, maybe it had something to do with that year being the height of WWII?
  
  Never heard of it, I bet the USSR wasn’t affected by it tho /s
  
  nah that's not it.
  Probably the year when Stalin got his big spoon

I have absolutely zero patience for anti-communism
- um...you should try to be torlerant...
  
  Is this a bit?
  
  Mind clarifying what you mean, or giving a little more context?

Seriously tho what's the difference between a Soviet gulag and a Western prison? Any society that still has crime requires correctional facilities, the USSR is no different. Why do libs insist on Soviet ones being called gulags? If you want to criticize their prison system just call it that. I know it's a Russian word but we're speaking English here which already has a word for prisons, and to me the Soviet system really does not seem different or unique enough to warrant its own word as a proper noun. (I-it's not just to make the Soviet system seem more evil by distancing it from their own Western prison systems right? I-it's not that right?)
- Often gulag is used for working prison, including those outside the Soviet Union. And very serious crimes in the Soviet Union would have prison time, not gulag time.
  
  TIL that it's referring to that. Wait so basically US private prisons are gulags?
- what's the difference between a Soviet gulag and a Western prison?
  The popular depiction of the soviet gulag existed for a relatively short time within the USSR's history whereas at least US prisons haven't changed since the 1800s?
- Why do libs insist on Soviet ones being called gulags?
  Because GULAG is a Russian acronym (Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps). They were literally called gulags. They are corrective labor camps, not storage containers for human. Granted, most US prisons are labor camps as well.
  
  Gulag = scary Russian acronym
  Prisons = too normal in the most incarcerated state in the world
  Just like how that add the word “camp” when they talk about evil north korean prisons (that are probably no worse than western ones).
  
  i dont think they were called gulags tho. gulag was the name of the central administrative body, but the prisoners didnt call the camps gulags. just camps. or prison.
  it'd be like calling US prisons BOPs.
- Gulags were used to try and rehabilitate dangerous people back into society, which is in theory what American prisons do too. But in practice American prisons are where the poor are tortured, raped, beaten, branded with second-class citizenry and commited to a lifetime of hellish punishment, especially for crimes of poverty.
  
  You forgot enslaved. America outlawed slavery except as punishment for crime, so how do you get your slaves back? arrest them all for nonsense!
- From my understanding, the application of the word "gulag" to a prison is to indicate there is strenuous forced labor in harsh conditions in a distant location free from public scrutiny. The implication is that people die from being overworked or due to exposure and the government is able to cover up these deaths because of the remoteness of these facilities. Likely, this implication is meant to harken back to the labor camps of Nazi Germany.
  This is irrespective of whether or not Soviet labor camps should be characterized this way or whether US prisons are inherently more humane. If anything, I highly advocate for referring to US prisons by a more pejorative name to indicate their cruel nature. I would use the term "gulag", but I think what makes US prisons cruel is different from a labor camp and deserves a different name.
  
  Private prisons is a pretty good term IMO. Private, as in the purpose of them is not to rehabilitate, but to generate profit for the bourgeoisie under the guise of rehabilitation. The inmates are private property.

However, we must remember these people are people
Correction: these people are proletariat. We have the same enemy. Mostly, the only difference between us and them is that we're a little better at identifying the enemy than they are.

These people are not our enemies
That’s where I disagree. Liberals fund the police and the military, which is the main reason much of the world is enslaved and unable to fight climate change. So long as anyone is making excuses for this shit, they are most certainly the enemy of history. That being said, people can change. I know that because I did.
- Liberalism as an entity is absolutely our enemy. I just mean individual liberals.
  I believe this war will continue to heat up, and I just prefer to convert enemies in order to lessen their ranks, while we still can.
  I have never regretted extending humanity and compassion to my enemies, and trying instead to see them as a victim of brainwashing, which they are.
  
  Don't forget, brainwashing is a co-opted term, and you're using the co-opted version. Brain washing is literally the act of washing the brain from impurities and toxins. This is what you are describing as your preferred course of action, which is also the strategy of Mao and the PLA. They captured KMT soldiers and they washed their brains clean of anti-communist lies and showed them the truth. Once their brains were cleaned, the KMT soldiers saw that the correct course of action was joining the PLA.
  Our rhetorical opponents are not brain washed, they are brain dirtied. They need to cleanse their minds of false beliefs, and our role in the process is to help them find and eliminate those false beliefs.
  
  Right. Liberalism is the enemy. But if someone isn't a member of the state, active agent of fascism or a capitalist then we should see them as temporarily embarrassed comrades.
- The people are not our enemy. They have been hoodwinked by the enemy in order to work against their own self-interest.
  While they are in this state of mind, they will oppose us, but the empty promises of their capitalist masters will eventually force them to realise that their only path forward is with us.
  
  As long as they're standing across from me a member of the police, they are my enemy, even if they come around later, until that time they are my enemy.
  Liberals are just that but politically. they are doing incredible damage, even unknowingly the damage has to be acknowledged
- anyone that pays taxes funds the police and military
  
  I have no meaningful control over how my taxes are spent precisely because liberals make it impossible for genuine democratic control over the government to exist.
  
  Some of us would not object if the police and military were entirely defunded.

Thanks for this. I saw a Lib get smashed pretty hard over on hexbear yesterday. They certainly didn't word their initial comment nicely but there were genuine questions that pointed to a lack of understanding. A few of the responses were just agro and started fights with the lib. A few of the replies were good faith answers to which the lib replied nicely.
It might feel frustrating but we need to start nice even when dealing with someone who starts in an aggressive tone. If they don't respond to calm reasoning then its fair to bring the hammer down and in some cases that is what they need.
- Bullying works. It's not about the :LIB: writing the post, it's about the one reading it
  .
  
  Well sure but if a lib reads a thread where everyone starts bullying someone for asking questions they are just going to think the community is a bunch of assholes.

If they have read and understand the theory, then that’s already better than most people.

Can someone actually link to those sources though?
- I'm bad at looking for this kind of thing, I looked a bit (one google scholar search) for the first citation in the image, and found this list of times when it was cited as a source and a page for it but it all seems to be paywalled (which seems like a VERY normal thing to paywall wtf is that really how we share rigorous information?! Is that all JSTOR is?! anyway...)
  https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=10763573413538837835&as_sdt=400005&sciodt=0,14&hl=en
  this also might be it but Idk if its something else or if the citation translates the title to english or what?
- ~~Which sources?~~ The ones in the image. I see now.

Quite frankly, the term liberal refers to Democrats and Republicans not Conservatives and Centralists. I'm a Centralist and its sometimes weird when people outright call me a liberal. I don't pay attention it though.
- it refers to anyone who supports capitalism. if that's not you, it's not you.
  
  oh...fuck...then..
- Centralist?
  
  neutral. Not left or right. Well..kinda right..
- Liberal = supporter of capitalism. I suggest reading lots and lots on liberal and especially marxist theory, I used to be a centrist like you, because I only trusted what was trusted by liberal media, because ofc I wantdd to be correct, and it took years to realize they were lying and acting in bad faith. I was also hardcore falling for the golden mean fallacy
  No one has suggested any readings yet (being a marxist is 50% reading and learning 50% trying to organize), so I'm recommending On Authority by Engels (this is a page long but very necessary, I highly suggest reading this future comrade!) After that dive in to State and Revolution by Lenin or Kapital by Marx, depending on how skeptical you are on supporting capitalism
  On Authority, which is only a page long!
  Lemme know if you have any questions too
  
  I'm not THAT supportive of Capitalism. I just..go with it. Cuz I'm raised that way.
- conservative means opposed to change. It's more like a flavour you can have on any political ideology for example conservatives in the later years of the soviet union who opposed opening up to the west

152 comments