Tell me about it. When I first learned that the website developed and run by Communists had Communists on it, I couldn’t believe what was happening.

The only moral stance is to post about the US election in lemmydotEthiopia, the Australian election in lemmydotSuriname, the Bolivian election in LemmydotAlbania, and so on, but only if it’s months out of sync. Anything else is suspicious.

That fits nicely because it’s always people who have and will continue to have enough food in their belly that they can indulge in an extra meal while indulging in fantasies like ‘one more election cycle, pleeeease, I trust them to stop murdering millions of innocent people, just one more election cycle and then they’ll fix everything, pleeease’.

What’s non-wealth-based fascism?

Fr when I’m filling in my spreadsheet for the people I have to watch, it’s a lot easier if everyone goes in column A or column B.

Column A is titled ‘Radical speech but thinks that voting will change anything – no action required’.

Column B is ‘Radical shitposter – maintain eyes, no immediate action required’.

The other columns, though – damn it’s a lot of paperwork.

Column O, ‘Organising their community, feeding people, and providing healthcare’ is the worst. Luckily for me, the agency’s action means they don’t stay on the list for long so the paperwork is finite. I probably shouldn’t be saying all this as it’s top secret. But we do know what’s up in our department.

Monsieur 'andprint

Depends if you’re hungry.

The modlog is public. You can see exactly what comment led to the ban if you search for it.

The US state department lawyers and the British House of Lords have evidence. That’s why they’re pursuing convictions of the Chinese leaders involved. No, wait— sorry, I misremembered. They both concluded there is insufficient evidence.

Damn, I don’t know what you’ve started here but the number of presumably white people coming up with all sorts of reasons to argue why black people shouldn’t have reparations is… is it a white settler moment? Then to follow this up with ‘you need to include white people or they’re not going to like it’ is… maybe Malcolm X was onto something about white liberals.

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Marxists aren’t, or shouldn’t be, dogmatic. It’s the method that they uphold. Plus, Marx didn’t live to see the USSR, China, Cuba, etc, so it’s not possible to know whether he would maintain that position (taking your claim at face value).

Also, YouTube ads are about the most random things. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad on YouTube for anything that I would actually buy. I’m not even nearly immune to ads, either. Show me a product that solves a problem for me and I’ll strongly consider it. Consciously and I’m sure subconsciously.

Google knows what I do for a living, where I live, and what I spend money on. Google also knows that I use YouTube primarily to watch videos in other languages. It’s not a secret to them. Yet they insist on trying to sell me products or services that have zero relevance to anything that I do. In English.

It makes me wonder if they’re even trying to profit through ads. I know the answer – no, not really – the advertiser is the customer, not me. It must be too complicated for them to realise that they could charge more for ads the more sales they led to.

You’re a fount of knowledge, new (to the grad) comrade. Keep it coming.

Essentially, it means fascism is the method by which liberalism defends itself in the face of progress and revolution.

By your definition, every community is a tankie because every communist rejects idealism. If these are the only two options, the only option left is to choose a team. But that can’t be right because you imply that some communists aren’t tankies.

Further, does it count as a definition if other people use the term in different ways?

If so, how do you know who is a communist and who is a tankie without asking them how they decided to show (critical) support for XYZ?

By your definition, you must first know whether someone has strong reasons to support XYZ before being able to decide that they really decided because XYZ was on the right team. That would be exhausting and fraught with the problem that nobody is going to say they didn’t do the reading; if they give an argument, how do you determine whether it’s valid or a cover for ‘choosing by reference to team’?

I’m unsure if it’s possible to define ‘tankie’ by reference to ‘communist’ without also defining the latter and showing how they’re different.

Reducing all the nuance of Marxism, socialism, and communism to

“from each according to his ability to each according to his need”

is problematic.

It’s not going to lead to much explanation and it ignores the hundreds of thousands of other words that Marxists have written.

This is in addition to the problem that “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” is the goal of communism and you’re arguing with someone who (rightly) says communism hasn’t been reached.

socialism with Chinese characteristics

is the answer…

That’s partly because ‘tankies’ read theory. Liberal theory, Marxist theory, all of it that they can get their hands on. According to both liberal and Marxist theory, liberalism is the main ideology of capitalism. When ‘tankies’ oppose ‘liberals’, they are talking about the ‘progressive’ left of the Anlgo-European empire and what that ‘left’ calls ‘conservatives’. So if conservatives laugh when ‘tankies’ make fun of liberals, the joke’s on them because the ‘tankie’ means them, too.

There is absolutely no defence of fascism from ‘tankies’. That term usually refers to Marxist-Leninists, who praise Stalin and Mao for their stances against fascism, colonialism, and imperialism. If nothing else (and there is a lot ‘else’), anti-fascism is a central tenet of ‘tankie’ ideology and practice. Anti-fascism is/was a core tenet of all Marxist parties. If you think that a ‘tankie’ is ‘defending fascism’, you have misunderstood what they are saying and/or have inferred something from their words that they did not intend. Horseshoe theory is an intellectually bankrupt ‘theory’.

You are right about this:

We are inherently a position of compromise[.]

As Mao said:

… liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration[.]

This and the other types of liberalism are often what ‘tankies’ are challenging when they criticise ‘liberals’—not what counts as ‘liberal’ in the extremely narrow US electoral politics sense of the term.

Marxism is dialectical and historical materialism. It is the analysis of contradictory and internally-connected relations and processes. To detach NATO from the actions of its member states is anti-dialectical.

Additionally, as you say, words have meanings. When people criticise NATO it is as a stand-in for the imperialist world order. It includes the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the ‘international’ courts and rules, and all their elements and capitalist lackeys. You’re making a semantic argument, which misses the crucial point: that NATO and its member states are concerned only with the wealth and power of their bourgeoisie, regardless of Russia.

I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have an agenda, that we can’t have world peace until there are no more imperialists, which includes and is often, in ordinary language, represented by NATO. If you interpret that as support for Russia, there’s not much left for us to discuss.