• GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Whoops, I misread the reply chain pretty severely, you can ignore the edit. You were picking a fight, but not along the lines I wrote there.

    I don’t they’ve expressed any liberal sentiments here at all.

    Neoliberal is a subset of liberal (in the traditional philosophical sense, not American vernacular), and there is a very clear divide in the thread between neoliberal and socialist.

    I legitimately don’t care either way tbh.

    With due respect, you’re just a little Not Mad, but let’s not belabor the point. I’ve been Not Mad too, it’s not a sin.

    All this does is once again reinforce the idea that leftist spaces on the Internet are hostile to anything besides a very narrow set of ideas which makes up a very small and myopic subset of leftist thought

    There are a bunch of things wrong with this, starting with that the article was misleading dogshit and deserves to be mocked. Beyond that, the cultural clique of Hexbear can be myopic, but I think that it does not compare negatively to modern neoliberals in this respect. It is much more interested in international perspectives rather than the perspective of the “international community” (i.e. the EU + the Anglosphere + the most convenient elements of Taiwan, Japan, and SK). They quite frequently read neoliberal writing and listen to neoliberal speeches and so on, while neoliberals are usually content to hear about anything to do with their opposition exclusively through second- and third-hand reporting by their own media.

    Which leads me into my next point, that “tankies” etc. are readily called fringe by liberals on the internet, but internationally represent a very common set of opinions (or a strong overlap therewith). It is itself myopia to dismiss the opinions of Chinese and many other people in the imperial periphery and consider only the opinions of the imperial core when evaluating what people think and what “leftist thought” consists of. You could not serious believe, for example, that the Collected Writings of Chairman Mao are important to only a “small subset of leftist thought,” right? Sure, you are unlikely to know anyone – or even to have ever met anyone in your real life – who regards such a thing positively, but your personal experiences are not the world.

    As an aside, the “bot” rhetoric that the liberals so often display is not really helping your case about the tankies being especially closed-minded.

    I am not here to cure anyone’s ignorance.

    Do you see how most people would not be interested in talking with someone who says things like this? That level of condescension rarely produces anything other than scorn.

    “You are being condescending to me too!”

    Sure, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable view (though not my intention), but I am nonetheless explaining and substantiating my differences rather than merely denouncing what you say as “ignorant,” and even if we nonetheless accept my fault, that just results in a criticism towards both of us rather than solely towards me.

    I am engaging earnestly with you because you are actually making an effort to converse instead of just posting literal pig shit.

    I would not have replied at all if I didn’t recognize your username. You hadn’t been saying anything in this thread that someone would normally think merits a serious response. You were derisive right out of the gate. To act this way and then complain about other people not turning the other cheek and speaking patiently to you is silly.

    I promise you that if you make an alt (preferably with a different username in case people are grumpy with the interaction here) and post a thread on asklemmygrad or askchapo to the effect of “Hey, I’m a [whatever you call your flavor of liberalism], but I want to learn about what you believe on various topics and what you think of certain criticisms . . .” you will get mostly responses that are earnest. If you expect people to be polite and unassuming towards you when you begin by being aggressive and presumptuous, you will almost exclusively be disappointed, and I don’t just mean that for interacting with commies.

    • socsa
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      10 months ago

      Ignorance, once again, being the idea that ML orthodoxy is the only “true socialism.” We’ve been over this already and I’m not sure there’s much point in carrying on this conversation if you are going to intentionally misrepresent politics I have articulated to you a number of times.

      And to be honest, it sounds like you are the one doing a lot of speaking for the Chinese while making a lot of assumptions about my relationship with Chinese society. I don’t really feel the need to justify any of this to you or trade cultural credentials. That honestly feels offensive and chauvinist.

      I do appreciate the discussion though. I hope we can continue this in a different setting somehow.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Ignorance, once again, being the idea that ML orthodoxy is the only “true socialism.”

        That is not the hexbear line and not even relevant to the thread. Being an anarchist or whatever you like doesn’t mean believing western smears of China – like this incredibly poor article that you keep talking around.

        We’ve been over this already and I’m not sure there’s much point in carrying on this conversation if you are going to intentionally misrepresent politics I have articulated to you a number of times.

        I remember now from that conversation a week ago that you insist on being some type of socialist but I am pretty sure you never specified.

        And to be honest, it sounds like you are the one doing a lot of speaking for the Chinese

        It’s not an unfounded opinion that the CPC has strong popular support. That doesn’t mean the majority of China is ML in any serious way – plainly, they don’t seem to be – but it does support the view that articles like this are a completely bullshit characterization of the PRC - RoC situation and most people in China (and many other countries in the imperial periphery) would agree.

        while making a lot of assumptions about my relationship with Chinese society. I don’t really feel the need to justify any of this to you or trade cultural credentials.

        Reading another comment you made in this thread: Whoops, I guess you probably have met a Marxist or two. That wasn’t terribly important to my argument, I was merely speculating on how you might have developed you false opinions. Given this new information, I don’t have a new guess.

        I don’t care about your life and wasn’t attempting to initiate some identity game, I merely try to understand things in terms of how ideology is downstream from personal circumstances, and how an ideology that is well-suited to one’s personal circumstances can nonetheless lead them to have a distorted view of the world outside their experience. I support your inclination to not discuss these details with me but invite you to reflect on them to yourself in this context.

      • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        being the idea that ML orthodoxy is the only “true socialism.”

        hexbear literally bans anyone who posts this unironically. there’s a strict rule against sectarianism.