TERFs are far-right at the end of the day.

Happy Birthday Lemmygrad!

I can get it.

I’m not American and my dive into left-wing politics predated the 2016 election and Bernie’s popularity, but I can understand why he’d be a gateway; I certainly (initially) admired how he talked about socialism.

For me I was quite into the PKK and Öcalan for a while, which I suppose is quite niche (from a Western perspective). That’s because, at the time, the Kurds were leading the fight against ISIS and I was more Anarchist-aligned at the time. Rojava is often touted by ‘less authoritarian’ types. Again, my interest in left-wing politics predated a lot of the online culture of ‘political compass’ memes and ‘muh authoritarian’ but I was initially a sceptic of outright Marxism-Leninism at the time, and being an Anarchist with an ostensibly living example of more libertarian socialism really elevated the PKK in my eyes.

Does this mean the conflict in Yemen may come to an end soon?

Ah shit, I didn’t see it, my bad.

Yeah, thank you!

I sincerely hope this will put an end to the whole ‘Don’t get the CPB confused with the CPGB-ML!’ criers. They are just as bad, if not even worse, considering how hidden-away a lot of their shortcomings are.

I forgot it was quarantined on my birthday

Meanwhile it’s my actual cake day :')

Happy Birthday comrade!

You know what’s funny? I had the exact same in mind with regards to Despacito in 2017. I was never a real big fan of the song, but it’s probably the last real song that fits into the aforementioned bracket of ‘songs I heard and can remember where I was when I heard them’.

And even though there are games that have come out I really enjoy, I find it extremely difficult to get into games these days. I often find myself playing games pre-2017. The only real exception to that was Red Dead Redemption 2, but again, that was a sequel to a concept that already existed. That said, it did take that universe to whole new heights, and had a much different feel; it didn’t feel as Western as the first one, ironically, in spite of its earlier setting. Not a criticism by any means however.

I’ve definitely fallen behind on what’s ‘current’. I don’t even use TikTok at all, yet I know it’s probably the most popular social media now. For the longest time I was confined to just Facebook which appears to have gained status as popular amongst boomers now.

2017 was before my last year of actual ‘school’, so I was still within the same environment I had been until my last year. 2017 was the year of this massive cultural change for me, and it certainly hasn’t helped that my early 20s have been entirely dominated by the Covid pandemic.

I definitely get what you mean.

I’ve been interested in politics since I was like 14—to the point of being an open communist and actually reading about fascism from a young age. I saw the occasional Nazi or racist crap here and there, but I put it all down to trolling or an extremely small number of crazies. By 2015 I had heard of sites such as Iron March (fascist website) but I just put that down to, again, a very small number of people.

Then 2016 hit.

I remember one film in particular, starring Daniel Radcliffe called Imperium, released a trailer by then. I decided to check it out on YouTube and, for some reason, I decided to read the comments. Aside from a fair few jokes like ‘You’re a Grand Wizard, Harry!’ which were pretty amusing, the comments were absolutely filled with white nationalist apologia with hundreds of upvotes.

Seeing that really shocked me, as I was so accustomed to seeing Nazis/racists/fascists getting shat on. I figured it was simply a joke, but some of the people engaging with the Nazis received entire essays full of racist bile, yet they were written by people who had a decent command of the English language—it blew the idea that Neo-Nazis were this tiny group of uneducated extremists out of my head.

In 2016 I heard about the dregs of the internet such as /pol/ as well as the rise of the ‘alt right’. Antifa getting condemned for punching Nazis. I genuinely couldn’t believe that people were defending the latter group, to the extent it had penetrated the mainstream. I remember even watching a video called ‘What is Fascism’ and the top comment, with thousands of votes, was saying ‘Fascism is coming back? Hell yeah!’ It became very difficult for me to enjoy some of the media I consumed. Extreme Metal is filled with Nazis, YouTube was recommending me far-right shit, fandoms I was in were riddled with them. And yet all everyone wanted to talk about was, at the time, the evil ‘SJWs’.

Of course this all coincided with some seminal events that have set a precedent for today’s even more divided politics. Migration crisis, Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Hofer, you name it. Every country seemed to be experiencing a sharp rise in far-right rhetoric and every news article I read was filled with comments that would make Hitler blush. Every language-learning Discord server I joined had been infiltrated by mods who banned you over the slightest left-wing sentiment.

Things probably got to their worst point by 2017 as that was when the alt right was in full swing, the online left presence (even if it is shit now) was non-existent then, and even some prominent (I guess you could call them this) internet ‘celebrities’ such as JonTron and PewDiePie echoed far-right sentiments. Since then there’s been a lot more pushback, but far-right content was permitted for so long that it’s now become an incontrovertible part of every social media platform.

On a less political note, I do agree that 2017 was a massive cultural change for me. There is so much music I didn’t like from the early-2010s that sounds bittersweet to me now, because even though I never went out of my way to listen to them, those melodies are fresh in my head and I can even name who wrote them (most of the time) and say where I was when I heard these songs. After 2017, I could barely name a single song; nothing has ever stood out to me since then. I don’t want to sound like a gatekeeper, but all music today genuinely sounds the same to me with trap beats and mumble rap.

Not just music either, but take for example games, cartoons, anime and TV shows. Every game that gets released these days receives massive hate, massive controversy after taking ages to develop. When I think of games from the early 2010s and before, there seemed to be a wider variety of new ideas; a lot of what’s coming out now consists of sequels, remasters/remakes because they’re trying to hook on to that golden era. Quite a few shows I watched ended around 2017-19, and since then, there’s never really been anything to supplant them.

On the topic of memes, I find them pretty indigestible now. I can watch memes from early-2010s and before and still laugh, but a lot of them now don’t get much of a reaction from me.

I can’t tell whether the latter part is just me being an adult.

I live in the soon-to-be 51st state of the US called Great Britain and I am not going to be serving for the imperialists.

I’m reasonably convinced every Western communist party is infiltrated to a certain extent. It would explain the CPB/YCL’s lack of ‘vetting’, so to speak. One of their members I encountered didn’t even realise that the party called itself Marxist-Leninist!

I’m not a native German speaker, but I’ve studied it for years. I didn’t even need the English to understand what you were saying. (I’ve also done a small amount of Yiddish on Duolingo to boot.)

Yiddish is an interesting one for me. I remember seeing a news broadcast (sadly Israeli) and I not only understood the gist of it, it genuinely sounded like German with a distinct accent, minus the occasional Hebrew word. I pretty much understood the entire thing.

That said, I’ve found other Yiddish videos where the people speak in such a way that it was a lot harder for me to understand.

Three Arrows flag too, must be a troll; that is literally an anti-communist flag as much as it is an anti-fascist flag.

Funny thing is, I once found some Pol Potists, and I was curious. In the same way I wanted to see the defence for [insert socialist figure here/project], I wanted to see what case could be made for Pol Pot.

And while there was truth to saying that the number of killed was inflated (at the expense of disguising American bombing’s impact), it was still extremely high and unjustifiable in any case whatsoever. Not to mention they seemed to think Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was built by the Vietnamese solely to consolidate ‘Vietnamese social imperialism’?

I’ve heard claims that they’re the largest ML party, which is definitely true insofar as the CPB isn’t really ML or even Marxist—whether they’re larger than the CPB I don’t quite know.

Their stance on socialist states as well as their publications about key socialist figures often hit the nail on the head. But holy fuck their incessant obsession with wanting to deny trans people’s existence is unconscionable.

I had heard that there were trans people in the organisation who were seeking to change things, which prompted me to apply to join back in 2019 or so. Well, in the extremely long time during which they never got back to me, I noticed they had doubled down and published several transphobic articles. Since then I’ve had nothing but spite for them.

Most of my beef is with the YCL, but they are the youth wing of the CPB so I view them as an entity sharing beliefs as well as problems. I personally had a dispute with their Facebook admin (of both CPB and YCL) who was also the head of their London branch of the YCL, and while that’s all anecdotal, she pointed out that the BRS contains a passage whose wording is, as the kids of today would say, sus. In the context of talking about transgender people, it also states the need to ‘protect the rights of women and girls’. Its understanding of sex and gender is also pretty lacklustre.

That doesn’t even go on to the poor handling of a sexual assault case they had as well as the gloating YCL members displayed when RFB went defunct. Even the Trotskyists I know were upset to hear that RFB fell apart.

Lmao Bhagat Singh, an actual communist, in the right-wing section

Someone else has already covered the British communist parties, but I’ll just mention the Trots here. Not a Trotskyist myself, but my local Trotskyists are reporting membership increases of 100-400% in some branches.