I’d more say that the military occupation was done for the sake of confrontation (this is similar to the official Chinese line). It was a really senseless invasion, as far as I can tell (and I disagree with the Vietnamese line that the war was expansionist).

Come on, you’re more well-read than this. You know that military occupation and annexation are not the same thing.

If I was just complaining about border skirmishes, then I’d mention India or something. The attack on Vietnam was more than just a “minor border skirmish”.

the map is far more accurate than it is not though

Come on, Yog, we can hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. It’d be so easy to just color in Vietnam and then you’d be set, but by posting it in its current form you are actively lying.

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The one is not the other

Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

Such a pathetic thing to say. Even if what they were saying was true, why does the show need to be about the election? Isn’t it, like, a political comedy show? Aren’t there other political issues to talk about? idk, I hate South Park anyway, but it seems like a remarkably stupid thing to say.

Oh sure, Owen was mistaken from the outset because his genuinely more-efficient way of running things isn’t going to be as profitable to the owning class, meaning that no amount of advocacy can escape the gravitational pull of the profit motive dragging it down into the mire of human misery. I was just talking about what he did that ruined his career from a practical standpoint by drawing the ire of the bourgeoisie, which was not his company town model alone.

Sorry to spam you with nitpicks, but I do feel obliged to say that while Einstein was certainly a socialist and spoke very well of Lenin and even Stalin, I don’t think we have evidence of him having a specific and cultivated political ideology that fit a label like “Marxism.” I think he was more of a generic humanist who appreciated what his Marxist contemporaries were doing.

Incidentally, how did Marx borrow from Proudhon? I fully only know of Proudhon through Discourse about concerning material he wrote and that quote about, ironically, wishing for a future where he would be executed as a conservative.

I think that what fucked over Owen, according to Engels, was not his coops but his assessment that they were inadequate and more fundamental changes to society were required, concerning marriage, religion, and something else that I forget. For just the coops, he was celebrated in a way that isn’t even that different from the OP, because he didn’t really shatter the existing paradigm, but produce an extremely productive version of it that just happened to be relatively pro-social.

Biden said of the bill, “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

Jeeesus, what a fucking scoundrel. Literally just a Republican at this point.

They absolutely are, and many people would be excited to answer questions you have (including me, depending on the question). You just need to be careful not to come across as combative, because they’ll meet you in kind and it’ll be a dogpile.

c/askchapo , depending on the question

Don’t you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!?

I don’t see what the Zionist entity has to do with this, it’s not like they claim to be communist (though that would be a funny bit). I was talking about your reference to “dictator states” since Cuba surely is one of them, being communist.

I wish you wouldn’t believe what those very plutocrats you disavow tell you about Cuba.

You must not merely criticize, but offer a positive alternative. Capitalism has not coopted communism except it the most superficial sense (selling books, merchandise, and so on). It is all those works that bemoan capitalist conditions but offer no solution which are used to enforce capitalist realism.

Literally just read the list. It’s not ahistorical because it gets history wrong, it’s ahistorical because it has nothing to do with history. It has no ability to explain how and why fascism emerged when it did rather than sooner or later and thereby has very little understanding of what it actually is. It’s like defining a disease by a very loose checklist of symptoms, the fundamental causality is completely absent, so there is very little you can even do with it besides make a shaky diagnosis.

Incidentally, Trump isn’t a fascist. He flirts with being a fascist and in many ways has lit the way [something something tiki torches] for future fascists, but fundamentally, he’s just doing fascist-like rhetoric as a way to sell people on relatively normal neoliberal policy. Probably the most strange thing he did was bomb Qasem Soleimani, something that Democrats didn’t even really oppose on any grounds other than it being rash, despite Soleimani being a leader in the fight against ISIS. If I had to pick a second thing, it was probably lowering military funding to South Korea, which was just him being stupid and accidentally a clearly good thing to do. He’s not harder on immigrants than Democrats, he’s not harder on China or Russia, he’s just a normal rightist wrt to queers, he likes giving tax cuts to rich people, and he’s fussy in diplomatic meetings. He had very few policies that Biden didn’t immediately perpetuate. If you want to call the whole neoliberal edifice fascist, fine, whatever, but he’s not special in anything but aesthetics.