The funny thing is we have safe consumption sites for drug use all over the country. They’re called bars.

And I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people that are pearl clutching about safe injection sites would cry body murder if the same standard was applied to their socially accepted, well regulated and protected drug use.

Why does his hand look so small when he brings it up to his face?

I show it to my partners so they can pat me on the head and say “good post babe”

Mario is the least interesting Mario character

Windows has more software support due to their near monopoly, but it certainly isn’t a better OS.

You still have vision even when your eyes are closed, and even the small amount of light that gets filtered through your eyelids as the sun rises in the morning is a significant enough stimuli to trigger the biological responses that are related to regulating sleep and managing your circadian rhythm.

I’m not suggesting that what you’re speculating is impossible.

I’m suggesting your analysis is facile and uninteresting

Imagine it was true

Nice thought experiment, but in most cases we have the declassified documents from the CIA and other such organizations who originated the accusations showing that in their internal communications and records that were not public facing that they knowingly and intentionally lied to the public as part of their campaign of information warfare.

The inherent problem is that skepticism is an inexhaustible well. If the only principle guiding your analysis is skepticism, you will inevitably end up stuck in a perpetual and ultimately unproductive cycle doing little more than tilting at windmills.

This is why theory is important to study. You need to have a framework for understanding the world to build off of if you want to have any analysis that’s more insightful than “what if we imagine that he had bad thoughts? Pretty scary, huh?”

What if we imagine a purple elephant? What if we imagine flying sharks? Makes you think, doesn’t it??

You are either very credulous or intentionally engaging in bad faith, and I don’t much care to figure out which

I admire your continued professionalism

Kremlin-aligned government

Me when I want to make having completely normal relations with a directly neighboring country sound sinister, when everyone knows that a Ukraine with true self determination obviously welcomes an administration installed by a US backed coup in order to use the country as a forward outpost/cannon fodder in their ceaseless aggression and military encirclement of their geopolitical targets.

This is some professional level obliviousness, willful ignorance, and weaponized misunderstanding on display. Bravo.

Remember when burning a police precinct had a higher approval rating than any of the presidential candidates?

Pepridge Farms remembers

it’s not as efficient as you make it sounds.

No one has referred to capitalism as efficient or entirely rational.

We are referring to the incentive structure that the capitalist mode of production creates, and which behaviors that structure rewards and therefore elevates into positions of authority.

The framework you are describing as the foundation for your analysis sounds very analogous to the anarchist concept of “authoritarian personality disorder,” and I personally don’t find that to be a very rigorous or intellectually sound framework for understanding the world. To the contrary, it is an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. You are basically starting from an assumption of ill intent, and therefore any evidence that is presented is transformed into evidence of malice by speculating on internal and inherently unknowable “bad thoughts.”

It’s an entirely unscientific way of trying to understand the world.

Historically speaking, socialism and communism are terms that are synonymous and interchangeable.

That is certainly not the case today, but the disagreement over terminology largely comes about as a result of state led suppression of communists and Red Scare tactics. As it became more dangerous to identify oneself as a communist the result was that it became more desirable/safer to identify as a socialist and also to argue that socialism was distinct from communism.

And while I’m no linguistic prescriptivist and I recognize that semantic drift happens to nearly all terminology over a long enough time frame, the issue with this changing definition is that it does not come out of any theoretical grounding or ideological framework. It is a reaction to external pressure, and that reaction by different groups and different peoples leads to the situation today where there is very little agreement or consensus regarding what people are referring to when they use these terms. They have been effectively rendered useless for the purposes of political discussion unless you first begin with a lengthy preamble about how you personally define these terms.

One popular way of making this distinction is the framing that Lenin used. He described socialism in terms of the international class struggle in the epoch of imperialism (the epoch we were currently living through). The jist is that the communist theory of “The State” is that it is definitionally an organ of class domination/class warfare. It is the instrument through which one set of class interests are enforced upon the rest of society, and during the epoch of imperialism that instrument of capitalist class domination is wielded on a global scale. Therefore, any communist party seeking to put an end to the tyranny of the capitalist class will necessarily need a plan for opposing the counter-revolution of the capitalist class and the inevitable sabotage, acts of war, and attempts of the re-domination of the working classes during the epoch of imperialism.

In other words, the working classes would require their own state organ to enforce the interests of the working classes and protect against capitalist reaction and domination. If we are talking about this in terms of the common framing of the “endpoint” of communism being a “stateless, classless” society*, the argument goes that you cannot immediately jump to a stateless society so long as capitalism still has a stranglehold over the majority of the world and imperialist nations are still empowered to wage class warfare across the globe.

This analysis of the strategy and tactics required for the liberation of the working class was referred to as socialism by Lenin. So in this framework, Socialism is the strategy a communist party uses on the path to communism. If you would like to argue that a communist party working towards communism is meaningfully distinct from being communist, you are free to do so. But the distinction is quite slim.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people inside the imperial core who describe themselves as socialists, or more commonly democratic socialists, and what they mean when they call themselves socialist is, “I want the system to remain relatively unchanged, but we should distribute the fruits of our country’s imperial plunder more equitably by petitioning the capitalist state to administer more welfare and social programs such as universal healthcare.”

This variety of socialist has very little relation to the historical usage of the term, and comes about much more directly as a result of that Cold war/red scare reaction I mentioned above. I would argue that this kind of socialism is little more than a rebranding of liberalism, but that certainly qualifies it as being distinct from communism.

On this forum at least, if you see someone talking about socialism they are much more likely to be using a definition closer to the first definition than the second one.

(*The framing of communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society is a very sloppy framing, but is sufficient for this discussion)

Yeah, I feel the same towards Stalin as I feel towards most figures and places that have been relentlessly smeared by Cold War and Red Scare propaganda.

And that is that the entire reason these figures are so viscously demonized is because capitalism cannot survive the threat of a good example. The ruling class needs the most radical allowable criticism of their system to be, “Sure, we have many faults, but all of the alternatives are far worse so you better not dare even thinking about fighting for positive change.”

That narrative can only function if every victory of the global proletariat is smeared as a dystopian hellscape ruled by cartoon villains. And I don’t think it’s to our benefit to cede that rhetorical ground wholesale out of fear that challenging it might be unpopular among Cold Warriors.

Sounds like your complaints are more about the audience that certain youtubers attract more so than the youtubers themselves.

but it’s a really common refrain from within the hardcore fanbases of Breadtubers and streamerbros for fans to claim that “they’ve done more for the left than anyone else.”

Like, I agree that this is a believable interaction, but the question I would have to ask is why are we assigning so much weight to the opinions of randos on the internet?

I mean, I certainly understand the frustration that comes from these kinds of interactions. But you also need to keep in mind that people who are nuanced and put a lot of thought into their positions/opinions aren’t the people who are loudly posting their bad takes. The people who are doing that tend to be opinionated and arrogant, and as a result trying to have a discussion with them can be frustrating and feel like you’re talking to a brick wall. But that’s also the majority of opinions and argumentation that you’re going to see being shared, because that kind of axiomatic and simplistic world view is the easiest kind to share. You don’t have to lay out the ground work for why you believe something is true, you just proclaim that it is true and double down when challenged.

The thing is, you shouldn’t be addressing those people directly. If you’re replying to/challenging a person like this, you should be writing your response for the benefit of the audience who will be reading that exchange, and you should be responding with the presumption that the bulk of people are not the arrogant and opinionated person you’re replying to and that they would appreciate being introduced to an opposing viewpoint.

Now, if you’re going to a place such as a dedicated discord or subreddit for a specific content creator, depending on how that community developed it’s possible that all of the reasonable people have left those communities and the only people left are the “true believers,” so to speak. But you have to keep in mind that the people who will join a community and regularly post in that community is usually a tiny fraction of the overall audience for a given content creator. And that can still end up being hundreds or thousands of people jumping into your replies when you criticize their darling content creator, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate any widely held sentiment among an audience more broadly. It just indicates that some randos on the internet have bad takes, and those randos happen to be part of those communities. Whereas the majority of a given audience is probably mostly “normal,” and don’t have their identity invested into their favorite content creator in nearly the same way.

Like, this kind of complaint feels akin to what conservatives like to do where they sift through the discourse™️ in order to find the most cringey arguments that they can scrape off of tumblr, often posts from literal children/teenagers, and then sharing memes with “TRIGGERED” as the caption and pretending that those memes represent “The Left.” Or it feels like the Ben Shapiro special where he picks “debates” with random college freshmen that he can mock and talk over to show how pathetic “The Left” is, instead of finding someone who can put forward the strongest and most well thought out version of a position and debating them on fair terms. Yeah, Ben Shapiro can talk down to people half his age who haven’t fully developed their political beliefs yet and make them look foolish, and yeah, we can pick out random fans of a specific content creator and talk about how bad their takes are. But neither of those things tell us anything meaningful about the larger population, and there isn’t any reason why the opinions of randos should be treated as indicating anything significant or meaningful.

I suppose you could make the argument that in the case of content creators that you get the community that you cultivate, but even in that case the more meaningful criticism would be to break down what a creator is doing that would cultivate an audience like that. The existence of online randos having bad takes is not itself significant or meaningful.

I think it would be helpful to just take a step back and reframe your experience, starting with the understanding that most people are reasonable, reachable, and teachable. And then approach these interactions with the understanding that the people posting inflammatory takes and who immediately become defensive in response to criticism aren’t the people you are trying to reach, but they will be the people you encounter online the most because they are the most likely people to share their opinion and to respond to criticism. Either adapt your response with the understanding that your intended audience is all of the people who will be reading that exchange and that your intended audience is not the person you are responding to specifically, or step away from online discourse altogether and focus your outreach/persuasion on people in your actual life where you can have face-to-face discussions instead of semi-anonymous flame wars.