Don’t forget the favorite buzzword, “Tankie”.
Cited the Simple Sabotage Field Manual and mentioned how it was used against civil rights organizers, anti-war demonstrators, and labor organizers.
Got called a Tankie.
Crazy how the term seems to shut down the higher brain functions for certain people.
Some of it is just genuine infighting over orthodoxy and interpretations and whatnot. People be passionate about the holy books
The Neoconservative Counterrevolution
Many of the early neoconservatives were members of “the family,” Murray Kempton’s apt designation for that disputatious tribe otherwise known as the New York intellectuals. They had come of age in the 1930s at the City College of New York (CCNY), a common destination for smart working-class Jews who otherwise might have attended Ivy League schools, where quotas prohibited much Jewish enrollment until after World War II.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, and their milieu learned the art of polemics during years spent in the CCNY cafeteria’s celebrated Alcove No. 1, where young Trotskyists waged ideological warfare against the Communist students who occupied Alcove No. 2. During their flirtations with Trotskyism in the 1930s, when tussles with other radical students seemed like a matter of life and death, future neoconservatives developed habits of mind that never atrophied.
They held on to their combative spirits, their fondness for sweeping declarations, and their suspicion of leftist dogma. Such an epistemological background endowed neoconservatives with what seemed like an intuitive capacity for critiquing New Left arguments. They were uniquely qualified for the job of translating New Left discourses for a conservative movement fervent in its desire to know its enemy.
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I get it. I’m just saying, keep some perspective on the current stakes.
Without a doubt some of it is stoked by malicious outside actors, as you said
Nobody reads books. Books are for fucking losers. If you suggest people read books you’ll have a very bad time.
i unironically agree. i wrote about it yesterday
basically the ideal text length is 1-2 paragraphs where you say your opinion, not longer than that, because longer text easily is perceived as a wall of text, and that’s very exhausting to read.
Basically my ideal piece of text looks like this:
3-5 paragraphs, 1-3 lines each, and 1-2 images strewn into it.
You understand that this is not a good state of affairs?
in IT there’s the Signal-to-noise ratio concept. i think verbosity increases the noise, mostly. i try to keep my comments succinct and to the point.
That just means not taking longer to say a thing than necessary.
Some ideas take longer. Short understandings of long ideas can have disastrous results.
in separate but related news, high-calorie food is better digested when it’s mixed with lots of low-calorie fiber. relevant link
edit: to clarify, it’s relevant because it’s the same with ideas. “high-impact ideas” are better received when they’re mixed with a lot of low-impact context and examples.
I’m familiar with both the formal and informal versions of this idea. I actually wrote a pretty good essay on it for a communications class like twenty years ago.
Doesn’t change the fact that some ideas simply are not easily or legally conveyed in this format. Many, in fact. Some of them really fucking important. Lefties who got their entire grasp of shit from twitter posts are useful primarily as mass.
You’re an addict defending your brain rot surrender as noble crusade for truth. I won’t scold you for not doing the hardest kind of activism, but dont entrench yourself in the failures of those around you to make space for you and not suck by defining your cope as high morality.
Separate reply; information theory isn’t ‘from IT’. The inverse is closer to true.
In an ecosystem full of text-based discussions, a single individual putting up an enormous wall of text that fails to engage the reader is often ignored in favor of a number of smaller posts layout out the argument piecemeal.
Also, iterative comments expressing the same view in a few short words can reinforce the idea as popular in the eyes of a reader. A long winded spiel can come across as defensive, by comparison, and weaken the argument in the end.
You’re explaining what is and I’m saying the way this is has me seriously concerned. Its bad. This is bad. It’s the opposite of good.
I’m not confused about what it is. I’m saying the thing you described is bad.
This is bad. It’s the opposite of good.
It’s a heuristic for absorbing information that’s predicated on people not having infinite time or attention.
Lots of Wall Of Text posts aren’t actually worth reading.
Zoomies want that influencer Youtube video take on those books
Problem isn’t generational.
It’s definitely one of those things where it’s worse every generation
You didn’t talk to a lot of boomer hippies when they were still alive, did you?
Big fans of Youtube, were they?
Huge. Couldn’t get enough of that shit.
It’s not all CIA. In fact, in a lot of cases, it’s just human nature, especially our tribalism. I have seen the same amount of “leftist gatekeepers” by ratio as I’ve seen fandom ones, often on the same exact beats being translated into leftist linguo.
Granted, nobody needs a conspiracy or invisible hand to create problems like this.
That said, it’s far easier to look for weak points to exploit for political means, than build a new movement from whole cloth. In the US, ideological divisions, wedge topics, racism, and even the ghost of the Civil War, have all been used to sow division for various means.
Yes, we need to put our disagreements aside and focus on our real enemy… The People’s Front of Judea!
faction A will just say faction B isn’t “really leftist” so therefore their attacks don’t count as “leftist infighting”
Joke’s on you, Mr. CIA Man, I want to be easier to penetrate
bonk
bonked all the way to horny
jailCIA blacksiteBonking comrades to the Horny Reeducation Center
bonk harder nanny
It’s because we actually care about being correct
I have not found this to be generally true.
Elaborate?
Most people even on the left are just tribal, doing things for group membership and not really understanding or caring about underlying ethics. Most people haven’t read a single book of theory¹, and if they have they didn’t understand it.
They might be doing vaguely the right thing,but they’re probably doing it because that’s where they made friends. It’s not a bad reason, it’s just not really that radical. They don’t care about truth much more than the average howling christofascist orc does; they mostly judge information on group acceptance like everybody else, and just fell into a less awful group.
¹or equivalent
exactly my experience. people actually looking at data and making decisions based on reality is rare. most people adhere to group-think and do what their friends think is acceptable.
And telling them to please be more than that does not go over well.
And prefer it over doing anything.
So true
And that’s a weakness that the elites target in us. We need to target their weaknesses, like their soft bellies, or their flimsy neck vertebra.
It’s not even always a MLM/anarchist split.
I’ve run into some terminally online-dumb shit. Look at my account age and post count for how strong a claim I’m making here:
I’m less terminally online brain poisoned and social media brain rotted than 95% of the people I find in left spaces in California. It’s wild.
It’s not even about real ideology sometimes. I recommended an essay about why being a cop is bullshit by George Orwell and got iced out of a mutual aid project for ‘liking problematic authors’, and that’s not even the dumbest one. I’ve been called ableist about a disability I have for saying reading theory has value.
3.2k over 2 months is numbers I generally attribute to bots/shills. Is that a normal level of online in your spaces?
No, that’s what I’m saying. I am buried in and embalmed with grass compared to most people I’ve met.
There are real problems in organizing, and I too have seen things like you’re describing. I just try not to take part in such petty squabbles. If a group is too wound up with internal politics to get anything done, I just find somewhere else to put my energy.
Yeah. It means I work without other organizers most of the time, bringing people up from total disempowerment. Need to move on pretty often to avoid… excessive regard.
i’m in the same position as you. i’m trying (or rather i tried) to be active in a number of activist groups where i live but most of them are too busy with petty infighting to actually improve anything. that’s why i’m so active on lemmy now, because here i feel like i can actually get things done by talking to people, having interesting discussions, learning and teaching stuff.
The revolution is not posting. Go outside. Share a pack of beer or regional hot beverage with a few unhoused people on the sidewalk and chat, vandalize some cameras, build a shadow library operating on secret rootkitted daemons on government servers, grab a machete and hunt fascists like you’re something out of a particularly based Asian noir film; whatever your contribution is: do your fucking part.
Also read theory.
education is the most important element of progress, and discussion is literally the most effective tool for that.
also don’t tell me what to do, i don’t like that, thank you.
Do what you like is my point. Posting just isn’t the revolution.
It’s not great education either! The overwhelming majority here is either too defensive or bad faith, so every discussion is incredibly basic surface pithy and conforming. you get surface bullshit with no depth or background. Long form content-whether that’s long private discussions with educated people or a fucking book-has advantages.
Posting is a vice, and only a vice.
Posting is a vice, and only a vice.
posting/commenting is what we make of it. :-)
Keep doing what you’re doing ✊
It’s not the easiest way to do things, or the most rewarding. I fail a lot.
“Leftism” is an umbrella term that encapsulates dozens of ideologies. “Leftist infighting” is a result of these groups wanting different things as they explicitly have different goals.
A communist and an anarchist doing “infighting” is largely a result of them having completely different goals, not CIA mind-control.
The CIA narrative you’re referring to pertains largely to socialist organization specifically.
My general observation:
Yankistanis on their capitalists raining in on societal failures causing division:
Chinese 50 cent army, Russian Bot farms, Tankies. Russian Trolls. We see you, comrade. They’re trying to divide us. Reeeeee
Yankistanis when a recorded history of CIA interference, coup, embargo, wars, propaganda where most yankistanis shrieks at the mention of the words and country trying a different economic system:
It’s not the CIA. Trust me bro!
How can you be certain either way?
It’s both. Popular fronts are a thing, and Spanish Republican style coalitions are incredibly powerful tools. Political pluralism within leftist movements is healthy when we let it be healthy. The CIA, FBI, and various governments and reactionary groups have engaged in psyops against this for decades.
But these divisions are real and they come from real ideological differences and hurt. The CIA didn’t force the red army to fire on the black armies, it didn’t force the blunder of ideology at Kronstadt, it didn’t force the betrayal in Spain. And it also didn’t force anarchists to have issues controlling their people or implementing their goals. It didn’t force the syndicalists to fuck up in South America and Berlin. And it didn’t force the USSR and CCP to nearly go to war with each other.
What they did do however is project Gladius, COINTELPRO, operation condor, and various other anti left programs. They made damn sure Fred Hampton died and they made sure the Black Panthers couldn’t trust each other enough to be effective. They also made sure the inner cities were filled with crack to destroy black anti capitalist organizing.
And here’s where you get the mix. Anarchists already don’t trust MLs, because of the aforementioned betrayals and disorganization, then you get government campaigns working to ensure that trust remains broken and that the culture becomes one in which cooperation is anathema. And the trots are kept distrustful of the MLs and the anarchists. MLs are encouraged to keep thinking of themselves as the only real socialists except MLMs. It’s similar to the Russian campaigns between democrats and republicans, both already didn’t like each other and the goal is to keep picking at the wounds and encouraging off putting behaviors.
Speaking at least in the context of the US, any revolutionary minded leftists (or “leftists”, if you prefer) have goals that diverge so far from the present day as to be irrelevant.
Right but it isn’t that easy. MLs and Trotskyists were taught things a certain way, a way that developed contrary to each other. Trotskyists and anarchists were purged ruthlessly and that has an effect on our politics. It would be nice to just dispense with it, but its not that easy. As long as people learn organizing from more experienced organizers, we will carry baggage from the past into the future. It takes an enormous amount of work and reflection to overcome, and I argue that most leftists regardless of ideology lack the tools that are needed, because many of us also carry the baggage of philosophical liberalism by default, either we don’t know how it affects us or when we do know we act contrary to it, which is still a source of heavy influence.
This isn’t being doomer about it, the solution is praxis, but the problems caused by history do actually exist, and have to be reckoned with
An easy thing we can all do, is refrain from sniping at one another online. I don’t mean serious discussion in good faith, but throwing barbs and shit.
I wish.
This is why I I try to focus on the right and just ignore stupid people on the left. They can be by my side as long as they throw rocks at the fascists.
This is why I work on blind solidarity. If a leftist organization organizes something and I like it I help it and assume they’re better than Democrats. If I think its demonic I ignore it.
Plus I like bragging about achieving to an infighter
If I think its demonic
yikes
Not everything is the fault of the CIA. I don’t think left parties need any help in self-destruction, they are well capable in this department. 😁
It’s how it is, because the left parties are democratic and discuss many ideas and people get passionate about different things. The right are usually authoritarian and people fall in line, no matter how much they disagree with the actual set of ideas, also because of the consequences.
It’s the natural natural way of things.
Sure. Wrecking absolutely exploits existing vulnerabilities. Resist exacerbating such vulnerabilities.
honestly, most “leftist infighting” is men who won’t stop hanging out with their rapist mates who got kicked out of an organising space. im an ancom but we have a wide array of ideologies in our scene but the bullshit shows up wherever you organise.
Misogynist bros are an FBI agents favorite kind of asset.
That may be a more inflated issue in your local scene. Where I am, brocialists have been excluded from many groups.
the irony of this coming from an ml user lol
🙄
Sounds like something a CIA agent would say!
Remember, it’s only leftist infighting when you disagree with them.
nah I mean if any of those people over there did anything productive in the real world I’d absolutely join. I can set differences aside for the greater good. unfortunately, most on ml serve only to disparage and divide, with no positive real world impact. you ever post a comment on a tankie post and get 13 people with essay responses complete with irrelevant/propaganda sources and uncited statistics? those take time to create, even if you are bullshitting together sources as they tend to do. that’s time that could have been spent talking to real leftists IRL or making real change in your community, which is desperately needed right now. there are more IRL leftist spaces around than you would think, but most of these ml tankies will not join an IRL space as an IRL leftist will punch you when you deny tiananmen square or say that ukranians are Nazis or any of the other horrid shit I’ve seen come from that chronically online “leftist” cesspool.
even memes like this become hard to take at face value. obviously I don’t know anything about this particular user and don’t feel the need to dig through profile history or mod logs, but a lot of shit like this coming from ml comes down to projection at best.
