I was pessimistic about the debate, but it was a fair deal funnier than I expected. I think Biden said something about cutting a black child in half.

They can't do this for just Biden because whatever conditions he needs to appear normal in public are probably the exact same conditions Trump needs to do his thing.

It's not just, like, the room temperature and chair tilt, but also the camerawork and moderation that influence this, and those can absolutely be biased, though idk what the bias would even be since I'm not following this

What I'm getting from this is we need to start raiding .world

Great Word Theory

I feel like this is a very boring answer, but it still needs to be given:

I think the main issue here is that you are starting from a lens of what borders on racial essentialism. The different historical examples you give have wildly different contexts (for example, the occupation of Korea being much more heavily military than the others you list, while white South Africans were overwhelmingly civilians -- whatever else might be said of them). I think the greater through line here is the one that any Marxist would point to first: class. Fundamentally, these societies of brutally exploited underclasses were setting themselves up for revolt by the very fact of their exploitation itself. What sets the US apart from these societies then is not the racial divide (though of course US society is highly racialized and it factors in to things) but that it is not primarily the site of the exploitation it carries out, i.e. it is imperialist, and therefore is able to temporarily "circumvent" the consequences of the basic principles of social stratification that all capitalist systems are bound by.

As imperial decline accelerates, more and more of the population you identified as settler (idk where you got 70% specifically from, but that doesn't really matter) is going to find themselves on the "brutally exploited" side of the above dichotomy, and from there, and with the necessary construction of dual power, it should not be difficult at all for them to be turned to the side of the colonized population as fellow exploited people.

So I believe that, in the framework of Mao's metaphor, the American people are still our God, and the mountains are capitalism and imperialism.

That's quite flattering, though expectations honestly terrify me

Everyone on hexbear thinks everyone else on hexbear is a lib, don't take it personally

I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don't know how intelligent most people are. You don't know how much empathy they actually have. You're just like a channer writing monologues online about how "normies" don't have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are "NPCs". Society has hurt you and you've grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren't superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.

It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.

...We must also arouse the political consciousness of the entire people so that they may willingly and gladly fight together with us for victory. We should fire the whole people with the conviction that China belongs not to the reactionaries but to the Chinese people. There is an ancient Chinese fable called "The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains." It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, "How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains." The Foolish Old Man replied, "When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we clear them anyway?" Having refuted the Wise Old Man's wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we too, will touch God's heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can't these mountains be cleared away?"

https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish

Devil's advocate for a sec... if elections can be "bought" because people are so apathetic or lazy that they need literally millions of dollars worth of advertising to convince them to vote, then maybe electoral democracy can't work?

Dig in just a bit deeper here: These are people who live in New York, a state notorious for being unfailingly Democrat and also unfailingly conservative in its governance. The fact that some people have become disillusioned with elections that, their whole lives, have probably demonstrated very little change, is understandable and not a symptom of the average person somehow being simply inadequate for very basic tasks.

Maybe Mao was right about a cultural revolution

Mao was a radical democrat (lowercase d) and both the successes and failures of the Cultural Revolution are connected to that. Though there was direction from the top, ultimately the events that I assume you are referring to, like the Four Olds Campaign, were carried out on a grassroots basis by young activists, sometimes constructively and sometimes not. It was in many respects a battle of the progressive elements of society against the reactionary elements, one that the reactionary elements ultimately won by holding out until Their Guy took over the country, since the progressive or would-be-progressive forces were too disorganized in themselves to succeed at anything but being a force of chaos that gave reactionaries a solid causus belli for police crackdown.

At scale this was not at all Mao dictating his socialism to the common people and then beating it into them when they resisted (though some of his followers certainly did, and this mostly failed).

The Cultural Revolution is a very fraught topic, but you are doing Mao a disservice by essentially accusing him of "commandism", an error that he was very much against.

Commandism is wrong in any type of work, because in overstepping the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of voluntary mass action it reflects the disease of impetuosity. Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses. Whether the masses understand it and are ready to take action can be discovered only by going into their midst and making investigations. If we do so, we can avoid commandism. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness. Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip us and are eager to advance a step when our comrades are still tailing behind certain backward elements, for instead of acting as leaders of the masses such comrades reflect the views of these backward elements and, moreover, mistake them for those of the broad masses. In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. Every comrade must be helped to understand that as long as we rely on the people, believe firmly in the inexhaustible creative power of the masses and hence trust and identify ourselves with them, no enemy can crush us while we can crush every enemy and overcome every difficulty.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm

Did the dunk tank comm get refederated?

I thought the rule was bullshit, but now I almost support it as a way of accelerating the protracted posters' war against the neoliberal pedophiles on lemmy.

moer liek nominalally

I think people jump to "Read On Authority" to quickly, a behavior that amounts to scripture-quoting, but

I just threw it into chatgpt, I think I understand now. It's basically saying that some level of authority is necessary for society to function (which I wouldn't have argued against otherwise).

chatgpt sucks and has demonstrated that again here. On Authority essentially argues that a socialist revolution 1: is itself a monumental exercise of authority and 2: requires authority to be protected when it exists in a world fundamentally hostile to it. There are some ancillary arguments about command structures, but overall it is written in opposition to anarchist dogmatism about "Authority" being an evil thing that must be discarded.

I'll let someone else unpack the "Stalinist Russia" part

Something can be aggressively decontextualized and still not sugar-coated

One is a country, one is an individual, to say that any individual is more important to the war than the United States is the literal definition of Great Man Theory (i.e. childish nonsense).

This is without getting into other considerations like how Netanyahu is a scapegoat for faux-progressives who want to deflect away from how this genocide has enthusiastic support from many powerful institutions within Israel. It is an Israeli project much more than Netanyahu's personal project.

P.S. Assassinating Putin wouldn't end the war in Ukraine either (nor would assassinating Zelensky or Biden)

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Matthew 7:5

Just wait until you find out how popular aryanism still is with basically any group of white people in the world outside of maybe some of Ireland.

Honestly an interesting concept for a tomb, making a living space for a dead person.

The NED is notorious for basically being a CIA cut-out

Specific people or archetypal people?