GarbageShoot [he/him]

nor is it to “de-Nazify” Ukraine

I think they do want to do this, since the Nazis are extremely hostile to Russia, so it’s crushing the opposition. Obviously this is pretty different from the historical de-Nazification efforts whose corpse Putin cynically puppets as cover for his actions.

If there are meaningful factions of Greater Russia Nazis in Ukraine, he’d obviously be fine with those as he is fine with them in Russia.

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

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.

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.

Eco is not a definitive authority and his little checklist is extremely ahistorical.

Bizarro world leftist meme

On a personal level i agree with you, but politically that is probably a non-starter . . .

I’m not saying Christianity as a personal practice needs to be destroyed, but essentially that the country needs to be secularized by any means necessary because Christo-fascist theocratic policy has massive support in some places. There can be no privileging Christians above other citizens, no “teaching the controversy” on science and myth, no cultish Christian home"schools", no protecting the souls of blastocysts, etc.

This shit isn’t something that would make a popular movement non-viable, it would help it while preventing massive, systemic abuse of women and children, because the simple fact of the matter is that this shit only gets into legislation because of massive backing by the bourgeoisie. Most people even in the most conservative states oppose it, it’s just the fucking Christian nationalist think tanks that push it.

. . . whereas an atheistic philosophy at least could (not saying that it is) be compatible with materialism.

I mentioned Daoism, I think it was to you. Daoism definitely has elements compatible with materialism. I’m not convinced that Confucianism has any except maybe yì.

I am not a big fan of the whole “filial piety” thing myself . . .

I’ve had the opportunity to argue somewhat extensively with a Chinese communist about a number of issues, filial piety being one. He is, like a lot of them are, revisionist, but I need to give him credit for being open-minded. I don’t think it was all that possible even to change his mind, but he at least acknowledged that I had a point when I claimed filial piety is hierarchical and (coincidentally like some of the western practices that I just mentioned) absolutely begging for abuse on the part of the patriarch and – speaking of there being patriarchs – deeply sexist, and, in addition, it and ren represent a dysfunctional way to order an egalitarian society if family members are commanded to give deontological preference to their own family and those closest to them.

Almost no one, myself included, thinks he went about it in a constructive way, but Mao had reason to want to fight this stuff.

It’s not like I’m saying they should follow American ideas of progressiveness, I’m not saying Xi should wear a dashiki and kneel for eight minutes, but in a broader sense Mao acknowledged and the country was built on the belief that there is some amount of trans-culturally relevant notions of what it means to be a progressive (e.g. Marxism-Leninism) and that these should be pursued, even if the application looks different in different places.

the world and its laws are unknowable, rejection of mysticism

Should all of Christianity and all of Islam be combated as well? Once upon a time i might have said yes, but now i don’t know. Maybe eventually.

Let me point out first that there’s a difference between a religion/philosophy as a major component of a countries superstructure vs something that merely exists in personal practices here and there.

With that caveat, I think most of us who live in America would say that Christianity absolutely does need to be rooted out of the culture because it is monstrous.

But is it really a priority at the moment? Is this the primary contradiction that we are facing?

You can’t accomplish revolutionary change by focusing on exactly one thing at a time while letting all other forms of reaction flourish. That is a form of tailism.

Would it not be more prudent to focus on denouncing specifically the most reactionary elements of these philosophies/religions while ignoring the more benign ones, at least for the time being?

What matters is if it is actually actionably reactionary. Confucianism, being a philosophy and not a religion, really loses wiggle room that religions have in terms of benign beliefs like “mee-maw is looking down on me from Heaven” or whatever. It’s almost entirely things that have real, practical significance, like filial piety and ren (which are reactionary).

I wouldn’t say “extremely” reactionary but it does have reactionary elements. Probably not more than Abrahamic religions do

That’s like saying “He’s not ‘extremely’ violent, probably not more than Mengele”

Whether it should be combated or not is not for me to say since i’m not from that region or culture.

This is extremely backwards, anti-marxist thinking. To get a good grasp on the nature of things might take you much more investigation because of your lack of baseline familiarity, but you are not fundamentally and unalterably excluded from criticism. Chinese people aren’t space aliens.

How?

Taoism is the same thing, just using the old transliteration system where Beijing is Peking and Mao Zedong is Mao Tsetung.

My recommendation is just to read the Daodejing. It’s a pretty short compilation of poems that is the main text of Daoism.

To be fair, Confucianism is extremely reactionary and should be combated. It would make much more sense to have a Daoist Marxism than a Confucian one.

I wouldn’t rate that very highly on diamat

tl;dr: You’re deeply disingenuous and talking to you is a waste of time.

Maybe spend . . . more time getting a sense of humor

It wasn’t a joke

Never believe that [reactionaries] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [reactionaries] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I called it! Though I suppose it was plain enough by the time I came across it.

Faux-populist rhetoric is not a Marx thing and Magats are absolutely not opposed to big business. It’s like Trump’s only thing that he’s a billionaire due to real estate and other related fields.

Have I finally met that unicorn of perfect ignorance for whom the “Trump Is a Leninist” thinkpieces were written for? I’m just dying to know what part of Marx is used by Republicans!