Rather it was the people using the new system to settle old scores or for personal advancement.
Lenin, Mao, et al look at how many people had gotten into the party entirely for the purpose of abusing their positions for personal gain.
How was that allowed to happen? Did they build a system of oppression that was ripe for takeover by petty tyrants, some of whom became actual, fully fledged tyrants, whilst simultaneously shutting down the mechanisms by which workers could have power over their own lives?
This isn’t about whether Stalin personally gets into heaven, plus the absurd strawman that people think he did anything personally shows a complete lack of systemic thinking, which was ironically one of Marx’s great contributions to political thought. It is about whether the systems we build are liberatory or oppressive.
MLs love reading, don’t they? Oh but wait, that’s anarchism. Go ahead, tell me it’s beneath you and I should read On Authority. I have. It was underwhelming to put it nicely.
And yes, the system they built was on the back of and patterned after the authoritarian monarchist regimes they followed. That’s not a favourable light to put that system in. Was it marginally better than a monarchy? Sure, why is that relevant to anything? We live under neoliberal regimes of which none to my knowledge has never been toppled by an ML revolution.
That ideology is centuries out of date. Anarchists saw its downfall before it started. It’s failed.
Even if you’re combatting some bizarre strawman about absolute dictators, it’s equally bizarre that your response is to attempt to rehabilitate Stalin’s character. That puts you squarely in tankie territory.
Assuming you’re trying to ask what that term means, it’s short for Marxist-Leninist, it’s a polite way of referring to tankies, where you accept their rebranding of what is effectively Stalinism. It was after all Stalin’s term to coopt and puppeteer the legacy of two dead men to give legitimacy to his reign of terror. They will try to tell you there are principled MLs but if they think there is any merit in the concept then they are doing the same kind of historical revisionism that all tankies do.
And you can see this person was in fact clearly trying to defend Stalin, if only indirectly.
Edit: Also look at the username - they’re from lemmy.ml, where the .ml is the Mali country code but in this case it definitely also stands for Marxism-Leninism. It’s a tankie instance.
I gave them the text as published on the anarchist library, but they didn’t seem to appreciate that either. It’s almost like they just don’t want to learn history that isn’t their revisionist version of it.
The frustrating thing is that most of it was CIA propaganda at one point in time, it just happened to also be true, which made it much more effective propaganda. It’s a big gift the USSR gave to anti-communists.
On 28 April 2022, Just Stop Oil supporters blocked the entrances to Clacket Lane Services on the M25 by sitting in the road with Just Stop Oil banners. They also decommissioned the petrol pumps by breaking the display glass and covering it with spray paint. This action was taken in support of their demand for the UK government...
They didn’t lose the support of 12 out of 12 jury members. You’re lying about something we can all see right in front of us. This verdict proves you’re wrong and is a massive win for this movement. So weird that you chose this story to get on your high horse about.
It seems like it probably was. Since none of their defences were allowed, then the jury had to simply decide factually whether the acts occurred. “We didn’t do that” is one type of defense, so it stands to reason they didn’t offer that defence and the acts themselves weren’t disputed in the case.
[The court] has ruled that mass loss of life from climate breakdown and the government’s failure to act on the science are irrelevant to the circumstances of an action, for the purposes of the defence of consent to damage to property. That is – protesters deeply-held and factual beliefs are no defence.
So the defendants weren’t saying they didn’t do it, and why would they? It was a demonstration, and claiming it never happened would defeat the purpose.
So that means that as a simple matter of law it’s open and shut. They admit they did it, and they don’t have any legally allowed defense for their actions. However, the jury are judges of fact, and the only way they can find them not guilty is if they determine that actually no they didn’t do it.
That flies in the face of the cases presented to them, so it has to be jury nullification. I assume there was someone in the jury who knew about that loophole and informed their peers.
I don’t see any mainstream outlets reporting on this - shocker I know. The neoliberal hegemon isn’t going to want people talking about this, because they avoid jury nullification by just not talking about it and implying in court that the jury has to follow the law. If this news starts to spread and people start talking about it, it’s going to get harder and harder to find juries that don’t know about nullification and then these acts are going to get very hard to prosecute in a way that is seen to be legitimate.
This should be a claxon in the ears of the ruling class that they are facing dire consequences in the near future if they don’t change shit like yesterday.
Jury nullification is powerful partly because you need to get a group of 12 strangers together who have been vetted to remove bias, to all unanimously agree to say, in effect, “fuck the law”. The more people realise this is an option, the more it will happen, and the more it happens the more it will become obvious that we are being screwed and our oppressors want it to happen. They should be shitting themselves right now.
Instead nobody’s reporting on it, not even the centrist style conservatives, and the very wealthy have clogged their ears with reactionary rhetoric that will stop them hearing the alarm until it’s far too late.
I had this gif open in a tab once in college. I just thought it was funny and I had it in a portable web browser on my portable hard drive, so I could resume my session on any computer.
Anyway, I opened it one time and a friend of mine went, “Oh shit please get rid of that.”
I didn’t really get it, then they said, “No you don’t understand, I have an irrational fear of Beaker. I had a horrible dream where he was doing surgical experiments on me and he really upsets me.”
I had just inadvertently found possibly the worst version of their worst nightmare and jump scared them with it.
“Always have been” specific in your denials… like the specific insistence that you’re not a banana. I’m starting to wonder if you’re some other kind of berry. It would fit the evidence just as well.
You can’t have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like “thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings”. We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don’t even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.
If you’re not serious enough about the problem to break away from civil politics and lesser evilism,then we’re doomed. At some point people need to start breaking things.
I agree, although my concept of breaking things is working outside the system to undermine it and render it irrelevant, and to build something better now in spite of it.
I don’t know if voting or not voting for dems even matters at this point, because the worse their opponents get the more they use that as an excuse not to try. I don’t think they even care to win, so I don’t think threatening not to vote for them works.
In about a decade the dem approach shifted from “hope & change” to “get a load of this idiot”. I think they’re basically saying the quiet part loud now, that electoral politics doesn’t represent regular people so it doesn’t have to appeal to them.
(Edit because libs are gonna get mad that I said voting isn’t important. Here libs: vote as far left as you realistically can, which in the US means voting for Biden. I vote for my preferred enemy and giving the Dems more opportunities to disappoint people will radicalise them further left. Are you happy? I said vote for Biden. No of course you’re not happy because I didn’t say to vote for the reasons you like even though that literally doesn’t matter which is the point of forcing people to vote strategically.)
Yes. You can’t seriously say that “Biden is the genocide candidate but that’s better than the uber genocide candidate” and then say that you’re happy with the system. A system that offers you those choices is already broken, the only thing that remains is to build the best successor you can.
The project of building the new in the shell of the old is not accelerationist, it is decelerationist.
Edit: also bold to try to scare me with the prospect of a genocide. Our functioning society would never do a genocide am I right? Or maybe the scary prospect is a genocide at home, but Foucault’s boomerang means that’s coming anyway. My interest is in making structures that will keep society functioning whilst the empire crumbles.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population is about 3.2 million, Rojava is estimated at around 2 million and the EZLN’s region has over 5 million, but now according to you I need a single contiguous example bigger than 10 million, which is more than most countries.
Why? I assume because you’re so scared of change that you’d rather content yourself with voting for slightly less genocide than consider the alternatives, and the best way to do that is to grab the goalposts and walk off with them.
And again, I’m not talking about burning things down, I’m talking about building alternatives. Let me know if you’re at all curious to understand what I mean by that.
Also, please keep downvoting all my comments. It makes your argument look so superior, it’s devastating.
In another example of how our pay-to-play society privileges the extremely wealthy, they won’t say things like that because they could get sued for it, and even though it’s a totally accurate description of the behaviour, they might not be able to survive the process of being sued, whereas Google would just use the lawyers they keep on retainer as part of their cost of doing business.
This meme was inspired by the response to a meme I posted on r/worldjerking (slrpnk.net)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/10351845...
Just Stop Oil supporters found not guilty in petrol pump case (juststopoil.org)
On 28 April 2022, Just Stop Oil supporters blocked the entrances to Clacket Lane Services on the M25 by sitting in the road with Just Stop Oil banners. They also decommissioned the petrol pumps by breaking the display glass and covering it with spray paint. This action was taken in support of their demand for the UK government...
Felt Age Culture (lemmy.world)
Massive bug found (lemmy.world)
Everyday, as an American (midwest.social)
SPLORP! (i.imgur.com)
Just in case the direct link doesn’t work properly: i.imgur.com/IgbRs9y.mp4...
International Public Opinion on Climate Change: Household Climate Actions – Adoption and Barriers, 2023 (climatecommunication.yale.edu)
Sure, Biden’s climate policy could be better, but consider what a second Trump term would be like (www.motherjones.com)
Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10 (arstechnica.com)
Google might keep your Pixel during a repair if you're caught using non-OEM parts (www.androidpolice.com)