Unfortunately due to *circumstances* Twitter has become my main "social gathering" space. I'm afraid to lose the wonderful film-lovers that I've encountered here if I delete my account.
Pls follow my LB and Discord "xenonoxide1", if you feel like it.
No he didn't. He was a victim of child abuse and he writes about child abuse all the time because it is a way to work out his complex reactions to that trauma (as many victims do). But never is his moral allegiance to the victim ever in doubt.
Rowling sucks but the whole "Nabokov was playing 4D chess" angle is bullshit.
The dude wrote fantasy porn about fucking children in like half of his literary output.
Every Nabokov novel that features CSA is basically prolonged meditation on "how the f*** did this happen? Why did he do this to me?" which as *any* survivor can tell you, is one of the most common things a survivor can obsessively fixate on and seek answers about.
@RodericDay
Really? A YouTube video? And one that presents, right out of the gate, Nabakov's *characters* statements as if they were the *author's* views. Immediately disqualifying
@revdefeat
I mean this duality is the *direct* result of this imo. The more straight-laced you are on weekdays, the more you need to get absolutely wasted on the weekends to let off the steam
@RodericDay
Okay then this argument hasn't been ground to dust with "endless citations" then. The only citation is a wilful misinterpretation of artistic devices rather than any "proof" against my biographical statement about Nabakov's real experience with being molested by his uncle
@destructionset
It must be parents predominantly from a particular social class, right? Like who else has the time to spend hours on eavesdropping every day?
Leftists haven't fully grappled with the reality that an American mass fascist movement (even though it'll obviously culminate in an outright racialist white dictatorship) will begin as an explicitly *multi-racial* rhetorical strategy playing on "respectability" politics.
A lot of DSA "labor aristocracy doesn't exist" discourse can be easily explained by the fact that, like, a good chunk of members are 6-figure salaried tech workers or middle managers whose political education ended with "and everyone who earns a wage is working class."
@lmartods
Also sexual abuse would be easier to spot if people didn't keep believing in the fantasy that there's any fool proof way of stereotyping what an abuser looks like. Guess what abusers are more likely to be the "upstanding citizens"
@TravisHedgeCoke
Exactly right. That's why I said elsewhere, I'm not his biggest fan though I do appreciate his artistry. It's just dumb (and regressive) to call literature "porn" because it makes you feel uncomfortable
@gfaunaa
@h0mmelette
Explicit but also somehow artsy and not like blunt or literal?
Like can't recall a pop song in many years with a line as evocative as "knee deep in the passenger seat"
I can live-and-let-live with religious communists -- but with some religious commies, when I notice they spend way more effort in defending why their religion is actually secretly communist than on criticizing their own religious institutions, I'm immediately suspicious.
It’s also why I reject pretty adamantly even leftist gestures toward “returning” to religion, especially Christianity - a religion whose goal is the realization of the community of believers (communism) predicated on collective self-sanction
This is what the smarter (and therefore more dangerous) pretenders like Tucker Carlson have realized. "Spiritualized" (I.e. not crudely biologicist) racism, imperial citizenship as reward for "good minorities", those will be the mass ideologies that first take root.
@House97Glass
Everyone in the replies saying “it’s 10 years ago!” — look you’re definitely allowed to grow, but if you were saying wildly racist things 10 years ago, maybe don’t act so sanctimonious towards people to your left.
Proof of the deep popular support for armed struggle. Like imagine getting hundreds of thousands of tweens and teens to be so absolutely disciplined about posting on social media...
I'm more in awe every day of discipline & dedication of Palestinian organizers and strategists.
Interview with Palestinian Kataib Al-Aqsa "Hacker Force":
"Intelligence units all over the world spend lots of money on online stores where people download applications for their phone. They do this to track people. We also know that the Israeli Mossad spends money on
@saint_morg
China takes regional patriotism far more seriously than American society lol. As amusing as the New York discourse is, it's extremely mild in the grand scheme of things.
The irony of lecturing about "tailism" with such gravity when the DSA has done nothing but chase: chase the Bernie bump, chase the squad, chase BLM, chase Palestine protests. All post-facto. Literally, every single movement was initiated by someone else. Learn some humility man.
If a magic pill exists for "socializing" young men away from right wing ideas, it's breaking down the gendered segregation that's manifested in a million subtle ways since childhood, so that boys relate to girls as friends and humans outside of the idea of "romantic pursuit" --
You absolutely cannot reclaim "degeneracy" for leftist art criticism. The modern ruling class's primary mode of spectacle is channelizing our libidinal to consumption via restrictive and sanitized pathways. Tightly controlling libido. *Not* indulging it in free play of perversity
@dr_cosmo
@gfaunaa
@h0mmelette
Yeah I guess I didn't express myself accurately. She'd do that but also do a whole extended metaphor comparing herself to take-out food. It's very playful and a lot more interesting than just "sex sex sex sex sex"
@Staroxvia
A lot of straight guys hate sex because their organic connection to their sexual desires has been so warped by the fact that the default expectations for masculinity aggressively cuts one off from intimacy and vulnerability, which is the sine qua non for finding pleasure in sex
I mean a crucial detail people omit in this retelling is they didn't ally with Kerensky by voting for him, they made a temporary *military* joint action to defend the provisional government as a whole from being overthrown by fascist boots on the ground
Lenin, in order to stop the bourgeois Kadet party from gaining power, formed a temporary alliance with Kerensky. Bolsheviks helped Kerensky come to power while plotting to remove him. "Communist" should remember this instead of going into sycophantic convulsions for Kamala + Tim
I'm sorry but I gotta talk about the elephant in the room: "normie" is not in the daily vocabulary of the culture you idolize. You know how many times I've heard my coworkers say the word "normie"? Zero (0).
Talking about "normies" immediately makes you a weirdo
the worst insult for people who embrace leftism as an aesthetic is “normie”
the greatest compliment for an actual leftist organizer is that they come off as a “normie”
@courktree
Genuine question: do you think CPUSA is the only institution in the world where, as luck would have it, *every single critic* just happen to be haters with a bad faith agenda and no one could have genuine criticisms of it? Cuz that would be quite incredible.
My 2 cents on the "read Marx" discourse:
Read Marx! Read everyone! Devour the canonical texts (and I mean "canon" in the expanded, inclusive sense) in every field: politics, literature, art, theory. Watch classic movies. Listen to classical music (from every culture). Do it all!
@h0mmelette
I'd argue it's the first modernist novel, decades before James Joyce. Its canonization as some boring stuffy Victorian classic really did its popular reputation a disservice.
@_Sheehogue_
"The film name-dropped socialism in a positive light! What more can you ask??"
Yeah sorry I'm not a child you can't buy me off just by saying my favorite word
Because they're the only workers these downwardly mobile middle class LARPers interact with daily. They can safely fetishize the factory worker they'll never meet, while venting all their frustrations abt their declining standard of living on the ppl who actually serve them daily
Why do MAGA communists hate baristas so much?
There's no other job where they try so hard to grasp at straws trying to make the case that they're somehow not proletarians. It just seems to be Starbucks baristas for some reason.
Both things can be true: a lot of poor whites have reactionary racist views (some educatable, some not), but also there's no way in hell anyone in that frat makes less than 100k a year lol.
@Hezbolsonaro
They did the same stuff with Maki. Hopefully it's just youth since I've been guilty of same in the past. But if you're an adult, please, don't have strong opinions on things you haven't learned about!
@thumbelulu
Why does "traditional characters" matter at all in this conversation? Cantonese speakers in Guangdong write the dialect using simplified characters and it has no effect on their ability to represent dialect.
Bread and Roses' whole deal is they absolutely looove the fact that they're the "kingmakers" bc of NPC composition, soooooo psyched that they're doing serious adult wheeling-n-dealing PoLiTiCs... just to use it to change abso-effing-lutely nothing. Waste of space.
@Brumrade
IMT's article on the BPP claims that people like Huey Newton were not theoretical but merely fiery poets, buying into the "intuitive unintellectual black people" trope, overstresses the role of gangs and violence in the BPP playing into the bourgeois mythology about them etc
Talking about "school abolition", when the dominant political trend for decades is to gut public schooling for the poor and racially oppressed, just seems incredibly misplaced. Our theory are interventions in concrete situations, not abstract 1st principles.
The way communist sects systematically train its members to not be able to say, "I don't have a position on that topic, I don't know enough about it" rather than parroting hot takes on everything from physics to ecology to art based on very little...
The promise of walz is less that he is himself some dyed in the wool progressive, and much more that he is not hostile to the left, and even views the left as a partner. My understanding is that he had to work with dsa legislators order to pass all the good stuff we’ve seen in MN
@AOC
@ryangrim
And are the “rank-and-file workers” you’re talking about in the room with us now? Because it seems like the *actual* rank and file workers feel very differently, we have their public statement and everything
I have to say in my 7 years as a committed American socialist, I have never been as embarrassed and ashamed as now. What are we doing? We're almost as pathetic as the Israeli "left". The world deserves to laugh at us.
Imagine looking at the state of the movement around the US and thinking, "you know what... My meal ticket -- yup, *that's* the burning issue of our movement".
One of the reasons I left the IMT is because its internal culture and organizational norms felt like it could easily breed complacency and abuse in leadership positions. Please read this and reflect seriously -- if we are ever to build a revolutionary party, we must take stock.
Statement on my resignation from Socialist Fightback/the IMT. Major content warnings for violence, sexual assault, abuse, transphobia, etc. I tried to be as concise as possible, but there’s a lot of ground to cover. I’ll summarize in this thread.
Also every single "muh Islamic imperialism" Zionist talking point misses the crucial fact that none of these conquests involved *mass displacements*. 99% of the peasants stayed exactly where they are and simply paid taxes to a different set of rulers.
If you ever mention that Zionism was a colonial project (obviously…) guys show up to say “In 620 AD the Levant was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate.” yea.. cool. 500,000 years ago there were different kinds of hominids. Why are you giving me this information
Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin are so out-dated! We need new ideas!
"What are your new ideas, exactly?"
Not gonna tell you -- you have to find out for yourself! *Waves hands mysteriously*
@CosmonautMag
I'm usually all for Cosmonaut's "open door" editorial policy, and I get why you might be reluctant to be accused of "censoring" an opposition to your editorial, but there's gotta be standards here
This is not a joke: when I first started reading Marxist theory, I saw Rosa Luxemburg's name come up in passing, and spent a few months misremembering her as "Anna Lichtenstein" and couldn't for the life of me find anything about her on Google. No idea what my brain did there.
I'm not a Trotskyist anymore but this sort of thing is classic punching-down. Nope let's not blame the red scare or labor bureaucrats or NGOcrats or labor chauvinism, let's blame the one group that's never wielded any influence at all in US politics.
@vanillaopinions
These memes "work" because they only ever imagine the racially scary man in the woods, not like, the fathers, teachers and uncles in their lives
If I rag on this book too hard and too often it's because I not only think (not just this particular book, but any kind of similar "sect-Marxist" production) is cringe and wrong, but actually full on, deeply dangerous. It's poisonous to critical thinking
Big reactions to the brief piece below. Along with lots of gratitude, I heard from trusted movement friends who objected to the original characterization of celebration on parts of the left. That’s a fair critique.
As most of you know, writers don’t choose headlines and I did
@femalenickmllr
It absolutely is! It's such a common rhetorical strategy to suggest that oppressed people (this also applies to race and class) are just somehow built less sensitive and not, you know, they have no choice but to grin and bear it
@esmesayss
Important also to note that Maddy's planetarium monologue far from suggests coming out is some instant cure. In many ways they continue to live the same life as before, even down to the time slipping away. Authenticity doesn't magically change everything else
I'm genuinely curious what exactly is the purpose of a "Cuba delegation" if independent fact-finding is frowned upon? How exactly would it be different from political tourism? I agree that ending the embargo is the key issue, but you can agitate for that at home...
"Labor aristocracy" theory gets overfitted quite often but a pretty strong anecdotal example of why it's nevertheless such a useful concept is how Shawn Fain, the one major labor leader off the top of my head who rose from the ranks rather than staff, had a police chief as a dad.
@kdgriffit
@qaomene
I swear my first thought on this was literally "this must be a 4chan psyop using some stock-photo avatar" and was shocked to see based on their bio that they're a very real person.
"Organized democratic mass politics isn't easy" is a wild thing to say sitting in your leisurely middle class career in an imperialist nation with a functioning civic society while talking down to concentration camp inmates whose lives are 1000 times harder than yours.
Organized democratic mass politics isn’t easy, but it’s got a great track record and doesn’t involve mowing down elderly women with machine guns. Many on the Palestinian left, which is not a monolith dominated by Hamas, actually prefer it to terrorist attacks on civilians
@poisonjr
@McfaulDylan
Every single time, it's like their cruelty to (people they deem) predators is just a projection/externalization of the predator within themselves.
@souljagoytellem
Who's "supporting the indiscriminate murder of civilians"? Are they in the room right now?
Sorry that these freedom fighters haven't invented a new type of war without collateral damage
Idk, not an Israeli Communist Party fan myself -- but something just doesn't sit right with me about tripping over ourselves to land Epic Dunks on a party of mostly '48 Palestinians, when the state of the "American Left" is just as pathetic as the "Israeli left".
A flat-out joke of a position. We lost thousands of members for Bowman’s previous vote? Bowman is a “progressive except for Palestine” when he’s defined his re-election on ending support for Netanyahu? This isn’t serious politics.
The problem with what's implied here, is that queer ppl are somehow *more* individualistic, hedonistic, than straights.
It takes 2 secs to see this is idiotic. As if straights don't "just want to party"? When the vast majority of our party culture caters to straights? Huh??
I'll be the first to defend my queer ppl but we have to stop pretending queerness (especially in the West) is inherently revolutionary. Some of yall are some of the most liberal, individualist, decadent people holding the revolution back. Imperialism = the primary contradiction.
We don't need guilt, we don't need self-flagellation -- if you're poor white, supporting people of color's struggle isn't just moral, it's in your direct material interests -- our interests are TIED TOGETHER, but we need to fight together in the material realm!
@amithecommie
@courktree
If I'm understanding what this implies correctly: the vast majority of "good faith" criticism will be only restricted to those made in the medium and timing determined ahead of time by the organization? That most criticism outside this prescribed limit must be bad faith?
@BolshevikEagle
Nobody said a minority of settlers couldn't support the resistance. The issue is that IMT *opposes BDS* and constantly shat on "firing rockets" because of fear of scaring off "Israeli working class". Asking Palestinians to moderate for the sake of settler opinion is the problem!
“For this reason, Wellred Books, the publishing house of the IMT internationally, […] stand virtually alone in continuing to issue new editions of classic texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.”
I… I just… are they really saying literally *anything* now?
Some people like to talk shit about “cushy email jobs” but good luck organizing your way out of a paper bag when your member database crashes, your funds get embezzled because random volunteers are in charge of financial controls, & you’re getting sued for compliance violations.