Ahem.

Juche Juice

Can neither confirm nor deny this rumor…

All thanks are due to the immortal ideas of Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism, not me.

I gave Haz & Co. critical support at the beginning, only to see them get worse and worse and worse. Early on, when they were associated with CPI, their tailism was absolutely a strategy. They would say all kinds of offensive things, and pepper their speech with any number of right-wing memes and dog whistles, but you could tell that it all rested on a basic Marxist worldview. One can disagree with such tactics (I do), or find them stupid and counterproductive, but it was almost certainly sincere. Since early 2023, however, the predictable has happened, and Haz, Hinkle, etc. have become prisoners of their own brand. Now I don’t see them as trying to do anything other than a sort of 4chan with Stalinist aesthetics.

It’s a good cautionary tale, though with an obvious moral: don’t try to do all your organizing online.

Yeah, the Infrared crowd hates Maupin because they see him as an old fuddy-duddy who (gasp) wanted them to do real stuff in the real world, and not just be edgy online. Maupin dislikes them because (1) they rip off his ideas without attribution, and (2) they went whole hog on the “recruit from the right” thing in the dumbest way possible. And when I say dumb, I mean really dumb: as in “talk about Hegel in front an American flag bikini poster” dumb. Yes, Haz actually did this.

Basically, the way that whole sphere works is: Maupin says something that’s wrongheaded, but somewhat thought out; Haz presents it a few days later as his own, mixed with some dumbass Ned Land/Dugin/Larouche stuff; then Jackson Hinkle, Midwestern Marx, Sameera Khan, and other assorted intellectual lightweights spread it all over the internet in the form of lazy AI-generated memes. With each step the original idea gets stupider, with @REVMAXXING being the absolute nadir.

That I thought for a long time that whole crowd could reform and become principled Marxists is one of the worst blunders I’ve made.

EDIT: for instance, look at this not-very-original piece of analysis. I think my dog could come up with something about as profound, and I don’t even have a dog. Face of modern communism, anybody?

Yes, this is correct. Only two things I would add: first, recognizing that those who sell sex are almost always victims does not mean we should have a positive attitude toward buyers of sex. Quite the opposite, in fact. I would actually argue that anyone who has ever paid a prostitute (of any gender) for sex should be excluded from a communist organization; OnlyFans is maybe a bit different, since it’s all online and porn use is so accepted in our society, but I would certainly be very wary of anybody in a leadership position who was bought “services” on it. It’s all a form of rent seeking, but with the rented commodity being an actual human being, and the “want” satisified being in no way neccesary to human life or human flourishing in the way that (say) housing is. So with the level of brutal exploitation in the industry, a principled Marxist has no reason to support it.

(For clarity, I don’t think you were saying anything different, but in my experience it’s good to make the point explicitly, because libs like to twist support for sex workers around into “visiting the red light district is AKSHUALLY a revolutionary act, and buying feet pics is just like reading Lenin!1!1!” We want to raise the productive forces and increase overall prosperity, so that everybody can work and support themselves, and nobody is forced to sell their body in order to put food on the table. In the meantime we can help sex workers through mutual aid, etc. Sex need never enter into the equation.)

The second thing is very minor, and feel completely free to disagree – but I’m always bothered somewhat by the term “normalize,” as it feels very idealistic. Things don’t get “normalized” or accepted without some change in the underlying economic relations. So I don’t think the normalization of sex work is good in and of itself; it’s a symptom of some unhealthy cause, not people waking up one day and deciding to be less prudish. We’re all a little prey to the liberal notion of social change, that it’s precipitated by what Stefan Molyneux (remember him? what a bozo) called “magic individuals” who step up and “change the discourse.” It might be good to avoid their language altogether.

OP has an… interesting name and profile picture.

As well as a post history that looks like it escaped from r/redscarepod.

NIP-16’s builders cobbled the hardware together from old railroad bridges, the hulls of decommissioned submarines and the rotating mechanism from a scrapped battleship.

If the US or one of its allies had built it a satellite station that way, you can bet the article would be talking about “recycling,” “earth-friendly building techniques,” “innovative use of former military hardware.”

Almost all those American ads are so lazy. “Let’s just take a picture, slap some text with a ‘woman bad’ joke on it, and call it a day.” And the last one doesn’t even make sense; why would someone be wearing a helmet and a space suit but no gloves?

Compare to those Soviet posters which could be in a museum of modern art.

“You don’t understand how threatened I feel going outside as as Jew!”

– the most basic-looking, pasty-white New Yorker you know (nobody would even guess they were Jewish if they didn’t keep bringing up Oct. 7th and the homeland they don’t live in at every single opportunity)

Chad believer, proud of his heritage

vs.

the dumb larpy “I wanna be Nazi, but also, like, Jewish as well!” Zionist

YET

I should do that too. Yogthos is also a legend.

Unfortunately, I don’t know lemmy all that well outside of the 'grad. What are some good instances to go on for that sweet, sweet lib cringe?

It’s not even really a toxic atmosphere for liberals who happen to stray in here. Sure, they’ll get dogpiled if they start acting rude, or are clearly arguing in bad faith – and they quickly find that if you can’t take it, you shouldn’t dish it out. But generally, the community goes out of its way to explain things even to people who disagree.

People who said the computer would end up being one of the most useful scientific tools ever invented were (1) right, but (2) also didn’t anticipate how whole sectors of western academia would end up just browsing social media, collecting some screenshots, and presenting the whole together with some lazy-ass graph as “research.”

A certain Albanian (and a certain Wisconsonian) would probably agree.

Tigger

I remember that meme showing up on r/blursedimages, and Le Aberage Redditors were absolutely making the connection.

That sounds like something I would have found funny back when I was an idiot eleven-year-old.

Yeah, I know they were wrong the last 187 times about China, but this time they’re totally right and China will collapse any day now!

It’s the same process they use to justify whatever war the United States currently happens to be waging. “Sure, the US government lied to us about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc., but this time is different, I swear!”

Like the old proverb goes: Fool me once, shame on you fool me a hundred times, and I just might be a lib.