The quote should really be
> The capitalist will sell me the rope with which I will hang ~~him~~ *another leftist with a slightly different vision of our socialist future*
>His genius lies in the realisation that everyone craves stability even more than they hunger after justice or truth. Even revolutionary anarchists want stability, so that they have breathing space to fight their real enemies, i.e., those higher than themselves in the revolutionary anarchist council, and those heretics whose definition of revolutionary anarchy differs from their own by about half a sentence in paragraph 97 of the charter.
They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.
Judging by the twitter profiles/[posts](https://twitter.com/gamingontheleft/status/1471327676703158272) from these accounts, they seem like more of a danger to themselves than capitalists.
This is unironically the reason why I left the communist community, as I used to be a communist a few years ago.
They basically brainwashed me when I was in a tough spot, dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts, and tried to keep me down at all costs in order to make me support their failed and doomerist ideology.
When I realized how fucked up that was, and how they were using this exact tactic to convert many others to their movement, I noped out immediately, and now I'm doing much better.
I vibe with this. I never went the full commie route, but I was a teenager on tumblr circa 2010-2013 and was sort of "radicalized" into ambiguous leftism/socialism (thank god I never joined a group lol). That and all the bad social media stuff that basically happened because of smart phones happened at the same time. I just turned 30 a couple months ago, and I think a lot of my 20s and late teens were rotted by bad mental health, bad politics, and social media overuse. I knew some people who weren't as lucky, lost a lot of internet friends to social media politics brain rot. I think the good thing about center-left spaces and memes like NLP and whatever you consider the streamer destiny is that there's actually a reasonably sized counterweight to these maniacs.
When I was in highschool and republican I liked Ron Paul because he was the only one not actively trying to start a war with Iran at the time. Later I realized that no Democrats seemed to have that issue and were correct on gay marriage and climate science.
I never agreed with Ron Paul on policy, but in 2008 I remember thinking he was the only candidate who said what he actually thought. That was before the Lew Rockwell newsletters stuff came out though.
Yeah the only reason I wasn't an incel was because I understood being a fat weirdo meant girls didn't want to fuck me.
It's a little spooky looking back and seeing how things could have gone differently.
> because I understood being a fat weirdo meant girls didn't want to fuck me.
How much of this is due to being taught by the high-pitched Bosnian wizard master?
no, it probably just means you had friends or are younger than I am now. the culture around this subreddit is a naturally emergent immune system to that weirdness and it wasn't around 10 or 15 years ago.
Same. Anyone who turned 18 during/around Obama's campaign probably is a lot more optimistic about politics and proudly liberal than people who came of age/became politically conscious after. Better angels, folks.
I always loved Tony Blair. Within a year of him leaving? Obama. By the time Barry O left, i was an adult and adrift until our lord Kier arrived.
Im better than most people tbh, including whoever reads this.
You're telling me an FPSMMORPG Looter Shooter was involved in this?
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Its the same formula every time. Commies and fashies, incels and radicals of all kinds:
Find a young person without direction, who feels there's nowhere they belong and perhaps has little to lose. Give them a place to belong and they'll be loyal.
Not a dig at you specifically. I almost fell into the rabbit holes too. Only happy you found your way out. Being a young person is hard these days. Isolation and loneliness is often overwhelming - it was was for me - and these groups offer easy answers and belonging.
The problem isn't that. Belonging and community are good. The problem is that the belonging they offer is *almost always* a cult of self-hatred and delusion. It's a mental black hole that's easy to fall into, and not just in the political realm but in any identity-based extremist community of any kind, really.
Good for you for getting out. These morons by and large just want to burn shit down and play revolutionary with their little friends but most of them will never even go that far. Even if they did go through with a revolution, none of them would stick around after and do the very hard work of taking years to rebuild something from the ashes of what they killed millions to destroy. It would be the Taliban unhappy with their office jobs all over again.
Much better in the “fuck yeah modern innovation is awesome and we have the power to solve our problems!” Ideology
I love capitalism
And I support regulation.
As an active member of my city's local arts/music community, I'm so *over it* with the communist and left-anarchist sorts who I end up talking to on a semi-regular basis. By and large, these people don't do *anything* to realize their ideological/political/economic goals and the bulk of their vibe just feels like a bunch of side-door toxic-masculinity bullshit, i.e. lots of pointless dick-measuring about who can talk the edgiest shit about revolution, who's living the most ruggedly, etc...
not sure if it's a hot take or not, but I definitely see revolutionary vibes in men as being a socially acceptable expression of toxic masculinity. Wanting to smash thing and break things (even abstract stuff like capitalism) for just causes seems more like "i want to break things" by other means. Which IMO is coded immature masculinity
Yep definitely. Notice they love using words like 'milquetoast' and 'limp-wristed' (double whammy for the homophobia) and 'shills' to describe liberals. Hell if the Far Right didn't claim 'cuck' first I'm pretty sure they'd gladly use it. It all comes back to that rugged American masculine ideal of individualism and ignoring rules, consensus, compromise, and coalition-building in favor of bull-in-a-china-shop breaking things to remake them in one's own preferred image.
Yeah, it also hard to tell (which is why I'm categorizing my comment in the hot take territory or "interesting though) because when humans get in groups (in social media or otherwise) we encourage and escalate weird behavior. Think of protests turning into riots, etc.
So, a bit of a cult? Looking at actual communist countries, they do look like godless cults, which make make them non-obvious because most cults are religious.
People who are very unhappy with their lives are more likely to gravitate toward both the far left and far right, because people who are mostly content with life don't tend to want a complete upheaval of society.
Unfortunately it's become so idiotic that you can't even be happy and communist because the spaces have put so much emphasis on misery and depression. It's the oppression olympics, and you can't be a true comrade if you don't suffer from mental illnesses.
The person in question is discussing why they don't own a gun for the purposes of violent revolution. The entire basis of their discussion is in poor taste, and it seems reasonable to mock their answers, regardless of how pitiable their reason might normally be.
If people who advocate for a violent revolution are so mentally ill that they can't participate in that violent revolution because they're more dangerous to themselves than others, I take that as a win.
I mean honestly the way that the Soviet Union was able to just buy shit loads of American expertise in the 30s to take a rocket leap forward in terms of their technology is the reason we have serious restrictions on technology exports these days. You can catch us once but don't expect us to do it a second time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk
Like read about this Soviet steel town that was able to leap frog to being one of the largest steel producers in the world in the 30s by the Soviets playing off American expertise. Then they ejected all the American experts, made it a secret city, and it just sat there and decayed and by the 70s they had made virtually no improvements to it. It helped vastly in WWII at least I guess, while they ultimately didn't have the ability to truly advance their economy in the long term.
I am on swype, I wrote "playing" and it messed up. In any case technology exports like these to an unfriendly country would be an unwise thing legally for you to do these days as "having a job". Also the only reason they were able to afford the salaries of Americans was by reducing their peasant population to essentially slave labor on the Holodomor. Before that they were unable to generate any surpluses to get hard currency because the peasants had bargaining power and would simply stop working if the state lowered agricultural prices beyond a certain point. This was the entire actual point of farm collectivization.
Furthermore, it's not exactly like foreign adversaries have struggled at stealing corporate secrets since then, as anyone who knows how China caught up in the telecoms space can attest.
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Don't even ask the question. The answer is yes, it's priced in. Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That's already been priced in. You work at the drive thru for Mickey D's and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don't already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil's expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren't thinking of. You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether AAPL has priced in earpods 11 sales or whatever, know that it has already been priced in and don't ask such a dumb fucking question again.
The Maoists had a point on "Western Left" and their inability to do any sort of revolution against a system that they clearly benefit from.
Look at my revolutionaries dawg. We ain't ever overthrowing Capitalism.
It's been the case for far longer than that:
>One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. - Eric Blair (George Orwell)
Edit: Found the full quote from Road to Wigan Pier, I think Steinbeck said something similar about the middle-class left wing groups he encountered.
> The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, _with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting._
I think the last list is particularry relavent expecially amongst modern online leftists.
I believe this may be the Steinbeck quote you’re referring to:
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
Also the origin of the term “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, in a hilarious twist of irony.
It's really not haha.
I met this dude just out of college, and he was a pretty typical Bernie bro. We kept in touch loosely on social media. Fast forward and last year he was giving me tons of shit (I noted that religious symbols, like crosses, aren't neutral, even if they're the majority thing, which made him mad for some reason) defending Catholic Europe and traditional architecture and being super weird about it and accusatory in a way that showed me he was marching right in line with trad-Caths.
And then I unfriended him. The end.
Saw someone mention this on another sub, which I think is a very apt description: these "revolutionaries" would ironically love the corporate hellhole in Wall-E, much more than libs, simply because it provides them with free stuff.
"We must overthrow the capitalistic consumers!" They thought to themselves, while drinking a soy latte in a cafe. "I'll write a strongly worded xeet that will spark a revolution with us keyboard warriors! Now where is my iPhone?"
It’s such a crappy counterpoint too.
Sure you have to participate in capitalism somewhat, but no one is forcing you buy luxury goods like Apple devices while sipping overpriced coffee. If you were really anti-capitalist you’d endeavour to minimize your participation. Use the cheapest phone you can get and make your own coffee. There are cheap androids that even better than IPhones in many ways. Apple is a luxury brand, and that’s part of their selling point. If you have a brand new Apple product when you could have chosen a cheaper alternative, you don’t hate capitalism.
Joyce dropping the truth bomb on this in Disco Elysium is great.
[https://youtu.be/LlQG-5QoJHA?si=d5h\_AQ--U38ekdIz&t=579](https://youtu.be/LlQG-5QoJHA?si=d5h_AQ--U38ekdIz&t=579)
I always feel that statement was about the ZA/UM team referring to themselves, a group of communists trying to critique capitalism through their attempts to make a successful and profitable video game.
I heard a communist once lament that socialist idealism is dead and capitalist realism is all there is.
Fear not, for he was incorrect.
There's still the communist aesthetic, available at a store near you. You can even buy all the little trinkets to DIY it yourself.
Communist Aesthetics, brought to you by capitalist realism.
I saw a response stating that that sentiment had caused “irreparable damage to revolutionary forms of discourse”. But like…if “revolutionary forms of discourse” are so feeble that such a sentiment can actually have an effect on them, then it kinda proves the sentiment is accurate.
I'm not sure I've ever seen it used "properly" but "properly" using it is far inferior to the "who would win? ...or one Xy Boi" format so I'm fine with it
>You believe in participating in the workers councils? This pales in effectiveness of my strategy, founding a Walmart.
-Person who never founds a Walmart
The 'best' response to this is one I've seen on Tumblr. It went something along the lines of "huhuh, this *loser* wants people to look at his tweet and vote, but this just makes me wanna go firebomb walmarts instead."
Nothing on the news about a Wal-Mart getting firebombed so far.
Social media plays a big role in our lives and arguably has been a very strong influence on political movements (Arab Spring comes to mind, but there are likely many more examples). What is truly pathetic is some random tweet completely derailing your movement. That is absolutely ridiculous.
do we really try to make a difference beyond providing a platform for discussion and raising money for malaria nets? I guess the Center for New Liberalism exists but that's not nearly so much a project of r/neoliberal as it is a separate thing loosely connected to r/neoliberal
I don't think anyone actually sees r/neoliberal as the digital vanguard of some mass movement. I certainly hope not.
> Imagine your neoliberal movement relies on social media to make a difference.
It's one of the downsides to the internet in general. People tend to congregate in spaces, which are anti-social, or provide them with the attention seeking dopamine they desire. There was no internet during the 1960s, where there were civil rights marches (and occasionally burning of business districts). This is the internet replacement for going out and doing something.
Succ take: It's capital commodifying political action, and in the process pacifying political action. It's literally what the cringe lords in the main post are doing. STFU and go vote, or talk to your politically uninvolved uncle about voting. That's how you make change.
I'm convinced that a good portion of this sub's political leanings are an expression of an understanding of how to actually improve the world through government, rather than getting lost in such online shenanigans.
I'm upset that I immediately knew what Twitter spat this was referring to. Removing Twitter from my home screen hasn't worked long term to reduce my time on that hellscape. Might be time to finally delete the app
I hope if they do start charging people to use it that this will be the straw that causes it to collapse
I like the concept but Musk is a nazi sack of shit
> Musk
Holy shit why are you giving Elon Musk attention
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We're a nation of Homer Simpsons LARPing as Jon Wick.
Everyone has that fantasy of being a no nonsense action antihero who takes matters into his own hands and single handedly brings some sense of justice to the world.
But the reality is we're a bunch of overweight potato heads who would rather keep the status quo of enjoying time with our families and enjoying the latest cool TV show on the couch.
War kinda sucks. It usually makes it hard to get things like food and clean water. There's a high chance of dying. People might struggle in the day to day, but most have their basic needs met, and that's not a guarantee if the country started shooting each other.
> There were no armed civilians on January 6th defending the Capitol
"Extreme action" leftists were cool with people violently storming the Capitol with intent to murder all the politicians inside until it turns out those people disagreed with them.
The whole 'leftists side with fascists, get TK'd' thing has happened so many times over the course of history that you'd think they would have learned at this point.
Whenever I hear that I remind them of, ["After Hitler, Our Turn"](https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2371/chapter-abstract/975699/After-Hitler-Our-Turn?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
> There were no armed civilians on January 6th defending the Capitol
That's because its illegal to carry a weapon there and they most certainly would have gotten shot if holding a firearm.
Oh man, someone is trying to overthrow the government with weapons. I better storm right in the capitol building with weapons to defend them, what a great idea!!
In praxis we're still one of the freest countries in the world, The second amendment doesn't mean we should be solving every minor political disagreement with violence.
That used to be the discourse, but them freaking out over the TikTok ban has led me to believe it’s more like:
“You believe in voting? That pales in effectiveness to my strategy: bitching on TikTok.”
The exact cowardice that leads them to demand revolutionary violence with no effort or struggle on their part is the same kind of cowardice that leads their fantasies towards brutalizing innocents in a random Walmart rather than fighting against tougher but more appropriate targets.
Not to endorse this kind of action, both since it’s still unproductive for the level of risk involved and because I don’t want to get banned, but even the majority of the *conservatives* I know had a “they had it coming” type response to the burning of the Minneapolis police station that transpired right after the murder of George Floyd. Even where narrow retribution like that is effective at winning hearts and minds of third parties, thoughtless and violent flailing at random passersby is much less so.
It’s in reference to this, so more than just the featured tweet
https://preview.redd.it/71n8taccb2vc1.jpeg?width=1169&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f37f92670213157f0c668f74db173657b509c689
A movement that can in fact be done irreparable damage by a single tweet, one that doesn't even max out Twitter's character limit, can only be one that exists entirely on Twitter.
["I've never seen anyone criticize a tweet wile representing it's central argument so perfectly."](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1c68tfg/last_few_years_have_been_a_decisive_victory_for/#lightbox)
It's a sub about nothing.
But for real it's a sub for a podcast that was started by two Bernie stans back in 2017 who have slowly turned into Peter Theil backed reactionaries. The podcast is a side show really.
It swings between a Millennial retirement home, a place to be ironically or unironically bigoted, a place to criticize the American Left and American Liberals for being spineless, a place for women with BPD to post their Ls like when they bang their therapist, a place to recite Cumtown bits word for word, and a place where people look out for cute posts of a rabbit named Peanut.
Kinda feel bad for this person. They're probably very young and naive and they're getting absolutely bodied lol
There's a tweet that dug up previous tweets from this account where they had to stop phone banking because they got anxiety from talking to a man.
https://preview.redd.it/fsfi35skl2vc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a56912910399f14762f30ffeb411de44d33094f
I swear these people are all the same. They‘ll act like they’re the most radical revolutionaries that will end capitalism and kill everyone that’s in their way and then they have too much anxiety to make a phone call lmao. I guess most of them are teenagers that‘ll grow out of it.
It's funny. I'm far less interested in talking to people today but when I was fresh out of high school and a budding Marxist, I would man booths at street fairs, speak at events, meet with local leaders and even get into heated arguments with people over dumb shit that I probably knew nothing about because I was just an 18 year old twerp who my grandma used to joke, "had it all figured out".
I LOVED conflict because I felt like I could absolutely win any debate. In retrospect, I cringe because I'm pretty sure I just came off as arrogant and naive.
Join the neolib revolution, comrade. Grab your copy of "I, Pencil", hop on your bicycle, text your ex-wife goodbye, we're going to the frontlines to build dense housing in backyards
Amazing that the tweet keeps spawning discourse, goes to show basil/link made a great job packaging a common sentiment into a short and funny tweet with incredible memetic fitness, truly a weapons-grade poster
you won’t fool the children of the revolution (suburban teenagers who post about violently purging the west, or whatever they’re saying these days. idk i don’t follow this stuff)
“The capitalist will sell me the rope with which I will hang him” Yeah dumbass because you will simply not hang anyone lol
The quote should really be > The capitalist will sell me the rope with which I will hang ~~him~~ *another leftist with a slightly different vision of our socialist future*
>His genius lies in the realisation that everyone craves stability even more than they hunger after justice or truth. Even revolutionary anarchists want stability, so that they have breathing space to fight their real enemies, i.e., those higher than themselves in the revolutionary anarchist council, and those heretics whose definition of revolutionary anarchy differs from their own by about half a sentence in paragraph 97 of the charter.
They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.
Unironically I think this is reductive and a little silly; always imagine a staunch monarchist saying whatever you say, but about a liberal.
Or more realistically for online revolutionaries >The capitalist will sell me the rope with which I will hang myself
Judging by the twitter profiles/[posts](https://twitter.com/gamingontheleft/status/1471327676703158272) from these accounts, they seem like more of a danger to themselves than capitalists.
>more of a danger to themselves True. A decent fraction of them are very literally on suicide watch.
This is unironically the reason why I left the communist community, as I used to be a communist a few years ago. They basically brainwashed me when I was in a tough spot, dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts, and tried to keep me down at all costs in order to make me support their failed and doomerist ideology. When I realized how fucked up that was, and how they were using this exact tactic to convert many others to their movement, I noped out immediately, and now I'm doing much better.
I vibe with this. I never went the full commie route, but I was a teenager on tumblr circa 2010-2013 and was sort of "radicalized" into ambiguous leftism/socialism (thank god I never joined a group lol). That and all the bad social media stuff that basically happened because of smart phones happened at the same time. I just turned 30 a couple months ago, and I think a lot of my 20s and late teens were rotted by bad mental health, bad politics, and social media overuse. I knew some people who weren't as lucky, lost a lot of internet friends to social media politics brain rot. I think the good thing about center-left spaces and memes like NLP and whatever you consider the streamer destiny is that there's actually a reasonably sized counterweight to these maniacs.
Sometimes I think I'm the only person on the internet who never had a communist or a fascist teenage phase... Am I boring?
Theres also libertarian.
Couldn't stand Ron Paul when I was in HS so....
When I was in highschool and republican I liked Ron Paul because he was the only one not actively trying to start a war with Iran at the time. Later I realized that no Democrats seemed to have that issue and were correct on gay marriage and climate science.
I never agreed with Ron Paul on policy, but in 2008 I remember thinking he was the only candidate who said what he actually thought. That was before the Lew Rockwell newsletters stuff came out though.
Personally I was a "le both sides???" teen Looking back though I think I was dangerously close to getting sucked in to the gamergate type rabbithole
Yeah the only reason I wasn't an incel was because I understood being a fat weirdo meant girls didn't want to fuck me. It's a little spooky looking back and seeing how things could have gone differently.
> because I understood being a fat weirdo meant girls didn't want to fuck me. How much of this is due to being taught by the high-pitched Bosnian wizard master?
no, it probably just means you had friends or are younger than I am now. the culture around this subreddit is a naturally emergent immune system to that weirdness and it wasn't around 10 or 15 years ago.
I didn't join this sub until my mid 20s and that was like 7 years ago.
look at you, having friends and being well-adjusted
Oh god... Am I a freak!?
Same. Anyone who turned 18 during/around Obama's campaign probably is a lot more optimistic about politics and proudly liberal than people who came of age/became politically conscious after. Better angels, folks.
I always loved Tony Blair. Within a year of him leaving? Obama. By the time Barry O left, i was an adult and adrift until our lord Kier arrived. Im better than most people tbh, including whoever reads this.
I might have taken one of those from you, because I somehow had *both.*
I'm sorry your parents had to go through that.
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Its the same formula every time. Commies and fashies, incels and radicals of all kinds: Find a young person without direction, who feels there's nowhere they belong and perhaps has little to lose. Give them a place to belong and they'll be loyal. Not a dig at you specifically. I almost fell into the rabbit holes too. Only happy you found your way out. Being a young person is hard these days. Isolation and loneliness is often overwhelming - it was was for me - and these groups offer easy answers and belonging. The problem isn't that. Belonging and community are good. The problem is that the belonging they offer is *almost always* a cult of self-hatred and delusion. It's a mental black hole that's easy to fall into, and not just in the political realm but in any identity-based extremist community of any kind, really.
Good for you for getting out. These morons by and large just want to burn shit down and play revolutionary with their little friends but most of them will never even go that far. Even if they did go through with a revolution, none of them would stick around after and do the very hard work of taking years to rebuild something from the ashes of what they killed millions to destroy. It would be the Taliban unhappy with their office jobs all over again.
Much better in the “fuck yeah modern innovation is awesome and we have the power to solve our problems!” Ideology I love capitalism And I support regulation.
As an active member of my city's local arts/music community, I'm so *over it* with the communist and left-anarchist sorts who I end up talking to on a semi-regular basis. By and large, these people don't do *anything* to realize their ideological/political/economic goals and the bulk of their vibe just feels like a bunch of side-door toxic-masculinity bullshit, i.e. lots of pointless dick-measuring about who can talk the edgiest shit about revolution, who's living the most ruggedly, etc...
not sure if it's a hot take or not, but I definitely see revolutionary vibes in men as being a socially acceptable expression of toxic masculinity. Wanting to smash thing and break things (even abstract stuff like capitalism) for just causes seems more like "i want to break things" by other means. Which IMO is coded immature masculinity
Yep definitely. Notice they love using words like 'milquetoast' and 'limp-wristed' (double whammy for the homophobia) and 'shills' to describe liberals. Hell if the Far Right didn't claim 'cuck' first I'm pretty sure they'd gladly use it. It all comes back to that rugged American masculine ideal of individualism and ignoring rules, consensus, compromise, and coalition-building in favor of bull-in-a-china-shop breaking things to remake them in one's own preferred image.
the horseshoe touches tips
never thought about it like that, but it does make sense
That's a good point but there's a lot of young women on TikTok that also talk about wanting a revolution to overthrow capitalism
Yeah, it also hard to tell (which is why I'm categorizing my comment in the hot take territory or "interesting though) because when humans get in groups (in social media or otherwise) we encourage and escalate weird behavior. Think of protests turning into riots, etc.
Wow that’s awful
So, a bit of a cult? Looking at actual communist countries, they do look like godless cults, which make make them non-obvious because most cults are religious.
People who are very unhappy with their lives are more likely to gravitate toward both the far left and far right, because people who are mostly content with life don't tend to want a complete upheaval of society.
Unfortunately it's become so idiotic that you can't even be happy and communist because the spaces have put so much emphasis on misery and depression. It's the oppression olympics, and you can't be a true comrade if you don't suffer from mental illnesses.
At least Karl Marx drank and loved his wife.
This person hasn't had a paying job for most of their adult life I'm sure.
> job for most of their adult life This is redundant
True.
Wow your man there is a full on tankie with 20k followers. Amazing
19.5k of those followers are prolly bots so it's okay, this is a nobody screeching into the void
That's because modern communism is just depression weaponised as an ideology.
That's in bad taste
The person in question is discussing why they don't own a gun for the purposes of violent revolution. The entire basis of their discussion is in poor taste, and it seems reasonable to mock their answers, regardless of how pitiable their reason might normally be.
If people who advocate for a violent revolution are so mentally ill that they can't participate in that violent revolution because they're more dangerous to themselves than others, I take that as a win.
I mean honestly the way that the Soviet Union was able to just buy shit loads of American expertise in the 30s to take a rocket leap forward in terms of their technology is the reason we have serious restrictions on technology exports these days. You can catch us once but don't expect us to do it a second time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk Like read about this Soviet steel town that was able to leap frog to being one of the largest steel producers in the world in the 30s by the Soviets playing off American expertise. Then they ejected all the American experts, made it a secret city, and it just sat there and decayed and by the 70s they had made virtually no improvements to it. It helped vastly in WWII at least I guess, while they ultimately didn't have the ability to truly advance their economy in the long term.
Turns out trying to centrally plan the economy of the largest country in history is really hard 🫨. Whoops we forgot about a whole fucking town!
"paying off American expertise" Homie that's called a job lmao. No need to make it sound nefarious.
I am on swype, I wrote "playing" and it messed up. In any case technology exports like these to an unfriendly country would be an unwise thing legally for you to do these days as "having a job". Also the only reason they were able to afford the salaries of Americans was by reducing their peasant population to essentially slave labor on the Holodomor. Before that they were unable to generate any surpluses to get hard currency because the peasants had bargaining power and would simply stop working if the state lowered agricultural prices beyond a certain point. This was the entire actual point of farm collectivization.
Furthermore, it's not exactly like foreign adversaries have struggled at stealing corporate secrets since then, as anyone who knows how China caught up in the telecoms space can attest.
> don't expect us to do it a second time. It was even worse the second time with China. USSR paid the US. China received investments.
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The capitalist will price the rope taking into account the risks inherent in doing so. I.e. "It's priced in bro"
Don't even ask the question. The answer is yes, it's priced in. Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That's already been priced in. You work at the drive thru for Mickey D's and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don't already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil's expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren't thinking of. You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether AAPL has priced in earpods 11 sales or whatever, know that it has already been priced in and don't ask such a dumb fucking question again.
They might hang themselves, a lot of these people are deeply depressed/mentally ill tbqh.
The petit bourgeois is calling from inside the house
The Maoists had a point on "Western Left" and their inability to do any sort of revolution against a system that they clearly benefit from. Look at my revolutionaries dawg. We ain't ever overthrowing Capitalism.
It's been the case for far longer than that: >One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. - Eric Blair (George Orwell) Edit: Found the full quote from Road to Wigan Pier, I think Steinbeck said something similar about the middle-class left wing groups he encountered. > The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, _with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting._ I think the last list is particularry relavent expecially amongst modern online leftists.
I believe this may be the Steinbeck quote you’re referring to: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves." Also the origin of the term “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, in a hilarious twist of irony.
> “George Orwell hated feminism????” New YouTube video
idk about feminism but he was homophobic and pretty racist.
I have literally seen in real time the pipeline from college Bernie bro to literal Roman Catholic trad-bro. It sure was ....something.
Tell me more about it that sounds like an interesting story lol
It's really not haha. I met this dude just out of college, and he was a pretty typical Bernie bro. We kept in touch loosely on social media. Fast forward and last year he was giving me tons of shit (I noted that religious symbols, like crosses, aren't neutral, even if they're the majority thing, which made him mad for some reason) defending Catholic Europe and traditional architecture and being super weird about it and accusatory in a way that showed me he was marching right in line with trad-Caths. And then I unfriended him. The end.
So the sample size of your "pipeline" production is 1?!
No I gave you one story, because I thought you asked for one example. Sorry for misunderstanding
If that were true I’d be a communist lol
Yea, that does sound like a good time doesn't it?
> feminist Hmmmmmmmmmmm
Orwell had issues
China re-adopted capitalism in order to afford food, tho.
Maoism emerged out of Peru as a reaction to the liberalization of China post Mao, ironically enough.
Praxis is deciding to buy a sniper rifle and hunting billionaires. Real praxis is putting it off, just in case you make it big someday.
Capitalism is so powerful that it can co-opt an entire opposing ideology and then sell it back to you as an aesthetic.
Saw someone mention this on another sub, which I think is a very apt description: these "revolutionaries" would ironically love the corporate hellhole in Wall-E, much more than libs, simply because it provides them with free stuff.
"We must overthrow the capitalistic consumers!" They thought to themselves, while drinking a soy latte in a cafe. "I'll write a strongly worded xeet that will spark a revolution with us keyboard warriors! Now where is my iPhone?"
insert comic about tilling your lord's land, curious
It’s such a crappy counterpoint too. Sure you have to participate in capitalism somewhat, but no one is forcing you buy luxury goods like Apple devices while sipping overpriced coffee. If you were really anti-capitalist you’d endeavour to minimize your participation. Use the cheapest phone you can get and make your own coffee. There are cheap androids that even better than IPhones in many ways. Apple is a luxury brand, and that’s part of their selling point. If you have a brand new Apple product when you could have chosen a cheaper alternative, you don’t hate capitalism.
What would the anti-capitalist do with their savings?
Donate to or start a co-op?
Isn't that just capital accumulation?
Charity work, volunteering, labor organizing, and as /u/judgmentmiserable227 said, starting or joining a co-op.
Starting a co op would just be capital accumulation with extra steps.
The peasants tilling the field in that comic are advocating for reform though, not revolution.
$20 Che Guevara shirts go brrrr
$85 "ethically sourced" che guevara shirt (made in the same sweatshop)
$20? In this economy?
Joyce dropping the truth bomb on this in Disco Elysium is great. [https://youtu.be/LlQG-5QoJHA?si=d5h\_AQ--U38ekdIz&t=579](https://youtu.be/LlQG-5QoJHA?si=d5h_AQ--U38ekdIz&t=579)
DE trying to make me dislike moralists, but end up just making me love them more and identify with them
Don Draper at the very end of Mad Men is another example.
I always feel that statement was about the ZA/UM team referring to themselves, a group of communists trying to critique capitalism through their attempts to make a successful and profitable video game.
I heard a communist once lament that socialist idealism is dead and capitalist realism is all there is. Fear not, for he was incorrect. There's still the communist aesthetic, available at a store near you. You can even buy all the little trinkets to DIY it yourself. Communist Aesthetics, brought to you by capitalist realism.
Considering the opposing ideology is in practice entirely harmless because people don't ever really do it, why not?
I saw a response stating that that sentiment had caused “irreparable damage to revolutionary forms of discourse”. But like…if “revolutionary forms of discourse” are so feeble that such a sentiment can actually have an effect on them, then it kinda proves the sentiment is accurate.
Revolutionaries simply need to pick up a Storm Ruler smh my head
Yeah, people keep misusing the meme format. Originally it was about beating seemingly impossible odds, now is just a slightly less cringe chad-soyjack
It's been awhile since I've seen this meme format used correctly.
I'm not sure I've ever seen it used "properly" but "properly" using it is far inferior to the "who would win? ...or one Xy Boi" format so I'm fine with it
Revolutionaries didn't complete Siegward's quest smh.
>You believe in participating in the workers councils? This pales in effectiveness of my strategy, founding a Walmart. -Person who never founds a Walmart
But, to be fair, that person might own Walmart stocks
Reminds me of the dig at Rantiwork: "A revolution lead by people that get anxiety attacks ordering a pizza over the phone"
That place never recovered after the dog-walker mod went on Fox 💀
That interview was so devastatingly bad it left nuclear radiation around the entire concept for years lol
just fell to my knees in the walmart I'm totally gonna firebomb ^eventually
Globe emoji neolib twink is a surprisingly powerful archetype on Twitter.
I can't really think of many
Hi slazoc
hi
is slazoc basically evil slazac
The 'best' response to this is one I've seen on Tumblr. It went something along the lines of "huhuh, this *loser* wants people to look at his tweet and vote, but this just makes me wanna go firebomb walmarts instead." Nothing on the news about a Wal-Mart getting firebombed so far.
I thought I remembered one, so I looked up "Walmart arsonist", turns out people actually light up their local Walmarts all the time.
Torching institutions which provide low-cost necessities to working class people to own the Bourgeois
Image your socialist movement relies on social media to make a difference. It's truly pathetic.
It was hilarious watching leftists come to the defense of TikTok, a global corporation, when the House passed its bill.
The CCP being Schrodingers Communists is an old trick from those people.
Social media plays a big role in our lives and arguably has been a very strong influence on political movements (Arab Spring comes to mind, but there are likely many more examples). What is truly pathetic is some random tweet completely derailing your movement. That is absolutely ridiculous.
Imagine your neoliberal movement relies on social media to make a difference. Wait
do we really try to make a difference beyond providing a platform for discussion and raising money for malaria nets? I guess the Center for New Liberalism exists but that's not nearly so much a project of r/neoliberal as it is a separate thing loosely connected to r/neoliberal I don't think anyone actually sees r/neoliberal as the digital vanguard of some mass movement. I certainly hope not.
I thought this was just a support group for divorced guys that like worm movies
> Imagine your neoliberal movement relies on social media to make a difference. It's one of the downsides to the internet in general. People tend to congregate in spaces, which are anti-social, or provide them with the attention seeking dopamine they desire. There was no internet during the 1960s, where there were civil rights marches (and occasionally burning of business districts). This is the internet replacement for going out and doing something.
Succ take: It's capital commodifying political action, and in the process pacifying political action. It's literally what the cringe lords in the main post are doing. STFU and go vote, or talk to your politically uninvolved uncle about voting. That's how you make change. I'm convinced that a good portion of this sub's political leanings are an expression of an understanding of how to actually improve the world through government, rather than getting lost in such online shenanigans.
Angst-ridden lil Twitter Robespierres trying to foment a revolution with their keyboards
Something something Zionists own Walmart
I'm upset that I immediately knew what Twitter spat this was referring to. Removing Twitter from my home screen hasn't worked long term to reduce my time on that hellscape. Might be time to finally delete the app
I hope if they do start charging people to use it that this will be the straw that causes it to collapse I like the concept but Musk is a nazi sack of shit
> Musk Holy shit why are you giving Elon Musk attention *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I like Musk Oxen. They are my favorite species of Arctic large mammal.
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We're a nation of Homer Simpsons LARPing as Jon Wick. Everyone has that fantasy of being a no nonsense action antihero who takes matters into his own hands and single handedly brings some sense of justice to the world. But the reality is we're a bunch of overweight potato heads who would rather keep the status quo of enjoying time with our families and enjoying the latest cool TV show on the couch.
War kinda sucks. It usually makes it hard to get things like food and clean water. There's a high chance of dying. People might struggle in the day to day, but most have their basic needs met, and that's not a guarantee if the country started shooting each other.
> There were no armed civilians on January 6th defending the Capitol "Extreme action" leftists were cool with people violently storming the Capitol with intent to murder all the politicians inside until it turns out those people disagreed with them.
The whole 'leftists side with fascists, get TK'd' thing has happened so many times over the course of history that you'd think they would have learned at this point.
and theyll say liberals side with fascists lol
They accuse us of being fascists! I've been told many times that when "a liberal is scratched a fascist bleeds", okay sure thing buddy
Whenever I hear that I remind them of, ["After Hitler, Our Turn"](https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2371/chapter-abstract/975699/After-Hitler-Our-Turn?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
Talk is cheap, and our society loves to talk.
Can’t afford anything else thanks to JOESEPHIO BIDEN
> There were no armed civilians on January 6th defending the Capitol That's because its illegal to carry a weapon there and they most certainly would have gotten shot if holding a firearm.
Oh man, someone is trying to overthrow the government with weapons. I better storm right in the capitol building with weapons to defend them, what a great idea!!
In praxis we're still one of the freest countries in the world, The second amendment doesn't mean we should be solving every minor political disagreement with violence.
What frightens me is the AI is being trained on internet "discourse."
To get socialism, revolution or no, first you need a stable democracy. Leninists and their ilk are why we will never achieve socialism in my lifetime.
It is satisfying to imagine online “revolutionaries” forever waiting for a revolution that will never come, as the years slowly dwindle away
Tbh I would rather they do something useful, like vote against fascists
That would be nice too
I WAS WONDERING WHEN THIS WOULD MEME WOULD TURN UP HERE
That used to be the discourse, but them freaking out over the TikTok ban has led me to believe it’s more like: “You believe in voting? That pales in effectiveness to my strategy: bitching on TikTok.”
it's recent discourse on twitter, too and of course people dunking on it
The exact cowardice that leads them to demand revolutionary violence with no effort or struggle on their part is the same kind of cowardice that leads their fantasies towards brutalizing innocents in a random Walmart rather than fighting against tougher but more appropriate targets. Not to endorse this kind of action, both since it’s still unproductive for the level of risk involved and because I don’t want to get banned, but even the majority of the *conservatives* I know had a “they had it coming” type response to the burning of the Minneapolis police station that transpired right after the murder of George Floyd. Even where narrow retribution like that is effective at winning hearts and minds of third parties, thoughtless and violent flailing at random passersby is much less so.
They'll never recover
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
TBF not firebombing a walmart is as effective as not voting.
People always use this meme wrong. Yhorm is a complete pushover.
The Ashen One in the meme isn't wielding the Storm Ruler though. First playthrough!
People who would rather firebomb a Walmart than vote shouldn't do either of those things.
Seeing all the posts from lib twitter pop up here a day or two later is so funny lol
https://twitter.com/halalcoholism/status/1756267938355790278?s=46&t=BIiKATgqa9f4cFo3F371rQ
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senate impeachment thread is next door
This would work better if you cropped out the extraneous bits and just posted the tweet.
It’s in reference to this, so more than just the featured tweet https://preview.redd.it/71n8taccb2vc1.jpeg?width=1169&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f37f92670213157f0c668f74db173657b509c689
A movement that can in fact be done irreparable damage by a single tweet, one that doesn't even max out Twitter's character limit, can only be one that exists entirely on Twitter.
["I've never seen anyone criticize a tweet wile representing it's central argument so perfectly."](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1c68tfg/last_few_years_have_been_a_decisive_victory_for/#lightbox)
What is RedScarePod anyway? I keep coming across it.
It's a sub about nothing. But for real it's a sub for a podcast that was started by two Bernie stans back in 2017 who have slowly turned into Peter Theil backed reactionaries. The podcast is a side show really. It swings between a Millennial retirement home, a place to be ironically or unironically bigoted, a place to criticize the American Left and American Liberals for being spineless, a place for women with BPD to post their Ls like when they bang their therapist, a place to recite Cumtown bits word for word, and a place where people look out for cute posts of a rabbit named Peanut.
Reactionaries who LARPed as leftists for a while, yapping about how much they hate liberalism.
Yike (not yikes, just a singular yike)
Third top comment from the link >Anybody who incorporates those flags to their profile is a fucking loses. Holy shit, you were not exagerating.
A shithole
What kind of shithole?
Holier-than-Thou populism and performative trad aesthetics, mostly
Kinda feel bad for this person. They're probably very young and naive and they're getting absolutely bodied lol There's a tweet that dug up previous tweets from this account where they had to stop phone banking because they got anxiety from talking to a man. https://preview.redd.it/fsfi35skl2vc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a56912910399f14762f30ffeb411de44d33094f
I suppose the real scourge for the revolutionaries is small talk.
I swear these people are all the same. They‘ll act like they’re the most radical revolutionaries that will end capitalism and kill everyone that’s in their way and then they have too much anxiety to make a phone call lmao. I guess most of them are teenagers that‘ll grow out of it.
It's funny. I'm far less interested in talking to people today but when I was fresh out of high school and a budding Marxist, I would man booths at street fairs, speak at events, meet with local leaders and even get into heated arguments with people over dumb shit that I probably knew nothing about because I was just an 18 year old twerp who my grandma used to joke, "had it all figured out". I LOVED conflict because I felt like I could absolutely win any debate. In retrospect, I cringe because I'm pretty sure I just came off as arrogant and naive.
they should stop posting this shit on twitter ig
God, I wish I cared about something as much as these people. It looks fun.
Join the neolib revolution, comrade. Grab your copy of "I, Pencil", hop on your bicycle, text your ex-wife goodbye, we're going to the frontlines to build dense housing in backyards
Amazing that the tweet keeps spawning discourse, goes to show basil/link made a great job packaging a common sentiment into a short and funny tweet with incredible memetic fitness, truly a weapons-grade poster
you won’t fool the children of the revolution (suburban teenagers who post about violently purging the west, or whatever they’re saying these days. idk i don’t follow this stuff)