I thought Hexbear users didn’t assume gender.

apologies, we have pronoun tags on Hexbear so that we don’t have to assume, we can just know.

democracy is when most of your country disapproves of their elected representatives and authoritarianism is when most of your country approves of their elected representatives and yes, there are in fact elections in China and even (hold on to your hat for this one) North Korea!

Is democracy is the mere condition of being able to choose from two awful choices, or is it instead the condition of having a competent government of which most of the population approves of?

Could you see how it would be incredibly easy to create an authoritarian government if you decided to have effectively the same party swap power every couple terms, so long as you defined “democracy” as “the ability to vote for what party rules over your state”? Could you see how it would be much more difficult to fulfil the latter definition without actually addressing the concerns of the populace, which bad authoritarian states would have a hard time doing?

“authoritarianism” is the condition of one person, or group of people, having coercive or even violent power over another. all governments are authoritarian, obviously, and most are very authoritarian. Lenin’s definition of the state as the means for the outnumbered class (the rich, the elite, the bourgeoisie, whatever) to exert control over the working class is the most sensible and applicable definition I’ve ever found, and by that definition, and by the fact that people all around the world have to labor for the rich regularly to not starve or become homeless, all countries are generally pretty comparable in “authoritarian-ness”, making it an awful way of defining countries at all.

I really don’t think you guys are that out of pocket

Thank you. Most of us are pretty chilled out back on Hexbear, I spend my time trawling through news articles and trying to understand shit and many of us do the same. But as we are so surrounded by liberal talking points and views (in real life, with our families and friends, at work, or online on reddit, youtube, etc etc) that tend to be the most infuriating combination of a) utterly smug, b) utterly unquestioned, and c) utterly incorrect, and our origins were battling liberals on Reddit until we were banned, we tend to get a little frenzied when somebody comes along with a point we disagree with. Given that many - maybe even almost all - of us used to be liberals that got bullied and dunked on by leftists on that subreddit or on Hexbear, we generally believe in the power of insulting+educating (insulducating?) people into submission.

Every single one of us genuinely wants to create a better world, free of poverty, where everybody has a home and food and healthcare, without that requiring exploitation of people at home or abroad, for every demographic (except capitalists and fascists, but nobody is born either of those things). So our anger also comes from the frustration about how far away from these things and how liberals and liberterians and conservatives are so maddeningly dismissive of those things like “Yeah, that would be nice, but there’s a little thing called ECONOMICS” (as if many of us haven’t read many books on economics and history from experts old and new) or are like “That can be achieved with the profit motive and if people just worked a little harder!” and are so hyperfocussed on individualistic solutions rather than trying to implement systemic change.

And also American propaganda about other countries. Which I and others are especially attuned to due our aforementioned time spent going through western media in the news megathreads.

name your favourite anti-authoritarian system. you wanna have a revolution to create it? whoopsie doopsie, you’re literally forcing people (maybe at gunpoint!!!) to do something that they don’t want to do, you fucking authoritarian tankie monster. next you’ll be saying you want to get rid of corporations (extremely authoritarian over those business owners)

bro the United States has the largest prison population in the world and regularly overthrows countries they don’t like, the US is by far the most authoritarian country in the world by any sensible definition

Wagner has always seemed like quite a fluid entity to me that could go anywhere they were welcome. my assumption was that there probably wasn’t Wagner presence in Niger before the coup due to French influence but they might step in if called by the new government. no idea if that’s actually what will happen unless a war kicks off though.

the statues are paid actors

me, before federation: “fuck dude, I’ve gotta skim through these books I read way back when, wanna be on my top form during arguments with libs”

me, now: “oh. these people haven’t read books since high school, and even in high school they were ‘the curtains are just blue’ dweebs”

Bread-bro culture is uber-macho and attracts the bearded man-bun crowd, like chilli-infused cocktails and kimchi. The dudes that used to obsess about pizza have now shifted to sourdough. In fact, it’s worse than that – they are now making pizza from sourdough. Perverts.

even I am not terminally online enough to understand what the hell she just said

fuck the poors and striving toward peace and true equality

sir, the NATO people are on reddit, you’ve got the wrong crowd

sorry to any Cyrus the “Great” lovers, but here’s a :thread: on why your fav might NOT be as good as you think!

this is what is meant by “permanent revolution” I believe

“the last time I looked at China’s economy was in 2005, but I reckon nothing much has changed there since then. hasn’t changed much since then in the West, so…”

This is just a silly argument. We’re already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We’re already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We’re already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We’re already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.

Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn’t set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.

Um, sir! Sir! This is Russian propaganda, given an article by Wikipedia itself!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_have_you_been_for_eight_years%3F#:~:text="Where have you been for,pointing out to what Ukraine

the unspoken (hell, sometimes spoken) assumption is that China would be doing a lot better with a Western-style neoliberal economy, which is an extremely funny assertion when all these economies are doing even worse than China is

there’s a manufacturing and possibly soon-to-be services recession everywhere. hyperfocussing on China while everybody else metaphorically (and literally) burns around them is just silly.

and, as others have said, the US is literally declaring economic war against China! again, it’s Schrodinger’s Sanctions! They both exist and are good, but also aren’t doing anything and it’s all that country’s fault! “Ooo, Russia is experiencing a fall in GDP in 2022, this proves that Putin’s war machine isn’t sustaina–” no, it proves that you’ve put sanctions on them! “Aha, Cuba and Venezuela’s economies are collapsing and they can’t afford enough basic necessities, this just shows how socialism is–” No, it proves that the sanctions that you actively boast about putting on them are working! “See, China’s economy is now not doing so hot (defined as “only” growing by like 5-6% or whatever), this is really a lesson in how Marxist econo–” Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you’re putting sanctions on their industries instead, the thing you, again, boast about doing?

“See, this patient is blacking out when we put pressure on his carotid artery, this shows how their vascular system is simply inferior to our own (which isn’t being actively strangled)!”

Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool

these headlines are just to make libs go

“See, even the conservatives want him gone! This is a respectable opposition which I’d be glad to reach over the aisle for!” and then either ignore when these exact same people want to like, completely destroy social security and abolish food stamps and thus kill millions of poor people, or go “Sure, we can do that, if you vote for our bill to make it easier for black Americans in low-income neighbourhoods (who fulfil a set of critera for which only about 5 people in the entire country qualify for) get 10% off their university loans for the next year!” and then they refuse and they go “Well, we tried, we’re voting to gut social security anyway because we can take the high road and agree to compromises!”

right?

Does a sweatshop worker in Southeast Asia who has just been laid off from their job and cannot find another one because their economy has been hyperfocused on producing textiles due to globalisation and IMF loans and there is an ongoing recession and they don’t have the money to move away from their country nor could they anyway because of racist border policies have the freedom to negotiate their labor for money or goods or whatever else they want in exchange? Sounds to me like the capitalist has come away from that negotiating table and said “No, actually. You can starve to death.”

This isn’t a hypothetical question. You owe an answer to 700,000 workers in Pakistan, a country in which 40% of the country is employed in the textile industry.

Any government interference with economics is anti-capitalism. So automatically, a large government is incompatible with capitalism.

This is entirely false. A powerful state is required to uphold and protect private property rights for capitalists. It’s also required to declare war on other states for not opening themselves up to capitalists and their businesses. See: the history of the West from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present. The governments of Europe sent their armies and navies around the world destroying civilizations and societes wherever they found them, and the capitalists followed in their wake, establishing markets protected by those troops, with cargo ships protected by those navies going to and fro. The modern situation is not so different, with the state providing police forces to protect the businesses and homes of the rich, establishing laws to protect them from major consequences, destroying rebelling countries with their armies for the capitalists to come in and seize what remains, and so on. The state also helps corporations with subsidies, such as Tesla. In 2008, you might remember that the state saved the banks from imploding.

The market and the state are not opposites, especially when the bourgeoisie are in charge of the state, as the state is the apparatus through which their class interests are enacted. The market is a tool - often a brutal tool - that the state can employ to achieve its interests.

I loved the part of Markus, Prince of Zucker’s boss fight when you get him to half health and he groans in pain, starts softly laughing, and then the environment around you fades away to reveal you’ve been in the Metaverse this whole time and he changes his body to become a towering knight with a flaming greatsword while an orchestra and a latin choir starts chanting.

“'Tis one path and one path only to thy goal, and I shall not yield to thee. Thy curiosity will never be sated, gazing into the Metanexus. I beseech three - begone, or prepare for torment unending.”