And you’ve read zero of them.

Exactly right.

I love it when other leftists offer criticism. It makes the movement stronger, not weaker, by allowing us to root out wrong ideas or approaches. “Ruthless criticism of everything that exists,” as Marx said.

The problem I have with Trots is that they are incredibly obstinate about criticisms that make no fucking sense. For example, the chief Trotskyist criticism of the USSR is the whole “permanent revolution” thing, the idea of expanding the revolution globally. What that actually means is a permanent state of warfare with every other country on earth. Because supporting a revolution in another country’s borders is a violation of their sovereignty.

This is a completely impractical and self-destructive approach to foreign policy, and to the extent that the USSR did try to expand communism to other countries, for example, in Afghanistan, it is rightfully criticized for it. But Trots will simultaneously criticize the USSR for things like invading Afghanistan and critize it for not being expansionist enough!

They’re just contrarians for the sake of it. It’s impossible to know what the Trotskyist position on anything is going to be unless you know the Soviet position, in which case you know it’ll be the opposite. There’s no actual reasoning beyond that.

My point is that it’s not necessary to use language that puts down entire groups of people in order to offend someone. The phrase, “bigoted piece of shit,” is obviously ‘insulting language,’ but it is categorically different from calling someone a slur.

I see people going around saying that the only way they can possibly offend people with their insults is by calling them slurs. That’s nonsense. And it’s very ironic that these same people get really, really mad at me when I call them something like “bigoted piece of shit,” which just proves my point - if it were actually true that slurs are necessary to get that ‘sting,’ then they wouldn’t get so upset when I call them out for being the bigoted pieces of shit they are.

Saying that you need slurs in order to insult people is basically an invitation for people to lay into you as harshly as they like, short of using slurs. And I am more than happy to accept that invitation by calling such people what they are.

This is complete nonsense, it was already an insult 10-15 years ago and was largely phased out because most people agreed it was problematic and offensive. Now, the right is trying to bring it back and sow division by introducing the idea that it isn’t, an effort which you are choosing to be complicit in, god knows why.

It’s meant to divide people who would otherwise by united.

“I want to avoid using language that offends others in order to be more inclusive and reduce division.”

“Stop being divisive!”

“People used to live to be 900 years old.”

They also used to be able to fly, according to my dad, who was not happy with me when I laughed it off because I thought he was joking.

This is a really dumb perspective, in general. By that logic I could say, “If Holocaust denialism is so baseless, then why does it get censored so much? If there’s no truth to it, wouldn’t you want people talking about it?” No, it’s censored because it is baseless, because we don’t want people spreading around long debunked misinformation. Just because something is untrue doesn’t mean that people repeating it can’t create confusion, doubt, etc.

I mean, look at all the bullshit propaganda the right puts out, and because they have so much money backing it, strengthening their signal, it’s all some people ever hear, and if some spends thousands of hours watching Fox News, and the other side gets like 20 minutes once a year at Thanksgiving, which narrative they go with is going to have very little to do with what’s actually true.

That same far-right media sphere has spread out from the US to all sorts of small countries around the world. If you look at them, you’ll often find right-wingers in those countries screaming about shit that doesn’t even apply to their country, because it’s what this propaganda network told them to be mad about. I mean, fucking anti-mask protests in Japan, for example.

Regardless of your perspective on Tienanmen Square, this logic of, “If it’s not true then there’s no reason to censor it” doesn’t really hold up.

That’s literally been the strategy taken by leftist in the US since the 1940’s and it’s only gotten worse and worse, to the point that people like Obama, Harris, and even Biden get labelled as “socialist.” It literally does not matter how much you try to avoid being associated with the USSR or other socialist states, you will be accused of being like them if you try to do anything even remotely good. So, since that’s going to happen anyway, we might as well stop punching left and stop letting misinformation about such states run wild out of fear of being associated with them.

Your lack of critical thinking and willingness to believe anything the government tells you isn’t my responsibility.

I’m so shocked that you’re completely dismissing the possibility that Zenz is a capitalist pig-dog liar, when it’s very obvious to anyone who knows anything about him that he is.

if you don’t immediately accept it without evidence, it means you’re a genocide denier, a bad person, basically a fascist who shouldn’t even be engaged with (conveniently averting the need to provide evidence).

As usual, by failing to accept a claim made without evidence, I have proven that I don’t “deserve” real evidence. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I mean, if you think about it, if you were wrong, you’d never find out, since you never seriously look at the evidence.

Some of us actually practice something called, “critical thinking.”

Can I also get a recipe for chicken noodle soup?

You just asked an AI to assemble a list of sources, which you haven’t actually read or examined. Now I’m expected to go through each of them, putting in substantially more work in order to refute them. Work which you will most likely disregard anyway. You didn’t even bother to provide links, so apparently I’m supposed to hunt these documents down myself.

Give me two to three sources, that you have actually read, that specifically call it a genocide, that don’t come from the US government (or other Western governments), and also don’t rely on far-right crackpot Adrian Zenz.

No, I would like actual sources.

When you start denying genocide, it doesn’t matter how good your economic policy is.

Perfect example of propagandized individuals hating communists because of propaganda.

I deny lots of genocides. For example, when Elon Musk talks about the “white genocide” I deny that. But somehow libs have gotten it in their heads that claims of genocide get to bypass all standards of evidence and fact-checking, because if you don’t immediately accept it without evidence, it means you’re a genocide denier, a bad person, basically a fascist who shouldn’t even be engaged with (conveniently averting the need to provide evidence). The state is more than happy to exploit this nonsense by putting out claims of genocide with zero credible evidence, because they know you’ll do this.

I’m just responding in kind, what I said is no more “lashing out” than what you said.

I’m more than happy to have a conversation, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize and call out impossible standards. You want a state that never persecuted anyone, show me a society where people didn’t knock out all their teeth that didn’t persecute anyone. Every society has murderers, and every society makes mistakes, and someone who is unjustly punished for a murder they didn’t commit could certainly be said to have been persecuted, no? So I don’t accept this standard.

And I was hoping you’d ground your views in reality.

Non-states or weak states very quickly run into collective action problems which are made significantly worse at large scales. Generally, they work when the material conditions allow for it, for example, the Zapatistas are in rural mountains that nobody really cares that much about. If they happened to be sitting on top of a bunch of oil, then the situation would be quite different.

States are the most effective means of solving collective action problems that currently exist. Even the fundamental goal of keeping people safe from other states cannot be achieved in most cases without some degree of centralization. “I can’t go up and defend the pass, I have to stay here and protect my farm.” That’s what decentralization gets you, and the result is that the enemy, who is solving such collective action problems through the mechanism of a state, is (generally) able to subdue each individual with overwhelming force. But it extends beyond defense, “I can’t help build that bridge so we can all trade with our neighbors, I have to tend to my crops or I’ll starve.” While these problems can be solved on a very small scale, on a local level where people know and trust each other, it generally cannot be scaled up to similar situations beyond that.

That’s an impossible standard, and doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. I’m not interested in impractical moral perfectionism.