You sealed him into the dang crystal and he’s gone now.

steering towards your dogmatic views

He didn’t do anything wrong, though? You’re the one that kept trying to hold China up against the standard of Utopia. You’re the one that called China a “regime” (a meaningless term). You’ve been repeatedly leaving these comments in this thread, acting like you’re gonna leave, but you continue to blather on with your liberal platitudes. If you could write just 1 or 2 substantial comments with good sources for every 5 “Bye!” that you write, maybe the conversation would have come to its natural conclusion by now.

unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.

Where I am, the problem is not that people are too “hypnotised” or propagandized to act. The problem is that every time we have tried to establish our sovereignty the US has violently suppressed us.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponce_massacre
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utuado_uprising
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Coalition_(Fred_Hampton) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Lords
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filiberto_Ojeda_Ríos

Most recently we had a massive protest movement that went absolutely nowhere because it wasn’t organized with anything resembling a coherent leadership; if the various previous attempts at organizing the people hadn’t been destroyed by the US or the colonial government, maybe it could’ve been productive.

Generally, our views on why revolutions haven’t been successful are a lot more nuanced than “people are just too brainwashed.” A lot of us believe that brainwashing itself is not real and it’s just a concept that serves to obscure the real sociological phenomena that prevent class consciousness and revolution.

SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.

Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.

there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy

Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.

there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…

Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?

Edit: just to pre-empt the obvious counterargument that in the US you can oppose the government without being arrested: yes, you can, as long as you aren’t speaking out in a dangerous way. The 6 Ferguson organizers who all died under mysterious circumstances should be evidence that if you do speak out in a way that the state deems unacceptable, they’ll just kill you. Hopefully you can see how in Iran, not everyone who ever says anything against their government is jailed (we even have Hexbear users from Iran that have posted things that are critical of their government). The thing that would get you jailed is if you destabilize the country with your speech. Every single state in the world will have you jailed for destabilizing it, the only difference is how hard to destabilize each state is.

Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you’re just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between “authoritarian” countries that aren’t even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?

In this comment you give the reason “it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world.” I’m not going to deny that.^[1] But that has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn’t make the US a country that isn’t authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you’re authoritarian and rich, that’s fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?

Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you’re failing to appreciate the long arc here. You’re talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban’s party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called “democratic” European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be “blinded by ideology” to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western “democratic” countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European “democracies” aren’t going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?

Honestly, Absurd Ominous Clown is a bit of a miss. That’s just not very good.

Awful Obvious Chauvinist? I welcome other suggestions.

Hexbear is full of these types.

Sorry, just to be clear, do you mean people with reactionary biases or people calling out reactionary biases?

Here’s one post about Viki where a user brought up the really islamophobic comment she had made: https://hexbear.net/comment/5730673

Here’s the last post from that user: https://hexbear.net/post/4672233

This is the only post discussing her islamophobic statement I found. I’m not gonna say that 1 instance makes a pattern, that would be a hasty generalization, but hopefully it’s not hard to see the point.

It shows that she’s either really bad at feeling out where the wind is blowing, or is overestimating her capacity to change public sentiment against genocide.

She’s just obfuscating the criticism by defending against a weaker argument. Some people may have been implying that she voted yes on the bill as a whole, but she voted no. This is burying the lede that she voted no on the amendment that would’ve stopped Iron Dome funding.

Usually the way Marxists analyze the difference between systems like Feudalism and Capitalism, the focus is on how production is carried out, and what kinds of property exist. Under capitalism, generally, industrial capitalists who own private factories transform money into commodities (capital and labor, where labor imparts its value on the capital) which are sold back for more money than the capitalist paid (the surplus coming from labor, which isn’t fully compensated). Feudalism is characterized because instead of the principal mode of production being industrial, it’s agrarian and relies on serfs working on their lord’s land for some period of time, then being allowed to work on their own lands.

The fact that the structure of who owns what kind of property is different is very important. In a lot of ways, this change in how production is carried out (what is called the material base) is more relevant in deciding the direction society is headed than how the government is organized (society’s superstructure). The superstructure is shaped by the social relations in the base, but it can only maintain the base.

Is it really antimaterialist to say that when a group of mostly cis people are extremely harsh to a trans person, but lenient against cis people who make similar mistakes, it might be a sign of cis brainworms? I can probably phrase that in terms that are more materialist but the message is the same; I don’t think it’d be any different if a mostly white website was being weird about POC.

My Civ VI games have those foos landing on Mars in the 19th century.

we can’t agree that there are fundamental differences between what is commonly intended as authoritarian government (let’s say Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, …) and the average western country.

Yeah there’s differences. In Western countries, a lot of wealthy white people can just chill while their governments enact tremendous violence against minorities to sustain their quality of life. In Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and other peripheral or semiperipheral countries, the state has to deal with the contradictions head-on instead of exporting them elsewhere, so they have to be more repressive. That’s a real difference, but it makes me think that the Western countries are worse than the “authoritarian governments” you list.

In fact, the way you choose Trump’s US as the turning point that supposedly shows that authoritarianism just now appeared out of nowhere, shows how one-sided your view of history and politics is. Now the US turned authoritarian. Not when they were literally dousing Mexican immigrants in kerosene in 1916 or doing Jim Crow segregation that inspired the Nazis.

Someone with as many victims as Callaghan having a platform and clout to coerce more people outweighs however good his “journalism” is.

This is so funny lol, what exactly is authoritarianism, then? You’re just short circuiting because the most default liberal argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. You don’t have to run away from the conversation just because you have a different definition of authoritarianism. As much as we may have different definitions, we live in the same reality, we can discuss the same ground truths of what “authoritarianism” means to you and how we conceptualize those things in different ways.

The “not open to debate” part is what gets me. Dude, if you brought me something I hadn’t heard before, I’d have a much more charitable conversation. But as they’re talking right now it’s just an array of thought terminating cliches that I used to hear repeatedly on reddit and when talking with older family members.