Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "HasanAbi"
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Nobby Heads For one, DPRK's position as socialist is theoretically dubious. More concretely, basically no socialist in America is proposing to implement a DPRK style siege socialist, military dictatorship. Again, when people bring shit like that up, they're deflecting from substance to aesthetics. Your job is to bring them back to issues of substance where they might agree.
The other example I sometimes use is LGBT rights, like marriage equality. Would changing words like "homosexual" or "LGBT" have made reactionaries any more receptive to gay marriage? Even shit libs like Bill Maher made lame ass jokes about the LGBTQALMNOP, as if the "ridiculous" name was to blame for oppression and inequality.
But attitudes about homosexuals have changed a lot in the past decade. It didn't come from changing the names of things, like some vapid PR stunt, or by making being gay more aesthetically normie friendly. It came through struggle, protest, legal battles, consciousness raising, friends and family members sharing painful or joyful coming out stories.
Much the same could be said of virtually ever major struggle of the past few centuries, women's rights, civil rights, labor rights.
If you get people to talk about the substance of socialism, of a more just, more democratic society, they won't give a shit about the DPRK.
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@floopsiemcsoops6008 It's like you didn't even bother reading my comment. Conservatives believe in leftist concepts like abolishing private property, dismantling the state, having a commitment to equal protections for social minorities, and reorganizing society on a non-hierarchical basis? Really? Which poll showed that? I must've missed it.
Politics isn't merely a matter of shuffling around some signifiers until people's beliefs match their material needs. One has to attend to the meaning behind the word and the long-inculcated, highly propagandized notions of what is necessary for society—competition, hierarchy, ownership, use of force. The people who reject socialism reject it for particular reasons. They may not be good reasons, but they must be grappled with. If anyone's underestimating "the average voter" (not sure why "voter" is the unit of analysis) it's you.
That you think some conservatives agreeing with a modicum of social democracy (built on third world exploitation) speaks less to their willingness to budge left as it does to the lengths to which you had to go to put the left within their reach—not by making an appeal to the meaning of "socialism," not by overturning fundamental assumptions, not by dispelling double consciousness,but by bringing socialism more in line with capitalism.
Thinking that politics is primarily a matter of branding is a peculiarly liberal way of looking at things, as if we were trying to sell soda or launder a reputation. It doesn't require action. It doesn't require a transformation of personal and social consciousness.
Imagine that you had said to people in the black or gay rights movements that their real problem was branding, and if only they used different language and different tactics, the public would be on their side. In fact, people did just that, and they were wrong. People didn't change their minds about these groups because of a change of label. They changed because of repeated, provocative, enduring exposure, violent repression, and because of association with people in their own lives. They had to change the way they thought and related to black and LGBT people.
If you start calling socialism "workplace democracy," you're either not really being true to the aims and commitments of socialism, or you're just being dishonest with people. And what's to stop reactionaries from simply associating "workplace democracy" with socialism, just as they've done with countless other terms and subjects regardless of their connection to socialism?
If you're not aware of the (by now) centuries of conservative propaganda against democracy, I don't know what to tell you. Just about any Republican would be thrilled to inform you that we have a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
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@cereszin The authoritarian deviations like Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism (maybe to a lesser extent), Social Democracy, Shining Path, etc. All demand arrogation of power to some hierarchical structure which substitutes itself for "the people" or "the workers," usually in the name of some combination of security, efficiency, or historical necessity. Lenin and Trotsky, for instance, were quite explicit that workers were not to be entrusted with managing production themselves.
In short, they tend to favor utilizing the state, maximizing production along a rational, Western basis (speaking historically here), and limiting direct control of social and material production by society itself.
The youtuber Anark has a series called "The State is Counterrevolutionary" which has plenty of insightful citations in the description.
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@Jeff Belding Your own critical thinking is irrelevant when it goes against the data.
"The left," by which I assume you mean liberals, aren't refusing the vaccine because of spurious connections to Trump. I don't know where you got that idea.
Doctors and other experts aren't changing their minds on "a whim." It may look that way, but, aside from some really stupid policies, like the CDC's early discouragement of masking, opinions change when new data provokes a revision. Early in the pandemic, there was less data; now there's more. Nothing to date has shown the vaccines to be unsafe (beyond the normal risks of any medication) or ineffective, exactly the opposite, and the more data has come in, the more confident we are that is the case.
Covid is deadly. It's killed 600k+ in the US alone and 4m+ worldwide. It's not a "mild flu," as many conservatives claim. You personally might be okay, but consider the ramifications. Every person who gets sick risks infecting others, must take time off work, and in severe cases, which can occur in otherwise young, healthy people, using up hospital resources. Not to mention that unvaccinated populations are driving virus mutation, leading to new strains which are more contagious, could be more virulent, and reduce vaccine efficacy.
If there's another dominate strain after Delta, but worse, the vaccines may not work. We may need new ones, and we're going to have to go through this over and over, never getting to herd immunity because some boomers are on facebook too much. Let's just be done with this shit.
The number of people who absolutely cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons is vanishingly small, and of course accommodations have to be made for them. Your typical white evangelical anti-vaxxer is not that person.
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