KurtVonnegut [comrade/them]

  • 61 Posts
  • 354 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: March 12th, 2021

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  • I also don’t think this story is true because

    1. Trotsky only lived in New York for 2 months, so he probably did not have enough time to develop a “favorite” restaurant

    2. Trotsky says in his autobiography that he spent almost all of his waking hours reading, writing, and going to meetings about socialism. This was during WWI and all the socialist parties were in disarray and chaos about what to do next.

    3. Trotsky barely spoke English (his main languages were Ukrainian, Russian, French, and German, and he was literally trying to learn English on the boat ride over to New York), so the idea of him trying to “convince other patrons” to not tip in broken English seems very silly to me.










  • the all too common man-activity of earning social validation by shitting on socially disenfranchised people

    I apologize for by bluntness, but don’t all human beings do this, not just men? Can you honestly tell me that you have never spoken to a woman or a group of women and heard them insult a social group lower than them on the conventional social hierarchy? For a current example, there are a certain number of women on Twitter right now talking about calling ICE to have the undocumented family members of their Trump-voting neighbors deported. I mean, men are making those posts too, but I have seen just as many women making the same posts. Anecdotally, I have personally known many Christian women who insult or are dismissive towards Muslim women, which also has a racial component to it.

    J. K. Rowling, specifically, is the world’s most famous hater of trans women. She holds events where groups of cis women get together to basically hate on trans women together. In my opinion, this is a way for her to earn “social validation.” Obviously this is toxic, as you say. But to claim that men do it far more often than women do, well, I have not seen any evidence of that in my personal life nor have I seen any data to support it. If you do have a book on the subject or a scientific study saying that men engage in this activity more than women do, I would be interested to read it and learn more about the issue. But I just think most human beings do it in specific social situations. Thank you for being open enough to have this discussion.



  • I like your “against argument,” but I would add just one thing to it: the “Spoonful of Sugar” argument. A spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down. I don’t think that anyone here is trying to argue that low-effort posts (screenshots of right-wingers on Twitter or Reddit) are revolutionary or will change the world. Low-effort posts are just supposed to be fun. They give you a little hit of dopamine. And then the rest of the site is the “fruit and vegetables” of the website. Personally I go on c/theory to look at the Das Kapital reading club, and I also click on low-effort posts to have a little laugh at how the conservative right-wing cancer is evolving in real time on social media.

    Isn’t that the whole point of left-wing social media? Invite as many people in as you can with “sugar” (comedy and community) and then introduce them to “fruits and vegetables” (Marxist theory and real-life organizations)? Is there a single website that exists and functions that only has the fruits and vegetables, with no sugar? If Hexbear is going to be a “no fun allowed” website, why not just make it a straight re-direct to the collected works of Marx and Engels? https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

    To be fair, did I roll my eyes when I saw UlyssesT make his 1,000th Elon Musk dunk? Yeah, because I had seen it before. But then again, it seems like that was their hyper-fixation, and I don’t ever want to insult someone or put them down for being passionate about something. Not clicking on a UlyssesT post costs me nothing. Anyone who wants to avoid low-efforts posts can just unsubscribe from low-effort coms.

    And like, people are always going to find a way to make low-effort posts. If you ban recess at school, kids will run around in the hallways. Kids need recess! You can’t just tell them, “Sit in a chair all day, and learn all day, and don’t do anything fun, or else you’re a terrible person.” That attitude will obviously lead to resentment among the students.

    This whole situation reminds me of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. The Bolsheviks wanted to be serious and disciplined, while the Mensheviks wanted to let amateur socialists (mainly academic professors) join in. I guess it worked out for the Bolsheviks. But at the same time, Lenin spent a good deal of time “dunking” on people. So did Marx. And one of the reasons Lenin and Marx won people over is because they were funny. They had some sugar.