Yeah except for the fact that they are causing very real damage to POC and LGBTQ people. So let’s be very clear here. Conservatives are not intentionally hateful and can be nice and kind if you are a straight white Christian. If you aren’t in the in group though they can and will turn on you even if they tolerate you. Because conservative ideology is one fundamentally founded on hate and oppression.

Conservatives are entirely driven by prejudice and to maintain power structures. Conservative ideology was literally created by English and French aristocrats who saw the writing on the wall for the monarchy and nobility and needed to ensure that the aristocracy continue to be in charge. Today they serve to ensure that white cishet men remain in power. We absolutely 1000% do not need conservatives in society. This both sides are valid nonsense only serves to further entrench power structures and oppress minorities

I’d love for there to be a communist nation in the world. Except the US government won’t allow that. Chile democratically elected Salvador Allende a democratic socialist to be their president. And the United States responded on September 11 1973 (the irony of that date) by backing Augusto Pinochet a fascist who launched a military coup and established a dictatorship marked by his favorite tactic of throwing leftists out of helicopters, the source of one of the alt rights favorite memes.

Isn’t it funny how the CIA always is behind overthrowing attempts at doing communism and socialism well in South America Africa and Asia. And then we all sit here and say “See, communism just doesn’t work!”.

Violence and force is always necessary to extract change from the powers that be. Hell they use violence and force every single day to keep us in line so why shouldn’t we use violence and force to fight back? And you’re right people won’t want to do that when they are safe and cared for. That’s why we aren’t launching a revolution. Communists are instead attempting to organize people and build new (ideally horizontal) power structures so that when the system gets bad enough to mobilize we will be ready.

Allende is all the evidence you need that peacefully bringing about change has its limits. Allende didn’t kill people to get into power. But the fascists and their liberal allies sure killed people to keep their power.

edit: also communism isn’t any more susceptible to people corrupting it than capitalism is. Especially anarchist / libertarian communism which doesn’t have hierarchies for people to take over. If you got a few minutes I’d recommend listening to this article talking about whether we are good enough for communism

https://youtu.be/t2Al-ivn074

Korea. You mean like South Korea which had a military dictatorship at the time of the war? The problems with Korea largely come from a few issues.

1.) Strong USSR influence on their ideology of Juche. 2.) During the Korean war the United States bombed North Korea more than all the bombs dropped on Europe during WW2. We actually ran out of targets to bomb because we bombed so much. Still NK bounced back after the war and for awhile was much better off than SK was despite the horrific prison system there (which I won’t even attempt to defend. But again, this is what happens when Russia is your primary influence. 3.) They are completely isolated from the rest of the world.

You also need to consider why Korea was ripe for revolution in the first place. They were colonized by imperial Japan and were enslaved and their entire way of life threatened by them. Many of the communists in the region started as liberation fighters attempting to remove the Japanese from their land. After the war America switched places with the Japanese and began to occupy Korea and installed a government friendly to them, a government filled with collaborators who worked with the Japanese during the occupation. Even before the Korean war broke out that pro American military dictatorship began executing people assumed to be communists slaughtering entire villages and committing horrible massacres. To many of the communists in the north they viewed the American imperial occupation no different than the Japanese.

China was extremely connected to and influenced by Stalin. Maoism, also called Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, or MLM is literally an extension of the Marxist Leninists beliefs created by Stalin and Lenin. Had their been a less authoritarian communist influence in the region who knows how Mao would have operated. There were certainly people who had libertarian communist beliefs in the region involved in the early resistance in both China and Korea to both European colonization and Japanese occupation. However these voices were largely silenced thanks to the strong influence of Stalin.

The Khmer Rouge has absolutely nothing to do with communism. Similar to China Korea and Vietnam, Cambodia was colonized by the Europeans, and Cambodian rebels were attempting to liberate their lands. Pol Pot was not a communist. He aligned himself with communism to get help from others but was not a believer. He literally wanted to destroy the working city dwelling classes and return cambodians to nature. That’s the exact opposite of what communists believe. Not to mention that Pol Pot was supported by the United States

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge

As an attempt to weaken Soviet influence. And it was the communists in Vietnam who actually invaded and removed the Khmer Rouge from power. So if anything, Pol Pot is a strike against the west. Not against Communism.

All of your last paragraph is a critique of Marxist-Leninist belief and I agree that it is a terrible ideology. But just because ML is communist doesn’t mean all communists are ML. As I pointed to before, the Spanish had a very strong libertarian communist influence in the form of the CNT-FAI who were defeated not because their government failed but because the Soviets played power games while the Fascists under Franco received troops and arms from Italy and Germany.

You also have the Makhnovists in Ukraine lead by Nestor Makhno who believed in the Soviet system (Soviet means workers council and not ML. The Soviet System is basically that the workers should get together and decide how to run things themselves). Makhno fought against both the USSR and the Europeans who were attempting to secure victory for the Tsars. Makhno liberated the villages from both the reds and the whites (USSR and tsarists respectively) and liberated the people. He told them that he came to destroy the old ways of power, taught them how to organize themselves, and said he didn’t care how they did it, they just couldn’t go back to how things were. Their movement grew and in 1919 they controlled most of Southern and Eastern Ukraine, including some major cities even though their base was primarily with the peasants. They instituted civil liberties in the region for the first time ever. Literacy rates skyrocketed, and the people successfully organized themselves into a non authoritarian Soviet system. The way that Lenin described how it should have worked before he came to power and switched up. They would have continued to work except they were betrayed. The Makhnovists aligned with the reds temporarily to drive out the last of the whites in the region and after a tough fight where the Makhnovists did most of the fighting they were ambushed by the reds the night of their victory while they were celebrating and drinking in their camp.

The Free Territory of Ukraine (the name the Makhnovists fought under) and the CNT-FAI both provide examples of how communism can and should work. Under their reign the people prospered and flourished. They were defeated by war and betrayal both. Not because their government didn’t work. That would have been true even if they were liberal capitalists aligned with the West.

Today, while not explicitly communist (but definitely heavily influenced by communism) you have places like Rojava in Syria which is the single freest place in the middle east, attempting to bring Murray Bookchins communalism into being while creating an ethnic homeland for the Kurdish peoples. You also have the EZLN in Chiapas who are fusing leftist belief with traditional Mayan culture to create the last holdout of Mayan culture and civilization in Chiapas.

Neither the Kurds in Rojava, nor the Zapatistas in Chiapas are perfect. But they represent a resistance to imperial power and the hope of oppressed peoples to have their own homeland.

Communist beliefs are not authoritarian in nature. The ML’s and MLM’s mistakenly believe that you need authoritarian governments in order to destroy the capitalists and bring about communism which is supposedly their end goal. I do not support them in that. Communism can only come from destroying vertical hierarchies. You cannot bring about communism through the use of new vertical hierarchies, because as you’ve correctly pointed out it’s too easy for someone to rise to the top. That is why the successful libertarian communist attempts first destroyed the hierarchies and organized the people along democratic horizontal structures.

If you are open to learning more and like to read I’d suggest you read The Conquest of Bread by Pyotr Kropotkin. It’s a plan for how a communist revolution in Paris could have worked and organized itself. The first half is very interesting in my opinion. The second half gets bogged down in details and numbers specific to the ideas and reality of Paris in the early 20th century. But the vision Kropotkin lays out for society is amazing and one that I would absolutely love to experience.

They couldn’t even handle Ukraine. How is this going to get bumpy? What troops do they even have to build up in the west.

Remember a few years ago when Russian mercs decided to attack an American special forces team in Syria and they not only failed to kill a single American they got bombed into oblivion?

Same thing will happen if these troops so much as step into NATO territory

Same thing with the West that you are so opposed to critiquing. And I know you know how to read so I know you know WHY it is like that. But it’s not the only way. The free territory of Ukraine and Anarchist Barcelona were both communist and neither of them were authoritarian in their “rule”. They were the only real attempt at actual communism vs what the Bolshevists did, which was create a strong vanguard state until such a time as communism was ready to come forth. And they were both effective at doing it. They only disappeared because of the wars they were in (Russian/Soviet civil war and Spanish civil war respectively)

Tell me you know nothing about communism and nazism. Wanna know the craziest shit? Throughout the world since the end of world war 2 a pattern has emerged. Communists would launch a revolution to overthrow western backed dictators and the US would support fascists to keep them under control. Even before WW2 the Nazis got most of their ideas from the US, a liberal democracy. Curious. So if we have the communists, the Nazis who are fascists, and the US who support fascists which two sound more alike to you…

Now if you want to argue the bolshevism is authoritarian as fuck then sure yeah it is. But that was only the dominant strain of communist beliefs because the libs betrayed Rosa Luxemburg to (surprise surprise) the fascists causing the revolution in Germany to fail and passing the torch to Russia, land of oppression and the Tsars. Is anyone shocked that the people in one of the most backwater oppressed parts of Europe turned out to be authoritarian as fuck? And once they became the only state pushing for communism every other revolution had to enact their brand of communism or be left to fight the US on their own.

The ideal of Nazism is to oppress and destroy the other while building up the “tribe” and maintaining traditional power structures.

The ideal of Communism is to liberate the masses and achieve equality.

They are not the same.

TIL being a communist who criticized the West for the evils of our society is the same thing as gore, Nazi shit, and csam.

Cry harder lib

These usually aren’t fronts per se. They do everything there. Tax prep, scams, consulting, private eyes. These psychic places are never JUST a psychic place that’s usually just what the sign says.

Ewww don’t repost Nazi trash.

Perhaps because even after they lost the slaves they were still rich as fuck and powerful. And then they passed laws to still enslave black people and fuck them over so shit didn’t really change all that much. Think about how much better life would be today if every slave owner and klansman were put to death for their heinous crimes instead of slapped on the wrist and given back control of their slaves

Bro what part of a revolution do you not understand. The people saying this stuff are communists and leftists. After a revolution there won’t be stocks left to own or corporations. The whole point of communist revolution is to seize the companies and desolve the capitalist institutions. Surely you understand this no?

I mean the general idea is we kill them and take their property instead of giving it to their heirs. Killing the billionaires is generally something that occurs as part of the larger revolution and not just a leisurely Sunday activity

It’s 425

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/425

You can find it if you Google existential comics anarchism chomsky

The pain and oppression he feels is real and it’s caused by patriarchy And capitalism. Not the LGBTQ community. Other forces have validated those feelings but pointed to gay and trans and brown people as the cause. Rather than dunking on them with “are you even oppressed bro?” Like many others here are suggesting which they admit would never work because of course it wouldn’t work who responds well to that, the best way to change someone’s mind is to talk with them validate their feelings and struggles and fears and point out that it isn’t minorities causing these issues but direct them to the real cause. I know it’s hard to empathize with people who see you as the problem but it’s the only way to actually change their mind and get them on the right path if that’s what you actually want to have happen. If it isn’t then go ahead and hit them with a “check your privilege shit lord” and go about your day knowing you just owned the patriarchy

The anime is called New Game and it’s honestly really fucking good. As a developer who dabbles in game dev it’s honestly pretty true to life and accurate in many ways. I’m usually more of a action anime guy but my wife introduced this one to me and I loved it. It stopped after 2 seasons because they used up all the material but the manga recently released enough chapters that we could get a season 3 so hopefully the anime studio decides to pick it back up again.

It’s not just you meditation is really scary and hard for lots of people because being alone with your thoughts is really fucking scary especially when you are already on the verge of no longer wanting to live. A key part of the process however is realizing that you are not your emotions or your fears. That you are something fundamentally different than those and that you can place distance between yourself and how you feel. And that distance allows you to observe without internalizing. It’s really fucking hard but honestly it’s so good for you. Just start small. And like the other poster said talking about it helps.

I see this answer given a lot on reddit when this paradox is brought up so I’ll post it here too. There is no paradox of tolerance because tolerance is not a rule but a social contract. When someone is intolerant they have violated said social contract and thus are no longer covered by it and are not granted tolerance. We tolerate those who tolerate others.