Found some discussion on hexbear where dbzer0 was once more found to be living rent-free in their heads, but it got me thinking:
I find it telling that tankies will constantly prattle about "critical-support" of fascist chuds like Asad, and red-fash regimes like North Korea, or more often, just unironically bring up bog-standard SocDem capitalism like China as "Actually Existing Socialism" (AES), but will immediately marginalize, dehumanize or expel from their spaces anarchists who don't support AES, or who support market-based forms of socialism (such as mutualism).
Likewise, why not give "critical support" to other SocDems for their good policies? (note, I don't support socdems in either liberal-capitalist of state-capitalist form, I'm just asking questions, philosophically)
I can't quite put into words why this bothers me, but I suspect it's due to the usual hypocrisy I see from them. What do you think of this phenomenon?
A large part of it is that they are simply not as well read on political science as they believe. They have an ideological pen which exists at the intersection of Marxist.org and their favorite Lenin pamphlet and that's the entire political world to them. That's also why they seem obsessed with cold war dogma - because a lot of that era's leftist thought was constructed through that lens.
Honestly I take the other view here though. Social Democrat liberalism shares a lot of values with libertarian socialist ideals, and the whole attachment of capitalism to liberalism is misunderstood. Harm reduction isn't a naughty word, because every leftist idea is harm reduction until we have post-scarcity materialism.
Well, surprisingly a lot of of them tend to be very well read, and demand that anyone engaging with them has similar literary consumption.
Eh, most of them haven't actually read the source material they claim. I have run into a bunch of cases where they seem to have not even read the entire essay they are citing and are only familiar with a particular passage (the one with the best fan service.)
And even the ones who do read more than that, often fail to connect and contextualize the philosophy in the broader sphere of political science. It's a big reason why they seem so absolutist about this or that - they have a poor grasp of basic first principles of government, economics, sociology and politics. They can parrot some writer as a "gotcha" but they don't actually understand how that person got to their ideas, or the broader context of that argument.
This becomes hilariously obvious when they straight up bring up "On Authority" as an argument, one of the worst socialist essays ever written.
Right, I have seen MLs quote Chomsky to defend Chinese media censorship. I have seen people quote a Lenin essay which glibly states "civil war gives the peasantry practice at arms" when arguing that "dictatorship" doesn't imply violence. They barely manage a wikipedia-level understanding of these issues.
Hilariously there is already an ML sea lion in here demanding I "prove" this. What, exactly, I am supposed to prove is unclear, since I am effectively distilling a handful of personal anecdotes into a few bullet points. But the aggressive framing and vagueness of the request really does kind of illustrate part of what I'm talking about here. MLs have people convinced that they are thoughtful, when in really they are just aggressive and confrontational.
Interesting. There's a reply from mastodon.social which went to piefed.social but didn't reach this instance so it's not not visible anywhere except your instance.
I remember there was one recently written Chinese political opinion piece that openly stated that China's government was not democratic. That claim is consistent with China's self view, but you see a lot of tankies get tripped up on that claim.