What are they supposed to self crit about though? Bad analysis? From what I’ve read on this so far, it comes across like substituting talking things through instructively with a permaban. If it is the case that thorough attempts were made to talk things through and they doubled down, or that they were being hostile toward others and not taking hints to back down, then that seems more fair to do a ban. But in general, expecting someone to go off in their corner and work things out is not a solution to ignorance. I would love for it to be that easy, but it takes sometimes painful, patient, and prolonged effort instead. None of us has the “correct” take all of the time. Hell, maybe I’m jumping to conclusions too quickly myself. But it would be kind of absurd if I were to be banned from somewhere for saying this, wouldn’t it?

I know there’s a fine line sometimes where it’s important not to be permissive of BS and draw lines, but at the same time, sometimes you can get far just trying to connect on the spirit of what someone means while disagreeing with the content. For example, when I read the original post they made, the tone sounds abrasive and hasty to me, but the general sentiment of being tired of zionists calling upon anti-semitism and playing up being victims is nothing new. People can get tired of pre-empting every statement with a big thing about the difference between zionism and Judaism, and trying to word it all just right so nobody gets the wrong idea, like Jewish people are the main characters of world oppression, while Palestinian children are being slaughtered en masse. And it’s not like it’s just internet posting struggling with this kind of thing, I remember Gabor Maté mentioning something in passing along similar lines when he came on a podcast his son co-hosts. How, if I remember right (hopefully I am not misrepresenting him), he was tired of dealing with the centering of generational trauma and how that related to zionism. I see what appears like an echo of the same theme in OP’s post. I do think OP’s original post is being somewhat dismissive of how Jewish people can and do still suffer, but any frustration behind it is understandable.

Jewish people are not made of porcelain. We should do what we can to combat prejudice and discrimination against them, but they can handle a bad take now and then. And someone pointing out, albeit harshly, that there’s a clear source of continuing prejudice against them, is not itself the problem; it’s the zionist state that is the source of that problem.

If someone is actually coercing, that’d be abusive. But if we’re just talking about people doing it because it’s common, I’d think coercion is a bit misleading of a word (makes it sound like it’s one person doing it to another) and it’d be more suitable to say it’s peer pressure, social expectations, and socializing (media, etc.) shaping what people do. I am personally not convinced there’s anything inherently wrong with monogamy that would imply open relationships are somehow healthier, but the structure of it when it is tied up in economics undoubtedly has problems, as do the unrealistic expectations brought on by endless romanticizing in media. It seems to me that under the capitalist framework, some of the urge to go for open relationships would just suffer from problems of being seen as disposable and transactional, a convenience that gets called upon when desired and nothing more. Not that monogamy can’t suffer from this too, but point being, I don’t think the alternative is fixing the underlying issues on any generalized level.

Ultimately, if you don’t want to do monogamy, you should make that clear from the offset and if someone is trying to pressure you to do otherwise, then get out of that relationship as fast as you can. That’s a person who is not respecting your side of things.

I guess someone could see it that way, especially under capitalism, but I don’t think that’s generally where the hurt comes from. If somebody explicitly says I don’t want monogamy, that’s different from going in with the belief that it’s exclusive and then going behind someone’s back. Whether monogamy makes sense or not is kind of beside the point about trust and the breaking of trust. If I agreed with you that I’m going to play tennis with you and only you, however absurd that might be, I’m still going back on my word if I go play with someone else without telling you. And sex and romance together are generally going to be a much more personal thing than playing tennis together, with a lot more intense feelings tied up in it.

To simplify: Breaking trust generally doesn’t go over well.

Whoops. So yeah, to expand on it, if you skim the last link I posted, you can see they’re basically one of those USAID orgs (now in trouble because of USAID funding cuts) that helps with US soft power propaganda. So naturally, AES states tend to have a very low score and liberal capitalist governments tend to have a high one.

Lol good point.

Oh and in case anyone thinks Freedom House is some impartial org that just happens to also rate Germany highly, take a gander at what they give China:

https://freedomhouse.org/country/scores

A 9 out of 100

There’s also this:

https://freedomhouse.org/effects-us-foreign-aid-freeze-freedom-house

Germany today not only scores an impressive 95 out of 100 on the Freedom House index, reflecting strong civil liberties and political rights

Freedom in the World is a yearly survey and report by the U.S.-based non-governmental organization Freedom House that measures the degree of civil liberties and political rights in every nation and significant related and disputed territories around the world.

Same energy as “we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong.”

I wonder if you could get it in front of a “true crime” demographic in a more mainstream space. That might be a way to both broaden audience and make it easier to find people who would tip. A potential issue in a place like this is people may be more money poor, even if they’d like to be able to tip (though couldn’t hurt to try anyway).

You might say well just give up on sex/love if you’re married, but I don’t think we should expect people to renounce that very prevalent aspect of the human life because of some private property shenanigans

Eh, on this part, I feel like these are two pretty different points:

(1) Giving up on sex: Sure, it’s a pain, but you can live without it. There are people who have trouble even finding a partner in the first place, which can last for decades. I’m not sure sometimes if this is made easier by having supplementary ways of getting off, like porn, or if porn actually makes it worse because you can get close mentally but don’t actually get the real thing. But either way, you aren’t dying of thirst in the desert for not getting the real thing. It can suck, yeah, but you can get through it without doing something dishonest/hurtful to another person.

(2) Giving up on love: This one I more understand (and I suspect is more the part that people who think they badly want to get laid are actually after). Loneliness can really eat at a person. Maybe it’s even more intensified if you’re in a loveless marriage, so close to intimacy and yet so far (I don’t know from experience, just trying to give credit to the possibility). But also, romance is not the only way to have emotional or physical intimacy (and I’m not even thinking of sex atm when I say “physical”). Friends can be extremely close sometimes and not have it be romantic. Though socializing probably gets in the way of this at times, shoving this idea into people’s heads that if they are close and sync up in the right gender or sexual preference combo, then they must be needing to make it romantic. As if this is the ultimate form of adult closeness and everything else is on a sliding scale, with romance as the endpoint.

This kind of socializing, I think, is toxic to people being able to be happy without romance. What they need as a basic human thing, is closeness. What they (tend to be) taught is that for an adult, romance is the ultimate way to do this. So then, they’re going to extrapolate from that, that they will never be satisfied until they have a good romance. But romance itself is not a static feeling thing, where you find somebody and feel exactly the same toward each other forever. Feelings can deepen or fade, and it seems to be a consistent thing that the initial “high” early on is not something that lasts and has to be replaced with something more slow-burn affection for things to be maintained.

But if somebody believes the high is what love is and keeps chasing that, they’re going to have a harder time “settling down” and building love, not just searching for it. This is not to say all failed relationships can be fixed by “trying harder” or something, just that if someone views it as a magic that has to stay in the air and loses sight of the action part of any kind of relationship, I’m sure that’d increase their temptations to cheat.

Zoom in: Asked about the shouting match, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to comments she made to the Times about how “it’s no secret President Trump has put together a team of people who are incredibly passionate about the issues impacting our country.”

The spin lmao. 🤣

I’d think at that point, you could just say “repressive” then instead of unnecessarily all-encompassing words like “totalitarian”, but even that is getting lost in being too vague. A state that represses the capitalist class is fundamentally not the same as a state that represses working class organization, for example. Also, you mentioned “North Korea”, you may be confused about the history there due to endless western vilifying. The DPRK, aka: “North Korea” is not repressive toward regular people. It is a bulwark of attempted liberation and reunification from colonialism and imperialism, and it happens to be communist in ideology, which makes sense because communism and liberation typically go hand in hand. It is “South Korea”, the part of Korea still occupied by the US to this day, that has a history of being brutally repressive and being an extension of US imperialism there.

To reiterate, the problem is not that something is a state, inherently (this is where I would differ with some who call themselves anarchists). The problem is in whose organized interests are behind the state. And although it’s true that communists see an endpoint where the state is no longer necessary, there is still the question of how you actually get there. This is a defining point in the conversation, the question of transition, and where the concept of a socialist working class state comes from. And when we look at the historical gains in liberation, quality of life, and developing toward communism, nothing comes close to socialist state projects. Naturally, this is terrifying to the capitalists and so they would have you believing that these states are always incredibly scary places running on fear and desperation.

It is incredibly important, if you are sympathetic to communism, to be able to side with socialist state projects overall, even if you acknowledge that they don’t always do right all of the time (no entity ever does and holding them to standards of perfection is a common tactic from the capitalists). If you don’t side with them, you are effectively, whether you realize it or not, siding with the capitalists and imperialists of the world; with the narrative that is arguing better is not really possible, that gains can only be made on a small level by small groups “choosing” to be free. It is critical to understand this, or else “anarchism” becomes little more than a fear of authority, and you lose sight of who represents the best chance of liberating the people of the world. You don’t have to personally love vast bureaucratic systems, in other words, to understand that the DPRK is the main thing that kept Korea from being a neoliberal puppet state across the board. Or to understand that China is currently facing down US imperial hegemony and is capable of standing up to it, without even pulling a trigger, while pushing for a multipolar world instead of another form of hegemony. That’s a powerful force toward liberation. It’s not the whole thing of it, it’s not all said and done, but we can’t lose sight of how pivotal this kind of organized force is in the broader context of the worldwide struggle for liberation.

the idea of total control by the state over all aspects of life, political, social, and private

Pretty sure no such state exists or ever has existed. To borrow the phrasing of George Carlin, it’s “spooky language.” It conjures up an image of a society in which you can’t do anything without worrying about someone or something being over your shoulder, ready to report you at a moment’s notice. Probably the closest thing to this in practice is extremely repressive transitory “states” like Occupied Korea under Syngman Rhee. It’s not something you’d be able to formalize, practically speaking, without also undermining the concept of having a society in the first place.

And part of the problem with this kind of framing is that it trivializes what real mundane brutality can look like. Take the US, for example. Does the state have total control over everything? No. When a cop guns down a black person over basically nothing, does this mean all black people in the US are being actively hunted and exterminated? No. But it is nevertheless a shadow cast over them, that they are not really free or safe; that whatever “liberties” they do share with “white” people, are much more conditional than the ones white people usually at least get a trial over.

Furthermore, if you focus purely on “the state”, you leave out the brutality inflicted in the name of “private ownership” of land, factories, etc. For example, when a worker dies of exhaustion on an Amazon warehouse floor, it isn’t a state actor murdering them, but the lack of a working class state forcing Amazon to have humane and stable working conditions, coupled with the system of capitalism enforced by the state that puts people in a position where they desperately need the money even if it risks their life, is indirectly killing them. This is one way in which capitalism shirks responsibility for what it causes, but the consequences are nevertheless real.

You must make him read all of Mearx’s Catpital and then explain it back to you.

That might be a major place the romanticizing of it started. I know there’s also been The Vampire Diaries (never watched it, but I believe that’s got romanticizing going on, of sorts). The demon thing, I’m not sure who started it, but some stories portray them as demons, such as in the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in that one, they have a demon form and a prettified form, so they can appear conventionally attractive to lure people in but are grotesque underneath).

I’m not sure how it developed to the airbrushed-looking Hollywood kind of vampire, but I suspect that kind of vampire portrayal has something to do with the whole “eternal love” theme in romance. Especially people at the height of romantic affection, may feel like they want to be with the person forever. So then you combine that with an immortal vampire who can turn others into vampires by biting them and you have a formula for eternal love. But as many stories that involve “cheating death” go, there has to be a catch, a tradeoff, some sort of consequence of trying to cheat death. So with vampires, it can be that they’re demons and the tradeoff is you lose your humanity; what you thought would be eternal love turns out to be a farce.

Yeah it’s not actually that far-fetched, considering how the US has acted toward opposition, historically.

an oil company with a military

I love this as a way to sum up the US. Really hits home how fundamentally environmentally destructive it is.

Then I guess we’re meaning more or less the same thing, just going about it differently.

That’s fair as a general thing, but I didn’t really mean it as a “moral argument”? People have good reason to have developed a viscerally negative view of policing if their experience has only been the US. So part of my point there is just how abnormally bad US policing is and some reasons why it is that way, to help ease off on the instinct that if they are horrific in the US, they must always be horrific everywhere. Yes, part of it is the standard “the police are there to protect capital, etc.”, but it’s not just that. The US developed from colonizing, genocide, slavery, none of which it ever really reckoned with as more than reformist things that were extremely hard-won. In post WWII, it also became a global capitalist empire and the breeding ground of a vicious anti-communist world campaign. All of this is going to have consequences on what policing ends up looking like.

The whole “they favor the capitalists” thing is true for the US, but also somewhat of an oversimplification. The worst crimes done by US cops (such as extrajudicial murder) are more often carried out against people who are considered non-white, for example. That’s something you won’t see covered in a purely class analysis.

I’m not trying to be snarky or pedantic when I ask, what is a cop to you? Would you consider a cop to be any enforcer of a formalized state structure that has a monopoly on violence? Anyone who takes on an armed role for organized community defense?

It’s very easy and sensible to go with ACAB for the US, but when we’re talking about for example a communist vanguard in defense of a working class state socialist project, if we just say it is identical fundamentally, then what are we left with to defend against the violence of the colonizer, imperialist, etc.? Or if we were to say it’s bad when it’s a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but good if it’s community defense, what constitutes the difference and how is the 2nd one strong enough on a practical level to achieve liberation?