Haha, I know how that can be.

I learned a new phrase today, thanks. I could see that being intentional to an extent, for sure. Certainly the alphabet agencies have done far worse over the decades, so it’s not like it’s a stretch to imagine western imperialism trying a thing like that. Would also fit with the general theme of gangster/mafia-like, where the threat isn’t necessarily made explicit, but you are steered toward drawing the conclusion about what can happen. So that people develop certain kinds of fears without those in power having to go full mask off to induce those fears directly. Which, loosely related, but reminds me of how in horror writing, it’s often the case that the audience’s imagined version of the monster through implication is scarier than the real monster. And so much time is spent activating the imagination without showing the monster directly. I know there are also uses of this kind of thing through history, such as military tactics to make an army look bigger than it is or that sort of thing.

In fitting with this, I remember that Mao quote:

All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.

Intimidation and appearance of threat can be more powerful in its effect than the threat itself. Important for us to remember that. That we need to ground ourselves in what the threats substantively are, so we don’t let runaway imagination intimidate us into subservience to imperialism.

Reminds of the “This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy” vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

Well said!

Fair enough. I guess I am so used to platforms where wording can be a problem, it’s gotten me in the habit of self-censoring more online in general (like reddit really got into my head with how on some subreddits, a post you made could be automatically hidden without you even knowing, presumably because of something in the wording that set off a filter).

Reminds me of Parenti talking about JFK assassination and the gangster nature of the state.

Have had it on my mind cause of other stuff recently too, like this: https://x.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1791581687178281026

Billionaire CEOs didn’t just reach Mayor Adams in a private chat urging him to arrest pro-Palestine Columbia students, they also offered PRIVATE staff to help NYPD. The Mayor accepted.

Members of the group also coordinated with Israel’s war cabinet, UN ambassador and former PM.

Or the Boeing whistleblowers who keep being unalived.

Then this thing from Blinken: not directly threatening starvation, but implying what will happen if you go against them.

Then was also thinking about how imperialist media has accused Russia of being a gangster state before and the whole “every accusation is a confession” thing.

Thinking more about this and these articles come to mind about the US military and the general unsustainability of how things are being run in terms of infrastructure:

https://indi.ca/nothing-to-see-here-just-the-wheels-falling-off-empire/

https://indi.ca/how-americas-military-has-fallen-apart/

If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it and I don’t see people having enough loyalty to the country to fight such a thing meaningfully. Already, we know how the public feels and what gets implemented as policy has little connection. We are seeing right now people being willing to risk their futures or even lives now to protest genocide in another country, similar to the actions during the US violence against Vietnam. An encounter that the US ultimately lost, even if it did inflict barbaric harm on the Vietnamese people in the process.

Now China with BRICS is rising in influence, anti-imperialism appears to be overall strengthening and western imperialism weakening even if it is not always a straightforward “win” because even under the best conditions, it will not always go the way we want it to for the colonized.

And then there is climate change to contend with too, as well as the US’s general poor handling of covid, where it sacrificed its own people in order to push for faster re-opening and just sort of say “the pandemic is over.” That kind of cynically evil approach might work some of the time at a small scale, but the displacement climate change could cause is not going to be small and ignorable, and there will be no “just wait on a vaccine” moment for it.

All of this is to say that there is a lot levied against the US and western imperialism as a whole, both now and going forward, some of it plain old nature coming home with the consequences of mass ecological destruction.

And if the US loses its hold, I don’t see what other wing of western imperialism would be strong enough to take its place. I hesitate to make any personal predictions on time, but I don’t see western imperialism having any meaningful capability to navigate the consequences of climate change as a power figure, so I can’t see it lasting as a global power beyond that getting bad. If we take covid as a preview, it’s more likely for the violence to turn inward and deteriorate the conditions of the US further and China to be the one leading in acting pragmatically on a large scale.

Gotcha. I guess part of where I was hedging on in my thoughts, is if its military presence in other countries evaporated because of fast decline in power, it wouldn’t necessarily be able to do a whole lot of lashing out, except for maybe internally. I do think the internally part is very plausible though, considering the amount of splintering and scapegoating there is.

Considering how splintered the US is in ideology and how much paranoia it has toward “foreigners” (which in reality aren’t necessarily foreign and are almost always people who don’t pass as white) a war with the entire world would likely turn into the US doubling down on that paranoia and on white supremacy and start hurting its own citizens en masse before a single other country has set foot there. Add to that the severe drop in functionality and amenities from being cut off from the world economy and everything they outsourced. The rest of the world would show up one day to see what’s going on and the US would be Mad Max. Profoundly disturbing country to live in.

I had some thoughts on this but then I realized I’m not clear on what you mean by “fell within one generation.” You mean the US stays more or less the same as it is now in internal political landscape, but with the addition of losing global power? Or you mean the US as a state collapses?

Read this: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/2022_Russo-Ukrainian_conflict

It’s okay, I apparently made a faux pas trying to engage to learn here on this issue but this community is clearly more for comradeship like its name suggests rather than outreach.

You have received a lot of attention and information. What do you expect, for people to bend over backwards to talk to you about this on your terms? What person who takes learning seriously does this? Do you show up to a classroom and leave if the teacher does not re-frame their lecture on physics into the trolley problem? “Outreach” does not mean you change nothing about yourself and everyone else changes what they’re doing for you. You could receive the ideal maximum of compassion, patience, and clarity of thought and word, but if you are only willing to approach it on your terms, then no matter what you tell yourself about your intent, the substance of your actions is that of reinforcing what you already believe, not learning.

And I am speaking from some experience here. I did not always have the views that I do and one of the most important things in changing that was doing more listening to people who are better informed. Philosophical questions like the trolley problem gives people a false sense of competence in understanding a given issue; that as long as you can abstract a problem to its component parts, you can overcome any ignorance of it and arrive at the correct position. This is not so. You must understand what is happening correctly, so that you can properly generalize. If your information on the fundamentals is incorrect, attempting to generalize will only obfuscate rather than clarify and give a false sense of confidence in your position.

Well, Trump and Biden are not substantially on different sides. They are two faces of the same side. If the parties were on substantially different sides, there would be some kind of actual holding accountable from the one to the other and preventing things from getting worse. Instead, what we get is blame directed at “the left” (a vague amorphous blob buzzword in these situations, similar to “tankie”) for wanting anything different from the status quo. The democrats continuously show a near total lack of interest in doing anything about the depravity that they say the republicans are doing, even going so far as to do much the same things (if not worse) but with different PR branding, and then shame people for correctly understanding this means that neither party is meaningfully better.

Another garden-variety western imperialist who thinks they’re a “free-thinker” because they left religion. The western atheist celebrity sphere is such a disappointment, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, cause celebrities in general tend to have garbage takes.

Nope, never, it will ALWAYS look bad.

I think that about sums up their position. People like that don’t think in terms of human life and the value of it. They think in terms of optics and philosophical moral quandaries. It is pointless arguing with them on that level because they are not arguing about real lives and consequences of actions, even if they claim that’s what it’s about. Their arguments make as much effort as possible to move away from reality and embrace hypotheticals and truisms, where they can make you look foolish for being on the wrong side of a dichotomy.

These sort of people who go for truisms want to be able to ally with the “perfect victim.” It is not so much about keeping people safe, but about protecting their own sense of moral purity by association.

So I recommend to people, rather than arguing with such people on the hypotheticals and the truisms, go back to the facts. The Nakba, the decades of settler-colonialism hurting people on a systematic and systemic level. How that is not some thing in the distant past, but is very much ongoing. People act like history there began on October 7th when it was a blip of resistance in an ongoing struggle, with the majority of violence being israel hurting Palestine and its people. The majority of power: israel. The disinterest in any kind of peace: israel. The devaluing of hostages: israel. The majority of hostages: Palestinian people that israel holds. The months and months of bombing that has followed October 7th: israel bombing civilians and civilian infrastructure.

That is a bizarre subreddit, but I kinda of get why their content makes no sense given the premise is based on linking to an urbandictionary definition. It very much seems like what happens when someone thinks communism is a cool aesthetic, but never learns a single thing about dialectical and historical materialism, about contradictions, about the power struggle between classes, and hangs out on the edges of “authority is bad and scary.” I had a period where I was sort of in that “libertarian left” identifying sphere of thought and IIRC, two of the most important points of getting past that was recognizing the nature of imperialism and what makes something imperialist vs. not, and reading into the basics of contradictions and the class struggle and the state’s monopoly on violence via Lenin.

I think it’s sort of hard to see how the monopoly on violence works in practice and decide that the means of liberating from that repression is some kind of pacifist thing where nobody has state power. History and present day repeatedly shows us that armed struggle is the defining factor in liberating from imperialism and not being able to defend yourself properly in that way means the imperialists will be the ones bringing in tanks. I do wonder if some of this comes down to the sort of No True Scotsman approach to communism, that if a socialist project is suspected of doing something repressive in a way that goes against what they are supposed to be about, you’re supposed to view it as some kind of attack on communism itself and do everything you can to question the legitimacy of the project as a whole. In effect, holding communists to a standard they can never live up to in practice. That realm of thinking, in other words, seems to be about viewing it as a betrayal of the people if you take the actions of socialist projects in the context of the contradictions they are navigating rather than viewing them through a lens of moral purity. That socialist projects have at times done repression that was unhelpful to the goals of communism and the people’s liberation I think is an idea no one with any sense with regards to communism or the mechanisms of reality would challenge. But then there is this sort of litmus test thinking, are you being mad enough about the right (alleged) incidents of state repression. If you sound like you’re making excuses for it, you must be corrupt too (“tankie!”). You know, it goes back to that thinking centered around corruption of the mind and desire rather than material conditions.

Not sure if that’s all clear. I guess I am using this as an opportunity to process and try to better understand that sphere where people take on certain elements of causes that communists also take on, but place a fear of authority over what is effective for liberation.

Person pointing at random things and doing a creative writing exercise on its backstory “And this is how the communists were bad”

In seriousness though, this is a perfect example of what the Parenti quote is talking about, isn’t it. “Everything the communists do/did was malicious and manipulative and controlling, even if it has some perfectly innocent reason, it must be bad somehow.”

Interesting, thanks for the insight on it!

I was genuinely wondering on that part, if exposed wiring would be an actual hazard or not. I don’t know much about types of wiring and types of them, so didn’t want to jump to conclusions one way or the other. Like my computer cables at home aren’t exactly hidden and years back, there was one point where we had a cable running throughout our apartment (and IIRC, we used the wall and ceiling for part of it to get it from one room to the other). But that’s probably(?) a different story in terms of safety than, say, electrical wiring for a place.

So where my mind was going is like, if it’s not an unsafe kind of cables, they are literally just caring about appearances over quality from their alleged visit, which is what they claimed the communists are doing. If it’s truly a true story and unsafe wiring, I see that as a legitimate concern for safety reasons; but the claim it has to do with caring about appearances over quality still doesn’t make sense even granting them all of that, as you’d think if that were the case, they’d make dangerous infrastructure and hide the danger, not leave it out in the open for a visiting foreigner to say “China bad.” They can’t seem to get their reasoning straight on why exactly this means “communism bad.” The more I think on it, the more it looks like they started from their conclusion and worked backwards. Also, I’ve been in hotels before in the US where the first room we got had problems and we told them and they set us up in another room. The information I acquired there was that one room had problems and another did not. I did not acquire a whole picture of the hotel, much less every hotel in the entire country.

Fair points, there’s a lot of layers of misinformation in their thinking.