this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Its hard to challenge your opinions when you gish gallup 500 talking points
You gish galloped, you ad homin-ed, you no true scotsman-ed, you one true scotsman-ed, and then you mot and bailey-ed.
Checkmate sir
Its ok to say you dont know what any of those mean. You dont have to make an ass out of yourself in the process
I believe you just engaged in a masked man fallacy taken to the ad absurdum.
Checkmate
I believe you just engaged in ligma balls fallacy with a terminally online spin.
Checkmate
"I know why the Hexbear ppbs"
Someone learned something here!
What happened to PPB? I haven't seen it in a while despite a ton of PPB worthy posts
We got told to cool it with the emojis on other instances, because there's a Lemmy bug that makes our emojis look giant when we're not on Hexbear. A lot of us think it's funny though that our pig shit image takes up the whole screen. I want it to be larger.
I dont know what ppbs stands for
Hey, that one was decent actually! Good job!
500 talking points and you couldn't find a single thing to call into question
I dont want to be a victim of hexbear road rage thanks. You guys just vomit out material in hopes that you can string it together to form a cogent argument. Then you come back smug as ever asking why i didnt respond to the 10k talking points as if I was a human encyclopedia.
How would I distinguish you, based only on your reply, from someone who took one look at two whole paragraphs and decided you weren't going to read that but had to keep arguing no matter what and spewed out some sour grape nonsense?
Its information overload aka gish gallup
How should we frame our arguments in response to a meme that paints every single prominent socialist and socialist country as fascist without addressing each one?
Really the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim, shouldn't it?
People confuse facism and authoritarianism all the time, and people respond to this as if they've never figured this out.
So instead of anything productive these threads churn out:
Vs
You at least don't seem vitriolic so I'm gonna link you a 2 minute music video that addresses exactly this concern
Thanks for sharing, believe it or not I am a communist myself and I agree with most of what the video said. I just don't see how communism can ever emerge from authoritarianism, because if the defence against imperialism is authoritarianism are we not still dancing to the imperialist tune?
Comunism can only emerge from authoritarianism, by definition, because every single class society is authoritarian, and thus every state is. And as Engels noticed, revolution is the most authoritarian thing that is.
Imperialism is not the same as authoritarianism. To know what we mean by "imperialism" read Lenin's "Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism".
And you might noticed how authoritarianism in my first sentence is used incredibly wide, it's not a mistake, it's one of those terms that have no useful meaning, it wasn't even useful to start with, and especially not when it went through the liberal media and social media mill which had tendency to either purposefully or acidentally (or both) twist definitions to the point they are unrecognizable. Therefore to broadly talk about "authoritarianism" is meaningless, that word is unhelpful as definition and can be used at most as the cliche to deflect discussion (and note it's been used in this thread in this characer extensively by liberals who sure as hell aren't opposing it because they support authoritarian societies as well).
True communism is stateless, so how can this emerge from authoritarianism?
We could use the word oppressive or repressive if you prefer?
I agree, liberals are as bad as tankies for justifying their repressive ideology
Because history and society exist? States exist? Regardless if you are for transitional socialist state or you are some kind of utopist wanting to implement instant communism on a press of a button, that communist society will be necessarily build on a base of the current one.
What lack of dialectic materialism does to a mfer.
So how do you envisage communism arising from a socialist state which represses its citizens?
You do always discuss by asking questions this loaded? Especially after making completely outlandish claim that new society can't be build on base of the old one? Not even posadists went that far, that sounds more like some apocalypse preaching.
We don't ignore it when a socialist country takes security measures, we say they're an unfortunate reality of steps a country has to take in order to defend itself against external and internal aggression. Having your country go socialist earns you a lot of enemies and having a lot of enemies means you have to build up things like intelligence agencies, military apparatuses, and centralized agencies for combating sabotage and spying. These are things every country does, but western nations like to paint the security measures that socialist nations take as purely authoritarian, or needlessly tyrannical, or whatever other word gets thrown around. The nations yelling at socialist countries to change their domestic policies are usually the most imperialist and have the most to gain from socialist states being dismantled.
When your enemies are the global capitalists who operate global finance and industry, you should probably build up something to defend against it. Nukes tend to work as a deterrent, but they only go so far when you've also got an internal population that can present a security problem.
China's taken the smartest strategy of all honestly. They've intertwined their economy with the imperial powers to the point it's impossible to disentangle. The west can't take violent action against China, since that's where the industry is.
Also, so called authoritarian measures against our enemies are a good thing. It's good when fascists, racists, and imperialists lose civil liberties like the freedom to express themselves, organize, fund politicians, or operate businesses.
Do you think that we will see true communism ever arise from authoritarianism? I don't think that is possible.
I think that authoritarianism is a lot more palatable to the imperialists than actual communism would be, I worry that, quite apart from it being wrong to curtail civil rights, by being authoritarian a socialist state is simply dancing to the tune of the imperialists.
I don't think I'm comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don't have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Personally I don't believe the term authoritarianism is a useful description of anything. It's too vague. I've seen one definition that's like "a system that rejects the involvement of certain groups or interests from the political process." Well that would be all socialist nations by default, since socialist countries by definition have denied political representation for the capitalist class in some way.
A better question is: How is a socialist country supposed to defend itself? It may not be possible for a country to achieve what Marx called upper-phase communism. It may not be possible for money, states, and all property to be abolished. That's a question for the future. But when a country tries to curtail the power of capitalists, even attempts to create what's known as true communism, they find themselves on the receiving end of an entire world against them. Sanctions, invasions, sabotage, spying. The shape that a socialist country will take is the result of its conditions. We're living in a world dominated by capital and socialist countries represent a resistance against capital. If socialist movements are threatened, they either defend themselves or collapse.
You're right that countries are dancing to the imperialists, because the imperialists hold the most power right now. That's why an anti-imperialist movement is important, why a multi-polar world is important. Once the threat of imperialism subsides or is defeated, then I'm going to guess socialist countries will begin to express their policies differently.
Is there any society that isn't this? A central authority deciding how to distribute rights is a governing body.
Socialism is a movement about denying the right of property to capitalists. That's the entire purpose of the movement, to elevate working class people to the point of dominating society and to restrain or abolish the capitalist class. Landlords and capitalists shouldn't be able to exercise the same rights they have in a liberal capitalist nation. Fascists, racists, transphobes, imperialists, etc shouldn't have any civil liberties and should be subject to arrest, reeducation, or worse.
Thanks for the detailed response, you've given me a lot to think about.
It's hard to challenge my opinions because I'm cool as hell and I exude a pleasant aroma
If their post is short, accuse them of not engaging properly.
If their post is long, accuse them of gish gallop.
Said no one. Except you. You either know what a Gish gallop is, or you don't. A long comment is not necessarily a Gish gallop. In this case the charge is entirely accurate.
Oh spare me, we both know full well that there was no long comment they could have posted that wouldn't have been called gish gallop.
As if it's somehow impossible to make a long comment in support of a single argument? As if Gish galloping comments don't actually exist? Do I follow your logic properly? What part about this do I not understand?
Accusations of gish gallop are almost always just a bad faith way of dismissing an argument without bothering to address it.
What argument? 20+ arguments were made. Which one am I meant to address?
If I focus on one you'll jump on me for not addressing the 19 others, which is why it's a bullshit tactic.
Their argument was that so called Western socialists are mostly just Western chauvinists who make their determination on what movements are "real socialists" based on how closely they align, racially and culturally, to the West.
There, that's their argument.
Warning: this is a hexbear user
Warning: 🚨 ⚠️ Hexbearian detected! Everyone, into the posting bunkers!
But is warning morally justified?
Yes, because engaging with hexbears is a waste of time. They are not here in good faith. Either that or they don't know any better, which in practice amounts to the same thing.
My post was an inside joke based on that users previous posts on our instance.
Have you engaged with a hexbear in good faith?
That's a fair question and in all honesty the answer is no, because based on what I can easily see and understand of hexbears, they aren't intellectually serious people and to the contrary are more akin to a kind of 4-chan trolling community than anything worth actual intellectual engagement.
I could be wrong, but so far I have yet to see any evidence as such.
So you wouldn't engage with any of us in good faith, because you've decided that we aren't capable of that
Yes. That's correct.
I choose not to waste my time. What do you do when dealing with bad-faith actors?
I just think it's strange to think that people you've never engaged in good faith aren't capable of it.
That's precisely the point. These guys have a toolbox of fallacious arguments and techniques that they regularly trot out. The Gish gallop is one of them. Another, that you see being put to wide use in this thread, is redefining words and terms to fit their narrative.