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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • There are a few things to consider:

    Mao’s paper tiger

    The average lifespan of an empire is 250 years

    That the situation has always been desperate and hopeless, perhaps moreso in periods of history than it is today. We can look to the battle of Stalingrad or the Long March or the period around the October Revolution as examples of just how desperate things have been and how we have been able to prevail against all odds. Heck, Lenin didn’t expect to see the revolution in his lifetime and then in a few short years he ended up leading it.

    I’m not going to go into depth on this because I don’t have the focus rn but ultimately this is a question of having a world to win and daring to invent the future. We have two propositions:

    • We are in a hopeless situation with no potential for achieving revolution
    • We are in a situation which has potential for achieving a revolution

    The importance of revolutionary optimism cannot be overstated. (There are some good video essays out there on this topic.)

    Ultimately, the choice is between an attitude of defeatism or revolutionary optimism. If we choose defeatism then we foreclose on the potential for revolution because, if an opportunity for revolution exists, we will not be in a position to seize it.

    If we choose revolutionary optimism, on the other hand, we have the ability to seize the opportunity.

    We cannot allow ourselves to foreclose on the opportunity for revolution because we will only ever know if something is possible by striving for it and, in achieving it, proving that it is in fact possible retrospectively.





  • I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.

    The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.

    You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren’t going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn’t done in service of fascism 99% of the time.

    And on that matter, don’t let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn’t used by Nazis and isn’t representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:

    https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4