Lex of Excel's Miscellaney @lexofexcel - Tumblr Blog

"My family thinks because im a leftist it means im radical but like whats radical about that? I just want everyone to hug, no bad things to happen, free healthcare and be nice to everyone" - the coldest, rudest most judgemental person you know.

darkladynyara

Yeah. This. It's the refusal to acknowledge that the world is messy and complicated, that tradeoffs are a thing, and that people can disagree in good faith. Because only a Bad Person could possibly disagree with "healthcare and hugs."

fakenerdboy

I’ll never stop hating the public and the culture for deciding experts don’t need to be listened to anymore. I feel I’ll be lucky if I survive to old age because of what they’ve wrought.

jacensolodjo

Some of y'all like communism a little too much and act too much like it's communism or else you're a big ol' conservative republican who loves capitalism and 'Merica. (P.S. not everything is about the United States of America. No, not even if you dig. Misery can be brought by more than the US of A.)

It's concerning as someone who spends half their time trying to tell children about communist atrocities and wondering how many of them go home and rant about how evil I am for being against communism. Even after knowing/learning communism has killed far more millions than we will ever really fully know because they figured out how to do it a little too well in an age when you just have to toss everything into a fire to get rid of the evidence.

How much generational trauma is still going along the bloodline because of communism. How many victims feel like they have to be silent or else they get dogpiled by children. Telling them they're wrong.

Do you even know who the Khmer Rouge killed? Why?

Do you even know what the Holodomor is?

How many millions of Ukrainians and Cambodians are gone because of communists? Because their ideology literally says to murder en masse? I'm sorry that isn't what you took out of your little commie manual.

How much bigger, fuller, wonderful would life be in dozens of places if not for communism? Communism does not encourage art. It does not encourage writing (except for the machine of communism). It does not care if you are disabled, it will kill you for being useless as a worker. If you think it cares a fucking whit about people like me, you're sadly mistaken.

Queer people are an abomination. They will not/can not produce future workers. They are things to be killed and dumped into pits because they are not proper members of the Party. Some even got forced sterilization just for that extra bit of misery and humiliation.

It is not the amazing, wonderful, loving, caring ideology you take it for.

It cares not for true science. If a scientist disagrees with the Party Scientists, they have to go. Communist Science looks like putting hundreds into the freezing cold. Forcing them to have children. For the sole purpose of making the children immune to the cold. That's not how that works. So many dead for science that isn't real science. Where is your concern for ethics? For humanity? It does not exist in communism.

Communism is not what you think it is. Communism has murdered millions. Communism has hurt the families of people you claim the glory of communism in front of.

Better dead than red? Dead because of Red.

Communism is not 'people of color winning' in South America, in Cuba. In Cambodia. In China. It's people of color dying because of an ideology that should have been stopped in the 1800s.

marsprincess889

People who live in the western world and consider themselves communists/socialists really need to double, triple, quadruple (etc) check what that really means and maybe rethink a couple of times, or maybe learn history better. Abd that's the least that they should do.

exciztence

you are talking about a dictatorship tho…..

jacensolodjo

#I don’t think people learn what communism means anymore#this describes dictatorship

Did you miss the part where I literally teach this? I have spent a good portion of my adult life studying and teaching about communism. And honestly, I don't have much of a choice. I'm nearly 40 years old. Commies murdered millions of Ukrainians. The US has the highest concentration of Ukrs outside of Ukraine for one reason: communism.

I don't need a variant of "it was not real communism" on my posts.

I am 100% describing communist regimes. If it floats like a duck and quacks like a duck. Dictatorship and communist are not mutually exclusive. In many of these places, they went so far left that they touched the far right/authoritarian. But that doesn't mean it wasn't communism first. Communism brought them to that point. Democracy has led to authoritarianism and fascism. Does that mean it wasn't true democracy because of that evolution? Kuzco Emperor's New Groove voice: Let me guess you fully believe China is not communist because -checks notes- they vote*.

Communism cannot be done at a national level. It simply can't. All of their attempts to make it so? Ended in murder. Of millions. But then it seems you glossed over the part where I said communist theory requires mass murder. (And honestly I suspect Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, et al knew that. They knew it requires mass murder and were still fully willing to go ahead. Not that they got to that inevitable mass murder point then truly went "oh shit". But "aww, fuck it. Everyone is already so bloodthirsty anyway, right?" Stalin himself pulled a Scar with the Hyenas in his "Dizzy with Success" but like... he told them to kill so they did. And now he's saying he didn't?)

The ones who don't learn what communism means anymore are the kids with the hammer and sickle in their bios or avatars. Who say shit like they're a "marxist-leninist". And that they can't wait for the revolution to come so they can kill people they incorrectly refer to as the bourgeoise and they say they are proudly anti-intelligentsia.

Please do me a favor and read at least three of the books on this list. Then you tell me whether or not I'm correct in my assessment of what communism "means". Millions are dead and cannot tell you. Only their survivors, if any, can point to communism and say 'that's why my great aunt is dead, that's why my grandpa went to gulag'.

Don't you think... a little bit... that it's wild how everywhere communism has embedded itself, there has been mass murder? You can go "but capitalism--" but again, at the end of the day, it didn't kill millions in the matter of a single year even though they had the means to feed everyone. It didn't kill people for wearing eyeglasses. It did not torture and murder people for the simple 'crime' of 'stealing' a handful of fucking grain. Atrocities exist in the West. But not with the same cause, the same reasoning, as in communism.

Communism is not the goddamn answer to capitalism. It cannot work large scale. Trying to do so is asinine and is telling people who survived other regimes that you didn't learn squat from previous 'experiments'.

The sheer fact that communism has led to a cult of personality single leader system does not mean it wasn't communism. I mean for fuck's sake, proto-communism wanted to completely demolish the idea of privacy whatsoever! But I guess "that's actually authoritarianism".

And at the end of the day? Survivors and their families don't give two shits if you think it "wasn't real communism" or "um actually that's a dictatorship". Because people who proclaimed themselves commies did real damage, real mass murder. They did what they did at the behest of an ideology that looks great on paper but not so much in real life.

Actual communist theory cannot work except in super small communes like a fucking kibbutz.

What's that quote? Something something the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

*This is incredibly simplistic but I think I get the point across.

(Honestly checking my anti communism tag, I basically end up repeating myself over and over. I guess in a way I am also driving myself insane by writing the same thing over and over expecting someone to go 'oh wow, you're right, Mr. Jacensolodjo' this time.)

prince-atom

I remember the tankies on here a couple years ago sincerely passing around the story alleging that recently declassified Stalin era papers revealed that the Holodomor was not a directed event. No one wrote out an order saying "starve Ukraine."

Do, great. The best story you can come up with is that your perfect society doesn't know that you don't eat your seed corn.

Communism. We'll Starve You Through Ignorance.

#tankie punks fuck off #tankies suck #communism sucks

afurioushawk

Horrible news for the people who think I'm a secret Republican

afurioushawk

My theory:

freegazafromhamas

midnightssea

this is such a stupid take and emblematic of a lot of critiques i have of all-or-nothing leftists. god forbid an elected official puts out a respectful professional statement about the death of a colleague, i guess??

I think Lindsey Graham was a terrible person and a disgrace to the senate and I certainly wouldn’t argue that owes him respect. but condemning Democrats essentially for having a sense of public decorum is juvenile, pointless, and weirdly Trumpian.

mini-wrants

Elected officials who are capable of having negative internal thoughts about a person while publicly mourning a coworker’s death for the good of public peace might also be the same people who are able to reach across the aisle and write bills that can be passed by their ideological opposites for the good of the nation.

Stop removing them over stupid shit like an “RIP” tweet.

ragnarokascendant

I disagree.

There is no reaching across the aisle with Republicans and has not been for twenty years. They have committed themselves to refusing to do anything of use. The *only* thing that matters is getting enough Democrats in office to actually pass things.

What we need are people who are, bare minimum, not going to care about some shit-for-brains dying far too late for the amount of harm he did the nation. Every single Dem who thinks Graham *deserves* professionalism given his capitulation to outright fascism is either an idiot or someone who cannot be trusted to consistently uphold rights.

What you want is performative mourning, nothing less. And fuck that, there's better things to do.

mini-wrants

Whether you like it or not, the only reason we got a Covid vaccine as fast as we did was because Democrats in the house (because we had the majority!) passed a huge-as-fuck bill to throw billions of dollars at the problem from every single angle even though Trump would take the credit for signing the bill and put his fucking name on those two checks.

That bill probably saved millions of lives as well as a worldwide economic catastrophe.

Unfortunately, if you want to be a good politician and do good things for your country, sometimes it means giving your public enemies credit for “finding” a vaccine that’s crippling the world. And in order to get into office in the first place to do shit like that, you have to not end up on a Fox News listicle of “every politician who refused to mourn X dead Republican” during a midterm year and see your reputation drop amongst independent voters.

🤷‍♀️

jadwigaspeaks

I think there's a popular perception that "more radical" automatically equals "better" and "less radical" automatically equals "worse"

And a tendency to base one's viewpoints not on any actual values or material outcomes (these will still be invoked as justification, though not consistently), but on status. Being one of the cool kids

And that combination leads people with that perception to 1. be much more amicable towards people with completely opposite views to their own, than towards people with similar but more moderate views than their own, and 2. always try to be the Most Radical person in the room while accusing everyone else in the room of being Less Radical and therefore More Worse

Which is terrible both as a way of enacting actual political change and as a way of getting a friend group that is not technically a cult

free-my-mindd

wyrm-boy

biglawbear

None of the big name "democratic" socialists in Congress or in public are actually democratic socialists. Because they don't believe in democracy.

Whenever they lose in a democratic election, it's not because people didn't like their ideas. It's AIPAC or Jews or the "establishment" or the billionaires or Black people.

These people are authoritarian socialists.

nitpickspot

People lose elections for ONE reason. Because people don't like them. Putting any other reason into the ether makes you anti-democratic unless you have got HARD evidence and a fucking court case backing you up

zaprowsdower27

More particularly, if you put any reason that can be described as 'things people other than me or my opponent did" rather than "things I did not do to appeal to the specific desires of the electorate in question".

If people do not vote for you, you look at your platform and your rhetoric and then you talk to key constituencies to ask what they were looking for and try to adjust platform and rhetoric in a way that answers that need without compromising your principles.

Talk to, not at, people and try to tune your approach to what they want in a candidate, instead of just repeating the same platform and rhetoric that you personally love without any changes ever. Shift which platform plank gets focus. Adjust details. Introduce new platform planks if they don't conflict with your principles. Change your rhetoric to meet people where they are. Respond to changing circumstances and differing priorities and differing problems between core constituencies.

biglawbear

None of the big name "democratic" socialists in Congress or in public are actually democratic socialists. Because they don't believe in democracy.

Whenever they lose in a democratic election, it's not because people didn't like their ideas. It's AIPAC or Jews or the "establishment" or the billionaires or Black people.

These people are authoritarian socialists.

mariacallous

perfectlyvalid49

The problem that I have with the people the DSA is putting forward is that things like compromise and coalition building with people they don't agree with 100% of the time are antithetical to their ideology and the ideologies of the people who vote for them. And they don't understand concepts like harm reduction or many small wins adding up to a big one, so when they show up in congress they are unable to actually DO anything to advance their goals.

And while they're busy not getting anything done, they also shoot all the other Dems in the foot by refusing to cooperate with them, because they're [insert your favorite antisemitic conspiracy theory here]. So not only are they ineffective at ushering in their socialist utopia, they're ALSO making it harder or even preventing other Democrats from being able to pass bills that would help people, even if they're not perfect.

Honestly, I'm at the point where I'd rather vote for a centrist Democrat who is to the right of me on many issues than a leftist who better aligns with my beliefs because the centrist might actually pass a bill or two to make things better, whereas the only part of the leftist's entire platform that is achievable is "I'll fuck over anyone else in congress that can't pass my purity tests, including other Democrats."

pagecommando

I mean this is why I'm not using the term 'centrist' for democrats and I highly encourage using it to describe the DSA. "Centrist" implies someone who is in the middle of the two parties and as they use it, a tacit aid to the GOP.

The Blue Dogs are dead. Even Fetterman is a regular democrat. A whacky one I don't much care for, but he's a Democrat. The DSA/No Bedtime left are in the middle, impossible to please, and more damaging TO the Democrats while helping the GOP agenda BECAUSE they only think Dems have agency and are only spec'd to run insurgent campaigns in sapphire blue districts AGAINST democrats. They're psychos in a cult fandom and they are, functionally centrists, while screaming about "THE AIPAC UNIPARTY" or whatever. Don't believe me? Call any leftist/DSA/Omnicause fan screaming about Jew Democrats a centrist supporting the GOP and see how quickly they start whining

darklynoon-deactivated20170407

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

glorianas

a lot of anti-historian stuff comes across like “i want history to be simple and i am suspicious of people who tell me it’s not” and this is a thing you see from people on any place on the political spectrum

starlight-shadowbanned

a lot of antisemitic stuff is also this

lobstabear

To my 25 - 35 year olds, you've reached the age where people around you are starting to give up on themselves because they think it's too late. Don't let that energy rub off on you. It's not too late.

knittingontheroad

I became a tattoo artist at 49.

Married the love of my life at 50.

Got my Class A CDL at 59.

You've got time.

As long as you're breathing, you've got time.

sluglover666

Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.

darkladynyara

emfrots

"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.

standwithdaanes

In the spring of 1994, the small African nation of Rwanda was engulfed in a maelstrom of violence that saw at least 800,000 Tutsi and modera

I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.

In particular, from that second link:

As we have already seen in this series of articles, Rwanda’s ethnic division between Hutu (around 85 %) and Tutsi (around 14 %) had deep roots in colonial rule. Under Belgian administration, identity cards fixed ethnicity as a rigid category, and the Tutsi minority was favoured for education and government work. After independence in 1962, this hierarchy inverted, and Hutu elites consolidated control. [...] When RTLM launched in July 1993, it combined pop-culture style with extremist ideology. This hybrid made hatred sound normal, even entertaining. Music, jokes, gossip, and death threats co-existed in the same broadcast. [...] RTLM’s language fused entertainment with ideology. It mocked Tutsis as arrogant “cockroaches” (inyenzi), accused them of conspiring to enslave Hutus, and encouraged listeners to “work” to eliminate them—a euphemism for killing. Humour, music, and familiarity disguised the lethal message.

brainscrems

“Anything goes as long as it’s punching up” is also the central tenet of antisemitism. Leftists think Jews are the ultrawhite ruling class, worst of the worst of whiteness, and conservatives think we’re a race secretly controlling the world and pretending to be white as a plot to bring down the white race. People who believe the latter are in charge of the US government rn. The nature of antisemitism is that we serve as a misdirect for the people with real power. Whatever issues you care about, people in power will find a way to blame the Jews. I cannot remember the exact quote or who it’s from, but I will paraphrase it anyways. Depending on who you ask we’re communists, capitalists, nationalists, rootless cosmopolitans, white, least white, liberals, conservatives, fascists, anarchists, or whatever other “existential and powerful” threat one may believe exists. But what we never are to these people is human. We’re the monsters who hurt them and so it’s okay to hurt us. The truth doesn’t matter, of course, because they aren’t actually afraid of us. We’re just a safer and easier target, and the lie that hurting us is dangerous and makes a change is easier than the hard truths and dangers one must face to fight real power. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Because it is not about the truth, but having a comforting lie that you can make positive change through abusing the vulnerable.

starlight-shadowbanned

Another thing that happens is that white American gentiles will speak this way about Israeli Jews, because if a Palestinian said it it would be punching up, and they see themselves on some level as Palestinian because of their allyship.

However, they aren’t actually Palestinian, and they do hold power and privilege over Israeli Jews, by virtue of being white gentiles and by virtue of being American.

Plus maybe some of them believe that US military aid to Israel means that Israelis are oppressing them, I guess.

darkladynyara

Yeah, there's that whole "we don't have healthcare because Israel" nonsense that gets trotted out by people who don't understand numbers. And we also see the claiming of oppression with the collection of "you literally stole that talking point from the Klan" conspiracies that Israel is somehow puppeting the US government. Or the idea that Israel somehow invented police brutality. It's all about justifying violence against a tiny minority as ~resistance~.

imyourbadjew

Jews did not need a state because it was “promised” to us. We needed a state because all your grandparents were happily killing us.

Our ethnic ties to the land influenced the location of our state. But they were not actually the reason that we decided to build one.

forrest-sterling

So is it a racially diverse state where everyone is accepted or is it a Jewish ethnostate? If it protects Jews then why is it constantly provoking retaliation from its neighbors? If it was bad when Jews were rounded up and murdered why is it acceptable when Israeli Jews do it to Gazans?

imyourbadjew

Thanks for asking! Israel is in fact an incredibly diverse country where Jews only make up around 70% of the population and the rest enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens. Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, make up around 20% of the population, which I bet is more than whatever pasty country you’re from. Arab Muslims hold seats in the parliament, there are Arab judges in the highest courts, and the Arab population is disproportionately represented in healthcare (about a quarter of doctors in Israel are Arabs).

The rest of your questions are answered by the fact that our kindly neighbors keep trying to murder us with bombs knives and missiles.

Have a great day!

short-wooloo

"If it protects Jews then why is it constantly provoking retaliation from its neighbors?"

Because it protects Jews

That's it, that's the thing that "provokes" Israel's neighbors into retaliation

the-library-alcove

Israel "provokes" its neighbors in the same way that the Black residents of Tulsa "provoked" the White Supremacists in 1921.

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