Remember when the left was all about saying that liberals would ally with fascists against them, when it turns out that, thanks to antisemitism, they're allying with fascists against everyone?

I think these two should work with Musk (who they probably love now) and be on the first mission to mars.

And that whole "the liberals always ally with the fascists!" thing? Straight up Soviet propaganda. See the thing about the ideologies derived from Marx's writings is that Marx had a deterministic and very simplified view of history that allowed him to make predictions about how the future would play out. And the ideologies based on his writings, take his analysis of history and his predictions as truth, and see the truth of his views, and their own ideology, as confirmed or refuted by those prediction's coming true or failing to. but actually, when his predictions don't come to pass, because he did not actually have a crystal ball, instead of really seeing their ideologies as refuted, they come up with reasons why the prediction was right, and the works just got gummed up for some reason.

And one of those times was that according to the Soviet reading of Marx, the Weinmar Republic was supposed to have a glorious Communist revolution at exactly the moment it instead fell to the Nazis.

So Soviet academics after World War II came up with the justification that the German liberals used fascism to stop the revolution and therefore betrayed the revolution, and underneath their fake liberalism, they're really just fascists, and all they really care about is capitalistic greed and keeping the proletariat down. This had the lovely side effect of being very useful to paint the US led Cold War "free world" as all secretly fascist and just like Hitler.

The tragic irony is that the exact opposite happened from what the Soviet academics claimed. In the years leading up to the rise of the Nazis, the Marxist political associations had splintered into two groups, a liberal wing that was pro-democracy and sought electoral success in the new Weinmar government, and a wing that was still holding out for a glorious Communist revolution that would sweep all aside, and leave them in power. This split was deeply acrimonious, and the more radical wing especially saw the pro-liberal democracy wing as traitors and sellouts. They felt even angrier when that pro-liberal democracy wing actually did achieve quite a bit of electoral success. The revolutionary wing did not achieve electoral success, but they did have street gangs and a sense of grievance and moral purity, so who were the real winners?

But then came the depression and the resurgent Right, and a rise in street violence, and the pro-democracy faction found themselves alone, trying to hold the state together. And when pro-democracy politicians reached out to the Communists, the Communists laughed at them and refused to help. They didn't care about democracy, or preserving it, and these right wing movements, especially the Nazis, looked a lot like the proletarian revolution they were waiting for. So almost all of the communists either stood back or outright allied themselves with the Nazis, and even joined the party, in the hopes that they would guide this revolutionary movement into being the proper Communist revolution they were certain it would become.

And then once Hitler was firmly in power, he purged them from the ranks and had them arrested and/or killed, along with the liberals who tried to warn them.

And it's happening again. The same people who kept insisting that "scratch a liberal, find a fascist," and "the liberals always side with the fascists to betray the revolution", are cheerfully sitting back as the liberals try to hold a democratic government together, and falling all over themselves to welcome our new fascist overlords.

Reminder that ocasio-cortez and bernie sanders, the faces of the "progressive left" movement, launched their last speech tour (March 2025) with an interview with piker up there. He was their very first pick to speak to.

Apparently all it takes for a neonazi to pass as a leftist these days is to say he also hates Jews, cough, sorry, Zionists. Then the leftists welcome him with open arms and throw away any and all principles they claimed to stand for.

Just now saw a post on here that was talking about how liberalism and fascism are two ends of a spectrum and only differed in how overtly the state employed its violence to oppress dissidents. And buddy. If you think Marxist states refrain from using state violence to oppress dissidents. Then you maybe aren’t all that bright.

@cardassiangoodreads The idea that America has always been all of these things also is a thing that seems to be lost to the nihilists too. There's been resistance to racism in America as long as there has been racism. That resistance is every bit as much "who we are." (I also think the "who we are" comment is making a more specific statement that these people don't understand. Like when your country is founded on democratic ideals, even if it's long been imperfect at implementing those, it's fair to use that to talk about how the people claiming to "uphold" that are actually in conflict with those ideals! It's fair to say that fully living up to those ideals means creating something better than what has historically been given to us.)

I muted this post right after I made it and still haven't looked into the notes (lol) so I only just saw your reply now, but yes! There have been Americans fighting against racism as long as there have been Americans! The abolitionist movement and Civil Rights Movement are key components to this country's history. Fighting against oppression? That's part of America, too, and it's a disservice to everyone from previous generations who fought for civil rights to say otherwise. The history of America has been a constant struggle to achieve that more perfect union.

And yeah, just on a basic level, people who get really mad at "this isn't who we are" are just missing the point. America is an idea, an idea of a nation that values equality with "liberty and justice for all", etc., etc., and like you said, it's legitimate to point out when politicians are acting in direct opposition to those founding principles. When people say that hatred is un-American, they're not necessarily ignoring America's hate-filled past, but saying hatred is antithetical to the founding principles that the country should be living up to. Like, idk, I never had a hard time understanding this lol, but people do, and as I mentioned in the original post, they seem to either be unaware or unconcerned with the fact that "hatred isn't who we are" is just much more appealing rhetoric to the average person than "everything has always sucked shit and nothing will get better and America must burn in a holy fire--"

Hey, turns out, if you treat everything positive that anybody might say about the United States as propaganda from the imperial core, then the only things you tend to believe about the Untied Snakes is the violent shit we’ve done, potentially distorted by propaganda from other countries.

And then their whole plan to solve everything is to burn everything down and survive in the ashes as a network of Rugged Mutual Aid Networks of balcony container gardens and bathroom insulin stills, apparently based on the notion that if this pill you’re charged an arm and a leg for costs pennies to produce, that means it can be cooked up in the bathroom sink.

obligatory reblog of this after I forgot to bookmark them (again)

Holy fuck you illegally downloaded a cardigan

Dang. The skill needed to know how to use all of those machines, the vision, the planning. Wowzers.

Got a hole in your cardigan? The fix is simple! First, bust out your portable Jacquard loom …

I found a guy on YouTube with a series of videos about “I FORCED myself to play these super old games!” like … Oblivion and Fallout 3.

He complained about getting lost in the DC Metro system “forever … about ten minutes” and I was like, my dude, do you realize that containers … hold things? Do you poke? Do you peer? Do you pry? I can spend waaaaay more than ten minutes in the DC Metro and by the end of it I have hundreds of caps, dozens of bullets and all the bent tin cans I can carry!

Also maybe play something from the 90s if you’re wanting “super old” ?

there's a phenomenon i've observed wherein a person stews in their own misery, hopelessness, anger, fear, to the point that they can no longer fathom that something might exist outside of that, and so they reject any effort to improve their situation because they no longer believe it can be improved.

i am not blaming the people who are in this place. it's a terrifying, dark place to be in, and when you're there it really does feel like it's the only thing that exists. this is the place where people kill themselves.

i think, though, that this phenomenon, scaled up to apply to politics and activism, undergirds so much of what we see from the left now -- the world is dark and terrifying, and in the 24-hour news cycle, social media doomscrolling era we live in it's so so easy to only see the bad, and when you surround yourself with other scared, overwhelmed people, it can form a sort of 2014-tumblr-depression-tag echo chamber where that hopelessness is glorified and lauded and propped up as Correct And Enlightened.

and then they commit hate crimes about it and my sympathy shuts all the way off.

Boosting signal