I usually go with the “cancel culture doesn’t exist” argument on the basis that experiencing social repercussions for saying or doing something publicly that most people find detestable is not a new thing and should not be at all surprising.
have yet to personally meet someone who thinks R Kelly and Harvey Weinstein shouldn’t have been canceled
There are always the obvious missteps in choosing who to cancel (Ken Jennings and Garrison Keillor should not have been canceled, for example), but most people had it coming. The world is undeniably a better place if some creep like Bill Cosby can’t get a “they want to silence me” Netflix stand up routine.
Or, the current enforcers of “cancel culture” are HR/PR departments at major corporations, so of course their decisions are arbitrary and divorced from actual arguments activists are making. We need to distinguish between the need for social revolution against racism, patriarchy, etc which most people agree with, and shit like Hulu removing the dungeons and dragons episode of community which literally no one asked for
Defending Stalin.
EDIT: You all make great points, but I try not to fuck with Great Man Theory.
Seriously depends on the context, and what you mean by defending. “The Soviets are the reason WW2 was won” and “Churchill was awful but doesn’t get nearly as much scrutiny” are more lib-friendly defenses, for instance.
Also the fact that more or less all the world leaders of the western countries were massive Nazi sympathizers.
Nah, that is a hill we have to die on. Iberals care about that kind of thing. We have to say “stalin did nothing wrong”, so they instinctively compromise with us and end up at “comunism can do good stuff”
This is actually the power move because it:
- Forces them to reconcile what they “know” about Stalin with what actually happened.
- Allows you to show that the body count for famine should be applied to capitalists and not Stalin
- Shifts the conversation out of intangible “he was bad and mean” to “what would you have done here”
Remind them: Those “peasants” that “Stalin killed” were setting their own crops on fire to deny their countrymen food.
Eh, it needs to be addressed eventually (and we definitely shouldn’t be feeding into the myths), but I do think it shouldn’t be frontloaded. Definitely off-putting and the people treating it like the most important thing, like it needs to be front and center at all times, are very disconnected from where most people are at.
70% good, 30% bad. That’s the official Chinese stance on Stalin and it’s a great way to get libs to think more critically about him. The guy made mistakes and he even acknowledged some of them (“dizzy with success” for example) but still lead the Soviet Union to great victory and successful economic industrialization. In Russia and former USSR he is far more often remembered and appreciated for these things than the times he had his political rivals shot or ate all the grain.
After Stalin’s death Khrushchev dumped literally everything wrong with the USSR on to Stalin for political gain (bruh you were literally First Secretary of Ukraine I think you would also bare some responsibility) and finally people are starting to recognize that it was just a heated Corn Lord Moment and his claims should not be taken seriously.
when they bring up the gazillion death by communism ,… they mostly argue the Number not the Narrative…
better would be " its wierd how famineis the communist fault , but never the Capitalists that blockade them "
Honestly though…isn’t that the conversation you want to have? I know its an absolutely exhausting one to deal with but that really does cut to the heart of everything and especially now in our current era in a way I think people can kinda see almost day to day.
“Capitalism is an economic system, but communism is also a political system.”
“If capitalism has nothing to do with our political system then why is everyone so concerned with campaign finance in elections? Why are people so concerned with corporate bailouts?”
Even better, if capitalism is not political then how come capitalist governments keep interfering with and invading/couping communist countries?
Prison abolition/Police abolition/defunding the police.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an argument that goes into what happens after abolition. Like are we aiming for the Scandinavian model of prisons, community policing, or what? When you say abolition and don’t offer any concrete solutions people will end up voting for the former cop in NYC.
The best proposal I’ve heard argues for splitting up the role of police into two parts, one of which is emergency response, and one of which is violence work- doing violence on people who are an imminent threat to others.
The emergency response would be more like a cross between handymen and social workers. Programs like CAHOOTS in Eugene, OR are already remarkably successful at relieving the police force of 50% of their calls.
Violence workers shouldn’t come out until someone is threatening another person’s life. And they shouldn’t be the first line of response; no one should just be able to basically SWAT somebody else. The lesson from the death penalty should be better internalized: if it is wrong for individuals to kill, it is wrong for the state to kill, unless the threat is severe and persistent.
There’s a video from England of an erratic person brandishing a long knife, and the police draw him into a sort of impasse until they get a delivery of riot shields and knock him to the ground and box him in. That is exactly how it should end, with the dangerous person disarmed and no one hurt.
there’s resources for this but we can’t write 18 paragraphs on every goddamn sign
and libs refuse to read anyway
we dont scrap ‘down with capitalism’ because people are baffled at how a noncapitalist society functions, we shouldn’t capitulate on this either
Make it obligatory community policing service everyone has to do one month a year, unless they fucked up last time, then they have to clean the sewers. Easy
any participation on a policing force (even good post win of communism community policing) should require months and months (years probably) or experience and training , psychological and background investigation. Having random people doing for an arbitrary amount of time every arbitrary amount of time (unless they fucked up last time oopsie lol) sounds like a recipe for disaster on so many levels
Labor theory of value. It’s true, but you have to already accept a ton of premises that most people don’t by default for it to make sense. Trying to convince someone “this is a more useful way to count value” is such a massive, complex thing with so many moving parts that it’s pointless to talk about it as an argument. It is only useful to talk about as educating someone about it.
It’s easier to make it a solid argument if you frame it as the opportunity cost that underlies the concept of supply. Liberal economics starts out with supply and demand but really doesn’t ground these concepts in anything more concrete and fundamental.
It’s also easier if you say that economics should work rationally and objectively. Liberal economics is filled with subjectivities from bottom to top. If you can say "it costs 20 glass beads because it cost me 2.0 hours to produce, you have a much stronger argument than “Because I say so” or “Because I want it that way”.
But the liberal conception of economics makes more sense in the short term, on a small scale. Like, sure I can say my 20 glass beads should cost this much, but the reality is I’m never gonna sell them for that much. How much I can sell them for appears to have little to nothing to do with the labor value or anything like that.
It’s only when you get onto the larger scale of where value is created and moves, and you see the long term effects of some kinds of investment vs others to separate real and fake value that the flaws show up in a way that can’t be dismissed.
The difference between the labor and marginal theory of value goes through so much abstract stuff before you can loop it back to daily life that it feels theoretical compared to a lot of easier to talk about things. Like, for instance, how the bourgeoisie may not always have physical power of violence over you, but whenever it comes down to a sacrifice needing to be made, they choose to sacrifice you, and you can’t do anything about it when you play along the way they want you to.
I think you have to be sure to approach it from a philosophical style of discussion rather than a microeconomic approach, otherwise you end up at “mudpies” or “working slow doesn’t make something worth more”. It also requires separating value from price though, which is pretty ingrained in us at this point. If your house appreciates 200%, with no labour input, is it providing more value?
I’m using glass beads as a money-commodity because it’s easier to imagine them as something independent of inflation. Maybe I should have said “it costs 2 liters of 80-proof vodka”, that is something that I think is more viable as a medium of exchange.
If you think a market should be objective and fair, there should be a set of rules that applies consistently to everyone about how much something should cost. Denying the prerogative of being objective and fair means accepting that the market is a medium of tyranny.
