Ask the hundreds of millions of corpses in Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Grenada, Iran, etc, etc. if they think liberalism ‘won’t actually try to kill them’ if they have an opinion that isn’t aligned with capitalist interests.

Yeah, sorry, I’m gonna pass. Like I told the guy above, I’m sure whatever definition of Liberalism you use fits whatever point you’re trying to make, but unless you have a specific point to make, I’m not going through all of these countries’ histories in search of how “liberalism” has led to hundreds of millions of corpses. Especially because I see Brazil in that list and I’m familiar enough with its history to bet your definition of “liberalism” is actually fascism, so I’d rather not bite.

’Tankie’ is literally the word your sect uses to describe Marxist Leninists

I don’t use tankie to describe marxist leninists. I’ve made that very clear in my comment above. Like the person above, you seem to be trying to mix concepts in order to attack points I haven’t made. I also wonder what sect you think I’m a part of. I’d ask you to at least pretend you’re arguing in good faith and, if you truly want to argue, argue against the points I’ve made, not the strawman you’ve made up in your mind. Thought that would probably mean veering off the pre-approved script.

Such as? By the way worker’s rights and socialism cannot be attained simply by voting

The communist party in my country is very fond of aligning with the new far right party when it comes to women’s right - which aren’t an issue according to the communist leader, as only workers’ rights are a true issue - and minority rights in general. It was a bit surprising to some when they decided to walk that path, but I guess we should’ve known.

As for workers’ rights, a combination of voting, strikes and protests have worked fairly well for my country’s history. A lot of unions in the past 20 or so years have steered away from the communist party, given their alleged attempts at suppression, and have become independent. The communist party has been continually losing votes as it clings to fringe topics such as the defense of dictatorships and often attacks unions which try to act in a democratic manner and pick leaders among the workers, instead of accepting the outside leaders the Party had decreed.

But what would you propose as an alternative to voting and protesting? Terrorism?

Examples?

I don’t know if you’ve accidentally only cropped part of what you intended to. Do I really need to show you examples of the far right trying to sell the idea that everyone to the left aligns with dictatorships? You can just look up any interview of any far right leader in europe and you’ll probably find your example. Thought I’m confused why you need examples of that.

This isn’t comparable to my Auschwitz comparison, because this picks two unrelated things. The USSR also didn’t genocide millions of Ukrainians.

They are as related as your two picks. The meat of the comparison was simply how you cherry pick a bad thing about the horrible dictatorship you dislike and something good about the horrible dictatorship you like.

I don’t see a difference between Marxist-leninism, “Stalinism” (not a real thing, though sometimes people use the term), and communism. I’m happy to go into the nuts and bolts, if you’d find that interesting. I’ll try to use Marxism-leninism going forward, if that’s easier.

There is a very distinct difference between Marxism, Marxist-leninism, Stalinism, etc. I couldn’t tell you what communism means in the modern world. Just going through a list of communist parties in europe, for example, they all defend such radically different things that even they don’t seem to agree on what communism means. I appreciate your offer to inform me, but unlike most communists, I’ve read Marx’s works. Cool stuff. Shame many modern day communist movements have completely thrown out that whole part about workers’ rights and class struggles and have gone full into adopting far right conspiracies in order to grab hold of the extremist votes as what used to be their main talking points has been normalized as is mostly still defended by movements closer to the center.

If these are the reasons you oppose both fascism and Marxism-leninism, do you oppose Liberalism the same amount?

I don’t oppose Marxism-leninism. Tankies are by definition not marxist. I don’t understand why you keep shifting the conversation to try and mix tankies with actual communists. It’s usually the far right who tries to argue that people who might be favourable to marxist rhetoric are the exact same as people who condone genocides commited by states which defined themselves as “communist”, so it’s extra weird to have to defend this notion from a supposedly marxist-leninist.

As for Liberalism, like with Communism, I don’t really know what it actually means. What americans call Liberalism is practically the opposite of what is described as Liberalism in European politics, which itself is fundamentally different from something like classical liberalism, so you’d have to be more specific. Having said that, none of these groups usually defend genocidal actions, so I don’t “oppose” them in the sense I oppose fascists and stalinists. I might disagree with everything they stand for, depending again on the kind of liberalism we’re talking about, but at least I know they won’t actually try to kill me.

What is your opinion on people “screeching” about the Holocaust, given it happened so long ago?

EDIT: No answer. I’m assuming the user is as in favour of erasing memories of the Holocaust as he is of erasing memories of the genocides commited by Stalin and his supporters.

Almost the entirety of the political spectrum of most democratic countries sits as far away from Trump as it does from tankies. Let’s stop pretending that if I oppose people who pretend that no genocides happened under Stalin I’m suddenly pro-Trump. There’s an entire political spectrum between those two.

“People who built the Volkswagen, people who genocided millions of Ukrainians, what’s the difference?”

Just thought I’d turn your line around. It’s fun to reduce the atrocities of a movement to a good thing they did. Though the OP didn’t even mention communists at all, he mentioned tankies, as in the people who actively deny the atrocities of stalinism and maoism. It’s weird that you’d jump to defending communism.

You’re right that there’s a difference between fascists and tankies/ stalinists. And if this were a discussion in an academic setting, that might actually matter. But in an online discussion about the evils of both, it sort of doesn’t really matter. They both have a track record of authoritarianism and mass genocides, and I don’t get along well with people which defend either.

This is a really well thought out post, cheers. I think your choice is fair in the end, but I also think that it becomes impossible to do this for every word that people decide is racist or offensive to someone.

Especially because it all comes from american internet culture and it’s hard for non americans to keep track. By this point, every few days some word or internet term or even the name of something in everyday life that I thought was perfectly normal is suddenly deemed immoral by american users. English is a secondary language to me, a lot of my knowledge of it comes from internet forums and such which only makes it even harder because I don’t have a deep knowledge of the roots of the language, especially when it comes to slang or “internet terms” I mostly copy what I see. And while my stance used to be the same as yours, that I could just avoid using that word and it wasn’t a big deal, I feel like at some point I started losing track of the list of words and I just gave up.

I remember there being a big fuss around a similar situation in home gardening subreddits because the most common worldwide name of some flower offended someone in the States, and a similar situation in baking communities, and it’s just… I give up. There’s no winning this fight. Someone is bound to be offended by something eventually. If people are refusing to look at context and intent, too bad I guess.

Also, on a side note, I noticed you tagged me while scrolling through the thread, but I didn’t get a notification or anything, I don’t know if tagged users are supposed to be notified? Just as an FYI as you might’ve expected that I would get a notification.

This is a really well thought out post, cheers. I think your choice is fair in the end, but I also think that it becomes impossible to do this for every word that people decide is racist or offensive to someone.

Especially because it all comes from american internet culture and it’s hard for non americans to keep track. By this point, every few days some word or internet term or even the name of something in everyday life that I thought was perfectly normal is suddenly deemed immoral by american users. English is a secondary language to me, a lot of my knowledge of it comes from internet forums and such which only makes it even harder because I don’t have a deep knowledge of the roots of the language, especially when it comes to slang or “internet terms” I mostly copy what I see. And while my stance used to be the same as yours, that I could just avoid using that word and it wasn’t a big deal, I feel like at some point I started losing track of the list of words and I just gave up.

I remember there being a big fuss around a similar situation in home gardening subreddits because the most common worldwide name of some flower offended someone in the States, and a similar situation in baking communities, and it’s just… I give up. There’s no winning this fight. Someone is bound to be offended by something eventually. If people are refusing to look at context and intent, too bad I guess.

Also, on a side note, I noticed you tagged me while scrolling through the thread, but I didn’t get a notification or anything, I don’t know if tagged users are supposed to be notified? Just as an FYI as you might’ve expected that I would get a notification.

Gimp is one of the few FOSS projects with some notoriety outside of tech circles. It, VLC and Linux are possibly the only names I could expect some random person to have heard of. Changing its name would probably torpedo years of work to become seen as a reliable piece of software and send it back to the realm of “software that only people who watch the code repository know about”.

And the whole changing the name to avoid offending someone is a losing battle in the first place. According to this thread, “rice” is potentially racist. I had no idea anyone could find “Gimp” offensive, but apparently they can. By this point, it’s part of american internet culture to be offended and no word is safe from americans turning it into a slur, dog-whistle, etc etc and advocating that everyone else in the world should stop using it.

Being a non-american, I never really liked the term “rice” because it’s not an intuitive term to convey modifying or customizing a system. But I have used it because that’s what the subreddit used to call it. I never thought it might be racist as I never saw anyone use the term in a racist manner - I can’t even understand how it could be racist - outside of this community, rice is just a word for something I eat for most of my meals. But again, I’m not american, so I might be lacking some cultural context - the whole culture war thing kind of escapes me and I’m not up to date on the list of forbidden words.

The images look fine from kbin. Also, this setup looks great. I love setups that look useful and look like something one could actually use everyday and that aren’t only meant to be pretty.

I had no idea this existed, cheers!

No idea honestly, it’s the word that the community used back in the subreddit. I think it is exactly a reference to its use in the car world, though

I’m curious, what distro do you have on your laptop?