The drama is fun for a tiny minority. The rest of us don’t want anything to do with it and think it reflects very poorly on the community to keep pushing this dumb shit to the front page of the forum.
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I forget what your alternative was. A new thread each time for posts like this? I’m not sure how we can avoid this type of thread altogether if we are to be community governed. The discussions are a necessary evil of that type of governance, right?
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What did the mods say when you asked them to ship this whole bad posters thread over to France BBQ? Doesn’t that simple fix address all of your personal concerns?
I know we’ve been through this a bit and people are going to @ me for telling you your history, but it’s pretty wild that you are so anti-working class because a group of middle and upper class intellectual vanguarders passed themselves off as representing the working class and then used their power to oppress that class and then your impression is that the vanguard itself was working class.
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That was microbet’s suggestion and it’s a good one because no one starts threads so if you start one to say somebody sucks, they probably really suck.
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Ok, I’m down for that.
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The term “proletariat” doesn’t have anything to do with education. And given the disparities in education in this country, your interpretation isn’t much more charitable.
The person who actually took power studied law and was the son of someone who studied physics and mathematics and taught at a prestigious school.
Lenin and Trostky were both intellectuals of middle/upper-middle class. They took power, not Stalin. They pushed out the proletariat in 1917-18. They disempowered the working class before Stalin was in power. They broke up or took power from the Soviets. Trotsky led the Red Army to crush working class rebellions. All of this before Stalin.
And Stalin was poor and uneducated, but not really working class. What was his working class job? Was he a factory worker? A farmer? No, he was the criminal class. He was a thug that the vanguard used to keep people in line - and to rob banks and such to raise money for the revolution.
My solution was to simply move it off the front page. And more than a week later Sabo is still pitching a fit over that grave injustice.
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This makes it seem like you are saying Lenin was cool and then Stalin made things bad. Lenin was not cool. He wasn’t a complete psychopath like the guy he had used to rob banks and murder people who tried to eat the wheat they grew instead of sending it all to the cities, but he was not cool at all - and he was not working class.
And the working class had no power at any time after 1918. No one did but the political elite. It was not rule by the working class. It was absolute rule by a political party, an elite, and structurally no different than any kind of rule by a small minority whether you call them aristocracy, capitalists, or party members.
No, he wasn’t. He changed his ideas back and forth repeatedly. He was an opportunist. He purged the idealists.
And he wasn’t stupid either. He was a smart and educated person who thought that smart and educated people should hold all the power. Giving him maximum credit, he thought that smart people should be in power for the benefit of the working class, but that the working class itself should not have power because they were not capable of using it well. Sound familiar?
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Plenty of waiters and waitresses and bartenders and baristas can speak in full sentences.
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We still haven’t solved what to do with a disruptive poster who refuses to stop being disruptive. One complaint about someone’s politics on a political forum seems silly.
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You know what would have stopped that…
The kapos were not in charge of the concentration camps.
I’m going to ask you a second time not to talk down to me like I am a child. This kind of ‘fan fiction’ is 100% inappropriate.
Would you really like me to explain to you like you are a 5yo why what you are sarcastically calling a “grave injustice”, in the context of our aspiration to community, is in fact a "grave injustice. I’ll do that sometime, someplace, anyways… but I don’t think a bad posters thread is the correct venue.
Instead of taking everything so damn personal in such a LOL-tastical manner, how about this…
- I didn’t start this bad posters thread. IDK why you feel it’s ok to personally blame me for that fact. If you want to whine about the existence of a bad poster thread in About… talk to it’s OP: @ g_oreo.
- If this bad posters thread isn’t locked or moved, peeps are going to post into it. That’s just what peeps do. IDK why you feel it’s ok to personally blame me for that fact. But whatever.
- So, the status-quo is we got a bad posters thread in About, and every time some peep posts into it, you just can’t help yourself from whining. IDK why you feel it’s ok to personally blame me for that fact. But whatever.
- So… I’m suggesting… instead of just whining all the time, why don’t you try to fix the problem? Why not lobby the mods, or start a thread of your own in About, to have this one particular bad posters moved or locked?
- Cliffs: Stop being part of the problem, and start being part of a solution.
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It’s the same exact dynamic in a feudal aristocracy. You put people with no legitimate claim to authority and utter dependence on their superiors to even continue living in positions of power and you are assured their loyalty. Whether this power is handed to the town drunk or your 2nd cousin (probably that happened more often than not in Russia too, right?) is irrelevant.
I certainly don’t want kapos, but that system is any hierarchical system and the more concentrated the power, the more that happens. I’m not a communist, totalitarian, statist. The “power to the working class” thing in Russia was propaganda.
What happened to your dad sucked and things like that happened all over the world in places with right-wing dictators imposed by capitalists like Batista or Pinochet or like the Csar. It’s an artifact of concentration of power, not of the specific identity or ideology of the group that holds it.