purpleworm

That's not what entryism means, but it's similar in its pathological aversion to confrontation. Why not just suggest Parenti? He's got some nice, accessible polemics, and also a lot of his material is in talks, so you're more likely to get a young person to engage with it (though I guess you didn't mention the demo).

Are you going to get killed or fired if the person you are talking to discovers you to be a communist? If not, then hiding it is probably counter-productive if you're still advocating for your positions. You don't need to shout in people's faces demanding that they acknowledge the efficacy of Mao's land reform, but actively hiding behind lib academics is just silly.

I don't think this is very different from radlibs in general. By some defintions of communist, you can easily get most of them to agree to the label, but they still behave how you say. I think it's question-begging to call most of the states you have in mind "AES," but the lines of objection radlibs raise to such states are usually incoherent (and at best deeply hypocritical), and they will oscillate between talking like an anarchist and a neoliberal point to point based on rhetorical convenience, because they love the language and aesthetic of radicalism but all they believe in is the lifestyle of being a person who knows better while protecting their own comfort. At least, that's my experience.

All of non-hobbyist Reddit (and a lot of hobbyist Reddit) is a struggle to make your preferred political view apolitical and ban the other ones for being political

I only caught that one because a certain "not a Republican" MAGA rapper made a whole song called "Daddy's Home." I went and rewatched it and remembered why I hadn't done so before, which is that it's just unbelievably lame but not even in an interesting way. There's an industry of Republican media people whose whole schtick is going "nyeh!" at a camera attacking libs, but it's not for liberals to watch, it's for reactionaries to fantasize about shit talking liberals, like a post-hoc shower argument but someone else is doing the arguing for you to the liberal who isn't there. There's no point in seeing it more than once because it's all just this weird pathology of affecting not caring what anyone thinks while being extremely concerned with people thinking that you don't care what anyone thinks.

I suppose that a lot of media is like that, to be fair, but at least chapo makes some effort to come up with jokes or draw broader conclusions instead of just talking about le tears.

Either this is a lie or Colbert's brain is fried, because he was wording it in the same loaded "does the state of Israel have a right to exist?" with zero critical engagement. Colbert was indistinguishable from whatever typical zio could ask that question except for his affectation of empathy to Mamdani. If that's what being an ally is, then it's indistinguishable from being an enemy who has a trace of good faith.

Don't you see? His speech there lives on!

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

He's just relaying its content by way of demonstration now.

You can see people use the term that way if you put it into a search engine. I was just noting that specific word because the person I was responding to proposed it as a hypothetical nonsense word while they were misunderstanding what Islamism was.

This person is a horrible, orientalizing racist, but "Islamism" in this context is basically a shorthand for "Islamic theocracy," isn't not just a confused way of saying "Muslim."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism

So ISIS, for example, are extremely Islamist, and the Taliban are as well. That is much less true of the overall factions opposing Israel in relation to the genocide, though they will inevitably have members and segments who are straightforwardly Islamist (as you have in most militant movements with mostly-very-religious membership).

("Christianism" is sometimes used in the corresponding way, though it has other terms like christo-fascism or Catholicism to refer to it by depending on the specifics).

The symmetry of conspiracy theories is always really interesting to me, like how both Western and Russian conservatives say that queerness existing in society is basically a psychological warfare weapon being inflicted upon them by the other side. Whether the Brits control China or China controls the Brits is just a matter of which group your audience hates more.

It's almost refreshing to see them suggest that communism is mostly not racist.

What I mentioned is not an exhaustive list, but in terms of specific political movements, those are the two stories that I see most often, the "betrayal" of the Spanish anarchists (and Trots) who thought that a civil war with fascists was a good time for a revolution and therefore sabotaged their liberal allies (the Spanish Republicans, who the Communists were working with), and the betrayal of the Makhnovists who had genuinely been engaging in banditry on Bolshevik-controlled cities because, despite being very militarily effective, they (the Makhnovists) were not economically self-sufficient or really productive at all, and that's before you factor in having maybe their whimsical monetary policy, because the root issue had more to do with relations of production.

I'm not going to pretend to you that anarchists have never been wronged by communists, whether in Spain, Russia, or elsewhere, but the specific examples that I usually see are instances where it would be more accurate to call the anarchists the "traitors," but the communist retaliation is framed as the first shot. I am quite confident that you can go through the history of the Red Terror, of the post-Cultural Revolution crackdowns (and I mean under both Mao and Deng) and find much more genuine misdeeds, I'm just less familiar with these because they aren't thrown in front of my face all the time like the stories I mentioned.

It should also be mentioned that even though I think Mao ended his career with some of the gravest betrayals of a political project that I have ever heard of, he and the CPC had facilitated various anarchist and anarchist-like projects from the interwar period until the unofficial end of the Cultural Revolution, and there wasn't zero communist interference, but generally they had neutral or supportive relationships (with some communist factions being much more hostile, one going as far as assassinating a KPAM leader) until various factors (Japanese aggression, poor construction, etc.) caused them to fail. That and Mao's crackdown ending the CR was mainly to stop country-wide gang violence, meanwhile the more substantial anarchist-like projects like the Shanghai People's Commune were dissolved in a more orderly fashion as they didn't perform as well as hoped and were deemed effectively to be left-deviationist.

Anyway, I wouldn't ascribe a "level of historical knowledge" to myself, I just know some stories, and the accusations led me to read a bunch of different anarchist (and Trot) accounts until eventually I found bitter anarchists who nonetheless admitted to things like the Spanish anarchists sabotaging the Republicans. I encourage you to look up things on your own and treat what I have to say like a Wikipedia article, as mainly being a basis for further research at most. If someone would like to offer corrections, I am happy to hear them.

My real thesis is that these myths of aggrievement are just the Red Scare as processed by, well, another group of people who don't seem to have more nuance in their accounts than the neoliberals and are therefore happy to have the same boogeymen following roughly the same logic. Besides the blatant revisionism, I'd respect it a lot more if the people in question were just more upfront about the fact that the substantial divide (where there is one, and that really depends on the anarchist) is about democracy vs autonomy, where the communists demand the continuous advancement of the former and anarchists the latter, and these two things are inevitably at odds.

It's like the newest level of

"This is hurting your cause" -- person who hates you and your cause.

And it really shows how Klein doesn't believe in anything but drama.