“A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit [of selflessness], he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.”

Profile picture: Norman Bethune.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 4th, 2023

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  • Valbrandur@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlCapitalists don’t care if we burn
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    2 months ago

    In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

    • Michael Parenti






  • I think this is a bad take. Sure, it is a kids show, but anyone who has a mild amount of knowledge of marxism knows about the concepts of base and superstructure, and the division of the latter into political and civil society described by Gramsci.

    Taking a look at the messages delivered by TV shows and other forms of media lets us see the type of ideological positions that the current mode of production allows, promotes, concedes and forbids at the moment of their production to all or some demographics - Including children and teenagers, whose opinions are the easiest to mold and shape for the future. Whoever thinks media aimed to the youngest sectors of society does not have any political effects has been completely oblivious to the spineless liberalism that Potter-mania has resulted in years later amongst masses of millennial man-children.

    And yes, there are more efficient ways to use your time to spread communism than recording, editing and uploading a 10 min video essay on a children’s cartoon, but so are there better ways than commenting about it on a Cambodian trout fishing forum. Take it easy and do with your life and time whatever you want.


  • I may or not remember a couple of scenes in that season of benders overpowering and bullying non-benders for petty reasons as the only portrayal of that inequality. Correct me if I am wrong though: my brain sometimes erases things for my own sake (such as most of Korra).

    Class conflict doesn’t exist in fantasy settings written by liberals of course, only in the mind of radical looneys. At most you will only have things that can be solved with enough Burny Sandals social democracy. Have you ever heard of Norway?


  • “You see kids, if you replace the bad king with a good king then everything will be okay.”

    Despite its strengths, Avatar has some very weak points in the ideological front. Decolonization is one of them as already addressed here, and in my opinion not as much as you could in the Avatar universe: Republic City, which later becomes the main setting of Korra, originates according to the comics from the oldest colonial remnants of the Fire Nation, which were never returned to the Earth Kingdom because settlers had enough time to form families there and thus that somehow makes decolonization impossible without having a negative outcome: the children of settlers were born in the lands they took, and in the eyes of the writers, that is enough to justify never being returned to its original peoples (extrapolate that message to Palestine, the USA, Canada and so on and you will soon see how this is not good).

    But this sentence I referenced at the beginning is also another point where the Avatar universe fails big time. In the first season of Korra there is a clear reference to a popular movement where, instead of class struggle, you have a movement of non-benders dissatisfied with the societal inequality between benders and non-benders. The way the show has of acknowledging this problem without altering the status quo? Elect a non-bender for president. And when Obama became president, racism was no more.

    But to be fair, Korra is a terrible show overall.







  • I have probably more than one, but my silliest and, at the same time, most annoying one is an object: my wireless earbuds. I cannot put my phone one meter away without losing signal and my music cutting out. Not even carrying it in my pocket works, and at the end of my training session I have lost a ridiculous amount of time trying to get those things to work by turning them on and off again or resetting them. I would buy new ones, but alas, there’s no money for that.