askchapo

Yeah. Listening to JD Vance of all people talk eloquently and with a populist message about the east Palestine train derailment really took me by surprise. The guy - our future far right VP - sounded like Bernie sanders.

I think the political parties are doing a really weird shift and most people haven’t caught on yet.

If your "strongly held belief" can't survive scrutiny or contact with intelligent argumentation it doesn't deserve to be a "strongly held belief."

Regularly examining your own assumptions and attacking your own point of view will not only help you better solve real problems, it will allow you to better recognize and answer specious arguments as they arise.

i recall C. Derick Varn making a similar point and it's mostly true. that's why i'm personally annoyed when people still do the "right-wingers are stupid" bit

I was watching a China special on teleSUR a couple of nights ago and got my first taste of Dugin. I honestly have no idea why he was a part of it. He didn't even talk about China, but was harping on about how all of Africa must unite to struggle against American imperialism. He didn't put forth a single idea regarding how that can be achieved. As if all of Africa is some monolith. And this nonsense was immediately preceded by a pretty good Radhika Desai lecture. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

There's a not uncommon tendency among leftists, and especially MLs where they want to consume the "right" kind of information, as though reading anything that isn't the most pure, anti-imperialist, regionally specific Chinese news paper will taint them with liberalism.

No baby girl, you need to read liberal, reactionary, and other leftist sources in earnest, with a principled Marxist analysis, and genuinely understand them.

Tbh, I think this tendency is a manifestation of the western left's pseudo-Christian purity obsession.

Marx and Engels clarified many of their ideas through their critical readings and polemics.

I can’t recall where — I think a preface to one of Marx’s works — Engels describes how the publishing of the work was not important in the end; that the important thing was the clarification of their own ideas through the effort of refuting their opponents. I think it was against Proudhon or Stirner… can’t remember…

Maybe I’ve just not read the “correct” stuff, but I’ve largely found fascist propaganda to be incoherent and a waste of time.

I think also whispers Hayek did actually have some valid critiques of managed economies. I believe there are solutions to these problems tbc, but you can't just hand-wave the critique, even if he was an evil pos.

I don't think I've ever personally conversed with a right winger who has actually engaged with 'the good stuff' from the Right tradition however, so it's important to understand that the cultural impact of this stuff is negligible compared to e.g. Rand

There is a podcast that tackles this very subject.

The Black and Red Book Review

Highly recommend, though production quality is not exactly great.