Erika2rsis
I design flags and edit videos about them for fun, for coin, and for glory. Alt account Erika3sis@hexbear.net
she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ | NO/EN/RU/JP
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191·1 year agoA ramble
I’m replying to my own comment to add: I’m barely even joking about this. Which is to say, actually having personal experience of living in a country can be very useful in discussions of it, but we also need to be aware of the limitations of lived experience.
For instance, I live in Norway, and I’ve met people here who didn’t know that they had suffrage in local elections, and who didn’t know the difference between national and local elections. I’ve met autistic people who know nothing about local autistic advocacy, trans people who know nothing about local trans advocacy, and I’ve met more people here who sincerely believe in “plandemic” conspiracy theories than who are even remotely aware of what Norwegian state-owned corporations have done in the global south. These people will go on and on about how “Americans are all idiots!” while simultaneously demonstrating a complete obliviousness to the actual political issues in their own backyards.
So sometimes people just don’t know what they’re talking about, simple as that. Lived experience should be respected, obviously, but it is not absolute nor immune from criticism. There are plenty of things that I’ve learned about the country where I live from people who have never set a foot in it — even things that feel so basic that I’m really embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know them.
And we need to be particularly aware of this effect with regard to those who were children and adolescents in the USSR. Those who turned 18 when the USSR dissolved would be 50 years old now. Those who turned 18 when Stalin died would be 88 years old now. This obviously doesn’t mean that you’ll have no opportunities to chat with people who lived a significant portion of their adult lives in the USSR, I have done this myself… And that guy basically said that living in the USSR was the time of his life. I suspect that this might’ve had something to do with how he was a popular musician in his home republic, and how he was a comparatively young adult in the 1980s. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn how one of his songs was actually a load of anti-evolutionist nonsense, which to me indicated that Soviet censorship was perhaps not as strict as a lot of people say it was… And again, seeing a grainy video cassette rip of this guy on Sukhumi’s Red Bridge pointing to a giant monkey plush like a big ol’ doofus, shows how not everybody in the USSR was the sharpest tool in the shed (sorry, Anzor!)
So if you find some 30-to-50-something year old who says that thon actually lived in the USSR and is therefore qualified to speak about it… Asking for thons lived experiences of the USSR is like asking a zoomer today for sy lived experiences of Dubya and Obama. Not to say that a child’s perspective is worthless, just that it will be a child’s perspective. Meanwhile, ask a 60-or-70-something year old, and chances are pretty good that you’ll get nostalgia goggles of young adulthood. Ask an 80+ year old, and… Where the hell are you gonna find one of those? Especially if you can’t speak Russian, your access to authentic Soviet perspectives is going to be severely limited.
On the other hand, if you ask someone who left the USSR for political reasons for thons experiences, then that’s like asking someone who left the USA for political reasons for thons experiences: you’re gonna hear an overtly negative perspective, and maybe some of that perspective will be useful, but that perspective is also not going to be representative of the majority experience, and it could’ve even been twisted by outside factors (obviously praising your new country is gonna increase your mobility in your new country!). Paul Robeson said of the USSR that being in that country was “the first time [he] felt like a human being”.
So, the best way to be educated about the USSR is through scholarly analysis, which takes into account the lived experiences of a broad range of people as they recounted their lives at the time, and which also considers the factors that the individuals might not have been aware of. We should always be open to hearing people out, obviously, but we also always need to remember that nobody has all the answers — and so sometimes the 14 year old white Yankee really does know her shit better than the guy who actually lived in the country.
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
Honestly, I absolutely already believe that Wikipedia can be highly biased in those ways. The problem is really just with the liberal shaitan who whispers kapitalist propaganda into my ears. I should know better.
I don’t live in the US, but I’ll try to ask around about it anyways. It doesn’t really come up in real-life conversations for me either.
“MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ” — “ALL IS IN THE HANDS OF GOD” — were the words uttered by Juda, leader of the Bikinians, to Commodore Wyatt when asked to exile his own people for the “good of mankind”. It is said that Juda’s words were intended to imply, “It would literally take divine intervention for me to agree to this.”. Nevertheless, the Bikinians would be taken from their homes, and as the ships sailed away, the Bikinians got to watch their many-generations’ houses and boats get burned down by the American soldiers. Many of the Bikinians wouldn’t eat after witnessing that, and they would live in poverty in their new homes.
It’s no wonder, then, that the Bikinian flag looks like a desecrated American flag.
This isn’t to say that Bikini was a more inhumane act than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hearing any recollection by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or seeing any of the artwork that they created to process their experiences, makes that much obvious. But you hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it has a place in the popular imagination, even if it is a heavily sanitized version that portrays the annihilation as “necessary”.
In contrast, when’s the last time you met someone who knew of “Bikini” as anything other than swimwear?
Honestly, I read the above article a few months ago, and I think it is a genuinely good article that I would recommend others read. It was written nine years after Tiananmen by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who was in Beijing during the protests; and the Columbia Journalism Review is a respected publication written by and for professional journalists. So the article is basically just trying to disspell the dumbing down and memeifying and misremembering and making-into-propaganda that happened with Tiananmen, and which honestly tends to happen with any major loss of life. No conspiracy theories, no denialism or claiming that “they had it coming”, just dispelling misconceptions. It’s good stuff.
I can’t speak for Davel’s other comment citing Prolewiki, though — I’m pretty skeptical to any website that tries to be Wikipedia but for X ideology.
In any case, this “butthurt report” feels pretty unfair, although I honestly did kinda roll my eyes at how Davel’s comment said “6 out of 7 ain’t bad”, that was kinda cringe… But basically, what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t fault someone for commenting under a “9/11 NEVER FORGET” post about the extent to which mismanagement and confusion contributed to the death toll of that, and likewise I wouldn’t fault someone for commenting under a Tiananmen Square post with more nuance about that event.
“Was there a massacre in Tiananmen Square?”
—“No.”
“Were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?”
—“…Ermh…”
“Ahem. I am asking you if people were killed in the area immediately surrounding Tiananmen Square, even if nobody was killed in the square itself.”
—“The protesters in Tiananmen Square left after negotiations with the PLA. There was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square.”
“I understand that, but were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?”
—“Nowhere in Beijing were student protestors specifically targeted.”
“Well, were non-students targeted, and were any students injured or killed without being targeted?”
—“Hey did you know that the Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest—”
“Gongchandang, my friend, I am begging you.”
—“…Force may have been used when provoked by attacks.”
“May force have also been used unprovoked? Could it have been that the protesters felt like they were provoked first, because you were sending tanks past the barricades that they’d put up?”
—“I mean… you know… uhh…”
“Gongchandang. Were you scared that the occupation of Beijing and the potential of a workers’ revolt would threaten the survival of socialism in China, by presenting a still-socialist alternative to your rule, because societal division particularly among the less politically literate could be (and was) exploited by outside forces?”
—“OUR YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDA, OK‽ ALSO, TANK MAN DIDN’T GET RUN OVER. SEE. HE WAS PULLED AWAY BY A PASSERBY. NOT RUN OVER.”
Jan Misali’s 2022 Toki Pona language cover of the Symphogear “Beef Stroganoff” song is nearing its 40,000th view on YouTube. Whether this entertaining deconstruction of a beef Stroganoff recipe will reach this milestone of popularity this year or next remains to be seen. “Moku Sutolokanopu” is the most popular song about beef Stroganoff of the 2020s thus far, and the most popular song about beef Stroganoff in the Toki Pona language of all time.
That concludes this year’s big Stroganews. Thank you for your attention.
- United Kingdom (or Liechtenstein, whose anthem uses the same melody)
- United States of America
- Dunno
- People’s Republic of China
- Canada
- Dunno
Hopefully number 3 and 6 will come to me later!
STOP POSTING ABOUT POLITICS. I’M TIRED OF SEEING IT. MY FRIENDS ON LEMMY SEND ME MEMES. ON KBIN IT’S FUCKIN’ MEMES. I WAS ON AN INSTANCE, RIGHT, AND AAAAAAALLLL OF THE COMMUNITIES ARE JUST POLITICS STUFF. I- I SHOWED MY CHAMPION UNDERWEAR TO MY GIRLFRIEND, AND THE LOGO, I LOOKED AT IT, AND I SAID, “HEY BABE, WHEN THE COMMODITY IS FETISHIZED” [ding-ding-dings to the tune of The Internationale] I FUCKIN’ LOOKED AT A TRASH CAN, I SAID, “UNDER CAPITALISM, WASTE PLAYS A VITAL ROLE IN THE ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY THAT UNDERPINS THE ENTIRE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM”. I LOOK AT MY PENIS, I THINK OF THE OMNIPRESENT PHALLOCENTRISM IN OUR PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, AND I GO, “POLITICS? MORE LIKE POLY-DICKS!”
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
“You know, that 1% of annoying radical leftists will drive away the rest of Lemmy’s user base.”
“YES, IT’S BRILLIANT, KATHLEEN, AND FAIR PLAY TO THEM! GREAT LADS!”
Columbo addressing his ancestor, lol
Meanwhile, deaf-blind people:
“What is or isn’t politics is itself a political question” mfers when my politic is that nothing is political, there is only what the Irish call craic
Thoughts on George Habash? —He was a good doctor innit
Thoughts on the GERD? —It’s a marvel of engineering innit
Thoughts on indigenous language education? —I like flicking through the Dakota dictionary sometimes. I don’t understand any of it but yeah
Thoughts on the South China Sea? —yummy fishies there innit
Thoughts on trans people using public restrooms? —I’ll answer your question with another question: why’s it called a “public” restroom when you aren’t shitting out in the open?
Thoughts on the world’s interlocking systems of marginalization, exploitation, and oppression, including the core contradiction between the working and owning class, causing the slow demise of the planet under a world order which can only justify itself through unsustainable constant growth? —Them systems can’t be reformed innit (※this opinion is apolitical because I have declared it to be common sense.)
Honestly? Based. I’ve always thought that the idea of building a car at home sounded kick-ass.
Yyyyyyou have a point.
But at the same time, there are also a lot more people on Lemmy now who came from Reddit and aren’t communists, right? So maybe it isn’t pushing leftwards so much as it’s trying to prevent a push rightwards. Does that sound more correct?
Also, regarding “a material analysis that pig poop balls advances the cause somehow” — basically ever since I first started seeing this sort of stuff coming from Hexbear in the brief time when they federated with Blåhaj Lemmy, I thought of stuff like pig poop balls in kind of the same way as, like, the climate/vegan activists who throw soup cans at paintings or pour milk jugs in stores or trespass F1 races or break fuel pumps or so forth. A lot of people express a lot of anger and frustration and annoyance at these sorts of things and say “How can these activists be so stupid‽ Don’t they know that this hurts support for their cause‽”, but… ehhhh, being goddamn annoying as all Hell is honestly a more effective form of political action than a lot of people consciously believe it to be. The video essayist Ponderful once said about this,
People criticize actions like milk pours and soup…chucks? Because it “gives the right something to criticize”…but it seems like that’s the point! And at the same time, it makes other climate activists look extremely reasonable and “good, actually” in comparison! If pouring some milk on the ground will mean that Daily Mail readers might hear some messages about how messed-up the dairy industry is, and then also maybe even consider old enemies like our Greta as good in comparison, then…yay! Yay, I say! And if it makes the public look kinder upon activists who actually target oil infrastructure, in comparison to what they see as random and annoying publicity stunts, then f*ck!gn ay!
Whether all of this applies in the case of Hexbear is something that people can argue about — it feels like kind of a silly comparison given that Lemmy is just an obscure social media platform, which doesn’t exactly seem like the type of place where meaningful praxis can happen… But it’s at least a thought that we can keep in mind. Hexbear has certainly succeeded in getting people on Lemmy talking and thinking about them and their beliefs, pushing the Overton window leftwards — especially if other, less annoying leftists look “good in comparison”. I’m kind of reminded of my own path towards leftism, honestly: I’d certainly been annoyed by communist interlocutors plenty of times over the years, but I think that without that annoyance, I probably wouldn’t agree with those selfsame interlocutors on so much today. That was just one of the many tactics that collectively led me down that path.
I don’t think that this is necessarily Hexbear’s intentional strategy in the same way as those aforementioned climate/vegan activists, but nevertheless, this is at least my spitball of a material analysis of why Pig Poop Balls actually does advance the cause. This is just a little advocacy for the devil, as it were.
From Wikipedia:
“A bondage suit, also commonly called a gimp suit, is a form-fitting garment designed to cover the body completely […] A bondage suit is sometimes used in BDSM to objectify the wearer, or gimp, and reduce them to the status of a sexual toy, rather than a sexual partner.”