Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
I think a big part of Marx’ appeal back in the day was that he was fully slotted into the rationalist milieu of the time. Identifying an impersonal, inevitable “march of progress” that wasn’t religious was a powerful idea for some people.
(btw the Communist Manifesto is 150 years old and could have been written yesterday, at least the first part)
By all accounts, postwar Soviet union was a pretty sexist and racist place. It’s no wonder the “old guard” communists look at today’s blue-haired leftists and sound just like crusty old fascists.
If you see a reactionary impulse as a desire to go back to an imagined past, the “old guard” communists (who mostly didn’t seem to have lived under communism) aka the tankies, being similar to crusty old fascists (who also didn’t live in a fascist regime, or in the world depicted by 50s americana postcards/commercials) makes a lot of sense.
It’s ironic that there is a “good old days” of (state) Communism, seeing that it was supposed to be the end of history.
(side note, back in HS I saw a graph illustrating the Marxist theory that successive revolutions lifted human civilization up a series of stairs (pastoralism -> city states -> feudalism -> centralized kingdoms -> bourgeois capitalism) up until Communism where these steps became an ascending straight line… and I though “hey, why does the line straighten out just there???”)
They never said which end
Obviously the arse end.