Juice

The framing of this is... interesting. I don't know what the Chilean positions are, but its my understanding that he absolutely brought this on because he took no measures to actually defend the country from this kind of inevitable counter revolution. This also happened in Guatemala. If you don't fight them off like in Cuba or the USSR or DPRK or Viet Nam, then that's what they do, this is what the imperialists want, and Pinochet or Batista are just the guys to carry it out. Fuck go back to the Paris commune.

If, after the February revolution, Kerensky had control of the government and not Lenin, then the soviets would have been crushed in the counter revolution. And it would have been clear why it happened, he would have done everything by the rules of the imperialists, and they would have committed some sort of counter revolutionary slaughter anyway. And the dream of the people would have been strangled to death in the nursery, as has happened so many times.

I get where people are coming from, and the values of Allende's Chile are very much my values. My heart aches when I listen to Victor Jara. But there is a valid criticism of Allende to be made, that he did not defend the revolution and he should have known better. What no historical materialism does to a MF.

I'm open to a critique of this position because I didn't realize it was even controversial, let alone considered "reactionary" so please excuse any ignorance on my part. This is not apologia for 9/11

For me its my dad.

You have to start with things you agree with. Don't get hung up on specific details, if you have to misinterpret them in order to agree with them then start there. Then once you establish agreement, find out why they believe what they believe in an issue, and repeat back to them what you think you understand (very important, and its okay to guess if not sure). Then connect it to why you agree, how those things are connected, and how this connects to what they value, bonus points if you can add class analysis.

Granted, the minute you walk away they could just put on fox news and undo it all. If your family member is merely backward, then you can help them catch up. It's a long term strategy, there's no shortcut, and you might never turn them into a full fledged lefty, or it might take a long time.

Look up nonviolent communication strategies to drill down on some of the fundamentals. And don't forget to connect over shared interests! Music and books and shows are easier to find points of agreement, since they are engineered to have broad mass appeal, than political points which are engineered to sow division. Only a real social connection can dechuddify someone.

I'm here with you all, my story is just like a lot of peoples it seems! Started working from home which turned my moderate, borderline weed habit into a compulsion. I used to justify it as I would get these big productive hits of energy and inspiration...and on the main starting to smoke weed after not smoking for a long time helped me change my life for the dramatically better. But now I only get those productive, inspired boosts rarely if ever. My tolerance is at a place where I'm either so high I can't think straight (though still not feeling super high) or just kind of normal.

Anyway, I'm on a taper, I switched to tincture + pen for getting through the day and cutting back on smoking, and then hopefully cut back on the pen and tincture use. I don't want to have to go completely without forever, but I have substituted alcohol for weed in the past, which i feel might be counter-productive. I do feel kind of trapped, and I don't like it. But out of all of the behaviors that manifest in my struggles with compulsion and impulse control, a chronic weed habit has been one of the more manageable and nondestructive. Or at least it has been up until this point.

I'm with you all in this struggle. Solidarity comrades.

First as tragedy, then as farce.

Yeah I think a break is a good idea. I'm an energetic person, my mind is active, my hands love to fidget. Videogames is great because it can be very technical and challenging but also it takes no actual physical exercise. My mind can focus on the goals of the game rather than what it does most of the time. Its a real nice break every once in a while. And to do it with friends is the best of all possible worlds.

Moderation, however, is the thing that kills me every time.

I'd love to take you through bloodborne! I'll def take you up on that if I decide to get back on!

Thanks. Yeah I'm trying not to beat myself up too much about any of it, since that really is like my default it seems. There's something where, during pandemic lockdown, that virtual socializing was basically all anyone got which had a lot of unusual effects on myself and others, since something like a discord server is at best semi-social or quasi-social. But then, when I go back to those spaces post-lockdown, after having lots of IRL social experiences over the last 12 months or whatever, going back to those places expecting a social experience is thwarted because my standards for what is social has improved. Also the people who are on there are a lot of the same people, so to some extent they may not have moved on.

I scream next to any Italian sports car I see, like I just stand there screaming until I go hoarse

I got an identical rating it would appear

That's exactly what I said in my first comment. I was saying that we may be talking about different things. For a socialist, sure there are national revolutions, but that's not the struggle. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes about how on Angola, there was a nationalist uprising that supplanted direct French colonial rule, but when the French were kicked out they just spread a bunch of money around to get their people elected or into positions of power to the new nationalist government. They fought to maintain the old system and the people weren't educated in struggle, and didn't realize they were giving their victory back to the French, but this time in the form of neo-colonial rule, or economic and political rule.

This is the kind of rule that the USA had on the island of Cuba under Bautista. But in this case there were guerrillas in the rural areas working with the peasants, and advanced socialist and communist parties in the cities working with the workers. Because the people were educated in struggle, they weren't as easy for compradores to lure the people back into neocolonial economic rule.

That's a weird thing to say, "they" are probably organized, and have participated in actual antifascist action in the last year or so. You think I was dismissing them, I'm dismissing what I perceive as indignation from you.

Pinochet was backed explicitly by western economic interests bent on taking back the mines and other seized properties that the Allende government had paid over full value for. Look up the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein. What did Pinochet do when he got into power? The same thing the Nazis and South Koreans did: kill every communist or suspected communist they could get their hands on. And why? Communists want to abolish private property. Allendes government, democratically elected, had taken control of some industry and was using the proceeds to pay for social services. Just like in Guatemala and Cuba, and countless other examples. This was untenable and had to be put to a stop, by the western capitalist imperialist powers. Its economic and political.

They are messing with you. That and you are hamming it up a little. Its young people on the internet who read history, relax.

Google Victor Jara