pkill

lesser evil

Jfc that narrow-minded idealist obsession with Trump. Trumpism cannot be defeated with lesser evilism when the lesser evil is basically also far right, only slightly more to the left and that is also dubious with all the war mongering, which Trump's promise to put it to an end indisputably helped him secure a victory, alongside a slew of economic shortcomings affecting the working class (even though his solutions are no solutions at all)

(2/2)

A system where the faction with the most absolute and unquestioned loyalty wins fights and slaughters their intellectual betters.

This reeks of a bourgeois fear of the masses rising up to demand what’s rightfully theirs, of thinly veiled elitism and misunderstanding of the basics of class relations. No, it's not blue vs white collars but people living off others' toil and the toilers.

Who are these “intellectual betters”? Capitalist apologists? Corporate technocrats? The same people whose “brilliance” built a world teetering on ecological collapse? Spare us the melodrama. Revolutions don’t thrive on blind loyalty; they’re built on solidarity and the shared understanding that the status quo is unsustainable.

Your argument boils down to a defense of complacency: ballots over barricades, submission over struggle. You seem more afraid of the risks of change than the certainty of suffering under capitalism. But history teaches us that systemic change demands courage—not the cowardice of hoping billionaires and their henchmen will play nice. Keep clutching those ballots; the rest of us will be busy building a world where they aren’t needed to decide who gets to live with dignity.

(1/2)

Your comment reads like a manifesto for maintaining the status quo dressed up as pragmatic wisdom. It’s almost charming, in the same way, an infomercial about a "miracle" weight-loss pill is charming, assuming the audience hasn’t read the fine print. But let’s get to the real business of dismantling this labyrinth of myths you’ve built.

The number of people who 'broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule' don’t have any impact on the system that creates and restrains billionaires.

Oh, so now we’re pretending that mass shifts in consciousness are irrelevant? History begs to differ. The abolition of feudalism, the rise of unions, civil rights movements—all were powered by collective awakenings. The Paris Commune was ridiculed as a blip, yet it shaped proletarian strategies worldwide. The suffragettes, who were once dismissed as a hysterical sideshow, rewrote the political landscape. Sure, individual enlightenment alone won’t topple billionaires—but dismissing the transformative potential of collective action? That’s some industrial-strength cynicism masquerading as “realism.”

Real change has to come from ballots. From pen on paper.

This Hallmark sentiment belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious discussion about systemic change. Who controls the ballots? Capitalist elites, through gerrymandering, corporate media, voter suppression, and lobbying. Let’s talk specifics: Tsipras in Greece was democratically elected to resist austerity. What did ballots deliver? Betrayal. Ask the Greeks who were prevented by the banksters from withdrawing more than 50€ a day. Bernie Sanders inspired millions, only to capitulate to the Democrat machine with imperialist war criminals at the helm, because Democrats were never a party that served the working people. They had so many chances to e.g. codify abortion when they were in power, before Roe v Wade got struck down. Meanwhile, Corbyn faced a relentless smear campaign and sabotage from within Labour and now virtually all of the Labour left is purged and Sir Starmer happily approves more and more money being wasted on warfare while denying the possibility of renationalizing the water companies which have turned British rivers into one of the most polluted in Europe, because his narrow reformist mindset rejects the possibility of expropriation without compensation, even if it's something so indusputably belonging to all, a common (outside_ the WEF and other ultra-rich psychopath meetings, of course).

The conclusion? Ballots are a tool wielded by the ruling class to manage dissent, not overthrow it.

If you utilize violence to the extent of permanent systemic change, you will absolutely have a worse system at the end of it.

Ohh the old pearl-clutching “violence begets chaos” trope. Conveniently ignores the systemic violence baked into capitalism: poverty, imperialist wars, environmental destruction, police brutality.

Over 100 million people displaced in the last year.

56 wars raging worldwide, the highest figure since WWII.

Nuclear warfare back in business after three decades.

Approx. 5-20 million people dying annually due to preventable causes

Revolutionary violence isn’t arbitrary carnage; it’s the oppressed defending themselves against the daily brutality of the ruling class. In fact, it is out of the fatigue with the incessant brutality, injustice and deprivation of the existing order that revolutions are born. Look at the revolutionary wave that followed after the Great Slaughter of WWI.

Capitalist states routinely murder and displace millions to maintain power. Revolutionary violence seeks to end that barbarism, not perpetuate it.

Take again the Russian Revolution—initially a relatively bloodless overthrow. More people got trampled over when the storming of Winter Palace was being reenacted 10 years later for a movie than during the actual event. The ensuing violence was primarily defensive, against counter-revolutionaries and imperialist invaders. Without the Red Army, the October Revolution would’ve been a footnote. If you don't believe me, read Ten days that shook the world by John Reed.

Capitalism's birth was hardly a bloodless affair—whether through the American or French Revolutions, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, La Conquista, Opium Wars, colonialism in Africa, India or Indonesia, it was drenched in violence. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and freedom of the press. The civil war resulted in the death of roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. During the Russian Civil War, about 0.7% of the population died, a large portion of which can be attributed to the White Terror. Yet, the Bolsheviks, despite the brutal conditions, attempted to minimize violence. They first sought to rely on agitation among intervention forces, and even amid famine, Lenin organized the largest international aid operation of its time, importing vast amounts of grain into the USSR between 1918 and 1921—much of it sabotaged by the Whites, Esery or kulaks. The mutinies within the foreign troops and the strikes and blockades organized in solidarity by French or British workers also contributed to the withdrawal of many of the Allied troops. Still, you wouldn’t think of questioning the legitimacy of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions or the U.S. Civil War, would you? And in fact, if not then rightly so. Beacause freedom is the recognition of necessity. They played their progressive role at their time, along with capitalism. But that potential is long gone and now capitalism is holding human potential back.

Let's step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR's trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.

But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.

From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.

Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called "land of the free" still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women's suffrage and workers' rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.

Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.

And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.

In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR "worked out" but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.

Political action is violent by definition. To rule somebody essentially means nothing else than to enforce your will upon somebody by force.

There can be no talk of consensual politics in a society where opinions are shaped by media owned and managed by the ruling tiny, very wealthy minority.

No, the question boils down to the effect it has on consciousness. How many people broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule of those who may have seemed untouchable to them less than a week ago is hard to fathom.

Not to mention that it was yet another instance of a large scale masks-off event for the exploiter class, with both Democrats and Trump as well as their media lackeys proving once again that they are really just one single party of capital.

Of course however, this does not mean that it also poses a threat of some people falling into the erroneous conviction that risks resulting in anything more than repression by the authorities, that the problem is personal and not structural.

The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal.

This truth (...) forms the essence of socialism.

Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.

The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact.

(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)

Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing in the world. Revolution is an act in which one section of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and guns, all of which are exceedingly authoritarian implements. The victorious party is necessarily compelled to maintain its rule by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. If the Paris Commune had not employed the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie, would it have maintained itself more than twenty-four hours? And are we not, on the contrary, justified in reproaching the Commune for having employed this authority too little?

(On authority by Frederich Engels)

Because it's just bing under the hood, same as qwant. And Bing/microshaft doesn't really care that much about you using it for actual search. M$hit wants you to use Copilot. Copilot cannot be fit as easily into meta search engines such as SearxNG. I'm quite convinced that the whole push behind the aggressive AI promotion going hand in hand with search engine experience degradation (ACCELERATED BY THE PROLIFERATION OF SEOMAXXING AI-SLOP ONLINE) is to a large extent driven by the desire to tighten the walled gardens and information control. Millions of idiots convinced that a text generator program is somehow similar to an actual person would more readily accept it providing opinions or censored information, in place of diverse information.

Congratulations to all of you still happily trading your freedom for convenience. Instead of just a ranking algorithm that nonetheless can show you multiple results at a glance, you get the generation of just one result, at the environmental cost much higher than a regular search, up to 10 times more energy, and sometimes even slower than what would be the time required to load a regular page on a good LTE connection if modern web wasn't so bloated.

All while accelerating the march towards digital feudalism. Because even the immense amount of storage space and link capacity required to build your own search index is nothing compared to the cost of training a LLM and then providing it via some SaaSS.

Also the 'cultural exchange' you'd get if you lived in border regions!