Do you have a source for what the elections were because I provided one.

The one you provided supports what I said. You do not seem to be understanding what I am saying. Please ask for clarification if you are having trouble understanding.

Also in representative surveys after the unification 90% of east germans were happy about it, which indicates that it was in favor of the east german population. Source: the article above

And? Doesn’t make it legal.

I think your point doesn’t really have power if there is no proof of there not being the public votes.

I think it does because liberals are all about feigning belief in rules and the rule of law. Right until they don’t.

I will reply to you as soon as you have sources for your claims

What sources would you even need? Do you know how to talk to other people and ask them questions when you want to know something?

I think it’s representative of my friend network. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were asking. This was a response to “how many leftists do you know?”

And what was that in response to?

No I have not read Sakai yet. This topic is not new to me, I just disagree with you.

These are somewhat contradictory statements.

But very well, I am glad that we have reached the mutual agreement that it is not an appropriate word for non-indigenous people in general, which was my original point that you responded to:

Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.

As I see it, it turns out we both agree. I misunderstood your initial response to that statement as one that was intending to be a counterargument. So, sorry – I really didn’t mean to straw man you; I legitimately misunderstood what your point was.

I introduced the use of the term. When you started talking about your own understanding, I told you I was talking about something else and explained what it was twice and with examples and context. So far as I can tell that was entirely ignored in order to seek conflict. This is a tendency many of us have at the beginning, but we must train it out of ourselves because it is highly counterproductive.

Like, all my friends are leftists. When we talk about politics, they sound like leftists, they say leftist things, and espouse leftist values. My friends are all leftists because my friends’ friends are leftists and I make friends with my friends’ friends.

Why would you think this would be in some way representative? It’s just your friend network.

Regarding “settler,” I think it’s a motte-and-bailey tactic you’re using. The motte – the easily defensible position – is that settler refers to people who are bigoted. The bailey – the hard to defend position, but which is easily equivocated for the motte – is that it refers to any non-indigenous person. […]

You’re wrong in your attempt to identify a fallacy and are doing your own one at the same time (straw man). I have explained at least twice that being a settler is a psychology derived from settler colonialism. Someone else suggested that you read Sakai. Have you done so before trying to contradict and lecture? Have you asked questions about a topic that is clearly new to you?

You keep belaboring this straw man that it means anyone non-indigenous. I think I was pretty clear on this, so can you explain why you are pretending otherwise?

I don’t deny that it’s a useful verbal weapon against bigots. I would merely like it to be well-understood that a verbal weapon is what it is intended to be.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

How was it an illegal annexation if the rulers of the country signed a contract that was literally about uniting with western germany.

I just explained how. You can review the articles governing West Germany to verify this if you’d like. Are you being obtuse or did you just not read what I said?

I will ignore everything else you said until you clarify.

Edit: actually I will reply quickly to the rest because it is just quotes from one article doing the bullshitting I mentioned. They play fast and loose right off the bat, saying the peolle voted four times for reunification, twice before and twixe after. Let’s look at their examples.

1. The one I alreasy described to you and that you are obtusely avoiding thinking about: the vote for members of their analog of a parliament. This is not a plebiscite for joining West Germany.

2. The exact same thing but for local elections.

3. The exact same thing but for newly entering state elections.

4. The exact same thing but for the whole of Germany.

Given that you don’t organize, how many leftists do you know? The people I know ran quite the gamut before winding up coherently left.

I don’t know why you’d be astonished at the term being used dismissively. Generally it’s when someone is being white supremacist, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, etc. They may not even realize it at first because it’s normalized for them, but when they respond negatively to correction well guess who’s digging in their heels about being shitty. That’s exactly who you don’t want to cater to. They will eat up all of your time and fight you the whole time because they have not developed basic humility.

The settler mindset has long outlived the immediate settler colonists that were genociding the natives or otherwise assisting it by stealing land (with extra steps). Nobody who uses the term has that meaning. We are referring to the settler colonial psychology that persists, and particularly its US version that is merged with white supremacy and national chauvinism.

You can also recognize it in other Euro settler colonists like the Afrikaners and “Israelis”. They tell the same stories about deserving the land, of doing a better job with it, of blaming the colonized for fighting back or “bringing up the past”, they seed conversations with racial supremacist implications and sometimes just overt racism. Are cowboys the good guys? Is it cool to be a cowboy? If you picture a cowboy in your head, are they a white guy? Most cowboys were brown and a substantial minority were black. American settler psychology has in some ways moved beyond those examples, however, as the “settlement” is nearly complete so they can entertain performative actions like cynical land acknowledgements while never supporting Land Back or even just basic material improvements for natice people. They can temporarily “feel bad”, but not so bad as to need to actually do anything, because the national genocide doesn’t warrant doing even one tangible thing per year.

I have not gotten too deep into the material basis of the settler mindset, but it is also prevalent and the most important. The fundamental fact of free or almost free land (stolen land) led to an economic base premised on it that has been slowly closing up. It acted as a release valve for social pressures that advanced in Europe, it could create profits from essentially nothing and be a carrot dangled in front of the face of generations that told their kids and grandkids that you could just work hard and go be a farmer. Two depressions resulted from the loss of the material basis for this but not the culture, as The New Deal and associated red scare then coincided with the US firmly taking over as prime imperialist, propping up the welfare of white people of settler culture via neocolonial exploitation. Pineapples on tables and virtual guarantees on jobs and cheap houses for a few generations. Not so much for black or brown people.

These are things in living memory. They color all of our experiences, ambitions, cultural references, and attitudes towards one another - and what we think we owe each other (usually nothing per this mindset).

Re: knee jerk reactions, yes of course, it is supposed to be dismissive when you call someone a settler to their face. It is usually an irrefutable fact and they don’t know how to deal with it because they don’t understand it. Is it always wrong to be dismissive? I think it can carry important emotional content so as to agitate others. Maybe the audience isn’t the centrist settler, or is otherwise someone they think it would be a waste of time to try and convert directly. Most of the time they are going to be right about that. A “centrist” sharing their opinion already lacks humility and that’s rarely the place a person can improve from.

Poland being part of germany and east germany are very different things.

Not based on what parent said. Their simplistic rationale was that it was somehow legal and fine because it used to be part of Germany before WWII. That applies equally to both.

There is a much larger gap between poland being part of germany than east germany being part of united germany.

Only about 35 years or so. East and West were split from the end of WWII to 1990. You seem to be exaggerating and drawing an arbitrary line.

So anyways, by your logic you think it would have been legal and good for Germany to annex the parts it lost to Poland so long as it did so before 1990? Are you sure you’ve thought this through?

Also, the GDR literally agreed to the unification contract so it’s not an annexation.

Incorrect. There were two process options:

1. Carry out the creation of a new nation via negotiations between states and the draftinh of a new constitution.

2. Absorb states into West Germany if their populations produce a majority vote in favor.

They “chose” the latter and then didn’t do the vote. They did the usual annexer thing and just fudged some bullshit to claim that the GDR government following its first Western-style (and massively Western influenced via cash and NGOs) counted since it was a ruling coalition and therefore represented the majority. Again, this is just inventing some bullshit to get what they wanted. This is somewhat like voting for a pro-Brexit party that says they want to start the process of Brexit and then, lo and behold, they are forcing an immediate and unfavorable Brexit that you would not have supported and against the law of both the EU and the UK. Only the result is that instead of breaking treaties, you no longer have a country or basically any of your laws, you are simply annexed. So you cross your fingers and hope the Western propaganda is true and your previous state’s was false (spoiler: it was the opposite).

Now, generally speaking, I am not a “but the rules say otherwise!” nerd. But liberals do think of themselves this way and their propaganda tells them that everything they do against the authoritarian commies is actually for democracy and the rule of law. So when they see a basic fact like this, they either go into denial mode based on vibes, twist themselves into a pretzel (like the official legal logic), or acknowledge the reality and start to question their assumptions.

I would agree. Both are just a standard Hero’s Journey where they build a team and increase their power to then resolve the major conflict. And both use East Asian culture essentially as a fantasy element to entertain a Western audience in a relatively respectful way. Most audience members don’t get most of the references because they aren’t familiar with the narratives or traditions to which they are referring. They just understand it as “other” and don’t see a deeper meaning. In that sense they are both somewhat exploitative, though these examples are very far down on my list of grievances against capitalist entertainment media.

The settler mindset is taught to basically every American either through school or wider social conditioning. It is an ongoing challenge to left organizing and has to be unlearned so that one can take liberating actions rather than explicitly oppositional settler ones. It is a mixture of white supremacy, colonial chauvinism, national chauvinism and myth-making, and some other reactionary ingredients that many have trouble observing because they are so normalized. And indigenous people can have this same mindset to varying degrees just like a black American can internalize anti-black racism.

The core precepts taught about US history are fundamentally a lie to benefit this mindset. As Marx said, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A bit of seemingly harmless Americana like [fruit] picking, a little farmhouse that sells [fruit]-based goods. Well, about 100-200 years ago you can usually bet that land was native. Not much folksy history to draw on. Not much tradition, aside from what was imported and normalized by waves of settlers for which whiteness was invented by ruling class interests to mollify the newly white people and further exploit everyone else. An identity that rationalized the theft of that land, of “settling” it for the imported culture’s definition of stewardship, of extraction for [fruit]. The history of that place is told as a “family farm for 7 generations”. Its crop is picked by underpaid workers, many of them undocumented: the labor underclass established for the modern settler mindset. Wage slaves and sometimes actual slaves, something considered perfectly normal in the settler mindset. An actual horror and overt injustice often just a few meters away and yet everyone is not up in arms demanding equal treatment. Instead, they respond to the ruling class’ demands to blame the marginalized for the bourgeoisie’s harms, they call for cruelty and deportation or they call for the status quo in response. Rarely do they call for liberation or equal treatment. The idea of open borders is used by the far far right to ridicule the far right that also wants closed borders. The idea itself is considered absurd by the mainstream settler mindset, as they are told it is absurd because it is against settler interests. “Imagine having to make just as little money as a Spanish-speaking brown person!”, they internalize. They pick the [fruit] by the pretty white farmhouse and talk about how nice it would be to own their own place just like this. So long as they eventually own a house - or believe they will - they tend to not organically question the system that benefits them, surrounded by a system that discourages or coopts such thinking.

It is a potent force to overcome and it is why a full socialist education in The West takes so long. So much to unlearn. So many potential pitfalls. So many places where you are basically asking a person to have empathy for others and not interpret this as a form of self-hatred and get all defensive. Because to understand US-based oppression is to hate it. To be revolted. To reject all forms of settler thought as best you can, as you refuse to ever intentionally celebrate genocide or chattel slavery or the crushing of entire nations’ simple dreams of sovereignty, food security, intact families, and limbs.

I was going to follow up with a sick zinger but instead I’ll just be normal, ha.

It is important to grow the left, to turn it from like 100-1000 people in a given city into 5-10%. I can agree with that motivation, as can the vast majority of socialists. Our aim is revolution, that doesn’t happen from just a few reading groups, it has to become more.

The entire country already caters to the demo you mentioned. Everything is ready-made for them. Many orgs are dominated by them, such as the DSA. You should not write off straight white cis guys but they are consistently the hardest to reach because they are dismissive of others’ experiences with oppression and have been more shielded from capitalism’s worst in their country, but tend to feel very entitled to an opinion about it.

Centrism is the only described characteristic that is a chosen identity and it is a political tendency, if you can call it that. It’s a person with no political development whatsoever, they just vaguely cobble together an incoherent mishmash of common liberal and reactionary ideas that they can’t really defend but they call themselves an outsider as if that means something regarding someone whose political life can be summed up as, “sometimes votes”.

So what would it mean to try to boost efforts to recruit straight white cis dude centrists? Because the first things that would come to mind for me are usually called tailism by socialists and has a long track record of failure in the US in particular, where the US had a gargantuan labor movement that was entirely scuttled by liberal cooption and playing straight white cis dudes off of marginalized groups. There were entire unions that were segregated or disallowed black membership, for example. Those were the easiest to coopt into the red scare and, once they were used to out and isolate socialists, were then easily undermined and shrunk when their anticommunist government came for labor a couple decades later, having no radical core remsining and no material leverage.

Yes, and I didn’t label you as any of those things. I sharee that the first two points overlap with some communist ways of thinking, which I view as a positive. I list the third point as food for thought and I was fairly qualified in how I described your politics so as to match what you had said and no more.

This question is difficult to correctly answer, as anyone can define their own political boundaries. They can be wrong about those boundaries and they can define many different ones that are all valid. Is my “political creed” to be a communist? Which subset might that mean? Am I friendly with certain subsets despite disagreeing with them (yes) and if so would they potentially count as the majority? Am I a (de)famed Western leftist or part of a worldwide effort in terms of having a less popular view of a subject?

I would say that among the people with whom I have the most general agreement, my least popular opinion is the potential for imperial core workers to become radicalized and organized for the left. A very large amount of organized resources is constantly poured into efforts to prevent this from happening, including those that reinforce settler, white supremacist, and chauvinist attitudes that permeate our cultures. That means that our struggle is very challenging right now but also means that if those flows are ever cut off or undermined, there will be immense opportunity and we have to be ready to channel the inevitable accompaniment to the conditions (austerity) that got us to that place away from neoliberal fascistic movements.

Basically, there is a common pathway in understanding that goes from hope for revolution from within the imperial core (no successful precedents) to attempts to understand this and explain why it’s least likely to happen there. This can lead to a self-defeating cynicism towards all imperial core organizing or to curb vision. But I think it is our duty to continually reformulate as needed to discovery organizable enclaves, to grow with current and upcoming conditions. We owe that to each other.

Are you active in any socialist parties?

Dawkins’ anti-theist works and his reactionary views are related to one another. As with Hitchens and Sam Harris, their work was poorly researched and was forwarded because their real agendas were based on chauvinist attitudes, particularly against muslims.

Dennett was the only good one and unfortunately he passed away. PZ Myers is less knowm but also didn’t bite on the islamophobia bait.

Based on the various accounts, Gaiman is a cruel and explpitative rapist and I find it difficult to appreciate words about charm or love from such a source.

Do you have any other examples of people who should not be rejected by the left? Who was the podcaster?

PS always kill your heroes. Being of the left means doing work and building organizations that (in addition to trying to prevent) withstand the inevitable failures of prominent figures.

The first point is a fairly common opinion among communists, who understand “DEI” to be a liberal cooption of liberationist language and thought that tokenizes identities and reworks the concepts in favor of exploiters (and was doomed to be shed the moment it was less profitable for exploiters).

It may be beneficial to consider the second point with some nuance that is often neglected in order to agitate. Again with communists, you will find many that hate their country’s cops but acknowledge the necessity in a post-revolutionary framework, either in their own visions for their own revolution or in defending the actions taken by their comrades that rapidly discover the need for some form of organized enforcement. One way to think about this is that the police are an arm of the state, and who that state serves via its structures and nature changes how they operate. In OECD countries, cops primarily serve capital. They protect profits based on shop owner complaints, shut down capital-inconvenient demonstrations, etc, and spend little time helping average people. In many capitalist countries, cops are underpaid and openly corrupt, so they do the same things while being more obvious bribes. In countries run by socialists, cops of course still do many cop things, but you will find them spending more of their time on other tasks, there are fewer per capita, and the job of being a cop in capitalist counties has been split into many different jobs that don’t involve having a gun or otherwise carrying out the worst actions taken by cops. So, in short, it is entirely coherent to hate your local cops as an arm of capital that will beat you for protesting while not condemning the mere existence of cops in other countries while also understanding that we want to create a society free of them.

For the third point, it really depends on what you mean by accepting. Socialists need to educate people where they are, warts and all, but you also cannot be taillist and morph your work into accepting reactionary positions. That defeats the entire point of rejecting reactionary positions. Patience in explaining is valuable, tacit agreement with racism/xenophobia/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/etc is counterproductive. In addition, getting dunked on can and does create results. Despite growing up conservative and getting dunked on by those to your left, you now think of yourself as non-conservative. Are you sure none of those dunks ever led you to question your positions?

Democratic politicians tend to be cynical more than ignorant, friend. They feign incompetence because taking actions is against their larger strategy of holding to whatever the current status quo is or whatever pleases donors (these are usually the same).

We’re talking about a group that acts like it can’t deliver on basic platform promises because of a parliamentarian they can just fire and replace like the GOP has done reoeatedly and then turns around and breaks plenty of its own rules when a SocDem grandpa (Bernie) gives people some hope for positive change.

The party relishes in scapegoats for inaction because they do not, in actuality, oppose the status quo nor even most of the changes made by e.g. Trump. Their opposition is performative, it is meant to get someone to do that 99% voting for them thing and then call it a day politically. Their main agenda is to say there is no acceptable alternative beyond their controlled neoliberal duopoly.

“Make politics boring again” simply means you have no connection to the immense violences carried out by that status quo, or do not recognize them as such. Tell me, for which period of time was US politics boring? During slavery? Settler colonial genocide of the people who lived here? Jim Crow? Labor fights? Imperial conquests throughout the Americas, Hawaii, The Philippines? Both World Wars? The Great Depression? The Cold War and its many sponsored coups and genocides? The forced unequal exchange for the countries it dominates? The frequent hot wars it begets around the world?

Supporting UBI is not really a leftist thing. It was promoted by laissez-faire economists as a way to kill the welfare state (universal services) and is still formulated as such by its prominant proponents.

Why do you believe you are leftist rather than simply a fairly mainstream liberal? Liberals have pivoted to being openly in favor of immigration crackdowns in the US over the last few years.

Wut? Germany was a singular country until the Soviet Union occupied half of it.

This is a non-sequitor, it does not change whether West Germany illegally annexed East Germany, which it did. Germany included parts of what are now Poland prior to the Nazis’ invasions. Would you also write off Germany illegally annexing them as a righteous revanchism?

Re-uniting the occupied territories with the rest of the country is literally the opposite of an illegal annexation.

You should learn your basic history before trying to lecture others. Germany was cut down and the remaining pieces split into regions governed by 4 countries (France, UK, USA, USSR). With the rise of the US the first 3 of course rapidly became de facto one region and the legal mumbo jumbo followed to create West Germany.

West Germany was created from this as an “independent” country, still under the thumb of the US, excluding East Germany. The USSR proposed full reintegration of Germany as a neutral country, but the US had already committed to a policy of isolation, preferring their NATO-pushing givernors of West Germany.

Regarding illegal annexation of East Germany, it was done against the consent of the people who lived there and against their own supposed legal framework.

The East is in a poor state because The West illegally annexed it, threw away their welfare state, outlawed the communist party, and gave all of its industry to exploitative West German companies. Indicators of quality of life plummeted after the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall. The West also trashed East Germany’s liberating policies towards women and LGBTQ+ people. East Germans that were older have nostalgia for the better times. Patronizing and ignorant liberals, rather than understand the truth in their experiences, have invented a fantasy called Ostolgie to explain this away, doing their best to pretend that this is just old people being silly rather than remembering tangibly better experiences.

This fictionalization is a necessary part of anticommunist thinking: no aspects of “the enemy” can ever be good or beneficial for anyone. All seemingly good things done by that enemy must either be attributed to a “brainwashed” population or a devious plot to appear better than they really are for propaganda purposes. It is important to recognize that these patterns of thought are not usually effectively exported and are instead intended for a domestic audience to make sure they don’t actually understand and sympathize with the designated enemy.

If you think of history as often involving opposing material and social forces, then patterns will emerge. We are constrained by the material in what actions we can take to resolve a major conflict in interests, often escalating to, for example, war. So war has happened repeatedly. That’s not quite history repeating itself so much as a consequence of historically common conditions.

Under this way of thinking, you could expect conditions that are even more similar to one another to lead to similar outcomes - though not necessarily identical. For example, the revolution in Russia that led to the first sustained socialist revolution had precedent in similar conditions jn the few decades prior, and for the same basic reasons (driving material forces): a rising but weak bourgeoisie, unpopular war foisted on the population, frustrations at capitalist oppression at home, and various unpopular domestic policies that were a holdover from monarchist ways of thinkinh that liberalism had made unpopular. During the prior revolution, the masses (and representative organizations) were too idealistic and believed establishing a Duma and some reforms would address these problems. They were wrong: the Tsar simply reversed most of the policy concessions once the people went home and were no longer organized, dragged his feet on the Duma, and eventually established one that was purely representative of ruling class interests. At the same time, the Tsar went after the organizations that had participated in the failed revolution, banning them and jailing their members.

And when similar conditions occurred and people became again colocated and agitated by these conditions, those organizations were back in force, grew rapidly, and learned their lessons. The group that won, the communists, correctly identified that even the current offered concessions were similarly false and that the defeat of the Tsarist-bourgeois ruling class required them to be fully deposed and that the time to do so was ripe.

So, the similar conditions led to a similar culmination (mass action, strikes, etc) but had a different outcome due to their differences (learning the lessons of the previous failure).