GarbageShoot

When Bernie was doing something useful, he was worth supporting. Right now he is not, and often is being very actively detrimental.

but I'd propose that maybe unstable people who hurt people based on what they read are kind of inevitably going to end up on that trajectory regardless of the freedom of our speech spaces

You say that, but do you have any evidence for it? Are we just going to brush off the mentally unwell people that cults like QAnon prey upon as being a lost cause? As being people who would just be violent because the seeds of sin in their souls compel them to? You're just arguing for a secularized version of Calvinism that is even more reliant on faith because it lacks the element of theological reasoning.

And that maybe it's not worth sacrificing the free speech of all people simply because a few people are going to do bad things

Maybe this obfuscates relevant factors, like how money controls media and it's not just a matter of private citizens vs other private citizens.

What you're describing where people end up in their own media bubble is exactly why we need more open access to speech

It takes more of an argument than you have so far put forward to prove this, though I agree with you in a way that I suspect you would reject. Specifically, the blackballing of journalists and other sources who provide more useful explanations than exist in mainstream American Discourse is definitely part of the reason people resort to cults.

That said, if we are discounting questions like Class consciousness, your thesis falls apart entirely. These bubbles are largely self-selecting, based on marketing algorithms for the consumer-lifestyle brands that you call American politics. There is nothing stopping a brain-rotted Twitter Q freak from going on some socdem hive on Reddit, but they don't want to and they have been encouraged to this mindset by various forms of conditioning on the multi-billion dollar skinner boxes that are social media platforms. Of course, there are less polarized spaces and ones designed for "open debate" (and again Reddit provides an excellent example of these empty gestures) but overwhelmingly what we see there is more tribalism, just with a different set of etiquette.

This shows one of the many significant failures of idealist fetishization of open society: People only have so much time and effort to put into research, especially more nebulous ideological subjects. Ideology is first and foremost a survival strategy, and people will budget their finite resources based on what they are able to project as best serving them from the limited information they operate within, starting from environments that are overwhelmingly controlled by the rich in neoliberal societies. You already have your goddam Marketplace of Idea and it has failed.

free, neutral platforms for people to have these kinds of discussions on.

Neutrality doesn't exist and the bodies that claim to be neutral are just question-begging their own ideology.

Some people used to think that the internet would end war, but they were operating on a type of idealism similar to your own.

Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let's not emulate him.

Let's not pretend that whichever western states are included in "us" here aren't similarly despotic. It makes little difference whether you kill the journalist yourself or have a dog like Israel do it and then cover for them.

I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.

Hate speech is bad and dying on the hill that people should be able to advocate for genocide is nothing but useful idiocy for fascists.

None of this is especially relevant to the particulars of this case, obviously Putin has mostly rather banal things to say, because it's either a: correct, b: wretchedly chauvinist in a way that Republicans agree with (e.g. homophobia), or c: that weird revanchist shit that doesn't mean anything. I just think your ideology is intellectually and practically suicidal and wanted to comment on part of it.

Because question-begging centrism is all that any of these really are

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/d8evq0/a_transcription_of_michael_parenti_on_the_cuban/

We'll critically support countries that aren't remotely leftist (Russia, Iran), but won't give an inch to American politicians who are anything short of Lenin

You're looking at things in too moralistic a frame. It's not that Russia and Iran have progressive values but that they geopolitically represent historically progressive forces as part of the anti-imperialist bloc. Some shithead in the House who gets elected just to Tweet Kropotkin and get pressured into voting Yes instead of Present on the latest Warcrime Bill before crying about it does not represent historical progress geopolitically or in any other sense.

It's not about who is "good" or "bad", it is about who is beneficial and who is not, and just because that means something else if you cross out the words and replace them with different words does not mean I'm actually saying something very similar to the second thing.

That applies to American politicians who have as much to do with imperialism as you or I, too.

If you mean municipal politicians, you're incorrect as we do support them. If you mean Congresspeople at the federal level, you are smoking crack if you think they aren't significantly involved in the maintenance of imperialism.

Although that was scary enough that the US immediately put in term limits afterwards.

That's true, but scary for who?

Yeah, it's kind of baffling to me since Japan has a ton of, uh, racial ideology that it's generally uncritical of. Credit where credit is due, I guess.

So the part I don't get is how a lot of these countries end up with the same leaders for life? You think if they were so democratic that they'd change out occasionally

Typically it's because to win the election in the first place, you need to be pretty popular. There are cases of unpopular leaders who, while they did some things right, had such massive problems that they were tossed out -- Khrushchev is the perfect example of that, but if someone proves that they are good at what they are doing, as Stalin did, as Fidel Castro did, and so on, people are going to generally support that person. Even when someone has a real decline in the quality of leadership (see Mao, though I think the issue is overstated beyond sheer senescence right at the end), if they were involved in something like personally saving the party and leading the revolution to victory while overseeing a doubling in life-expectancy and an end to the vast majority of colonial occupation and reactionary practices like footbinding, spread in literacy and healthcare, etc. etc.

Each of those individual things can completely change someone's life for the better, so you get a whole lot of good will you need to burn through by fucking up before people abandon you.

An example of this perspective can be seen in part of a talk Michael Parenti gave:

If someone taught me to read when I grew up illiterate, gave me a hospital where before the nearest one was many hours away, gave my family a way to safely make a living, I'd probably be grateful to him for the rest of my life, too.

Now, there's the matter of what should happen, because term limits are principally reactionary (money has no term limit, so it ends up controlling elections that have them), but age limits* are necessary and part of the reason for the customary term limits in China after how old Mao got. We have yet to see what Xi will do or how long he will seek re-election for, but the thing keeping him there is that he has transformed people's lives by the tens of millions and improved lives by the hundreds of millions, so they believe in him.

*Or cognitive assessments

Are you familiar with what a primary election is? In the electoral process here in the US, one where there is "democracy", the parties have primary elections and then each put forward a candidate for the general. You can call the primary "intraparty competition" and the general "interparty competition" in this case.

In the upper offices (I think Cuba, like most AES states, is tolerant of other parties in lower offices), there is no interparty competition, so the election that decides the winner, the equivalent of the general in the US, is intraparty.

For all intents and purposes, this is mainly a difference on a formal level. In either case, you have a collection of candidates and you vote on them. If you want to run for a high office in China, say, and we are imagining everyone had to be a member of the one party, just join the Communist Party of China and engage in intraparty competition with the other Communist Party members.

It's more complicated in Cuba, but it's more complicated in the direction of being more permissive.

A much more substantial argument is required to make a plausible case that there is anything wrong with a process like this. Are you worried that the Communist Party of China in that earlier hypothetical won't let you join or run under them and you want the freedom to make your own party? First of all, that's absurdly idealist to claim is substantially different -- if you look at the US senate, the only third parties that are tolerated (a single independent and a single libertarian) are comfortably within the D and R voting blocs, respectively, and do not in any way represent a substantial political force, just empty gestures at being peace doves.

Secondly, I will repeat to you that even this distinction is basically just one of procedure. What parties have rights and what gets you on watchlists or having a tank drive up to your house is not in the jurisdiction of a single party's arbitrary will, correct (except on the state level, where that often is exactly the case), it is in the jurisdiction of the arbitrary will of two parties that mostly agree with each other except on culture war issues and as a matter of cynical opportunism. There is still no useful difference established here between having one party and two.

I will furthermore say that the basic type of entity that the Communist Party of Cuba is -- as an organ of the government itself -- should be much more agreeable even to a left-ish liberal than the DNC and the RNC, because those two groups are private entities for who don't answer to anyone! So much of US politics is not just controlled by private entities (by merit of campaign finance, etc.) but the entire goddam platform consists of private entities! Do you know why those interparty debates that the circus of election coverage pivoted on stopped happening? Those were also run by a private entity that just decided not to because negotiations broke down. It's pathetic, and don't get me started on how the DNC just skipped the primary process this time because they won't accept Joe being replaced.

Anyway, this is all very separate from the conditions in Cuba, but that's because most of the objections people make are grounded in hazy generalities that don't even hold together internally, much less survive contact with the target of their criticism. I'll let other people who are more educated on Cuba itself handle those aspects, which I admit are somewhat more important.

Could you link to the page for those of us for whom that format is easier? ty

It's pretty well-known that the Irish were Not White at one time in history, and I don't think the Welsh were either