AbnormalHumanBeing

Maybe I am, part of being in a bubble is, that it is hard to properly know that you are. Although I think I prefer the term "to live in ideology" - because it is perfectly possible to consume lots and lots of different, real-life sources, and still delude oneself into believing things, by only viewing them through a distorted lens. But I do see what you mean, and my answer has been: That was also the case when socialist movements first formed, needing to go through a phase of disillusionment with the former French Revolutionary period, as well as Utopian Socialism first developing as a multipronged movement/collection of ideas, until the realities of class struggle shaped it in a specific way. For example: Yet immature phenomena like the Luddites or the Silesian Weaver's Uprising were indeed necessary steps, for further developments later on.

I also cannot say as much about the state of things in the US, outside of internet chatter and mainstream news, that much is true.

I had a talk about this with a friend a few years back, who essentially made the same argument as you did, because all he saw was things getting worse. I think that observation isn't wrong, and will probably remain true for years, probably one or two decades at least. All with political confusion, further vanishing of the middle class and increased barbarism within politics. But it's precisely because things will get so unbearably bad, globally, that I think a material movement opposing it will appear again - successful or not - because that has always happened in history.

Concerning the younger generations: The apathy is precisely a thing, that is also upheld by ideological structures making organisation impossible, by basically making the very thought of being hopeful in any way seem foolish. I don't know if it ultimately will be foolish - but I do know, this sort of pessimistic current has been one of the main ways the status quo defends itself. (See for example Ẑiẑek's famous interpretation of the "coffee without milk/coffee without cream" joke - about how what is presented as not within the status quo is essential to how the status quo presents itself; Similarily with his exploration of how ideology nowadays tends to work by not believing yourself, but deferring to people believing for you - "I myself don't have superstitions, but the others do, so I shouldn't try to exert influence over society that, it would be futile/disrespectful.") Thus, I, of course, don't know how it will pan out either, but I do remain convinced - it's basically impossible to have the total collapse of many essential structures as we, in my opinion, will have/are having, without a dialectically growing answer in the form of a new material movement.

And besides that, younger generations also need some time to escape utopian, childish interpretations, one way or the other - not just in the way movements develop historically, as I mentioned in the first paragraph - but also, how people develop and mature with age.

Huh, you actually bring something up there, I hadn't thought about. You are right in theory for sure, although at least right now, chances to get into trouble are probably extremely low. There needs to be someone actually putting forth a claim against you, without HBO or a lawyer's office in their service actively recording the WebTorrent connections, chances are basically 0 at this moment at least.

But - I may also have some survivor's bias here. Even before using a VPN sevice, I had been torrenting for many, many years in Germany, including seeding everything to a 1.5 ratio at least - and never got mail from a lawyer, while others I know definitely did. I think it was because I had never really been torrenting any mainstream stuff with lots of peers, but I also can't claim, the risk isn't there at all.

Es wäre ja wünschenswert, wenn das auch wirklich nicht nur so ein narzisstischer Impuls von Trump bleibt. Das hin und her seiner Politik je nachdem welche Laus ihm heute über die Leber gelaufen ist oder wer ihm am zeitnahesten erfolgreich Honig ums Maul geschmiert hat, macht eine echte Einschätzung seiner auch nur mittelfristigen Politik ja de facto unmöglich. (Außer, dass die allgemeine Stoßrichtung bei "was ihm und seiner Clique helfen soll" bleiben wird)

Bringing up Digg is a good point, though, to highlight that "being dead/dying" in a maximalist definition is not a good model to highlight developments and relevancy. Them not being dead didn't mean they hadn't lost all relevancy for a long while.

Reddit is of course still a giant, like, genuinely gargantuan. The de-facto mainstream implementation of threaded discussions and public forums. But there has been a clear development for a while now, that indicates they may indeed have peaked and will only lose relevancy from now on. Hopefully, with a huge chunk of people switching over to the Fediverse, which currently is on a rising tide¹ - even though of course in a picture looking at just the present, it's still an ant compared to Reddit.

¹: A huge bonus effect being the additional synergies, especially from Mastodon -> other platforms. I feel like I have increasingly seen comments from Mastodon on Lemmy even, and PeerTube has had a huge chunk of their interactions from Mastodon for a while now.

Sadly, Lemmy has limited interactivity with most other Fediverse services. It is by design centered around content and communities, thus lacking some of the user-centric protocols of e.g. Mastodon, that PeerTube uses for comments afaik.

I did, and from what I heard, it is a big myth that the results were actually as useful as the first assessment on discovery of them had been. Later studies have, as far as I know, been much more sobering as to the "usefulness" of the data acquired there.

The website you link also immediately shows the problem (even in presentation, presenting them quite sensationalist, immediately highlighting, that there is no possibility of neutrality in assessing the results): The "cruelty for cruelty's sake" in the conditions of the experiments cannot easily be removed from the results. Making the data in the end only useful for very specific circumstances, and hard to untangle. Lets take venereal diseases for example - it ultimately shows how they spread and interact in conditions of forced mass rape under conditions of extreme squalor, as documented by people not engaged in proper double-blind environments. The usefulness of that is not as high as the myth surrounding Unit 731 or Mengele's experiments might suggest - and as your linked website also shows, there is a material interest in selling that myth of "forbidden, evil experiments resulting in knowledge".

So, this has actually been one of those things often claimed, you may have heard of it or maybe even thought it yourself (I certainly had the thought as an edgy teen). Stuff like "For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps" or similar things.

Now, beside the point of it being unacceptable to do so ethically - the stuff done there was also quite useless. I currently can't do the work of searching for and gathering all the sources again, but to my memory: the cruelty and dismissal of humanity made the "results" of those "studies" mostly useless garbage, saying nothing at all worthwhile for science, and being clearly tainted ideologically.

Because, while you may think that in some "ideal" world, you could have neutral research on unwilling humans, the reality has always been, that the conditions needed to get humans to do such experiments on other humans, necessitate the kind of ideological distortions, that mostly make the results useless in the end. There's simply not enough psychopaths that are also willing to do proper, frustrating, hard-work-necessitating, non-self-aggrandising research - and to get non-psychopaths to do it, you need an ideology that ultimately removes their neutrality and the neutrality of the research.

The only things I remember being deemed "useful" and "properly" done from a scientific perspective in the recovered "studies" were things like "lethality of grenades by proximity to the explosion" - something that is questionable to begin with in value and that can also be determined with sensors of different kinds - as well as "effects of massive hypothermia and frostbites" - which as far as I remember basically just confirmed what has been estimated from case studies in a broader way, as well as animal studies (the latter, admittedly, have their own legitimate controversy).

Being a clever bastard with a gangster mindset, of course Putin would have been paranoid one way or the other, so that won't change much I think. But things like that happening - no matter if it will end up being explainable as a proper accident or a failed assassination attempt or whatever - tend to undermine the mythos of being invulnerable and always 3 steps ahead of the game, that people like Putin want to disseminate about themselves. That's my current hope in the political climate.

That's fair criticism, and I guess that is something that happens in my psyche as well. But the thought process is basically:

The communist movement of the 20th century had been pushed back by a mix of Social Democracy succeeding in mitigating class conflict in the West, world market structures creating conditions for the exploitation of internationally cheap labour in service of upholding the global profit rate while still maintaining high living standards for the big Blocs, the conditions after WW2, where so much had been destroyed, creating opportunities for massive growth and basically 0 unemployment for a few decades - and the hope of the Soviet Union maybe actually being a viable solution directing class struggle into imperialist bloc-think instead of political struggle for the working class itself.

The Social Democratic welfare state is basically in retreat across the board, from what I gathered, even in its traditional places of strength, like Scandinavia, it develops more exclusionary mechanisms. One of the main reasons of this happening is related to point #2, that the global net profit rate has been in crisis since the late 70s, which prompted neoliberal politics (and ultimately also the crisis that furthered the collapse of the Soviet Union due to their dependence on the global resource market). At the same time, international, cheap labour has become less ubiquitous, mainly due to China developing a new, massive middle class, which removed a huge chunk of that cheap labour, and which is now also becoming a player in the kind of economic imperialism the west had been doing to uphold its own balance. (Note that China is now starting to face its own crises as well, as that period of growth begins to stagnate). The Soviet collapse also shook things up, removing what in hindsight turned out to be a false hope, but percisely the removal of a false hope opens up the room for a new one.

Thus, the underlying class conflict is erupting again, and from that, political organisation is necessarily as well. Say what you will, but there suddenly were phenomena like "socialism" being a genuine word even in US political discourse. There's currently disorganised flailing around of politics without an underlying organisation and consciousness, as that old middle class is dying to serve the profit rate. The way I see it, we are in the chaotic times of growing problems and suffering (also exacerbated by the climate catastrophe), but those problems and suffering have always also created the contradictions and conditions for change. The very fact that fascism is organising is in my eyes a symptom of the upper class reacting to a new, burgeoning class struggle.

Now, I have no crystal ball to see what will happen, no one does. (And I'd like to stress: Pessimistic positions don't, either. Just because there is a current in our ideology upholding the status quo to immediately dismiss anything remotely hopeful as impossible.) But it seems clear to me, that the material struggle between classes is very real, again. And the tools have all still been there, if anything, the internet actually increases international organisational capabilities.

I think across the world, you have the phenomenon of the younger generations being less interested politically in the old status quo, while material conditions continue to get worse and consolidation of capital does so as well. In recent elections here in Germany, the younger generation has been as split as never before, between leftist movements on the one hand, while their support for fascism was about the same as in the rest of society, and the old centrist parties had shrunk to a clear minority in their support, as one example.

No matter what it will be calling itself, I indeed think it is inevitable, that there will be a new movement of international struggle, that will fit the bill of "communist" - the really existing movement in opposition to capital and its tendency to create a growing class of people that own nothing beyond subsistence but their labour power to sell.

How strong it will be, how it will pan out in the end - that will be decided by us and our actions. But the political necessity of asking questions of property relations and class, that exists and will become more prevalent, I am sure of it.

To quote myself from their comments:

So happy to see this one pop up in my notifications, will probably have to watch it twice in a row at least! I don't want to be the annoying guy advertising other platforms in the comments, so let me preface that I mean this just exactly as is said, as a compliment: You are one of the few channels that I still return to big platforms like YT for, instead of staying in the Fediverse.

Ah, okay, I was indeed missing all the snark, lol

We’ve never tried a pure and proper capitalistic movement either.

Genuinely confused what you even mean there - because, yes, we did. Like, to the extent "proper" makes sense - "pure" is nonsense that only makes sense for ideologies, not materialist movements. I assume there is some intentional snark to it? I may be missing some signalling there, AuDHD and all, but I think it is worthwhile to explore that idea, regardless:

What do you think the long and arduous, sometimes brutal, sometimes liberatory, stuff was, that happened in the early modern era? Where property relations and the mode of production changed from Feudalism to global (back then at first colonial) markets and industrial capitalist wage labour? That is also precisely, why I think a material analysis of the Eastern Bloc is so damning: They had wage labour, they traded on the international market, they even had hire- and fire at factory gates at times, with a more decentralised economy than more consolidated western economies at times (managers competing against each others for state resources) - even though their ideals said that that should not happen. Not for lack of their purity or ideological drive, simply because the material and historical conditions panned out like that for those entities.

That is what I am getting at: "Pure" does not make any sense, it's ideological nonsense, IMO. And "proper" only means - being a material, real political force. If you go on general strike, the effects of that at first don't care for ideology at all, they are immediate. (further organisational capabilities are still important, though)

I think that's something we sort of lost in ideology, especially since the 80s - thinking not from the perspective of "ideal -> reality", plopping an ideal on top of reality (and failing, and getting more brutal in failure) - but instead "reality <-> contradictions within reality", where there are developments stemming from the way we produce, we distribute, power manifests and we, more broadly, interact with the world, and then resulting from that, failures and contradictions building up, leading to eventual, revolutionary change over several key, historical events. (That often fail repeatedly at first. See how republics and democracy faired in the 19th century after the French Revolution, where the common consensus for a long time was basically: "That can only result in new mass terror and a new Napoleon - or, if at all, maybe work for a low population, rural settler state like the US")

As an aside: That does not mean, vision is completely unimportant, or anything, just that vision is itself is not useful as an ideal to strife for, but just a tool for changing along what is necessary and possible materially, and organising for that.