I do wonder if the democratic party could produce much of anything viable at this point even with a concerted effort to do so. Biden seems to have largely gotten in on “he’s not Trump”. Bernie might have been a real shot at a milquetoast reformist, but even without the capitalists doing everything they could to stop him, the anti-anything-remotely-socialist-sounding rhetoric in the US is strong. And if we look at how pathetic Bernie’s takes on the genocide against Palestine have been, who’s to say he wouldn’t have been funding it just like Biden is, but with slightly different rhetoric and so receiving much the same criticism Biden is.

Trump on the other hand, is willing to say he wants to do something drastically different. In practice, I’m not sure even he has any real intention of consolidating a new christo-fascist order, but he is at least willing to play the part of wanting to and that prolongs the belief for a little longer that the shambling burger empire can be changed significantly through voting.

I could see it being plausible that the capitalists would throw their support behind a Trump kind of figure getting rid of the facade of democracy because of not having much else of direction to go with it. How many times can they do the same Charlie Brown / Lucy Football maneuver while conditions continue to deteriorate for most USians before a critical mass of people go, “Yeah, this stuff is a bunch of BS and we’re not going to feed into the facade anymore.” The anything-but-Trump panic pushed by liberals seems to center on this idea that there is in fact a functional “democracy” and that Trump is going to destroy it, but nowhere in this panic do liberals explain why their candidates are so incredibly bad that a guy like Trump is viable in the first place.

It’s bizarre watching them effectively tell people “we are one of the worst things there is in your universe, but vote for us anyway.” And I’m not sure it’s tactical ineptitude or neglect, so much as it is having reached the limits of pretending to care without meaningfully doing anything for regular people while in office. Obama did nothing to shake up anything while putting on a show like he was the kind of person who would. Biden has done nothing to shake up anything while the media acts like he’s FDR. Liberals can pull out a list of minor stuff they’ve done, but none of it addresses the fundamentals and it’s the fundamentals that leaves people open to a guy like Trump to come in and say, “I’m not going to legitimize how ridiculous and humiliating this system is.” Of course, he’s perfectly capable of legitimizing it anyway, while pretending not to, and I think that’s much of what he did when he was in office before. But then there is the following he has who doesn’t see it that way and they may push him to challenge the fundamentals more than he actually wants to himself. Shaking things up wouldn’t exactly be a cozy thing to attempt. He’d be taking a lot of risk that the existing fascist forces of neoliberalism rally against him and make the remains of his life more painful, and I don’t think his heart is really in it on the beliefs.

As far as I can tell, base skepticism doesn’t accomplish much, if not grounded in a conscious understanding and embracing of one’s biases (such as a bias for the working class), as well as translating that to an understanding of the biases implicit in sources (not just whether they are “factual” or not). For example, an article could say, “A man at the supermarket today was wearing a pink shirt.” Okay, on its own, this may be factual, but why are they focusing on the color of one man’s shirt and specifically the color pink? Sometimes answering that is way more important than whether it’s strictly true or not that there was a man at the supermarket wearing a pink shirt.

But if people don’t even get to that stage because they’re too exhausted with the exercise of verifying whether what they’re being told is even true on a basic factual level, I’m concerned they’re just going to tap out in general. Do you see what I mean?

nefarious synthetic content risks increasing people’s scepticism towards digital information altogether

This is honestly my biggest concern with AI gen and information. I’m not so much concerned about “fake news” as I am about people who are already jaded becoming more cynical about information as a whole and effectively saying, “Let me just enjoy my Cheetos and iPhone 53 in my domicile and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.”

I just read through the thread and tried to mentally filter for people saying it’s a common thing. Didn’t find anything particularly overt in that way. Don’t think anyone was making claims as to how common it is either way, but I guess I could have missed it.

I think that makes sense yeah. Thanks.

It’s telling to me how fragile the gender binary is when people feel the need to police attraction lines based on such arbitrary physical characteristics as how much someone does bodybuilding or fitness.

Keep an eye out for opportunities to show them how their struggles in life are tied into the political order they live within. And if it’s hard to do that, try to understand the political order better first, so you can more communicate about those connections.

It’s relatively easy in the US, for example, to point out that the healthcare system is awful and “that issue you’re dealing with relating to your health would probably be less of one with a better system”. But for some people, they are going to have a view of capitalist realism here or they are going to think “so what? if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride”. So you may have to get more specific about what exactly is wrong with the system in specifics, why it’s possible it could be better in actionable terms.

Then there is stuff where it’s trickier to draw connections, even though the connections are undeniably there. For example, someone who is struggling in dating. Patriarchal socializing and system and the resulting dynamic along with the pushes against it have contributed to making things more fraught, fearful, and tenuous. As well as how the capitalist order pushes individualization and atomization. Trust is low, women have lots of real reason to be fearful and to just prefer independence if that’s that vs. risking being with a controlling man. Women are taught to expect someone who can only speak one emotion flavor: anger/outrage, and to devalue their own emotions. Men are taught to only express anger/outrage and see the rest as weakness. There is all kinds of stuff like this you can get into because the political order is the social order is the economic order is the everyday life. They are inextricably interconnected. And in a meta way, recognizing this in itself as a fact may be necessary to shake some people out of the malaise, so that they stop viewing highly conditional systems in a particular country in a particular period in time as historical inevitabilities of the human species.

Too often online I encounter a sentiment like “X is human nature,” “people are tribal”, “this is how things have always been.” It’s simply not true and there’s no getting around the fact that if you want to get through to those particular people, you have to somehow get past their false beliefs about history and humanity. Which you don’t necessarily have to argue with directly. Showing them how things are intertwined right now in their life may naturally help them see how contextual a political order.

Edit: wording

What is this from? I’m trying to figure out who is the Pacheco he is talking about. Most likely seems to be Rodrigo Pacheco, who as far as I can tell, is associated with the Social Democratic Party. I don’t know how reliable wikipedia is on this, but it describes the Social Democratic Party as a force of centrism in Brazil.

So I’m a bit confused as to why Lula would be saying that to Pacheco in a way that sounds like some kind of counter argument, if it’s the same Pacheco.

I’m sort of at a loss at this point, so let me backtrack a bit. This is your original post:

When someone says “organize” without further elaboration or context regarding what they actually mean, they are saying: “I am either so immensely lazy that I refuse to give even the most basic directions to a receptive audience or else I’m a poser who doesn’t know what they’re talking about”

I approached this in my replies from a couple of different angles at first: 1) Opposition to individualism and the value of it. 2) The implication of ignorance and/or laziness and challenging that portrayal of others.

I’m willing to emphasize and admit I could have zeroed in on the 2nd one with more clarity and awareness in my initial reply, which I think is what bothered me most. But rhetorically, I was trying to challenge what read to me like binary thinking and projecting intent onto what may just be ineffective communication. Something which, ironically (or fittingly?) may be happening with us two here.

Like, have you talked to people who just say “organize”? Did you investigate and discover that they are posers or didn’t want to bother to elaborate? Or is that an assumption you’re making about why they’re doing it? How do we get to the point of fixing that problem if we don’t even know why people are doing it? I shouldn’t have tried to excuse it as much as I did. I’m willing to agree it is a problem of a kind. But I don’t think passing judgment on entire swaths of people without evidence is going to fix anything.

That’s fair. I don’t pretend it is “scientific.” Where I’ve seen value in it, in practice, is as a framework (like a lens through which to think about thinking), not an empirical description of reality. I’m just not sure if the potential benefit outweighs the harm it can cause. Now I’m reflecting on it more, the notion of tension in the psyche between the dominant and inferior function might be the most salvageable part of the theory, on the fact that it’s looking at contradiction and tension between opposites that is never fully resolved. Not unlike dialectics, in spirit, even if the rest of it is a bit iffy. I could maybe see value in examining the psyche as tension between contradictions, where instead of viewing the “cognitive functions” as static preferences that stay dominant and inferior throughout life, there are primary contradictions and secondary contradictions that can shift and change as you develop as a person. This is closer to one alternative take on the theory, which views the cognitive functions more as something you flow between rather than as static preferences.

But in practice, it would still probably be more useful to ground such a view of contradictions in the details of a person’s life and upbringing and so on, rather than through a generic lens of preferences like Intuition or Sensing.

It took another poster a sentence to describe some substantive meanings of organizing in a communist context; what you’ve failed to say once in post after post of self indulgent ranting. Get your mind out of the cycle of elitism and dunking, and take this seriously.

That’s reasonable to me. “Objective Personality System”, a derivative of it that is intended to be more scientific, is the closest I’m aware of to going beyond that. And as far as I know, they have yet to actually publish their findings in any meaningful capacity that others can study and reproduce, so it’s sort of down to trusting they are doing any kind of research diligence.

Ok, but what context is that sentence in? If you said “get involved with a group of activists even if you need to make the group yourself” to a neo-nazi, you aren’t really helping the communist cause, are you. You aren’t with saying “organize” either, of course. But the point I’m trying to make is against overgeneralizing the context of what these things are being said in order to be dismissive about how people are presenting them and the knowledge they are implied to possess as a result.

I resisted saying it at first cause I didn’t want it to come across as a snarky gotcha, but it seems relevant at this stage of our back and forth to point out that in your original post of dismissal, you did not in fact elaborate on what organizing means yourself. And within the back and forth so far, the furthest you have gotten is “get involved with a group of activists even if you need to make the group yourself.” Which has no inherent anti-imperialist, working class, or communist connotation within it.

Yeah, MBTI is a topic I could probably get into at great length. Spent a lot of time in it on and off over the years. I think a lot of its problem is that people see the surface level MBTI categorization, especially as pushed on them in workplaces and the like, and justifiably think it’s an annoying oversimplification. But I’ve also seen quite a lot of sincere effort into digging deep into psychology and using theories relating to Psychological Types and MBTI as a means of understanding each other better and being more accepting of cognitive differences. Then again, I’ve also seen people who use it for obsessing over how they are better than others, or uniquely unique and special, or becoming so enmeshed in viewing the world through an MBTI lens that they lose sight of more complex dynamics beyond it. So it can go a number of ways.

There are platforms (like twitter) where every word counts. And the TL;DR thing on the internet is real. I don’t think you can blanketly say that elaborating is always easy and therefore it’s always ignorance if someone does not give the full spiel.

So I do not have the clarity I can summarize him on my own. I recall some iffy stuff with his views on the Nazis, here is one source I could find on it though I’m not sure if this page has the full text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.12072

The article shows how strongly anti-Nazi Jung’s views were in relation to events during World War II such as Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the bombings of Britain, the U.S. entry into the War, and Allied troops advancing into Germany. Schoenl and Peck, ‘An Answer to the Question: Was Jung, for a Time, a “Nazi Sympathizer” or Not?’ (2012) demonstrated how his views of Nazi Germany changed from 1933 to March 1936. The present article shows how his views evolved from 1936 to the War’s end in 1945.

If you need whole stuff written on you to explain your views on Nazis, that’s probably not a great sign.

Then there’s also stuff he wrote on psychology. From what I’ve seen, he’s most known by association for his Psychological Types, which is what MBTI was derived from. But he also wrote some other lesser known stuff on psychology.

Eh, I’d say it is a point worth making to some people even in vague terms. When you’re dealing with people who have been socialized to view everything through an individualist lens of “do your own thing and it will somehow change the world among enough people doing their own thing,” the emphasis alone of arguing for organization can mean something.

The most perturbing question for the liberal is the question of violence. The liberal’s initial reaction to violence is to try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never accomplishes anything. The Europeans took America through violence and through violence they established the most powerful country in the world. Through violence they maintain the most powerful country in the world. It is absolutely absurd for one to say that violence never accomplishes anything.

Most societies in the West are not opposed to violence. The oppressor is only opposed to violence when the oppressed talks about using violence against the oppressor. Then the question of violence is raised as the incorrect means to attain one’s ends.

https://redsails.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism/

These sort of people act like the organized violence inflicted by the oppressor was just siblings having a shouting match and having to learn to share space. No sense of the gravity of what they’re talking about.

It’s part of the cycle of blame. Liberals can’t take responsibility for failing cause that’d mean they have to actually do something more than whine about what the rightists are doing; they would have to both obtain power and leverage the organized violence of that power in order to suppress any and all rightist influence. But they don’t and in practice, often ally with and enable them instead. That leaves them blaming the nebulous, shifting, ill-defined entity “the left”. An entity which is portrayed as both weak and strong; on the one hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as an inconsequential sample of the population and thus something that should be ignored when it comes time to legislate or court votes. On the other hand, “the left” is viewed by liberals as a serious threat that undermines their ability to win elections by refusing to support them and carrying water for what they label rightist talking points, such as (at this point, with the vote blue no matter who nonsense) criticizing anything a liberal in charge is doing.

If they took responsibility, they would have to admit that the liberal order they idealize is impossible to manage or sustain or implement meaningfully much at all without the contradictions building over time rather than lessening. They would have to admit that where they stand isn’t in any kind of middle, but is in direct opposition to the marginalized, the colonized, the working class. And the best they can ever do as liberals is the political worldview equivalent of Scrooge voluntarily becoming a good guy in A Christmas Carol. They can’t take it further than charity unless they take power seriously and for them to take power seriously, they either end up aligning with the rightists or they figure out they’ve got to reject liberalism and embrace a dialectical liberation as laid out by communists.

I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.