#Campism

[daloy-politsey]

[themistressofdolls]

Can pro gaza people on the shitty bird site just not boost Russian anti ukraine propagandists for like just one day please? Or even defend Russians genocidal ass invasion or make both conflicts some kind of competition of worth.

The US is worthy of heavy criticism but maybe its not good to take that as an excuse to simp for imperial authoritarians just because your politics are little more than vapid "US BAD"

Worth a look https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/294/

[anarchistin]

honestly couldn't care less abt what any long-dead thinker 'would have thought' about something from today. it's a useless question, purely speculative, and a poor substitute for thinking about it yourself.

source

[atsvensson]

Vänstern som tänker

Vänstern som tänker. I Magasinet Konkret har jag skrivit en artikel om vänstern som slutade tänka. Det är framförallt en kritik av Vänsterpartiets ledning och resterna av den gamla stalinistiska/maoistiska vänstern som gått kraftigt åt höger. Vänsterpartiets ledning och de som stöder dem har anpassat sig till makten för de tycks det som viktigare att ha makt än att ha en politik som är bra.…

[russianreader]

Simon Pirani: No Path to Peace in Ukraine Through This Fantasy World

The Russian army’s meagre successes in Ukraine – such as taking the ruined town of Avdiivka, at horrendous human cost – have produced a new round of western politicians’ statements and commentators’ articles about possible peace negotiations. Hopes are not high, because the Kremlin shows no appetite for such talks. Its actions, such as nightly bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure,…

[argyrocratie]

communists be like help me idealized and simplistic version of bourgeois legality

[eleemosynecdoche]

Anyways, sometimes I think I'm being too mean towards open-about-it communists on social media, many of whom are young and structurally pushed towards behaving in ways I find personally annoying, and then I see a post which could have been written by diehard anti-union go-USA anticommunist coworkers of mine and I think, "for fuck's sake". For fuck's sake.

[scorpius-rising]

When you're observing other people doing it leftist infighting can be funny but it's just enormously frustrating when it's happening around you

[redbards]

Social-chauvinism is advocacy of the idea of “defence of the fatherland” in the present war. Further, this idea logically leads to the abandonment of the class struggle during the war, to voting war credits, etc. Actually, the social-chauvinists are pursuing an anti-proletarian, bourgeois policy; for actually, they are championing not “defence of the fatherland” in the sense of fighting foreign oppression, but the “right” of one or other of the “great” powers to plunder colonies and to oppress other nations. The social-chauvinists repeat the bourgeois deception of the people that the war is being waged to protect the freedom and existence of nations, and thereby they go over to the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In the category of social-chauvinists are those who justify and embellish the governments and bourgeoisie of one of the belligerent groups of powers, as well as those who, like Kautsky, argue that the Socialists of all the belligerent powers have an equal right to “defend the fatherland.” Social-chauvinism, being actually defence of the privileges, advantages, robbery and violence of one’s “own” (or every) imperialist bourgeoisie, is the utter betrayal of all socialist convictions and of the decision of the Basle International Socialist Congress.  

- V.I. Lenin, Socialism and War (1915), Ch. 1

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm

also available as audiobook thanks to @socialismforall:

[tyrannuspitch]

i'm rewatching thor 2011 with relatively few pauses to add to my conspiracy board (are u proud of me) and god what i said when i first returned to it almost two years ago now about it feeling more intense/individual/present that later marvel movies was SO right....... i still don't really have the technical eye to pin down what it is but there's just a sense of TENSION and SCALE in every scene (even to a certain extent the comedic ones!) that even marvel movies from two years later feel bland beside. (in fact, this quality might actually be unique to thor among the mcu? i haven't directly compared them all.)

i think the cinematography is a large part of it, especially how the camera moves, zooming and panning and lingering in such obviously deliberate ways. but i think it's also the dialogue - the words themselves, and the delivery, and both in combination - so much emotional information condensed into short, stark, simple lines and interspersed with tense silences that can't possibly be as long as they feel. and it's the surreal, abstract set design, and it's the flashy, tacky costumes, and it's the music, admittedly generic but never invisible...

i know that branagh said that the dutch angles, at least, were meant to make the movie feel like a comic book, but i think that's probably true of all of these choices - EVERYTHING is heightened. like, THIS is a movie where i can see the characters speaking in different fonts, and their actions coming with sound effect bubbles. THIS is a movie where characters feel like they might be framed within a comic panel, and where impactful moments might spill over the panel's edges. and it does all this while managing to have genuine emotional impact and complex psychology and clever writing!!!

god thor rules. rip to everyone else but i fucking love it when marvel movies are simultaneously ridiculous and taking themselves deadly fucking seriously. thor es número uno. vive le mélodrame vive la camp

[lurks-no-more]

Don't forget Venezuela, and Maduro's brutal, corrupt, authoritarian, constantly lying and utterly incompetent Chavista regime, that a lot of leftists online support just because it's opposed to the US.

My high school history teacher once said, "America has supported miserable governments just because they were Anti-Commie."

And I'm seeing the same with the Far Left. They are supporting some of the most objectively horrible "governments" in the world (Iranian regime, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, etc) with stone age-era penal codes just because they're Anti-West.

[psychotrenny]

It's certainly true that one shouldn't uncritically and unconditionally support any group or nation, regardless of their previous achievements. Errors can occur even with the best of intentions, while ideological changes on both personal and organisation scales may lead any group into all sorts of disagreeable directions. You should evaluate things in terms of how they are, their material impacts on the world and genuine reasoning behind them, and not what you wish they were or what you claim them to be.

All that being considered, it's funny how consistently the most useless sorts of Western Marxists* will attack actually existing Socialism using all manner of distortions and outright lies, and when pointed out "this just isn't true" they resort to accusations of "factionalism" or "campism". They seem to think their criticisms are so correct and righteous that people only ever disagree because of a mindless devotion to badist fake commies. The idea that they're just repeating Imperialist propaganda with a thin Marxian coating is never one that seems to get through to them.

I suppose that wouldn't sit well with their self image of detached intellectual enlightenment i.e. the most important thing about being a communist as far as this sort of person is concerned. They seem to think what Marx actually meant to say was "Philosophers have only changed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to interpret it"

*as in those who follow the strain of Marxism that emerged in Western Europe as diverged from Marxism-Leninism (Frankfurt school and the like), who are not necessarily themselves citizens of Western Europe/their settler colonies

[tanadrin]

There is this chronic rhetorical transmutation of “the US may be positioned to usefully pressure Israel on its treatment of Palestine, and one way as an American to effect political change in this regard is to put pressure on American politicians” to “American politicians are the principle architects of Israeli policy and bear a greater share of responsibility for Palestinian death and suffering than even the Israeli government.” But no American president is in a position to micromanage Israeli government policy—the US is not the only country with agency in the world! On the one hand, I think this view can be the result of a certain optimism—the idea that perhaps nothing you can do as an American could really end Israeli occupation of Palestine in a just way is perhaps a depressing thought. On the other hand, this also feels like the usual shallow campism: the US is the only country capable of sin, and every other actor in international politics is behaving in a purely agency-free, mechanistic fashion.

[vacuouslyfalse]

Anyway. I've said this before but while I am generally critical of communism and the USSR, anticommunism is a far more bleak and disturbing ideology. There is an oft-repeated lie that the Cold War was a conflict between democratic capitalism and authoritarian communism, but you really don't have to look that hard to see how that narrative falls apart - the people the US supported as bulwarks against communism were consistently antidemocratic.

The cognitive dissonance induced by anticommunism was staggering - you have all these US government officials talking about the loathed enemy, unable to really articulate what they were fighting and why, and why they thought the people they were supporting were better, besides their shared opposition to communism.

A particularly stark example of this comes up in this season of Blowback when the CIA director was flirting with a plan to try and get Soviet soldiers to defect. To shoot down the plan, other CIA operatives showed him evidence of Mujaheddin sexual violence against Soviet prisoners, which elicited a response along the lines of "I see your point, there's no way any of the Soviets would ever ally with those subhuman monsters." But those were the same people the CIA were funding, training, and arming!

Even some concept of pro-US campism (support people who are pro-US!) or shared interest in capitalist profits (support people who make the US money!) doesn't hold up - the Islamic fundamentalists were completely uninterested in what the US was selling, except that it furthered their immediate aims!

[evilwickedme]

I don't really know what to say. I'm not an African American, or even really American at all. On the one hand, I feel like the culture at large entirely dismisses how genuinely awful BHI is; on the other hand, I feel like sometimes jumblr is too quick to call people antisemites, especially if they were recently in the limelight. I have a lot of criticism of jumblr at large, especially in the last year, as campism and hostilities towards anyone they don't 100% agree with have increased.

I'm also not a big rap fan - not in a "I listen to everything except rap and country" way (if only because I listen to a lot of country actually), but in a "I've heard rap songs I enjoy and can appreciate the artistry but overall it's not my genre" way. As a result, I'm not very familiar with Kendrick's work, let alone from a Jewish context. I did feel uncomfortable with the specific line where he implied Drake wasn't black - I thought it was because of him being half Jewish - but I've now heard more of the context and I'm pretty sure that's not the meaning of the line (people can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understood it's more about his upbringing being more privileged, making him an outsider to the roots of the genre).

Tl;dr: I think there's context missing on all sides here. Personally, I'd like to hear some black Jewish American voices talk about this. I'd tag some, but I don't want to put them on blast if they choose not to respond. So, black Jewish American mutuals - any thoughts?

[thequeeranachronism]

The urge to dehumanize people is the enemy. You can get nowhere if those you disagree with are no longer human in your eyes. To make true change you have to work with people you may disagree with. You can change no one’s mind if you treat them like monsters. You will get nowhere if you refuse to even try and understand the other side.

Now that doesn’t mean you can always work with or change someone’s mind. Of course the kkk isn’t going to work with antiracists and to try and get them to is dangerous. But you’ll find most people do not fall into such extreme positions. We must resist radicalization to either side. Campism has really rotted the way a lot of people think of politics and how to work towards change. “Political purity” is a myth