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I know a couple of liberals who L.O.V.E. to cite Du Bois around that would be pretty shocked by this quote.

If liberals knew how fucking “tankie” some of their idols really were they would completely melt.

Dê a ordem, camarada! <3

I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.

I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of “left liberal” and respectful of my family’s history, but I tended to be the “progressive on social issues, conservative on economics” kind of liberal.

Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.

That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.

I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and… here I am.

I always had a difficulty to choose those things. Favorite genre of music, favorite movie, favorite artists…

I like music. That’s it. I’d listen to and learn to like mostly anything. The secret is trying to understand each musical tradition’s language, values, aesthetic aims and how they achieve them. If you do, you end up liking it.

neo-bonapartiste

People really go out of their way to call themselves fascists without calling themselves fascists.

I tried to write that in 200 paragraphs and the comrade above said it beautifully in a single one. Listen to them.

I honestly think those kinds of debates are useless. They tire you, make you sad and despondent, and accomplish nothing. We don’t bring people over with angry arguments with liberals about how Marx felt about jews. We don’t make progress on the revolution by dunking on liberals online on minutia about the history of the USSR.

Let’s take a look at how it played out in the past we could have some pointers on what is an useful controversy.

When Lenin debates Kautsky in writing, does that resemble what we do in online debates? When Marx debates Proudhon, is it the same thing we are doing? I would argue that it isn’t at all.

First of all, Marx and Lenin are engaging with people they perceive to be in the same camp as they are. They are not debating hostile outsiders. They are addressing what they perceive to be errors within the same movement. They also do, of course, address theoretically and practically the actual enemies of their camp. But they rarely do so nominally and point by point. They do so more generally, when building their own theory.

Second of all, they are doing so in long form writing. Not point by point argument with immediate response. This is important. It allows you to build an actual argument, enriched with data, enriched with a thorough reading of the thesis of the person you’re addressing. It also doesn’t have the same dynamics where the other person can move goal posts freely.

Third, were them hoping to convince their opponents? Was mit directly addressed to the other side in hopes of bringing them over? They weren’t.They were writing to an audience that will read both texts and hope to make that audience see the problems with the thesis the other side is defending and propose alternatives. The audience is the target to be convinced, not the opponent. If they see the error of their thinking, good! But that’s not likely to happen by the very nature of debate.

I think we should emulate this. And this is what I see, for example, online agitators doing (for example on YouTube). They don’t engage directly with the liberals. They collect the liberal thought they see online and respond in long form, with a thorough take down, well supported by data and theory, aimed at the audience, not at the people they’re responding to.

Also, we need to remember that liberals are not on our camp. Addressing them is not a weeding out of errors by our comrades that we hope to prevent from spreading. They are our enemies. Remember they are the ones that will side with the bourgeois state to kill us, like they did with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

I understand that it’s difficult to resist when you see people saying shit online and not respond. I do it all the time myself. It’s also not without value to not allow the shit to stand there to be read by people without response. But I would advise you to only do so if you have the time and fortitude to engage non-emotionally with it, without any hopes of convincing the other person, but only of not allowing the record to go on without correction. Remember: you’re not talking with that person. You’re talking to someone reading that thread. Disconnect emotionally from the process because this will take a toll on you.

Repeating: online angry debate have never and will never bring anyone over to our side. Nobody ever became a socialist after being “convinced with facts and logic” in an angry online debate. As I said, if it has a function, it’s only function is to not allow the other side to have full control of the online record.

But where and how do we actually convince people? I’d argue that it is one-on-one conversations and with a lot of love and patience. Spend your energy talking one-on-one with people. Listen to them, understand their problems, and discuss the problems they bring to you. Stick to topics they care about. Don’t dump a bunch of theory and history of the USSR on their head. Patiently listen and use theory to guide you on how to address the things they complain about and show them that there’s an alternative world that is possible. Point their anger towards the real problems that prevents this world from existing. Do this and this person will naturally come towards socialism. And do it out of love and care. With a patient attitude. It’s not a debate anymore. You’re talking to a fellow worker about making their life better. You’re not trying to win a debate. You’re trying to win a person.

And most important of all: don’t sacrifice your mental health in the process. Burning yourself down trying to debate liberals online will not accelerate the revolution. It serves no purpose but wearing a motivated comrade down. And that’s to their advantage.

Well, well, well, isn’t that just the thing that we say all the time? That in capitalism the primary division is class and all the other ones are contingent on that.

Wow. A transgender person that has a public career and adopted 3 kids. This person’s life would absolutely hell in the so called “democratic west”.

I’m at a current point in my life were I can derive musical satisfaction from mostly anything if I pay enough attention to it.

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It depends on which right wing.

I’m Brazilian. Although I’m of mixed European and African ancestry, I phenotypically pass as what Brazilians consider white (which is a bit more elastic than whiteness in the US). Perhaps I could pass in the US as well if they don’t know where I’m from and I avoid the sun for a few months.

I also work at a very well respected industry. One of the very bad ones.

So, here in Brazil if I just trim my hair and beard and put on a suit and walk through the financial core of the city I can easily pass for one of them. That’s not how I usually present though. I’m usually wearing a shaggy hair, and shorts with visible tattoos. And I’m pretty annoyingly political all the time. So they usually treat me as a “one of those dumb, drug addict leftists who don’t bathe” (even though I actually never took drugs and bathe at least twice a day because this place is hot as fuck).

If I step a foot in the US I’m immediately branded as “Hispanic” or “Latino” with all the connotations that will imply, with a pinch of Brazilian stereotypes on top:

So, they’ll probably think I’m:

• lazy (yeah, I am kind of lazy… can’t deny that one. But who isn’t?),
• a womanizer who just hits on all women all the time (I’m super shy and respectful when talking to women, only had two long term relationships my whole life),
• ultra machoman, misogynistic and homophobic (I’m bisexual, dude…)
• a super incredibly amazing lover (well, I’m not going to comment that, curious people would have to find by themselves)
• amazing soccer player (lol… no…)
• amazing dancer (lol, double no)
• a jungle dwelling savage (I live in a 25 million people metropolis),
• uneducated and dumb (I have a PhD, I speak two languages more than you, and I know where China is on a map, you racist)
• violent and prone to raging and fist fighting (I never got into a physical fight in my life, I’m kind of a nerd, you know?)
• a suffering little guy who knew abject poverty and needs help (although we aren’t rich and there were some periods of relative scarcity when I was a kid, I’m mostly ok, don’t worry),

Also, “oh wow, Brazil, Pelé, Samba!!” is not a nice thing to say to a Brazilian when you first meet them. First of all, you sound condescending and stupid. I speak English. You don’t need to shout random words at me. Second… This ain’t the 70s, folks. Learn some updated stereotypes. Pelé retired before I was born.

Also don’t do a little faux-samba dance. Please. You don’t know how to, and the music playing here is not samba (it’s salsa, maybe rumba — totally different rhythm, completely different country, not even the same language).

And speaking of that… Latin America is a huge place, you know? Full of different cultures. The global north seems to treat Brazilians, Mexicans, Colombians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentinians, etc, as pretty much the same thing and that is infuriating for us.

And like… It’s already super insensitive and offensive to deny individuality to the different countries of Spanish-speaking Latin America and treating them as a blob of indistinct “Hispanic” culture. But… Do you realize how clueless it is to bundle Brazil together in that blob? It’s so fucking dumb!!!

Like, yeah we have some of things in common culturally, sure. And I fucking love my Latin American brothers and feel a shared sense of belonging to a bigger thing. I’d easily pick the side of another Latin American most of the time… Like… there’s a sense of camaraderie difficult to explain.

But!!! Dude… we don’t even speak the same language. Brazil is a really odd puppy in the Latin American litter. Colombia has a lot more shared culture with far away Mexico than with neighboring Brazil. They share music on the radio, they share TV shows by Televisa, they share literature in Spanish, etc. And imagine this: if Colombia and Mexico, with all that cultural dialogue are so different and distinct, imagine how much more distinct they are from Brazil, who participates a lot less in this shared Spanish-speaking Latin American identity.

(Although we all share the most important cultural product of all times, which is El Chavo del Ocho, and no imperialist will ever take that away from us)

That’s so fucking annoying dude. It looks like the world look at us with fucking inverted binoculars, you know? Like… 3000 different music genres? It’s all Latin music. Just play some stock salsa from the 50s, give some maracas to a scantily clad oversexualized tanned girl to shake while she dances and that’s it, a whole fucking continent summarized. FUCK YOU.

Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.

I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.

Brazilian here. You’re just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.

• 0.5 cm is the width of a pencil
• 2 cm is the size of a small coin (the American penny is roughly 2cm wide, BTW)
• 1 meter is roughly a long step
• 1 km is the distance you walk in roughly 20 minutes
• 1 liter is easy because in any metric country it’s the volume of a standard soda bottle
• 1 kg is the weight of a small bean, rice or sugar bag, or the weight of a soda bottle, or the weight of a good sized cabbage.

There are two areas that make me very angry in this debate: music and African art.

In music there’s this completely ridiculous myth that popular music is based and influenced primarily by the harmonic and melodic language of Western Classical music(*). That it is somehow a popularization and bastardization of this “highest peak” of achievement of that extended Europe.

This is completely absurd!!!

First of all, even if you consider only the music traditionally produced in Western Europe and its area of cultural hegemony, what we call Western Classical music is a ridiculously thin and restricted strip even of this whole.

Western Classical Music is a tradition that encompass the techniques, conceptualizations, rules, styles, etc, etc, that governed how musicians produced the music for the use of the European elites at first and then the elites of the areas were European culture was transplanted to through colonialism. It started as the music for the Church and Nobility, that tradition was adopted for the music of the Bourgeoisie and later was adopted for the music of the bourgeois intellectual and cultural elites.

This elitist tradition is not representative AT ALL of the whole of the music produced even within Europe!!! Popular and folk music within Europe have their own traditions that are independent of and conversant with the music of the elites. There is a dialogue between the two, but they are not confused traditions. There are things that are valid, good and acceptable for one that is out of character and dislocated in the other in both directions.

To give a single example, Common Practice music (the Tonal period, lets say, from Monteverdi to Tchaikovsky), counter-melodies moving in parallel intervals, specially in fifths, were considered very bad practice (**). For the specific style of counterpoint they wanted to make it causes lines to blend too much instead of creating the effect of polyphony, of simultaneous and independent voices. But it was tremendously common in European folk music where that specific thing about counterpoint wasn’t a concern!!! See? A cardinal, very important rule in one tradition was regularly broken in a concurrent tradition that was used by other people in the same place!

Second of all our current contemporary popular music has an overwhelmingly bigger influence from sources that are not European and sources that are not the music of the European elite. Most music that is listened by young people in the USA/Europe/so-called Western sphere of cultural influence has three sources:

1. The harmony and melody of European popular music. Yes, this have interplayed and dialogued with the so-called classical musical, but it’s not identical with it. And it have, beyond it’s own particular traditions, the influence of surrounding areas, since popular music tend to be less insular about that. See for example how much of Iberian, French and Italian popular musics were influenced by Northern African, West Asian music and Mediterranean sources in general.

2. The harmony and melody of Blues and the Jazz, and with them a whole host of harmonic and melodic traditions both from African origin and indigenously developed in the Americas by the enslaved Africans and their descendants.

3. The harmony and melody of the indigenous cultures of America, which is an understudied and incredibly neglected part of the mix, which is there if you know were to look.

But you noticed there’s one thing I haven’t mentioned so far which is fucking RHYTHM? Which is that one thing that we all know that Europeans simply don’t have? Hahahahah. I’m kidding, of course, but this is super important.

I’ve been repeatedly using the term “harmony and melody” above because that’s what “Western Classical Music” is all about. It’s very little about rhythm. But our popular music is incredibly rhythmic! Where does it come from? It comes from all over the place, including even Europe, but the most important rhythmic influence in a lot of our popular music is West African drums. Rock, Jazz, Blues, Funk, Hip Hop, Drum & Bass, R&B, Soul, Latin music, etc, etc, I could list a thousand genres.

Whenever you see a Metal drummer do a cool drumroll, he’s drinking from this source. Whenever you move your body to the “bop bopbop-bop bopbop-bop bopbop-bop” in Shape Of You by freaking Ed Sheeran, you’re listening to something that was brought to our shared culture by enslaved African people.

Of course it’s not the only source. The boring “one-two-THREE-four boom-BOP-boom-BOP-boom-BOP” you hear below the cool stuff is kind of European. Hahahaha. But the rich rhythmic layer on the music we REALLY spend most of our time listening too definitely didn’t come from freaking Bach or Mozart.

And it doesn’t stop there. Have you ever listened to popular harmonies? They are completely outside the language of classical music! It owes a lot more to other traditions. Hell, the most basic rock-and-roll harmony template sometimes resolves a dominant chord to another dominant chord!!! Common Practice theoreticians would be absolutely flabbergasted with that.

That ridiculous myth of Western Classical Music as the pinnacle of music achievement from which all our current music flows from as corruption and degeneration is simply cultural colonialism. It’s bullshit. It’s wrong and pernicious.

I say: long live the Africans who didn’t forget how to play their drums and beautiful harmonies even after being kidnapped, enslaved and brutalized, and forcefully transplanted from their home. Long live the indigenous peoples of America, who didn’t forget how to play their flutes and drums even after being murdered, decimated, raped and brutally expropriated. Long live the working class who came from all over the world to the Americas, frequently forced by economic oppression, war and exploitation, and brought with them their horns, guitars and voices. And long live the working people’s of the whole world who everyday contribute their voices to complex tapestry of musical culture who persists despite cultural colonialism. The people who instead of passively consuming the colonial culture, ingest what’s available, digest it, mix with what they know and out spits back something of their own.

(*) Or “concert music”, “art music”, “erudite music”, “common practice music” or whatever other ridiculous and pompous name we give to that thing. You know what I’m talking about – that shared musical tradition that includes from late medieval European church music up until the New Music movement passing through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, etc, etc. I know people complain when we call it Classical Music, because the classical period is a specific period, but if you force me I will call it “Music of the European Ruling Class”.

(**) That changed later, but only in the late Romantic and early Modern period.

I took a look at the article and the authors. The senior author is a computer science guy focused on researching online harmful behavior.

It’s quite telling that he has no humanities training whatsoever in his academic background. A CS guy doing humanities research without any training in humanities.

I myself fit the description of guy from a hard quantitative science background who delved into humanities and social sciences research. I’ll honestly say to you: the only thing worse than a humanities researcher who eschew any type of quantitative research as “positivist reductionism” is a “hard science guy” who thinks he^[1] doesn’t have to give a shit to the work that was done by humanities researchers because “numbers will tell me everything I need to know”.

[1] Masculine referents 100% intended because it’s usually a guy.

I used the API to overwrite and delete all my messages and deleted my account today.

I’m slowly deleting all my social media accounts and stay only on fediverse stuff. I think the slower, less FOMO driven nature of Lemmy will make it a more healthy to find people to talk with.