Lex of Excel's Miscellaney

It’s the same shit it’s been for years and years now. You can’t say shit like this or enable Republican victories by withholding your vote and relentlessly lying about the Democratic Party or openly say you don’t care about handing the Supreme Court to the far-right in 2016, and then cry that people hate you for being “too left." No, it’s that you’re much too similar to Republicans, not simply in enabling GOP victories, but in your reactionary bullshit.

tl;dr (screenshot from mariacallous, as I try to stay off twitter)

It's concerning as someone who spends half their time trying to tell children about communist atrocities and wondering how many of them go home and rant about how evil I am for being against communism. Even after knowing/learning communism has killed far more millions than we will ever really fully know because they figured out how to do it a little too well in an age when you just have to toss everything into a fire to get rid of the evidence.

How much generational trauma is still going along the bloodline because of communism. How many victims feel like they have to be silent or else they get dogpiled by children. Telling them they're wrong.

Do you even know who the Khmer Rouge killed? Why?

Do you even know what the Holodomor is?

How many millions of Ukrainians and Cambodians are gone because of communists? Because their ideology literally says to murder en masse? I'm sorry that isn't what you took out of your little commie manual.

How much bigger, fuller, wonderful would life be in dozens of places if not for communism? Communism does not encourage art. It does not encourage writing (except for the machine of communism). It does not care if you are disabled, it will kill you for being useless as a worker. If you think it cares a fucking whit about people like me, you're sadly mistaken.

Queer people are an abomination. They will not/can not produce future workers. They are things to be killed and dumped into pits because they are not proper members of the Party. Some even got forced sterilization just for that extra bit of misery and humiliation.

It is not the amazing, wonderful, loving, caring ideology you take it for.

It cares not for true science. If a scientist disagrees with the Party Scientists, they have to go. Communist Science looks like putting hundreds into the freezing cold. Forcing them to have children. For the sole purpose of making the children immune to the cold. That's not how that works. So many dead for science that isn't real science. Where is your concern for ethics? For humanity? It does not exist in communism.

Communism is not what you think it is. Communism has murdered millions. Communism has hurt the families of people you claim the glory of communism in front of.

Better dead than red? Dead because of Red.

Did you miss the part where I literally teach this? I have spent a good portion of my adult life studying and teaching about communism. And honestly, I don't have much of a choice. I'm nearly 40 years old. Commies murdered millions of Ukrainians. The US has the highest concentration of Ukrs outside of Ukraine for one reason: communism.

I don't need a variant of "it was not real communism" on my posts.

I am 100% describing communist regimes. If it floats like a duck and quacks like a duck. Dictatorship and communist are not mutually exclusive. In many of these places, they went so far left that they touched the far right/authoritarian. But that doesn't mean it wasn't communism first. Communism brought them to that point. Democracy has led to authoritarianism and fascism. Does that mean it wasn't true democracy because of that evolution? Kuzco Emperor's New Groove voice: Let me guess you fully believe China is not communist because -checks notes- they vote*.

Communism cannot be done at a national level. It simply can't. All of their attempts to make it so? Ended in murder. Of millions. But then it seems you glossed over the part where I said communist theory requires mass murder. (And honestly I suspect Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, et al knew that. They knew it requires mass murder and were still fully willing to go ahead. Not that they got to that inevitable mass murder point then truly went "oh shit". But "aww, fuck it. Everyone is already so bloodthirsty anyway, right?" Stalin himself pulled a Scar with the Hyenas in his "Dizzy with Success" but like... he told them to kill so they did. And now he's saying he didn't?)

The ones who don't learn what communism means anymore are the kids with the hammer and sickle in their bios or avatars. Who say shit like they're a "marxist-leninist". And that they can't wait for the revolution to come so they can kill people they incorrectly refer to as the bourgeoise and they say they are proudly anti-intelligentsia.

Please do me a favor and read at least three of the books on this list. Then you tell me whether or not I'm correct in my assessment of what communism "means". Millions are dead and cannot tell you. Only their survivors, if any, can point to communism and say 'that's why my great aunt is dead, that's why my grandpa went to gulag'.

Don't you think... a little bit... that it's wild how everywhere communism has embedded itself, there has been mass murder? You can go "but capitalism--" but again, at the end of the day, it didn't kill millions in the matter of a single year even though they had the means to feed everyone. It didn't kill people for wearing eyeglasses. It did not torture and murder people for the simple 'crime' of 'stealing' a handful of fucking grain. Atrocities exist in the West. But not with the same cause, the same reasoning, as in communism.

Communism is not the goddamn answer to capitalism. It cannot work large scale. Trying to do so is asinine and is telling people who survived other regimes that you didn't learn squat from previous 'experiments'.

The sheer fact that communism has led to a cult of personality single leader system does not mean it wasn't communism. I mean for fuck's sake, proto-communism wanted to completely demolish the idea of privacy whatsoever! But I guess "that's actually authoritarianism".

And at the end of the day? Survivors and their families don't give two shits if you think it "wasn't real communism" or "um actually that's a dictatorship". Because people who proclaimed themselves commies did real damage, real mass murder. They did what they did at the behest of an ideology that looks great on paper but not so much in real life.

Actual communist theory cannot work except in super small communes like a fucking kibbutz.

What's that quote? Something something the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

*This is incredibly simplistic but I think I get the point across.

Do, great. The best story you can come up with is that your perfect society doesn't know that you don't eat your seed corn.

this is such a stupid take and emblematic of a lot of critiques i have of all-or-nothing leftists. god forbid an elected official puts out a respectful professional statement about the death of a colleague, i guess??

There is no reaching across the aisle with Republicans and has not been for twenty years. They have committed themselves to refusing to do anything of use. The *only* thing that matters is getting enough Democrats in office to actually pass things.

What we need are people who are, bare minimum, not going to care about some shit-for-brains dying far too late for the amount of harm he did the nation. Every single Dem who thinks Graham *deserves* professionalism given his capitulation to outright fascism is either an idiot or someone who cannot be trusted to consistently uphold rights.

That bill probably saved millions of lives as well as a worldwide economic catastrophe.

Unfortunately, if you want to be a good politician and do good things for your country, sometimes it means giving your public enemies credit for “finding” a vaccine that’s crippling the world. And in order to get into office in the first place to do shit like that, you have to not end up on a Fox News listicle of “every politician who refused to mourn X dead Republican” during a midterm year and see your reputation drop amongst independent voters.

And a tendency to base one's viewpoints not on any actual values or material outcomes (these will still be invoked as justification, though not consistently), but on status. Being one of the cool kids

And that combination leads people with that perception to 1. be much more amicable towards people with completely opposite views to their own, than towards people with similar but more moderate views than their own, and 2. always try to be the Most Radical person in the room while accusing everyone else in the room of being Less Radical and therefore More Worse

Whenever they lose in a democratic election, it's not because people didn't like their ideas. It's AIPAC or Jews or the "establishment" or the billionaires or Black people.

If people do not vote for you, you look at your platform and your rhetoric and then you talk to key constituencies to ask what they were looking for and try to adjust platform and rhetoric in a way that answers that need without compromising your principles.

Whenever they lose in a democratic election, it's not because people didn't like their ideas. It's AIPAC or Jews or the "establishment" or the billionaires or Black people.

And while they're busy not getting anything done, they also shoot all the other Dems in the foot by refusing to cooperate with them, because they're [insert your favorite antisemitic conspiracy theory here]. So not only are they ineffective at ushering in their socialist utopia, they're ALSO making it harder or even preventing other Democrats from being able to pass bills that would help people, even if they're not perfect.

Married the love of my life at 50.

Got my Class A CDL at 59.

You've got time.

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.

In particular, from that second link:

However, they aren’t actually Palestinian, and they do hold power and privilege over Israeli Jews, by virtue of being white gentiles and by virtue of being American.