This is such an idealist take. Refusing to engage with bourgeois media because it contains bourgeois bias is ironically the most liberal thing you can do. It’s retreatism, curating a ‘safe space’ where you never have to encounter a contradiction, rather than confronting the dominant narrative head on.
If we discarded every source that had a liberal or capitalist slant, we would effectively have to stop reading 99% of Western media. We would be blinding ourselves to the very mechanisms we are trying to dismantle. We are adults with functioning brains. We possess the capacity for critical analysis. We should be able to read a piece of liberal slop, identify the ideological framing, strip it away, and analyze the material conditions they are reporting on or trying to obscure.
From a dialectical perspective, you need to read the Wall Street Journal because it is the mouthpiece of the ruling class. It tells you exactly what capital is thinking, what they are afraid of, and how they are strategizing to protect their interests. You cannot effectively dismantle an argument if you refuse to understand its internal structure and logic.
Running away from information because it doesn’t align with your worldview is what liberals do when they retreat into their MSNBC bubbles. As socialists, we should be secure enough in our own position to read sources we abhor, understand them, and approach their claims from a position of knowledge. Ruthless criticism of all that exists includes reading the wsj.
I agree with everything you said. My comment was strictly about posting such an article without any discussion, any comment, just a link to it. If feels like posting “shit reactionaries say” outside its proper space. But to be clear, since my short comment was certainly unclear, my problem was not with discussing such article, just with posting them without any commentary whatsoever.
My view is that we are in an explicitly Marxist space here, so we should be able to share these kinds of articles with understanding that people will read them critically. The article is a great illustration of the power dynamics between the empire and the vassals, and I don’t really see anything you could really add to the title there to make it better. Like I said in another comment, if people see news from imperialist sources and they’re not clear on what the materialist take on the news is, that’s a perfect opportunity to start a discussion.
I’ll have that in mind going forward, thank you :) Though I still think it might be a good idea to write a couple sentences in the comments, just like you did here. “The article is a great illustration of the power dynamics between the empire and the vassals” would’ve been perfect. But of course I’m in no place at all to demand such a thing, please don’t take it that way.
I’m also still adapting to this space and I understand things work differently here, which is something I do appreciate.
I think to further refine @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml’s comment, one important skill as a leftist is to build on one’s ability to think dialectically. One way to overcome liberal propaganda is to engage with it, process its arguments and still come out saying “No.” The failure to do this is why you have all those “Why I left the Left” grifters where their origin story is that they were once the “model Marxist Leninist” but then were enlightened because some redditor one day spammed them with the NATOpedia article on Tiananmen.
If everyone could do that, there would be no need for AES to protect themselves from the modern West’s propaganda system, the most comprehensive discourse hegemony in history.
This is why, if you read Marx and Lenin, they sound at times like they would be the most terminally online debate bros today because a bulk of their writings are just constantly dunking on Bakunin, Kautsky, The Economist or various other political talking heads. Yet in spite of their obsession in exposing themselves to slop, they maintained the integrity of their beliefs.
On the other hand, the alternate side of dialectics entails that this does not mean you need to spend your day reading just NYT or FT articles. Some “leftists” do this, where they have clearly never heard of Parenti/Losurdo/Amin or even the 20th century heavyweights like Fanon, Rodney, and Sakai. We need to support leftist information and content, especially because in the West, they are suppressed and leftist authors/platforms are suffocated of support like African Stream was. That’s why it’s also just as disappointing to see leftists who get all their information from liberal media and academic materials.
It’s a valid concern, I think, especially if people read the headlines uncritically at a glance without reading the content of it. IIRC, I’ve mentioned such a concern in the past myself. One thing I’ve seen yogthos do sometimes is post articles like these but with a communist slant custom headline that differs from the source. In this case, the headline looks like the empire taking an L even at a glance, so I don’t think it needs communist editing. But I do like the practice as a general rule to help guard against people taking imperialist news at face value.
We aren’t analyzing these articles as a more formal group communist discussion (though maybe we should be doing some of that), which is more where I’d expect benefit of us reading it. And approaching it as individualistic capability to see through the imperialist BS has its risks. So I tend to have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, yes, we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand about it. On the other hand, we do have to consider the nature of how people engage with internet headlines and information in general.
I had an additional thought just now. I wonder how some LLMs would do at editing for such a communist slant title. I wouldn’t expect them to be reliable for doing it to an entire article without careful reading through of their output, but it might be an easier way to get better titles, since it wouldn’t require much proofreading.
I feel like for something like a title, it’s easy enough to come up with one yourself. And it’s good practice for seeing if you can easily decode what the article is actually saying. I do think discussing these kinds of articles and people asking questions on their framing and understanding is something we should be doing more of. If it’s not clear what the socialist perspective on a particular story is, it’s worth leaving a comment asking for clarification in my opinion. That’s kind of the whole point of having a forum like this where we can educate each other and swap ideas.
We posting Wall Street Journal? =( I get that the “news” is funny but it’s still liberal slop
This is such an idealist take. Refusing to engage with bourgeois media because it contains bourgeois bias is ironically the most liberal thing you can do. It’s retreatism, curating a ‘safe space’ where you never have to encounter a contradiction, rather than confronting the dominant narrative head on.
If we discarded every source that had a liberal or capitalist slant, we would effectively have to stop reading 99% of Western media. We would be blinding ourselves to the very mechanisms we are trying to dismantle. We are adults with functioning brains. We possess the capacity for critical analysis. We should be able to read a piece of liberal slop, identify the ideological framing, strip it away, and analyze the material conditions they are reporting on or trying to obscure.
From a dialectical perspective, you need to read the Wall Street Journal because it is the mouthpiece of the ruling class. It tells you exactly what capital is thinking, what they are afraid of, and how they are strategizing to protect their interests. You cannot effectively dismantle an argument if you refuse to understand its internal structure and logic.
Running away from information because it doesn’t align with your worldview is what liberals do when they retreat into their MSNBC bubbles. As socialists, we should be secure enough in our own position to read sources we abhor, understand them, and approach their claims from a position of knowledge. Ruthless criticism of all that exists includes reading the wsj.
I agree with everything you said. My comment was strictly about posting such an article without any discussion, any comment, just a link to it. If feels like posting “shit reactionaries say” outside its proper space. But to be clear, since my short comment was certainly unclear, my problem was not with discussing such article, just with posting them without any commentary whatsoever.
My view is that we are in an explicitly Marxist space here, so we should be able to share these kinds of articles with understanding that people will read them critically. The article is a great illustration of the power dynamics between the empire and the vassals, and I don’t really see anything you could really add to the title there to make it better. Like I said in another comment, if people see news from imperialist sources and they’re not clear on what the materialist take on the news is, that’s a perfect opportunity to start a discussion.
I’ll have that in mind going forward, thank you :) Though I still think it might be a good idea to write a couple sentences in the comments, just like you did here. “The article is a great illustration of the power dynamics between the empire and the vassals” would’ve been perfect. But of course I’m in no place at all to demand such a thing, please don’t take it that way.
I’m also still adapting to this space and I understand things work differently here, which is something I do appreciate.
👍
I think to further refine @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml’s comment, one important skill as a leftist is to build on one’s ability to think dialectically. One way to overcome liberal propaganda is to engage with it, process its arguments and still come out saying “No.” The failure to do this is why you have all those “Why I left the Left” grifters where their origin story is that they were once the “model Marxist Leninist” but then were enlightened because some redditor one day spammed them with the NATOpedia article on Tiananmen.
If everyone could do that, there would be no need for AES to protect themselves from the modern West’s propaganda system, the most comprehensive discourse hegemony in history.
This is why, if you read Marx and Lenin, they sound at times like they would be the most terminally online debate bros today because a bulk of their writings are just constantly dunking on Bakunin, Kautsky, The Economist or various other political talking heads. Yet in spite of their obsession in exposing themselves to slop, they maintained the integrity of their beliefs.
On the other hand, the alternate side of dialectics entails that this does not mean you need to spend your day reading just NYT or FT articles. Some “leftists” do this, where they have clearly never heard of Parenti/Losurdo/Amin or even the 20th century heavyweights like Fanon, Rodney, and Sakai. We need to support leftist information and content, especially because in the West, they are suppressed and leftist authors/platforms are suffocated of support like African Stream was. That’s why it’s also just as disappointing to see leftists who get all their information from liberal media and academic materials.
well put
It’s a valid concern, I think, especially if people read the headlines uncritically at a glance without reading the content of it. IIRC, I’ve mentioned such a concern in the past myself. One thing I’ve seen yogthos do sometimes is post articles like these but with a communist slant custom headline that differs from the source. In this case, the headline looks like the empire taking an L even at a glance, so I don’t think it needs communist editing. But I do like the practice as a general rule to help guard against people taking imperialist news at face value.
We aren’t analyzing these articles as a more formal group communist discussion (though maybe we should be doing some of that), which is more where I’d expect benefit of us reading it. And approaching it as individualistic capability to see through the imperialist BS has its risks. So I tend to have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, yes, we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand about it. On the other hand, we do have to consider the nature of how people engage with internet headlines and information in general.
I had an additional thought just now. I wonder how some LLMs would do at editing for such a communist slant title. I wouldn’t expect them to be reliable for doing it to an entire article without careful reading through of their output, but it might be an easier way to get better titles, since it wouldn’t require much proofreading.
I feel like for something like a title, it’s easy enough to come up with one yourself. And it’s good practice for seeing if you can easily decode what the article is actually saying. I do think discussing these kinds of articles and people asking questions on their framing and understanding is something we should be doing more of. If it’s not clear what the socialist perspective on a particular story is, it’s worth leaving a comment asking for clarification in my opinion. That’s kind of the whole point of having a forum like this where we can educate each other and swap ideas.
That’s fair.