felipeforte

You only fear death because your mind is attached to your self, your memories, your experiences, your subjective perceptions... As an exercise, try to the remember the time before you were born. You can't really remember anything, but you know, you can even feel it, there was just total emptiness, no subjective experience, nothing. There is nothing to be afraid of, it's just emptiness. This, to me, was the first step in pacifying my mind in relation to death.

wholesome to see this 4chan meme from my teenage years

reducing his cult of personality is a good thing as long as it’s executed right

It's not like this "cult" is imposed from above and could be gone with a decree. The people has admiration and respect for their leader, who comes from a family of historical revolutionaries.

vagueposting

Hahaha never heard that before. I loved it

not allowing obvious liberals to run rampant in lemmygrad is easily recognized as a political outcome focus

I don't know what you mean by this paragraph comrade, and I have trouble following your reasoning. But I'll comment about this. The liberal propagandists should definitely be extracted from our community, but the honest liberals should definitely be heard and honestly debated. On our part, trying as much as possible to ignore provocations and try our best to dismantle their arguments in few words. I see a few reasons why:

1. liberals have common misunderstandings which are useful to debunk. Some of us are well read (most of us aren't), so the thinking you had when you were a conservative, liberal or "apolitical" has been lost. You cannot empathize to how liberals think now. Alas, comes a liberal, with doubts, silly mistakes, but they are prevalent in political discourse and thinking. A lurker on the website may be presented with arguments dismantling the same silly mistakes they may have. So in terms of political education this is useful;
2. we learn to deal with those who think differently. We need to learn to treat a right-winger well and learn how to defuse a tense situation IRL. Not always we manage to do this, often we manage to hurt others from our own camp, but we aspire to do it. We need to learn how to deal with Nazi provocations both online and personally, physically. We need to learn how to deal emotionally with the situation, train ourselves to not be affected by this interaction. You do this by understanding how your opponents think, and respecting as much as possible their identity. So you do not focus on their religion, their political affiliations, their moral stances on subjects, etc. These are divisive points which separates us from these politically alienated people. We cannot change a person's identity through force or imposition, it only changes socially and historically.

We need to learn to treat a right-winger well and learn how to defuse a tense situation IRL.

A comment on this, about treating well right-wing colleagues, etc. (unless they are awful people of course, besides their shitty foolish worldview). Of course a Nazi provocateur should be harassed or physically assaulted until they stop their provocation, because it is ethical to do so. It is ethical to repress genocidal ideologies because you're saving lives by punishing some. But notice a liberal surely would equate us with genociders! They are indoctrinated by bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology needs to accuse communists of what they do so that they feel at least "equal" in comparison, and thus, shielded from criticism. At least you're doing genocide for a just cause! Not the communists, they genocide for evil!

Bourgeois ideology is hegemonic. You should already expect people to be right-wing. You need to learn to accept this fact so that you're able to be friendly with right-wingers and not be affected by their provocations. Because you understand their worldview is not their fault, they are too distracted to realize the facts, and we need to reach them somehow. How would you achieve this person to eventually learn the facts if you're provoking the person, teasing them, insulting them, questioning their sanity, their ability to think, mocking them, etc. Practice shows us that these behaviors tend to alienate these people even further, and even worse, alienate yourself from others.

Left-wingers tend to be more critical of certain expressions of authority, whereas sometimes this in excess can be destructive.

Side note on this.

Many leaders and progressive thinkers were awful in their personal lives, especially with relatives or spouses, like comrade Stalin, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, etc. This is because humans make grave mistakes all the time, irrespective of how correct they are. Except Lenin, perhaps, he was both an impeccable human being and very often correct. Look at your own lives, have you not hurt someone? Were you never selfish, arrogant, insensible? People make those mistakes all the time, to a greater or lesser extent. Why should our leaderships be different? Should we disregard historical figures in the past because of their personal mistakes? Should we disregard current leaderships for that?

I think this is a case by case thing, but sometimes we simply cannot afford to be too much critical. Think of an actual communist, politically isolated, representing a small city in the bourgeois state, or something. If the opposition found out bad stuff about that guy's past, of course the bourgeois media would create a campaign to hunt them down. In such cases should we join the hunt? This is the challenge of having the correct historical understanding of your time and place, so these choices become clearer. Over the time you start acting based on the political outcome, instead of an abstract moral value which you do not adopt yourself in your life. Then you criticize any mistake in private if possible, outside the eyes of the opposition.

You can democratically elect a party that will impose a 99% corporate profit tax rate.

Please, enlighten us and show where that was done. If it was never done, then no, you can't.

Don't get fooled by this, the Workers' Party of Brazil is a social-liberal party dominated by bourgeois factions. They have a few Marxist militants, but it's by far the minority of the party, which is composed of millions of people, the majority of which blindly follows their opportunist leadership.

From that moment on, the Chinese people have had in the Party an anchor for their struggles to achieve national independence and liberation

A bit too romantic, the party had only 13 representatives, and about 50 members. Most of the people didn't even know about the Communist Party then.

I think this is important to mention because it shows how we can start from nothing and achieve everything. The CPC didn't start with full support of the people, they won it.

Thanks, comrade

I never understood what "war games" are

Discussions with people like you, even if we may not have the same opinion, are the reason I am glad my instance is still federated with you guys because if I didn’t have you, I’d feel trapped in the echo chamber.

This is refreshing to read, thank you very much! And this is why people should struggle to preserve federation with us. I'm sure your instance admins may be bothered if an event catalyzes polemics. When the war in Ukraine started, a lot of instances broke contact with us because we presented different points of view. But most of us ground our opinions on facts. Unfortunately not everyone has the same temperament to deal with different points of view, and this "denouncing" may happen from some users, but that happens anywhere, a whole instance cannot be blamed because of a few users. In our case, it's not a systematic phenomenon, like some right-wing and fascist instances.

Also thanks for taking your time to read. A few people dismiss what I write because I'm very detailed in my answers, but imo complex topics demand complex answers, otherwise we are left with a distorted picture. I try my best to be concise and capture the essence of the things we're discussing. That said, allow me to make some comments on your response. To be clear, I don't want to "convince" you nor anyone else, for me we are just sharing our worldviews here, simply to pass time or something hehe.

But the way I see it every aggressive Russian action has further catalyzed it. From Crimea to Donbass up until the SMO and the various crimes against humanity that were committed.

I'm skeptical of the Russian claims that they are trying to protect the Russians living in Ukraine. Russia is a capitalist state, and the war obviously has bourgeois interests involved. The Ukrainian fascists have harassed Russian nationals inside Ukraine in the Donbass region for almost 8 years, why did it take Russia that long to intervene if that was the intention? However, as I see it, it was a matter of time a conflict would happen there, and the Russians attacked preemptively as a legitimate matter of national security.

Ukraine had a government which didn't treat Russia as the devil and had a comprehensive partnership with the country until 2014, when a coup with full support from US politicians, including John McCain, suddenly changed everything. For decades Ukraine had an economic, cultural, diplomatic and political relationship with Russia, and then after a coup sponsored by Western countries, a regime took an opposite direction of denouncing Russians as the Fourth Reich incarnate. But there were already Ukrainian citizens who profoundly hated Russia, so much so, that the regime received support from the citizens in the Western Ukraine regions.

That country with an explicitly anti-Russian regime since then has been armed, trained, and sponsored by the greatest rivals of Russia, with increasing militarization. For scholars who study Russian foreign policy, such as the United Statesian John Mearsheimer, it was quite obvious Russia would intervene. As early as 2015, he said the actions of the United States would prompt a military intervention from the Russians. If an individual scholar who studies this issue was aware of this, you can be certain the Pentagon generals was aware of that, and this is probably what they wanted in the first place. So the war didn't start in 2022, but in 2014, with blood in the hands of the US.

And furthermore I see NATO’s guarantee to the sovereignty of Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia as a way to prevent Russia from executing further military operations in the future.

Only if you base on the (erroneous) premise that NATO is a "defensive" organization. The atrocious NATO interventions in Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Kosovo, and others, leads us to believe this is not the case. They are as aggressive as the Russians, perhaps even more so. And since NATO is led by Europe and the US, I'm pretty sure they couldn't care less about the sovereignty of these countries. So much so that in order to let these countries into the organization, and these countries are desperate to join since their governments fear Russian intervention, they demand many economic and political "reforms" which precisely undermine the sovereignty of these countries::

“We know that right now is not the time for a breakthrough in the open-door policy. And I know the Georgian authorities know that, but they still need to be prepared, to fulfill all the reforms that are needed -- in electoral reform, judicial reform, security, etc.,” [NATO’s special representative] Colomina told RFE/RL in an interview."

They demand the country to change its whole political system before they join NATO. That's not what you'd expect from an organization interested in preserving the sovereignty of any country.

state capitalism pretending to be socialism

I think your heart is in the right place, but I'm just curious... If the Soviet Union was "pretending to be socialism", what is or was actual socialism?