[Thanos]

You can't credibly say you weren't "properly informed" with communism when communists gained their power through the complete physical destruction of their enemies during the revolutions and then behaved the same way when they took control. No one can say that "I didn't think this free trade deal would cause all those job losses and business closings!" when free trade deals have been causing exactly those things for over twenty five years. Or "I didn't think those bankers and fund managers would do this to me!" when those kind of creatures have been doing it to anyone they can for longer than most of our countries have existed.

I don't expect anyone to know each and every detail about the people they vote for or who they buy their things from. There's always a possibility of a nasty surprise from single politician or business leader every now and then because some of them are really good actors in the way psychopaths usually are. Ignoring the meta though, of what these political parties and movements stand for, and of what they've done not only to their opponents but to their own supporters over the decades? Sorry, that type of responsibility-evading is just plain sad. It's not credible and it's junior-high levels of juvenile the way all "but I didn't know!" excuses always turn out to be. If the people who voted Hitler into power weren't allowed to get off the hook for supporting what he openly said he was going to do then no one else anywhere else is allowed to either.

[Public_Domain]

Boycotts and voting for the least evil takes the blame off the abusers and places it on the abused. It removes responsibility of individual action from the specific individuals that caused it. Women shouldn't wear short shorts-type logic, they should know serial rapists by now.

I don't really blame the people for Hitler either. They were lied to, told Commies were attacking their way of life, and driven into fear and patriotism by bombast and vitriol. When the only legitimate authorities around you are lying to you, it's hard to not believe them, as most don't have an inate distrust of those they've been taught to trust.

I'm plenty informed about "communism". I probably at this point know more about the tragedies and atrocities carried out by Marxist-Leninists than even you, as dedicated you are to conflating all radical leftism with the Soviets. They killed people like me, you know. You're pribably aware of Kronstadt. My communism is not their communism. The difference isn't simplistic and easy, it requires the explaination of many details. Bothering anymore with explaining those differences to you, or why the Soviets killed people like, yet why people like me are still technically "communists" despite being killed by people who also considered themselves "communist" is something that would be best explained by books and people you would refuse to bother listening too, because you reject them outright and refuse their explainations. So I'd love to bother, and if you want me to, I will, but all indications you've given suggest you consider all "communism" to be the same exact movement with the same inevitable outcome. That's wrong and suuuuuuper simplistic, a cop out of even minor critical thought, but the convinced ade hard to dissuade.

The responsibility of tyrants lies on the tyrants. If people are deserving of losing their heads, the first on the list shouldn't be those who were compelled to support those people. There is nuance to the voters, there is none for the tyrants.

[Thanos]

You should examine your movement more closely to understand that they weren't joking around with their eliminationist rhetoric. They weren't talking about merely removing a mindset or philosophy or political difference from the world, they were talking from the very beginning about physically blasting entire classes of people out of existence altogether. And from Robespierre through to Pol Pot they went about their task with all the diligence and merriment they had in them. We can probably put down most of the western politicians as mere salespeople, with their "eliminate poverty" or "eliminate government regulation" nonsense. The ones that talk about the elemental destruction of their enemies though? Yeah, it might be safe to take them at their word.

You should also do more to note how many of the true believers in the new system tend to get knocked off along with the bourgeoisie or the anti-socials. This isn't just mere culling of potential internal threats. It's the removal of those who are left aghast with a new horrified "it wasn't supposed to be this way!" look on their faces. I'm not sure how sorry I feel for these types. If it took pure merciless savagery to take control in the first place so why in the hell would anyone expect the savagery to stop after control has been consolidated? If anything the atrocities become exponentially worse. This isn't an aberration, it's a built-in feature of the system, no matter how many dilettante coffee-shop pseudo-intellectuals have tried to say otherwise in the last hundred and fifty or so years since this nonsense first got written down.

As for your Kronsradt, or the Paris Commune, or the Israeli kibbutzes, or the hippie communes? Well, it's a cute idea. If it could be achieved peacefully without brutal state control then it would still be around, wouldn't it? Even if it's peaceful it's not long-term economically viable, and it won't survive if enough of the collective grow up and want to do something different with their lives, or even simply just want to go home to where they feel safe. Even these place need their leaders and like leaders everywhere they need to be bullies that won't tolerate the kind of dissent that would upset the system too much. They might resort to exile of troublemakers instead of murder or harassment, or even freely allow someone to leave of their own volition if they're that unhappy. Those who want change though? Well, even the condo board or the guys down at the union hall have their ways, some legal but some really dirty and underhanded, of kicking members off the main committee or out of the membership altogether if they think it's necessary.

[Public_Domain]

How is a society collapsing to much larger invaders a mark of failure for the ideology of that smaller society? Ukraine's experiment in anarchism was plenty interesting, and then it fell to the USSR. Does that mean statist Marxist-Leninism, which beat on for royghly 75 years, "worked", before it suddenly didn't anymore decades later? Simplistic thought.

You guys and your obsession with calling me a Starbucks philosopher. Does that make tou feel superior? The idea that maybe I'm some upper middle class guy who's never worked in his life? My family and I are poor as shit. Many a time when we should have been in line getting soup at a shelter. I've seen nothing but heartache, struggle, and conflict in my home and in the relationships around me my entire life. I'm not the rich boy enemy you paint me as.

As for violence, I'm not interested in discussing peace anymore. Are you, truly, interested in peace either? I disagree that we need "leaders", and what I call for is not some vanguard. I want a people's movement, not a fucking Che Guevara-esque leader. Direct consensus democracy over society and the workplace. The commons should be free and we should be ready to defend it if that's how it's gotta be. I disagree that the violence doesn't end. After all, liberals have been boring as hell since the French Revolution ended. You'll notice this is a slight turnaround from my usual pitch for peace and what not. Well you'd be correct. I fail to see how that makes me any worse than the violence you and almost all others beg for here on a regular badis.

[Thanos]

If you're waiting for politics to fix your life then you're wasting your time in the worst possible way you ever could. You're still young enough to fix things for yourself, and with the subsidies and other government educational assistance out there (that you most likely won't even have to pay back) you should be more than eligible. They won't pay to send to McGill to get a law degree but they will pay for you to learn some kind of trade or IT work. If you're not even going to try to this minimum level of effort to see what's available to you then the rest of your life's misery is all on you. Not on the state. Not on politics. Not on any of the people who you think are voting "wrong". Only on you, and it hasn't been a secret that's been kept from you by all the bad guys out there that you need some kind of further education after high school to have some kind of decent life. You're the one who has to look in the mirror if you aren't even going to try. And sitting around having serious discussions about the virtues of a dead ideology with your family and friends is genuinely awful.

As for all of us basically supporting violence in one way or another, well GO TEAM! All our monkey brains are the same and we want our side to win in the incessant poop/bomb-throwing contests that are the main marker of our rather ridiculous specie's time on this world. It'll take a major evolutionary leap forward, towards some kind of hyper-empathetic hive mentality with a partially shared consciousness, for real peace to ever come into a widespread state of existence. Only when we can actually physically feel each other's mental/physical/emotional anguish caused by violence will we no longer be violent. And that kind of evolution is probably a million years away. Not a good forecast for an animal that probably isn't going to even survive en masse for more than another hundred years anyway because all the bills from poisoning the planetary environment are going to have to be paid before much longer.

For now violence is only stopped by the threat of greater violence. We're living in the longest period of peace that's ever occurred in the last three thousand years between major states. Not because we're nicer or anything. It's only because of the US and the Russians pointing nukes at each other since the early 1950's that we haven't gone at it with the same joy they did from 1914-18/1939-45. It's a flawed system. It works for now but there's no way that someone doesn't push one of those buttons one day and when that happens all it means is that a new inning in the same old ballgame begins.

Welcome to the human condition, everyone. You have my genuine pity.

[Public_Domain]

I'm not waiting for politics to fix my life, that's not why I mentioned that shit. I mentioned it because you want to pretend I'm better off than I am to insult me and my ideas.

A life of debt is definitely tempting for some non-guarantees, certainly, and I am not sure where I implied I have no intentions of going to school, or being employed, whether I "like" it or not. Statements making an ass out of you and me.

As for the nukes, they didn't save Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, the Ukraine, Poland, East Germany... The supposed hopelessness of human nature is by no means an argument for the people not fighting to better their conditions. Should capitalism have never come about because of a widespread belief in the hopelessness of humanity under fuedalism, would that have been ideal? Or do we live in better times because of the actions of people violently bringing mass social change, bringing us capitalism?

What I share with my family is my choice. What they choose to believe is theirs. My talks with them are hardly worse than the ads telling them to vote Liberal.