• take_five_seconds [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    everyone i work with thinks he’s a saint, brilliant minded, incredibly kind; they’ve basically deified him already. idk how to tell them he posted dumb things on social media.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      if my chud father in law shot a healthcare CEO tomorrow because of the weird areas of the Venn diagram where we overlap, I would simply declare that he was a “land of contrasts, with many problematic opinons” but that he “died doing what he loved.”

      John Brown was a deeply religious petit bourgeois man with 20 children who he disciplined sternly. I very much doubt I would have enjoyed growing up in his house, but I honor him for his commitment to abolitionism and self sacrifice.

      Karl Marx had unkind and sometimes racist things to say about other people in the 1st International, like Ferdinand Lassalle, but nobody on here upholds Marx because of the problematic things he said, in fact they uphold Marx despite the problematic things he said.

      Engels called Mexicans “lazy” and stated in no uncertain terms that he thought the US annexation of Texas was historically progressive (in the accelerationist sense of the word). But that’s not why we appreciate Engels, is it?

      Lenin wrote a scathing letter to Clara Zetkin for pursuing feminism in conjunction with Marxism. But that’s not why we uphold Lenin.

      Stalin received a letter from a gay communist in England, asking if homosexuals like himself were acceptable in the Communist movement, and Stalin dismissed the letter with “D*generate. Archive.” But that’s not why we like Stalin.

      Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation and oversaw the defeat of the confederacy, despite declaring during his presidential run that he thought black people and white people could never be equal.

      It is very easy to extend this principle to someone like Luigi Mangione. Which btw I don’t think it is possible or advisable to build an educated/organized mass movement out of isolated acts of adventurism.

      We should avoid “people worship” in general, but also understand why people receive veneration, and use that as a barometer for the social attitudes of our time. Adventurist assassinations like those carried out against Brian Thompson and Shinzo Abe are a sign that people are fed up. Lenin’s older brother was hung for trying to assassinate the tsar. Lenin thought of his older brother’s attempt on the tsar as misguided and advised against such actions. Society learns lessons from failed strategies. Sometimes they forget those lessons and need to learn them again.

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        16 hours ago

        Good post but Lincoln doesn’t quite belong in that list. Any progressive things he did were essentially concessions he had to make to preserve the Union, which he wanted to do for non progressive ends.

        Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. They freed themselves and in 1860 were the most revolutionary class in America.

    • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      You don’t, you agree that ventilating CEOs is cool and oh hey look at how deep that rot goes, this whole profit-over-people thing will keep making CEOs until we tear it up by the roots

    • blunder [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      24 hours ago

      idk how to tell them he posted dumb things on social media.

      Why is this your first priority, or even part of the conversation at all?

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      24 hours ago

      idk how to tell them he posted dumb things on social media

      don’t, instead focus on how his manifesto mentioned how the system itself is at fault and how there’s lots of other similar writings well versed on it