the_dunk_tank

Thing is, they're partially right. Revolution means war and war is violent. Innocent people will be murdered. Sick children. Homeless people. The elderly. Perfectly healthy random people. Pets, wild animals, you name it. Stuff that shouldn't have to die will die. That's the nature of war.

The reason it's still worth it is that we're already at war. It's just that largely only one side is waging that war. Innocent people are being murdered under the status quo every single day. Sick children, homeless people, the elderly, perfectly healthy random people, pets, wild animals, you name it. They're already being murdered. Revolution only looks violent and unreasonable from the privileged position that the status quo isn't violent.

Man it's a good thing structural violence isn't a thing. Otherwise incremental reform (or more honestly, its vain pursuit under bourgeois democracy) would have its own death toll that is being assumed as the normal, immutable state of things

Tagging your essay with #de-radicalisation is literally the soyest thing imagibable

Why do people think the revolution is one singular magical eschatological even that will happen everywhere at the same time, and involves destryoing everything? Why did i believe that at one point? Where did that idea come from and why does it persist?

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” -Mark Twain

-Happybadger

before you start a revolution, you have to submit detailed plan and schedule of your movements to your local fbi headquarters, so that they can ensure steady workings of proletarians (who will otherwise crumble into ash when shareholders can't answer their emails)

Sometimes I think I'm too doomer, but this is what real defeatism looks like. Pure "I don't care" energy distilled into a thread.

de-radicalization

People who ideology-hop into marxism and plant no roots by reading theory will just as quickly ideology-hop out of marxism. Simple as.

Those people are currently dying and would be saved by a revolution. They just described what's happening right now.

Gonna need a list of revolutions where all the children in the hospitals spontaneously died.

Oh wait guess what... Didn't happen. Even when shit gets really bad the hospitals make it work right up until you create literal famine conditions like Gaza. Shut up lib.

I don't know where in the world you live and how rich you have to be to think "slow steady and long term changes" could possibly be thought of as positive considering the entire world has obviously been on a very steady downward spiral since like the 60s.

Because, of course, the one and only defining trait of every revolution is taking a flamethrower to the paediatric unit of your local hospital.

"Fuck them kids, bro!"

• Che Guevara

Soooo, these people think the American revolution was a bad thing? The Haitian revolution? French Revolution? Do they think the Vietnamese should have just rolled over and been content with being French subjects because otherwise the supply of baguettes might have been interrupted? Once again, libs love every prior revolution and hate the idea of the revolution around the corner.

These are the people who see revolution not as one stage of an ongoing struggle to improve the world, but as a spontaneous rapture-like event divorced from the conditions before. The kind of people who've read no theory or performed no praxis and assume that socialists want the system to be violently upheaved and rebuilt with themselves at the top with no further changes. They've never heard of dual power, of communities taking care of their own, or even Food Not Bombs feeding the needy for free

Literacy is oppression for those who can't read.

Its weird how the government, when attacked, can immediately turn off the power/water/gas/food/medicine to defend itself like that.

I fucking hate tumblr left anti-communists (liberals)

Another great example about how disconnected the average westerner is from the material condition that most of the world faces. If you even take a second to look at the conditions that were necessary to preempt revolutions like that seen in China, Russia, Haiti, or as we see now the resistance of the Palestinians it becomes quite clear the question is not whether there will be medicine for sick children or whether child support comes through. The reality is that there will be NO hospitals and NO organization to even process the concept of child support. The liberal tendency to put the cart before the horse and insert their idealized concept of revolution into what they think revolutionary times might look like is what I personally see as one of the greatest divides in thought between them and some of the older relatives in my family I have had the chance to talk to. For my older relatives that lived through the war and revolution it was do or die. Just goes to show how far away any real chance of revolution is here in the west.

Ok I got an idea: we take care of each other. Before, after, during the revolution. And if people tell us to stop, we fuck em up.

What do you mean the revolution was the friends and anticapitalist structures we made along the way?? SHENANIGANS!!

This might be a reasonable concern if the current governments weren't already killing and causing suffering en masse.

Why is my life right now considered "acceptable collateral" but revolution to solve that is wrong?

This radlib navel-gazing pisses me off so much. Not just because its completely detached from the reality that these people are going to be killed in the exact way they're describing by the systems in place currently, but because it's always trotted out to scold and tut-tut people for being reprehensible tankies presumably to preserve the fragile ego of some imperial chauvinist.

I love how these self described "leftists" and "progressives" only ever say things that serve to reinforce the idea that nothing should or can change. Regardless of if these things are true or not, at the end of the day the function of these statements is to reinforce the status quo. Yet these dipshits will claim to be progressive, to want change. Don't buy it for a fucking second. They're privileged enough to live in a world that seems "peaceful" to them, and that's all they care about. They want that world to stay exactly the same, "safe" for them at any cost to anyone else. The irony is the violence they think doesn't occur under the status quo is coming for them too, it's coming for us all.

But there's people who rely on government programs to eat and live.

Just fucking steal shit?

Sounds like these einsteins have never experienced poverty or any kind of an undeprivileged position where medication and access to healthcare is systemically disrubted all the damn time as a system feature.

Where are all the Westerners with actual access to even basic healthcare right the f now? I mean this is again a post that only reveales the privilege and ignorance of the posters.

This level of ignorance can only come from a consistent choice to not aknowledge the endless and constant violence the system we live in does. On every level. We live in a system of violence that was built on violence and is upheld by it. Ffs...

the redditor who posted this is an israeli zionazi is anyone surprised???

Everyone claims they would pull the lever in the Trolley Problem, yet here is an actual example of it.

Dumbass uses the database analogy, but apparently has never encountered the situation where a database is fundamentally ill-equipped to handle the task you require, and attempts to bolt on band aids will result in collapse of the database.

Almost as if the working class needs to seize the means of production

Also insert Mark Twain quote about the terror of the revolution being dwarfed by the terror of the old regime. How many thousands of children with medical needs are being neglected, abused, or their families indebted by the cruelty of capitalism, right now?

taking my hedge clippers to the local hospital when the revolution starts (killing children is my main motivation); I think there will be an obvious power cable to just snip off; I get confused and ask the doctors where the huge power cable for the hospital is; they don't know either

Until the revolution every kid with significant medical needs is in peril of not getting the help they need and every hospital is on the brink of collapse if one too many nurses call in sick that day and millions go without getting any care at all.

Violence is invisible to libs until it becomes personally inconvenient to them.

Third commenter describing awful shit that happens under capitalism as a justification to keep capitalism around lmao

this is the "why are you hitting yourself" of ideology

I think about how if the revolution doesn't happen then 10s of thousands of people will continue to die due to lack of basic services like healthcare and food and transportation and heating and housing on an ongoing basis every single year.

The revolution can be peaceful if the bourgeoisie and fascists let it be peaceful (they won't)