Lenin: Miraculous prophecy is a fairy-tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact.
Noam Chomsky: See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
George Bernard Shaw: Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Henry Kissinger: Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
Fidel Castro: This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries' press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world - in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara - coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons.
Fidel Castro: Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction.
Fidel Castro: Yon Sosa led the movement of a group of armed officers in the crushing of whom the mercenaries who later invaded Playa Girón participated. Through a businessman who took charge of the movement's political aspects, the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: It is the beginning of the end.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: Financiers flourish only when nations decline.
George Friedman: The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
Lenin: Prompted by fear of revolution, the old state power, which is independent of the people and is a power over the people, promises the people that it will ensure their freedom. But its promises remain unfulfilled; they cannot be fulfilled.
James Connolly: If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain.
Lenin: There are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle.
Kim Il Sung: Our ideal is to build a society where everyone is well fed, well clothed, and lives a long life, a society where everybody is progressive and works devotedly, a society where all people live united in harmony as one big family.
Michael Parenti: To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
Edward Snowden: There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war.
Lenin: Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.
Stalin: Only in the highest phase of communism will people, working in accordance with their capacity, receive recompense therefor in accordance with their needs: "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs."
Stalin: All that Marxism declares is that until classes have been completely abolished, and until work has been transformed from being a means of maintaining existence, into a prime necessity of life, into voluntary labour performed for the benefit of society, people will continue to be paid for their labour in accordance with the amount of labour performed.
Stalin: The October Revolution is neither the continuation nor the culmination of the Great French Revolution. The purpose of the French Revolution was to put an end to feudalism and establish capitalism. The aim of the October Revolution is to put an end to capitalism and to establish socialism.
Lenin: We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.
Gilbert Scott-Heron: The first revolution is when you change your mind.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya: Solidarity among the male and female workers, a general cause, general goals, a general path to that goal - that is the solution to the "woman" question in the working-class environment.
Lenin: No idea could be more erroneous or harmful than to separate foreign from home policy.
Kim Jong-il: Introducing individualism into socialism, which is based entirely on collectivism, is tantamount to taking poison.
Langston Hughes: Put one more S in the U.S.A. To make it Soviet.
Lenin: There is a good Latin proverb which says: “It is natural for all men to err; but only a fool persists in his error.
Lenin: A Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.
Kim Il Sung: It can be said that the life of a revolutionary begins by going among the masses and that it is over when he parts from them.
Lenin: Deafened by liberal catch-phrases, people in our country are apt to overlook the actual class stand of the liberal party’s real bosses.
Lenin: The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”).
I shared this 3 years ago today before my egg even cracked...
And honestly, rereading it is chilling a true. I never experienced dysphoria before transitioning, but I definitely felt that those were not my spaces or my people.
On top of that, when around other women I was incredibly self conscious... in the spaces that felt the most natural, the relationships that felt the most natural, I felt like I was intruding.
I was so intimately aware of the threat of men and because I thought I was one I was so terrified of being threatening and making the women around me feel unsafe... because doing so would mean being feared and ostracized by the people I felt most natural with.
For the longest time I thought this was maybe just because I was autistic, and even then I still couldn't understand why I felt natural around women and those socialized as women... It was a sticking point in my mind constantly because I know I wasn't socialized female and I have a bio-brother who lived through similar circumstances and didn't remotely turn out the same way.
And honestly as I finally found true family... I was low key terrified for the longest time because the people I adopted were almost all women (at least, we thought so at the time... funnily enough most turned out to be trans-masc sometime after adopting them, but that didn't change the terror...)
All this is to say we're not men who decide to become women... we're women who decide to stop pretending to be men. Who grew up being forced to pretend to be someone other than who we are, and being told that the idea of being who we are is impossible, gross, and wrong. And even after we have to live in terror of people accusing us of pretending to somehow abuse other women.
it’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman
Reply by valkyriethunderbitch
This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.
When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.
Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.
Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.
Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?
If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.
Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.
Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.
A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.
Reply by thecuckoohaslanded
“exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around”
So many people have no idea how true this is. Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.
One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.” This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).
There can be benefits, here and there. But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.
Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces. That does not mean we belong in them. Or feel comfortable anywhere near them. Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying. Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying. You are in a constant state of panic around men. And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family. We NEVER feel safe. And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men. They’re horrifying. What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk. Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this. I have never been an athlete. My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable. I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports. The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING. Men don’t see women as less than human. They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.
Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them. Your LIFE depends on whether they notice. That’s not safety. That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place. Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.
We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people. Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe. Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity. We have to lie to get them. We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are. We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.
Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make. If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:
Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.
Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.
For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces. But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women. Everything else is social. Everything else is acting. Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die. We can never really be anything other than female.
Womanhood is not the thing trans women have to fake.
Why does my dumb ass keep bouncing around these platforms instead of just using them consistently? new posts should be novelty enough to let the dopamine flow why
The funny part is that the (not actually a) crossposter I'm using for Fedi/ATProto stuff is that it natively has quote posts. Friendica has had quoteposts forever, I suspect other AP software has had quoteposts forever, yet Mastodon refuses to implement them.
My first post. Been looking into Friendica lately so decided to give it try. My post will be mostly related to TV and Movies, climate issues, food security. Personally I have a nihilistic view of the world, do not think the future is bright...
@Shiri Bailem thank you for the warm welcome. I am still trying to figure out how to use Friendica , as the info is not displayed like in Mastodon or Pleroma. Any good clients for iOS?
@contradogma friendica definitely follows more of the facebook format style, one of the reasons I chose it for this instance. That and the fact that it is basically the swiss army knife of social, attempting to support everything it possibly can.
Biggest downside is the poor UI and that's the entire reason it's not my default recommendation for the fediverse.
@contradogma it's mostly things being in weird places, easy to get lost... if you're even a little bit of a tinkerer it's no big, but for the casual computer user it gets really frustrating really fast.
ie. try and find where to go to change your profile picture.
So the temporary system had some sort of failure, I'm not even 100% sure what caused it to be honest. It went down sometime yesterday and some of the virtual drives got corrupted, which caught the database and the virtual gateway device.
I was able to restore the system... most of the way. Thankfully there are backups of the database, but some of them were also flawed as well, the most recent intact one was from 5/16, so 5 days were lost.
To be clear, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there's not as much redundancy in the temporary setup (sadly it looks like it'll be a few more months before I have a place of my own and can spin up my own hardware again). But I'm going to still look at how I might get those in better shape.
As far as how long it took: I had a busy day yesterday and didn't see that the server was down until I was too exhausted to do anything about it, so it had to wait until I got off work today... each attempt at restoring the database takes around an hour, so that took *a while* to get restored.
You mention Tumblr and Bluesky addons? How or where does one start?
Thanks for the kind feedback! Very curious now.
To explain better:
1. New-ish to the Fediverse, but complete noob with Friendica (+ Hubzilla).
2. Looking for a "central hub" to interact from to the AT fediverse. Is this what is called a "nomadic ID?" Was told Friendica and Hubzilla are the best for this but HZ makes no sense at all...?
3. Don't want to have an account for every Fediverse-tool / software, but finding it might be needed, as they don't all ecessarily interact well with one another.
@Plastic Frog @Shiri Bailem Hubzilla has nomadic ID, that is where you can seamlessly move all of your information over to other instances/cloning. Friendica just requires you provider to install the bluesky addon. Go to setting> social networks. You will see the bluesky option. Put in your bluesky and password and other setting and now you never have to log into bluesky and it all comes through your friendica account. Twitter used to have that option, I rarely logged into twitter, but Musk broke the API. I would do that for bluesky but I have yet to have a reason to join it.
@Plastic Frog @anubis2814eventually that add-on will turn into full AT support, plus there is at least one person building an AP/AT bridge as well (which allows the two to talk without the servers having to understand the other protocol).
As far as Tumblr it's the same method as Bluesky, though you can follow Tumblr feeds without a Tumblr account, having the account lets you comment and have some/all your posts mirror to your Tumblr account.
In the same area you see options for all the other platforms I've enabled plugins for (the others I haven't enabled are just because they haven't come up... not that most of those have come up either)
Most of the time you're talking about platforms that share the ActivityPub protocol (shortened to AP), everything that uses AP can talk to everything else that uses AP (ie. Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, Threads).
Bluesky is starting up their own protocol, AT (I forget what it's short for). So it can't talk to anything that's AP and vice versa, at least not without some sort of translation layer inbetween.
Right now the Bluesky addon is a "puppet" addon, meaning it just mirrors and controls a separate Bluesky account... Friendica plans to incorporate AT support more directly which would remove that step. Also, there's things like bridgeyfed that are making bridges. A bridge sits on two networks and translates calls between two protocols (ie. an AP server asks it for posts from an AT user, it just sees the bridge as an instance with that user on it)
The biggest reason to have multiple accounts is just for different experiences. Ie. Friendica (Facebook/Myspace style) is very different from say Pixelfed (Instagram style experience) and Lemmy (Reddit style experience)
@shiri thanks so much for the detailed explanation.
Yes, read about the AP / AT protocols before and that there is some poor guy under fire now for trying to bridge the two, though it’s probably inevitable either way. (BridgyFed?)
Basically just curious to see the smaller abilities and limitations between all the Fediverse tools out there.
Have written a post just now with a table. Just a very basic test, but after many hours of back and forth between the different tools, a pattern emerged.
Using different tools for different uses makes sense, like photos or videos or threads, music, etc.
Though very little posting anywhere is done from this side. Just want to be able to follow, like and comment.
So thought maybe there is something like that, and Friendica / Mastodon and others work fine for that with posts and media.
It’s the aggregators that become an issue when following from a different tool.
mug
in reply to mug • •