Incredibly hurtful? Cowardly? Come on. That’s the same as a chud crying about being pasted in a bad light onto a wojak comic. It’s a dumb meme, you should be happy your pfp made it onto one that someone made for a niche leftist website to chuckle at. I have seen you tear into liberals for their bullshit beliefs (which I enjoyed watching), and I wouldn’t have expected you’d be so weirdly sensitive to being on the other side of that equation. I think most here would take this as being barely more than a comradely joshing. You weren’t even the prime character in it, your pfp (pfp for christ sakes!) was pasted over the microphone of the original pic. But given all that, the fact you got this twisted up about it makes me feel like it was all the more a good thing to do. You should take this as an opportunity to examine why you did find something so mild as this “incredibly hurtful” but more importantly why your fellow communists would be jokingly comparing you to the current poster child for woo lunacy.
As for what is comparable, well you both believe in nonsense woo that would make many spirit crystal chiropractors blush and you both have come up with absurd justifications for it. You have this strange fixation that I was calling you a zionist when it was pretty clear that had nothing to do with it, and the comparison was around the nutty unsubstantiated beliefs. In fact I didn’t know the other person in the picture even was a zionist, but I did know she uses her “spiritualism” as a justification for the dippy new-age version of white supremacy. I think you just focus on the zionism part because you’re mad at me for making a mediocre niche meme picture and you saying that I’m calling you a zionist is a way to try to lash out. But nah, I wasn’t calling you a zionist, I was calling you a nut. So please enough with the hyperfixation on zionism. By putting your pfp next to a picture of her, I didn’t call you a zionist any more than I called you someone who appropriates black culture by wearing dreadlocks, and I think you actually know that.
You happen to be lucky in that despite adamantly believing in wacky things that there is zero proof for and has been demonstrably proven false, you still arrived at the correct conclusions about politics, capitalism, imperialism etc., which I think most here would agree is by far what’s important. But again, I think you got there in spite of having some massive brainworms about the supernatural. Having wacky batty woo beliefs isn’t a crime but it is one hundred percent on the table fair game to be made fun of, and it needs to be. Because uncritical belief in magic is not something that should be present in a healthy society, the society that we as communists and materialists should aim for, where we examine reality with a scientific mindset to come as close as we can to modeling reality instead of making up just-so stories that fit our conception of how we wish things were instead of how they are. It is only through brutal honesty with ourselves and how the world works (as opposed to how we wish it worked, like with magic telekinetic, telepathic or prophetic powers) that we can find the way towards true human flourishing. Going the route of ghosts, demons, telekinesis, astral projection, crystal powers, star seeds, or whatever, it’s all different facets of the same bunkum and it is anathema to a materialist conception of reality (in whatever way you want to define materialism, strictly Marxist, more broadly philosophical, but any meaningful definition of materialism).
This Shanin person (who tbh I didn’t know existed until the thread here about her and that chud singer) has also followed this path of going down the rabbit hole of unsubstantiated spiritualist nonsense that “makes sense to her” despite all these things she believes being obvious, provable bullshit. She arrived at much more odious conclusions about people and supremacy, and that’s not surprising. I know the concept of the “slippery slope” is often abused, but in this case it’s very fitting and actually happens a lot. I’ve watched it happen with people, the new age woo to white supremacy pipeline. It’s not uncommon that it is tangential to Joe Rogan. It’s not always a bad trajectory, but it often is. When you start believing in this kind of antiscience wishful thinking, you can follow it to all sorts of conclusions, literally anything imaginable, including the truly horrible and antihuman. I think of the esoteric alien origins horseshit that many of the inner core nazis made foundational to their beliefs. I think about the batshit mormon beliefs that were based on the whims of a known charlatan con artist, and how interwoven all of that became with the white supremacist “security” apparatus of the US, the most evil organizations that ever existed. Magic underwear is innocuous and even funny, but it’s part of a sort of larger complex of beliefs, a structure founded on woo supernatural mysticism, self referential and self reinforcing, that is used to justify some of the most heinous crimes. A failure of critical thinking, which in my opinion is a form of a failure of self crit, is dangerous in the long run, and belief in magic is without a doubt a failure of critical thinking.
There, does that meet your criteria for being “said it to your face”? I don’t see how anything else I posted before wasn’t saying it to your face. I don’t even know what subtweeting is, as I fortunately never got sucked into that brand of social media. But stop implying I was doing something underhanded or sneaky. That’s absurd. I made a dumb meme pic and posted it where you and anyone else could see. Just like with the zionism thing (that didn’t happen) you keep twisting me into this strange caricature that has nothing to do with… well, anything, and assigning to me these nonsensical intentions that simply aren’t there. It’s weird, comrade! Don’t do that! Now, if you want to take my pfp and paste it to compare me to some scientism nerd like ND Tyson, or even a bigger asshole like Dick Dawkins, that would be a fair reciprocal and I’d have to laugh even. But I wouldn’t suddenly think you were, for example, accusing me of SA just because they were (I think?) I definitely wouldn’t come back and call you a coward and make up all these off the wall accusations about your intentions.
Whatever though. I feel like I’ve said my piece and I’m pretty sure also answered your questions, mostly by trying to straighten out the misconceptions about me you glomed onto. I know this was long, but that’s mostly because I think you’re still a decent poster and commie, so I’m taking the time to lay it out there. If you were just some random chud which I’d assume you were if this thread was all I’d ever seen you post, I’d roll my eyes, PPB you and move on. Even though the hostility you assumed I had wasn’t there in my original image post nor this comment, I do feel like your response with demands of posting “to your face” and calling me cowardly, etc. really was hostile. And I don’t like that. So this is the end of the conversation at my end. I expect you’ll respond, and I hope it is about things I actually said this time. But I won’t know. Tomorrow is my scheduled day to touch grass and be away from the internet entirely, and I won’t be touching this pile of internet drama with a ten meter pole. Again, I’ve said my piece, I went into great detail specifically to answer your hostile questioning, now I’m disengaging.
Nah, contrary to the belief of some weirdos, poking fun at people for their supernatural woo idealism is providing a positive service.