Diva

apology accepted, anyways the last thing I want is to be taken too seriously.

You definitely didn’t do yourself favors by bringing up Hitchens though lol, because him I do know.

I brought him up because I'm familiar with him as well, I read a number of his books early on in my own political trajectory and it was his full embrace of fearmongering about Islam post 9/11 that turned me off of him entirely. I appreciate that he was principled about waterboarding at least.

bringing him up served my wider rhetorical point that you would cry foul at association of Hitchens with neocons over a geopolitical position, but participate in spaces where a perceived alignment with Russia on geopolitics is all it takes for communists and anarchists to get smeared as secret Republicans, Russian bots, faking being trans, etc.

looks like special pleading

Nothing I saw in anything you linked to made it seem convincing to me that any other ones of these people were neocons either.

hmmm, k.

Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism.

He [Irving Kristol] was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism"

A socialist in his early life, [Seymour Martin Lipset] later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.

also you flipped it around trying to say (apparently) that genuine neocons can also be considered as Trotskyites because of their “revolutionary posture” which to me is utterly insane.

It's manifestly not what I said

what makes you think Christopher Hitchens is a neocon? Or is it just that one thing?

It's his aligning specifically with neocons and writing in support of the full-scale invasion of Iraq that I took issue with. You are asking me to have a charitable read of someone who took an opposing geopolitical position. I hope you can appreciate the irony of the posts you've made complaining about communists on lemmy being too aligned with Russia, especially because any 'support of russia' that I've seen from anonymous posters has been significantly more muted than any of the many articles that Hitchens wrote in support of the full-scale invasion of Iraq.

you keep making broad leaps from my statements, doesn't make you easy to talk to either. you understand that just because oranges are round not all round things are orange, right?

I said that a number of neocons started their political trajectory as trotskyists, then became neocons later in life. There's a list of some in the wiki I linked you.

even I would not accuse it of being on the same moral and intellectual level and fighting for the same principles as Bush and Rumsfeld were fighting for.

not sure how you took that from my statement, the point is that neoconservatism preserves Trotskyism’s revolutionary posture while inverting its content: the revolution is now for liberal capitalism rather than socialism.

Ah yes, those famous neocon Trotsky fans. Clearly, your grasp of geopolitics is unparalleled, and not at all based on a fuzzy team sports based value system totally unmoored from reality.

This isn't my own observation, it's a well-trod assertion.

Which Trotskyist neocon was your favorite?

There's been a lot of them, most way predating me. For me it's probably Christopher Hitchens who started out out as trotskyist anti-stalinist and drifted over time to being in favor of the US-led full-scale invasion of Iraq.

He was the war commissar during the civil war, effectively commander-in-chief of the red army, so he's kind of responsible for what happened to the anarchist factions in it.

On some level he was going with a party line, but based on how the guy operated and what he was saying I don't think that was much of a deviation from his actual beliefs.

I think it's also telling how many former Trotskyists in the US pivoted to being neocon warmongers.

Hey, what do you think of Leon Trotsky? I am just curious.

He was kind of a counter-revolutionary asshole who also happened to be in charge of killing a lot of anarchists, not a fan.

In the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, in the Balkans, in Italy, in Spain, in addition to the so-called Southern type, which is characterized by a combination of lazy shiftlessness and explosive irascibility, one meets cold natures, in whom phlegm is combined with stubbornness and slyness. The first type prevails ; the second augments it as an exception. It would seem as if each national group is doled out its due share of basic character elements, yet these are less happily distributed under the southern than under the northern sun. But we must not venture too far afield into the unprofitable region of national metaphysics." – Leon Trotsky in his biography of Stalin

As soon as you find out a guy has a nazi tattoo you decide it's time to support the guy 🤔 I mean I knew you were a social democrat but this is really on the nose

If you're claiming a strong ideological stance, ie being a communist, to be simultaneously claiming ignorance of having a tattoo from one of the largest killers of communists, and having served in the military of the runner-up, makes it hard to trust him or his political understanding.

it's like a year before the election, surely someone else is able to run.

it was here, the ragebait was too obvious so I disengaged lol

misleadingly doubted the existence of russian bot networks

don't get me wrong, I know these exist. I am just expressing skepticism because people on the English speaking Internet will act like every reply they don't like is a bot puppeteered by foreign intelligence.

It's just more likely to be a normal person and any state actors are probably going to be focusing on the corporate-run social media spaces

'tankie' is used a pejorative for any leftist, just like 'red' or 'commie' or 'pinko' was. You apply it to them because they say one thing, and automatically ascribe to them all of the other things that you dislike. It's a caricature.

I linked two different threads of people unanimously shitting on purported communists who are reactionary or offer full support to the war in ukraine and you read it as them being 'aligned on the war in ukraine'. I don't really know what else to say if you're just going to read the opposite.

I find it’s more often the people complaining loudly about ‘tankies’ who are starting off with slogans and an uncritical reading of their own sides history.

Once again, most leftist anti-tankies already criticize the US.

The 'vaguely left' poster that's one of the main 'anti-tankies' is constantly posting NAFO shit and anticommunism. I don't think that we are in agreement on what 'leftist' is, beyond a self-identification.