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This thread is for discussing politics, political science, and other politics-related topics in a general, non-country/region-specific context. Do mind sensitive topics, especially controversial ones; I think we'd all rather the thread stay free of Flame Wars.

Please consult the following threads for country/region-specific politics (NOTE: The list is eternally non-comprehensive; it will be gradually updated whenever possible).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 25th 2025 at 9:51:19 AM

KRider Desire Grand Prix Entry from Origin System Since: Feb, 2021
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#5301: Aug 1st 2025 at 4:14:55 AM

[up]Well there has been talk in the past of Marx being a Boomerang Bigot and his philosophy has been an excuse to justify antisemitism but that has never been proven. But if that is true then it only proves that purely Marxist leftism or any form of leftism that focuses on so-called workers' rights to the exclusion of all else is just as fundamentally corrupt as objectivism and fascism and it's a good thing that there are other leftist philosophies that put as much focus if not more focus on protecting minority rights and universal egalitarianism than just workers.

Set! Avenge! "Henshin." Black General! Bujin Sword! Ready, Fight!
Risa123 Since: Dec, 2021 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
#5302: Aug 1st 2025 at 4:43:22 AM

I'm going to use this opportunity to complain about performative actions of soviet socialist goverment on the matter. Soviet union sent only sent two women to space both times to beat US. Sally Ride may not have been first in space, but it was after her that it become routine if unsually for a women to fly to space.

Kaiseror Since: Jul, 2016
#5303: Aug 1st 2025 at 4:49:43 AM

[up] If I remember right, gay marriage actually used to be legal in Russia before the Soviet Union took power, and the current homophobia there is just an extension of that.

xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5304: Aug 1st 2025 at 4:50:55 AM

I'll take the occasion to offer the reminder that Marx and Engels were homophobic

Isnt that the overwhelming majority of the human population in the 1800s?

his philosophy has been an excuse to justify antisemitism but that has never been proven

That feels like an extreme reach. Though given he has come from a Jewish family and got first baptized to christian and then turned atheist, I am wondering if it is him being an edgy atheist at play as much as antisemitism. Though I believe the antisemitic allegation is coming from Marx's essay on the Jewish question where near the end of the essay he uses stereotypes of Jewish being deeply consumed by the drive for wealth and consumerism (and then he argues how christianity and Christian civil society have also become just like that).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

     Excerpt from the essay 
Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals.

“The man who you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a trader; his business having failed, he became a minister. The other began as a priest but as soon as he had some money at his disposal he left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many people, the religious ministry is a veritable business career.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 185,186)

According to Bauer, it is

“a fictitious state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of political rights, whereas in practice he has immense power and exerts his political influence en gros, although it is curtailed en détail.” (Die Judenfrage, p. 114)

The contradiction that exists between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Although theoretically the former is superior to the latter, in actual fact politics has become the serf of financial power.

Judaism has held its own alongside Christianity, not only as religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious derivation of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and even attained its highest development in Christian society. The Jew, who exists as a distinct member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society.

Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to history.

The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.

The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.

Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination.

It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable

“that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.”

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.

Here, too, man’s supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged.

Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws.

Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law.

Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes.

By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.

Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but finds itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions.

Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.

Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism.

From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

Christianity had only in semblance overcome real Judaism. It was too noble-minded, too spiritualistic to eliminate the crudity of practical need in any other way than by elevation to the skies.

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity as a developed religion had completed theoretically the estrangement of man from himself and from nature.

Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading.

Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them.

In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is turned into world need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion – practical need, egoism.

Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

[up]Wasnt homosexuality illegal in Tsarist Russia? Lenin's govt specifically made homosexuality legal and I recall even here it was argued that it was just performative actions.

Yeah, the wiki states the same

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Russia

In the wake of the October Revolution, Russia underwent a sexual revolution and became one of the first countries to decriminalise male same-sex relations. The Bolsheviks rewrote the constitution and "produced two Criminal Codes – in 1922 and 1926 – and an article prohibiting homosexual sex was left off both."[32] The new Communist Party government removed the old laws regarding sexual relations, effectively legalising homosexual intercourse within Russia, although it remained illegal in other territories of the Soviet Union, and the homosexuals in Russia were still persecuted and sacked from their jobs.

Edited by xyzt on Aug 1st 2025 at 5:24:03 PM

Risa123 Since: Dec, 2021 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
#5305: Aug 1st 2025 at 4:54:50 AM

[up][up] Ok, first "took power" is not how I would describe it. More like soviet russia become soviet union. There was continuity. Second it was not marriage, but decriminialisation of homosexuality. Also, what happend is that they replace the legal code entirely and new one did not include an article criminalisation of it rather then explicitly deciding to make it legal.

Edited by Risa123 on Aug 1st 2025 at 1:55:09 PM

GearFriedTheKnight BLOCKING - A weapon for the 21st century. from The nearest road that can be raced (Experienced Trainee) Relationship Status: I'm in love with my car
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#5306: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:24:52 AM

Isnt that the overwhelming majority of the human population in the 1800s?
Tell that to LGBT communists who lionize Marx and Engels and completely ignore their bigotry, claiming they would back them in their struggles... or LGBT Stalinists despite the crackdown on anybody remotely LGBT and how celebrated a massive homophobe such as Gorky was under Stalin.

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#5307: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:33:51 AM

I will say that Marx's homophobia is not itself a reason to write off Marxism, that's more of a personal matter. I will however note that Marxist regimes are often homophobic historically.

To my understanding, the reason why is basically because Communism's collectivist attitude makes it prone to a negative attitude towards non-reproductive sex. Basically, homosexuality in The Soviet Union was seen as a selfish pursuit of pleasure that could have been spent helping the community instead. In addition, it was seen as a bourgeois personality trait.

This is not universal, mind you, but it has been common historically.

Leviticus 19:34
KRider Desire Grand Prix Entry from Origin System Since: Feb, 2021
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#5308: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:38:57 AM

Also, Values Dissonance or not, just because bigotry was more accepted in the past doesn't mean it was good. Using the past is also another reasoning bigots use to want to promote it again and prevent its removal.

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#5309: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:39:10 AM

Homosexuality was also treated as a mental illness in the Soviet Union, a "fascist tendency", a "decadent Western liberal-capitalist tendency", and "behaviour that goes against the manly standards that Soviet manly men should carry for the Motherland". Also a useful tool to do dissidents in.

Whilst some may not consider it a reason in itself to decry Marxism, it does hint to its wider problem, that being its complete and utter hypocrisy in its quest for a more "equal" society, to say nothing of how unsustainable it is because of how it gets rid of any breathing room civil society might have to express itself.

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5310: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:40:30 AM

[up][up][up][up]I would assume they all employ the tried and tested "product of his time" argument. Marx and Engels would hardly be unique in that case since I doubt even poster boys of any of the other ideologies would fare well in their treatment and view of LGBTQ people. Pre 20th century (and even 20th century upto a certain period) has been unanimously bad on LGBTQ with very little contention.

Edited by xyzt on Aug 1st 2025 at 6:12:35 PM

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#5311: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:46:08 AM

No, no, they don't even try to say they're "products of their time", that would crack the armor of their reasoning because it'd expose them to "then how come their theory isn't a product of its time?" as a question and they generally lack the answer to it. (side note — I employ the triple "Marx was right, Marx was wrong, Marx is wrong", wherein Marx generally understood several issues and highlighted them but based his reasoning on his limited experiences in one corner of the world on top of basing his analysis on a flawed economical model that later caused the Great Depression. Marxist thought was already deeply flawed, but today becomes impossible to apply without heavy adjustments, which some will just denounce as "revisionism".)

They just say it's "all lies" or "misinformation" or "well they wouldn't have said that to me". Speaking from experience here.

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5312: Aug 1st 2025 at 5:55:41 AM

[up]The ones in my circle usually do bring up the "product of his time" argument, and regards to your question, I have seen an answer brought up once to that in the circles i frequented be that Marxism is a science, and plenty of later Marxists have built up on Marx's works to account for changes, and with regards to his work being outdated and on a flawed view of the world, would bring up that neoliberal economists still hold Adam Smith's work to be still valid even though his work is even more older and outdated, and built on observations of a world that was even more different from modern times.

Edited by xyzt on Aug 1st 2025 at 6:33:40 PM

Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#5313: Aug 1st 2025 at 6:00:36 AM

I'll say that Marx's personal views on the subject are not that important, what's more important is more the collectivism thing that I mentioned before.

Leviticus 19:34
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#5314: Aug 1st 2025 at 6:01:00 AM

"We're doing wrong, but others are doing even more wrong so there's nothing wrong with what we're doing" is one of the worst justifications I've ever heard for anything. It's the same kind of mindset that has lead Italy to collapse under the weight of rampant tax evasion because "everybody does it, so why me doing it is wrong?".

As for the rest, then you're in a peculiar group of Marxists, ones that would be decried as "revisionists" by others.

(Side note — Adam Ant Smith is one of the greatest typos ever.)

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5315: Aug 1st 2025 at 6:15:26 AM

[up]I took the comparision with Adam Smith more as them stating that "Marx's theory is old and outdated" is a dishonest argument when that same people arguing consider Smith's work to still be very relevant and applicable in today's world. Is Smith considered wrong and outdated like Marx is today? I thought his work formed the foundation of modern economics on which everything developed.

Edited by xyzt on Aug 1st 2025 at 6:47:40 PM

GearFriedTheKnight BLOCKING - A weapon for the 21st century. from The nearest road that can be raced (Experienced Trainee) Relationship Status: I'm in love with my car
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#5316: Aug 1st 2025 at 6:19:35 AM

From what I know, outside some fringe groups, Adam Smith's ideas are used in vague terms, but modern economies do not give him much thought, if at all. There are a lot other, more modern economists upon whose works modern economies work. Even the Classical Austrian School's theory is somewhat more reputable despite largely being frowned upon after the Great Depression, outside some liberals who still base themselvess off of it and Hayek's ideas.

I remember Adam Smith being briefly brought up during Economy class in high school, but it was a mention, as in "oh this guy had ideas and pushed thought in this general direction, but he's almost entirely irrelevant nowadays, let's study Hayek and Keynes now and compare the two".

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#5317: Aug 1st 2025 at 7:18:22 AM

Why is Lenin not mentioned here? Impolite minds might think that we are cherry picking.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Risa123 Since: Dec, 2021 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
#5318: Aug 1st 2025 at 7:23:16 AM

[up] Lenin specifically no, but soviet socialism is marxism leninism.

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#5319: Aug 1st 2025 at 7:26:34 AM

I also don't hold Mr. "The social democrats won the elections fair and square, slaughter them all" and "Ukrainians don't exist" to high esteem, to say the least.

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
KRider Desire Grand Prix Entry from Origin System Since: Feb, 2021
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#5320: Aug 1st 2025 at 7:36:33 AM

Thought it was already a given that when we were criticizing the Soviet Union we're criticizing all of it from Lenin to Stalin to Breznev, etc.

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Risa123 Since: Dec, 2021 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
#5321: Aug 1st 2025 at 7:37:11 AM

[up][up] As fair as a first election in middle of war and such can be. And yes that is the guy who helped to poisoned the well for all socialists that came after so I depise the guy.

Edited by Risa123 on Aug 1st 2025 at 4:37:22 PM

xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5322: Aug 1st 2025 at 8:24:09 AM

I also don't hold Mr. "The social democrats won the elections fair and square, slaughter them all" and "Ukrainians don't exist" to high esteem, to say the least.

Who is being referred to here? Lenin? I never heard of him stating that Ukrainians don't exist. Wasnt the Soviet union having an indegenization policy during his time which led to a revival in Ukrainian culture (until that policy was reversed by Stalin). Wasnt he also blamed by Putin for creating modern Ukraine?

And i am not sure I would call the Social Revolutionaries (that won the constituent assembly election) as social democrats since as I recall they were very much agrarian socialists with the left S Rs (who were used by Lenin to dispute the election results as their split was not taken into consideration by the election results that still kept the S Rs as one party) being even more radical to the left closer to the bolsheviks than the S Rs.

Edited by xyzt on Aug 1st 2025 at 8:58:00 PM

Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#5323: Aug 1st 2025 at 8:32:46 AM

While Putin claimed that Ukraine was a creation of Lenin, I have no idea where Putin is getting that claim from. Lenin did conquer Ukraine.

Leviticus 19:34
xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5324: Aug 1st 2025 at 8:48:24 AM

[up]Probably the creation of the Ukrainian SSR and the short Ukrainization policy if the wiki is to be believed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Soviet_Socialist_Republic

At first, the Bolshevik authorities were skeptical about the revival and independence of the non-Russian nations (e.g. Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine etc.) after the collapse of the Russian Empire. However, after they noticed that the indigenous peoples of the former Russian Empire had a rather negative view of becoming a part of a new Russian state, the Soviet government started an indigenization policy, which had an influence on all non-Russian peoples of the USSR.[17] The purpose of this policy was to expand the communist party network on the non-Russian lands with the involvement of the indigenous population. As a result, this also caused a short period of Ukrainization, until a reversal happened in the early 1930s.[18]

Also that Lenin initially recognised the Ukrainian's right to secede "in principal" (not in practice), while rejecting the legitimacy of the Ukrainian Rada, which I guess is acknowledging them as a nation

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/dec/03.htm

Proceeding from the interests of the unity and fraternal alliance of factory workers and the working and exploited masses in the struggle for socialism, and also from the recognition of these principles by numerous decisions of the organs of revolutionary democracy, the Soviets, and especially the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets, the Council of People’s Commissars—the Socialist government of Russia—reaffirms that the right to self-determination belongs to all nations oppressed by tsarism and the Great Russian bourgeoisie, up to and including the right of these nations to secede from Russia.

Accordingly we, the Council of People’s Commissars, recognise the People’s Ukrainian Republic, and its right to secede from Russia or enter into a treaty with the Russian Republic on federal or similar relations between them. We, the Council of People’s Commissars, recognise at once, unconditionally and without reservations everything that pertains to the Ukrainian people’s national rights and national independence......

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Movie and TV Goddess
#5325: Aug 15th 2025 at 7:25:31 AM

So, in terms of petitions and boycotts, what does it take to create an effective boycott or petition against something that most of the population don't want? There are discussions about how most boycotts and petitions are rarely successful and I'm wondering about why some petitions and boycotts are not so successful and how they can be more successful in their efforts to change whatever laws or policies that happens within a country?

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