I think Mao gets a bad rap for stuff that happened during his later years.

I’ve seen a lot of people who kinda just melancholically say he would’ve been remembered better had he not led China through the 50s and 60s. I guess I get it, but is that what we care about? Legacy? Everyone should just hang up their hats when they make a bad decision?

Additionally, i think in any case, it’s hard to blame Mao and Mao Zedong Thought for the problems that occurred specifically during the era. Establishing a new proletarian state us hard, establishing one of the first ones ever is even harder, establishing one in China was a miracle. The economy grew at similar rates before before reform and opening up as it did after, and without that initial foundation of independence there could never have been an independent reform and opening up. I also think the red book is one of the most important texts for beginners and should be one of the first reccomended.

Additionally, like I’ve said in other threads, I’m not one for discussions on morality. I think i got empathy overload [edit: more like empathy burnout] at some point and have just accepted bad things are going to happen no matter what when things get violent. If you just boil it down to “is hurting x necessary to establish socialism? Yes? Then it’s moral. If not then it’s immoral” then life becomes much simpler. I’d kill the entire Romanov family 20 times over personally if that was the decision that needed to be made to save the USSR. I would lie, cheat, and consort with the worst to establish socialism, and that’s the attitude that’s needed to do so. I will argue at length about what is necessary–materially–to establish socialism [I don’t think the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki were necessary, so they were immoral] but individual sob stories are pointless and I’m glad I’m becoming numb to them. Maybe your grandpa wasn’t a counter revolutionary, but the wider purge was necessary to save the people from the blackest era of reaction. So it was moral. Life is very much a play of averages and odds. Unfortunately it will be that way until the last capitalist is dissolved. Edit: However this also applies the other way. I don’t really care about justice if its unnecessary. It’s not about what people deserve, it’s about living, about science, and about the natural coarse of human events

Lastly, the Jacobins are more than just Bourgeois revolutionaries. I wouldn’t go as far as to describe them as proto-socialist or anything, but there was a difference between them, the Girondins, thermadorians, etc. The jacobins were the Bourgeoisie who aligned themselves with the journeyman proto-proletariat and the peasantry. This is opposed to people like Cromwell in Britain who aligned themselves with the lower landowners against the peasants. It’s why we appreciate Sun Yat-sen more than Chiang Kai-Shek, or Thomas Paine than George Washington, etc.

That’s the point, I think. Idk I’m tired.

The point from what I understand is that you dont want to teach kids those things because that would be wierd, gross, and probably not that productive anyway. Teaching children about proper body autonomy will help without having to explicitly describe sex and sexually abusive acts

I get what you’re saying I think. For me it’s hard to compare because I’m always unsure what’s natural and what’s instigated by my thoughts.

It’s like observing a quantum system. If I actively try to recognize my thoughts with XYZ behavior, often it’s hard to tell if they’re caused by a problem or by the act of thinking about them. [I.e, I can’t force intrusive thoughts with my OCD since they wouldn’t be intrusive anymore]. Unfortunately letting things happen and examining them afterwards usually hurts ):

As usual, please base your thinking in Marxist Dialectical materialism and not emotions and vibes.

At the very least try to explain things materially. Yes, all these bad things have happened and the US populace hasn’t rebelled. At the very least do some analysis instead of giving up. The fact that this has occurred is an indictment of liberalism and all its failures, the fact people haven’t rebelled is an ultimate prover of Marxist theory over all others. It is backwards to say otherwise.

It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they won’t. I mean look at Amsterdam. It took protests and action and an oil crisis to get them to redesign the city [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422421000769]. If you leave the ruling class to their devices you end up with people like NYC’s Robert Moses

I seriously wish all of that social construct stuff was just dissolved and we could just be honest. Like “hey i wanna date you” “ok” or “hey i wanna date you” “no thank you” “alright it’s all good.”

Honestly this (and the other piece of art showing a soldier in the white palace) really encapsulates that feeling of awe at the wealth of the rich. Not like an appreciative awe, or even envious, but simply shock at the opulence that is inconceivable to a lot of people. I remember feeling this even when I walked onto my university campus for the first time, although obviously it’s not as evil as aristicrats, just the shock that such a thing actually exists (as someone who went to very badly underfunded schools as a kid)

Of course, although im more partial to The Motherland Calls

I’m biased because i prefer this type of art but “beat the whites with a red wedge” I’d my personal favorite

I think i like it so much because it has an…“意境深远” or resonant quality to it. Meaning that, at least in my experience, it conveys a lot of emotion and meaning through its abstractness without the viewer being able to explicitly state what exactly is causing that. I’m a very “Daoist” person when it comes to art so that’s probably why i like it so much

Eugenia Cheng’s “How to bake pi” and “joy of abstraction” are good introductions to category theory in math without having to take a bunch of college courses.

Yeah. I don’t want to be overbearing or anything. I think she’ll be okay. I just know what it was like to grow up so fast and have a lot of expectations placed on me, and…Idk, obviously everything isnt about me. I mean, obviously she’s succeeding where I failed so I think she’s doing fine. Idk. I don’t interact with children that much, and never a child who reminded me so much of, well, me.

I’m sorry if it came off as privileged. I mean, obviously I knew about “creeps” (for lack of a better term for how I had imagined them in my adolescence) as a child. Don’t go off with strangers, don’t accept candy from vans, that kind of thing. Maybe I hadn’t considered…casually I guess. The idea that any person i talk to could be one of those people. I dont mind if its a psychiatric issue but to act on it has a sense of…disgusting selfishness that i hadnt considered possible in average people. It’s one of those things that makes me feel like I’ll never be a girl because I was never exposed to that kind of thing as a kid. (Not saying that being a girl is tied to how much you were abused, just that I feel like im…infringing on the space. That i get to be a girl without having gone through that. Hopefully that makes sense)