Ok, this is making things more clear, although I get the impression I’d have to know way more about the Fr. Revolution, and maybe the following period in France to actually understand it. Was it really politically commonplace already in early 19th c. to demand abolishment of property?

Who’s Maréchal?

leftism is defined by opposition to the status quo

You’ve just introduced a whole other definition of leftism. Also it seems to mean that no leftist society could exist in practice.

the french monarchy was capitalist

From what I can figure out, it was still in principle feudal but moving towards capitalism due to the growth of the bourgeois class. Is that correct?

The political terms “right” and “left” have meant the same thing since the French Revolution.

the weakening or abolishment of capitalism - the traditional dividing line of left and right

Wasn’t the French revolution just abolishing feudalism and the monarchy?

Lemmy has been chock-full of these memes critical of the dems since the election. How much more of this good start is needed before people move on to the next step (whatever it might be)?

agreed with them on transphobic talking points

I decided to check the actual podcast with Kirk and see what’s the transphobic statement he made.

Here’s the video, 22:20 onwards, it goes on for a while.

We can discuss the details, neither do I like his response overall, but you’re massively overblowing and demonizing his position. Anyone can check for themselves. If this is how you think a transphobic fascist-lite sounds, if you think he would actually appeal to any republican voters thanks to this response, you must have a very caricatural understanding of politics and society.

So youre simultaneously saying you dont live in a democracy, and also that your vote matters?

I’m pretty sure I didnt say either of those things; I don’t wish to argue about the semantics regarding the first statement, and the second statement is definitely correct for large parts of the population in some nominally democratic western countries (specifically US and UK whose electoral systems are a fucking disgrace).

Also yes i am speaking about the notion of democracy itself, that’s why I put the words in theory there lol

Alright, but it’s clear that I dismissed this idealist/theoretical mode of dealing with politics in my first comment, and I don’t really see any arguments for reestablishing it.

Yeah, “(in theory)” - that doesn’t have to be inside brackets, all you speak of is a theoretical, ideal democracy. But what we have is, for many good and bad reasons, not even close to that (as can be seem from the actual process of any elections), and it is delusional and useless to act like it is.

Would you mind pointing me to somewhere where I could be educated on this matter?

You are giving consent when you vote. You are saying this choice is fine.

Actually, when you vote, you just vote.

That’s it. It’s not a magic ritual, you don’t telepathically send your message to the Holy Ghost of Democracy when you vote, Anubis isn’t going to weigh your ballot against a feather before deciding on the fate of your soul.

You circle something or you don’t and then you deal with whatever happens however you want.

Lots of people would like to “leave politics”, as they find themselves under “vicious and unethical attacks” by politicians. However, those people’s political existence was forced upon them, they didn’t want to be a “political” object, especially not in the current landscape.

Musk instead took up his political role consciously, and used it to further attack and harm many who would prefer to be left in peace. He had the luxury to activate himself, commit far worse violence upon the people than he has been subjected to by the people, and when he realises he doesn’t really like it, even though the issues he’s facing are probably comparatively trivial, he (believes he) has the luxury to return to a more secluded, safe position.

It’s really quite disgusting. And I fear he’ll get away with it. But I am at least satisfied that his story (a supposed tech guru with his marketing bullshit and his comically immature behaviour) has damaged much of the aura of the modern technocapitalist elite.

This is a great article, thank you

Wow you’re so cool and edgy

No, Hexbear was literally blocked in China.

If it suggests a connection, that’s synonymous with it being evidence.

No it isn’t synonymous. Evidence is in principle unambiguous, whereas merely “suggesting” something could be more or less ambiguous. And I think that if you put down the raw facts on paper, i.e. described exactly what the document says, nobody could call that “evidence”, and some number of people would probably agree that it might be only a “suggestion”.

yes, my meme wasn’t 100% accurate

That heavily downplays its actual rhetorical effect. It’s not accurate, but it makes a big attention-grabbing dramatic statement. In other words, it’s in line with the usual methods of conspiracy theories based on bullshit reasoning.

Literally how many times have you brought up one simple typo

No more and no less than twice. Once in my very first comment, and second time in the previous comment. I mostly tried to ignore it, and I brought it up again to underline your general carelessness in treating of the issue. (And it’s not a typo, it’s a factual mistake, as you’ve said.)

you justified your lack of investigation into the CIA while also making statements about CIA history

There’s a few issues here. I haven’t simultaneously claimed to be a leftist and that leftists should be experts in world history and economics, while you did, so this contradiction is only your own. I don’t think I’m an expert on history and I’m afraid I never will be. However, since I have indeed not investigated the history of CIA, that’s exactly why I’ve made only minimal statements about CIA history, statements that should be correct regardless of various other information on its history. I said that: CIA supported some Hungarian dissidents in 1963 (as evidenced by the document in OP), and that CIA spread some radio programs in 1956 Hungary in order to stoke the revolt (as is widely accepted and found on Wikipedia). Everything else I wrote is conditionals based on reasonable assumptions and general knowledge that I am aware is not backed by more precise info on my part: yes, it seems perfectly reasonable that CIA has supported anti-communist movements (I haven’t read about that in any detail but I’ve heard of that happening and it seems to be widely agreed on, so I didn’t problematise it), and it could also be that it has done the same in 1956 Hungary (correct, as it has turned out).

This is simply intellectual carefulness. I’m not appealing to my expertise or wide knowledge, I’m appealing to reading the actual text carefully and extrapolating what can be reasonably extrapolated from it.

I have to be exactly right about everything

In your position, yes you kind of do (even you said: “If you’re a leftist, you have to be an expert on the history of the entire globe, as well as economics and all sorts of other fields.” - high standards!). In general, I think everyone should strive to be maximally correct if they make a claim that hundreds of other people see and take for truth.

Try to approach this discussion with a bit more focus on the arguments and the actual words, and less on me and your own perspective in it. At every turn you’re attacking me, making a stereotype out of me and claiming I’ve said things I haven’t said in order to make our positions seem more symmetrical (you’re trying to argue about what CIA did or did not do, but I’m trying to argue about whether this counts as proof of what CIA did), and conveniently ignoring my key point even when I spell it out in bold letters. Do you find that I’ve done the same to you, have I ascribed you statements and ideas that you haven’t actually previously expressed? (Aside, of course, from the instance where I explicitly announced I would do it by ascribing you the position of those leftists who deride NYT, and in retrospect I shouldn’t have done that because it was nothing more than a pointless jab.) At the same time, you seem to be very emotionally invested in this, downvoting me even while absolutely nobody else is reading this dialogue anymore. Cool it down, you don’t have to respond to me, just please reflect on your own thinking/reasoning process once more, maybe sometime later when you have some distance from all this.

So you’ve at least silently dropped the accusation of my denial of CIA’s involvment in anything. Good, that’s some progress.

What an incredibly stupid line of argument.

Indeed, I did literally declare that it is based on stereotyping as a response to your making a stereotype out of me…

I saw something that suggested there was a connection between the CIA and the uprising

It sure might look like it if you ignore that the uprising happened 7 years earlier and that the organisation CIA supported wasn’t based in Hungary. But it looks like you ignored that while reading the document, so the connection seemed much stronger than it really is.

and how compelling I considered the evidence to be

This is literally no “evidence”, you yourself said it just suggested a connection, it isn’t even close to evidence of it, and your meme straight-up says it was admitted.

If you understood it was an analogy, then nitpicking that the date used in my analogy “wasn’t even in the same decade as my source” is utterly irrelevant.

That’s simply not the point I was going for, you’ve misread it or I should’ve been more clear. My point was this: your analogy used a time and place where the event is nigh impossible to be ascribed to any other entity than KKK and similar; on the other hand, the event of CIA supporting Hungarian dissidents that is described in the document did not happen in the time and place that is the focus of your theory.

but also, there is other evidence that does prove it. So my process seems pretty reasonable.

No, it is not even remotely reasonable to provide mere indications, weak proof, or non-proof, while you have easily available and already generally-accepted proof at your disposal.

criticizing me for not doing a thorough enough investigation into Hungary

Lol, “thorough investigation”, that’s not what I asked of you (again, my first comment: “Can’t you just Google one or two key words?”), you didn’t even check Wikipedia and couldn’t get the year of the revolution right, and, as I said above, made your whole conjecture while likely ignoring the actual content and context of the letter.

If you’re a leftist, you have to be an expert on the history of the entire globe, as well as economics and all sorts of other fields.

But you’ve just justified your lack of investigation into the topic by saying that you don’t have any connection to Hungary, while simultaneously also making a statement on Hungarian history…

And in principle the discussion of whether something did or didn’t happen has little to do with whether one is a leftist or a liberal or anything else. If I’m wrong about something, my politics matter fuck all, I’m simply wrong, and the actual facts will speak for themselves.

It’s incredible to me how ignorant people are of the CIA’s history

I’m not from the US and we didn’t have a class on CIA history. What you expect, am I supposed to be utterly fascinated by your country’s history and read about it extensively just so that we all can be as enlightened as you are?

even calling into question whether they were engaged in these sorts of activities in general

You’re the one who is deviating from the historical record accepted by actual historians.

But I literally haven’t done that. If I have, show me the sentence where I did and I’ll absolutely take it back. You’re reading something into my comments that isn’t there - just like you’re reading events from 1963 US into 1956 Hungary.

The proper propaganda line you’re supposed to use here is

No, I’m not supposed to act like whatever stereotype/strawman you’re imagining in your head. You can fuck right off with this sort of “communication”.

Kinzer is a respected journalist who’s contributed to the NYT and the Guardian.

Thank you for the recommendation. However, if we’re going to hurl stereotypes at each other instead of arguments, I can’t help but point out that I’ve seen numerous Lemmy leftists claim that NYT is a liberal propaganda rag. So idk if that’s actually a plus for Kinzer.

Bruh. That was a separate hypothetical.

What does this even mean? You brought it up as an analogy, I pointed out that the analogy has been picked to make your primary claim look more obvious and logical than it really is.

Great! So I’m right, it’s just like the meme. The only detail that’s in dispute is whether or not the document provides further evidence of involvement.

You might finally start to get it! You accused me of doubting CIA’s involvment even though I literally pointed out to you that there is different, solid evidence they were involved! Like how stupid of a CIA-involvment-denier would I have to be to do that? And yet you’re still failing to understand that this never was my main point anyway!

If I believe that the Earth is flat, but then I have a dream where I see that the Earth is actually round, and then I start believing that it is round, does that mean I’m “correct”? Technically maybe yes but based on wrong information/reasoning!

Antisemitic conspiracy theorists would certainly be glad to send you extensive “evidence” that e.g. the Russian revolution was also supported by Jews, or various other political manipulations that they’ve supposedly carried out (why only limit it to toppling governments?). Now, as I’ve talked with these people enough times, I found it is impossible to spend days trying to check all the nonsense they may throw at me, and in general any discussion of any topic ever could be extended into eternity. What is perfectly reasonable is to abstract the individual case and figure out how it may plausibly be explained by itself. Antisemitic nonsense always fails here. In this case, so does your ascription of 1956 to CIA based on this particular document. The wider picture is different, as I’ve already said, it’s simply much more logical that CIA has supported anti-communist movements than that the antisemitic bullshit about the Jews is true. But if your standards are low enough to be convinced by a conjecture as weak as this one, that does lead me to worry about whether your general conviction on CIA’s actions is well-founded either.

I mean it is very obvious that you don’t want to inquire into this any further or discuss the contents and context of the document, I’ve simply checked Wikipedia on Kiraly and it looks like I’ve already done more research about it than you have. All you have are implications, you haven’t addressed the chronology, who was active where and when…

if I hear about a black person who was found strung up from a tree in the 20’s, I’m gonna go, “Huh, seems like it was probably white supremacists like the KKK”

This is a good comparison too - “in the 20’s”, you say, but the document you posted is not from the relevant decade, and is even from a different continent.

Besides, even just ctrl+F’ing “CIA” in the Wikipedia article on the revolution shows that yes, CIA did emit materials that were meant to stoke the Hungarians’ desire for revolt. It’s literally on Wikipedia, it’s no CIA-hidden secret at all! And if they were active that way, maybe they also funded some of the people and organisations in Hungary at the time? That doesn’t sound unreasonable to me as an otherwise uninformed person on the topic. But is that idea corroborated by this new document? No.

If an organization exists that has the ability to cover up it’s involvement in things like this reliably and very rarely leaves behind hard evidence, and I’m a rando trying to piece together what happened 70 years later, then it seems like circumstantial evidence is the best I could reasonably expect to find.

This is word for word the logic of right wing conspiracy theorists who ascribe every thing they don’t like to Jews.

Have you actually tried to piece it together, though? Have you at the very least googled who these people are, what sort of plausible chronology could be reconstructed, anything? Have you noticed that Kiraly, who was involved in the 1956 revolution and subsequently left the country, lived in US at the time of the letter (1963)? Is it not worthy of considering that the HFFF Inc. was based in the US and was founded by Kiraly and similar Hungarians in exile?

There are people with the exact same resources as you, i.e. the internet, already discussing this seriously and digging for more info and trying to figure out what can be reasonably concluded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AHungarian_Revolution_of_1956#JFK_files

This isn’t a court of law where the standard is either, “100%, beyond any reasonable doubt, or they didn’t do it.”

In court of law, an admission is pretty solid proof. Your meme says the involvement was admitted. I guess it wouldn’t look as convincing or funny if the meme said they admitted they funded some organisation outside of Hungary 7 years after the actual event.

you can keep imagining that this Hungarian Freedom Fighters org connected to the CIA was, I don’t know, selling dinner plates or something

Your arguments are growing thin. Your narrative is actually made up of vague connections with a 7-year gap. I don’t even intend to suggest to know what HFFF actually did or whether CIA was involved in 1956 Hungary, my point is only that this is neither admission nor meaningful proof of anything other than that they did fund some dissidents outside Hungary in 1963. (They obviously funded dissidents all over the place throughout the decades, I mean, they’d be crazy not to, and 1956 Hungary wouldn’t surprise me either, I suppose.)

See, while trawling through these JFK files right wingers have already found a connection with Jews, as tenuous as it is, and tout it as solid proof it was them who had JFK killed, because after all we already know Jews are nefarious and evil, and clearly any weak connection to JFK’s death is good enough - of course (((they’ve))) scrubbed the proof, etc. so internet randos can go creative. Or maybe some higher standards for proof would be in order…

What was this group? Do you have any info on when and where it was actually active and what were its intents? Do you know anything about this incorporated (???) organisation aside from its name and that it was supported by CIA in 1963?

the way that CIA funded groups were doing all over the globe at this time

This is not how any historical event can be meaningfully approached. You’re not an oracle, intuitions and insinuations are not proof, please use actual data, show actual connections and explanations of the claims regarding the 1956 revolution.

There was no uprising in Hungary in 1953. There was one in 1956, but it does not seem that this “Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation, Inc.” participated in it (I mean, an “Inc.” in socialist Hungary?). And the letter that this text mentions is all the way from 1963.

Can’t you people read the actual text and check whether this all makes any sense? Can’t you just Google one or two key words?