Anti communists never talk about this though. As far as their education goes, Pol Pot killed billions, and then they suddenly fell off from the face of the planet.

“communists and marxists need to answer for Pol Pot”

Answer: “This is why you need to read theory”

ok, thanks. I did just look for what happened (although internet research is ofc limited) and it looks like that claim comes from a testimony (that I can’t find but is quoted, idk the origin of it) given to the commission set up by the Liberal, US educated president, and that it claims that a group of 29 people (including men, women, children) were gathered into a house and attacked with machetes, hatchets, and guns, and during and after this (i.e while alive and while dead) were sprayed with boiling water.

I get killing people with weapons, but I’m a bit confused at the purpose of the boiling water? idk if there’s some utility of boiling water that I’m missing?

I was under the impression the lynching happened after the PCP had been occupying the village for months and had themselves executed several villagers.

Do you have the source for those admissions and that proof by any chance? The ones I could find weren’t very good.

Of course, many revolutions involve the death of children, and peasants. Obviously not a good thing, but the successful ones get upheld regardless - damned sometimes in part but not in whole.

Ah ok, thanks. I know there’s a lot of dislike toward Shining Path, and like I said I don’t know much - I haven’t taken the time to attempt to properly investigate - but from what little I do know I don’t see any particular problems, just that they were unsucessful in winning (so far).

The leader of the movement admitting to massacring peasants and saying it was good and he would do it again does in fact repudiate his entire ideological strain that he invented

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That’s bourgeois

Yeah, I’ve experienced this as of late too. I don’t think it’s classist to require folks to have proper hygiene, even if it’d be embarrassing to enforce, I don’t want to go down the “respectability” pipeline but if you smell like shit and you don’t have a good excuse what the fuck are you doing.

doodoo ass is anti authority

How ripe we talking: local Friday Night Magic? Anime con? Melee tournament?

Babies are pure reactionary id. Only through studying marxism can you not become counter-revolutionary.

I’m not sure you understand scientific socialism then. The scientific part requires communists to apply dialectical and historical materialism to improve their revolutionary methods. If you only look at the successes you don’t see what not to do or patterns of failure your movement might be falling into.

What you’re saying is tautological, why bother attempting any revolution if there’s a chance of failure? Surely living under oppressive bourgeois and semi-feudal regimes is acceptable if you can’t guarantee you’ll win, right?

In science you use a null hypothesis to determine like, is the thing I’m proposing even worth doing? Is my hypothesis completely wrong?

To give an example because my plain-english attempts to explain stuff are usually cruddy: I see two doors, 🚪A and 🚪B. One door, 🚪A is of average width and height and the other, 🚪B is about 2/3rd’s the height, same width.

People walk through the 🚪doors, I look and think I see a pattern. What I think is that people who are tall, will not go through 🚪B, why? Yeah maybe because tall people really really don’t like it. Maybe they are entitled since they are generally viewed favourable in terms of dating on average at least. Maybe tall people just don’t see the 🚪B, they only see things at a certain height.

Really I know it’s physically possible, I just need to start somewhere, so I put people into two bins, tall and not-tall. I count 100 people walking through the 🚪doors and my null hypothesis, is something I can be confident in saying is not true. Like the opposite of what I want. My null hypothesis then is that no tall people go through 🚪B

Ok let’s look at the data to see if we can reject my null hypothesis or not. Excuse the table formatting

             🚪A  🚪B
        Tall: 46   3
    Not-Tall: 37   14

Oh wow look at that! Ok now I can move on to my real question, which is, do people who are tall like to go through 🚪doors which are of lower height? This is much harder. Maybe I’ll say if there is a preference of like 90%, so 90% of tall people go through regular height 🚪doors that means that they don’t like going through shorter height 🚪doors. I also need to know how many people generally like to go through 🚪doors of shorter height. Because if tall people prefer regular 🚪doors as much as non-tall people, then height of the individual, tall or not, would not play a role in the difference.

Since I was able to eliminate the idea that tall people do not go through shorter 🚪doors, I can move on to other questions which depend on the initial null hypothesis to be false. Because, why waste time if our hunches or guesses (i.e our _hypotheses) are not on the right track?

Ok, does this relate. I’m skipping stuff for brevity, and I think you can still get it bcuz of scientific socialism & all that goodness. These ‘failures’ can tell us what not to do. And more importantly, these ‘failures’ failed in a specific way! Why that specific way? Because the overall ‘failure’ is the result of a ton of smaller ‘failures’ and ‘successes’ and we will say stuff that didn’t really affect anything. Did the weather during a specific guerrilla attack lead to the end failure? Did a comrade in a mid-level position decrease the fighting power of the fighters? Are guerrilla tactics different in the 80s (I think it was the 80s?) and because tactics from the civil war in China were used, that was what ultimately led to failure?

The thing is there is likely some useful information. You’re not wrong when you say it is a failure and thus not worth studying or that there is no point considering it. And others with different knowledge may find something useful. The trick is–you cannot know until you try. Because a presumption or prediction is a model, or something in your head. And as dialectical materialists we must accept that what is in our head is not the same as the external world, i.e. the stuff _outside of our head.

Again it’s not that you are wrong; it’s only, that is a difficult, perhaps impossible thing to know without actually putting in the work and effort.

One other way, think of these as experiments, not all experiments succeed, and why they fail helps you figure out how to run the experiment next time.

well, we at least ought to study them to see what went wrong and why they thought it would work

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I’ve not really investigated the socialist character of Yemen, so I can’t speak on that. The PCP, CPP, and CPN did/are waging active people’s wars so I’m not sure it’s worth comparing how revolutionary they are when that’s a common feature. I’m not aware of Hezbollah having any socialist stances either, is that a historical thing or has there been some shift?