I'm planning to cut down my activity on this site significantly, so I figured I'd share some closing thoughts before I go.
It's funny (read infuriating) seeing people playing the ideological purity game with Marxism of all things. Marx and Engels weren't religious leaders, they were intellectuals and political activists who wrote books. And all of the successful socialist movements thus-far have diverged from their thought in pretty significant ways. If we are to look at socialism as a science, then we should aim to test and revise our theories as we gain new information, not go "erm, okay, but what does Capital say about this". I can't count the number of times people have quote-mined Marx and Engels at me as if it were an argument, even though the quotes being mined were disproved by Mao nearly a century ago.
The power of free speech and free press is that it allows room for people to question things and come up with new theories that exist outside of mainstream thought. As such, they should be allowed to exist. However, this does not mean free speech and free press in the liberal sense, if only because neither of them makes any sense under socialism. No, under socialism, mainstream media and the internet will be heavily censored indeed, since there's no point to giving air time to disinformation, or even just stuff the public doesn't want to see. But when speaking face to face, or handing a paper you printed to a friend, one should be given a great degree of freedom.
Marxists will make fun of you for bringing up morality, but I still think it's good to have some kind of ethics guiding your action; not because it's metaphysically necessary, but because it's practical. Something like Utilitarianism, for example, gives you a yardstick by which to judge your actions, saving a ton of time that would otherwise be spent mulling over stupid questions like "will backwards baseball caps be allowed under socialism?".
Speaking of philosophical shit, I used to be a Nietzschean, but over time I've come to strongly disagree with him on the important stuff. I do, however, think that there is something to be said for ressentiment, even if his conception of it makes no sense. Vengefulness is a wasteful, childish behavior that attributes a legitimacy and humanity to the enemy that it doesn't deserve. I don't want evil people to suffer, I want them instantly dead, wiped off the face of the planet as fast as humanly possible.
Peo
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