There’s plenty of podcast piracy. For example, look on SoulSeek. Slskd is a FOSS client. Use it to search for user “podking.”

Podcasts seem to be the only type of media impossible to find on torrent indexing sites.

I haven’t looked, but I’m not surprised because podcasts aren’t really the kind of medium people would tend want to keep a large local archive of.

If you’re just looking for premium feeds there are sites like piratefeeds.net

Removed by mod

Is the existence of absolute power itself not a restriction
I just don’t see how dialectical materialism is consistent with unchallenged and unjustified power.

Well there’s your problem. Did you even read the rest of what Cowbee said in this thread, explaining much of how governance in China actually works? You come here basing your questions around this false assumption of “the existence of absolute power,” when no one in China has absolute power, rather power is vastly more evenly distributed there than in liberal “democracies.”

The fact that there is a single party is not (as western propaganda would have you believe) evidence of “dictatorship,” but instead functions as a bulwark preventing reaction and the destruction of the revolution by capital - something I would hope you would be able to recognize even with a very basic understanding of dialectics. There is no reason the will of the people can’t be enacted via a single party that exists to ensure it is their will and not that of capital that rules, indeed it makes more sense to have a single party when the rule of the people is the goal.

Consider how the approval rating for their government across the population of China, well over a billion people, is above 90%! And now consider the U.S. with it’s “two party” system, where both parties represent the interests only of the political donor class (capital) and the government is largely despised by the population. The power there is concentrated in a small number of ultrawealthy bourgeoisie and it is continuously getting worse, more and more concentrated, while the people of the US are losing more and more of their so-called rights every day.

Yet you frame your questions under this base (and false) assumption of “unchallenged and unjustified power” in China without even considering how power is constantly challenged there (see Cowbee’s explanation further up of the many direct elections in China) and through that challenge, its justification is consistently being reestablished.

Since people here seem to disagree

Since people here have seen all this sinophobic propaganda countless times already and thoroughly debunked it all, you’re going to go ahead and confidently spew tired, gullible U.S. State Department talking points and lies to be debunked yet again for the umpteenth time because you’re either painfully naive and depressingly uneducated or you have an explicit pro-U.S. anti-China agenda you’re desperately trying to spread.

Yeah, we know, dronie.

lol who is downvoting this? Is it just because it’s not funny since it’s a 1:1 representation of reality, so not really anything satirical?

Evergreen:
https://leftypol.org/edu/src/1662026001627.webm

The excuses that libs will insist on making for loudly openly self-procliamed nazis will never cease to… disappoint me.

Yeah, FWIW, having a viable non-chud alternative to reddit 6 or so years ago was nothing short of a godsend. And that it was made by actual comrades was just icing on the community cake. Though clearly the libs will never be able to forgive you for making the best federated social media platform while being principled and ideologically consistent in ways they never can be.

So I figure what better place than yet another thread soiled by a tantrum-throwing toddler screeching about how mean the tankies are who made the platform he’s screeching and sobbing on, to sincerely thank you & Dessalines for what you’ve made and for the work you do.

This is unironically the big moral dilemma presented by so much western entertainment media it’s nauseating. “Would you pRoTeCt yOuR FaMiLy even if it meant the world/everyone else would die?” and the correct moral position, after much soul searching and garment rending is usually presented as: “Yes, fuck the world, you gotta protect you and your own above literally ALL else.” And it’s always so contrived, with such manufactured scenarios to ignore the fact that in the vast majority of both real and imagined cases, the better option for the world is also going to be the better option for your family. But constantly pitting the individual and their immediate family’s interests over the well being of the community and society is fundamentally necessary to maintain the capitalist mode, so they gotta keep reinforcing that false dichotomy as some kind of universal conundrum that is best answered by being as self centered as possible “for your family.”

Or maybe try telling it to all the people of color shot by cops from 2020-2024, or the kids in cages that never went away when a Democrat was elected president but just silently forgotten about and suddenly ignored by the same media that had been using them for cheap political points during election season, or the thousands of people in NOT brand-new concentration camps but the ones that have existed the whole fucking time. Or are you saying that none of that shit mattered then since your blue team was in the big boy chair, but only matters now that a cheeto is office and it was a white person that got executed by the bipartisan fascists this time? Despicable.

That’s just not voting but with extra steps.

So voting for who or what we actually want is the same as just not voting. Got it. We HAVE to vote for fascists we’re opposed to or our vote is meaningless.

Sounds like a pretty fucking airtight argument for not voting then, dipshit.

correct horse battery staple

The original version of this meme was problematic but my god this version of it is spot on accurate. And it still would be accurate for countless other things that could be put in the Biden/Trump speech bubble. Despite what Democrats pretend, and how they like to (ineffectively) play the role of opposition to Trump, they are fine with 90% of what he does, he just does it without any deference to the liberal theatrics of “law,” with too much bombast instead of fake personal difficulty making “hard choices,” and because he’s not on team Blue. Granted, there are a few significant things I think it’s safe to say would not have happened under a Democrat president, but vanishingly few of those are things they wouldn’t have wanted to do.

In principle, I agree with you. But the problem is, these assholes already have the platform. They own it, in the literal sense (they outright own or hold large shares in the major social media platforms and the traditional media outlets) and in the more general, vague sense (their beliefs, even if fringe, will get pushed into mainstream discourse because of their grotesquely outsized disproportionate influence). He’s a billionaire. If he wants his message heard by the world, it will be heard, period, because we live in a capitalist society, which isn’t called a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie for nothing.

Given this reality that their ideas will be disseminated regardless, it becomes important to counter them. To shout out the truth that their ideas are disgusting and how they do great harm to regular people and to the world. It is important to mock them and show others how ridiculous and heinous their ideas are.

In short:
If an evil voice has no platform or is struggling to grow one, then I absolutely agree - do not give it to them. But when they already have it, it can only make things worse if their opposition (we, ourselves) remain silent about the harm they’re already doing.

If you’re “finding balance” in an inherently imbalanced world, you’re tipping the scales.

But no, that has nothing to do with why people arrive at Marxism-Leninism as a lens through which the world can be accurately seen and as a tool with which to change it. That comes only through a lot of difficult self examination and contrasting that with a thorough and honest examination of the broader world - not just your own immediate surroundings and not just your own time period, but empathizing with other cultures the world over and learning about the history that led things to be as they are now. That is how people arrive at a Marxist-Leninist view of the world.

THANK you. I was considering saying something similar here, and did in response to another ignorant, self-assuaging user elsewhere in the thread. So I’ll just say the same thing I said to them, as a response to WatDabney above:

If you read the many comments in this thread, not to mention other threads on this topic, a significant chunk of western leftists who are ML arrive at Marxism Leninism only after going through a more anarchist phase, and only through a lot of examination of the world and themselves, coupled with a lot of study and reading, do they move from anarchism to come to recognize the undeniable accuracy of Marxism Leninism to reflect the real world and to offer an actually-working methodology for revolution.

Your fallacious description of people’s process towards becoming Marxist Leninists as being the same sort of way that poor, ignorant, emotionally needy people latch onto a cult, is ridiculous, and the kind of things liberals like to say of all of us on the anticapitalist left to comfort themselves into maintaining their simplistic “I’m right but they’re wrong” worldview and avoid having to engage with the many real reasons people become anticapitalists. But that’s what you’re doing. Don’t be like the liberals. Try to understand the real why of things, don’t make up nice little bedtime stories that ensure you don’t have to examine your own misconceptions.

And some of them just get born into it.

No one is born into Marxism Leninism, anarchism, or any other ideology, and saying that is a grotesquely anti-anarchist thing to say.

And to add to that, when first coming to realize the lies you’ve been told by the state you live under, it is a lack of nuance to immediately jump to the false premise that just because your state is bad, that must mean all states are bad. That’s just the easy and childish answer. That doesn’t make it inherently wrong, but it does make it the one that requires further examination and sometimes a hard look at ones misconceptions. MLs are the ones who have done that hard work, not the ones who have fallen for the easy, un-nuanced end point. As someone else here went into a lot of detail describing but I can’t find at the moment, the typical and more easy trajectory for a young leftist is to go from disillusionment at their own state to anarchism. It is only after a lot more learning, examination, and recognition of nuance, that a person comes to see that the understandable kneejerk reaction that “all of them are evil!” is naive, simplistic, and totally lacking the nuance these things need.

It takes more internal work to conclude that “oh wow, all these other things I assumed were just the flat truth, common knowledge, - like how evil the communist states were and how bad they were for their people - were actually just more lies I was being told for a reason.” Which is why we have so many young anarchists who over time become ML’s but only rarely the other way around. @WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com has it exactly backwards.

If you read the many comments in this thread, not to mention other threads on this topic, a significant chunk of western leftists who are ML arrive at Marxism Leninism only after going through a more anarchist phase, and only through a lot of examination of the world and themselves, coupled with a lot of study and reading, do they move from anarchism to come to recognize the undeniable accuracy of Marxism Leninism to reflect the real world and to offer an actually-working methodology for revolution.

Your fallacious description of people’s process towards becoming Marxist Leninists as being the same sort of way that poor, ignorant, emotionally needy people latch onto a cult, is ridiculous, and the kind of things liberals like to say of all of us on the anticapitalist left to comfort themselves into maintaining their simplistic “I’m right but they’re wrong” worldview and avoid having to engage with the many real reasons people become anticapitalists. But that’s what you’re doing. Don’t be like the liberals. Try to understand the real why of things, don’t make up nice little bedtime stories that ensure you don’t have to examine your own misconceptions.

And some of them just get born into it.

No one is born into Marxism Leninism, anarchism, or any other ideology, and saying that is a grotesquely anti-anarchist thing to say.

The working class in China are not being crushed under anyone’s bootheel, though. They really do enjoy a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, which has been used to great effect to improve working class lives. Yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat as mediated by the party, but vast swathes of the working class people are the party. And those who are not, well, there is a reason the party has an over 90% approval rating and it’s not some disgusting racist trope about Asians being sheep. It is because they’ve watched their quality of life rise by leaps and bounds, repeatedly.

Tankies only call themselves as leftists. And some places, like Hexbear, aren’t genuinely anything at all except people seeking “the dunk” - the appearance of winning an argument regardless of the reality of it (which requires a rigidly controlled echo chamber).

Hexbear got rid of their dunk tank comm. They are one of the most active instances with an excellent ongoing thread for international news and have some of the best analysis from people living in the Middle East, Nordic countries, China, South America, etc. Their mutual aid comm is one of the few places you can give directly to Palestinians, and a lot of comrades in need have found monetary help there (including me). Hexbear has its problems, but saying that whole instance is all about “seeking the dunk” is just another display of your ignorance, and how ironic it is that you keep accusing everyone else of only being interested in “winning and argument regardless of reality” all while revealing how unwilling you are to engage with actual reality. Every accusation a confession.

Uh, what? Look at the context of this post, jackass. The meme is trying to portray Russia as a misunderstood good guy

The flag of Russia isn’t even in the meme, “jackass.” The flag of the USSR is, though sadly it hasn’t existed for a few decades now. Like most clueless liberals happily drowning in propaganda, you are falsely equating modern capitalist Russia with the USSR.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that even modern Russia (whose flag appears nowhere in this image, genius) was wholly justified in entering the civil war that had already been ongoing inside Ukraine on behalf of the eastern regions of Ukraine whose civilians were being slaughtered by the Ukrainian government’s militias. But I admit that it’s hard to keep a straight face when talking to someone who uses NATO buzzwords like “unjustified foreign aggressor” because I keep having to facepalm.

You’re assuming libs apply their racism consistently rather than in whatever way immediately suits their interests. “How can you accuse me of hating black people, I loved Obama!” -countless libs.

As much as anyone on the left should agree that the fall of the Soviet Union was a horrible, tragic event for workers there (if not worldwide), I think many if not the majority of Social Democrats and even a few who like to call themselves Anarchists, would deny that fact as vehemently as any capitalist. Western hatred for the USSR runs deep. Chomsky is a perfect example, and there are droves of supposed “lefties” who readily side with him on insisting that “The collapse of USSR was victory for the working class.”