I just read through the thread and tried to mentally filter for people saying it’s a common thing. Didn’t find anything particularly overt in that way. Don’t think anyone was making claims as to how common it is either way, but I guess I could have missed it.

It’s telling to me how fragile the gender binary is when people feel the need to police attraction lines based on such arbitrary physical characteristics as how much someone does bodybuilding or fitness.

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

I have had conversations with self described communists who don’t care at all about minorities.

There are those who co-opt, historically. And in modern day, in the US, there’s patsoc MAGA communists (though I’m not sure how much they actually exist beyond online bullshitting).

But I would also ask what you mean by “don’t care at all about minorities,” like if they have actually expressed such things to you and in what way, or if you’re inferring that from something and from what. Because sometimes there are disagreements on what is actually going to make a difference and that is taken as a lack of interest in caring what happens, in bad faith. For example, democrats in the US who shame people on “the left” for not supporting their blue ghoul because the red ghoul might get in, citing that their disinterest in validating the blue ghoul as a candidate means they don’t care about XYZ issue minorities have that the blue ghoul pays lip service to.

I need to reread State and Revolution, cause I want to say Lenin distinguishes between the two there as OP replied, where one is transition state and the other is after the state has “withered away” but now I can’t recall exactly if he used that specific terminology. Either way, the phrasing I tend to see used is that there is a socialist worker state with a vanguard party who suppresses the capitalist class and has a dictatorship of the working class, or proletariat. And then there is communism, which is the end goal to transition to. But the party itself is communist.

So something like:

• People doing socialist worker state: communists heading up a communist vanguard party that focuses on the needs of the masses and on educating them in communist principles and methods of analysis (such as dialectical materialism), and guards against the reaction
• The state power model: dictatorship of the proletariat in order to suppress the capitalist class and empower the proletariat
• Goals: to create and maintain a socialist state along the lines of “to each according to their contribution” and transition to a communist “to each according to their needs” as the need for the state “withers away,” and maintain the revolution which is an ongoing process of transition and guarding against the reaction, not something that ends as soon as you have state power.

If anyone thinks I’m oversimplifying, am open to correction. (Is worth noting that the details of this will vary some in practice because of the conditions unique to the socialist project and what they have developed and so on.)

I’ve not researched this piece extensively, but I am remembering now this piece on Jonestown: http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=78282#p8

The narrative associated with Jonestown of people being misguided in their thinking and so “drinking the Kool-Aid” may have been a major distortion. It’s been some time since I read through the article in full. I’ll try to see about re-reading it later, so I’m more clear on that point.

edit: wording