Practice by reading out loud slowly and enunciating like you want a child to understand you. Do the same with others' speeches, as they were written to be said out loud. If they are recorded in an accent that is in the neighborhood of your goal, even better - you can practice talking exactly like a recording.

Even though this isn't off-the-cuff speaking, you will likely adopt verbal patterns that let your words flow more freely.

You can also join clubs that are dedicated to speaking to other people. If all else fails, something like toastmasters, though that's specifically about public speaking.

If this doesn't go well, that's also okay. You might want to look into a speech therapist if practice doesn't help.

I did not give an extensive definition because the self-description of liberalism, by liberals, is at odds with the historical actions of liberalism. It could be distracting and take a while to get the point across.

For example, liberalism self-defined with maximizing individual liberty while it also advocated for the "freedom" of corporations to work you as many hours as it could while shitting down your unionizing effort with violence. Liberalism also self-defined as favoring democracy and everyone having a say, but implemented this in a racist and sexist way that placed capital in charge while also colonizing others and depriving them of self-determination.

The common thread is really just that it is the dominant ideology of capitalism, its function is to extoll the virtues of capitalism and tying it to an illusion of liberation and self-determination while actually working against both of those things, as under capitalism, capital works against both struggles. The person that liberals have you read as foundational to liberalism, John Locke, worked to support an American settler colony and its slavery rules and explicitly supported child labor. Then, as today, there is a difference between how political figures present themselves and what their advocacy actually entails.

The Russian Federation did leave Ukraine be. It was only after Western meddling, a coup, a civil war, not implementing agreements, toying with NATO membership, and resuming a civilian shelling campaign that the RF invaded.

The imperial core Western powers poked and prodded and used Ukraine as a pawn until the RF hit its limit.

Given that you likely live in one of the countries doing the relentless escalation, why not work against them doing so?

I was just like "you seem to be telling the dude that he isn't using tankie correctly, but that's not how language works"

What I actually did was provide some context for the term and how it's used nowadays. The point of the history lesson was to point out how the term became appropriated and set the stage for laughing about how some Trots get called tankie nowadays. The point of "how it's used nowadays" was go provide a counter-narrative for the "definition" they were taking their own liberties with. I did what they did, but I'm more correct in my context.

Injecting a prescription vs description debate isn't really relevant.

And then you replied that I'm wrong, and seemed to be making an appeal that the negative connotations had to do with the invalidity of the definition.

Yes that was me misunderstanding which word we were talkjng about. There's another thread I had in mind. I don't think what I said there applies to the word tankie.

Our wires are so crossed at this point that a random car in 1960 Spain just got spontaneously hotwired.

I can make it worse, just give me time.

Oh I misunderstood and thought we were talking about a different word. This makes this discussion even sillier.

You say that like it's mutually exclusive. Nobody gets to choose how other people use language. Definitions are whatever people agree that they are, even if you're not one of the people who agrees with it.\

How do people agree what they are without telling other people their meaning explicitly or implicitly? What about people that intentionally misuse language to deceive? What about language that is self-descriptive due to selective use?

I'm aware of prescriptivism vs descriptionism but this conversation isn't actually about that. In fact, I am already following a descriptivist line of reasoning, if you will review my earlier comment. I am saying how tankie is used nowadays.

You can dislike that definition of tankie all you want

What definition? Which one do I dislike? I don't know what you're talking about.

the fact that they used it in this way and that you understood it means that it was used correctly.

The way I understood it is, "anyone defending a target of US empire in any way from the left that I would like to stop listening to before my brain breaks". Seems spot-on to me.

The evolution of language may hurt people, but denying the reality of evolving language hurts nobody but yourself. The etymology and history is good to know (and the meme relies on it), but the new definition is still a correct alternate definition.

What on earth do you think you're replying to?

You misunderstood me. I’m saying that the US is an oligarchy as well.

Every capitalist country is an oligarchy. The term is used selectively for Russia, and you have specifically focused on its use re: Russia in this discussion.

the first part is your opinion

My correct opinion. Do you believe you are the first baby leftist I've come across that harbors these kinds of views? I am always part of the political education group in any org I am in. We have to root people out who are very confident in their chauvinism and isolate them from the others in some way, as they are very disruptive on top of being wrong. This is also why various baby-leftist-only spaces are so completely useless, they spend their time chasing phantoms and fighting people that do good work. This is also why the feds have historically supported Trotskyists and certain anarchist formations.

and the second part is not true.

It is true, I know where these claims come from. I recognize them.

I’m not being condescending, and I’m being equally patient replying to people who are just trolling

You are repeatedly broad-brushing "tankies" with bullshit and placing yourself in a position to argue with others despite clearly not doing the work of learning about the topic first. A cool guy once said, "no investigation, no right to speak".

If you have to compare RT to the NYT, that says more than enough

I don't know what that means.

I’m genuinely apologizing because I’m only skimming this as I’m getting sleepy. and it’s a lot to go through. I can tell you took effort so apologies.

No worries, I am not holding you to a schedule. Please take any amount of time to reply. I also won't take it personally if you don't reply.

It actually isn't much effort, I am very fast at writing.

Re: West also bad, at times worse

I know and I agree!

Well that isn't what I said, though. What I said about the West is that there is addressing the false perception of greater "free speech" in the West, which is, again, largely just chauvinism. You do not enjoy greater speech, you are just such a non-entity in terms of threatening the ruling interests. This is because those ruling interests keep you, along with the wider public, weak, docile, and hating their same enemies.

I am also highlighting the ruling interests, not the government. This is because in these places with allegedly more "free speech", international capital is dominant and has control over your everyday lives. It controls whether you can house and feed yourself and it censors on a constant basis. Restricting yourself solely to government censorship is a rhetorical trick used by capitalists to pretend that corporate control over life doesn't count as oppression. Where is the comparison to private censorship, where the "free press" is actually a corporate-censored press? Have you done a comparison between the accuracy of claims from the SCMP and NYT? Just pick Palestine, see how it serves you.

And in the case of China, it is for CCP interests. Holding elections every now and then doesn’t translate to the dictatorship of the proletariat as envisioned.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not specified as anything other than the proletarian class oppressing the bourgeois class because they gained power through revolution. The PRC regularly executes billionaires and uniquely reroutes funds to its people, and its poorest, to build material well-being for all, not just the richest, and certainly not just the higher-ups in the party.

By that logic, US democracy would be a dictatorship of the proletariat as well, since they hold elections every now and then.

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not have any governing structure specified whatsoever. It is something predicted by Marx to have certain attributes that are more about political economics, like using monopoly industry that is already centrally planned and wielding it for the good of the proletarians. Something that China has often done and is the explicit communist logic behind their conveyor belt strategy for requiring companies to have more party and government participation as they grow larger and more monopolistic.

I do not consider america really federal, since there is massive power concentrated at the top. Same for other “federal” states like Germany

Then I have no idea what your meaning is.

The reality of language is that people like op rely on the negative connotation of the definition I just gave.

Imagine of they just said, "advocating for" instead. Wouldn't have the same impact, right?

One thing that is different is the lack of government-critical sources available from China, also Russia. Freedom of Speech in the West is wobbly, but in China and especially Russia it is even worse (from everything I've read).

What have you read?

Your freedom of speech is tolerated in the West to the extent thst it doesn't threaten ruling class interests. The ruling class already owns all of the papers and TV channels and think tanks, they drown you out. You can never hope to push socialism through their apparatus. That is how effective their cemsorship already is: you're told you have freedom of speech and then deplatformed. If you get a little louder, you might get a platform on occasion, but will then will still be drowned out by "competing" views.

And if you fly too close to the sun, you will get direct government censorship. Ask Germany how "free speech" is going with regards yup Palestinian solidariry. Ask comrades in the US how free speech is going with Samidoun declared a terrorist orgsnization. Ask a former Black Panther for free their speech was while being soued on snd martyred by the feds and cops.

If you actually do anything that matters, if you truly challenge the ruling powers in the West, you will need to be realistic and expect oppression. The idea that you have free speech is just pure propaganda.

Re: China go on Weibo you will find plenty of criticism of the government. The idea that you can't criticize the government in China is xenophoboc propaganda.

Re: Russia: okay, but what is your point? There are bad things that happen in Russia so... their role against US imperialism is bad? Because that tends to be the only thing supported by "tankies". The Russian Federation is a capitalist project created by capitalist revanchist shock therapy on the USSR that killed 7-10 million people. The West created the RF, its "oligarchs" are hust centralized capitalists like in othet countries in Europe, except the West continued to exclude Russia from the imperisl core, attempting to force it into the periphery (extraction snd poverty). What you see today is a regional capitalist power that is respinding to that. One where the national bourgeoisie are dominant rather than the international bourgeoisie, due to circumstances imposef on them. As a consequence, they often align against Western imperislism.

This is a lovely segue into our China sidequest, and while I agree on the definition, I have doubts on how public the public sector really is. The way that national election results look and the way vocal dissidents or political opposition are treated does not give me the idea that the people truly have all the power here.

Which is to say, you don't actually know anything about it. Public means state-owned, by the way. Do you believe they aren't actually owned by the state?

Capitalism concentrates power in the capitalist class. This class can then subvert democracy, resulting in oligarchy.

This has the false premise that the historical course of capitalism is to enter spaces that were already "democratic" in the bourgeois democratic sense. This is not true. Instead, capitalism itself gained power through the replacement of feudalistic giverning powers (like monarchies) with structures they could control, compatible with their ideas of "progress". In short, they created bourgeous democracy. They were already in control. The question of concentration of capital changes the words but not the fact of who is in control.

In a similar way, central planning concentrates power in the central government, which actually makes it even easier to abuse that power.

In countries run by socialists, central planning is an exercise of power that already exists. The power is maintained through the oppression of competing classes and, traditionally, party bureaucracy.

I don't know what it could possibly mean to say it is "easier to abuse that power", it is so vague and decontextualized thst it just sounds like something you're makinh up on the spot. Socialists endeavour to speak in terms of concrete realities and draw conclusions from them. What is your standard of abuse? Of power? How are you comparing these things?

btw central planning is not unique to countries run by socialists. Highly concentrated capitalism also has central planning aspects, as do their governments in times of emergency. But it is, in that case, central planning for bourgeois interests.

Chinese government is not transparent

How so? Tell me how the Chinese system works for, say, someone working to get a hospital built in their town.

nor federal enough

This sounds like America-centrism. There is nothing inherently democratic about federalism and it is often antidemocratic. If you are in the US, do you applaud the electoral college?

for me to call it democratic or owned by the people.

Tell me which other peripheral countries hsve done so much for their people. Tell me who has alleviated so much poverty, built so much infrastructure, and by their own hand rather than imperialism and capitalist ventures. The proof is in the doing.

It is your repetition of radlib talking points to punch left.

The first source for this claim: https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1895632/

On June 29, 2023, a briefing on arms supplies to Ukraine was held at the UN Security Council at Russia’s initiative. The civil society briefers Russia invited included journalists Max Blumenthal (USA) and Chay Bowes (Ireland).

They provided facts about the Kiev regime using Western weapons to deliver strikes at civilian facilities in Donetsk and to send subversive groups into the Belgorod Region. They supplied evidence that billions of US taxpayer dollars have been invested in the corrupt schemes of fuelling a war against Russia in which Ukrainians are being used as a tool. They concluded that the Western elites and defence industries were the only ones to benefit from the escalation of the conflict.

Oh no, not journalists providing information at a public briefing! Don't they know it's time to do baby's first McCarthyism!?

C'mon bro just one more stock buyback bro just one more stimulus I'm good for it.