Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale...do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
It really feels like SOMEWHERE there was a legitimate use for this for very mission-critical stuff that might need to be immutable once published and kept for posterity...
...but then it just became yet another speculative asset to make magic money that fueled stupid monkey jpegs.
The pursuit of profit benefits mankind only by the occasional anomalous accident.
100%. Capitalism is great until it reaches a peak where people who provide no value except in the wealth they’ve amassed are the ones who gain the most from it. You can succeed simply by being born with wealth and having no other value because other people who do have value will need you.
The point in OP is that "blockchain" was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).
So, if you're not aware of this, that's because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
You do understand what a DB is right? Like there's millions of them...hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you're downloading it to read it... that's a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.
My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.
With the electricity used to validate a single crypto transaction you could do thousands or even millions of DB queries.
Yes, everything uses electricity. That's like saying that it's fine if you kill one cow per day to eat its ear and throw the rest because hundreds of them are killed every day in farms.
Wasting so much electricity in such a non efficient manner so a decentralization cult member can have his wet dream of using non-government money makes no sense.
DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.
There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.
DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It's absolutely comparable.
We're not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We're comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.
There doesn’t need to be. My argument is not bullshit, you just don’t understand the differences between blockchain and a standard database and are pretending you do which makes the argument impossible for you to understand.
Lol no I do, you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about. The amount of DBs we have alone, that's not counting any other compute servers or even WS dwarfs all the block chain out there. This article is a nothing burger and is complete bullshit. Even the study they referenced doesn't know the exact amount...as it points out .6 to 2.2% is their estimated use...but this shit article went with the higher numbers because it's great for people like you who hate any tech that you clearly don't understand.
Yeah, people tend hate what they don't understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a "digital gold" for a long time
But it's not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It's so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
You don't even understand blockchain so I'm not sure what your edit is all about. You're comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they're comparable.
When it comes to power...it absolutely is comparable....but most of you have no clue how much compute we use daily in terms of power. Acting like the block chain sucks down anywhere near the amount of power we use on even in the corporate world is hilarious...you know a lot of colos have their own sub stations right?
The only person here who doesn't know what they're talking about is you. If you took a standard DB (MySQL or Postgres, for example) and took that same information and stored it on a blockchain instead, you'd use far more energy on the blockchain and the issue would only get exponentially worse as the chain got bigger. Normal DBs don't need to hash new entries or validate them against previous entries that are also hashed.
Are you dense, man? No one said that. They’re saying that one blockchain would take several hundred DBs to equal its energy use. You’re wrong and doubling down for some reason and it’s just making you look silly.
I said that genius...go check my posts...the fuck you arguing about? I literally said that the amount of DBs we have make the miniscule amount of large block chains out there look like nothing. Then you show up and say one DB isn't comparable to one large fucking blockchain....no shit.
Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I'm serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don't have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can't come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring 'decorations' some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
New Jersey also banned billboards. That one is pretty easy and I vote that we should adopt that policy everywhere. It's much harder to control digital adspace, since you can do things like astroturf campaigns and product placement. Great point though! I like that law.
Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
Yes, those two are the most important and shouldn't even be that hard to push. There are many laws that were pushed "to protect the children", we might as well finally make some that actually do protect them.
Make sending unrequested data like ads and trackers to web clients a crime akin to gaining unrestricted access to computers. No need for a new law, just a new interpretation on an older one.
Most jurisdictions prohibit unauthorized access to computer systems. What if we just say, "running Javascript code that implements functionality not specifically requested by the user is unauthorized tampering".
Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
That's because ad serving doesn't set a lower bound on the electricity price. The value of crypto and the value of electricity are linked.
For the sake of simplicity I'll just say Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin stays constant (big if), and the rate of Bitcoin per watt does too, then everyone would start mining until the demand for power is so high that the price increases until it's as high as the Bitcoin per watt.
Sure, they are unrealistic assumptions, but it's easier to see this way that the value of Bitcoin is (almost) the same as electricity. If it were lower, noone would mine it, if higher, people would buy electricity with bitcoin for a profit until the 2 equalize.
Electricity will never be much cheaper than Bitcoin, market forces will make sure of that, causing a huge environmental impact. Ads, however, only use as much electricity as they need to operate, their amount is not decided based on how much electricity they waste.
Honestly, it never fails to surprise me when on a presumable anticapitalist forum such as this one, someone makes a passionate argument in favor of some of the most ghastly corporate practices known to man, but sure, let's put that premise to the test, shall we?
Shall we call it a draw? Keep in mind that online advertising is a fast growing industry (and likely to continue to grow in the future), whereas Bitcoin's power use isn't likely to grow too much, as the above article explains. Also keep in mind that this is JUST online advertising, and completely ignores print, TV, and those digital billboards that are spreading everywhere from Times Square to your local grocery store. Think about neon store signs, illuminated billboards, etc.
Also, that's just the cost of delivering ads to people (i.e. it doesn't even include the cost of producing them). Think about how many people work in advertising – all the offices they occupy, the computers, cameras, and whatever other equipment they use, business flights, what have you – and I'm pretty sure the carbon footprint of the entire industry far outstrips that of crypto.
I see you completely ignored my comment. The problem is not the amount of electricity used in itself, which the estimate of 6GWh-130TWh is as precise as shooting a dart at the moon.
Crypto uses energy for the sake of using energy. The value of crypto is based on the amount of energy used to create it. It's not valuable to society. That's what people is upset about. Crypto provides even less value to society than ads do.
Even you said it, ads spend energy because they employ people, those people generate value.
That's like saying we should stop heating homes because it consumes more energy than crypto mining. Hose heating improves the quality of life of people. Crypto does not.
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Well, we weren't very keen on talking in the family when I grew up. I can't remember if we sometimes talked while TV was muted because of ads, but when we didn't talk it didn't feel awkward. If anything, it felt awkward to ever talk to each other. Not the healthiest upbringing in my mind ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly! Blockchain and PoW are terrible but id really like to know how much time and electricity is consumed to serve ads, cool servers, train and educate people to effectively become ad engineers.
Same with porn. But I'm building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already ...they were doing it there anyway... Win/win.
Powerjerk (tm), we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say "Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!" And you'll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Energy isn't free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You'll have to brand this as either a carbon capture fapture system or as a weight loss program
Humans are incredibly inefficient power generators. I can buy 1kWh of electricity from the grid for about 18 cents (generation…transmission is extra).
I don’t think I can buy 870kCal of food for 18 cents. Certainly not a healthy source. And that’s even assuming 100% efficiency. Any high school physics student will tell you that won’t happen.
Yes but what about this whataboutism? And honestly I am fairly certain it ain't as much as Bitcoin. People usually focus on 1 thing to get it done because moving to the next. I bet you try to do that at work too.
No way ads consume less power than bitcoin. Just the lights for ads probably consume more than bitcoin, not even talking about creating ads, which I assume consumes a double digit percentage of the global work force.
I did a back of the envelope a few comments up. How it looks to me, just sending internet ads around the world consumes 20 times as much as all crypto mining combined.
You assume wrong. In the UK, about 0.3-0.5% of people work in marketing or advertising, and that's one of the most extremely financialised service economies in the whole world. No way is the number anywhere near even that high in countries where people actually work for a living.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don't know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
I think you missed the proverbial point. We likely slaughtered the chimps and put their heads on pikes. Chimps have nothing on the violence humans are capable of inflicting.
Yeah the context is that many indigenous people depended on the buffalo for food.
It was basically the same as when Israel pours concrete down wells and burns olive groves that took centuries to get that productive. They knew for every buffalo they killed, an indian would starve.
That image is similar to the rooms full of luggage in Auschwitz in what it represents.
I remember a documentary about a famous northwest passage expedition that was never seen again. One of the inuit people they talked to during an investigation claimed they found a boat, and in the captain's quarters they found a body in the bed with a big smile on its face. That would be absolutely terrifying, but apparently that's what naturally happens to corpses when their lips and gums receed.
You've just ruined my night. I screamed. My phone was like an inch from my face and I was all tucked into bed. That triggered something primaly unsettling for me. Thank you
You're right though, as soon as someone dies, there's something not right at all about how they look. They don't look asleep, they look uncanny valley.
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
What's "Mordor Intelligence" -- is that a real thing, or a parody of the surveillance/'defense' industry companies that are coming up with names nicked from LotR? ('Anduril', 'Palantir')
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/
They appear to be a real thing. Though naming yourself after the most evil thing in middle earth is a bit in the nose lol.
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I'm impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don't care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
There is and isn't one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you're constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.
I don't brag about it. I fear each winter that it will happen again. Or that we will be woefully under prepared for natural disasters when they do strike.
There is no safe season in Texas. It gets tornadoes in Spring and hurricanes in Fall. And because every year is getting hotter and hotter, Summer in Texas is probably also gonna get pretty rough soon. And every time ERCOT struggles, the price of energy soars because of their bullshit predatory small print. I truly don't understand why anybody would choose to move to Texas these days.
Summer will get rough soon? Didn't we have two back to back years with heat dome dominated summers and people collapsing on the concrete? I distinctly remember being told by my job not to go outside due to extreme risk of heatstroke. It's already bad. If ercot can't handle winter now, they won't be able to handle summer as AC system loads spike higher and higher.
I have lived here for 31 years. I don't get the pride I'm supposed to have for being a native Texan. If I weren't trapped here by the economic forces pressing all Texans down, I would live somewhere with a functional government at least.
Come to Chicago. Rent is fucked I won't lie, but you can still find some cheap places. Depending on what you do (or are willing to do) there's plenty of work here. Our city is a far cry from perfect but we have a mayor who actually has the people's best interests in mind, we're politically active and quite progressive, there aren't enough free community resources but far more than most places, we have multiple forms of slightly shitty but fully functional mass transit, and weed is legal. Also, portions of the city are extremely walkable and bikeable.
Right. What happens to Texas if it secedes and is subsequently hit by a substantial hurricane? Fuck those people in particular I guess. That's the general stance of our state government.
This is exactly it. Because ERCOT is fully contained within the state of Texas they don't have to follow any of the federal rules that would cover interstate connections in the Federal Power Act. The state can fully manage it without outside influence, and they've chosen to fully deregulate the entire market. Because fuck you it makes money.
Yep, a friend of mine there says he calls up different suppliers every year to shop for that year's current best price because they all regularly jack it up.
It's a normal thing in Texas. Annual plan are typical. Longer and shorter term ones are available. Never pay month to month. It's just like Internet plans.
Texas Power Guide does a nice job of analyzing a lot of plans based on your location and usage.
Do NOT use Power To Choose. The electricity retailers purchase positions on that site. There is usually bias in the plans its shows.
Because they are so strong and independent would rather funnel money into their own pockets than follow regulation to make sure people don't freeze to death in winter.
Because we didn't want to follow federal regulations due to cost. Some of said regulations included winterizing measures. It was peak "leopards ate my face" material.
Hilariously, Texas is all about giving people the freedom to freeze to death with their substandard electrical service in the name of "freedom from government oppression", but they can't just let trans people decide to transition because it could be a mistake and they might regret it? All while supporting child labor where kids could get crushed or heinously injured in massive industrial equipments? Amazing.
Thing is, statements like the one in the post are just as ignorant as the claimed "enemy".
You know what else takes 28 days? A moon cycle. We have absolutely no context, what this means. A period tracker bone is a perfectly valid hypothesis, but without any proof or context nothing more than this. It could have been used for moon phases, sheep counting, trade, or simply for testing stone knives.
And this reaction of yours is a prime example of jumping to conclusions based on political views.
You can argue, that this bone was used for 400 different things. Without context, arguing that it's definitely something about menstruation is just pseudo-feminist circle jerking. They just choose this interpretation because it fits their views and goals. That's unscientific.
What you're doing here is also not much better. Instead of actually engaging with the argument I brought, you just assume, that everyone who disagrees with a pseudo-feminist interpretation of a bone, must be the enemy. That is not exactly scientific.
you talked about enemity first, remember? you have this view of a fight, and that anyone who dare say that a woman did something and not a man, is fighting men.
You have a very defensive position. Which means you feal attacked. You say it directly when you talk about "enemy".
You are the problem my friend. Your first comment is aa problem. And the support it receives is concerning and scary.
Nope, I just pointed out, that an absolute statement like the one above is not valid. And the "enemy" I brought up, was used as a description of the position shown by the proponents of the menstruation bone absolutism.
And labeling me as a "problem", without even an attempt at telling me where I might be wrong is pretty, well, bold?
Think about it, I write, that absolutism is not good, and your first response is "you are evil because you dare question whatever I happen to believe in".
You don't help feminism like that. And that's pretty sad.
Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.
🤦♂️Yes, in that sense, English could be gendered. But what it actually means is that English used to be gendered and retains some gendered words from that time.
Another example, Russian has noun cases, but not the vocative case. However, it does have two words that have a vocative case from when the language as a whole did use to have the vocative case - Бог (Боже) and Господь (Господи) - but that doesn't mean that Russian has it now.
Also, blond/blonde are pronounced the same so the distinction is lost in speech and probably soon in writing as well, and words like fiancé/fiancée (which are also pronounced the same), widow/widower, actor/actress do not signify grammatical gender by itself.
Why do I have to know the gender of a person in order to talk about them in third person singular? On more days than not, there is conversation about someone I never met where there is an irrelevant sidebar to clarify gender before communication can continue. I find this relic of the language to be inefficient, pointless and annoying. Daily life would be a lot easier with a non-gendered word for referring to a single person in third person. Languages like Spanish, with gendered nouns, is confusing for even native speakers. I am fascinated by how different languages have different ways of being complicated as well as by their phonology and syntax. I asked my question because I was looking into how other languages use gender and came to the conclusion that none were free from that complication. So I agree with you so far. All languages have gender.
'Natural gender' has nothing to do with 'grammatical gender.' The reason we have words for male and female persons and pet animals is because they are male and female. Calling something male or female is not grammatical gender. It's just reality, something the trans supremacist militia hates.
Swahili.
If you want to translate “she/he went to the river”, you say “Alienda mtoni” which collapses she/he into the subject A- (Alienda) to mean “the person”.
You always need context to use a gendered word (like mwanamke for woman) otherwise general conversation does not foreground it.
There is literally no word for he/she in Swahili, as far as I know.
I'm pretty sure that was the intent behind the original wording. The interpretation of this being the remnant of a female human makes sense to me, but as this is an anecdotal account of Sandi Toksvig's time in university, we really have no idea if this is a good example of the lack of a female perspective in anthropology or just a convenient strawman to make a point.
But the point is soo much of history ignores the female perspective (or the non-european perspective). Sometimes intentionally like all the female scientists that contribute to foundational studies and don't get their name on the published paper.
And this is really damaging; I have a family member that legitimately believes that european-descent men are the smartest throughout history (when I brought up the Islamic Golden Age as a counter example he accused it of being propaganda).
American schools are so bad at teaching diverse history. So many still struggle with the basic truths about Columbus and the Natives.
Look at the ancient structures found throughout the world. The only one I know of in non-Mediterranian Europe is Stonehenge which, while impressive, is some stones hauled over a great distance and placed is an astronomically significant manner. Then you have pyramids and ziggurats in just about every other region except Northern Europe, North America, Australia, and Antarctica, ancient cities on every continent except Northern Europe, Australia, and Antarctica, Polynesians developing a means of marine navigation that is effective across the southern hemisphere (the Norse had a system that was effective in the North Atlantic), Australia having an oral history that has evidence of recording events that go back at least 10000 years (while surviving in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet). When you look at it, significant achievements in ancient Northern Europe were pretty sparse. We do seem to have caught up in the modern era, though.
Agreed, when speaking of the distant past, I always assume that by "man" they mean "mankind" aka human.... Not males.
In the grand scheme, I don't think it matters whether the thing was done by a male or female, the fact that it happened is the interesting thing about it.
I'm 100% positive that both men (males) and women contributed to these things, and it is impossible to know how much influence each sex had on any given thing, so I'm not sure why the sex of the ancient person who did it, matters.
I'm not sure why the sex of the ancient person who did it, matters.
Make that a common sentiment and a good chunk of the division surrounding modern discourse goes away. People care way too much about genitals both in the past and present.
Not only what your genitalia is, but what you do with it, seems to be a top priority for far too many people. They're not your genitals, so maybe don't worry about it?
I didn't take it as a correction. More of a clarification. I omitted some extraneous detail that they added. I felt it was implied well enough by context that it didn't need to be said, obviously they wanted to add more clarity to the statement.
In my mind the two statements are identical, except that mine relies on context and theirs is a bit more explicit in what is said.
Men did do their best to segregate women in the 18th and 19th century. And they succeeded. Even in the language.
Women fighting for women to be recognized in history is an important fight for women to be respected and recognized for their doing, because even now they aren't.
And I'm not saying it's an all men problem. It's a society problem.
We're talking about bone carvings. And you're well into or after the bronze age.
What I'm referring to is significantly prior to anything you're talking about. The events you're referring to are a few hundred years ago, part of recorded history, while I'm talking about the early days of mankind, well before the printing press, paper, or even writing instruments like the fountain pen or quill.
When you go back, well over 1000 years ago, more like 3000+ years ago, why does it matter if a thing was done by a human person with male genitalia or female genitalia?
That was my statement. Either you vastly misunderstood, or you're so occupied by making a point, you didn't care.
We're talking about history where mysoginy left a big footprint because it was made by men that incapable of thinking that women could be more than what they were in their time.
Exactly like today. You're asking why it matters whether it was a man or a woman, yet this whole conversation sparked because someone said that it could be a woman.
I'm not disputing the fact that misogyny was (and is) and big problem, that women's contributions were either disregarded or coopted by some guy and credit taken away from the actual contributor.
That happened. A lot.
But in the times before the written history books, we should be less concerned about the gender of an individual who we think used a thing in a new/innovative way for the time. I don't think that studies of bone carvings or other ancient artifacts, being referred to as an "achievement of man" should imply, or was ever meant to imply, that it was done by someone with a penis. In that context, in all cases, for all intents and purposes "man" should, and as far as I know, is, thought of as "human" or "mankind".
This isn't a debate about the sociopolitical unfairness towards women, it's a semantic argument about using the term "man" to refer to a human individual or someone who is a part of mankind. Bluntly, I took the statement in the OP as a tongue in cheek joke by the professor. They know that's not what it meant, and used the assumption that "man" = "mankind" as the juxtaposition to subvert expectations, to crack wise about it. The same way someone would say "you know what sucks about twenty six year olds? There's twenty of them" where the premise directs you to think of someone who is 26, and the punchline indicates that your assumption of it being a statement about people who are 26 years old, was wrong. That's what makes it funny. Granted, that's not very funny, but it's the structure of a very common type of joke.
That's what's in the OP.
Instead, here we are talking about women's suffrage for a field where they probably only remark about the gender of someone as a footnote.
In the context of prehistory it's to my knowledge taken to be short for mankind and feck all else. I agree its ambiguous in the modern age which is likely why it's dieing out. Science doesn't like ambiguous wordage
In history where we have names and context I absolutely agree and it is good to see the important women in history finally getting brought to the forefront
That's the correct interpretation of that use of the word, and the quote in the post is meaning to use it in that way before pretending it's a gotcha.
The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- "person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.
I don't know about English, but in French in the 19th century men did enforce the use of homme (men) instead of humain (human) in the déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, and in the language, because they did want to segregate women. It was a purposeful and deliberate decision.
That's a standard problem with ecology. I can't use a plastic straw which has negligible impact but fishing industry can dump 640,000 tonnes of plastic every year and that's fine. Let's just ignore that.
You go on holiday once a year with the efficient normal flight - bad guy. Ritch person uses private jet for no good reason - that's normal. Let's ignore those emissions and create special rules for the airlines so they don't have to worry about it too much.
Private jets pollution doubled during one year and it's probably the worst way to travel for the environment but I hope you have spent your life savings for a slightly better car to compensate that. We can't inconvenience ritch people, right?
It is this way because the rich people control everything. They won't lift a finger to change if they think they can scam 10,000,000 people into lives of utter inconvencience and guilt to "offset" their own pollution. Hint; every one of us could live in caves and recycle our everything with stillsuits and the rich's portion would just expand to fill the voids we left. This isn't a game with a high score. The hands of the many must join as one to cross the river of life.
A woodworker who actively dislikes the hypocritical and predatory exploitation of lower class people and who is willing to do his part to save us? Are you Jesus?
The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners and merchants which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between peasantry and aristocracy.
It is possible that the meaning of "middle class" has changed. So Musk is middle class, but the lawyer or pizza shop owner are not.
Edit: shit, I should have read farther. Bourgeois is used in multiple ideologies.
The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production.
If you can't afford to live without working, them you're working class. If you could quit your job and maintain a decent lifestyle, you're not working class anymore.
It's why all carbon should be a currency distributed to all people like an UBI. Let's say sustainable amount of CO2 emissions is 8 billion ton and there are 8 billion people, so everybody gets 1 ton per year. You want to pull oil it if the ground, pay in CO2 coin and ask the buyer to pay in turn. Rich guy wants to fly a private jet, they pay the oil producer. Not enough coin, buy with dollars from someone poor that drives a bike and has excess CO2 coins.
It seems fair to me. Everybody is equal, it keeps the market intact while keeping capitalism within sustainable emissions and distributes some wealth.
Of course no rich guy or oil producer is going to accept that, at least not until some people figuratively start building the wooden platform and sharpen the blade to a razor edge.
The environment does not take markets into account and it never will. This consumption will never be sustainable. Our entire ecosystem did not evolve with capitalism or industrial needs in mind. There will be a point where we cannot extract anymore resources without every system collapsing. You can't tie all your resources up into consumer products and military industrial complexes without major drawbacks to everything else. And we will always need more in this current system, and there is never a point where more is enough. You'll never hear "okay, everyone has a smartphone, shut the factory down."
It's fun stuff, right?? I've never been able to conceive why the ultra wealthy would want to let the peasants eventually die off.
Perhaps there are currently more peasants than they require? Was Ritchie Rich just waiting until AI drones became advanced enough to serve them properly?
My limited experience with wealthy folk (prob not even the top 15%) is that they like to feel superior by comparison. Some may be intelligent. Most are educated well even if they lack any aptitude.
My best guess is that they lack wisdom or any semblance of awareness that an aristocracy is stagnant. The things that live on our planet have had to struggle and adapt to survive. At some (small and meek) level, they fuel the forces that would oppose them.
It's not actually fun stuff. I was joshing. I doubt we get to create the United Federation of Planets in the future. I would be ecstatic if that statement was proven wrong.
Make it so the poorest homeless Junkie can make $5 to sell his "Carbon". Drive the price of Carbon down to nothing because rich people can always make you more desperate.
How about we don't involve the system that is actively destroying the planet - into the system meant to save it.
It's not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That's the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an "externality" when the things you're doing have side effects that you don't have to account for, such as pollution.
The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there's no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it's the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.
pre edit: this is just a pointless rant. Your time is precious. Consider skipping it
Please don't take my statement as arguing against your point (I like where you are coming from).
I don't even need sources, I rarely believe metrics in the first place because it is so difficult to conceive and even harder to conduct studies at this scale. This isn't even a possibility in my mind, but:
If everyone that wasn't in the global top 10% of wealth went full Fremen, would the problem truly continue to exist? I doubt it because much of the much industry owned by our increasingly indulgent hoarders wouldn't be necessary. There wouldn't be regular folks to make or buy the product. We'd be hiding under the sand in a cave while drinking our own pee.
I'm not knocking it - I haven't tried it. All at once, anyways.
The gluttonous upper crust would still be jetting to the poles and burning tires for light, but I feel like that would be a much smaller burden on our planet's ability to support life as we've known it than industry on a massive global scale.
I don't know what my point is exactly. I don't think I believe we'll find a workable solution without a cataclysm. Let's go with: selfish assholes are gonna earn their title every time. Regular folks shouldn't be told that their combined efforts won't put a dent in the problem. The ultra rich process nature into poison in order to gain more wealth and power over their peasants. Weakening public education and access to healthcare helps them sell their low quality, single use poisonous trinkets. Having a bunch of money isn't useful if there aren't a lot of folks that have little or even less money. Power, money, knowledge - resource - however you want to frame it.
But then the rich could just overpopulate and use their least favorite offspring as peasants...
Ugh. I should just delete this comment as I don't know what my central statement is. I am certainly not disagreeing. Maybe its that we shouldnt accept futility even though our efforts may truly be futile. To encourage integrity and contentment among our masses. It's very possible for the inhabitants to overcome our downward trend - but if we end up failing, there is still no reason we should accept defeat and be the poor, uneducated, meager servants they see us as.
Fuck the powers that don't respect every life equally. Even if resistance isn't effective, I'd rather suffer than accept a darker future. (I won't have kids. Easy for me to say)
Ugh. Sorry if anyone reads this. I just needed to vent I guess. Thanks for being interested and making the post and conversation. Be well all
I appreciated your rant. I don't really know what I'm talking about, so take this all with a grain of salt.
What you're sort of describing sounds like a boycott of our capitalist system. In theory, if we all could be self-sustainable and didn't need to participate in the current system just to survive, then I think it would collapse. How could it not? The billionaires are billionaires because we give up our time and labor for currency which we then reinvest in a system which transfers most of that currency to a select few at the top. If we all stopped participating where would the billionaires get their billions, and what would they even spend it on, if not our labor or products produced by our labor?
I can only speak for where I live but this kind of organizational boycott of the system isn't really likely to happen anytime soon. It's too difficult to organize that number of people into non-participation especially when there are not really any alternatives. It's not even easy to get people to give up listening to a certain artist's music if they've done a terrible thing. People are living shitty or difficult lives and need their creature comforts just to mentally get by. I don't blame them. There would have to be a viable, functioning alternative already in place which could absorb the needs of a massive number of people. It would take cooperation and compassion, and I guess I just don't see that in the cards.
Even if we did, how long would it last until the power hungry manipulated their way into building another version of the same system?
What do you have to offer but the water of your bodies? You're right. If everyone walked away. If you couldn't sell people a t-shirt with a cat's asshole and a stupid slogan on it, there wouldn't be an industry because there'd be no customers. But thats the issue, where we came from fucking sucked. Children died as often as they lived in every community. But what difference does it make? Its hard to tell. My kids sleep peacefully while Palestinian and Yemeni children are viciously murdered by world powers. So I agree with you. Fuck this. Leave your cities. Have an affair with the Earth and praise Shai-hulud. Would I rather cut my teeth experiencing the reality of life, or extend that percieved comfort to give 4000 people control over billions? Its a hard question. We don't truly know the hardships we would experience. I mean Fremen call their homes a seitch, a meeting place in a time of danger, they are accustomed to war and being hunted. I don't want that for my kids and everyone else that still breathes with compassion for others. Though, the current option seems to be surrending to the disgusting forces at the helm, to which my heart says it'd rather die, and it is in a way.
Anyway, clothes shouldn't be mass produced, lets learn how to make them again. Theres plenty of industries we could get by without if we were allowed to live as a community of people instead of strangers in nearby boxes. I thought I'd answer your rant with a rant of my own because I love our advancements but I hate the intentional suffering of our world. Suffering does not bring merit, suffering is not necessary for growth. All this suffering apologia makes me sick. We are better than this. Mankind is betfer than this. And more people can feel it on the inside now than ever before, we just don't know what to do, or what happens after.
Private jets is a very small part of airplane pollution and four people travelling in a Chevy Suburban with a big V8 actually use less fuel per km per passenger than the big passenger airplanes use per km per passenger. That's not even taking non CO2 pollution into consideration.
People in general rely on airplanes way too much, may it be for personal travel or to get shit shipped to them ASAP, it's not just a rich people issue.
Private planes emit significantly more CO2 than passenger planes per passenger. Here's why:
Fewer passengers: Private jets are designed to carry a small number of people, often just a handful. Passenger planes, on the other hand, can carry hundreds of passengers. This means the emissions from a private jet are spread out among far fewer people.
More frequent takeoffs and landings: Private jets often take off and land from smaller airports, which can mean shorter flights. Takeoff and landing are the most fuel-intensive parts of a flight, so these short trips contribute disproportionately to a private jet's CO2 emissions.
Studies estimate that private jets emit 5 to 14 times more CO2 per passenger compared to commercial airlines [Transport & Environment].
But there are so many more poors. If we all do our very best we can come close to breaking even with the damage done by the rich and mega corporations and help alleviate them of any guilt they might otherwise experience.
Yeah let's not do anything because something else is worse.
In just the U.S. alone, one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches. In the U.K., at least 4.4 billion straws are estimated to be thrown away annually.
The fishing industry is a fucking eldritch abomination. It puts everything else to shame. Fun fact, we kill roughly a hundred billion land animals for food every year across the world. But if you want an estimate on how many animals we kill total, you can just ignore that entirely because the answer is around 1 to 3 trillion fish, depending on how you estimate it.
That means an average U.S. citizen uses 1,46 straws a day. What the fuck are you guys doing? Compare that to the U.K. where it's 0,18 by your own numbers.
We use them as single shot spit ball launchers. It’s common to settle disputes lining up like a napoleonic army and blasting at each other. We need gun violence, but don’t always want someone to die.
I'm going to guess fast food is a large portion of that here in the US. Idk how other countries serve fast food, but here every "meal" comes with a drink, and that drink not only has a plastic straw but also a plastic lid the straw goes into.
After opening the plastic container with my pancakes in it, I open three individually plastic wrapped teaspoons of butter and one plastic tub of high fructose corn syrup to pour onto them. I begin eating with my plastic knife and fork, before getting thirsty and reaching for my plastic cup with a plastic lid. I throw the plastic straw that they gave me away, and pull out my trusty stainless steel straw. I am saving the environment one breakfast at a time.
Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. You're wasting time and money and not solving any problem in the process.
You also have a nice distraction while the actual source of the problem is getting worse.
UK has banned plastic straws in 2020 and guess what. Nothing has changed. We're still drowning in plastic. UK doesn't dump plastic waste in the ocean so the straws you see on the beaches aren't from here anyway. Never were. No problem was solved
No one's laughing at trump's shit anymore. Anyone with at least a lukewarm iq and even a cursory knowledge of history can see his fascism. It's just the system is rigged to give regressive areas more voting power
Eh, that's not what he said. Sure, yes, he said those words, but if you watch the whole thing it's clear he just can't talk like a normal person. He uses words that cause outrage because they get people riled up, and then he goes on to say what he really means. Although who knows man, he's a total liar, and nothing he says has any value anyways.
What got me about that video was the end. He said "We were doing so well. And we were coming together, and coming together, and it was a beautiful thing. And we're going to do that again.". So he personally acknowledged that we were doing well as a country, and more united, and then he came along and started tearing all that down. We've been going downhill ever since. His entire motto "make America great again" is built on a lie that he just acknowledged right here at the end of the clip. It was already great. It stopped being great when he wouldn't shut his fat fucking anus mouth.
But I can't even really evaluate the things he says without sounding like I'm contradicting myself, because the things he says are contradictory from one statement to another. Idk why I even bothered.
They don't say shit in good faith my friend. His whole thing is to say stuff that makes his followers react and exhausts anyone trying to pin him down on anything. Contrary to what anyone thinks he isn't fooling anyone. His rube followers are just happy he's upsetting everyone and wont hold him to a single thing. Everyone else is just tired of his shtick.
The GOP is done veiling their ideas and power plays but it's not like they are being honest. The political equivalent of yelling jibberish at the top of your lungs when someone asks you a simple question. Sad part is the media feeds on it somehow.
Boy, if there is a predetermined level of intelligence, you sure fucking pulled the short straw on that to take a simple turn of phrase and read that entire fucking reach into it.
But then again you're a tankie so that's not surprising.
Yup, not to say that my country is doing much better or anything, but looking over at the USA it's almost comical how extremely clear their decline into fascism and decay is. It'd almost be funny if it weren't so serious.
Unfortunately it's not hard to see a future where the rest of the world have to fight a war against some future form of christiofascist white supremacist USA.
Not next year or the year after of course, but within my lifetime for sure. People forget how quickly some nations go from progressive and democratic to straight up Third Reich.
It takes a shockingly short amount of time once the slow burn has laid the ground work over the initial decades. The slow burn we're watching now.
Yeah but this slow burn is already like ten years old. The fascists demand retribution for us daring to elect Obama. As soon as they saw the light at the end of that tunnel, they said never again.
If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy. (David Frum)
Against Christofascists sure. I don't see any actual white supremacy coming out of the USA. It is far too blended of a country now. Everyone knows someone, is related to someone, or involved with someone of varying races. Our friends, our families, and our lovers are all races. Sure, there will be little hate groups still, but white people are quickly losing ground to non-whites, and the government is very inter-racial. Whites are already a minority in California, and set to become minorities nationwide by 2045.
But the Christofacism is a very real threat, and the US military is a monumental behemoth of monstrous proportions. Woe to all if the Christofascists gain unchecked power.
It does happen in slow motion, and every single time, some people see it happening. They march and wave their arms shouting FASCISM! whilst their neighbours call them hyperbolic.
If you read contemporaneous accounts, you can feel the frustration.
Or… I thought I could feel the frustration, until recently (eta: if you haven’t read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, please do as soon as possible). Now it’s doubly frustrating. I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t. I can’t stop this, so I keep saying ‘if you were a German in the 1930s, knowing what you know now, what would you do?’
I don’t know the answer to that. I know many Germans saw it coming and couldn’t stop it.
What the fuck can we do? Because it is absolutely coming.
e: oh, and worse, trump isn’t actually the problem. He’ll likely lose, then everyone will high five that we’ve defeated The Problem, but Trump is just their carnival barker. He could die tomorrow and the threat wouldn’t change. There’s a solid fascist movement in the US and elsewhere that will not stop with trump’s defeat. There are thousands of them in high levels of the US government , and they’ll barely miss a beat without trump. He barely matters, and I’m afraid when he loses, the fascist movement behind this will find a wide opening.
I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t
These internal questions are what led to me finally realizing how powerless I really am. I can't even convince my close personal friends to re-evaluate the batshit crazy things they learn online, let alone change the trajectory of a nation.
What's frustrating is that anyone can find a piece of evidence for their argument, and there are propagandists everywhere offering up grand narratives full of such evidence. So when someone is extremely concerned about children getting sex changes, and you say something to the effect of "that's not really happening" they'll just come back at you with a few examples and you're like "yeah but a few examples isn't a statistical trend and you're blowing this way out of proportion" and then they call you a groomer. Like, I'm not okay with it, but also it's not something that we need to be specifically worried about and build an entire political movement around. Like children get attacked by sharks occasionally (probably more often than they get sex changes), but there's no mass political movement to shame parents who encourage their kids to swim in known shark habitats.
Unfortunately this is the state of discourse online these days. You can see it all over this and every site. Any time someone says something that someone else disagrees with, it's only one or two steps before the baseless accusations begin. Just this morning someone called me a Nazi. No discussion or anything, just accused me of being a Nazi because of a position I took on a complex and layered situation. I couldn't be further from a Nazi. But you know... Once they put you on the defensive, then you're not discussing the issue anymore, which is what they want.
They're not even bothering with destroying things behind the scenes. They're doing it right out in the open, because nobody has the teeth and cajones to stop them.
Fascism isn't something on the horizon. Look at what is happening in Idaho. Within a year or two half of the US states will have criminalized abortion, and all you hear from federal legislators is how important it is that we shovel more money we don't have into other countries' wars.
It's over.
The only power you or I have left is in our immediate local communities, where you can still accomplish the general good.
TIL fascism is when abortion is banned, and not when systems are put in place to enforce single party rule and violent suppression of political dissent.
Nazi Germany actually had a more liberal view of abortion than the laws that a lot of Republican states are now passing (for reasons that you can probably imagine, but still)
Nazi Germany isn't the only form of fascism, and had other individual freedoms even more restricted. Nazi Germany was a far-right, reactionary state that violently suppressed Workers and stripped their freedoms, just like American conservatives are attempting to do and are working towards.
The Nazi stance on abortion wasn't "liberal", that's ludicrous. It ranged from being forbidden for parents of German blood to encouraged or even forced in other cases, it was all about their ideas of racial hygiene. Not even the GOP is that racist, or can you imagine them mandating abortions for mixed-race couples?
The only case where this might be true is even the ban on abortion for German couples did not mean a ban on abortions in medical cases. German (not just Nazi) law generally considers it, as is proper, self-defence. Honestly I don't think a legal system which doesn't consider it such can consider itself a legal system at all, Radbruch and everything.
It can be, but fascism is extremely malleable as a template and can absolutely not give a shit about abortion (or even actively encourage/enforce it like china during the one child policy) or any other specific individual freedom.
The ones it really cares about are the ones that allow you to dissent and work against the government, so speech and association.
Fascism is fundamentally authoritarian first; specific social and economic prescriptions are tuned as the party/dictator deem necessary.
That's how you can have red fascism like China and Stalinist Russia, and capitalist fascism like Pinochet's Chile.
The US is never going to properly address its issues until it properly identifies them.
What you're dealing with is not fascism imposed from the top down, it's puritanism endorsed at all strata of society by a significant amount of people who genuinely co-sign it, either because they don't understand the repercussions or because they genuinely don't care.
If you're incapable of understanding that people in those states genuinely support banning abortion, for example, and are not actually being oppressed by a minority of powerful people who are denying them their rights, but are instead actively signing away those rights for the minority who want to keep them, you're never going to be able to effectively change this state of affairs.
My surviving jewish family were freed from a nazi death camp by the people you call fascists. Equating the two is holocaust trivialization and antisemitic. I literally link you to a well known mainstream Jewish historian and activist about this issue. Do you think David Katz is a "tankie"?
You call me scum equivalent to a nazi in response. Have words lost all meaning to you?
Oh my god there was antisemitism in the USSR, even among some leadership! Several doctors got killed!
You're right, a few incidences of antisemitism are the same as the holocaust, or the pogroms that the pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies engaged in. Or the antisemitism in the post soviet union liberal democracies. /s
You are a deeply unserious person. And a holocaust trivializer if it "owns the tankies" apparently. Great priorities.
Can you point me to the exact sentence where I trivialised the holocaust? Hint: I didn't say anything about the holocaust. All I gave you is a link, the rest is your imagination.
You, OTOH, are severely trivialising antisemitism within the USSR. Stop fucking fanboying.
pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies
Please fucking what liberal democracies during Tsarist times? England, France, possibly, am I missing one? And none of that antisemitism was home-grown, it was all the fault of those evil foreigners making poor Russian nobles and priests do stuff? The country most busy with fucking with Tsarist Russia, specifically sending Lenin over mind you, was Germany, very much not a liberal democracy. The age of liberal democracies started after WWI.
Can you point me to the exact sentence where I trivialised the holocaust? Hint: I didn’t say anything about the holocaust. All I gave you is a link, the rest is your imagination.
Oh, so to clarify, you don't think that the USSR could be described as morally equivalent to fascism?
You, OTOH, are severely trivialising antisemitism within the USSR. Stop fucking fanboying.
Only in the sense that it is trivial in scale compared to the alternative socioeconomic systems of the time.
Also a woman, stop being sexist by assuming a male default.
And none of that antisemitism was home-grown, it was all the fault of those evil foreigners making poor Russian nobles and priests do stuff?
During the Russian Civil War the US, Britain and France sure militarily and financially supported those nobles and priests who did pogroms regaining power. They went so far as to invade the USSR. They had previous working relationships with them and wanted them back in power. The nobles and priests were antisemitic, as were their western partners.
Oh, so to clarify, you don’t think that the USSR could be described as morally equivalent to fascism?
Morally? I'm not talking about morally I'm talking objectively and no of course it was objectively fascist. So was Italy and they didn't do the Holocaust. So is Scientology, in case you're looking for an example of non-racist fascists. So are Kahanites and they definitely aren't antisemitic, being Jews and all that. Your point?
Morally? I’m not talking about morally I’m talking objectively and no of course it was objectively fascist.
Okay, define fascism in a way that excludes liberal democracies and their colonies or neocolonies but includes the USSR. I dont think you know what fascism is.
So was Italy and they didn’t do the Holocaust.
They literally committed a genocide in Africa as part of their political project, they wanted to basically manifest destiny the Mediterranean, did you not hear about it because the victims weren't (conditionally) white? Do you think they didn't help the Germans do the Holocaust?
is Scientology, in case you’re looking for an example of non-racist fascists. So are Kahanites
Okay this shows me you can't give a coherent definition of fascism. Also imagine not thinking scientology is racist. Lol.
Kahanites and they definitely aren’t antisemitic, being Jews and all that.
Lolol are you seriously going to make that argument? Do I need to pull up photos of Jewish people who collaborated with the nazis?
Okay, define fascism in a way that excludes liberal democracies and their colonies or neocolonies but includes the USSR. I dont think you know what fascism is.
My definition of fascism is the usual one you'll hear from any anarchist: People who send me to bed. But feel free to read Umberto Eco and observe how the USSR gets a score of 10 out of 14, where of course one would be sufficient for fascism to coalesce. Also how you were all too happy to display rejection of modernism by your implicit dissing of liberal democracies. Please, go ahead, tell me about the grand colonial empire of Estonia! Of Greenland! Of Samoa!
Disagreement is treason (elementary school dismissal without argumentative engagement), reference to your precious cult of tradition (Nazism is also modernist you muppet) which you of course misread all the time that's another strike for Newspeak your "Marxist democracy" is neither of the two, lastly the equation of bourgeois oligarchy with liberal democracy (one does not imply the other), that's strike four, obsession with a plot and/or the enemy is simultaneously weak and strong, could go either way. Maybe just popular elitism.
Lol. Yes trying to return to an imagined past and having an intellectual tradition are the same thing /s
By that logic basically all ideology(including yours) is fascism, and to not be a fascist we cannot learn literally anything ever about politics.
(Nazism is also modernist you muppet)
You said I was rejecting modernism by rejecting liberal democracy, which is literally rooted in enlightenment ideas. I was saying you are not making sense, because you are saying I'm rejecting modernism when I'm rejecting enlightenment era ideology.
which you of course misread all the time that’s another strike for Newspeak
How about another strike for literally knowing what words mean and using them properly? You did not say modern, you said modernism. If you didn't want to be misinterpreted, do not use language that conveys an entirely different meaning.
lastly the equation of bourgeois oligarchy with liberal democracy (one does not imply the other), that’s strike four
I wish I had the confidence to make such bold claims with so little knowledge. Have you even ever read about "dictatorship of capital"? Do you even know what that term means? How about you explain it in your own words for me.
obsession with a plot and/or the enemy is simultaneously weak and strong, could go either way. Maybe just popular elitism
Loling at popular elitism.
Also I will never claim that the current state of capitalism is weak.
Also again you are misreading the 14 points as some litmus test.
Me. And Eco. You just can't let it go, can you, that someone disagrees with your precious ideology.
Lol. Yes trying to return to an imagined past and having an intellectual tradition are the same thing /s
I never said that. I said that you think that all truth has already been revealed by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and possibly Mao. At least one of which you misread but that's another topic.
You said I was rejecting modernism by rejecting liberal democracy, which is literally rooted in enlightenment ideas. I was saying you are not making sense, because you are saying I’m rejecting modernism when I’m rejecting enlightenment era ideology.
You are rejecting the rational development that started with the Enlightenment, aka modernism. Nazism and Marxism-Leninism are both part of that and reject it in their own ways, in a sense anticipating post-modernism. Neither are theologies or whatever, both reject democracy, both reject actually scientific socialism, the proper rational strain to follow, aka Anarchism. Something something complexity theory I'll let you do your own research can't be arsed to feed that to a tankie.
Have you even ever read about “dictatorship of capital”?
How's the GINI coefficient where you're from? Maybe that's the reason. Over where I am, struggle-wise, the labour aristocracy is actually kinda more of a headache than capital because capital is so easy to see.
Also again you are misreading the 14 points as some litmus test.
What is the proper application in your mind then, pray tell? Can you explain it?
There's a reason I said "one would be sufficient for fascism to coalesce around", not "one is sufficient for fascism". Otherwise post-modernism would be fascist which makes no sense. At the very least you need an ideological group which corrals around a specific instantiation of those points, a particular way to gloss over the inherent contradictions, really, and engages in political action.
Me. And Eco. You just can’t let it go, can you, that someone disagrees with your precious ideology.
Eco claims disagreement was treason in the USSR? What supporting evidence does he use?
said that you think that all truth has already been revealed by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and possibly Mao.
Bwahahahahaha this is really funny, literally reading a book on expanding marxist concepts into the sphere of transness
Marxism is a living intellectual tradition about ruthless critique, which includes of past leaders and thinkers.
You are rejecting the rational development that started with the Enlightenment, aka modernism. Nazism and Marxism-Leninism are both part of that and reject it in their own ways, in a sense anticipating post-modernism. Neither are theologies or whatever, both reject democracy, both reject actually scientific socialism, the proper rational strain to follow, aka Anarchism. Something something complexity theory I’ll let you do your own research can’t be arsed to feed that to a tankie.
Lol, sure, you can define words to mean whatever you want.
On democracy- literally every socialist state has more democracy than bourgeois democracies, because the people are (imperfectly) represented by politicians, the politicians are not there to serve capital.
both reject actually scientific socialism, the proper rational strain to follow, aka Anarchism.
Tell me how your anarchist projects in Catalonia and Ukraine were actually based anti-authoritarians when they did labor and concentration camps. Or when Ukraine was basically a military dictatorship, and enabled kulaks to massacre Jewish people.
Oh, or tell me about your more modern projects (the ones that actually claim to be anarchists, not indigenous resistors in Central America who don't claim to be socialist or anarchist)
"Anarchism is a coat that only leaks when it is wet. "
How’s the GINI coefficient where you’re from? Maybe that’s the reason. Over where I am, struggle-wise, the labour aristocracy is actually kinda more of a headache than capital because capital is so easy to see.
Wait, so your argument is that the labor aristocracy actually controls your country? You are responding to me asking you if you could define dictatorship of capital.
There’s a reason I said “one would be sufficient for fascism to coalesce around”, not “one is sufficient for fascism”.
Then what youre saying holds no water? Sufficient to coalesce around isn't the same as a definition of.
Also Marxism doesn't really fit any single point in the definition.
Eco claims disagreement was treason in the USSR? What supporting evidence does he use?
I don't even. He wrote about fascism in general, not about specific regimes short of Italy which he uses for some anecdotes, unsurprising given that he's Italian.
The rest of what you wrote makes just as little sense, so goodbye. Talk to me when you're grown up.
She asked you to give a definition of fascism that doesn't include the liberal democracies, and you went with "meets some (but not all) of the list from Ur-fascism), a standard that would absolutely include all of the liberal democracies.
If your liberal democracy puts you into a mental health ward or gulag for your opinion about the system it's not a liberal democracy. ML states OTOH really like to do that. There's an inherent totalitarianism to them, they demand that everyone thinks precisely like some centralised decision organ decides, and you tankies will even defend that. Note here totalitarian vs. authoritarian: Thought itself is controlled, not just practical behaviour (fulfilling the quota won't help you, you still can't complain). That kind of monopolisation of the prerogative of interpretation is a practical sign of fascism, once it is coalesced. The Ur-fascism points are merely crystallisation points.
The very point that you can type all that in (presumably) a liberal democracy without getting disappeared means that you're not living under fascism.
It's really something, MLs having so shit takes that you make me defend liberal democracies.
or the pogroms that the pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies
You gotta be fucking trolling, what fucking western liberal democracies? France?
Western Europe was almost all constitutional monarchies until the end of WW2 and even then what fucking backing of Tsarist Russia? Napoleon trying to conquer it centuries before and then Austria Hungary and Prussia trading with it?
Also who the fuck is trivialising the holocaust now by mentioning it in the same breath as pogroms, as if the scale and systematic nature of the former don't make them completely disanalogous?
I reiterate my former point: Fuck off tankie scum.
You gotta be fucking trolling, what fucking western liberal democracies? France?
The US, Britain. France.
Western Europe was almost all constitutional monarchies until the end of WW2 and even then what fucking backing of Tsarist Russia?
The US, France, Britain, and other countries literally invaded the USSR to try to restore the monarchy.
Also who the fuck is trivialising the holocaust now by mentioning it in the same breath as pogroms, as if the scale and systematic nature of the former don’t make them completely disanalogous?
My point is that the amount of antisemitism in the soviet union wasn't even approaching the level of pogroms, which was much smaller scale than the holocaust.
I reiterate my former point: Fuck off tankie scum.
My point is that the amount of antisemitism in the soviet union wasn’t even approaching the level of pogroms, which was much smaller scale than the holocaust.
Right so quantitative arguments are fine when they support your point. Gotcha.
Why don’t you call me woke next, CHUD.
Cause you aren't fucking woke. You fucking wish you were woke.
For one, woke people have at least some good points, unlike you; and for two, woke people don't look for arguments as to why "slightly less deliberately genocidal" is actually not so bad when you think about it.
Love them or hate them, progressives are pretty swift to condemn systematic imperialist genocide in all forms, but for you that would require not being a fucking dictatorship apologist.
Ok, fuck me, you got me mad enough to answer, gr8 b8 m8.
I want this on record that the only reason I am wasting my time replying to your tankie ass (and yes, I checked your post history, you're a tankie, surprising absolutely nobody) is so that if someone runs into this pathetic excuse for a rebuttal they don't believe for a second that I bought this as an actually valid response.
My surviving jewish family were freed from a nazi death camp by the people you call fascists.
Who asked?
Who the fuck cares, and for that matter who the fuck believes a rando on the internet just happens to have the right personal anecdote to pull rank in an online conversation? Fuck off with that shit. If I told you my wife is jewish and her grandfather died in Auschwitz would you believe me? Would it make you reconsider the validity of my argument? Of course it fucking wouldn't.
What does conquering and breaking up an enemy installation have to do with what form of governance is running a country? The soviets broke up auschwitz because they broke up every installation they ran across, as you do when conquering enemy land. That has nothing to do with whether stalinist Russia was or wasn't a fascist shithole.
Not all fascist regimes committed the holocaust. Most of them have committed genocides, and yes that very much includes the soviets, but talking about Fascism at large is not an invitation to barge in, well-achshually-ing as if the only fascist regimes to ever exist were the fucking Axis in WW2, no matter how much your obvious commie ass would like to believe that.
Hell the Axis didn't even include all the explicitly fascist countries of the time, (since Franco's Spain wasn't in it) let alone all of the ones that came and went since.
I literally link you to a well known mainstream Jewish historian and activist about this issue.
Sure, and? Neither being well known, mainstream, nor an activist are indicators of your understanding of political theory and the specific meanings and ideologies behind currents.
Technically speaking fucking Alex Jones is a well known mainstream activist if you go by raw numbers and popularity, and i doubt his opinion is worth listening to.
But even then, you absolutely shat the bed on linking the guy because, spoilers: I never even brought up the holocaust until this point, nor have I compared it to the holodomor and other genocides.
Nor would I, because I am not a fucking idiot.
No part of any definition of fascist requires the genocidal zeal the nazis exhibited, and if it makes you feel better I will fucking happily concede that Hitler's bloodlust is still undefeated in both unyieldingness and devotion.
Doesn't change jack shit about the definition of fascism or whether the soviets and maoists fit it, unfortunately for you.
Do you think David Katz is a “tankie”?
I have no idea who that is, nor do I care.
Ok, I lied, you got me curious, and you conveniently misspelled his name.
Because when looking up David Katz you find a highly distinguished history professor at Brandeis, but actually you linked one Dovid Katz whose academic background has fuckall to do with history since he's a fucking philologist.
So, do I think he's a tankie?
No, I don't think so.
Is his arguing against comparing the holocaust and other genocides at all relevant to this discussion?
Absolutely fucking not.
You call me scum equivalent to a nazi in response. Have words lost all meaning to you?
Let's see. You're arguing that the only aspect of fascism, an entire political movement whose impact is so strong and so damaging we are still feeling its effects a century later, that is worth addressing is the holocaust, instead of its far more consistently present, pervasive, and insidious characteristics of inevitably building a liberticidal, autocratic, centralist dictatorship whose morals change at the drop of a hat based entirely on the convenience of the political leadership of the regime.
You know, like every fascist regime, self-proclaimed or de-facto, other than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy which also did the holocaust.
Plus you bring this up as if not committing the most deliberate and industrialised genocide in recorded history makes stalinists or maoists not genocidal. A silver medal is as good as sitting on the couch to you, isn't it?
Furthermore, I would argue you are doing so because you are trying to protect your sacred cows of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao from being rightfully identified as just another flavour of fascist, and not out of genuine interest in highlighting how bad the holocaust truly was.
If you cared about that you wouldn't need to downplay how horrendous other genocides are to single out the nazis, you can roundly condemn them and the soviets as genocidal without making an equivalence.
Being genocidal and being exceptionally genocidal both earn you a one way ticket to "shoot on sight" land in my book, debating which one is worse is thoroughly pointless from a moral standpoint and a red herring from a political science standpoint as being a fascist does not require a kill count (though it usually predicts a pretty fucking high one.)
So yeah words have meanings, and tankie means fascist scum dressed in red, as opposed to dressed in black or dressed in brown.
Being genocidal and being exceptionally genocidal both earn you a one way ticket to “shoot on sight” land in my book, debating which one is worse is thoroughly pointless from a moral standpoint and a red herring from a political science standpoint as being a fascist does not require a kill count (though it usually predicts a pretty fucking high one.)
Okay, so people who support liberal "democracies" like the US currently backing genocide should be shot on sight then? Or just the governments responsible?
The problem with "those genocidal communists" is that liberal democracies are significantly more genocidal. You want to go with the least bad system.
Take the notion that man-made famine counts as genocide. 8 million people starve under the capitalist world order every year.
whose academic background has fuckall to do with history since he’s a fucking philologist.
Dude, don't do philology dirty like that. They're reading dusty old tomes all day long and you need a lot of historical knowledge to make proper sense of them. We couldn't read hieroglyphics without their work, and their extrapolations have been proven by Hittite (which was discovered after the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European and looks exactly as expected). The two disciplines feed into each other. Dr. Daniel Jackson is a philologist and at least as cool as Indiana Jones and do I need to mention J.R.R. Tolkien.
Dude, believe it or not my own mother is a philologist, so I know that damn well.
I know that the discipline is important but I'd be a bit gunshy to look at a random philologist for earthshattering insight on the nature of a political movement whose impact clearly touches the man on a very personal level.
The best part is that I don't even have to, Katz is not even wrong, it's just that this tankie fucker is instrumentalising an argument against minimising one side to minimise the other and frankly I hope he catches the bus the wrong way for that one.
back in the day (before chrome or incognito mode) I used to manually delete specific history items, individual cookies and temporary internet files one by one to leave no trace, while not making anything look suspicious, all so my nosy brother wouldn't stumble on any evidence and use it to mock me
As someone else put it, it's for making sure your wife doesn't get suspicious of the weird ads you're getting, and when she checks the browser history it's clean.
Meanwhile Google, your ISP, and the NSA all know you're looking at freaky old lady bondage porn.
I know this isn’t the point of your comment, but seeing “making sure your wife doesn’t get suspicious” reminded me that some people actually hide such things from their partner.
I find it a pity that some feel the need to hide their browsing habits from their S.O.
I feel lucky to have married a person who loves knowing all the depraved stuff I enjoy so they can incorporate it into what we enjoy together.
Honesty and communication are the bedrock of any relationship. I understand not sharing everything with every friend or family member… but if you can’t be honest regarding what you like with the person you literally decided to partner with for the rest of your life with whom to have sex… then who else in the world can you truly be honest with?
Except some sites seem to use your IP, so if you're both using the same WiFi, you're going to get ads for other party. And for anyone else who used the same WiFi, too
Websites with actual web devs block and track usage with ip instead of cookies/cache, nothing a vpn can't stop tho. More reliable to is to the way back machine on archive.org. Can also use a browsers reader mode to get around it too sometimes.
It's handy when you need to make sure that someone else can access a url ok without having to sign in to the website or anything. If you can immediately see the page in incognito mode without signing in, they'll have no problem
I remember having to use an incognito browser for testing at work one time, and it felt very wrong to pull it up on my work laptop instead of the personal laptop.
That's a good trouble-shooting step, but it's not a solution. That's some bullshit, sorry that happened. Maybe try clearing your browser cache and cookies if you haven't already? Basically my reasoning is if it works in incognito mode and only in that mode, then there's probably some saved state that the website is getting snagged on (state that a new incognito window wouldn't have).
Warren Buffett is like Bill Gates. He's an evil billionaire (all billionaires are evil) who keeps pretending to be a good guy so people won't despise him.
Nobody earns a billion dollars, we've decided as a society that even global leaders, scientists and life saving doctors who do the most important work don't earn that much. It's impossible for a human to be valuable enough to earn a billion dollars. Therefore every billionaire is where he is, because he stole the wealth of the people below him who did the actual work. Every billionaire is a wage thief.
Didn’t Bill Gates revolutionize home computing for the average user? I’d consider that important work.
And why is it just billionaires? What about people worth tens of millions? Shouldn’t we also talk about them? Steve Wozniak is estimated to be worth around 140 million. Is he also evil?
It's always some "started on 3rd base" bullshit with these "self made" billionaires...
Even with "common" people I see this shit and it kills me. I was watching some bullshit "I did x and so can you!" video and this fucker goes on to explain how he had company backing, previous experience, consultants to sit with, and a previous degree...
Bill Gates has also literally saved more lives and helped more impoverished people than you and the the closest 500 people you know. Yes, no one, no matter what they invent, create, or build, should be worth over a billion dollars, but unlike Amazon employees or wal mart, no one working at Microsoft ever needed food stamps and he stopped amassing wealth a long time ago, and even convinced some of his retarded wealthy friends to do the same.
If you've never dug deeply into the ramifications of the Gates' charity work, you might be surprised how much they use charity and their organizations to exert influence and control over the regions they help. It isn't purely from the goodness of their hearts: billionaire philanthropy is both a PR tactic for washing over their bad behaviors and a way of creating a captive, dependent population that you can control.
What regions has gates gained control of, and for what purpose? He's not trying to control the government of the country he lives in, and he already has a bottomless supply of money and investments, so what's he after?
Imagine how many lives could have been saved with the appropriate allocation of those resources Gates never paid in taxes. We shouldn't allow billionaires to take all that wealth and decide unilaterally who gets to be helped and who doesn't.
Gates has gone on the record a ton of times saying that the more wealthy you are, the more taxes you should be paying.
Also, don't kid yourself. If the US government taxed him appropriately over the years you're talking what? Fifty billion? A hundred billion total? The US spends over six TRILLION dollars a year. You think they're just an extra like five billion a year in tax collecting away from free school lunches or Healthcare for all? We already have the money in the US to make things better for us. Our corrupt government system is what's holding that up. You aren't going to get extra help by them getting more in taxes.
I clicked and read the second link there from the nation. It's just an opinion piece from a guy ranting about not agreeing with how Gates has been giving away his money and that he was still also making money on investments. You could post a dozen links like that going the other way really easily as well. Fact check still shows he's given away $50,000,000,000.
, we’ve decided as a society that even global leaders, scientists and life saving doctors who do the most important work don’t earn that much.
The US doesn't even pay the President $1 million a year salary. Arguably the most powerful person in the world isn't even considered a millionaire status job. And yet we allow shitfuckers like Elon to scam their way into hundreds of billions. It really says that the majority of Americans are A-OK with scams and cutthroat tactics representing them.
We're at the point where the Pentagon needs to check with Elon Musk before making decisions because he personally controls 50% of the satellites in orbit and if he feels offended he can prevent the US, and anyone else, from using them. He can single handedly turn the tides of war. He's undoubtedly more powerful than the US president. He's unelected and has zero accountability. Why are we all ok with this??
Because these oilrailroad tech barons have been good for the economy and therefore the growth of the United States, and no one wanted to stop one while there was still more money to be made and now it's late and gonna be an uphill battle to undo.
The fact that the DoD hasn't seized control of Starlink as a national security asset is insane. They could even pay him a fair market price for the company and keep all the employees on. Just appoint government personnel at the highest levels to ensure it stays online.
That's not a good solution either. The government seizing assets from private citizens isn't cool. That's oppressive. But the government should have built that network with our tax dollars, not given our tax dollars to a private citizen to build and keep all the profits from. I'm not saying he should retain control, but I am saying he should have never been given control.
It would be very good and cool under a socialist state, but not in the US currently and I'll explain my reasoning. In the US, nationalization represents the transfer of an enterprise from a single capitalist firm to the capitalist class as a whole via the state. Nationalization can bring benefits to both the working and capitalist classes, but ultimately the workers are still being exploited by the state for private profits instead of social ends. When an enterprise is nationalized by a capitalist state, the former owners are usually generously compensated with state bonds bearing a fixed rate of interest; this enables them to continue to exploit the workers involved at a rate of profit now guaranteed by the state. The class struggle continues, but but it is now necessary for the workers to struggle not against a single private management but against the capitalist state in its entirety. This is one of the reasons why Mussolini and Hitler heaped praise on FDR for his New Deal policies. They did a lot of good for people during the depression, but they also were market interventionist in a way that put a lot of corporate control in the hands of the capitalist state.
I won’t nitpick and just say that you’re mostly right. Nationalization within the imperial core has only ever provided small, temporary relief for a labor aristocracy that benefits from imperial super-profits.
You don't need to earn a million dollars per year to be a millionaire. The president gets a salary of $400k per year and has literally all of their expenses paid for, including room, board, maid service, butlers, cars, airfare, clothing, medical care, etc. They serve for 4-8 years, and they receive compensation for life. It doesn't take long to become a millionaire in that scenario. There are no US presidents that aren't millionaires.
The context of that quote is a little lost, because these days with inflation and housing prices, just owning your own home probably makes you a millionaire.
I think you meant to reply to my other response where I quoted William Jennings Bryan. If so, you're right, the number has changed. $1M in 1896 is the equivalent of $36.5M today. But it certainly applies to billionaires, and we were talking about them, so I felt that it was relevant.
It's posts like this that really make me embarrassed to be here on Lemmy. So many people here like to shake their fists at the sky and complain about how the world works.
Yes, capitalism leads to major inequality. Other options are out there but also lead to major inequality.
Best you can do for you and your family is to try to live well within the system, and vote for the changes you feel will best serve everyone.
Ranting about billionaires not being good people in any case just makes your audience stop listening.
Sounds like it would do you some good to take the advice of the post and read some Marx. It might help you contextualize the analysis that leads people to come to leftist conclusions.
Additionally, voting alone will not bring about positive change. You can't directly vote on changes in America, just candidates working within the Capitalist system. True change comes from grassroots action, like unionizing and building up parallel structures.
Ranting is just a detail here, focus on the point - it's a place of discussion. Like a tavern back in some older days. People talk here, come up with ideas, act on some of them, and it's through this ranting, too, that some people may eventually pursue political or otherwise influential careers, try and bring changes they want to see, exerice their rights.
You can't just get up and go to vote without having discussion either. This is all part of the process.
Yes, capitalism leads to major inequality. Other options are out there but also lead to major inequality.
The problem is that other options are not being explored. In the past 200 years (in the western world), pretty much nothing apart from Capitalism has been tried, very few small-scale experiments or anything but even then its for policies such as UBI.
So yes, if you look at poorer regions of the world which are often the only ones trying new things out, you often do see inequality increase but maybe it has something to do with them being poorer regions and all the baggage that comes with it (say, corruption or coups or authoritarianism)? Maybe this also influences the kind of ideologies that get adopted by the ruling class, and how the countries under the new ideology are being ran?
Also, at least in my opinion, this kind of mindset of "this is how the world works so you shouldn't care and live life" feels misguided. I do agree that LARPing on the internet about these things is kind of counter-productive as you're not really achieving any real change, but turning blind eye to injustices happening in your country (or in the world to a lesser extent) is even worse - an ignorance-based call to inaction.
It makes you stop listening, maybe. But I know people that are definitely not commies or even socialists that are interested. All billionaires being scum is a popular talking point.
I respect your right to be uninterested, but you are on a ML memes community. There will be leftist memes.
What makes Buffet exceptional is that he agrees with you. He has said our system is perverse in that it rewards him more than teachers who actually work for a living.
William Jennings Bryan, who was a three-time Democratic presidential nominee and served as Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, said "No man can earn a million dollars honestly". He campaigned under the idea that all of the wealthy are corrupt, and the United States needed reform. It's a sad state of affairs that the majority of our citizens won't vote for politicians that represent the interests of the working class. Almost all of our politicians support and assist the wealthy, and refuse to acknowledge the issues facing the working class, yet people keep putting them in office.
lol nowadays a million dollars is like, the bare minimum you need for a comfortable retirement that doesn’t include “dying before 70” as part of the plan.
Warren Buffet haven't "earned a billion dollars". Net worth means the value of all your assets and in his case it's mostly stocks. Look at the evolution of his net worth and see how it accelerates as he gets older. That's compounding interests doing what they do.
He could easily get a billion dollars cash whenever he wanted. Look, Musk got $42B in cash within a couple months, immediately lost half of it, and his net worth went up. It doesn't matter that the majority of their wealth isn't liquid. They can get cash whenever they want by borrowing it from banks and investors at lower rates than their holdings appreciate.
Defend him however you wish, he and his descendants will never have a need for anything in their lives, and that is because they robbed so many on their way up
This'll get you upvotes from the people that agree with you but it's almost like you're not even trying to change my mind. You're intentionally being vague and that doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.
I think my question is pretty straight forward. The claim is that Warren Buffet has robbed others so he could become wealthy. I simply asked how does that work exactly. I'm not sure what my knowledge of Marx's philosophy has to do with you being able to answer my question. If you have a good understanding of it yourself then it shouldn't be too hard to explain it to an idiot like me.
The reason claims like this rubs me the wrong way is because what Warren Buffet is doing is hardly different from what I'm doing myself aswell. It's just the scale that's different. About half of my wealth is tied into stocks. Stocks that I've bought with my own money that I have earned with my own labour. I'll never be able to become rich by working and I'm not going to become rich by investing either but that doesn't mean I shouldn't leverage the stock market to boost my own finances. The claim I hear you making here is that I'm essentially stealing from workers aswell.
EDIT: I asked chatGPT to steelman your position. This is what it said. Does this represent your view correctly?
When someone says "Ownership of Capital is theft from Workers" in a critical context of capitalism, they are likely expressing a viewpoint rooted in Marxist or socialist ideology. This statement reflects the belief that under capitalism, the ownership and control of capital (such as factories, land, machinery, etc.) by a relatively small group of individuals or entities (capitalists or owners) is inherently unjust because it deprives workers of the full value of their labor.
In Marxist theory, the means of production are considered to be collectively owned by society as a whole, and the capitalist system is seen as a mechanism through which the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) exploits the proletariat (working class) by extracting surplus value from their labor. According to this perspective, workers are only paid a portion of the value they produce, while the remainder is appropriated by the owners as profit.
From this viewpoint, the statement "Ownership of Capital is theft from Workers" suggests that the capitalist system is fundamentally exploitative, as it allows capitalists to profit from the labor of workers without adequately compensating them for their contributions. It highlights the unequal power dynamics inherent in capitalist societies, where a minority of individuals or corporations control the means of production and accumulate wealth at the expense of the majority who rely on selling their labor to survive.
It matters precisely because I need to know what I'm working with here. If you understand the concepts I asked about, I can pinpoint exactly where the robbery takes place. If not, then I have to try to explain those concepts in their most basic form.
You're right, it isn't too difficult to give you a brief overview, but without a firm understanding on your part it could open up far more questions than answer, unless you truly understand the basics of Marxism.
As for yourself, yes, you are ultimately stealing from Workers, but unfortunately that is the only way to actually retire in this Capitalist system without a pension or massive savings. The goal is to escape the Proletariat and join the bourgeoisie via steady Capital accumulation, and go from exploited to exploiter.
As for ChatGPT, it was broadly correct but was extremely vague and skipped over important details like the M-C-M' circuit I mentioned earlier, the broad cycle by which Capitalists use a sum of Money M to pay people to create a commodity C and sell for a greater value M'. Asking ChatGPT about Marxism is going to result in a lot of missed details and risk misinformation.
I wasn't saying bill gates was dead. I was asking if the only good billionaire was a dead billionaire. I was then suggesting you might believe Bill Gates is the one good billionaire. They were separate possible answers I was trying to think of.
For a decade I'm waiting for him to slip on his lies and spill out the billionaire evil. But there's still no drama, no posing, no yacht, no island, no employee-torturing, no supercars, no castles...
Just a guy who happened to get a ton of moneyz and trying to fulfil his vision of a free messenger that won't cooperate with governments like the others do. There's a reason it's banned in many countries and he's even been deported from his motherland.
Not saying he's an angel, and billionaires really shouldn't exist at all.
But if i had to choose one of them to get a fair trial instead of the ad-hoc-guillotine, it'd be him.
I love Angela Davis. I really need to learn more about her. I saw this video posted somewhere during 2020, and for folks who can resist the urge to impatiently skip past what she's setting up in the beginning, the payoff at the end of her response to the banal question of whether she supports violence for her cause is (IMO) exceptionally powerful.
It's actually kinda short, but the first time I watched it I think I didn't expect what she describes at the beginning to play so directly into her final words, nor to be so very personal at one tragic point. I think I was kinda going "OK I know awful things were happening back then" I'm embarrassed to say. Once realizing that she was putting all that together for a specific purpose, I had to go back and watch it word for word - so I could have been projecting my own general impatience with video clips onto others. :)
You're being downvoted because people people think you're being obtuse, but, as a person that overuses logical thinking to a diagnosable degree, my suspicion is that you're doing that. Also because your tone is kind of...not good.
The whole point of the Serenity Prayer ("accept the things I cannot change") is that it includes "change the things I can" -- so the things Davis is changing are things she CAN change, by definition.
But her point is that she is reframing what she believes she can and cannot change. Recategorizing, if you will.
She's invoking the third part of the Serenity Prayer: the wisdom to know the difference. As we grow and learn, our wisdom increases, so the things that belong in the first two categories will shift.
Things that used to be things that can't be changed are becoming things that she can.
To understand the quote, you just have to give it some space to breathe, and not be so logical about it.
There is a common prayer called the serenity prayer that includes a line about accepting the things you cannot change. The idea being it's not worth stressing out over aspects of your life that you have no control over and to instead focus on what you can do something about.
She is playing off that by saying she's no longer going to accept those things and is now going to fight to change them. I'm not familiar with her but presumably this would be regarding fighting injustices in the world.
Here is the full prayer (or at least the version I'm most familiar with):
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and Wisdom to know the difference.
I wouldn't describe it as a reversal, the actual serenity prayer as stated already has the "courage to change the things I can," so anything that is within the speaker's ability to change should already be covered. And the last part, the wisdom to know the difference, already asks to have the ability to discern the two categories, and seeks to avoid accepting the things that can be changed.
It's clever, but doesn't actually say anything the serenity prayer itself doesn't already say.
In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies—including conspiracy to murder—she was held in jail for over a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972.
Yes I am aware of the line "TRUMP BAD CRIMINAL!!!!!" so you guys cant see when malicious prosecution is happening. The facts are right in front of you, you can either follow your team to the countries destruction, or call out injustices. I already know you are going to just be a team player.
I suppose I might have used the word malicious wrongly because I am not a lawyer, but what i was referring to was all of the cases. I am in real estate and know the real estate one very well, and that is absolute bullshit, and he did nothing wrong. That is what I meant by the words malicous prosecution.
Is this not the point of a trial? To ascertain fact and adjudicate appropriately? Hell, this is explicitly the point of a grand jury, to determine if a trial is merited in the first place. And they've found, several times, that taking the charges to trial is justified. Not even that he's guilty, but that it's worth looking into.
Additionally, what facts am I missing? He wasn't exactly subtle with seeking to commit crimes ("Only stupid people pay taxes" comes to mind as a softball, but the fact that he was never held to the emoluments clause also stands out. Plus all the fraud and rape). Where is the misunderstanding in all this? He was found to be a rapist by a judge. He was found to have committed fraud by a different judge.
The misunderstanding isn't yours, it's the general publics understanding of the legal system and it's processes. Which has been misinformed by decades of American criminal dramas like Law and Order, CSI, and NCIS. No one in this thread will go to rich people court like Trump gets to, we all get regular court if we get the privileged right to a court date. So when misinformed Trump supporters hear the judge ruled from the bench they see an overreach. When Trump's legal team presented such a bad defense and showed a complete disregard for the court and it's ruling in their opinion it wasn't his team who did a bad job, but a judge who never gave him a chance.
Actually, for the New York civil fraud suit, Trump forgot to ask for a jury trial. But the judge very much found him guilty. In the E Jean Carol case, he was found guilty by not cooperating with discovery, and the jury was pretty clear on the 92m damages.
Fair, I intended that more as an idiom really. I mean whether or not the punishment goes through. He's so damned slippery I'm not taking anything as truth until the buildings have been seized/ he's in jail.
The only things that the Biden administration has done that's bad is genocide obviously, but a little genocide never hurt anybody... I guess you could try blaming him for inflation or gas prices, or the fallout of COVID-19, but that would be kind of dumb
You can, of course, say he hasn't done enough, which wouldn't be wrong, but the things he's done have had a pretty positive effect on the country and have brought us at least a little closer to the left – even with an opposing congress. I can't say I like how he treats, say, nationalism and the Middle East, but he's at least somewhat redeemed himself from just being a "moderate Republican" I would say. At least his administration has brought in officials who are tougher on corporations, even if he's still a corporate Democrat.
I don't remember a time where kidnapping people and putting them into concentration camps away from their families made something not left, actually it seems pretty common in former and current communist countries lol...
but actually i meant "slightly more left" in the sense of economic-social matters, not... killing or kidnapping people matters. he has done quite a lot to improve social services and lessen the financial fuckedness of many government programs, for example.
I don’t remember a time where kidnapping people and putting them into concentration camps away from their families wasn’t left, actually it seems pretty common in former and current communist countries lol…
The funniest part of this shitty rhetoric is you thinking that former communist countries are left wing. No, when the US overthrows your left wing government and installs a right wing dictatorship/psuedodemocracy thats actually a right wing system now.
What an incredible admission to not knowing shit about dick and still being ignorant enough to think your opinion matters.
??? are you just resorting to bringing up completely unrelated shit to escape embarrassment? I imagined context could make it clear but mentioning "former communist countries" I was speaking of communist countries in history which formerly existed, but now no longer exist. If I meant countries which were communist but now aren't, I would have specified "formerly communist countries". Why would you even think it was implying that a country being communist in the past means it's leftist in the present? How do you reason that?
Edit: lol apparently @cypherpunks or an admin is removing the replies because they speak of Lenin's Gulags, dekulakization, and Mao's Laogai. Funny what kind of comments get removed by .ml mods; apparently not comments trying to suddenly bring antisemitism into the conversation, and not comments pretending that saying sometimes in history leftist governments have interned kids means I must both be anti-leftist and making excuses for the US' treatment of immigrants.
How do you, with a straight face, say "criticizing a communist leader/government means you hate jews"? You are simply resorting to making up "you're an antisemite" out of thin air to invalidate others. I have literally not once mentioned judaism. I don't even know if I've mentioned jews in my entire comment history before you randomly started blaming jews for alleged "anticommunism".
You are using discrimination against jews as a tool to attempt silencing others. You accusing everyone else of being an "antisemite" is your way of avoiding your own responsibility and putting others in a box. Let me guess, you support the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and use "antisemite" to defend it too?
Are you not literally claiming that those nasty jews communists had a habit of kidnapping kids? Or are you going to plead ignorance about the connection between antisemitism and anticommunism?
Your literal words were
actually it seems pretty common in former and current communist countries lol…
Not, "it seems like it was pretty common in former communist countries"
Please, find me sources for these massive instances of child kidnapping.
Also, love it when liberals are like "oh, sure, we put kids in concentration camps, but so do socialist countries(unsourced)" aren't y'all the kind to complain about "whatabaoutism"?
Could you give me a recent source about these kidnappings? And if it's the unaccompanied immigrant children which haven't been kidnapped, then please don't even bother.
"The Supreme Court ordered Abbott to let Border Patrol remove the razor wire barriers. Instead—acting in defiance of the president, the Supreme Court, and federal authorities—Abbott installed more." ... Then some stuff about congress blocking decisions.. dunno... Doesn't sound like it's all on Biden. Especially since, like most of the stuff that people are complaining about, it stated with Trump. And it's been getting better just not fast enough. Which, again, not saying Biden is doing his best, but it doesn't sound like it's all his fault, does it?
Maybe I misunderstood but how is it Biden continuing doing it when they're actively trying to improve the situation but congress is blocking change and even when they sued Texas and the supreme court ordered them to take down the fences they still put up more because of the gop scum governor? If after all that you still think it's all Biden's fault then whatever, one of us is wrong, neither will admit it, but at least those that read the comments can make up their own minds. Have a nice day.
Biden just visited the border with a Trump to talk about being tough on immigration.
Hell, he literally has executive authority over ICE, and yet ICE is still up to their gestapo bullshit.
I think Biden cares more about not letting states walk over his domain of power than he does about immigrants. This was a friendly with segregationists, still currently opposes right to abortion, fossil who is in the process of enabling genocide. I dont know why you'd think he gives 2 shits about treating immigrants like the human beings they are and not as vermin.
Palestinians are literally starving to death because this administration gave your tax dollars to the AMIC to arm Israel for a genocide. The entire world sees what we're doing and abhors it. I don't pretend it would be somehow better under Trump, but this is not good by any definition.
Do you have any particular policies or are you just going to make claims? Trump’s policies were not good for the American working class, which is the vast majority of Americans.
His landmark legislation, the 2017 tax cuts, gave temporary marginal cuts to working people while giving substantial permanent cuts to corporations. He promised to fix healthcare. He didn’t. He promised to stop jobs from going overseas. He didn’t and, in fact, more jobs went overseas under him than Obama. He promised to fix the national debt. He increased it. He made a terrible deal with OPEC to cut oil production, which led to short term gains but eventually caused oil prices to skyrocket when economies recovered from Covid. His trade war with China hurt the US economy (for example, farmers who he had to bail out).
These are just some examples. There are many Biden policies that I am against but if you’re going to claim this admin has been worse for Americans than Trump’s admin, you need to provide examples.
I never said I like trump or all the things he did, but I do think its obvious he was/is better. Most presidents make lots of promises they intentioanlly or unintentionally dont follow through with. I can see you disagree with many of his policies, that is completely fair. But lets discuss what was wrong with Biden.
Without looking at policies I dont like here are the things off the top of my head that are/were objective failures. Afghanistan withdrawl was one of the worst failures n american history; people were hoarding baby food due to handling of that issue, the illegal migration issue that is currently happening that were directly due to his repealing of trump rules, insane spending that exasperates the inflation issue. This doesnt even get into the foolish policies that we could argue about, but are failures.
Yeah, a slow decline of the US empire is preferable for the third world, China, and Russia than to have to deal with Trump's weird international politics. With Joe you get a predictable further collapse of US power.
It’s not a perfect take, but I’ve seen so many takes insanely worse than this one that I am genuinely unsure what evoked such a strong reaction to it. (Particularly since you provided no explanation.)
Most USians don't like being reminded that the empire they live in and have internalized belonging to is in terminal decline, and the options are a drawn out slow collapse and a "really flinging shit around" collapse
Sorry, do you prefer the US to collapse in, idk, a flurry of proxy wars with the potential for the use of nuclear weapons? I much prefer the slow decline with limited proxy wars.
yea but unless you think you can convince half the population to chop every billionaire's head off we'll just have to deal with it until we die of climate change
Yeah dude, let me just dismantle America rn. In the meantime, fuck anyone on the Republican shit list. They should of focused on dismantling america rather than transing their genders or whatever. Don't worry, after this revolution I'm gonna do they totally will be accepted and not targeted. But until then, doing minor actions that in no way hinder the progress towards dismantling america but do make the life's of queer folk maybe less concentration campy is pointless because thats only 1% less Hitler to me, and why would I care about that? A worthy sacrifice. I mean if I took the day to go vote, my whole socialist output, organizing and networking collapses! They are a sacrifice that I am willing to make. Thank you for opening my eyes.
Dawg have you met communists??? A large portion of us are queer, i'm queer. Are you suggesting that i should vote for genocide Joe out of fear of being persecuted? I can accomplish a lot through literally every political avenue other than voting
maybe federally. Maybe. They definitely wouldn't do anything to stop red states from implementing hurtful anti trans laws.
That is simply a possibility however. But we are in the now, with a Democrat controlling the executive branch. what are Democrats doing with their executive power to stop Republicans in red states from doing whatever they want?
If youre having a hard time coming up with anything, don't worry, so are we.
Is Biden doing anything now? Trans people are hiring now. How can you tell them "well it won't be better, but it could be way worse" and feel good about what that means to them?
Because that's fucking reality right now. We are living in a hellscape and I'd like to at the very least slow down the fucking. 4 years later is 4 more years to do something. Even if it doesn't fix the problem, it's at least slower, less severe. And not voting isn't going to change that. It does nothing. It makes no statement, it makes no progress. You feel better not voting for Joe? Cool, so happy for you. Meanwhile Trump wins and someone's life gets worse than it would have. It's a shitty choice but that's the reality. So unless you wanna pick up a gun and start taking shots at the expense of your own life, take the 5 seconds to do the smallest act of kindness you have with this impossible choice
Even if it doesn’t fix the problem, it’s at least slower, less severe. And not voting isn’t going to change that. It does nothing. It makes no statement, it makes no progress. You feel better not voting for Joe? Cool, so happy for you.
Ok, first, it is only less severe than something in our heads. Dems aren't slowing anything. Second: yo, what is this? Who said i wasn't voting? What's this attitude youre sending?
If I've done something to raise your ire im prepared to apologize, but if not maybe think about how you present yourself
Your right. Re-reading I was heated from other discussions and came into your reply tainted by them. I apologize and agree with you. It just sucks and makes me emotional seeing people be willing to sacrifice others for nothing. You did nothing wrong. I'm sorry.
I'd still vote for mitt Romney in that scenario. Do you not get that voting doesn't prevent you from doing anything? You not voting doesn't stop it from effecting your life. The best you can do in that scenario is to pick the not worse option. It doesn't feel gr8 to make this choice. It sucks ass that we have to make it, but you do nothing by not making it. You just allow the depression of the reality of the world get you to throw your hands up in frustration.
Voting doesn't stop you from participating in direct action
It doesn't legitimize the system, that's already done. You and I and all of us can't touch that. It will run off as little votes as it needs to.
I get your frustration. It fucking sucks, but just like you pay your taxes, slave for your boss and make the ruling class money just to stay alive yourself, this is no different. Swallow your pride and try to make someone's life a little better than it'd be otherwise. Because someone's life depends on it. Care about the people who'd be hurt quicker.
Care about the people who would suffer under the worse option. Care that you can in a very small way give human beings a little more time. If I had to go to the booth and vote on 4 years of Holocaust or 6 I'd vote 4. It's cruel to do otherwise in the face of an Impossible decision.
Do you actually care about queer people? Because it is obvious that the democrats as a national party will do nothing to protect us, let alone build bulwarks against the next time Republicans take power nationally.
"Vote to get sent to a camp four years later" is what I hear the democrats trying to sell. Sorry but that isn't a very compelling sales pitch, because you're out here admitting "we are going to kill you"
I lost my reproductive rights under Biden and a democratic house and senate. They did nothing to save Roe other than howl at the moon and write strongly worded letters.
Fuck both parties. Fuck electorial politics. We COULD elect a green party president but people like you swallow the party line and spend your time yelling at us to vote for your shit candidates who don’t want to work for us instead of actually working to put people in power who want to protect AND expand rights.
I’ve been in this game a long ass time. The two party system will lead us to fascism eventually. The only way to win is to refuse to play their game.
Roe getting gutted was the result of conservative judges that got appointed to the supreme court and the states that have taken further steps to restrict are republican run states. The majority that the Dems had was very slim not enough to get a lot passed especially when the "majority" included "moderates" like Manchin and Sinema.
I agree the Dems and libs suck. If they werent so smugly sure that clinton would win 2016 they would have not played politics and forced in their supreme court pick and we would have less of a minority.
Roe getting gutted is the result of a decades long plan by the republican party and letting them them win a majority again will only make things worse.
And yet Biden refused to stack the court when he had the power too. And his party refused to codify roe into law since the supreme court decided the case in the 70’s. Obama even ran on codification in his first campaign and started out with a super majority.
It’s the fault of republican assholery and democratic lazyness.
And what does voting do to hinder those things? We both communists but you act like if you vote everything you else do doesn't matter. You act like if you dare vote in favor of any kind of harm reduction that you somehow ain't a communist or you somehow are contributing. That's not how that works. One of these two options will happen. The least you can do is take half a second to pick the one that will kill less people in the meantime while we keep working.
If your complaint is that "I don't wanna contribute to the system" then the fuck are you doing here? Go to the woods and punch trees like the libertarians. You live and participate in capitalism weather you like it or not, and in the meantime you play games, watch movies and pay rent. You already prop up genocide Joe with your taxes I'm sure you pay. Drawing the line at voting is just silly
I won't take a second to vote for him in part because it makes me stomach churn but also because without the threat of losing voters democrats literally have no incentive to impliment leftist policies. As a communist i'd expect you to be aware of that? I'm not a reformist and I don't believe that socialism can be voted into existence but I definitely see how voting blue no matter who is incredibly short sighted.
Why should our "left" political party do anything that benefits the proletariat if they will still be voted into office if they don't. Ultimately the democratic party is a bourgeoisie organization that serves its own interests which directly conflict with the interests of the prole. They will not offer us the slightest concession if they do not stand to lose something by not doing so.
Because the other option is more people suffer and I am not an accelerationist willing to hold my comrades lives hostage to prove a point to liberals. There are other means and methods. We can't vote socialism in but that doesn't mean we ignore it. It serves another purpose if not the one you want it to.
Wow. The blue no matter who liberals are downvoting a queer person now. It’s almost like they don’t give a shit about your needs as a person and only want to campaign on an abstract that is LGBTQ rights.
If Joe Biden wants me to vote for him, maybe he should use his executive powers to help my trans comrades facing persecution in red states
Liberals act like democrats are the only thing standing between us and Republicans, and that if Republicans win it'll be the end of the world, so why aren't they out there standing between? Why aren't they willing to actually use force against the fascists?
If democrats think Trump is literally Hitler, the jackass obviously stole nuclear secrets, put him on trial and execute him for treason when he is found guilty.
But the democrats obviously won't do this. Because they're not on your side. They're the good cop to the republican bad cop.
I think a lot of the blue no matter who types are following the dem line. You can't attack Biden, sure. But the point they argue is always pushing ones mind towards the two party system. They don't want people to even start thinking about talking about 3rd party. Cuz the Democrat's (the party, not the voters) only platform is being better than Republicans and voting for a third party would ruin their whole thing.
It's working too. I had forgotten there even was a green party lol and they've been around since before i could vote.
I dont even think it is about 3rd party stuff, I think it is about
"The facade of democracy gives us legitimacy, come on folks just participate in our democracy! Don't think about how the system could be otherwise changed!"
Yeah... actually. I know, craziness. But its true. Everyone drinks from the wrong cup of kool aid at the party eventually. We need to have empathy and sympathy for those led astray.
That was answering the first question, anyway. For the second, id say a resound, "fuck no!" but that unfortunately doesnt negate the answer to the first question :(
Israel wouldn't be able to exist without the sponsorship of the US, that's where it gets most of its shit from. Also wow, almost all those countries are subordinates to the US. How coincidental.
Yes, Israel shouldn't be allowed to exist. Israel is an affront to and attack on all Jews, perpetrated by Christian zionists, including Nazi Germany.
There should be a secular democracy without a tiered citizenship system that respects the rights of local jews, Muslims, and Christians, as much as it respects the rights of European immigrants.
None because what you are talking about doesn't exist. There was no ceasefire resolution only an American endorsement for israel to use starvation as a weapon of war.
Here is the text of the tweet and the text of the tweet quoted in it:
A draft that does not demand an immediate ceasefire, but instead suggests one might be negotiated if certain conditions are met, and that genocidal attacks can otherwise continue, is not a ceasefire resolution. It is a ransom note.
It quotes the following by Al Jazeera English:
The US has drafted a new UN Security Council resolution that appears to support a ceasefire in Gaza, after blocking several other attempts at achieving a truce. Al Jazeera’s @baysontheroad
looks at what the new US document says.
The quoted aje tweet is in reference to this video and the video is embedded in the tweet.
E: what do you do when you don’t have someone around to copy and paste shit from twitter? It seems absurd to block twitter but not have any way of accessing information that’s distributed on that website…
Joe Biden, who is the President of a country that has been trying to negotiate a cease fire, and is sending aid to Gaza is responsible for the actions of a completely separate and sovereign nation?
hitler could never imagine having the power of the presidency under pax americana, but he would have loved to translate the "racial jungle" speech. the supreme irony of biden's dog literally attacking federal law enforcement while people are in prison for the same thing is palpable. kids in cages, building a border wall, and supplying arms to the middle east to prop up an ethnostate. look... how much hitler are you willing to tolerate?
He's a far cry from it for certain, but he shares a considerable amount of responsibility for what is occurring in Gaza that a lot of people feel uncomfortable with that.
I'm sure some people have already forgotten because China and Russia recently vetoed the last conflict resolution proposed in the U.N. but don't let that stop you from remembering that our U.N. ambassador, appointed by the President who can revoke that appointment, issued multiple vetoes against multiple Gaza conflict resolution proposals previously.
It's not an accident that people suddenly care so much about US foreign policy when it's convenient to bash Biden before an election. It's a very concerted propaganda effort on social media that you're either intentionally or unintentionally a part of.
Before the last election Trump tried to extort Ukraine by withholding military aid unless Ukraine helped investigate his political opponent, Biden.
I don't agree with what's happening in Israel/Palestine either, but I'm more concerned at how often it's being used as this "trump card" to lower Biden to Trump's level. It's still not remotely close.
I really dislike how this always comes down to whataboutism.
I already consider Biden to be the lesser of the two evils here. That doesn't mean I have to look away from his actions though, nor does it mean I have to support them.
The Gaza example was already whataboutism. I only bring up the Trump example to emphasize that we already have historical evidence that he won't handle Ukraine or Gaza any better than Biden has. He only uses those situations to benefit himself.
I agree that being the lesser of two evils doesn't absolve Biden's part in it, but I hope you reconsider supporting him. As frustrating as it is that neither is perfect, it doesn't help anyone to allow an even worse candidate to win in protest.
How was it whataboutism? I didn't see anyone comparing him to Trump when I was replying. Hitler is absolutely not the any kind of standard that we should be comparing most politicians to hopefully. I'm also painfully aware that Trump is far worse in regards to foreign policy. I can imagine him offering further support to Israel even.
Look. I've already resolved to vote for Biden. There really isn't much choice, but that doesn't mean I have to ignore what he's responsible for. Nor should history forget it either. If that somehow hinders his campaign, then so be it. Anyone who votes for Biden without these considerations is an accessory to the genocide though.
You can have genocide in Gaza, or you can have genocide in Gaza and ("stepping-stone") Ukraine. Its an unfortunate choice, but an important one nonetheless. If im harping on a moot point to you bc you already know this, rest assured i say this for all other readers as well. Your votes down ballot are also extremely valuable. This primary there was a referendum in my county that I was in favor of that passed by less than 100 votes.
I don’t agree with what’s happening in Israel/Palestine either, but I’m more concerned at how often it’s being used as this “trump card” to lower Biden to Trump’s level. It’s still not remotely close.
There probably isn't a single politician that I fully agree with.
There are different levels of disagreement and what I'm pointing out is people trying to use Gaza as a way to fully discredit Biden as a candidate because they have no other scandals to use against him.
No, I'm more concerned with how the entire world will be impacted by electing Trump again. What's happening in Gaza will continue to happen whether we elect Biden or Trump.
“You’ve got to finish the problem,” Trump said on Fox News on Tuesday when asked about the war. “You had a horrible invasion that took place that would have never happened if I was president.”
He said on Oct. 11 that a future Trump administration would “fully support Israel defeating, dismantling, and permanently destroying the terrorist group Hamas,”
That month, his campaign also said that, if elected again, he would bar Gaza residents from entering the U.S. as part of an expanded travel ban.
Suggesting that the Gaza situation is a dealbreaker for Biden is trying to hold him to a higher standard than anyone holds Trump, and that higher standard by itself tells you who the better candidate is.
Every president since Eisenhower shares responsibility for what is happening in Gaza, but that doesn’t mean we vote for the end of democracy in the US.
Biden calls for ceasefire while still supplying Israel = bad
Trump says Israel would finish the job under his administration = magnitudes worse, the fucker is a few syllables away from literally saying final solution
Yes, but wisely by evolving beyond it, not by trying to fight a Goliath directly in their strongest areas. We're smart, we should be able to come up with real solutions.
Here's weird thought experiment
Think of our current government as scaffolding that we're all standing on 100 floors high, that is right on top of a slave/homeless/refugee camp/zoo (i.e. vulnerable populations). This scaffolding must be replaced because it's made out of rotting wood without sending us all crashing down on the camp and zoo killing billions of people and animals.
How do we do it?
The right wing position is to tear down the scaffolding by getting positions in site management and ordering replacing the rotting wood with broken plastic while kicking everyone they don't like, sometimes pushing them off the scaffolding. Of course, they don't care about any what the scaffolding is holding up or what's below, they just realized they can use this scaffold system to gain power and money.
The tankie position is to get your rotten wood hating friends together with their hammers and torches and start bashing. I guess they are either 1) seemingly unaware this will cause us all to fall, or 2) remember when it worked 100 years ago with the scaffolding was only 1 floor high and only a few people underneath and think it will be the same this time, or 3) are effectively right wingers on a different team in that they don't care about collateral damage as long as their team can rise from the ashes into power.
The liberal position is to put some polish on the wood and some rainbow and recycling stickers on some poles and send a few TV dinners below while we dump our trash down there and not admit that there are slaves down there making our stuff. The long-term problem of scaffold failure is talked about at various conferences and people donate millions to the "Replace the Rot" foundation.
I say the best way to go about it is to replace it part by part as it stands. Depend less and less on the bits of rotting wood and more on the strong sustainable replacements we build. Don't replace the very high bits that were built for ego by weak men, instead lift those underneath up onto the strong bits of the scaffold. Eventually we might realize that all that's left of the old rotting scaffold is that weak bit holding on at the end, might as well lop that off now that it's not critical to our survival anymore.
Now imagine we have an election between two site managers. Neither of them has any real plans to replace this scaffolding, in fact both have plans to expand it. Both candidates support the genocide in the neighboring scaffold.
Primary differences between candidates
Candidate #1 is going to criminalize talking about the scaffolding, ban encryption to ensure you don't talk about it, and start a new program to push more people off the scaffold.
Candidate #2 is going to do too little too late when it comes to truly solving the rotting scaffold problem or stopping people from falling off the scaffold.
Now ask yourself, under which candidate can I do more to solve the rotting scaffold problem directly? Under which candidate can I do my little part to solve the problem without falling or being pushed off the scaffold or being arrested? Under which candidate are fewer people going to be pushed off while me and my team go about fixing the scaffold ourselves because the leaders are unwilling or unable?
Voting is not about putting your support behind a candidate or identifying with them, it's a strategic decision taken to advance your goals.
I suppose I should've said it shouldn't be, people can and do of course think all kinds of silly and illogical things. It's a poor strategic choice at the individual and group level to identify with a candidate but to each their own. Propaganda gets us all.
, it’s a strategic decision taken to advance your goals.
this part also assumed universal goals. one of my goals is to smash capital and the state. the democrat party will most definitely be part of that. voting for them doesn't advance my goals.
I have read some, but I don't need to read deep republican theory to see why their ideas are fundamentally wrong any more than I need to "read theory" to see fundamental issues with "Marxist" positions.
I've read "On Authority" and see it's obvious flaws.
I mean, you obviously have not read enough if you think MLs are "burn it all down, don't worry about the consequences" you understand Republicans because you've been exposed to them throughout your life, how many times have you had a long conversation with a communist?
I am not surprised someone linked you to "on authority" but reading a brief retort to anarchists is not the same as understanding dialectical materialism, scientific socialism, the business cycle, the tendency or rate of profit to fall, uneven development theory, marxist feminism, marxist anticolonialism, proletarian democracy, prefigurative politics, etc
Why do you assume I don't know these ideas just because I don't agree with you? I am familiar with all of that, maybe not at your level, but enough to know I disagree fundamentally with the methods even if our compassion may be in common. I've talked with enough tankies that "burning it all down" is an apt enough description. War tends to do that.
There is nothing I could read that would convince me that massive authoritarian power structures put in place by war are the way to a stable sustainable peaceful future, the same way nothing I could read would make me believe in santa claus.
Why do you assume I don’t know these ideas just because I don’t agree with you?
Because you straight up said you've avoided looking into it in detail, your previous words:
I have read some, but I don’t need to read deep republican theory to see why their ideas are fundamentally wrong any more than I need to “read theory” to see fundamental issues with “Marxist” positions.
Also because from what I've read, you take a fundamentally reformist position which Marx painstakingly disproved the viability of over 150 years ago. If you've read capital to completion, or hell, just understood some of their short texts very well and extrapolated things yourself, you'd know a reformist position is unviable, and even if it were viable, would be magnitudes more violent than the worst mistakes and excesses of any ML movement.
I disagree fundamentally with the methods even if our compassion may be in common.
What methods do you disagree were inappropriate for the situations they occurred in? Because marxist leninists will probably agree that there was a mistake there to learn from, or will point out factors that might you might be uniformed or misinformed about.
I looked into it in detail enough to know what I need to know. I also didn't read Mein Kampf, should I read that before deciding I don't agree with fascism or is it enough to know that fascism fundamentally harms people and it doesn't matter what Mein Kampf says?
... reformist position Marx painstakingly disproved the viability of over 150 years ago
Disproved to you maybe, these are not facts. The bible proves things to Christians, they are wrong too.
I looked into it in detail enough to know what I need to know. I also didn’t read Mein Kampf, should I read that before deciding I don’t agree with fascism or is it enough to know that fascism fundamentally harms people and it doesn’t matter what Mein Kampf says?
Wait, you don't want to understand the ideology that saved the world from German fascism, the ideology that supported and enabled liberation movements worldwide, the ideology that took Russia from a feudal backwater to space in 40 years, that advanced woman's rights in that time frame past women's rights in modern western countries? Why don't you want to understand the ideology of the most lgbt friendly government in the world, Cuba? Why don't you want to understand the ideology of countries that were historically much less violent than bourgeois 'democracies'?
Disproved to you maybe, these are not facts. The bible proves things to Christians, they are wrong too.
This is a flawed analogy because the Bible expects you to take things on faith, and Marx expects to have to thoroughly defend his position as it is a position contrary to the interests of capital. i love how you're arguing "well I'm not convinced" while refusing to even engage with basic ideas.
Some real taught to be afraid of shadows shit if you ask me.
Oh my sweet uninformed reformest, my undying love 😘
Sorry i shouldn't be too sarcastic, but really you're so close. I've been where you are. If you're interest in learning why I changed my views I'd recommend reading Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxembourg. In short, while unions, reformists, and the expansion of social democracy are important to the development of clsss consciousess, they alone cannot create a socialist society. Revolution is required.
Who said I want a socialist society? I'm an anarcho-communist, I have never seen positions of authority, left or right, not abuse the position. A society that can function without some subset claiming authority and using violence to coerce others to gain and maintain power is what we should be striving for.
Ancom fits yeah, and i dont entirely disagree with you. I just dont see how that can be accomplished without revolution. Those in power don't typically give up that power without violence. I don't see how infiltrating a system run by and for the ruling class, designed specifically to benefit them, and attempting to make it better is supposed to work. The ruling class could just get rid of you no?
I think I wasn't clear in my language as multiple people didn't get what I was intending to say. When I talked of replacing rotting wood part by part but not the high parts, depending less on the rotting parts and lifting people onto the strong parts of the scaffold I wasn't talking about getting better people into office (though that can be part of making your job as a leftist easier and safer). I was talking about dual power and degrowth.
I think it's not radical communist to take a position that would likely lead to billions of people of dying from famine and lack of medicine etc only to put your favorite authoritarian into power to become corrupted itself over the following decades. All positions of power become corrupted, no exceptions. We need to move towards degrowth and decentralization of everything, especially power.
The only reason 8 billion + people can live on this planet is because of the Green Revolution, i.e. nitrogen that comes from our oil industry. If we actually had the kind of revolution that could lead to a socialist system the delicate supply chains of oil and food globally would almost certainly be interrupted. This could lead to crop failures and famine, massive inflation and probably end up in more places going fascist than moving left. Unless you can teach enough people about socialism before the revolution, they're going to look for safety and find a false sense of it in fascist authoritarians.
Remember, the revolutions of the early 20th were before the Green Revolution, there were 2 billion people on the planet and a much larger percentage than today knew how to support themselves by growing food and hunting, protect themselves etc. Today a revolution like that would look more like Gaza is looking right now with an entire population on the brink of starving to death.
If we actually want a better future, we need to build it, and not wait to start building until after some revolution that might never come. What does that look like? It looks like communities growing food together, protecting themselves without police, dropping out of popular culture, changing culture to not value what capitalists are selling us. We need cultural evolution, not war.
A reformist Anarchist? I have legitimately never heard of that kind of combination, lmao. You cannot achieve an ancom society via reform, that's utter utopianism. Anarcho-communism can only be achieved via revolution, and not even the whole pitchforks and torches kind.
Check Anarcho-Syndicalism if you want an actual, practical plan for achieving an Anarchist society, or read modern AnCom theory.
If these ideas are the only workable ideas, why have they failed for the last century?
We need new ideas that are built on the understanding of our current world. Even places where "leftists" got to power they just turned into capitalist dictatorships or cruel experiments in how far propaganda can be pushed and how much populations can endure suffering and helplessness.
You're believing in silliness if you think violent revolution in 2024 will end up in anything but massive death and fascism. We don't have the numbers to win, all we'd end up doing is scaring voters into putting people into power that will put you in prison and become dictators.
I guess we have a different definition of failure, at least when it comes to "socialist" states like China, Russia, and N. Korea.
Anarcho-syndicalism has some good things going for it, it could be part of a solution. I don't know why everyone assumes I am naive to all these ideas, I just don't fit in the little leftist boxes people made for us last century that the right already has formulas to defeat.
I suppose, these words are so nebulous. I understand socialism as needing a state and (real, not authoritarian) communism as being incompatible with a state.
Then you understand it wrong. Communism is socialism by definition. Maybe try actually looking up the definition of socialism that marxists and anarchists actually use. It's a broad term but not a nebulous one as it has a concrete definition: a society where the working class own/control the means of production.
Here in Australia we have preferential voting which is much better, but Biden and Trump are not the same.
Honestly, this is just the current strategy that right wingers seem to have switched to
Trump is a total psychopath who only cares about himself. He's a criminal. The fact they're trying hard to indict Biden, have for months but have found nothing should be a strong indicator he's not (his son might be, but that has nothing to do with Biden, since unlike Trump's kids, he wasn't part of government).
Trump made it clear he would cause a insurrection months before it happened, and now he's backed into a corner, what do you think will happen if he becomes president? He's made it clear that he will act like a dictator
Seriously, if you guys vote Trump, it will f*** everyone. They're not the same
Hunter did nothing worse than what the children of most politicians have done. Hell, Joe Manchin’s daughter is the reason epipens cost $500 each. Why isn’t she being investigated?
Because the charges are bullshit and Manchin votes with republicans.
The format currently used in adblocker predates uBO by almost a decade so no, but still, maintaining this add-on with how fast and often web browser changes, and keeping it performant must be quite the task.
I think performant is probably the key thing here. There were ad blockers before and there are alternative ones now, but the thing that sets unlock Origin apart is how light weight it is.
That's because the "rule" of !196 is to "post before you leave"... That creates a lot of random posts that all have some kind of "rule" in the title. Sometimes these posts get popular and you see them in your feed.
But then it’d be obvious the community is just used as a miscellaneous memes & 💩posts community and isn’t actually a place you go, browse, and post before logging off!
Doesn’t matter either way but it is a clever bit of engagement bait / encouragement for new posters.
It’s not, but it’s become sort of a de-facto tradition to cite the fact that you are posting because of the rule by adding the word “rule” cleverly (or, sometimes, not-so-cleverly) to the title
If you're talking about Lemmy's 196, it's not a rule and never was for us. "Post before you leave" is a "rule" but titling it rule is not. It's just an injoke.
For the curious, the original was actually /r/195 on Reddit. It started as a joke between some college roommates, in dorm room number 195. Then it eventually got popular as a sort of shitposting community. But the original 195 was basically unmoderated (because it was just a couple of dudes in college who started it for shiggles,) and was eventually brigaded and taken over by alt-right neonazis. The memes quickly devolved into straight up Nazi propaganda.
So 196 was created as a sort of “new” 195, and that original brigade and subsequent takeover is why a lot of the 196 memes tend to lean hard left. The 196 sub was sort of a rebellion against the 195 takeover, which means that conservative stuff quickly got shut down. It eventually became a sort of safe space for transgender memes as a result. From there it became a sort of self-sustaining reaction where trans people saw it as safe so more trans people gravitated towards it.
It's always seemed so wholesome to me how the trans folks are such a huge part of what makes that sub awesome but also it's not a "trans sub", so you get all these people there for the memes also experiencing fully normalized transness
No, I really couldn't have. My attention span is too short.
I apologize, if it makes you feel better. However, I can make no promises on any future mislabelings, to you, anyone or anything else. My attention span is too short for that.
Or building 1, section/floor 9, room 5. I’m in an apartment that has four digits, but that doesn’t mean there are over 1000 apartments in the complex. It simply means they follow a standard numbering scheme to make finding the specific apartments easier.
In the Netherlands I saw some building were, instead of having a street number-flat number, the building had all the numbers listed on them. So, if the building had 100 houses, the street number for the building would be 150-249, and the next street number would be 250.
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