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stabby_cicada

@stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net

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stabby_cicada OP ,

Is the point of charity to feed the hungry or to let rich people feel good about themselves?

It doesn't matter to the hungry person if the food they eat was paid for by taxes or voluntary charity. Food is food.

stabby_cicada OP ,

It doesn't mean anything to whom?

Cause I bet it means a lot to the people who need food and shelter.

stabby_cicada OP ,

The meme says "force you via taxes". And Jesus Christ Himself told people to pay their taxes.

stabby_cicada OP ,

He feels he's using objective logic and data. And feelings don't care about your facts.

stabby_cicada OP ,

Your "concrete statement" was false. 2024 is not a "proper year" - it is in fact on track to be the hottest ever. Again.

I no longer have the patience to debate blatant climate falsehoods seriously. If you want respectful responses to your comments, respect your audience and don't make objectively false claims.

stabby_cicada ,

It's not just cowardice. It's also strategy. There are many Americans out there who hate Nazis but support fascist beliefs as long as they aren't coming from Nazis. There are many social media moderators out there who will immediately ban self-admitted Nazis but approve of fascist posts and beliefs - this is especially common on modern Reddit where the most important thing is not to scare off advertisers. So Neo-Nazis online learned a long, long time ago to hide their power level, so they can keep posting fascist shit without being banned and gradually radicalize people into agreeing with them.

It's also cowardice, of course. I've found cowards are often authoritarians. They feel more secure with a "big man" backing them. It's why bullies at school attack their targets in gangs and then run to the teacher to cry if the target fights back. And it's also why teachers typically take the bully's side and punish the target for fighting back. Cowardly authoritarians gravitate to careers that give them power over children, and they protect their own.

(Now that I write that, there seems to be a clear parallel with Stonetoss spewing vile shit at minorities for like a decade and running to Elon the minute he faces any personal consequences for his hate. Fascists gonna fash, I guess.)

how can something be so courageous and yet so true (slrpnk.net)

Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee...

stabby_cicada OP ,

I would think the exact opposite. Apple's monopoly practices (you notice they just got mega sued by the USG for antitrust violations, right?) mean if you want to effectively collaborate with people inside the Apple ecosystem you need to use Apple products.

On the other hand, Starbucks is easily replaceable, unless you're in some sort of food desert urban wasteland, there are local coffee shops everywhere.

stabby_cicada ,

I don't want to read at library where people are getting lit - and it misses the whole point of having a healthy third place to be. Take your book to a bar if you want that 😆

stabby_cicada OP ,

Tumblr is the social media equivalent of those little hellstrips of lawn squeezed between the sidewalk and the street - useless for any profitable purpose and generally full of dog shit. I love it so much.

stabby_cicada OP ,

Unemployment is necessary under capitalism. Employees point to the suffering of unemployed people as an implicit threat to their workers. Look how bad off those people without jobs are, you'd better do what I say if you don't want to be one of them. Don't ask for more money or better treatment, you're not valuable or special, there's a hundred unemployed people out there who would work cheaper than I'm paying you so watch your mouth.

Who'd stay at a job where they're treated like shit, if they weren't afraid of the consequences of defying their employers? Capitalism doesn't work without starving, unemployed workers as an implicit threat to keep the others in line.

stabby_cicada OP ,

Almost as if something horrifying had recently happened that made people desperate and afraid. Wonder what that was.

stabby_cicada ,

I'm not an american,

That's the thing.

When you call the police in the United States there is a very real chance they'll kill whoever you call them to punish. And a smaller but nonzero chance they'll kill you or an innocent third party.

Not because the police are all inherently evil. But because they're heavily armed, and policing in a country that's also heavily armed, and that makes every police encounter more dangerous for everyone than it is in a country with rational gun laws.

US cops are trained to consider their lives at risk every time they go out on a call, and they are ready and willing to shoot to protect themselves. So if they're threatened - or they feel threatened - they may shoot instead of de-escalate.

So before you call the police in the US you have to ask yourself: is whatever just happened - theft, trespassing, vandalism, whatever - worth someone's life to punish?

stabby_cicada ,

In the United States in 2024, the most passionate and dedicated supporters of left unity are the Democratic Party and its supporters.

Most of the American left is in fact unified - behind the Democratic Party.

If your reflexive response is "the Democratic Party isn't actually leftist" and "no compromise with fascists" and blah blah... well, that explains your perception of disunity. Because the leftists who are willing to compromise their principles in order to accomplish some of their goals are already compromising - under the Democratic Party banner. And the ones who reject that banner are the ones who are the most stubborn about holding their principles and refusing to compromise for the sake of unity. Which explains why they can't compromise with each other, either.

stabby_cicada ,

No, quite the opposite. The Democratic Party's strategy is to appeal to leftist unity only when it's time for elections, only for them to give no concession whatsoever and keep on their neoliberal agenda.

There are two different questions going on here:

Is the Democratic Party leftist? Stipulated, no, they aren't.

Does the Democratic Party appeal to leftist unity? Yes. Very aggressively. Mostly by saying "Trump is worse", and, more practically, "if you work with us within the two party political system you are more likely to enact some of your policy goals than if you work outside it".

Which gets to my point: leftists who are willing to compromise their principles and policy goals for the sake of unity typically make that compromise with the large, powerful organization that's already asking for their support.

Which means, if you call for "left unity" outside the Democratic Party, you're speaking to a group of leftists who have already refused to compromise their principles and beliefs in the name of unity. So it's a hard sell from the beginning.

stabby_cicada ,

The one thing that I know for a fact (as an Anarchist), is that the way anarchist and left Organisation works is through social interactions. Sports clubs, Mastodon / Lemmy, families, school friends, uni friends, etc etc. All of these links, if they are strengthened, if we can use them more often than we use the capitalist machinery, are the social consciousness we need. If you eat your neighbours' bread and give them your tomatoes, you're closer to a left utopia, closer to "left unity", and closer to working together against tyranny.

So, we need to fight for third places, we need to fight for places to live, we need to fight for social connections which are peer to peer, not mediated by tech companies. If we can work with that, we can work on a unified left.

Love it!

To Change Everything, an anarchist appeal (crimethinc.com)

If you could change anything, what would you change? Would you go on vacation for the rest of your life? Make fossil fuels stop causing climate change? Ask for ethical banks and politicians? Surely nothing could be more unrealistic than to keep everything the way it is and expect different results....

stabby_cicada ,

That sounds like a lot of responsibility. I'd rather just keep voting Democrat, eat plant based once a week, put my pronouns in my e-mail signature, and tell myself I'm doing my part to make the world a better place.

stabby_cicada OP ,

And you don't see the problem with that?

stabby_cicada OP ,

Neither had to eat the shit.

That's the thing about capitalism. It always claims to be voluntary. You don't "have" to work at starvation wages. You don't "have" to take whatever work you're given. You don't "have" to endure abuse from your bosses.

And your bosses don't have to pay you, and your landlord doesn't have to rent to you, and the grocery store doesn't have to feed you, and the police don't have to protect you. So you either work "voluntarily" under whatever conditions "the market" sets, and earn enough money to afford food and housing and security, or you starve and die.

But the point of the joke is the bullshit metrics capitalism invents to pretend capitalist nations are prosperous, not all the other ways capitalism abuses people, society, and common sense.

stabby_cicada OP , (edited )

In this case, each person paid for the entertainment of watching their friends eat shit.

Not to overanalyze the joke even more, but:

Eating feces is not $100 worth of entertainment by any rational standard.

No rational person would spend $100 to watch his friend eat feces.

No rational person would accept $100 to eat feces.

No rational society allows someone to either eat feces or pay others to do so, for public health reasons if nothing else.

I mean, if you went to an unhoused person and offered him $100 to eat feces, you'd get arrested. And you'd deserve it. Because even the United States isn't quite that bad yet.

(And this is not a hypothetical. People do those kinds of things. There are unhoused people I know from Food Not Bombs who refuse food from strangers because too many of them have gotten adulterated food. And most of them have stories about people offering them money to do degrading things.)

So this $200 in GDP represents an activity that's injurious to public health, morally bankrupt, and leaves everyone participating in it worse off.

But from the Economics 101 worldview, the economists created $200 worth of entertainment, because both of them were willing to pay $100 to see each other eat shit and that means, by definition, eating shit was worth $100 in entertainment.

Which makes the punchline an even more vicious satire of capitalism and its bullshit metrics than it originally appeared.

stabby_cicada OP ,

The joke doesn't work because both transactions were welfare enhancing. In the end, both of them agree that eating shit is worth it to see the other do it. At least $200 of value was created.

Yes. And after overanalyzing it I realized that's the second level of the joke.

The Economics 101 idea is that value is defined by how much money someone is willing to pay for something. And the satire of that idea is vicious. Because by every measurable standpoint those two economists are worse off coming out of the forest than going in - they've both had a exceptionally unpleasant experience and are now at risk for parasites and food poisoning and other health concerns. And yet they're patting each other on the back saying they created value for the economy.

And there are people on this thread - like you - seriously arguing that watching someone eat shit is worth $100 by definition because someone was willing to pay $100 for it, and therefore the two economists really did create $200 in value.

If that's what capitalism means by "welfare enhancing" it uses a different definition of welfare than any rational human being ever.

But that's why economists are the butt of the joke, I guess.

And if you agree with the characters in the joke, the joke is on you.

stabby_cicada OP , (edited )

Bitcoin fixes this.

(sarcasm)

stabby_cicada OP ,

This is exactly what I meant :)

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