HB federated with SJW, a bunch of them raided two posts on SJW’s main and management communities, they started insulting the local users, calling them fascists and Nazis, they defederated by pretending they got insulted and called homophobic slurs and their admin called SJW “sh.itsfulla.chuds” and “sh.itholefor.nazis” without noticing the irony…
They’re trying their darndest to drag the left into the mud. They’re pushing the same rhetoric as trumpers trying to brainwash young people Jordan Peterson style. The Russian government has a vested interest in destabilizing the US and trying to push people to violence and ‘revolt’ because that would take down the only threat to them. At least most of us aren’t so stupid to believe these people are in any way representing the left, the LGBT or minorities. I was looking for an LGBT friendly community and was so saddened to find out what it really was… trying to radicalize vulnerable groups. Shame on them. Fucking shame.
It means you either don’t believe the accusation or are lying about not believing it, one is support and the other is denial, and quite frankly I think they’re mostly dumb enough to not believe them.
There are no “middle ground right-leaning” people. They either support fascism or they don’t. Right-leaning is fascism now, PERIOD. If it werent then fascism would have never taken power.
What, are you gonna Susan Collins everyone now? Did the orange guy “finally learn his lesson” and now we can enact his policies with a clear conscience?
Untio fascism is eradicated and all corporate power removed from government, we DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS.
Disagree entirely with that. There’s propaganda on all sides and there’s things that we’re all fucked up on. Hate to do the both sides things but I think its realistic that both sides are being driven to extremes and we should fight that and recognize
Imagine being braindead to the point of thinking “people should have as many rights as possible” and “people I dislike should die” are in some way similar. That’s why rightwingers don’t belong in society.
If by left you mean tankies, which are just fascists posing as leftists, then violence against liberals or anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their ccp/russia/nk bs…
It’s wild how many Dems are trying to tell us that he’s the most radically progressive President in modern history while we have so much footage of him in the Senate espousing radical fascist views on social policy
We call this the “Centrist pull” to get people to the right.
It’s like the carnival of flaming demon knife throwers insisting that throwing flaming chainsaws at your family every day is “extremism”, and just throwing knives at them is normal.
There is a lot of political and other “adult” discourse. Not extreme, but more exhausting for a person wanting memes, gifs, and lols. I imagine the median age here is higher than that of Reddit. Can’t confirm, but it certainly conducts itself with less…“juvenility”…or some word.
I find the political discourse, at least on some topics, very juvenile on Lemmy. You know, screeching about how billionaires aren’t people but parasites and need to die, hundreds of upvotes. That’s some edgy, frustrated teenager bullshit. Or at least it should be, guess some people never got the memo about inalienable rights, equal treatment, vigilantism and how two wrongs don’t make a right.
Seriously, this thirst for blood is disturbing and if it isn’t just venting then, well, look how the French Revolution turned on people. That wasn’t very poggers.
There’s also this idea that everybody who isn’t 100% on board needs to be defooed and marked, preferably as a fascist. Which plays into the hands of the actual fascists because the non-fascists hate each other too much to collectively tell them to fuck off, despite their differences.
Some Lemmings are extremely right. That is the norm on any other social media too. Luckily they were often contained on a specific instance. What I noticed tho is that at least in my german bubble the view is very, very left. That’s noticeable especially as the consensus of eg. !ich_iel seems to be extremely pro towards protestors of the last generation, which are often criticised in my real life bubble for their actions as they’re seen as too extreme. Could be that my RL bubble is just much more right than I perceive it to be, even after blending out some individuals.
The ich_iel community existed as sub on fuggid too, it was never as left tho. I guess there are much less older and therefore theoretically less tech savvy as well as statistically conservative folks people on Lemmy in general. Conservatives would probably care about new, better platforms anyway.
Remember like two weeks ago when someone posted a question asking why IKEA was in business when good quality wood furniture was basically the same price? Hilarious.
Used flat pack shit that lasts maybe 10 years in optimal conditions goes used for only half the price, bad lean and all.
Anything solid wood you might as well buy new, cuz it’s nearly the same price, like damn.
I now go to habitat for humanity restore locations or goodwill, because they -can’t afford to charge a lot for big stuff- because they don’t have the space to store it. It’s not great stuff, but refurbishable.
My local reStore wants $100 for a 20 year old washing machine with a tag that says “we don’t know if it works”. They want $50 for a shitty old door ripped off your parents house. I used to love that place, now it’s not even worth looking.
Yeah, I used to love thrifting. Could find really awesome stuff for a couple bucks. Now it’s too trendy. They’ve figured out that people were buying it from them dirt cheap and then reselling it in their own “vintage” shop for like 20x the price. Society has even ruined thrifting.
This doesn’t apply to furniture but the Goodwills in my area ship all the good stuff to a central location two counties away where it can be listed for sale online. The stuff in store is mostly garbage.
Fair. I live in a LCOL area, mine don’t touch appliances, outdoor stuff, etc., can’t even donate to them, so it’s really just a place for cheaper remodeling stuff.
They have furniture, cabinetry, and building supplies. That’s about it. Limited plumbing fixtures, limited lighting, some “extra” paint and carpet tiles in mostly neutral colors.
Doors (no frame) are like $5-10, same with window sashes. Doors with frame are iirc $25, I never looked at windows with frame.
An entire very nice kitchen cabinet set ripped out of a newer condo is like $600.
Then the next thought is, “oh I can make that, doesn’t look too hard” and then you realize the tools you need to make it and make it more than a couple boards nailed together are as much if not more. And that’s not even counting how expensive the wood itself will be
Shit, there is an upscale consignment shop near me where they have “vintage” flat pack furniture straight from Wayfair marked above list price. I know because I have the same fucking table. The whole midcentury modern revival has gotten completely out of hand.
No offense to your flat pack, but it was garbage then and it’s not better now (you have apparently taken good care of it to not have it fall apart since)
I have had a lot of flat pack stuff because poverty, including a full wood coffee table that sat in a box for 20 years (mom bought it) before I used it. Took 6 months before that one started to wobble from normal use.
It’s never been good. I’d almost argue they are better now than 20 years ago, because people can’t afford legacy furniture and everything is flat-pack. And that is not saying much.
Put some thread locker on those shitty table leg bolts. That’ll keep it sturdy until the bolts rip themselves out of the pressboard garbage they’re glued to
Yeah, their post was about why do people buy crappy ikea furniture when nice wood furniture exists for the same price. Why the OP thought nice wood furniture could be purchased for the same price as flat packed particle board was the question.
IDK maybe it varies by area and what you a re looking for but almost all my furniture is thrifted/scavenged and I think the most I paid for a single thing was a 100 bucks. I go to a local thift store not one of the big chains. I also don’t have to buy with any sort of time pressure.
E: the idea that it invalidates IKEAs existence is crazy though.
Thrifting gets pricey nowadays. I’ve had better luck scouring FB Marketplace and Craigslist for curb alerts, if not trawling around the neighborhood looking for stuff to pluck up and take home myself. For free, even!
This usually depends on the country/region. For example in India ikea is obscenely expensive for what they are selling when you can get a miles better product at a similar price.
At least in Delhi you can get really really good furniture at a fair price.
<span style="color:#323232;">My life over here is terrible.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Work environment is not very good (or not very bad, too blurry for me to read), benefits are few
</span><span style="color:#323232;">But don't need to worry, every day has about 10 people getting heavily injured
</span><span style="color:#323232;">But I am very careful
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I opened a small store, bussiness is not [unknown character]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Although I am not very familiar with English, but can still [Idk what this part says]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Can understand the words those white people speak
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Hope I can [find a better life here?] I will work hard here, and
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Will be careful with my body (becareful with not injuring my body)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Are you (plural) still good?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Very miss you (plural), wish we can meet again
</span>
That’s my 2nd grade level understanding of Chinese 😅
(I am a former citizen of China, if you are curious how I know this. Now I am a US Citizen. Haven’t spoken Mandarin or written in Chinese for 10+ years. I speak Cantonese at home not Mandarin)
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a third-grader 😉
Hey you know what’s weird. I can remember a language I haven’t used for 10+ years, yet I can’t remember my Bitwarden password 2 days after changing it. 🥲
Here’s Google’s translation. Knowing zero Chinese myself, you did very well.
I live very poorly here.
The working environment is unbearable and the benefits are lacking.
But don’t worry, only about + people are seriously injured every day,
And I am also very careful. We opened a small shop, and the business is doing well.
Although I don’t know English very well, I can understand a little
Understand what those white people are saying.
I hope I can get ahead! I will work hard here, and
Be careful, physically.
How are you?
Miss you very much, hope we can meet again.
It’s been so long since I studied any Mandarin that I remember almost nothing of it, but I find it really funny that Google translate somehow fucked up translating one of the easiest characters to learn.
<span style="color:#323232;">1 My life over here is terrible.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2 Work environment is not very good (yes you're correct), benefits are few
</span><span style="color:#323232;">3 But don't need to worry, every day has only about 10 people getting heavily injured,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">4 and I am very careful.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">5 We opened a small store, business is not bad.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">6 Although I am not very familiar with English, I can still sometimes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">7 (This line is adding a word to the previous line)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">8 understand what the white people (we meant westerners) are saying. (Line 6 to 8 are parts of the same sentence)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">9 Hope I can get some fame here! I will work hard here, and
</span><span style="color:#323232;">10 will be careful with my health
</span><span style="color:#323232;">11 Are you (plural) still good?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">12 Very miss you (plural), wish we can meet again
</span>
(I am a Hongkonger, speaking Cantonese since the day I was born. The other translations using translation software aren’t accurate because there is an added character at line 7.)
Been on chrome for like 12 years. Syncs across my phone, everything. I will make the switch. I have been wondering when google was going to go evil. Why not 2023 like everything else on the internet?
Dodge v. Ford is arguably the court case that proves all capitalist owned companies are legally required to not do the right thing. If Google was worker owned they would be a lot better.
Essentially, the Supreme Court ruled that Henry Ford had to operate the company in the best interests of its shareholders, not his employees. It’s an awful ruling by the Supreme Court that has never been revisited.
It’s one of a sequence of Supreme Court decisions (starting with Dartmouth College v Woodward and culminating most recently with Citizens United) that have led us down this path of corporate dystopia. For the full background, read this:
2 years from now Firefox will have blocked adblockers, and there will be chromium based browsers (not Chrome) that won’t have them blocked.
I don’t see why people seem to be thinking a large company in a capitalistic landscape isn’t going to side with profits. Firefox will oppose it openly right now and take the new users and then move to the same without lube and without apologies.
Small browsers that still have some morals before going public will build browers off chromium because of its ease, and they will be able to exclude those blocks. Likely means we will be using different browsers every few years until something else changes.
Maybe I’m pessimistic here, but anyone who just moved from Reddit to Lemmy should know that Firefox isn’t the answer, it is another greed driven overlord.
Mimicking the tokens on the otherhand… those sites we will need to boycott if possible.
Firefox is built by open source developers who overwhelmingly have those same values. They have also been at this for many years now and have given us no real reason to doubt this commitment.
“The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others.”
Everything you just said was optimistic as fuck.
750 employees, 826 million dollars in revenue a year.
So what do they choose. Fire 700 employees and go down to 26 mill revenue?
Edit: when the hivemind disperses and sees Firefox follow Google in using tokens and blocking ad blockers, you may not see it as one of the dumbest thing you’ve read before.
Makes no sense. Mozilla has no horse in the advertising race. But Google does. Almost all of Google’s profits are from ads. Ads keep the entire Alphabet house of cards afloat.
But not Mozilla. The largest connection there is them being paid for default lt search engine.
I love this quote, it exactly sums up my sentiments.
I’m actually looking forward to it, because it will finally force me to go cold turkey on so many bullshit websites I don’t need in my life anyway, which I was never able to do on my own, because the addiction simply is there. But not as strong ans my hatred of fingerprinting and advertisements.
same, I think I might start reading more books again, I wanted to do that for a long time now but I never head “enough” time as I always spent so much time on the internet
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.
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).
I saw this earlier and I’m glad it was removed almost immediately.
Working retail/service in the US is a joke because people have become so entitled that they don’t even think of service workers as humans anymore. When I used to work retail at a certain big blue box electronics store I was screamed at, yelled at, belittled, called names, and in a couple very extreme cases had items thrown at me and one person took a swing at me.
This is just another example of that. People here in the US are so detached from reality and laser focused on their routine that they literally cannot comprehend that workers may want to spend a holiday with their family too. Or worse than that, they think workers don’t deserve to be at home with their families on a holiday, because they deserve service more than you deserve to see your family. God forbid they microwave a meal that one day.
It’s pure entitlement and it’s disgusting. Surprisingly I found that the lower income/societal class the person is the more entitled they would act towards me as a service worker.
Nope. I worked retail for years and they’re spot-on. The absolute worst are the ones carrying tacky designer bags. Think the giant LV logo ones. They were almost universally nightmares to deal with that had $1000 deposit requirements for cell phones.
Yeah, I’ve had the opposite experience in my 20+ years of customer service work. Most of the times I’ve been screamed at by an entitled customer, they’ve been upper-middle class.
Sorry man, but no, granted that’s my personal anecdotal experience.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t people who were complete assholes at all levels, but generally speaking the most entitled people were the ones who didn’t deserve to be. I guess I could clarify that people who wanted to act like they were happy with life were the worst, most entitled people I came across. The people who either did actually hold status or didn’t care if they did were more tolerable.
I won’t pretend to be an expert and understand. The only things I’ve thought over the years were either 1) They needed to feel more important than someone, and service workers are a good scapegoat there or the more unfortunate one 2) There are just more points of contention. Someone doing well won’t react as badly to their laptop being fried compared to someone who isn’t doing well - they have different impacts on the people. That one is more important, but I don’t think that excuses the pure abuse that was hurled at me either.
Similar question to what I posed the other person; do you really think you’ve serviced an equal number of low income and high income customers to back up your conclusions?
A bit difficult to make that claim when I imagine you didn’t know each customers background, noted it down, and accounted for how proportinal your compared groups were.
Poo rolls down hill. It’s sad, I think that is the only way certain people can feel some sense of experiment. Working on ourselves and our own perceived inadequacies is hard, dirty work.
Living in a place where stores are shut sundays, ther isnt any service for my restaurant (beer/wine, or problems with keg equipment) and it’s actually quite refreshing.
If I run out, I run out. If there is no keg beer because the cooling unit stopped working then there isn’t any. No ribs on sunday night because we were busier than normal…on saturday. People understand.
it’s amazing.
*ps, if they dont, then thats their problem, not mine.
In their worldview, there is The Hierarchy,™ and everybody’s role is to do as they’re told by people above them. There is no other force in their moral universe. Nothing else decides what is real.
People stuck in this mindset are vicious when they have so few opportunities to be the boot instead of the face. It’s identifying with the aggressor.
One time I was dealing with a really bad migraine while I was running register at Walmart. I was barely functioning and could barely stand up straight. This lady comes through my line starting out all compassionate until she suggests that she lead me in a prayer that Jesus might heal me. I try to politely decline because I’d rather not hold up the line forming behind her. Well, also because I’m atheist but I had been in customer service for years at that point and knew better than to bring that tidbit up.
This lady starts into the most hate fueled tirade I’ve ever heard. Talking about how I’m a heathen, my migraine was a punishment directly from God, I deserve every second of my suffering, and calling me everything but a child of God. All because I tried to politely decline a performative prayer from her because there were now 3 people in line behind her. Like 20 minutes later I got taken out in an ambulance because I fainted from the pain trying to stand up after using the bathroom on my break.
Another guy tried to get me to discount his entire order because he supposedly knew the guy that owned the contacting company that built the store. Try to tell him that I don’t have the ability to do that and he’d have to talk to a manager. He gets right up in my face and starts yelling about how no one else ever had a problem with it and how with one phone call he could make it so I would never be able to work at Walmart again. Along with several threats to my person. If I never set foot behind a cash register again it’ll be too soon.
Despite never really having any problem customers in my 14 or so years of working in food service, I’m right there with you. Between the stress of dealing with people day in and day out, working every holiday with no overtime or holiday pay, and being expected to do the work of 2 people and not take any vacation time because “the company can’t afford to hire more people,” I will never work retail/service again. People talk about dreaming that they’re back in high school, I dream that I’m back working there. Even 3 years after I left the industry.
Where I live our stores are closed on Sundays except those located in larger railstations and gas stations.
And right in the time where people should be with their families, in Advent, stores are allowed to open up on the four Advent Sundays and everyone goes fucking wild.
Now, the retail store lobby or whatever it is called here is rallying for stores to be allowed to open up 8 Sundays a year, because ‘people want the convenience to be able to shop on a Sunday’. You know what? No. Fuck those people. Get your groceries on a Saturday or during the week and chill the fuck out on a Sunday.
It’s insane to me how people apparently just can’t go one day without getting something from a store.
I think it’s beautiful to have one day in the week where (most) people just don’t have to work at all. I really don’t like how the hypercapitalism of the US just swaps over to Europe more and more.
That last sentence is the exact opposite of my experience having worked a decade in various retail positions. Aside from the people who were on drugs, I never had any big issues with lower income people, all the arrogance and assholery and entitlement almost always came from the douchebag in the Audi with the flashy gold watch, not from Peggy who came down to the store in the family’s broken down Olds to grab a pint of milk and half a gallon of gas… Lower income people tend to know what’s up, and be the most attached to reality. Money is what allows you to dissociate from the struggles of everyday people
There’s a world of difference in disposition between new money and old money, in my experience, and flashy-car-and-expensive-jewelry rich is decidedly new money. Families with generational wealth tend to be more discreet about it, and often have a “noblesse obligee” mentally about how they engage with the world. New money’s much more likely to pull the “don’t you know who I am?!” card.
Similarly, there’s a split between working class folks who know the score and recognize that they’re all in it together with the guy behind the counter, and the sort of temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who have themselves convinced they’re better than they are.
I think it’s part of what I’ve seen called the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” effect. There’s a certain group of poor folk who have been convinced that, any day now, they’re going to come into wealth (through some nebulous means and no real action of their own), and so act like they are already part of the wealthy class. Even going so far as voting for benefits for the wealthy and against their own interests, including voting for the destruction of the very social programs that support them.
Just an assumption on my part, but I think you would find a correlation between political affiliation and treatment of service industry staff when it comes to lower income people.
I wanna go back to medieval crests, where they would throw in symbology for every little detail about the family/guild/whatever. I wanna be able to know everything about a product/app just by looking at its icon.
Wow I actually love this idea. There could be some common symbol in the crests to denote what kind of open source license they follow (GNU, MIT, etc), affiliation with other software, all sorts of cool stuff.
Yeah for real. Enshittification has gotten me permanently off Facebook for like 4 years and Twitter for like 10. Reddit now for a few months. Getting ready to leave YouTube.
Are you me? I have been off of Twitter and Facebook for years now. Reddit is dead to me. YouTube seems like it’s heading in the shitter. I’ve also been playing more guitar lately too! I’m still early on, I think I’m progressing nicely but I’m firmly in the “novice” stage. Take it from someone who didn’t exercise at all before, you’ll do yourself great even taking a nice walk for 20-30 minutes every day possible. It gets easier everyday, and they become enjoyable.
Haha pretty close! I’m more of a veteran guitar player. Just very rusty. Used to be 4-6 hrs a day. Now is more like 4-6 hrs a month. Last month was more like 4-6 hrs a week though!!
I hiked a lot during the pandemic! New job has had me sitting at my desk and ordering delivery though. Too much pot and beer, and I’m starting to feel winded doing things that are setting off some early alarm bells lol
I decided to get offline more and get more exercise. I found a personal trainer who runs his own gym. He has a media center set up to play music. It plays youtube videos. Without an adblock.
I’ve seen more youtube ads at the gym than I’ve seen when I’m doomscrolling at home.
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 oil railroad 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”
Backing up your point. Biden just agreed to ban the flying of pride flags at international embassays in order to get a budget passed. Democrats will happily sell out their voters once in office in the effort to be “bipartisan”. forbes.com/…/white-house-agrees-to-ban-pride-flag…
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.
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