I just really dislike the whole left/right tribalism. Politics is a lot more complex than left/right and just marking someone as either just increases polarisation…
“Both sides bad” is a bad take when applied to economics. In that area, one side is clearly superior. However, when it comes to politics as a whole, specifically social values, the other commenter is right. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m crazy about the right’s social values or anything, but I am very critical of some of the stuff the left is promoting lately (and no, I don’t mean just chronically online liberals).
I’d agree, except the progressives and conservatives align with the left and right respectively in 99% of cases. Some even go as far as to consider their social values inseparable from the economic ones. When’s the last time you met a conservative socialist, for instance?
Those are generally because reasons for being a Socialist are largely revolutionary and against the status quo, in favor of more equality and logic, while conservativism and Capitalism are built on retaining existing hierarchies.
Joseph Stalin was a conservative Socialist, he banned gay marriage which was previously legal.
They’re pretty compatible when you use capitalist principles to allow for a market economy where the corporate machines are owned collectively by their workers, rather than their boards of shareholders like we see today. We need a completely different government structure to properly enact and enforce environmental and safety regulations though, since lobbying, bribery, gerrymandering, and cronyism are entirely too effective in the US
I agree that it isn’t very similar to modern Capitalism at all, but the means of production would still not be state-owned or managed, so the only socialism going on would take the form of unions and government welfare, which is more similar to early 20th century american capitalism than it is to most socialist movements of the past 100 years.
The definitions of socialism and capitalism are constantly in flux though so assigning a simple name to a nuanced economic framework will always be reductive and confusing.
but the means of production would still not be state-owned or managed
All squares are quadrilaterals, but not all quadrilaterals are squares.
Socialism is when the workers control the means of production: could be through the state, could also be through unions or co-ops or other labor-controlled structures. Might make you uneasy to say so, but I think you’re a socialist, my man.
I am called a socialist by a lot of people who call themselves socialist, but I am called capitalist to a lot of people who call themselves capitalist. As I said, the word has taken on many different meanings by people who interpret or misinterpret Marx’s ideas differently.
I don’t align myself with any named doctrine because the names are reductive and often misleading or conflicting. If you consider me socialist because of your definition of socialism I won’t tell you otherwise, but I will push back if someone tells me to call myself socialist because I don’t agree with the more common interpretations of what it means to be socialist.
All squares are quadrilaterals and all cubes contain squares, but a cube is not a quadrilateral, it merely looks like a quadrilateral in some projections. It may look like a hexagon in others. Projections don’t show the whole shape
All squares are quadrilaterals and all cubes contain squares, but a cube is not a quadrilateral, it merely looks like a quadrilateral in some projections. It may look like a hexagon in others.
Game recognize game, that was an excellent response.
I’d just point out that there has been a decades-long crusade against socialism in the west, starting during the WWII and through the cold war, and the “socialism = state run economy” shtick comes from confused westerners who’ve bought into the red-scare propaganda. A lot of people feel quite comfortable imagining the USSR and Moaist China as the idealistic image of what socialism is, because it’s quite easy to write them off as failed “authoritarian” projects (a lot of reasons for those scare quotes, but I won’t go into it). Fair enough that you don’t want to be associated with that scary image, but all I’d say is that by avoiding the word with all its nuance, you loose the detailed and rich debate about it that can inform how one could approach a socialist system of organization, even the one you just described. And as long as we’re stuck arguing about semantic definitions and being pitted against one another, we’re not effectively unifying under our common interest, which would be the end to private ownership over the means of production.
I agree with most of this, I just don’t think we can afford to discount the power of stigma when it’s easier to go around that stigma and choose other names to unite under. The left has no problem getting hateful and even simply distasteful words out of common usage by drawing attention to what makes them problematic, sometimes even with proposed changes that are more inflammatory than the original (Looking at you, “Latinx”). I don’t see why we can’t do the same for the term “Socialism” and use something with less historical baggage in order to better appeal to moderates without sacrificing any actual ideological shifts.
That’s still not Capitalism. If it’s Worker Owned a la Cooperatives, it’s Socialism. It isn’t Marxism, but not Capitalism, as there literally are no Capitalists.
Well the user is saying that the left is also in favour of regulated markets. The meme can be interpreted as if that people on the left somehow want unregulated markets
I agree! But a planned economy, you could say is, in essence, an extremely tightly regulated market. Whereas the opposite of that, a complete lack of regulation is anarcho capitalism, a completely right wing idea.
Liberal policies have done a lot of harm to the French system. We still have a lot of holidays, probably more than anywhere else (minimum 5 weeks, sometimes 6 or 7, and then, if you have more than 35h/week, you have even more, up to 11 days/year for 39h/week).
But healthcare and unemployment are being dismantled over the years.
Government is planning a law this autumn to force people to work to get the lowest unemployment income (what you get after 2 years of unemployment, or if you never worked). Unemployment became harder (you get less for less time).
Public healthcare is understaffed and underfunded. There are more and more wait before you can get an appointment and the quality is decreasing. You more and more need a complementary insurance to cover the full cost, because the public one covers only a part of the cost or not some specific cares.
Police is becoming litteraly fascist, asking for special laws applying to them. And the government consider giving it to them. They are asking for more weapons, and they are asking to clean the vermin from the cities (litteral words they use, I consider this sedition). Currently the government plays nice to the police because they’re scared if what would happen if they didn’t. Especially since they rely a lot on the police to shit down protests.
Protest are severly repressed by the police, and the right to protest is in actual danger because if the préfet (chief of police in a department, appointed by the government, representative of the government locally and responsible for the security of the department ; a department is a small administrative region) decides that your work is necessary, then you can be drafted to work. Public services are already unable to protest (in hospitals for example).
Information is very concentrated. TV channels are possessed by like 4 people, same for newspapers. And public ones are less and less independant.
This autumn will be very hot. Right now it’s the holidays. In September both school and assembly will get back to work, and the government is planning to anger teachers, one of the most powerful union in the country, and several questionable security laws. Government has no legitimity but hide behind the discourse that “no one else has legitimity either”.
I don’t think we have it worse than in many places, but it’s getting worse for us. Fighting in the beginning of this year didn’t got us anything for retirement (now 65yo to get it).
it feels like the “promises” (read: lies) of neoliberalism have screwed over many first world nations.
a lot of what you excellently described is going on in the United States as well, for the most part.
many kudos to our French brothers and sisters and their massive protests. I’m not sure what needs to be done, but I hope that people around the world can take back what is rightfully theirs: equality, true freedom from oppressive, corrupt governments, and an honest living
The last time a slightly leftist government was elected was in 1981, and they turned neoliberal in 1983. Since then, worker’s right are fought by successive governments.
And successfully so: the last time a national worker’s movement won anything was in 1995 (in 2006 there was a student’s victory though).
Only 10% of the workers are in an Union, same as in the US.
However, it’s not a hell neither:
French work 1511 hours by year, indeed under the OECD average (1751) or the Americans (1810) but higher than Germans (1340) who have the reputation to be workaholics.
The reputation is however not without basis:
French have the highest number of strike days by year for 1000 workers (114), far more than Americans (6). But iy should be noted that not everyone strikes in France, generally the civil servants or employees of State owned firms strike for the others. I did not found the exact number, but for private firms’ employees, the number of strike days on average will be far lesser than 114 (but probably more that 6 ^^). And these hours are not paid, thus a lowering of quality of life.
The German numbers are low, because it is quite common to work only part-time, especially for women. Part-time workers are included in the statistics. Also it is questionable if overtime is counted correctly, because Germans probably do not report it.
I would add that France is the 7th largest economy in the world. Germany 5th. South Korea 13th.
Working time matters much less than the slave-driving CEOs or workaholics would have you believe. 1 week vs 6 weeks off a year is like a 10% difference. That’s a pitiful variance compared to how much our productivity is affected by liking our job, being motivated, not being overworked, etc.
What’s so hard to understand about this? There is a very popular meme that explains this person’s perspective, it has a dog having a cup of coffee in a burning room saying “this is fine”
Some of us think human extinction would ultimately be for the best, even for humans. There is no civilized future; it’s exploitation, violence and horror all the way to the end. The faster the end comes the less of all that there will be. Humanity is not suited for interstellar permanence, we are defective.
Humans won’t go extinct easily, for how many things we lived through and how many conditions we coped with, I don’t think nither climate change nor a third world war is enough for our extinction. LEMMiNO has an amazing video on this I recommend checking it out to see what I mean. Also u ok bro?
Yay? We have the ability to survive and the ability to prevent extinction. Honestly, I’m so jaded that I kinda wish we would engineer our current iteration of our species to extinction.
Sounds like you could benefit from talking with a professional about that. Being so jaded that you wish all humans would die is not a healthy attitude to live with. Happiness is possible.
I agree. I'm actually hoping for human extinction. We're a cancer on the earth. If bees went extinct, the natural world would collapse. If ants went extinct, again, the natural world would collapse. If humans went extinct? Well, not much would happen except that the natural world would achieve equilibrium again.
I don’t understand how anyone can say a statement as heartless as “humans are cancer”, but I shouldn’t be surprised because it’s within our nature to oversimplify, categorize, and put good and evil label on things. But the truth is that you can’t put a label on humans because we are too diverse for that. For as cruel and heartless humans can be, we can also be kind and forgiving. There are millions who dedicated their lives in helping others, and millions of forest rangers defending what you label as good. You know that life has existed on earth for 3 billion years, so what good did it do exactly? Creatures born and died one after the other and what good did they ever do? Also life wasn’t always stable on earth, there where 5 mass extincttions, and 5 ice ages long before we industrialized. It’s been a few hundred years at most since we’ve been a “cancer” to earth. If humans where gone things will continue as normal, stars shine until they fade without anyone to gaze at their beauty. Universe will turn dark without anything happening. I don’t think things will stay like this. Humans where hunter gatherers for ~288000 years but we grew out of it and learned to do better. I think the same will be true for war and injustice. We will grow out of these childish actions one day.
So you don’t understand how mass surveillance works? “Big brother” isn’t “watching” you in real time, they’re collecting and storing all the data they can en masse and having AI look at it for them. I personally object to the warrantless collection and storage of everyone’s data.
AI wrongly flags you as suspicious and someone has to take a manual look at all your data.
Why would you want anyone from the government doing any sort of investigation on you? Even if you have nothing to hide it’s a breach of privacy and you put a lot of trust in the government.
Yeah some of my University classes mandated the use of this “Lockdown Browser” last year. Pretty sure it’s just spyware that, conveniently, can render HTML
And a bunch of entitled douchenoozles, not understanding that THEY used to be screaming babies too!
Edit: The replies to this are wild lol this platform really is just single dudes circle jerking. If you really have no compassion for the parent in this picture, you need to take a deep look at yourself.
I’m not a screaming infant anymore. And I chose not to reproduce because I didn’t want to deal with screaming children. Not wanting to listen to someone else’s screaming/crying children in an enclosed space you can’t get away from them in isn’t being a douche its expecting common courtesy and a pleasant experience everyone has pain potentially a lot of money for.
Don’t be stupid. It’s on the parents not the infant. Nobody cares if the infant cries some, or if they do they aren’t worth talking to. The point is if you know you can’t control your child or have no way to handle them on a plane, you have no business bringing them and you should’ve driven. Simple as that.
Tbh taking your baby on a trip is a giant waste of money. They aren’t going to enjoy/remember it. And if you bring them on a plane they will have no clue what’s going on, be stressed, and annoy everyone else
Exactly! All these parents and self absorbed people trying to come after me for my comment because they think they should be catered to or bent over backwards for because they popped out a kid is laughable. It’s not a good experience for the kid and it’s not a good experience for other passengers who had no input on the kid being there.
“You used to be a child once, so you aren’t allowed to be frustrated at any behaviours of children or choices of their caregivers” sure is a perspective.
Yes, I was once a child. And if my parents had taken me on a flight before I was sufficiently mature not to yell during it, they would have been being irresponsible and selfish. “Babies scream, sometimes there’s nothing you can do to stop them” is true, but doesn’t imply that you should be allowed to take them anywhere.
What about ugly people or people with body odour? Do we not allow them to travel on planes, too? I can easily block noise with earplugs. Can’t really plug my nose or keep my eyes closed all the time.
Why is everyone else responsible for your comfort? Wanting all families banned from airtravel just because wearing earplugs is asking too much is in my opinion a lot more selfish than bringing a child onto a plane.
Neither of those things you described are intentional life-choices that people have planned, so no, it is not the same thing at all.
Why is everyone else responsible for your comfort?
This is a circular argument I’ve seen a lot of times on this thread (from several people), so I’m going to respond to it just once and then stop engaging here because this whole thread is not convincing anyone. Both sides of this issue believe that that argument supports them:
Pro-babies think “other passengers should just bring earplugs, I don’t have to be responsible for their comfort” (let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether earplugs are actually fully effective against screaming children (they’re not) and give this view the benefit of the doubt)
Anti-babies think “just don’t bring the baby on the plane. The whole rest of the plane shouldn’t have to adapt to your choices”
The thing is, one of these groups of people is knowingly introducing a factor that will cause distress to hundreds of people and is saying “fuck all of you if you aren’t prepared to adapt to my choices”, and the other group is saying…“please don’t do that”. The latter feels way more reasonable to me.
The key point here seems to be that air travel is considered to be a fundamental inalienable right, something which should not and cannot be denied. Parents are saying things like “well without air travel, how are we supposed to go on holiday”, to which the answer is…maybe you’re not (or you go by car/boat) until the baby’s a real human? Maybe that was something you should have thought about before you had a child? Maybe, just maybe, it should be the cultural and social norm that a choice that you made does not permit you to inflict the negative outcomes of that choice on a tube of strangers?
Such a waste of public resources, to not develop (or fund) free and open tools for everyone, instead of paying for temporary licenses for closed software.
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