davel

davel , 2 months ago to steam in Steam is now banned in Vietnam

More vagueposting. You assume a lot. Are you a mind reader? No, you’re a shit-talking dumbass on the internet.

davel , 2 months ago to steam in Steam is now banned in Vietnam

I don’t think anyone knows what your smug vageposting is supposed to mean but you.

davel , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to steam in Steam is now banned in Vietnam

Capitalist states are also authoritarian. In fact all states are.

Frederick Engels, 1872, On Authority

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

The Vietnamese state itself will tell you that it has not yet reached its end-goal of communism: the absence of social classes and withering away of the state.

davel , 2 months ago to worldnews in Nearly 75% of Climate Experts Blame ‘Lack of Political Will’ for High Chance of Future Warming

Not tonight dear, I’m lacking political will.

davel , 2 months ago to memes in Wishes

Someone reported this as NSFW, but I don’t see it. This is just Grandpa Simpson gumming a cucumber with his dentures out.

davel , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to memes in Lift like China, bro 🇨🇳💪

Raising 800 million people out of poverty in the span of 70 years is not “cherry picking,” it’s the “greatest such achievement in history” by the UN’s own reckoning. How do you square the circle of China being an “oppressive regime” and raising 800 million people out of poverty? I’m sure you’ve been fed virtually the same fire hose of cold war propaganda your whole life as I have.

concerning behavior jagoff Thank you for your concern trolling.

davel , 2 months ago to memes in The essence of liberalism

I usually rely on TinEye to for that: tineye.com/…/3ae58e30783903f716bfe5708e6c0ff6442b…

davel , 2 months ago to asklemmy in Why does a state like California that has supermajorities in both houses of the legislature not have a livable wage, housing guarantees, universal healthcare, and other very progressive policies?

Relatedly, on a national level, making our homes into investment vehicles was a huge mistake, and 1978 California Proposition 13 made it worse.

davel , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to memes in memes are inherently leftist, as they are meant to be shared.

We’re knee-deep in a thread about totalitarianism being nonsense, and now you trot out its synonym?

Authoritarianism is whatever the Council on Foreign Relations says it is this week.

davel , 2 months ago to memes in memes are inherently leftist, as they are meant to be shared.

Our theories are materialist ones, not idealist ones. We believe that ideas fundamentally arise from material conditions. Those ideas do affect the material in turn, dialectically, but the material conditions are still the prime mover. Dialectical materialism (and historical materialism) are fundamental to all Marxist theory.

We reject the popular liberal theory that, if one presents one’s case well enough in the “marketplace of ideas”, that those ideas will win the day. That doesn’t mean ideas shouldn’t be presented—because that’s clearly what I’m doing here—only that it’s not sufficient. The capitalist class spends billions each year pushing their propaganda and suppressing any that oppose it. They know very well what works. Just having a good idea and presenting it cogently won’t cut it.

Memes aren’t even a new thing. 18th century memes don’t look alien to us. And we’re not spending all of our time in the meme mines.

I would say that political discourse has become shorter, more emotional, and less informed and complex

I’m not sure how I’d go about trying to prove or disprove this. Online social media ain’t everything. I think most people are abysmally uninformed/disinformed and disengaged, but I don’t know how I’d measure these or compare them to the past. In 1993 Noam Chomsky wrote, ”the general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”

davel , 2 months ago to memes in memes are inherently leftist, as they are meant to be shared.

That is not why things are getting worse in the US. I could go on at great length on why things are getting worse, but I don’t think this is the time or place for that.

This post is actually a great example of how memes can be effective. The meme is the hook. The conversation that’s being had around the meme is the meat & potatoes (apologies for the mixed metaphor).

Going back to an earlier comment of yours:

Memes are short, contextless appeals to emotion and thus the perfect format for propaganda

By “context,” I think you mean something different from what I’m about to say, but memes are densely packed with context: our shared cultural context. They are effective at communicating so much out of seemingly so little by leveraging our shared context. The a-ha moment of perceiving the meme through recognition of the implicit context is the hook.

davel , 2 months ago to memes in memes are inherently leftist, as they are meant to be shared.

how about you give me a word that describes a country with a single party, ruling in perpetuity?

You’re still trying to construct the thing we’re saying is nonsense. Typically attributed to Julius Nyerere: The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.

The US has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois democracy, which was never meant to represent us, and never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

In socialist states, the “one party” is the party of the working class. The two major parties today in the US are parties of the capitalist class, as were the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig parties before them.

davel , 2 months ago to asklemmy in Why does a state like California that has supermajorities in both houses of the legislature not have a livable wage, housing guarantees, universal healthcare, and other very progressive policies?

I think @novibe is oversimplifying by quite a lot, but not completely off base.

The most condensed explanation I’ve found is by Second Thought: Why The Government Has Infinite Money.
The links in the description are great as well, addressing some common questions and counter-arguments.

New documentary film: Finding the Money (BitTorrent magnet link)
The film barely makes any class analysis, but is otherwise good.

If you want a Marxian economic perspective, I highly recommend Michael Hudson. He dispels a few misconceptions here: The Use and Abuse of MMT

davel , 2 months ago to worldnews in Japanese foreign minister blasts remarks in U.S. legitimizing atomic bombings

Does this show a shift in posture? I know nothing of the evolution of how Japanese administrations have framed the bombings over the last ~80 years.

Anyway, amerikkka

davel , 2 months ago to memes in memes are inherently leftist, as they are meant to be shared.

“Totalitarian” is itself propaganda: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. This is a bourgeois liberal, anticommunist construct for the purposes of equivalating fascism and communism.

Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t repressed by the red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism