tbh this post made me double check my calendar.

I assume he microdosed it because he read that it could increase productivity.

Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin, like a “good cop” and a “bad cop,” the only thing that distinguished the fascism of mid 20th century Europe was that it was being applied to Europeans, rather than its typical targets.

But that doesn’t actually matter in this case, because both of the options on offer for Americans have participated enthusiastically in bringing fascism to American communities. The Dems are the ones currently backing Israel’s genocide and escalation, the Dems are the ones who built the cages and the Dems are the ones currently throwing kids in them.

Biden could shoot someone on fifth avenue and you liberals would still think that he’s somehow better than Trump.

Imagine for a moment that you are a pacifist. But then you join the military, go overseas, and kill hundreds of people. Should you get to call yourself a pacifist? Of course not!

Same theory here. If you think socialist thoughts, speak socialist words, and then support capitalist parties - then you my friend are a capitalist. There are plenty of ways to do socialist praxis within a political system where the electral system has been entirely captured by capitalist interests, so don’t you waste your tears crying about “gatekeeping”.

socialists in the US vote for the democratic party

If you’re voting for the democratic party then you are not a socialist. Politics aren’t just a feeling you have or something you say you believe in, they’re actions that you take.

before… SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments

They’ve been doing that shit since the country was founded. The fourth and fifth amendments only exist if you’re a rich person and the cops need an excuse not to investigate you.

I’ve heard of card counters getting stopped by security when they try to walk into a casino, there are definitely ways to “make” someone’s car and put it in a database but the tech is still spotty afaik.

Eh, the cycle of collapse and consolidation will hit the streaming system exactly the same as it would any other industry. I feel like the system will stabilize around 3-5 big services - maybe amazon, hbo, and disney, with youtube premium and apple TV as the “also rans” - which will all have premium price points and ads, and the average person who subscribes to them will be paying about as much (after inflation) as they used to pay for cable.

There have been a few instances where licensed content has been retroactively removed from libraries, though. Steam doesn’t let you download older versions of a game unless the devs explicitly allow it.

No, but like… dude, you could flip half of those supposed traits between categories and it would read exactly the same. That’s why I called it astrology.

Perhaps you just did a bad job of presenting the book’s ideas, but I’ve just read through a summary of it and it didn’t exactly make me reconsider my knee jerk reaction.

This is your brain on idealism, just pure vibes. Political astrology.

I think a factor is just S Korea’s working class being squeezed that much harder than many other places. They’re calling it the “gender war” but it’s all just people being forced to live in unbearable conditions while getting more and more isolated from each other.

I thought that’s what you were talking about, only just now see your username

in terms of their foreign policy

but also, regardless of whose president I feel like things for the drag community will continue getting worse in red states while staying the same in blue states. It’s not like the Dems have given us any reason to believe that they will intervene from the federal level to protect minorities of any type.

7. Choosing the distro most aligned with Juche ideology - Red Star OS

I’m a debate pervert but I’m not that dedicated to the bit. Searching your name in the modlog was all I was willing to do.

Anyway perhaps if you simply stopped apologizing for genocides, you would no longer be accused of genocide apologia? Just a suggestion.

The both sides people are accurately pointing out that both sides of the American monoparty are equally accelerationist in terms of their foreign policy. They are both pro genocide, they both want to saber rattle at America’s perceived enemies, they can both potentially start world war 3 - and we’re against that happening.

This is one of the most inane threads I’ve ever seen on Lemmy. Nuance is having a fine understanding of a topic, while the line I’m quoting is taking a complicated topic and boiling it down to a truism. It’s the most obvious and classic form of anti-intellectualism and it certainly does not reflect a nuanced understanding of socialism or communism.

So I guess the problem is that socialism and communism are kinda used in two different ways. One way refers to a political program, the other refers to a hypothetical stage of economic development.

The political programs are more clearly defined. Socialism is an umbrella term for a lot of specific anticapitalist political programs, of which one calls itself Communism. Communism is for people who like the Soviet Union and China, but there’s basically no smoke in that ideology in western countries, where Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism are your biggest left wing contenders.

But “socialism” and “communism” as stages of economic development are moving targets, impossible to pin down because they’re entirely hypothetical and there are only a couple countries that have even tried to achieve them. Was the Soviet Union communist? Well, it was lead by Communists in the political program sense, but I don’t think anyone would argue that it achieved communism in the economic and social development sense. Modern day China, too, is Communist in the political sense, but even by their own metrics they are still capitalist, and see socialism as a goal they are working towards (if you believe their rhetoric and don’t think it’s all just cynical, which many western socialists do).

So while the Chinese Communists have their own definition of practical socialism, western leftists are not in power and all of our ideas remain purely theoretical as a result. Add to this the fact that there is no major leftist political org in western countries for the socialists to rally around and you get more definitions of socialism and communism (the stages of economic development) than you can shake a stick at. This leads to the problem you’re describing, where socialism appears to have no solid meaning at all, because the notion of it is so phantasmal.

But I don’t think that you can dismiss socialism or its results as “capitalism, but different,” because the whole thing about socialism is that new power structures create new incentive structures and therefore even if there are some superficial elements of capitalism that remain - like the use of currency - under a socialist regime the outcomes should be more equal, fair, and democratic. There are numerous historical examples of these better alternative outcomes, but of course they’ve all been relentlessly propagandized against in Western countries so that the average person doesn’t realize that there is a better way to run society than the one they were born into.

It makes perfect sense if you understand how nuance works.

Saying “if you do too much socialism, it’s communism” is exactly the opposite of a nuanced understanding. Please read a pamphlet.