• 4 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: April 1st, 2022

help-circle
  • There’s no reward for allowing them a platform. They are free to say what they want somewhere else. You can literally do nothing and they will pretend to be the victim, plenty try to suggest the mere existence of trans people victimizes them.

    Now, I’m not saying that it’s useful to be tactless, that anything goes. Obviously one should be aware of how some techniques are better than others, and how some could fuel their movement. But there’s no moral or ethical reason to assume their ability to speak should be inviolable, in fact that’s just tolerating harm. Ask the UK how they dissolved the British Union of Fascists: Mosley stopped appearing in public after dozens in Brighton threw bricks at his rally.



  • awards that cosmetically work like upvotes in a sense.

    Upvotes are mechanical, maybe there’s a better comparison. I left reddit before they added awards, but I assume the idea is that someone donates and is then able to add a decorative award to their favorite posts they see, maybe limited to giving one award per day?

    It’s fun, but on the other hand when I occasionally visit reddit, some posts look like a slot machine with a hundred awards, and even if they don’t mechanically push a post higher, it feels a bit pay-to-win for me, because someone with lots of money can put attention-grabbing awards on posts they like. So I’m not sure where I sit on on those kinds of features, because I do believe that it’s helpful to reward people who have donated, so long as they don’t get an advantage in the community for it.


  • It’s sad to say, but merely jumping ship from reddit doesn’t ensure that comrades will be safe online. .world and .ee users seem to be reddit-esque but just in a different ilk.

    It’s no secret that most people on Lemmy came from reddit at some point, and people left reddit for different reasons. The first big waves of users were from piracy subreddits, /r/GenZedong’s quarantine (went to Lemmygrad, which became the biggest federated instance at the time) and /r/ChapoTrapHouse (succeeded by Hexbear, the largest instance at the time). So because these groups were large, whole and somewhat outliers to reddit overall, there was only some broader reddit culture carried across.

    The next big waves were with the API fiasco and Luigi censorship, which largely went to general-purpose instances like .world and .ee for various reasons. Their move was most likely about disdain with the admins’ choices or being forced off the platform, not any opposition to reddit culture in general, so the shift toward reddit-esque community was immediately clear. And while Lemmy has a few design decisions that materially disincentive things like karma-farming, it will take a while, and most likely effort, if we want to counter or improve that culture.


  • Why do LGTBQ+xyz10 always have to make a fuss about everything…

    Because the group (collectively) have a history of being systematically killed and lynched for their sexuality, not to mention the rest of the suppression and oppression. So politics and attacks are taken seriously.

    It also reminds me all the fuss about THEIR safe game space only THEM are allowed to use…

    It’s pretty reasonable to create a community where they feel comfortable and kick out all the unconstructive trolling and arguments that people can find in a million other places. Lemmy.ml kicks out racists and other reactionary wastes, so you’re in a comparable safe space right now. Do you enjoy the lack of Nazi scum and rabid anti-socialist trolls? I do!

    What ever, my point is, if you want to keep Lemmy alive, help out and donate to the creators.

    Many of those comrades have already done this, judging by their comments on various instances.







  • comfy@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule when .ml simps for putin
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    Seriously, the whole definitions of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ is a context-dependent hell with over a century of baggage. It’s hard not to find definition errors in online arguments. In the time of Marx’s original writings the two terms were often treated interchangeably as synonyms, while others consider them mutually exclusive stages of development, while other people stretch the word socialism into anything from Bernie Sanders (a supporter of social capitalism and private property, who Marxists wouldn’t even consider to be socialist) and I’ve even seen some odd fellow claiming anything funded by taxes is socialism… a politically useless definition but unfortunately one many people recognise.

    Then you get the whole confusion of “-ist” and “-ism”. In one context, “communism” can mean a society with a communist mode of production (“money is abolished under communism”, “we’re trying to achieve communism”), while other times “communism” can mean "the political movement aiming to achieve a society with a communist mode of production", and then the word “communist” can describe a person or group subscribing to that movement. Similar with “socialism”/“socialist”. So, common vague questions like “is china socialist?” can be, sincerely, read different ways by different people - they obviously haven’t achieved a [fully] socialist mode of production so many will say no (they still ultimately have capitalist economic structures, whether state dominated or not), but they’re also evidently a communist state and therefore also a socialist state since it’s run by a Communist Party that believes in and attempts a transition towards a socialist mode of production, so many will say yes (in the same way that I call myself a socialist, they call the state of China socialist - neither exists in a socialist mode of production but both subscribe to a socialist school of thought).

    When you begin to see the different schools of thought (especially anarcho-communist vs. Marxist-Leninist schools), and know how some might have different interpretations of similar concepts, it can help clear up some of the confusion and apparent contradictions.

    (Don’t be worried if any of this was confusing, I intentionally picked some of the most confusing cases for dramatic effect! It gets much easier with a little experience.)




  • One of the most important things to understand about political violence is that the state (in this case, the US law enforcement) have a monopoly on legitimate violence. We just saw it today: the SS can legally kill the assassin with no problem, and of course that makes sense. But the point is that political violence against the state, as opposed to fringe groups like neo-Nazis, is hugely asymmetrical. The state doesn’t face repression when they commit violence, for obvious reasons.

    So political violence against the state (such as its electoral system and the candidates) is foolish and ineffective. An escalation, yes! It’s an ineffective strategy, as we saw back around the late 1800s and early 1900s.


  • Taken as an obvious parallel with the attempted assassination of Trump, political violence in America is very clearly a bad thing at this point.

    But trying to stop looming fascism through random political violence is like trying to stop a bear attack by covering yourself in steak sauce.

    In my opinion, the issue isn’t that it was political violence, but it was (as you said) random political violence. Thoughtless and extreme political violence. What happens if Trump was assassinated? I propose that Trump would be replaced by a more competent career politician, more appealing to capital and to the closer of the Democrats. I think Trump is like Hitler in that they’re somewhat of outsiders to politics who understand popularity more than pragmatism, related to that first answer you gave. There’s no point to just cutting off the head of the hydra, the failed tactic of propaganda of the deed already demonstrated that after killing a lot of presidents, kings and police chiefs. The problem with the Republican Party is systematic, not that it’s being headed by Trump. (obviously this all may not be the worldview of the would-be assassin, I’m just explaining this from a non-Republican perspective)

    But political violence as a broad umbrella goes well beyond this example and there’s not really any reason to leave it until it’s too late. I think it’s perfectly appropriate to have a Battle of Cable Street before the fascists get elected, and it (along with later '43 Group violence) worked. The BUF deteriorated due to forceful repression by ex-military antifascists. These are not just random acts of violence, but intentional, tactical violent resistance and then violent suppression of fascist movements. Non-violent methods are generally preferred by anti-fascists today for good reasons (easier to get mass involvement, more sustainable, etc.), but violent actions are a legitimate and effective part of the arsenal against fascism when used appropriately. Attempting an assassination of a state figurehead is not that.






  • If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??

    Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it’s especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won’t sell out and extort the userbase.


  • I’d say most hackers were anarchic full-stop. Most probably without any analysis of economic systems, merely a distaste for rules or authority. It’s intrinsic in the act of hacking.

    There is certainly a huge influence from (socialist) anarchists, such as zine culture and other punk influence, and rejection of intellectual property (e.g. piracy). “Anarcho-capitalism”, as far as I can interpret, is founded on a respect for property and non-aggression. Hacking is possibly the opposite.

    Cyberpunk culture, especially historically but even today despite recuperation, is a direct critique of capitalism-without-government, or where the corporate has become the government, depicting it as a dystopia.