GarbageShootAlt2

The liberals fucking won that election and it was the liberal Hindenburg appointing Hitler to the Chancellorship that facilitated his rise to power, not anything the KPD did. This is disgusting historical revisionism that a search engine could dispel in 5 seconds, but you choose to warp history to make it look like Hitler actually won the election and make the liberals who enabled him seem blameless. It is, in effect, apologia for Nazi collaborators. Exactly appropriate for someone shilling for Dems while they gleefully subsidize genocide.

Most folks on the planet are Indian, Chinese, or in an Islamic country of some sort. Now do tell, dear blakeus12. How do all of those cultures treat LGBTQ+ people :|

China has cities bigger than New York that are pretty trans-positive. These entities aren't monolithic in their values, and in fact I would say they are more diverse in their values for better and for worse, compared to the US. What you are referring to is a cartoon perspective on these ~dozen countries spoon fed to you by western chauvinists.

The monetization director should never say anything ever and should be beaten with a stick if he tries, but the standpoint the article is writing from is clear:

the unveiling of Assassin's Creed Shadows, which quickly gained controversy for numerous allegations that Ubisoft was mispresenting Japanese heritage through unpopular artistic design choices.

"unpopular artistic design choice", hm? What does that mean?

Neither the author's writing nor the quote from the director actually name it specifically, but we can infer that it's probably talking about Yasuke, which means that unfortunately this ghoul director is probably completely right and this author is no better than a concern troll.

The whole article is almost certainly demeaning, as you would expect of a celebrity gossip rag.

Contrary to certain self-victimizing sentiments, I think that the problem is that the platform is more and more overtaken by the topic of the election (and Israel in reference thereto) and it just results in interminable arguing in circles that accomplishes nothing but wasting time. Regardless of the outcome of the election, I think less-annoying activity will increase afterwards.

I rarely see it, but MBFC is an atrocious website that defines bias by distance from the center. It's just nonsense.

Speaking as a Marxist, this is false. Capitalism was once the historical progressive force against feudalism. This was already waning two centuries ago, but it was not always true.

Nazis shouldn't be able to do what they want on their own instances either, they should be crushed there as they should in every space

But also blacklisting is a basic first step that everyone should do, so you aren't wrong there.

In defense of some instance admins, I think they can just literally not know because it's hard to keep tabs on every instance that gets made, but that also means that, if you use that instance, you should totally DM them to let them know (I've had to do this with certain other instances). If the admins persistently ignore those warnings, they should be treated as complicit.

In most lemmy instances, the default feed is a mix of that instance's and popular threads from other instances. Participating in such a thread that you find spontaneously is therefore not anything resembling "brigading," even if other people on your instance also see it spontaneously and participate.

It's not because they think they can be billionaires, it's because they've been taught (and in a minority of cases this is true) that they are better off going after the crumbs that billionaires leave them than trying some other system.

Fight Club and the countless movies like it, which are character-driven and the character is driven by extremely maladjusted desires and behaviors.

"Alright, but isn't that being ableist in Fight Club's case?"

No, if both of the alters acted like normal people, you'd just have an especially weird buddy comedy with none of the conflict of the original movie.

It's silly to act like individual values are some sacred, unassailable thing gifted to everyone's soul by the heavens, rather than something that came from a combination of inborn human traits and memories*, i.e. they are something that is contingent, changing, and in no way above being questioned.

It's also silly to act like it makes sense to just have a blanket acceptance of something if it's an "individual value" even though, when we look at the world, individual values can sometimes be extremely fucked up and we shouldn't allow people who would enact those values to abuse with impunity.

*"memories" is simplistic, but I don't think it is catastrophically so.

Meanwhile anarchist organizing doesn't have cops, it has Agents of Community Defense who definitely aren't cops!

I have nothing against anarchists, but you need to see past slogans to be anything but a useful idiot to neoliberals.

This could be a language barrier thing, but it sounds like you're talking about a production issue, not a censorship issue.

Usually it's my friend Cowbee here who tells people to read things, but here I will:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

"Brainwashing" is a reactionary myth (that originally comes from orientalist stories of Chinese hypnosis that were used to explain-away defectors in the Korean war) that is used to position the believer in a position superior to the masses ("sheeple"), and which only knows how to treat the latter condescendingly as blind followers of this or that, which is not how you do mass organizing if you want to succeed.

It was still a white supremacist country under Biden and all previous Presidents and it would have been so under Kamala. This isn't something that gets changed by elections.

Most people will take "freedom" as an axiom, but how "freedom" is defined varies a lot. In a society where the commons are pretty much fully enclosed and you are homeless, the petite-bourgeois may very well be free, but you really aren't.

I'm going to avoid touching the rest of that and say that a centralized production not making sushi or shawarma is not the same as censoring those things. You can still make them at home, it's not like fish, rice, and seaweed were beyond the reach of the existing production. Again, it sounds like a production issue.

Yes, but you're going to need to find a way to think beyond that, because both parties understand that it's in their interests to oppose rcv, so "vote democrat until we get rcv" effectively means "vote democrat forever".

Fundamentally, there is a limit to the extent that a capitalist democracy will tolerate actual democratic power, because eclipsing the power of capitalists obviously means threatening their position. They will not sit idly by and allow their power to be voted away.

That's an easy one, conservatism came first because it preceded the founding of the US and was championed by many in the Continental Congress.

I'm really struggling to follow some of this. Are you saying the Soviets didn't need to fight Germany and didn't need to take as much time as they could manage to prepare to do so?

I chose to avoid most of the bait so far, even with those cloying :)s that you like adding so much, but this one is too disgusting. It's historical revisionism pure and simple that they were ever "allies" with Germany. They had a treaty to try and stall German invasion, but they never imagined things would go otherwise than one party defeating the other (though they did underestimate how soon the Germans would attack).

Patents are not, at their core, a good thing. They are nice for an idealized and transient scenario, but the reality of capitalism is that the vast, vast majority of investment, production, etc. are done by a handful of large companies, and that includes R&D. Patents are, in reality, overwhelmingly one of the many tools large corporations have to shut out upstarts. In short, it entrenches the power of monopolies, trusts, and similar large businesses.

And that's without even starting on how the law can be abused and, with the way our legal systems work, it is fundamentally more abusable for the side that has more money and can afford top corporate lawyers to concoct convenient arguments, leaving little Jimmy in the dust.

I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.

The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn't just implode of their own accord. Now, it's fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren't able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that's a very different assertion from "communism doesn't work".

and there’s apparently nothing to be done to fix it in our lifetimes,

This really isn't true, and treating it as true will lead to a much nastier future than "it feels really hot out most of the time". It has implications for agriculture and ecological collapse, with entire societies being destroyed and some of the more privileged ones turning to eco-fascism. It's a much darker future than you give it credit for, but also much less inevitable.

No, gay marriage is what the US culture war pivoted on for a long time because it doesn't involve disruption to normal cishet social currents and doesn't require anything of the state actually be provided to people, plus it represents a benefit to the gay members of the bourgeoisie just as much as to the common person.

Furthermore, like in Taiwan, gay marriage in the US was not approved by referendum, it was basically a fluke from the Supreme court independent of other efforts. There are still nearly as many states as before where it is a large popular sentiment that if your kid is gay, they are sick, and state legislatures that are, as we speak, preparing to bring gay marriage back to the SC to get its protection removed.

Edit: As an aside, despite your chauvinistic, idealist view of cultures being "there yet" or not, using China as the example, lateral cultural differences also exist, and ignorance of these makes it very difficult to actively evaluate what a cultural attitude is. In China's case, there is in most places a passive homophobia (which is still homophobia), but they generally don't have the same homophobic culture war front that we saw in America. They are more like a broad, cultural "don't ask, don't tell", which is in keeping with even Imperial Chinese traditions. There is obviously resistance to the existing movements to do things like legalizing gay marriage, but it's a losing battle for the conservatives, who are mostly passive on this issue, and several of the practical benefits of gay marriage have already been won by other concessions, allowing gay couples rights concerning medical and financial decisions and so on through their guardianship system.

All this to say "Is gay marriage legal?" should not be treated as a binary for queer people having any recognition.

P.P.S. China also has multiple dedicated clinics for transgender people in various cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

It bugs me just saying "the Chinese" did it. It was the Chinese company Ex-Robot.

If diverse opinions were allowed, what was the entire focus on eradicating factionalism?

The general line according to Stalin (e.g. in "Foundations of Leninism") was that there should be thorough and exhaustive debates among those with differing opinions within the Party but that, once a resolution was reached by a vote following the debate, further fighting on the topic as a Party official was essentially a form of wrecking, though of course matters were revisited periodically (for good and for ill). Even if you disagreed, you were then expected to go along with whatever the motion was in the interest of the integrity of the Party as an actor. This was "Diversity of opinion, unity of action" [edit: I got the motto slightly wrong, see cowbee]

I don't really have a developed opinion on it (I guess I should have left this to cowbee for that reason) but I definitely have sympathy for this approach when I look at it in the context of glory hounds like Trotsky being constantly contrarian for the sake of political brinkmanship instead of, you know, acting in good faith and believing in things besides that he should be top dog. There shouldn't be tolerance for people like that, and the long-term harm that Trotsky's opposition bloc did to the SU is hard to fathom.

I disagree about sortition, but I appreciate pushing back on elitist, misanthropic bullshit like you did. I think elections with a strong ability to quickly recall faithless representatives is a much better solution because it involves the decision-making of the whole community, rather than a community member chosen at random.

Counterpoint: "Fact checkers" with an institutional bias are an excellent way to cover for lies promoted by those institutions

That's not at all what the quote is and neither is the top level commenter's interpretation, and I think it not being these is pretty obvious if you read No Exit. The point that he was making (and this is putting it crassly because I know jack shit about his Heidegger-based phenomenology) is the presence of other people forces us to be self-conscious, to regard ourselves as the object of someone else's perception and judgement. That's why Sartre goes out of his way to say the room (their jail cell in Hell, effectively) had no reflective surfaces, so that the character's perception of themselves could only come from the people they are stuck with (this doesn't entirely make sense, but I am pretty sure it's what he meant). You can read him talk about some of the premises informing this by checking out his writing on "The Look," like is quoted below this comic.

So it's a slightly obtuse point about intersubjectivity that people have turned into a cutesy way of talking about their own misanthropy. It's probably more emblematic of the meaning of the quote how people in this thread, original commenter especially, are talking about silently judging people for this and that action.

I'm happy I could be helpful!

I guess this is in some ways an admittal of defeat

There's no need to claim defeat or victory, we're just talking; Success in communication is determined by the extent to which we are able to understand each other, and I think we did alright.

I think i still need to educate myself more on this topic.

I can't claim to represent any perspective but my own, but the text that really helped me to begin to see things differently was Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Feel free to DM me/necropost here if there's anything I can help with.

I find this reply very strange because it's the core point of Marxism that it's dialectical but materialist. It has a lot of forebears, but Hegel is the most direct and obvious of them.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.

-- Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

i don’t think social change boils down to just one theory.

If we believe that the universe fundamentally makes sense, then it must stem from that that it can all be explained on the same terms. Furthermore, within a domain, the extent to which a theory is unable to explain some part of that domain is the extent to which it either fails or is in-utero just a component of a larger theory whose other parts can cover those other areas. Not only can social change boil down to one theory, if you believe we live in an interconnected, logical world, it must boil down to one theory. Obviously there are many competitors for that title, and none of them are yet developed enough to properly claim it, but it is a legitimate and even a necessary title.

Edit: Sorry for piling on about the dialectics part, I see Cowbee did go over it later. fwiw I think he didn't represent materialism fairly, but part of why I included the Engels quote is because I think he does represent Hegelian idealism and its fundamental problem (How can this dialectic of humans -- material beings -- take place in the world of ideas?) fairly.

Under censorship you’ll not create . . . good meals

Are you saying that the Soviets censored recipes?

Is it really that hard to imagine that someone who loves you was hoping to see you happy instead of as a moldering corpse?

Seems like campaign finance reform is a more pertinent question then.

It's been happening a lot longer than that, that's a classic misspelling.

both the Communist and the Nazis were against democracy

This is ridiculous, the Communists opposed the Weimar Republic, but they absolutely supported democracy. In their view, in fact, they supported a much more authentic form of democracy by extricating private interests from the process.

Hindenburg used decrees to work with the Nazis so they could form a government.

We keep glossing over this "liberals siding with Nazis" thing

The Communists however never tried to work with the democratic forces.

I really think the word you're looking for here is "liberal"

Point should be obvious.

You're making significant assumptions, such as any of the liberals actually being willing to work the with the Communists, which would be a hell of a change for the SPD after that business with the Freikorps. Otherwise, the argument is just "join the SPD" and assume that they can bring their voters with them while completely abandoning their revolutionary project and putting themselves under the discipline of a liberal party. I feel that this is something of a muddy issue that you're interpreting in a convenient way.

"Aren't you as well?" Fair question, and there's a lot about this situation that I can't speak to, but what I said before I am completely sure holds, which is that Hitler gained power, on the most proximate level, because of liberal collaborators.

Slavery looks a lot more popular when you don't let the slaves vote. If the slaves could vote -- i.e. if there was a greater degree of democracy -- there would surely be no slavery. It was the repression of the political power of a large segment of the population that enabled slavery.

Surely, if we educate people on class consciousness, they will generally act in alignment with the common interest, right prole? Certainly it's not a better solution to dictate morality to them unilaterally through some technocratic institution (that's rather like what the aristocracy was), because we have no particular way of ensuring that they will act in the common interest -- which is not especially their interest -- unlike the common people, for whom the common interest is their interest.

You probably want to replace "atheism" with "antitheism" in that context. I would disagree either way, but I think you'd have a point with antitheism.