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Linux
Reddit bad
Am I doing it right?
Overthrow the bougoisie
Cook the bolognese…
Bean
Jean
Beef stroganoff
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Happydam Husain
Ponder the orb
It’s only us vs the billionaires! Don’t let them try to pit us against each other!
Anyone who owns more than two houses deserves to die!
Anyone who works X job is a bastard, no matter how much good they do.
No, I will not run for local elections.
No, I will not give up Xitter I need it to follow my niche artists despite them having accounts on multiple other platforms including BlueSky.
No I will not give up Facebook. I need it to poke meemaw and check the marketplace for things I’ll never buy or sell because Craigslist amirite?
At least all you twats use ETA less than they do on reddit. That bugs me way more than it should.
You know you’re also using the internet, right?
Yeah ya see, he’s stuck. how will he spread the light of his superiorioriority unless he comes to speak to the filth?
It was probably a sacrifice but Im so glad he took the time to show us what is possible.
What an inspiration
There’s also the part that is into crushing with a tank people who don’t hate the USA more than anything in the universe.
All those wanna be commies live in the USA too it’s fucking sad
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Where would you rather live?
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Ah… so let me get this straight. So instead of being poor in a capitalist country, you’d rather be poor in a communist country?
Really? Are you really genuinely ignorant or you simply can’t fathom that non-US people not only exist but also lead happier lives?
That’s great but doesn’t answer the question
No, he’s not. He’s talking about supposedly-socialist people in the USA who idealize vaguely socialism related countries like Russia or China, and think they would have a better life in these countries.
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Most of the world’s commies actually live in China, strangely enough.
Not the ones on Lemmy lol
Honestly I feel like most people on here are just tired of the ultra-capitalistic hell neoliberalism threw us into and want a better system that doesn’t rape dry the Earth and doesn’t allow companies to have the same wealth as entire states. Those people you mention are just a very loud, screaming minority.
I’m part of these people, I think most of them are social democrat and don’t have any illusion about supposedly socialist countries.
Yes, they are a minority since .world became the biggest player, but they are still very visible if you mention those subjects and countries, they are going to pop up.
I have trouble spelling that word, too.
dont forget star trek
And beans, for some reason.
Jeans too
Also, contemplating orbs.
And Denver Post subscribers
And the germans
SPRICH
DEUTSCH
DU
SPRÖSSLING
EINER
Live long, and may the force be wingardium leviosa!
- Capt. Jean-Luc Severus Skywalker
Linux, reddit bad, socialism and star trek are alright. The bean thing I don’t get. Never am I gonna spend energy learning about it either.
The bean thing I don’t get
I recall that being a thing on Reddit too for a bit… Just the internet doing its thing. People like random shit - it all gud.
Bagging Reddit is actually kinda discouraged, more Linux and communism. Or at least screeching about capitalism at every opportunity.
Yeah, for a website forged almost exclusively from former Redditors and especially ones who got burned by Reddit’s abysmal leadership, I rarely see complaints about Reddit on here – arguably far fewer than on Reddit itself.
The socialists are the native inhabitants of this land, the Redditors are the ruthless imperialist colonisers.
I’m half-Redditor, half-socialist. I hope I’m still welcome among those with a pure socialist heritage.
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He says that because the creators are tankies and so were the first communities built around them like .ml administrated by the creators. Last year’s Redditors migration after the API change moved the political center more towards social democracy and the people center towards .world.
Indeed, but the old tankie instances still exist, same as always. The centrists went elsewhere, to non-tankie instances that were set up for them.
Colonization involves taking somebody else’s land, but this is more like creating more land out of thin air and settling there.
I think those people consider the Lemmy federation to be their playground, and they are being xenophobic about others, but since there is not supposed to be xenophobia in their ideology, they call it colonialism instead.
Or maybe the Redditors are refugees and the lemmy nativists have convinced themselves they are eating their pets.
That’s been a welcome change in the last ~6 months. It was a fire hose blast of people going back and forth on whether a ‘thing’ was brought over from reddit, and whether or not it was welcome.
Do I want to open a can of worms by asking what the ‘thing’ is?
Oh, just insert whatever you remember from reddit. Replies that are obviously jokes but off topic, mimicking a meme or such; doing the ‘follow the link’ meme (though I only remember that one popping up once or twice); sounding out a sentence one word per reply… I saw all of those get panned or promoted. Some people screamed about leaving such habits at reddit, others thought they were the height of humor.
There’s a lot of those jokes that will hopefully die on the platform. They had well and truly run their course even on Reddit.
Also make sure you double check if you browse by all and decide to leave a comment
Lol since you mentioned you got banned i had a look… your comments were fuckin awful! Why world you advertise this? I’m absolutely embarrassed for ya… that you still feel this hurt when you got banned trollin.
I went to some other comms to check their logs and it looks like you get banned everywhere you post, fella.
Haha! nothing effin funnier than reading the hurt feelings of someone who got what they deserved.
Thanks for that, really <3
Why not show my comments then lol
Oh I see you’re a regular poster in USAauthoritarianism. 😂
Glad you enjoy sniffing my taint. Come back anytime.
I definitely will 🤣
Clutches pearls
Omg did you pull those out of… Dude wash those off first…
If you had read your own sources then you would have posted the article you are quoting from now first. It’s weird that you assume someone will click on every link in your Wikipedia page. A war is not necessarily genocide. I think you have trouble with understanding what genocide is. You are simply grasping at straws. USA is now killing people in Gaza? So anyone who does business with United States is now USAs fault? “Death to America”? You’re calling for death to Americans while at the same time you are crying about genocide. You’re nothing but a clown. Also, you’re from Iowa lmao. Please stop embarrassing yourself.
So for starters saying “a war is not necessarily a genocide” in response to an example of a genocidal act (America’s continued bombing of Japan after it served no valid military purpose) is genocide apologia.
Secondly questioning the USA’s role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza when the genocide is being explicitly carried out with American bombs is also genocide apologia.
Thirdly “Death to America” refers to the American political project, its imperialist ambitions and its global hegemony, not the mass killing of Americans that you seem to think it does, which is why saying “Death to America” is not a call to commit genocide and doesn’t make the person you were arguing with a hypocrite.
Thanks Marx (nice name lol)
Your anecdotes are irrelevant. You could have just posted the context, but you didn’t. Wonder why?
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.
Ah, I see it now.
You see what?
Thank you, I’ve been having a lot of depression and feeling pretty worthless, but comments like these remind me that no matter how bad things get at least I’ll never be this much of a loser.
Feel better brother
what did you do??
For lemmygrads this mf started off saying something about “time to take your medicine” to an OP in .ml and then started smoking crack right there in the thread.
I got banned for genocide denial when I called Ukrainian a genocide. ML tankies are a special breed of stupid.
Thank you! Your og ban wasn’t as funny as i’d like but the second “ban evasion” banhammer made my lips curl up some. Thanks for bringing that to my attention!
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Let me guess, you commented on a community nodded by the Lemmy.ml admin?
lol this is great. Sorry, non wannabe commies get brigaded around these parts
Yeah is is kind of wild. They act as if I killed the cat
It’s just a huge problem on Lemmy. Right now there isn’t enough content really to justify defederating so it’s like they are the weird family members than you can’t stand but have to somewhat tolerate
The problem is that they are on lots of instances now
bears eat beets. Bears, beets, “Battlestar Galactica.”
Beans!
I use Arch, btw
You forgot the 100 comment posts on anything mozilla does
Say Windows bad as well. We’re not allowed to use Windows for some reason… I use it, and I’m not sorry, but I really don’t care about internet doots.
Dear windows users
Not enough blaming capitalism for problems which have nothing to do with capitalism.
Plus space capitalism with the Ferengi.
Wait, where did this image come from? I’ll love this. Is this shen OC or is this an edit?
Started with this guy, then did my thing.
Dude you rock! Love what you did above
Holy fucking shit - amazing
And linux!
…and Linux.
I realize we’re inherently not capitalistic platform because everyone has the access to own their portion. Pretty cool imo and not to toot the horn for the millionth time, it definitely seems like the future of the internet
Blud thinks this is Mastodon or smth
That’s the neat part. From my perspective, this *is* Mastodon.
Who?
I mean, I dunno. It’s been the “future of the internet” since the 90’s, but nobody can solve the fundamental problems with such systems existing in the actual real material world, so we just get hit with an ever dwindling supply of larger and larger social media monopolies. Same as it ever was.
My partner has been insinuating that I’m a communist recently. I don’t think I’m a communist, I simply want to seize the means of production for the people.
good. kind of like an anti twitter.
Don’t forget about GNU and Linux mememery.
And Star Trek.
Wait, it’s all socialism?
Always has been.
Don’t get me started on Star Trek
Ok, I’ve never watched Star Trek and feel left out. Where do I start?
What about GNU+Linux?
Thank you 5714! My new favorite word: Memerery
You don’t need to sell it to me, I already love it.
I mean… It’s one of the reasons I like it so much here.
Ahem, this is a community
What did you expect?
What’s wrong with socialism? I like socialism.
I want to seize the means of production as much as the next guy but it gets kinda boring after a while if that’s the only content available
Sometimes there are cats! That’s always fun! Some of those cats want socialism too, but they’re still cats!
It doesnt get boring hearing about how judges demolish bodily autonomy of women and commit other atrocities in the name of corporate freedom.
Ah you mean in the US? I see, well there’s also the rest of the world
Are you positive? I feel like I need a source on that
If this was memes@lemmy.ml you would’ve been banned for this comment
When you assume anyone complaining about .ml and Hexbear must be a liberal
There’s a massive overlap between being anti-Marx and being liberal. Doesn’t mean all anti-Marxists are liberals, but most are.
I consider myself conservative.
I’ll let myself out before this comment thread explodes
Conservatives fall under the umbrella of liberalism, generally.
It’s statistically likely, as is their inability to find the block button.
No it’s more likely that they are an actual leftist. China and Ruzzia are (and the SU was!) fascist hellholes that have nothing to do with socialism and/or communism besides screaming it of the windows all the time.
And people who delude themselves to believe something else are really annoying…
I agree in spirit! However the soviet union was neither capitalist nor communist, and fascism is a form of capitalism which means the soviet union wasn’t fascist, but rather something else entirely.
Fun fact: blocking a community doesn’t stop you from mentioning them in a joking manner elsewhere!
Tankies are authoritarians and therefore cannot call themselves socialist
For clarity, comtemporaries of Marx and Engels also called them authoritarian, hence On Authority.
I’m just sick of the fucking tankies telling me World War 3 will finally give us workers rights.
They claim both sides are equally as bad while ignoring the fact that their side has never even been tested. Therefore they have no fucking clue that they wouldn’t be worse.
Shill Stein has already been outed, West is an incompetent blowhard and only shows up ever four years to suggest impractical and irrelevant nonsense,
And JFK….
The Green Party is essential a giant spoiler campaign.
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If both sides are the Democratic Party and the tankies, then yes, both are bad, and both are far less bad than the Republicans so vote Democrat please. Drag doesn’t like it when Trump kills all the trans people and women.
When you grow that third arm the production will increase by half by default…
Chernobyl was a long con to create production in order to cease the means of it.
???
…???
Do you think a tankie is someone who likes tanks?
Tankies are fake communists who worship dictators.
I don’t think there are real communists honestly. I don’t think communism is ever really a “viable” solution unless you suppress freedoms. Also someone will always rise to the top. Communism is just one big corporation that you can not leave.
Then you don’t know what communism is. I’ve never met a non-socalist who knows what socialism is, or can describe how or why socialism has failed in the past.
At the risk of starting another argument, I have heard it described thusly—
Suppose you have some number of apples and some number of people who want the apples.
- Capitalism is where one person owns all the apples and everyone has to work for them to get an apple.
- Socialism is where the apples are distributed evenly to all the people who want them.
- Communism is where unlimited apples fall out of the sky and everyone can have as many as they need.
Now, this quote was originally used by capitalists to mock communism, but I think it’s really not a bad analogy. Think about it: Star Trek, another beloved Lemmy staple, takes place in a communist society. Everyone works whatever job they want contributing to society and in return, everyone gets whatever they need provided for by the state. It’s not truly post scarcity, since human greed always outstrips any finite amount of resources. But there is no distinction of rich or poor in Star Trek. People are judged by their intelligence, skill, and merit, and rewarded proportionally. At the same time, there is no concept of money, mostly (except when the plot needs it). What good is money when all your necessities are taken care of? All but your wildest desires can be conjured up at a snap of your fingers, and all the state asks in return is that you do what you can to contribute. It is a mutually beneficial relationship that most people have learned to be content with. That, my friends, is an ideal depiction of communism.
- Capitalism is where one person owns all the copies of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room
- Socialism is where the copies of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room are distributed evenly to all the people who want them
- Communism is where a transgender furry breaks the DRM on the DVD and publishes a torrent of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room
I think the Star Trek ideal is not viable in the least as people will always be self centered. They will either seek either to make there own lives better or to make there families lives better. Also Star Trek changes its narrative depending on the movie or series.
I don’t think humans would be naturally self centered if they lived in an environment that actually encouraged sharing and cooperation instead of actively encouraging and rewarding psychopathy and selfishness.
There were likely people who thought it impossible that wolves would someday become domesticated, and eventually be our best buds, due to their ‘unchangeable’ nature.
We are all products of our environment.
I think a public production and distribution of goods can be handled democratically which will eventually happen organically with a strong and adaptable democracy, furthermore I agree any other form of Communism such as the CCP is just malarkey.
Accuracy of your definition aside, you should realize that they’re not the ones cheering for World War 3, it’s the people who want to invade Iran who are doing that.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, the Phillippines, Crimea, and Ukraine (just to name some ongoing conflicts)
But sure, its all the west with their “mutual defence pacts” and their “incentivizing diplomacy through trade”, Those beligerent bastards.
Drag isn’t a tankie, and drag wants Ukrainian troops to march on Moscow because Putin is a fuckhead and drag wants to see the fall of the Russian empire
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, the Phillippines, Crimea, and Ukraine
What world do you live in? Hong Kong had some protests four years ago, Taiwan has never had anything happen and nothing appears to be about to happen, Tibet is a conflict that was resolved seventy years ago, and The Phillipines is some boats ramming each other (which isn’t good don’t get me wrong, but it’s hardly a military conflict). You might as well say that Atlanta is an ongoing conflict because it’s still occupied by the Union!
Crimea/Ukraine is the only thing that’s a military conflict that you mentioned, and the people actively escalating it and sabotaging peace talks with regards to it are the western countries.
British Citizen in 1910: India is a conflict that was resolved 100 years ago.
I don’t think you’ll find too many bOtH siDEs accelerationists among the liberals, but don’t let this get in the way of some good ol’ fashioned uninformed ignorance!
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.
Hilarious! Thanks for that.
equally
Drag disagrees.
I mean that’s why they are called tankies :P It’s a derogatory word originally used to describe “socialists” defending tanks being sent into ukraine by the soviet union, and then was quickly used to describe all “socialists” defending genocide, imperialism, and authoritarianism.
Nine times out of ten it’s incorrectly defined by idealists that haven’t figured out that a fair amount of American sociological and economic standards are already steeped in socialist services, and the rest of the rhetoric that defines socialism would absolutely fail if attempted in America.
In short, nine times out of ten, a socialist has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about, but just parroting smug bullshit that they think makes them look edgy and educated.
a fair amount of American sociological and economic standards are already steeped in socialist services
If you believe this to be true then you don’t understand what socialism actually is. You seem to be of the mind that any publicly funded service or welfare is socialist, and I don’t blame you for thinking this since it is what the mainstream American political discourse would have you believe.
In short, nine times out of ten, a socialist has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about, but just parroting smug bullshit that they think makes them look edgy and educated.
When you say this immediately after demonstrating that you actually have no idea what you’re talking about it’s a pretty bad look. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Drag thinks the means of production should be owned by the workers. Drag is curious why you think the American workers own “a fair amount” of the means of production.
Or they are arguing against democracy
socialism itself is just, kinda weird. From a philosophical perspective it makes sense and has clear distinctions. But from a practical view it’s just sort of. Capitalism but if it was more confusing for some reason. If you go too far into one direction, it’s just communism, and that’s not socialism, obviously. The other direction and it’s literally just capitalism, so it has to sit in this weird space between where you can’t engage with the best parts of capitalism (or it just weirdly handicaps parts of capitalism) and communism.
and then of course you’ve got people (probably grifters) like hasan piker who claim to be socialist while having millions of dollars, but doing literally nothing with it, because investing it wouldn’t be socialist, and you can’t really just give it away, because well, it’s a lot of money. I mean you could, but it’s also just, sort of redundant at that point.
Realistically he should be investing that money into a lot of different things, increasing returns on revenues, and creating a content creator collective or something silly like that, but to my knowledge he hasn’t probably because he’s either stupid or lazy. I don’t blame him for either of those things though.
socialism, particularly modern western socialism that’s based on capital needs a fundamental proof of concept work-through before we can really do anything with it, i think.
Capitalism, while it has problems, it at least makes sense on a fundamental human perspective. I own things, you own things, we own things, that also applies to capital as well. It’s so fundamentally tied to the human experience and history that it’s just sort of hard to deviate from. Even china does a lot of capitalism.
man that was much longer than i anticipated. Apologies in retrospective lol.
Anyway for the second part of the admittedly very old and dead joke by this point in the post. It’s a meme about socialism on the internet. (particularly a farther left space on the internet)
The confusion stems from the fact that you seem not to know what you’re talking about. Like at all.
If you go too far into one direction, it’s just communism
This is a misunderstanding so fundamental that it’s a completely beaten dead horse of a joke.
i’ve seen socialism defined as anything from early USSR under lenin, to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.
It’s incredibly broad depending on how you want to apply it. And technically, communism is actually a subset of socialism.
Capitalism is likewise pretty broad as well, but generally the ownership of capital is traceable and has some form of root ownership. Even things like stocks still have clearly defined ownership. Loans are weird, but the ownership there is clearly defined.
Under socialism loans may not even be possible, depending on how aggressive with it you are. Unless you lent to a third party, like a separate state/country i guess.
IDK what definition you’re working with here, but there isn’t much flexibility allowing you very much room to differentiate it here. I’m really not sure how you’re going to work out of this one to be honest.
Like philosophically, socialism is theoretically simple. it’s the implementation that’s hard. The idea is pretty simple, it’s the concept that there is no singular ownership, but collective ownership. You could define this as something like “anybody who has any investment in any product/good or service has ownership” but this gets sort of confusing. If i buy product from the goods company, does that mean i now own a “share” of the goods company? If i can, does this mean buying literal shares of the company would be “negative” shares? Or is this backwards, buying product produces a negative share, while investing provides a positive share. Does this influence the “shares” of the employees of the company? Are these the same shares? Can i simply out own the shares of any employee with (literal) capital? Or is buying product not applicable in this scenario. That seems reasonable to me, so we’ll omit that.
Where does currency even come from? The government? The global trade market? Who owns that? Since the money is in my possession, and it’s doing work for me, i must own it, at least partially, but it’s also capable of doing work for others, so do other people also own a part of the capital that i hold? That would be weird so let’s simply ascribe capital as a means of temporarily holding “schizo” capital.
so now we have a socialist society, that has private capital, and relatively isolated businesses. The employees own a share of the business. We still havent determined how that’s proportioned. But we can assume they do, so we have a relatively capitalist market, as that’s generally how a market is going to work most effectively (also that would literally just be communism at that point), unless you are either god, or the worlds most powerful supercomputer that can simply predict the needs of a market at a whim. Or you just allow no flexibility in the market (surely this won’t cause problems) with companies that don’t have direct ownership, which is not dissimilar to how the silicon valley works, minus the VC funding.
So we’ve basically just created capitalism, but different. Not that this is a bad thing. It’s just, an odd problem.
At the end of the day, it’s either going to approach communism, or capitalism, there is no distinct mechanism of socialism. I generally refer to this as an “approaching zero problem” as it has no clear definition, and if you go far enough you’re just going to end up back where you started, one way or the other.
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.
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.
yeah, so the way that i see it is that communism is a specific subset of socialism with very clearly defined restrictions, however i think it suffers from a generally similar problem, regarding the lack of specificity at least. Capitalism manages to do away with it on a fundamental basis by simply moving that to the markets itself. I guess to preface this entire comment, i see the lack of market flexibility as a fundamental issue with everything other than capitalism, as it’s a decentralized system that works to fit the market needs.
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.
This is one of my primary concerns when i see people talking about economic socialism, there is no clearly defined mechanism of operation for it.
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.
it also depends on the period of time as well, you could make the argument that under lenin it was communist/socialist, but under stalin it was more authoritarian/dictatorship. It certainly made strides and advancements from the previous state that russia was in at the time, so there’s something to be said about that, although it’s pretty clear to most people that this was primarily due to industrialization and increasing productivity, which levels off in a goods market eventually.
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).
i’m not sure how applicable this is, since communism and capitalism are economic systems, the chinese government would be more authoritarian capitalist than anything. And as you said “socialism” as defined is a very broad goal, so it’s really hard to even interpret that statement to begin with.
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.
yeah i’m just sort of surprised that with the modern age being here and present and what not, that somebody hasn’t tried simulating a few hundred variants of a socialist economy to write a thesis on yet, it shouldn’t be difficult, and i’m sure it would make for an interesting read. It’s definitely an odd problem to have with something so popular among farther left types. Even the far right nazis know what they want to do when they get into government lol.
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.
to be clear, i’m not inherently dismissing socialism, i’m just dismissing the particular issue i see present with it. And while the equality aspect is arguably true, i feel like you could just as easily apply socialist policy to a capitalist system and get a similar result, while retaining the very clear operation of capitalism.
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.
idk i guess i just feel like we kinda hit the nail on the head with the “decentralized self regulating market economy” idea from the get go. There are problems with it, and notable issues for sure, but that’s why the government exists, to take care of these problems. There are also some interesting ethical implications you get into with either system as well. That’s a whole other discussion though.
I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.
If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in. Probably could’ve read das kapital, and taken notes on it, and then shot those notes at a professor or other talking head online or even just some other random commenter, and then probably been done with it in the amount of time you’ve spent talking about that shit on lemmy. And that’s probably the most dense and fundamental book on the subject if we’re not getting into weird french postmodern bullshit.
Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:
to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.
Which sounds pretty much completely incoherent at its face. I have no conception of what that would look like, because the ownership of capital is a foundational enough belief in capitalism to be what the system is named after. It’s like socialism but without any socialized stuff, or communism without communal ownership.
Like, I’ve never heard of socialism entailing that you buying a product a company sells entitles you to shares in that company. You’re not a worker at said company, that doesn’t really make any sense. You also later on talk about “schizo” capital (?), shit about where money comes from (you can answer this one in capitalism, as well. Also, money =/= capital), and the economic calculation problem, which, I dunno man. I’m not going to say so much that that shit’s made up, but it’s not really a big problem, and it’s also a problem that capitalism still basically has to reckon with at a fundamental level, it just ignores it and then decides to crash every decade or so, so that the market can “prune” itself or whatever bullshit. Go hit the paul cockshott vape pen, or go read the book about walmart or whatever.
Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth. Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted, maybe there’s a better measure of “efficiency” there. You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be. You can’t assume that there aren’t externalized costs that aren’t factored into the initial price, like how suburbia is subsidized, like how climate change is happening. You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.
Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.
I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.
i probably should, although my specific interest is more in the sociological aspect of things, so while it would be rather informative it’s probably not ultimately what i’m looking for. Although it would solve the obvious problem here lol.
If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in.
i haven’t although that’s mostly because i don’t really talk about socialism, i mostly engage with other political things i find more pressing/interesting. My previous bit explains most of it though.
Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:
yeah, which is why i made the point about needing some sort of real proof of concept application that we can work with more completely. Because right now the existing literature base is either, very old, or very academic, and while there’s nothing wrong with academic works, it should probably get some more attention outside of that. If for no other reason than to stop people from making shit up about it lol.
Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth.
ironically, i’d be willing to bet money those are all owned by one singular company, just sold under different names with slightly different manufacturing between them.
Technically, the reason you have different brands of peanut butter is the same the reason you have things like federated lemmy instances. We could have one centralized lemmy instance, but if one of those peanut butter manufacturers for example, laces all of their production batches with the death chemical for example, you can simply just use a different one. (not that this currently applies)
Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted,
from my knowledge, most of that food waste is farther down the consumption chain. A lot of production waste product is going to be reprocessed and consumed via other means, livestock feed being one example. A large example of food waste currently is stores throwing out perfectly good food rather than simply giving it away or something. Another big problem is food waste at the individual level. A lot of food ends up being wasted by the ultimate consumer of the food itself.
You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be.
this is true, but i think rationality is a potentially dangerous and arbitrary distinction here. If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example. I think markets need to be balanced somewhere between rationality, and market needs. Capitalism has the very distinct ability when compared to socialism/communism of allowing the market itself to stabilize on what is provided and what gets consumed. An interesting example of this is the internal combustion engine, once built to run on what was ostensibly a waste product from refining oil, is now the primary use case for refining oil. If gas gets too expensive, people will move to other things like EV’s for example, although there’s arguments against this, for example transportation is generally pretty important. I think a market functioning like this under a socialist/communist economic system is either going to be very very difficult to correctly implement, or that it will end up removing a significant degree of personal freedom and liberty from day to day life, which is not something i’m fond of from a conceptual level for multiple reasons.
You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.
yeah, and this is why the US isn’t a free market capitalist state. It’s a relatively free market with restrictions that are supposed to prevent this kind of thing, and have before in the past. For example your previous peanut butter example, that’s why there are literally 15 different brands. If there was only one, it would literally be a monopoly.
Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.
this is true, and i think this is the ultimate reason behind that schizo rant i went on in my previous comment. You simply cannot assume something about any given system. A lot of those comments i made might be rather silly, but it’s not like its improbable of happening in a socialist system based on capital either.
capitalism sits in the unique position compared to socialism where it has a self regulated market flow. Any state planned economy is not going to function like this in any significant capacity. And that’s arguably a significant drawback of any system.
If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example.
See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing. People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively, which seems pretty inefficient, people might also try to move, or leave your system as they get older. So I’d expect some level of brain drain there, which leads to another point: You’re also decreasing any worker productivity you would gain from old joe who ran the lumber yard still being around, so you can ask him questions about the quirks of the lumber yard. Maybe old joe even just boosts worker productivity by the fact that he makes his family and friends happier, and more able to tolerate bad working conditions, longer work hours, or more desirable than that, maybe he gives them the will to learn more, and bring you better higher level jobs where they will be ultimately much more efficient for whatever time they do end up spending on production. But back to rationality, that’s just a method you’re using to evaluate things. In this case, maybe “efficiency”, which is sort of a proxy value for other, more real values. Efficiency to do what? Usually by, economic efficiency, we mean like, we’re minimizing the necessary inputs, to affect some productive capacity, while maximizing the outputs, in like, a material way. But then, maybe the sort of our core value that we’re chasing after should be to maximize the happiness that old joe is capable of giving to his friends and family, or something harder to define and measure, and more along those lines. That, that would maybe be a flaw of socialist systems, that we don’t have some universal definition of a “good” to work towards, but I would say that, again, that’s not a distinct flaw of those systems in particular, and in capitalism, that just gets subsumed by a bunch of other bullshit values. You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.
Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take. To take the risk that, by defining the good, you eliminate other definitions of “good” that could’veexisted, and the freedom to have those other definitions of good. It’s better to take that risk, and define that good, and then work towards it (and mostly, even to point out that such a core value exists, in practice, even acknowledge that it exists, more than anything else.). I think it’s better to do that, than substitute your “good” for “freedom”, which, like efficiency (and even like “good”, but shhh), is just a proxy value for other things. In the market, in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things. We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy. Every little corporation gets their “good”, and then they fight it out in the marketplace. Ends up that actually, we’ve just blown this up to be even every single individual, because, again, we’ve adopted freedom as our current value. Swim in the water, stop knowing that it’s there. Big shocker when the individuals at the highest level of the market, having passed through many tests to get there, big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted, and when they can’t implement said definition if they even have one, because when they decide to do so, they get curbstomped for engaging in too much long term thinking compared to just sucking up as much of the industry as is possible at the time. I’m also not even saying that a monopoly is bad necessarily, right, as an alternative to this, I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical to the supposed value of capitalism, which should be to use market economics to do these calculations at basically every level (which I’m also not convinced would be more efficient then just doing them somewhere else). It also tends to be bad because it still exists within this context in which all this short term incentive is naturally floating around and in which the highest powers in the land are naturally selected to be bad authoritarians.
But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives. Suburbanization blows up out of white flight as america, conceived as a sort of colonial experiment in a time of slavery, obviously has a lot of hangups around 18th century conceptions of racial superiority. Then you have the corporate lobbying that affects the political system, on top of the general political system just being tailored for the wealthy from the jump (and being tuned to the wealthy over time), and badda bing badda boom pretty soon you’re ripping out LA’s streetcars to instead flood the streets with massive chunky automobiles that kill a ton of people per year, fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now, so we’re basically locked in, and none of the fundamental problems with cars as a format have been solved, even with EVs, you’re still getting particulate emissions from brakes, lithium mining issues, you’re still getting road wear and expenses from that, you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth. We can talk about socialism as a distinct set of values as mostly divorced from questions of authoritarianism, because it’s assumed that we’re doing this, in good faith, to decentralize ownership of everything, ownership of the workplace, restoring the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat and all that good shit. We can assume all that to be the case, right, oh, and then since we don’t want market economies to really re-emerge, replicating class dynamics inside of the apparatus of the corporation, we go from having a co-operative to just having the corporation be owned by the public, and then maybe that’s “authoritarian” even if we have a more democratic voting system than a capitalist country is allowed to have. Whatever, those are all good debates to have, those sorts of debates, they’re what socialists are gonna talk about in a sort of abstract sense, and then they’re all gonna draft up lines like, oh, I’m a marxist because of XYZ, whatever. My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever. My concern is that we currently find ourselves in a system where all of that shit about the ICE exists, and the ICE isn’t just used to power like, a bunch of farm vehicles somewhere, and then everyone else takes the train because if I talk through every other point about car use then obviously none of it makes any sense to any set of values that isn’t “I want to kill people with my car” or “I want to waste a lot of gas” or “I want to intentionally spend a lot of money” or “I want to look cool and feel cool and manly”, type shit. That, is multiplied for like every other facet of the economy, that times a million. I hate that shit, mostly more than anything. That we can come to the correct takeaways and decisions, and then do nothing about it because the system doesn’t care. I don’t care so much how we get there, or even necessarily how authoritarian a given system is, because I think about the most that can be expected from people who have been in a capitalist society is to vote for the replication of said capitalist society with maybe some socialized benefits, democratic socialismo style, and I fully expect that shit to get rolled back in 50 years and also to exploit the third world since obviously people outside the jurisdiction of the state aren’t allowed to vote in the state’s elections. Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense, I want people to stop dying in wars, whatever. The current global system fucking sucks for all that stuff. That’s mostly the only reason why I get pushed towards socialism. Mostly the specifics only exist for me insofar as they affect or not my ability to enforce that idea of “good”, which I think is pretty sensible once it actually gets spelled out into the material.
See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing.
thats the thing though, economically this is rational. If you’re arguing for some sort of ethical rationality, that would be irrelevant to socialism. Granted rationality of resource usage could also apply to capitalism, it’s just redundant, because the market already operates that way.
People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively
i guess birth certificates aren’t real? The government is already perfectly capable of tracking who is alive and who is dead, we already deal with it for voting lol. It wouldn’t be hard to do it in any other context. People might forge documents i guess. But you don’t need to forcibly through people off a tower or gas them or anything either, you could just abolish social security for example.
anyway, this is all entirely relevant since my point was that the definition of rationality is entirely arbitrary and probably not applicable to a large scale society/economy to begin with. Again this is just sort of a fundamental rule under capitalism.
You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.
yeah, in terms of work, but work isn’t the only thing you do, you have leisure as well. Capitalism is specifically designed to regulate goods and services in an economy at scale, very very efficiently, and it does that very very well. Once you get outside of that is where you get into things like social security and government assistance, as well as publicly owned things. The trick here is to focus on having a reasonable work life balance, as well as good working conditions, this allows for effective leisure under a capitalist economy.
Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take.
that may be the case, but my fundamental problem is that i don’t see how socialism is relevant here, you can do this in any society. Through socialist legislation if you really wanted, or just public services more broadly.
This is getting to my whole point about “socialism just turns into capitalism/communism if you go far enough” because eventually you’ve just reorganized capitalism, and put it into a box labelled socialism, or communism. Depends on the flavor.
in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things.
so actually, no. In capitalism we do not define freedom, capitalism is strictly adherent to monetary mechanisms. This idea of freedom and liberty comes from the US federal government, as well as it’s subsequent state governments. These are two unrelated concepts.
We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy.
yes, it’s not the job of capitalism to define this, it’s the job of the government, and it’s constituents to decide what is best. Again things like social security, the ACA. ETC…
big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted
i don’t necessarily disagree with you here, again there are things like regulations for this purpose. Anti trust laws exist to break these things up, there are numerous laws surrounding the rights of workers to protect against this sort of ruthless competition. Arguably there should probably be more, learning from standard oil would be a great start.
But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives.
technically this isn’t accurate, it’s the automobile and it’s creation that led to suburbs, and roads, and the highway system, ICE engines were initially just created as a way to turn a burnable substance (gas/diesel) into power without having to use steam, which is rather inconvenient in some cases. And it did work, however eventually people figured out you could use them in place of horses, and then people eventually figured out that, hey cars are pretty cool, but then big auto realized, wait, we need a market to buy these things. So in turn it ended up incentivizing and creating a car centric culture, which was arguably boosted by the US government enabling it through legislation and what not.
and to be clear, white flight was more market subversion than anything, not that racism wasn’t involved, but the markets stood to make lots of money by engaging in it. so it did. This isn’t necessarily a problem with capitalism, more so a societal problem.
fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now
leaded gas was banned a long time ago, so not quite, but i understand that this is hyperbole lol.
you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth.
well that’s the thing though, it was marketable, and it worked. It’s less marketable now, and people are pushing for mid density housing, zoning reform, and multi family units, all of these things promote the goals that you mention here. Under capitalism and democracy all we have to do is push for legislation that matches up with these goals, and we’ll get it. And it’s working. It’s not incredibly fast, but nothing is, that’s life. But as a result that means that the economy won’t at the very least completely shut down, which is the benefit.
My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever.
this is a valid concern but this is also one of the greatest things about capitalism as well. If 75% of the market wants something, it will eventually get that thing. It’s inevitable. In our case, lets say more high density housing, if people (not me) want more high density housing, than they can get it, it just needs to be pushed for. There are certainly legislative problems with it, but cities do exist, and they are real as evidenced by going outside, so to some capacity this must be possible, we know other countries have done similar things, so we can easily point to them as an example of why this legislation would be beneficial, and it’s clearly in our interest in terms of the market, as it incentivizes an entirely new market segment, which creates a lot more money flow.
My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says. If you need an example look at reddit now, although it’s not quite the same, it’s a mess over there. Half the posts on that website are AI, and the other half are just, bad. That’s why we moved to lemmy lmao. Anyway, i personally, do not want to live in high density housing, i don’t want to live in suburbia, i want to live in the middle of the woods far away from everyone. Capitalism and american democracy affords me that option if i so choose. And it also affords you to go live in a city, or to go build mid density housing. That’s one of the beautiful things about it.
And again, market forces are the driver, if mid density housing is just better than suburbia, suburbia will all but die out. Which is probably a good thing, not that it would stop it from being built, but it would be a very small portion of the market at that point. People go where the market allows them, some people go where they want to. Generally the market follows broad trends, and people reciprocate.
Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense,
healthcare is probably going to be an example of government expenditure, if we were to break it out on a state by state basis, we may be able to achieve the best of both worlds. transit is fundamentally harder but i think simply building mid density sprawl would solve it, energy infra is a weird one, but i would argue it already makes sense. Allowing more flexibility in production would help though. Food infra is generally pretty rough, i think we should move towards more farmers market type setups, as well as decentralized farming, allow people to plant gardens for food, maybe even incentivize them to do so, allow them to share that produce with neighbors etc…
1/2 (world limit)
capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.
Drag has never heard of that. Then again, drag has never heard of wet deserts or bland spices either.
surprised that you haven’t heard of bland spices, but i guess it’s all relative.
As for deserts, snow is very water based. As is ice. Antarctica is very ice.
It makes perfect sense if you understand how nuance works. But I think there is where the problem lies- YOUR confusion stems from your inability to understand it.
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.
to be clear, this is a complete and blatant misrepresentation of what i said.
I literally called it an “approaching zero” problem.
They’re not wrong. And I’m not going to apologize for not feeling like explaining it to you, but I’ll advise that you start by learning what nuance actually means.
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.
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.
well yeah, i’m reading economic socialism down through the lense of capitalism. Obviously it’s going to be a little bit restrictive, this is lemmy, not a PHD thesis.
Again. Not going to explain it to you.
Very well said. Nice write up.
half of it is pretty schizo, but aside from that it’s pretty comprehensive i think.
I just hate how it is vilified when we literally freely give billions in taxpayer monies to oil companies.
Though half of it is complaining about capitalism.
And vegan drama that you really don’t want to get involved in.
