DictatrshipOfTheseus [comrade/them, any]

Yes. This. This is exactly what I was talking about in my other comment in this thread, posted before seeing this one. I was calling it scale instead of scope, but this is spot on.

People will pick and choose how things function at one scope and pretend it applies at others. A lot of people, even good well-meaning ones, will do this and fall into this trap, but particularly shitty people will do this as a way to justify their garbage beliefs or justify hurting and demeaning others. Exactly like OP image “you don’t matter 'cause the Earth doesn’t give a shit if you’re here or not as one person. You’re a loser for thinking you matter at all.” FUCK that. You absolutely matter, just not necessarily at the scale/scope of an entire planet orbiting a star, that doesn’t invalidate or make meaningless the just as real scale/scope at which you DO matter. Their application of how things function at scale is always used in whatever way is beneficial to them at the moment or to prove whatever flawed, even sadistic point they’re trying to make. Capitalists, politicians, and of course the mass media under their control do this constantly and it infuriates me to no end.

It really is a matter of scale. Even at the scale of society as a whole, you as an individual don’t “matter” in that your presence (or lack of it) isn’t going to impact its course or functionality. It’s literally why we have to organize in order to even have any hope of achieving our aims. We certainly don’t “matter” on a global scale. However, what the person in the OP image said is entirely true. At the scale of our families and social group, and absolutely at the scale of our individual experience, each of us matters profoundly. At the scale of our individual experience, each of us is a universe unto ourselves.

It is infuriating to me when people refuse to understand that what is true at one scale may not be (and usually isn’t) true at another scale, but that this does not invalidate how true things are at any other given scale. The fact that your impact on the galaxy as a whole is so small as to be effectively insignificant does not mean that your impact on the world you live in, literally your sphere of experience and influence, is insignificant, because the truth is that it is extremely significant at that scale.

Western culture and society is pathological in how it simultaneously acts as though the only reality is what exists at the scale of the individual when it comes to blame and “rEsPoNsIbiLitY” but will utterly diminish and demean the experience of any individual that doesn’t spend their existence on this earth in service of the great evil god of capital. It’s Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families.” Meanwhile every single one of those individual men and women (rather the ones who don’t own or control capital) are treated as nothing more than a cog in a machine, a sliver of utility to be used as such then expended and replaced as such. It’s a philosophy that cherry-picks only the convenient truths of how things work at various different given scales and applies them across the board as if they’re true at all other scales, all of course to serve the interests of the ruling class. It is a source of many of the philosophical contradictions of capitalism and the diseased society that results from it.

https://htwins.net/scale2/

I’ve loved (and since missed) your weekly rankings. Fucking hilarious content. But I’m really happy to know that the reason they’ve been put on hiatus is because you’re gonna be a papa. Not happy about the difficulty part of course, I hope that all gets worked out comrade. Anyway, congratulations! Health and happiness to you, your wife, and your soon to be introduced to this world son.

Don’t know of any, but there was a similar (if shorter) list going around a few months ago, and it was pretty much debunked point by point here: https://hexbear.net/post/275117

I don’t know about mossad/IDF specifically and would guess that is unlikely, but I’m also not so sure everyone here who saying “no way, lemmy is way too small for feds/ops to care about” are really going off anything more than a hope.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they have a few spooks to send in to steer the narrative a bit here and discredit actual realities there. It’s not a lot of work for them. It is for us, because we’re of course fighting the dominant mainstream narratives. All they have to do is parrot that shit, or say something even worse than what the MSM is saying to shift the window of acceptability (not quite the Overton window, but same idea), putting people talking reality on their back foot. Because the ubiquity and predominance of libs, the feds will have a ton of support, a ready-made base of nodding fools who will upvote them because what they’re saying reproduces and reinforces the libs’ worldviews. It’s a feedback loop, and they’re there to ensure it keeps feeding back in the direction that benefits (again, reproduces/reinforces) the existing power structures.

It’s not like the feds that we know for a fact that are on reddit can’t also moonlight on lemmy a bit, the same way regular users often do. And come on, there are countless documented cases of undercover feds infiltrating the tiniest of innocent orgs, like 5-person book clubs IRL. It’s vastly easier to astroturf online communities than it is to infiltrate actual orgs. I think it’s a tad naive to think feds wouldn’t at the very least dip their toes into lemmy for a bit of astroturfing, especially since that silly reddit blackout. It doesn’t take much in the way of resources for them, but I think there’s obvious reason and benefits to do it, even on just a small scale.

As for feeling burnt out, if you feel like you could use a break, take a break! Don’t sacrifice your own well being for this shit, it’s not worth it. But if and when you do go back to the posting trenches, remember that the goal is never to change the mind of the person you’re arguing with. That is simply not going to happen, in anything but the most absurdly rare cases. But if others are seeing the conversation, lurkers, the people there just up/downvoting, they’re the ones who see your “debates” with the terminally brainwormed and lot of those lurkers really are capable of recognizing the bullshit versus the reasoned and sensical argument, even if it doesn’t immediately click for them (though sometimes it does). It’s not unlike watching a kind of dialectic. My mind has been changed that way a few times, and I know that’s the case for many others. So don’t let it get you too down when you’re inundated with their garbage and their lies. Someone else saw what you had to say and they were affected by it. Seeds do get planted.

Glad to help!

wtf is retrograde anyway.

Have you ever been on a bike (usual analogy is a car, but fuck that) traveling along at a pretty good clip, and you come upon another bike ahead of you that’s moving in the same direction as you but going slower?

They look like they’re moving forward against the background scenery at first, no surprise there. But as you’re passing them, they look like they’re moving backwards against the background hills. Then once you’re a ways ahead of them, they look like they’re moving forward normally again. Ever notice that? If not, try it sometime. The other bike was never actually moving backwards, but since they are going forward more slowly than you, relative to the background, it does look briefly like they are going backward.

Same thing happens with slower planets further from the sun than we are - as earth passes them, it looks for a period like they’re going backwards against the background stars from our perspective. That is retrograde motion. The planets don’t actually stop in their orbits, move backward for a bit, stop again and then move forward, but it looks like they do because of our relative motion around the sun.

Now, if you’re from a time before it was well known that Earth is in orbit around the sun same as those other planets (and not the center of the solar system and universe), then it would mean those planets were moving backwards. And if you also think of the sky as literally the heavens which determine the fate of people on Earth, this backward motion is going to seem extremely significant (even if it’s in reality basically just an optical illusion).

but how can they literally not see this?! Its been repeated over and over in history! How many times do they have to be wrong? How many times do they find out they were deceived on every level?! They know their politicians lie, at least they say they do, but they never once question them! Its so fucking tiring to watch it happen every single fucking time! They never learn! Ever!

It’s because they know, if even on an instinctual level, that their material interests are fundamentally aligned with the empire. Every time they’re lied to, they can easily say “it’s different this time” simply because it broadly serves them better to believe those lies.

Most of the propaganda isn’t there to “trick” or “fool” them into believing the lie, it’s there to provide them with the justification, the excuse that they long for, that they need in order to maintain their view of themselves as good and right and smart. It’s not that they’re incapable of learning, it’s that they have no material incentive to learn and plenty of incentive not to, since doing so would challenge their identity, their firmly-held beliefs that all their privilege and treats are earned and that they have a legitimate and moral right to them. Which of course they don’t. Of course they’re going to believe the lies over and over and over.

I was about to try to go to sleep. Not anymore.

1. Mostly it was about fooling you into thinking that, as a worker, you have even an iota of power within that company.

2. You: “The owners deserve all the value that results from owning the company and not the workers because the owners own the company, duh.” Reread what you said and note the ridiculous circular logic.

3. The company would continue to function perfectly fine without the owner(s), yet would immediately cease to function or even exist without the workers. The only role the owner plays in the company (that the workers operate), is to siphon the value away from the workers who made it and unto themselves.

I don’t know how to go about it - currently it sounds a bit like a left wing Wikipedia. In my head, I can see it more like a giant 4D map, or a big messy case file sprawling out over a desk.

Well to butt in again, I don’t know enough about it, but people here have said good things about Obsidian. This is the place I know of that shows how it might be used to build an interconnected knowledge base. I think it would be better for the kind of thing you’re describing than a wiki would. There’s no “4D map” but it does have a rotating 3D map of how different sections connect. Just a thought.

Country of the week.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

I am actually tempted to put some feelers out for the starting of a community researching project. I think we have a varied knowledge base and if we could put our collective minds to use in mapping the history of a country/region/issue in a similar way to the Ukraine stuff.

I think this is an excellent idea and believe that @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net has said something very similar. It was the major impetus behind the COTW thing that was started a few weeks back. It might be worth hitting him up to discuss further.

I guess I’m trying to understand what makes this a liberal viewpoint or why do you classify it as such?

I guess I am just trying to understand the viewpoints of my communist fellow humans

I’m not the person you’re responding to, but… A liberal viewpoint (in this context) is one that is idealist, not materialist. A liberal will point at a policy ostensibly drawn up to address some given issue, and whether that policy is effective or not, or even whether the policy is enforced, will claim that “something is being done” to address that issue. In a liberal framework, it is the policy itself that satisfies the condition that the issue has been addressed, not any actual action that makes a real material difference to solve or change the issue. Again, it’s just idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is a philosophy based on the former, communism is (among other things) a philosophy based on the latter.

Pretty sure Egon means this: Ukraine: The Avoidable War, which if I remember correctly, has a decent run-through of American interference in 90’s Russia, but is not specifically about that. Correct me if you meant a different video, Egon. If so, I’d like to see it too.

archived link for those who prefer: https://archive.ph/GyCQD

Does a link directly to the pertinent image work for you?

https://archive.is/tgXRb/66db743718e9277d76256a497f02785d141f979d/scr.png

Certain antivirus software seems to have been blocking the archive sites for no good reason. I assume the real reason is because those sites are the easiest way to bypass paywalls.

I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with using the word as an insult because I don’t think it’s actually a slur. If anyone can point me to something that shows “troglodyte” in particular is used to refer to any disadvantaged group (like people with DS), I will retract this and never use it again. Like several other comrades who have already commented, I’ve used troglodyte for years to refer to the same people we all tend to call chuds here. In fact, cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller is pretty damn close to troglodyte. Speaking of which…

If you’re going to dehumanize a person, I think it’s best to call them something that’s entirely unhuman (e.g. demon, ghoul, etc.) rather than something human-like (e.g. orc, ape, etc.)

That’s not really the problem, as I see it. There’s no line between “unhuman” and “human-like.” How is ghoul or demon any different than orc in that respect? Not to be cliche, but it really is all about the context. Orc in general wasn’t bad to use per se, but now that it’s being used to specifically refer to Russians or more generally, Asians, it has become problematic. Ape is pretty obviously not a good word to use in most cases because of the history of it’s use to dehumanize people based on race. But even then, I wouldn’t consider it a slur if I were to playfully say to my large, muscular, white friend “you big ape!”

All that said, as always I’m open to being shown where I might be wrong.

If I’m understanding HornyOnMain (OP) correctly, she’s not trying to say it shouldn’t be used, just that it’s odd and suspicious that libs seem to have suddenly picked up on it and are throwing it around incessantly. I fully agree on that.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think you missed the whole point of GarbageShoot asking you specifically about Allende.

just based on a small snippet of reading about them, I think in general […]

I think this is the main problem here: a lack of knowledge about the historical context of “authoritarian” socialist projects, but nevertheless making generalized statements about them without even considering the material reasons why they were by necessity “authoritarian.” Read up more about the history of Chile and consider what happened to Allende and the hope of a socialist Chile. Who came after Allende (and almost as important, who installed that successor)? Why do these events seem so familiar when learning about every other attempt, successful or not, to bring about a communist society? When you’ve done that, you will at the very least have a leg to stand on when criticizing so-called tankie authoritarianism.

I’d also suggest reading The Jakarta Method. Here’s a somewhat relevant quote from it:

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.