Religion doesn’t count. We’re on Lemmy, so neither does communism.

  • crime [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    We don’t talk enough about how much society openly despises teenage girls and the things that they like. It’s one of the purest, most distilled forms of misogyny.

    God forbid a color or a pattern or a beverage or a game or a show or a musician or a style becomes associated with teenage girls, the circlejerk shitting on it never goes away.

  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Most communists organisations are absolutely dogshit at communication. Get a nice professionally looking website. Get a SoMe strategy. Get a consistent visual identity. Do some SEO. It doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. This is what Lenin would have done. And stop writing in that horrible jargon that makes everything sound like a resolution from your 1976 congress, normal people find it weird and off-putting.

    You don’t have to be a theory nerd to be a real Marxist. Not everyone has the time, energy or personality to sit in a book club for hours. And that is fine. You can understand plenty without having to feel you’re back in school doing homework. If communist movements wants any kind of success they have to make theory accessible, relevant to what people are going through and attractive enough that people will want to engage with it.

    I don’t care whether you put pineapple on your pizza or not. I really don’t.

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      I think some people in niche communities (such as communist groups in this example) actually want the group to stay insular and personal. They like feeling part of a special little group, and if it started letting just anyone in then that would be lost.

    • i dont think its that controversial

      i’d also add on disco music hatred since that also originated from african americans. Disco didn’t die, right wingers went crazy and did a very effective national boycott of radio stations that played it. Disco didn’t die, it was murdered by freaks.

  • Trotskyists should be banned from leftist unity, their prevalence in the west is only due to them being the least threatening and effective form of marxism so therefore the least discriminated. Trotsky did not have many good takes and flip flopped on most of them just to side with any opposition because he was a grifter. Calling him a Bolshevik is an insult to Bolsheviks. Anyone could organize the Red Army, just because he was assigned to it doesn’t mean he gets a pass on being the most annoying leftist until bordiga.

    dengism should be applied only to the nations that had adopted it already, but nowhere else. It was a costly concession to the capitalists in order to avoid capitalist overthrow and encirclement. Such concessions are no longer necessary as the west is receding in power and countries are more likely to trade with ones with planned economies in the name of multipolarity. China’s now reaching the end of its usefulness with market socialism and will be entirely unprepared for the inevitable hot/cold war with the west over taiwan, south korea, or other regional conflict the west will generate unless they adopt a more anti capitalist or state capitalist system. They rely far too much on foreign trade that a war near their shores would be quite devastating. The belt and road will help this of course but is vulnerable to those countries apart of it being overthrown by western backed coups (pakistan). But i think china is definitely capable of making this transition, unlike others who stupidly regard china as just like any other capitalist country.

    Religion is an inherently reactionary institution, and if communism gains power in a nation with large religious institutions it needs to work hard to weaken them. Cooperate if you must for a time in order to not actively push them into agitation, but they will never be friends and have historically been easily used by capitalists for infiltration and overthrow. Religion tied to heritage, like judaism and hinduism is another matter and im unequipped to have a real position on it so i wont include those in this. Spiritualism as well.

    religious socialism should be a method of crushing religion and bringing about socialism, and is not actually possible. Not to say we should be vulgar in our hatred as thats stupid. Just recognize in the context of a socialist nation religion is an enemy force.

    freedom of debate, unity of action needs more debates after the unity of action because choosing the wrong way is devastating if you never correct it.

    • Ellen_musk_ox@lemm.ee
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      Just marriage honesty.

      I have zero idea or understanding why any queer couple wants to metaphorically cosplay as squares.

        • Ellen_musk_ox@lemm.ee
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          I personally don’t see that as liberation. It’s right up there with rainbow capitalism.

          “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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      Religious people, on the whole, have a fundamentally illogical and deeply problematic view of the most basic facts about our metaphysical reality, morality, and history. Even if they don’t use their religious views to justify deeply immoral behaviors, etc. Gotta have some sort of common ground to connect with a person.

  • impartial_fanboy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    People here should read more right wing theory. I think its very easy to get the impression that the only right wingers that exist are Shapiro or Alex Jones types and so when people on the left encounter a right winger who isn’t a total moron/grifter they can be overly impressed and more easily swayed by them.

    Case in point being Aleksandr Dugin. While he’s not as influential since the ACP was founded, I used to hear some his talking points on here a whole lot. He explicitly talks about using internet marxists as a 5th column to push right wing ideas. So inoculate yourselves.

    • There’s a not uncommon tendency among leftists, and especially MLs where they want to consume the “right” kind of information, as though reading anything that isn’t the most pure, anti-imperialist, regionally specific Chinese news paper will taint them with liberalism.

      No baby girl, you need to read liberal, reactionary, and other leftist sources in earnest, with a principled Marxist analysis, and genuinely understand them.

      Tbh, I think this tendency is a manifestation of the western left’s pseudo-Christian purity obsession.

      • Des [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        sometimes i think the western left has basically entered the “early middle age Irish monks preserving the classics and also drawing anthro bunnies” phase

        the purity stuff comes from the marginalization and effort to just keep the lights on right now

      • impartial_fanboy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Oh yeah don’t get me started on the left’s residual Christian thinking. The amount of barely veiled protestant thinking is too damn high. The obsession with splitting is a perfect example.

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Marx and Engels clarified many of their ideas through their critical readings and polemics.

      I can’t recall where — I think a preface to one of Marx’s works — Engels describes how the publishing of the work was not important in the end; that the important thing was the clarification of their own ideas through the effort of refuting their opponents. I think it was against Proudhon or Stirner… can’t remember…

    • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social
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      If your “strongly held belief” can’t survive scrutiny or contact with intelligent argumentation it doesn’t deserve to be a “strongly held belief.”

      Regularly examining your own assumptions and attacking your own point of view will not only help you better solve real problems, it will allow you to better recognize and answer specious arguments as they arise.

      • impartial_fanboy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Well there’s more to the right than just fascism. Catholic integralism is a hot topic right now. For a real head scratcher try George Fitzhugh. He was a pro slavery anti-capitalist who liked socialism because he thought it was the ultimate form of slavery.

    • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Yeah. Listening to JD Vance of all people talk eloquently and with a populist message about the east Palestine train derailment really took me by surprise. The guy - our future far right VP - sounded like Bernie sanders.

      I think the political parties are doing a really weird shift and most people haven’t caught on yet.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        I kinda hate that one of the few people on the left I’ve heard talk about this phenomenon is Joshua Cittarella who is far too comfortable with taking the next step into “maybe the fascists have a point.”

        • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          I mean they don’t call them National socialists for nothing. I’m not the least bit surprised that fascists are talking socialist adjacent talking points but rebranded. IIRC even the Nazis had some redeeming social welfare programs (for good aryan Germans, fuck everyone else) that were adjacent to socialism… to capture the interest of those who would vote for real socialists.

          Kinda like how Starbucks has decent workers benefits compared to their competitors - to prevent unionization. Or how FDR enacted the new deal to prevent actual socialists from gaining power.

          I hope I’m getting my point across…

          • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            Yeah I get your point but all that stuff is completely empty. The Nazis still privatized everything and worked with big German and foreign capitalists to fund the Holocaust. When fascists say all the populist crap they don’t mean it.

    • o_d [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
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      I was watching a China special on teleSUR a couple of nights ago and got my first taste of Dugin. I honestly have no idea why he was a part of it. He didn’t even talk about China, but was harping on about how all of Africa must unite to struggle against American imperialism. He didn’t put forth a single idea regarding how that can be achieved. As if all of Africa is some monolith. And this nonsense was immediately preceded by a pretty good Radhika Desai lecture. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

    • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      I think also whispers Hayek did actually have some valid critiques of managed economies. I believe there are solutions to these problems tbc, but you can’t just hand-wave the critique, even if he was an evil pos.

      I don’t think I’ve ever personally conversed with a right winger who has actually engaged with ‘the good stuff’ from the Right tradition however, so it’s important to understand that the cultural impact of this stuff is negligible compared to e.g. Rand

      • impartial_fanboy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Certainly of Soviet style planned economies. Though just the existence of computers refutes a lot of his so called problems.

        Theoretically literate right wingers don’t go around proselytizing because that would go against their theory of power. You don’t teach the peasants, you use them. I would argue that policy wise the popular ‘theorists’ are only now making in roads because no one reads anything anymore, left or right.

      • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        Definitely agree on Hayek. He’s one of the grandfathers of contemporary complex systems theory and has some stuff that’s worth reading from that angle too. It’s also worth knowing your enemy.

    • LoH_Mobius
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      There is a podcast that tackles this very subject.

      The Black and Red Book Review

      Highly recommend, though production quality is not exactly great.

    • SweetLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      i recall C. Derick Varn making a similar point and it’s mostly true. that’s why i’m personally annoyed when people still do the “right-wingers are stupid” bit

          • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
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            it happens anyway! on this topic people act like nobody ever has issues with windows but issues with windows are actually constant, people are just accustomed to dealing with them and posts about them are relegated to background noise.

        • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
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          I agree. I’ve fully been on Linux for almost a year now. Anyone who portrays Linux as being that straightforward and uncomplicated is being misleading and inaccurate. Linux is difficult. Getting it to do things you want is difficult. It takes time and energy and interest.

          I’d still advocate to use it. Linux gets easier every year and long may that simplification continue. But don’t jump into using Linux if you’re not ready to.

          • NaevaTheRat [she/her]@vegantheoryclub.org
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            2 days ago

            I ran archinstaller, then installed plasma, and everything works. My media keys, function keys, suspend on close, all the basic tooling of userspace is there. I guess I had to read a paragraph on a wiki page to make the fingerprint scanner work but I literally just searched “thinkpad fingerprint arch” and installed fprint so hardly mystical.

            • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
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              I’m glad it worked smoothly for you and it sometimes is a smooth effortless experience for some people; but if you want to “convert” people then you’ve got to be honest about the fact that people commonly face difficulties. I’ve commented about my Linux issues before and I can paste the comment again here to give an example:


              One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.

              A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out.

              I installed VMware Horizon for my job’s remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn’t bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.

              I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies.

              I still can’t get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I’ve stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.

              I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.

              Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute. I still can’t figure out how to use this to auto-mount my Synology NAS.

              Plasma recently added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can’t figure out why.

              I can’t get CopyQ to launch minimised, no matter what I do.

              My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can’t figure out why they’ve decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still. Update: this seems to have fixed itself (maybe through am update?).

              Flatpak Steam app wouldn’t pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.

              My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn’t supported.

              People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn’t include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS’s when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows.

      • MaoTheLawn [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        Nah, I’m very computer literate, built my own PC, can troubleshoot most software and hardware on Windows and sometimes Mac… I’m not a genius but my family and friends consider me the ‘computer fixer guy’ of the group.

        I’ve got Linux on my little laptop - constant troubleshooting. I want a specific program? Ah, well here’s this knock-off version that is almost totally functional but pretty inaccessible and the only tutorials for it are buried deep in some random forum, if at all. Oh, and you have to install these other versions and plugins, and it must be done via this specific command line. It’s just not accessible for easy use yet. Gaming? Oh, just use proton, except for this particular game, where you have to… go to some niche forum and follow a 25 step guide, and then it might work, depending on your graphics card. Come on, try it, don’t you have a spare 4 hours to set aside?

        It’s almost inevitable given that the computing monopolies don’t optimise for Linux at all. It’s a hostile environment, and to me it’s still more hassle than it’s worth.

        I think if I had a day or so to set it all up with a Linux expert they’d have me on the right course, but as far as plug and load goes, in a time when I don’t have any time at all, Windows just works. Of course, it’s being enshittified faster and faster. I expect I’ll have to switch to Linux some day properly.

        You might say: ‘MaoTheLawn’, you’re a stupid moron, its totally easy, just read the right guide! If it was, I would be saying it was! It just isn’t a simple enough switch for someone who has a million and one other things going on in their life.

        Maybe I just haven’t found the right Linux version for me yet.

    • NotLuigi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      I must have just lucked out with my hardware or something. I’ve never had a problem and everything just works. Much better experience than installing and running Windows. I also run a Mac with OSX too though.

    • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      My unpopular tech opinion is Windows Subsystem for Linux is good enough for people that want to tinker with Linux without dealing with OS and/or driver problems. Same for Apple computers that are functional BSD machines without the headaches.

    • kleeon [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I’ll tell you a little secret: desktop linux is not very good and it’s not getting better. Don’t believe anyone who tells you they found a perfect operating system

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    Sometimes it takes just as much effort to be kind as to be cruel.

    Like, some video game, public chat, someone says like “these poison monkeys are so fast. They keep killing me”.

    Someone replies “skill issue”.

    Like ok big lol I understood that reference, but also like… Why? Now the monkey victim feels mocked. Could just as easily said “I hear you bro. Those monkeys are jerks”.

    Could also just say nothing.

    I feel like sometimes too many people are stuck acting like insecure 14 year olds.

  • Tom742 [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    Whenever generative AI (or whatever, could be the climate driven death of slop) has completely replaced the need to use actual live child actors we’ll look back at Hollywoods use of child actors as straight up barbarism and child exploitation of the worst kind.

    As always, without the economic incentive to do the barbarous thing we’ll suddenly turn around and exclaim, “how could humans have done that for so long” completely oblivious to whatever horror is going on next to us at that time.

    Similar example, child chimney sweeps. Small enough to get into those numerous chimneys, someone has to after all, and they’re cheap! (Paid less than adults to do a job adults can’t do, sounds familiar…) They were phased out, not by safety concerns for the kids, but simply because they weren’t needed anymore as technology advanced. In modern times we have the luxury to look back and think we’re so much better than that now, but we aren’t. Not even close.

  • bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml
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    I think cis people should transition just for a little bit so they can understand what gender dysphoria is like

    • NotLuigi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Children do this experimentation naturally but are shamed out of it and railroaded into their sex assignment even though you’d get the same result for 90% of kids by just letting it run its course. The fact that there are adults who haven’t experimented with their gender before is a sign of major societal repression.

    • Zement@feddit.nl
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      Mine is similar: You can only be true cis if you are confronted and in contact with all faces of your sexuality. Everything else is compensation and/or unhealthy.

    • mathemachristian [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Yeah, I think the first time I “experienced gender” was that period of time when my kid knew “mom” but not “dad” and even though he meant it in a gender neutral way, I still felt strongly that it is wrong.