wpb
@wpb@lemmy.world
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 4 days ago:
This is just absolutely wild to me. Just true unfiltered insanity. The democrats literally sent 50B in military aid to a nation that is literally committing a genocide, and if someone complains about this your reactions to effectively say “geeze complain much?”. I truly, fundamentally, do not understand how a human can have that response. It just does not compute. The only thing I can think of is that you actually don’t believe there is a genocide, or that the democrats didn’t fund it. But that too seems so far fetched, because these are both so easy to verify. None of it adds up
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 4 days ago:
Exactly! Which is why moving right every cycle has proved to be such a winning strategy for the democrats! Finally someone talks sense.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 4 days ago:
Lovely how not actively supporting and funding a genocide is a purity test now. Beautiful stuff.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 4 days ago:
Elections are no time for democracy, that’s some tankie shit.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 4 days ago:
Go out and pressure the DNC to not be shit
How about you go out and draw the rest of the owl there? The main power we have is our right to vote, and you’re saying we shouldn’t use that to pressure the DNC to put forth a pro-worker anti-war candidate.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 4 days ago:
I take issue with your use of the adjective “good” in “good cop”.
- Comment on Oatly banned from using word ‘milk’ to market plant-based products in UK 1 week ago:
but I don’t think companies should be allowed to sell it as “milk” in any form
Well sure, and they haven’t been able to in almost a decade. This court ruling is about something else.
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
No no bro bro listen
- Comment on But bro please 1 week ago:
No bro just roll over and take it bro pls I’m telling you
- Comment on Im curious what they will come up with 2 weeks ago:
I feel like you’re a bit too emotionally involved. It’s just a cartoon, calm down.
Anyway, to clarify my comment, which I thought was brief and to the point enough that it was easy to grasp, but apparently not for you: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with covering current events or lampooning stuff. The way south park does this is sanctimonious and smug, to the point where I find it hard to watch.
- Comment on Im curious what they will come up with 2 weeks ago:
Whenever they take on real world stuff, they’re incredibly smug and sanctimonious about it. This has been the case since the start, and I can’t say I’ve ever been able to get past that.
- Comment on Ubisoft Fires Team Lead For Criticising Stupid Return-To-Office Mandate 2 weeks ago:
I’m getting strong rest of the owl vibes from a lot of what you say.
So for example, you say you need strong allies. Well, list some candidates! China? They have a policy of non-intervention, so don’t count on it. Cuba? Not very strong. The US, or some other nation that’s captured by the owning class (Netherlands, France, Germany, etc)? Fat chance.
Same with the focus having folks join unions more. I think it’s a great outcome to strive for, but how do we achieve that goal? On a systemic level we see union membership dropping, and that’s no coincidence, because more and more anti-union legislation is enacted across the board in Europe and America. And that in turn is no coincidence because the people who really don’t want us to unionize have enough money to lobby this legislation into existence, and they happen to own the media, so they’re also doing a good job of convincing us that it is against our interests to join a union. Voting a pro-union candidate into power is incredibly difficult for the simple fact that campaign funds are a pretty decent predictor of electoral success, and guess who has the money to contribute significant amounts to those funds? Not me.
The education thing too is pretty great, but it assumes that some worker-friendly entity already has control over the education system. How do you get there? And education only goes so far of course. At some point folks leave the educational system, and their main source of information becomes the media. I’ve seen well-educated folks be completely convinced that there is no genocide in Gaza, and I could not blame them, because for the first year no major outlet would even utter the word. How do you prevent the media from being captured by the owning class?
Ultimately the problem is that the opponent has the means and willingness to use violence to quell your movement. And they’ve shown time and again that they will use these means, and history shows it works (Allende, the Spanish anarchist revolution, the Paris commune, Indonesia’s takeover by Suharto, Lumumba, etc). How do you defend yourself effectively against a violent aggressor without resorting to illiberal means yourself?
- Comment on Ubisoft Fires Team Lead For Criticising Stupid Return-To-Office Mandate 2 weeks ago:
Yeah! And we need to do it in a way where the incredibly rich and powerful who have a vested interest and desparate need for us to fail won’t kill our movement! In the past and present, any socialist movement was met with
- death squads
- propaganda
- military invasions
- assasinations of heads of state
- funding, arming, and training the opposition
- economic sanctions
- so, so much propaganda
all funded by the absurdly wealthy to make nations fail and make them more amenable to re-exploitation by the owning class.
Any ideas to defend ourselves against this phenomenon which occurs over and over again?
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 2 weeks ago:
So how did the general strike go?
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 3 weeks ago:
since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right
American workers live in such a different world. Not once in my 34 years on earth would it have occurred to me to go on sick leave or spend one of my holidays on strike. Absolutely insane.
- Comment on But think of the landlords! 3 weeks ago:
So, I’m not interested in a Debbie Debater here, and I’m absolutely not claiming that you’re wrong, but I think two of the three sources you give don’t really pass my standard for reliable.
The first one doesn’t quite pass the vibe check for me. When I go to the home page, the top articles are about “the five greatest russian erotic films” and “7 budding russian models”. It just doesn’t screem “impartial scientific article” to me.
The Christian Science Moitor one from a researcher from radio liberty research. What I read is that this place was founded and funded by the CIA with the explicit purpose of broadcasting propaganda into the east bloc. To me, I’m about as likely to trust an article from this source as I am to trust an article about homelessness in South Korea coming from a think tank funded by North Korea, called the “Proletarian Empowerment Institute” or whatever.
One thing I can find plenty of impartial sources on is that it’s hard to find reliable data on homelessness from the USSR. But to go and trust some less than credible sources for a lack of alternatives is pure lamp post bias.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. All I’m saying is that the sources you cite don’t pass my personal smell test, and I still feel agnostic on whether or not homelessness rates in the USSR were better or worse than in the US in the 80s.
As an aside, it’s really embarrassing, but I don’t know where I got the 0.01% figure from. A second google search seems to suggest a range of 600,000 to 2,000,000 out of 247,000,000 so something closer to 0.0025%–0.08%. These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR. For me personally, it doesn’t really affect whether or not I believe that the homelessness rate in the USSR was higher or lower than in the US because I still feel like I’m pretty much in the dark on the former. But maybe for you these figures help you sharpen your beliefs, so I figured I’d share them.
- Comment on But think of the landlords! 3 weeks ago:
What was their homelessness rate in the 1980s? I’ve looked for 5 minutes and have not been able to find anything. In the US it was 0.01%.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
Yes I was being sarcastic, and I should’ve made that clearer. I know of no other way of dealing with the smug sanctimonious attitude of those in rich peaceful countries demanding that the oppressed turn the other cheek because “violence bad”. It’s this bizarre combination of smugness, ignorance of history, and effectively advocating in favor of the oppressor that I really, really, cannot stand.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
This is silly. Everyone knows, historically, you stop opressors by asking nicely. Maybe go into the street in a funny costume or something, organize a singalong. Violence is what the baddies do.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
Famously, the human rights gained by movements using violent tactics, such as the abolitionists, suffragettes, the civil rights movement, the ANC, were all very short-lived. Hollow victories, all.
- Comment on yeet 4 weeks ago:
If anyone’s having thoughts like this; it’s completely normal. Rest assured, I have thoughts like this multiple times a day, and I don’t even have a newborn.
- Comment on we need more users 5 weeks ago:
if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall
I don’t consider this a given. E.g. your new users might all be dingleberries, or they might attract more bots. It also depends on your definition of quality. I quite like recognizing and conversing with regulars that I know from lemmy. This is something you lose with a larger userbase.
Here’s another way a high monthly active user count doesn’t necessarily lead to a quality platform. Suppose most users post once a month. Conversations will largely be dominated by posts from folks who have no real connection with each other. Any meaningful conversation is drowned in an ocean of seagulls going “have my updoot, kind sir” and “this!”. Higher user count, lower quality.
Aside from that, vanity metrics like bare user count typically don’t tell you whether you have a sustainable non-ad based platform. You don’t need users, you need users willing to donate for the operation (to instance admins) and maintenance (to the devs) of the platform. And I feel (0 data to back this up) like users are more likely to be donating users if they feel like they know the operators and devs personally.
I’m not saying the idea of getting more users is bad, I’m just saying its goodness is very far from established.
- Comment on YSK that fracking is not safe. People living near fracking sites are more likely to develop serious diseases 7 months ago:
And still there’s politicians out there saying things like “I will not ban fracking. I did not as vice president. In fact, I cast the tie-breaking vote to open up more fracking leases”. Playing with people’s lives just to make a buck. Really shows they’re not beholden to the people but to the owning class.
- Comment on In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. 7 months ago:
What about the nakba massacres strikes you as reversible? Do you know what the word reversible means?
- Comment on In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. 7 months ago:
If I set fire to your house, and then I turn to you saying “ooh boy this is a hairy problem, you better take care of it”, I am entirely responsible for your house being on fire.
- Comment on In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. 7 months ago:
It should be noted that it was the “please stop murdering children” kind of “antisemitism”, not real antisemitism.
- Comment on Corporations are saving the planet! 7 months ago:
The only thing I can find in this direction is a letter from beverage companies (including coca cola) opposing these measures. But that’s based on a very shallow google search, so take it with a grain of salt. Where can I find info about what coca cola lobbied for or against?
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 7 months ago:
Omg are you an llm?
- Comment on You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning 7 months ago:
The user experience of GrapheneOS is basically the same as vanilla Android, except that you have more control (you can uninstall google apps, for example), but at the cost of a small minority of apps (banking ones, for example) not working (out of the box, sometimes at all). My banking app works, and a quick google search will tell you if yours does too. If your old pixel is not too old (4 is no longer supported, 8 definitely is, not sure abt in between), you should give it a go. I think you’ll see it’s not as big of a step as you maybe currently imagine.
- Comment on Socialism is the actual teaching of Jesus 7 months ago:
Wait, am I not forced to pay taxes? And isn’t any progressive tax by definition redistribution? United States confirmed as socialist, you heard it here first!