wpb
@wpb@lemmy.world
- Comment on Waffle House: Pull up then. 😐 1 day ago:
This is advertising. Cute posts from corporate accounts are there for no reason other than creating brand awareness. You reposted advertising.
- Comment on the two party system is just one big party 1 week ago:
So, I hate to be that guy, but the dems get a chance every 4 years or so, and yet here we are. It seems that the democratic leaderships of the past haven’t really prevented the slow and continuous slide to fascism. And please do note that every dem president and candidate is more right wing than the previous ones. They’re sliding too.
- Comment on the two party system is just one big party 1 week ago:
He’s not saying that.
- Comment on the two party system is just one big party 1 week ago:
That would be a weird thing to say indeed. No one’s saying that though.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
You know what bombs do? They kill people, indiscriminately, especially when you throw them on desnsely populated civilian centers that you’ve driven 100s of thousands of refugees into. What are you going to tell me next, “muh human shields”? Fuck off.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
Because they always argue in bad faith based on a surface level reading of headlines. It’s always the same story. I see a “tankie” citing research, statistics, historical texts on one side, and on the other I see someone like you, floundering. It’s embarrassing, and a waste of time, because you’re not in this in good faith. You never really engage with the arguments. So what’s the point?
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
There is not a single good bomb thrown by Israel in history, just like Russia hasn’t thrown a good bomb in the history of the Ukraine conflict. The reasoning is exactly the same. Israel, like Russia, is the aggressor, the occupier in this conflict, since its very inception. It’s very clear from your comments that you don’t read history, and it would serve you well to be less confident about the things you clearly don’t really know about.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
So there never was a terrorist threat to Israeli citizens?
Mask off moment. Never argue with a liberal, it’s a complete waste of time
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 1 week ago:
War crimes are only bad if the bad guy does them. NATO is a good guy.
- Comment on Ad companies are the ones destroying civilization 2 weeks ago:
Couple of things that are either a definition, obvious, or directly observable in literally every capitalist nation in history:
- the defining characteristic of capitalism is the private ownership of businesses
- the ability to own a business can buy you influence on the electorate legally, through owning ad agencies, newspapers, think tanks, online influencers
- owning a business can buy you influence on politicians legally, by hiring lobbyists, by threatening to take your business elsewhere, by promising politicians cushy jobs after their tenure, by contributing to their campaign through fundraisers, PACs, etc
- this influence gives you the power to change laws and regulations to your benefit
- in particular, it allows you to shape laws to benefit you financially, making the actions in point 2 and 3 easier to do
- in particular, it allows you to get rid of laws restricting you to do the things in points 2 and 3
- it is in the best interest of politicians to deregulate the latter parts of point 3
- as such, a capitalist system where only parts or even none of point 2 and 3 are allowed, has a natural tendency towards a system where they are fully allowed
Leaving all other economic systems aside for a moment*, the idea that this is not a direct and natural consequence of capitalism doesn’t seem to hold water, both on a theoretical and an empirical level.
- And we do this because, analogously, arguing your right hand isn’t bleeding because your left hand is makes no sense. Capitalism can be studied in its own right. What’s more is that the number of alternative systems is infinite, and I’m sure lemmy has a character limit.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks ago:
Elections are no time for democracy, that’s some tankie shit.
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago:
No no bro bro listen
- Comment on But bro please 4 weeks 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 5 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 5 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 5 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 5 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. 5 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. 1 month 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! 1 month 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! 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.