MLK said it best, so I’ll just quote him directly:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

When moderates advocate for “kindness” or “civility”, they’re advocating for negative peace; the absence of tension. Vegans advocate for positive peace; the presence of justice. When activists advocate for positive peace, in the face of those who deny said justice, tensions rise and moderates fall back to this common trope.

Your mistake here was saying “puppies” too early. You have to lead with a couple paragraphs of how you’re a flexitarian who has a farm and humanely raised animals like pets and then slaughters and feed them to your family.

Then list off the animals you exploit, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, cats and ducks. Then their brain gets hit with the dissonance of “wait why did I support this and then stop the second they said ‘dog’?” That jarring experience can work for the intellectually honest type.

Saying it too early means they can categorize your post as satire easily and not engage with it at all mentally.

They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.

The end goal is near-total eradication of the natives. Similar to native americans in the U.S. Israel is a settler state, much like the U.S was, and actively drove the natives out of their homes. They’re almost done though, we’re seeing some of the final acts of the ethnic cleansing/genocide.

Once there are barely any left, they’ll feign sympathy to garner support, and that’ll be that. Another win for imperialist settler states. Nothing unique or special about it.

I don’t use tiktok, but some people have unusually based tiktok feeds. They can get direct footage from the genocide happening in Gaza, for example. I never get that recommended on YouTube, despite my very obvious socialist leanings, watching pro-Palestine content, etc.

This is the actual reason tiktok is being banned (if they don’t sell) after the election. One of the largest lobbying groups in America, AIPAC, in probably the most well-funded policy categories (pro-Israel policies) backs most of Congress. They’ve determined tiktok has far too much influence on American youth, and has made the Israel/Palestine divide a young/old divide more-so than a left/right divide.

There’s already a strong correlation between political leaning and age, which is problematic for the future of the fascist movement in America, but this issue falls outside the norm. You’ll find a lot of young conservatives calling for an end to the needless killing of civilians. They won’t call it a genocide because admitting Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is too far for them, but they can at least admit killing tens of thousands of children is not the right path here.

That kind of extremism (e.g not greenlighting any amount of culling of “human animals” Israel feels it needs to do) is unacceptable to the pro-Israel lobby, and they’re not used to getting this kind of pushback from the American public.

Mercantilism and capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive, but the U.S is the opposite of mercantilist. Our imports vastly exceed our exports. China is more mercantilist, but still capitalist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

Unless of course you’re using a different definition. If you are, feel free to provide it and then I’ll address your claims on the basis of how you intended to use those words.

The goal of semantics, and words in general, are to convey ideas. It was true in the past that socialism was a very concrete, straightforward thing. If you believed in worker control of the means of production, you were a socialist. Now there are people who say they’re socialist, and they advocate for private tyrannies for the foreseeable future (decades or sometimes even a century+). They want entire generations of humans to be wage slaves, serve the interests of capital, pay their reduced wages to land leeches and banks, and then die without having ever seen a better system.

Those systems, systems by which entire generations of people are subjugated to the interests of capital under authoritarian rule, are now called socialist or sometimes communist. And I no longer have the word to describe a system where wage slavery is immediately abolished (much like chattel slavery was), and workers take immediate control over the means of production.

Those societies/institutions were often overthrown and overrun by either conservative Marxists (e.g Lenin) or fascists (e.g Catalonia).

People say things for reasons, and those reasons aren’t always to express the true state of things. For example, it’s powerful to capture positive social sentiment around socialism without having to actually relinquish any power to the working class. It effectively destroys workers’ ability to communicate effectively about what we want to see in the world.

Back in the day, you could simply say “I’m a socialist” and that meant that you advocated for a system where workers owned the means of production, and private property didn’t exist. Now you can say the same thing, and what does it mean? Literally nothing, it’s an incoherent thing to say because it has too many contradictory meanings.

I still identify as a libertarian socialist, but every other person I talk to doesn’t understand what I mean by this (pro-China? pro-Bernie? interested in dismantling private ownership? want to slightly increase taxes on corporations and implement universal healthcare?). Most people that use the label libertarian socialist align with the original definition of socialism, and I find value in that. However for the purposes of communicating to people who don’t agree with the position, it’s effectively useless.

Destroying that avenue to communicate was definitely intentional, it subverts actual organizational efforts. The same thing has happened with unions. Essentially the entire 19th century socialist movement has been systematically destroyed through propaganda and language manipulation.

The only metric that page uses to define India as socialist is “makes a constitutional reference to socialism”. That can mean socialism is some end goal, or they just have policy inspired by socialism.

Words have definitions, so just saying “this country is socialist” is not enough evidence to declare that country is socialist, unless your definition of socialism is “a system which people call socialist”.

By that definition, America is socialist so long as I call it socialist. It becomes tautological and useless.

I haven’t read all of these, but I have read a good deal of Marx/Engles, and am working through Das Kapital currently.

I have written similar comments to this, going over the history of thought. It’s important, and not something to be taken lightly (though there is a fine line between being thorough and gishgalloping, especially in the context of forums like lemmy/reddit/etc.)

Maybe you’re of the view that communism is such a loaded word that trying to define it in just a few dozen or hundred words is a pointless exercise. That’s fine, but if the word is so loaded and complicated, you probably shouldn’t be attaching it to nation-states to try to succinctly describe part of their economic system. The only people you’d be transmitting information to are the people who have the dozen or so required readings under their belt to truly grasp what you meant by communism. At this point, the word provides no value.

No economic system can actually be totally described by a single word, ever. However, a single word can be used to describe a part of a system, and it can be used in a reliable way. I pointed to very common definitions of the words, ones you seem to disagree with, and even in the ~thousand or so words you wrote you didn’t provide clear alternative definitions. That signals to me you probably need tens of thousands of words to properly define what you mean by the word “communism”, and at that point the utility of the word is just completely lost.

It’s just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I’ll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn’t understand why people call China communist.

First, I’ll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

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Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

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Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).

So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).

China isn’t even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.

Nobody is exactly aware of what will result from their actions, I think the absolute best-case scenario for Palestine as a result of this post-October 7th escalation is that American youth gain a vastly increased awareness of the horrors of the Palestinian genocide.

This seems to actually have happened. American congress people are super worried about the anti-Israel sentiment rising in youth, and this is a major factor, if not the sole factor, driving the tiktok ban/forced sale attempts.

If anti-Israel sentiment stays strong for say 1-2 more decades while boomers continue to die off, America could very easily turn anti-Israel, and vote in line with Palestine and the rest of the world on widely agreed upon 2 state solutions.

Socialists use work and labor to describe different things. Work is the set of actions a worker is coerced to participate in by capitalists to align with the interests of capital. Labor can be something you engage in as part of work, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes people have jobs that are so inefficient or bullshit that they literally don’t labor at all at work (read Bullshit Jobs).

Labor is necessary (currently), work is not. Aligning with the interests of capital is not synonymous with the interests of humanity (think ad work, literally encouraging greater consumption, especially around harmful products like tobacco/alcohol/sugar. Most western countries now have bans on tobacco advertising, but still let advertising in general flourish).

On the topic of feeding everyone, it would be very logistically difficult in the 1600s no doubt. Now we have a massive international trade system, I can easily get massive amounts of goods shipped from the other side of the world in weeks or maybe months at the worst. We also produce enough food currently to feed 12 billion people, and that’s with our incredibly inefficient system of converting edible plant matter (mostly soy) to animals.

The issue is, under capitalism, poor people don’t deserve to eat. If they lack money, they’re better off dead than alive and consuming resources without paying for them, so that’s what the global international capitalist system does, it moves more than enough food great enough distances to feed everyone as it is. It just moves it to the rich countries where obesity has been a massive issue instead of the global south, because people in rich countries have the money to pay for food, and so they deserve to live (and overeat/waste food) but people born in Africa deserve death.

Capitalists often lose sight of what an economy is for. An economy isn’t something of value in and of itself, it’s about setting up incentives and systems to benefit humanity. Capitalism fails to do this in everyway that is uniquely capitalist. Anything it does right is attributed to the general functioning of markets, which existed before capitalism and can exist after capitalism (market socialism is a real thing). There are problems with markets no doubt, but capitalism really has no redeeming qualities when compared to market socialism. If you compare it to feudalism, it does do better at mobilizing productive forces, of course at the massive detriment to workers.

Yes but in different ways depending on the country. The U.S has a pretty clear analogue, the Native American genocide.

The main difference between Israel/Palestine and the U.S/Native Americans is the former is happening currently, the U.S has already successfully completed the genocide on their natives, while Israel is in the middle of its extermination.

Germany also clearly has the Jewish Holocaust, but they weren’t successful in WW2, so that genocide didn’t get white-washed and instead was shamed to paint a clear good guy/bad guy narrative, despite the Nazis open praise of the U.S for our successful extermination of the natives, U.S business interests aligning with Nazis before and during the war, and the U.S trying to stay neutral between the Allies and Axis powers until Japan forced the U.S into action.

This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.

You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.

Bit of a strawman, the initial complaint wasn’t that he didn’t say some words, the initial complaint was the billions in military aid and actual physical support the administration gave Israel.

The only reason words matter is if they have any impact on reality. Israel knows the U.S is giving them a lot of leeway to commit this genocide because that’s what the administration’s actions say, hence they’re two-faced.

If they decide to stop materially supporting genocide, good. They were still wrong to do it at all, and they can’t undo that, so they’re still shit-libs, but better late than never I guess, and all those dead children will just have to stay dead.

Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone’s personal computer (no matter O.S). It’s also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.

The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn’t run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.

The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they’ll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don’t have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we’ve had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).

For what it’s worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don’t work, developers who won’t flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I’m just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn’t being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don’t want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol

I always tip when I eat out because I agree, and this post is mistakenly directing the anger at the waiters, but tipping culture is a problem that properly developed countries don’t have to deal with.

Also, the owners do have to cover the difference to minimum wage if tips don’t get you there. Minimum wage is generally too low to live off of, but some workers get paid that anyway. If you live somewhere with a $15 an hour minimum wage, and that actually aligns with COL, then tipping culture disappearing wouldn’t be terrible.

Humans aren’t perfectly rational consumers, capable of always depriving themselves of joy in the name of fiscal responsibility.

I imagine the crux of your argument rests on the idea that eating out for $70 or $90 are two identical things, when in fact they are not. If you do it 10 times a year, it’s a $200 difference.

The reason that difference exists is to satisfy the desire the owning class has to not pay workers enough to survive. If they did, the capitalists would have less money, you would have more money, and the waiter would have the same amount of money.

That’s better. Not perfectly ideal, but better than now.

Why did you link this? The Biden administration didn’t put this into action. They weren’t even major backers for this. This is far too left for their “practical moderate” image. And moderate in America is really right-leaning by any European or Asian standard.