Could do worse tbh.

Right: Things are shit because of the people who are already marginalized (letting us take advantage of pre-existing prejudice and targeting the people with the smallest platforms to push back against our narratives)

Left: Things are shit because the people at the top are fucking over all of us together

Center: Things aren’t shit

In the absence of a leftist narrative, the most fundamental Center vs Right disagreement is just whether or not things are shit. As things get shittier and shittier, the Center will keep losing strength to the Right.

The idea that China was socialist under Mao but became capitalist under Deng is a common Maoist take and something that distinguishes them from Marxist-Leninists, it’s kind of in the name.

Sometimes when people call China capitalist, I half-jokingly ask if they’re a Maoist, or if they think the best policy is closer to Mao than what they’re currently doing. Of course, usually, the answer (when I get an answer at all) is no: they opposed what China was doing when it was more state-controlled and they opposed what China was doing when it did reforms and opened up to private investment, if they make moves to hold billionaires accountable to the law or to move more of the economy to the public sector, they’re bad, and if they did the opposite, that would also be bad, but if they stayed steady, that too would be bad.

Maoists and Capitalists are both at least coherent in what they think China should do, in opposite extremes: either undo the reforms and revert to how it was or take it further and become more capitalist. Marxist-Leninists tend to have more nuanced takes about adapting to changing conditions, in line with what they’ve done. But then you have this other category that’s super prevalent on Lemmy that wants to criticize China’s every move without ever offering any kind of coherent idea of what they actually want them to do, economically. I don’t even know what to call that position because it makes no sense to me at all.

The idea of Tiananmen Square being one of the top ten most important historical events in that time period is wild to me. Just in terms of death toll, the highest estimate mentioned on Wikipedia of 10,000 comes from a US ambassador citing an anonymous “friend,” and is many times higher than any other estimate - a more realistic generous estimate is closer to 1,000 (the official number is 300). Let’s compare that to the lowest estimates from the list of genocides page:

• Gaza: 38,000 (ongoing)
• Darfur: 98,000 (2005)
• Congo (Effacer le tableau): 60,000 (2003)
• Congo (Massacre of Hutis): 200,000 (1997)
• Rwanda: 491,000 (1994)
• Bosnia: 31,000 (1995)
• Somalia (Isaaq): 50,000 (1989)
• Iraq (Kurds): 50,000 (1989)
• Cambodia: 1,386,000 (1979)
• Indonesia (East Timor): 85,000 (1999)
• Uganda: 100,000 (1978)

The same year that Tiananmen Square happened, two separate genocides were ongoing that, even by the most ridiculously generous comparisons possible, each killed at least 5 times as many people. Searching “Isaaq” on either .world or .ml gives exactly one hit which is a comment listing off a bunch of genocides, like I’m doing now. Entire cities were leveled and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee the country, but nobody ever talks about it (myself included, until today).

In addition to that list, if we’re talking about events in general, then we should also look at the list of interstate wars (again, lowest estimates):

• Persian Gulf War: 29,000 (1991)
• War in Abkhazia: 25,000 (1993)
• First Congo War: 235,000 (1997)
• Kosovo War: 16,000 (1999)
• Eritrian-Ethopian War: 53,000 (2000)
• Second Chechen War: 20,000 (2000)

There’s ongoing conflicts in Myanmar, in North Africa, in Mexico, and in Sudan, and more, each of which has left more dead than Tiananmen this year and the year’s not even over yet.

So it doesn’t seem especially significant in terms of raw numbers, but you could argue that it’s more significant because of the effect it had on Chinese politics, as the controversy led to the resignation of the head of state, Deng Xiaoping. Except that I never ever see anything like that discussed. Either way, it didn’t change the broad direction of the reforms.

I could give my own reasons as to why it’s given such a high position of importance, but I’m genuinely curious to hear your own explanation of why Tiananmen would warrant a spot on a top ten list of important events, compared to any of the other events I’ve listed.

But it isn’t wrong. I’d like it to be wrong, and I can appreciate wanting to shift the Overton window, but that’s not where we are and it won’t change before November.

Cool, so which other groups are acceptable sacrifices for the sake of political convenience?

The rights of any minority are always precarious because the majority has the ability to fuck them over. The only way to protect ourselves is by banding together in solidarity with other vulnerable groups and drawing red lines and treating an attack on one as an attack on all. A group I belong to could very easily be the next in the crosshairs. “We will hang together, or we will hang separately.”

You want to convince me to support a third-party candidate, first we need to put Trump in prison, then we need to roll out Star Voting, and then we need some third-party alternatives that aren’t obvious Russian assets.

Oh, is Star Voting part of Kamala’s platform? Is that listed on her campaign website? Has she talked about it in speeches, rallies, or debates? Has she ever even mentioned it once?

Your plan is, “unconditional support of the Democratic party whether or not they provide any sort of voting reform, until they voluntarily choose to give us voting reform, in direct contradiction of their interests, and if they never do then just unconditional support to the democrats forever.” In other words, talking about voting reform is just a red herring to obfuscate that your actual stance is just unconditional support to the democrats forever.

You know who does support voting reform to make third party candidates more viable? Third party candidates. So if you wanna talk about voting reform, in order for that to happen, we would need to get a third party candidate to win first. Or, alternatively, we could say that our support for Democrats should be conditional on them supporting voting reform, so that when they do their calculations they realize that they need to incorporate that into their platform to have a better chance of winning. Because why on earth would they ever support it otherwise?

Right now, the Dems have decided that supporting Israel gains them more votes than it loses, and they can live with that.

I don’t see how you can say this and still not get it. We’re trying to make sure that this calculation is wrong. Because it’s only if that calculation is wrong that they would have any reason to change their stance. Voting for them regardless would mean that their calculation was easily correct and they should keep making the same calculation in the future. If you aknowledge that such a calculation is being made, then surely you can understand the rationale for making the decision more costly.

I can see how an RV, lab equipment, and a helper might help, but you don’t actually need any of those to do OF.

out of context

Everything’s always “out of context” with him, isn’t it? Because that’s his whole deal. He does controversial stuff to make people mad while hiding behind plausible deniability.

Whether it’s saying the n word, or saying what he did about CP, or whatever other antics he’s gotten up to, it’s the same playbook of controversy-bait. Stir up shit, get people mad, get hate clicks, get clicks from people who hate the people who got mad, get clicks from people who don’t want to get left out of the loop about what’s going on, etc.

I only partially dislike him for the times he’s taken the controversy-bait too far and done something legitimately shitty. Mostly I dislike him because he’s controversy bait, and whether or not he plays the game well enough to make sure nothing sticks doesn’t really matter. It’s still just stirring the pot for attention.

The best thing to do with people like that is just to pay them no mind. It’s not like I’m missing some unique insight or valuable perspective. I wish I could to that with politicians like Trump who employ similar outrage bait tactics, but he is unfortunately relevant to world affairs.

Anyway, it is my longstanding policy to downvote any comment or post about Vaush, positive or negative, since I don’t think he’s worth paying attention to and doing so just drags down the level of discourse, so, true to my policy, I will now be downvoting my own comment since I talked about him.

You should’ve listened to your hesitancy, the less you know of him the better.

All the answers are slightly wrong. The Katagana that’s causing confusion is “under-skort,” skorts being a combination shorts/skirt, “under-skort” is the part that’s like shorts, underneath the skirt part.

Jisho.org

Honestly at that point I think it’s lower effort to just go vegan. You’re already avoiding meat in every situation where you can’t investigate the supply chain, so no meat at restaurants, fast food, friends’ houses, etc. I guess if you really crave the taste of meat or something or if you live on a farm already I could see a case for it. For me, the case of going to the grocery and making a meal at home was always the easiest case to have a vegan diet (and avoiding all the extra prep and cleanup from preparing meat were nice perks), the parts that were actual hurdles were the convenience of fast food and not wanting to assert myself in group meals.

Personally, I figure that the tiny sliver of meat that’s produced ethically can go to the tiny sliver of people with weird dietary restrictions, and to cats, I guess. We still need to see a massive reduction in meat consumption if we want to address the abuse that’s rampant in the vast majority of meat production.

Ah, the classic diffusion of responsibility under capitalism.

The consumer is blameless because they have no control over the production process. The people committing abuse are blameless because they’re just doing what they’re paid to do, and if they didn’t do it someone else would. The CEO is of course blameless because they have a feduciary responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. And so, the real villains are the shareholders, like granma who has a S&P 500 retirement fund with 0.00001% of the company.

If you accept that when it comes to meat, then what’s the difference when it comes to something like slave labor, or sweatshops? A company sets up in a third world country with deplorable, illegal conditions, which are necessary to compete in the market and secure a contract with a multinational corporation, if their practices get exposed, the big corporation pleads ignorance, some low level manager takes the fall, and they set up another company to do the exact same thing. Once again, everyone’s just responding to price signals and doing what they’re told or what they need to to keep their job.

It’s a wonderfully designed system that ensures that the evil necessary to keep the machine running can be performed without the hindrance of those peaky little consciences. But I have to question whether it’s more moral to make sure everyone can pass the buck for doing something wrong, rather than one person directly doing the same thing and being responsible for it.

Is it more “moral” to kill someone if you do it via firing squad where only one gun is loaded than just having one person shoot them? Is it more “moral” to be 1% responsible for abusing 100 animals than 100% responsible for abusing 1? I’m not sure I understand the moral framework you’re using to arrive at your conclusions.

Rating this one moderate effort, with a side of, “Wtf are you talking about?”

It’s kind of impressive how many wrong things you just said.

First, it is valid to disregard someone’s opinions based on their other political views. If you had a swastika in your username, should I ignore that and listen earnestly to everything you say? Of course not.

Second, this is about fascism because the quoted text in OP is fascist propaganda. What they’re describing is the idea of the ubermensch, of certain people being inherently superior and genetically predisposed to rule over others.

Third, you’re not a mind reader. You’re incorrectly assuming that you know my thought process. I did not think, “This person has an Israeli flag, therefore they must be wrong,” I thought, “This person is telling people to look for a point in what is very clearly fascist propaganda, hey, look at that, they also have a fascist flag in their username, I guess it makes sense that they’d do that.”

So no, I didn’t write off your opinion because of your support of a fascist regime, though if I had it would’ve been valid. I simply thought critically about two different behaviors you did and noticed that they both display sympathy towards fascism, which I found interesting.

I thought critically about the issue and came to the conclusion that genocide and apartheid are bad and that fascism is wrong. Not my fault if enough other people reach the same conclusion for it to be trendy.

>Isreali flag

>“Maybe the fascist propaganda has a point!”

Checks out.

That’s your highest effort one yet.

As a vegan tankie, I’m more than happy to welcome anyone who is passionate about justice and equality. If you think for yourself rather than just following and upholding arbitrary social norms, you’re going to get pushback from the people who believe in those norms. Whether the norms in question are the needless industrialized mass slaughter of animals, or the needless industrialized mass slaughter of the victims of US imperialism. And it’s much easier to have meaningful, higher level discussions among people who share certain common values, so you’re not having to constantly refute the same shitty low effort talking points over and over.

Please, keep pushing your vegan users our way.

Lower effort.

Low effort