CindyTheSkull

Most people who have it know why, and it has to do with the large swathes of chuds (and libs too) who insist it isn't real, just in your head, an excuse to be lazy, etc. etc. Almost any chronic illness that is hard to diagnose and can't be pinned with complete unambiguous medical certainty to a single clear cause gets that sort of treatment. There are still so many people who don't even believe Lyme disease is real.

I completely agree and this is something everyone should remember. Even so, it's fair to say that there is a spectrum when it comes to the ahistoricity of any given historical depiction. A work can be a bit off despite the honest attempt of the artist to make it historically accurate or it can be a grotesque mischaracterization that distorts the context beyond any semblance of the historical reality. G*mers tend to demand the latter while pretending they're the ones championing accuracy.

It honestly depends on how you want to define it and under what framework. In Marxism the definition of class depends on the relationship to the means of production. Obviously using the Marxist framework is the most accurate to describe what's actually happening and as Marxists we should use those definitions and try to inform people as best we can that proletariat and bourgeoisie are the two main and oppositional classes (primary contradiction) in capitalism. But like Mardoniush pointed out there still are other classes since the relationship to the means of production can be more complicated than just straight ownership vs labor despite the antagonism of those two classes being the primary contradiction.

Still, none of those are a "middle class" and you are completely right about how one of the big reasons that term gets heavily used is so the parts of the proletariat that are not impoverished can feel elevated above those who are. But that right there means there is a material difference between certain subsets of the proletariat that gets called "middle class" and "lower class." There is a large subset that historically in the US was generally well off (comparatively) to the subset that lives in poverty conditions, and it is true that the former subset is shrinking while the latter subset is growing (along with the intensity of the contradictions). It is not wrong to point this out, and "middle class" is definitely not meaningless when used this way, it's just that using the word "class" to describe this phenomenon is deliberately muddying the waters and it's not using the term according to a Marxist framework. Don't mistake that to mean that what the OP article is saying is untrue or isn't happening, because it most definitely is happening! It's just bad semantics.

I thought getting accused of being an AI was just a me thing.

Unfortunately no. If you ever try to discuss geopolitics outside of explicitly anti-imperialist spaces, you will inevitably get called a Russian Bot.

I appreciate that comment. I may have been too reactive and harsh in my response, and apologize for that. It is admittedly one of my "peeves" when someone I'd otherwise consider a comrade seems to advocate specifically for killing innocents and children as a means to punish the people who do deserve the pit and worse.

I absolutely share your anger, even rage for the demon shitstains supplying WP to aid a genocide. And to be clear, it's not that they don't deserve to see their own family killed in the same way they are facilitating the unimaginably painful murder of other families, I just personally think it's important for us as leftists to draw a line against targeting innocent people especially for the sake of vindictiveness. In other words, if we could somehow make the guilty fascists think that was happening to their own family without actually doing that to the innocent members of their family, I'd have zero problem with that, in fact I'd be all for it. Since we were discussing hypotheticals, I actually rather like that one.

Well wishes to you, I should probably log off for a bit too.

It’s actually quite crazy to see the amount of change Biden could get done even with out control of the legislative branch. Adding to that, the Republicans are in disarray too yet things still got done. I’m surprised OP didn’t include the largest climate legislation in world history. I want to see another country or region beat us, as this would be welcome competition.

You:

Eh, fuck em. It's killing somebody's families either way, might as well be theirs.

Also you:

Save your indignation for those who deserve it.

lol.

If we're just talking hypotheticals here, why is it so hard for you to say that it would be bad, hypothetically, to kill a 3 year old with white phosphorus?

What you're apparently trying to say is that your comments advocating for killing entire families based on the crimes of one of their members is that you're posing this hypothetical situation to people here on lemmy who are in a position to target/profit from/earn a living from white phosphorus. And that doing so will perhaps get them to imagine the horrors and change their ways. Really? K. Keep fighting that good fight then. As a final note, believe me, those who deserve my indignation aren't getting any less of it just because I took a moment to call out a chuddy comment.

Disgusting. The problem is the torture and murder of people who don't deserve it. If "their family" only consists of WP provider's cousins who condone the business then fine, good riddence. But you're saying their 3 year old niece who knows nothing about any of this should be killed by slowly burning to death from chemical weapons? Nah, fuck off with the "children are valid targets" bait.

"Go touch grass!" they keep telling me. Now I know they're just trying to get me killed.

I mean, that is their dream, that is indeed the ultimate capitalist goal that you're right they have largely achieved. But an important aspect of that capitalist dream world would be to do that in perpetuity, with all this kept in a stable balance they forever control from the top. That is where the dream can never be truly realized. They do have to struggle to maintain it, and while they have been doing an astoundingly good job of that for the most part (despite how well all of us here can see the gaping contradictions, we also rightly lament how communists are an insignificant minority in the west/core and how captured by capital nearly every institution is), that struggle still demands they have to keep inventing increasingly complex and stratified apparatus to keep their contradiction-riddled structure of exploitation afloat.

And that's what we're really talking about here. At what point does that corrosion from the countless contradictions become so extensive that maintenance of the structure becomes a truly lost cause? Where is the point where the downward slide back out of their capitalist dreamworld (the proletarian nightmare) accelerate into the certainty of waking up from it? The answer is necessarily subjective, since we can all pin different moments where we think this has or will happen. But it is an inevitability.

You were asking about the shifting nature of the meaning of the term whiteness. Go up and read your own comment to see how you related that to authoritarianism. If you can't follow your own train of thought, then I can't help you because it makes it apparent you're not asking in good faith.

You're saying "authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc"

What I'm trying to explain to you is that "we" are not saying that. The people who use whiteness to justify their actions and otherize their enemies are saying that. This isn't difficult.

Why not skip the middle step?

Go ask the NATO bloc and their supporters. The obvious and surface answer is that it has to do with making for an easy "us-vs-them" identifier. "Of course they're bad, they aren't white like us good wholesome folk are, who are inherently good and wholesome because we're white, and being good and wholesome makes us right and correct in what we do and you can tell because we're white. The ones who are bad clearly aren't like us. They're not white!" Yes, it is circular reasoning and garbage logic. But I don't know why you're getting pissy at us for that instead of the dipshits white people who keep moving the goalposts on the meaning of whiteness, as they always have done to suit their agenda. Take it up with them.