mozz

No, Big Chopper speaks only the truth

Absolutely I disagree with that. Here's why:

If we ran the numbers, and discovered that the demographics have shifted and now most users on Lemmy tend to be liberals, would that mean that you need to read up and research on liberal thinking before it makes sense for you to talk? And, getting back to the earlier point, that you needed to phrase your arguments in terms that would be acceptable to liberals, so that you could appeal to them?

Bro just let people talk. They can be in majority or minority, and you might or might not agree, but variety of political opinion in a forum is a good thing. This whole lemmy.ml thing where it's like "hey I'm a leftist and therefore privileged in this forum, and you need to make you're acceptable to my philosophy before I even want to listen to you, because I've pretty much decided what the right answers are, and yours is definitely wrong unless it lines up with mine" is just a bunch of crap. In my opinion.

Yeah. I guess I should have paid more attention to the title -- applying it to a "single issue voter" (or, non-voter, I guess) who really is throwing all the stuff on the right in the garbage, in the (incorrect) belief that they're helping the Palestinians, when in reality they're just threatening to make things worse for literally everybody, makes sense.

I just don't think that's most of the people in the tents or carrying the signs. If they had constructed the cartoon to attack all the people on Lemmy who don't want to vote because Biden personally killed all those Gazans and loves that the war is happening, or whatever they are claiming is happening, then that makes sense. But attacking the protestors themselves seems wrong.

To skip to the end, I will turn your question back on you: what do you want, and why?

I think I said it -- basically, return to the conditions of the New Deal and shortly after, just as applied to all people instead of only white people. I think it requires a lot of the same things that led to the New Deal -- strong labor unions directly exercising political power, a lot less power in the hands of political parties and professional politicians, but still keeping intact the main structures of US government on the government side.

In the short run, key steps would be big reforms to the things that are causing corruption in the US: Lobbying and campaign finance, broken and archaic voting systems, poor education and media that lead voting to be more or less a media-driven popularity contest that can be exploited by the wealthy to sideline any real progress.

I think a lot of the economic problems are intertwined with political problems. I don't think either of the two can be solved in isolation, and in particular I think that trying to solve economic problems by centralizing government so the government can "fix" the economic system to be more fair, is likely to be counterproductive, as turns out to be more difficult to prevent assholes from seizing control of it than it might at first appear.

That's the short answer, at least.

Wtf, who is upvoting this, this is alarming

I strongly suspect that most of the people on the left are also carrying all the signs on the right

And that the person writing the cartoon is planning move on to targeting the next-least-acceptable sign from the pile on the right, as soon as the one on the left is dealt with. This thing of slicing off segments of dissenting opinion to shut them down one at a time, in separation from their natural cohort of supporting allies, by driving wedges in between them, is fairly normal "advanced fascism from people who know how to get it done on the ground" tactics.

Yeah dude

"is why we're supporting the union drive our employees are putting together" or "is why we're donating some overstock clothes and blankets to the homeless" would have been better and more resonant with the moment, or hell, just like giving a discount because the customers and the stockholders are all created equal, or a little pamphlet about registering to vote, or more or less anything other than "we promise to redouble efforts to make our employees subservient in a satisfying fashion for you, their rightful masters."

Strong communities are good for a ton of different reasons, resisting fascism (or maximizing relative safety even if fascism comes) being a big one

TV killed American communities, and they haven't really recovered. Everyone just sits in their house or goes in their car.

I feel like it's like sports; if you do the game then it's interesting, but if you're just observing it as an observer, then it's sort of pointless.

I have observed live speedruns which are absolutely compelling though, too.

Ah, got it, fair point. My point still stands; surely by the same logic, you shouldn't be criticizing Biden unless you're willing to spend enough time learning about the facts of his record to get a comprehensive factual view of what you're talking about?

I mean, I don't think it should work that way. I'm just pointing out that your logic seems like it would imply that it should work that way.

I sorta had that same reaction, yeah. His Super Mario video was endlessly fascinating and then from time to time I would go to watch one of the others and they didn't seem all that different or exciting. Then yesterday I happened on this one, and for whatever reason, it absolutely hooked me.

You're making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots

Like I said, oversimplifying, yes.

Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia

The PRC killed somewhere from 15 to 55 million people in a multi-year famine, around 1960. It's widely regarded, says Wikipedia, as one of the greatest man-made disasters in all of human history. What KMT famine are you talking about? I searched "KMT famine" and found nothing.

The Russian famines I think I already addressed. You're free to pretend I didn't, and simply claim that the USSR didn't cause a massive man-made famine unlike anything that happened under the Tsars, that has a specific name and still is talked about to the present day in the affected areas almost a hundred years later.

That's why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR

I mean, technically true.

• In Russia it ramped up from about 30 to about 70.
• In China it ramped up from about 30 to about 80.
• In the US it ramped up from about 40 to about 80.

I'm open to the idea that things would never have happened the same way in China or Russia without the revolutions. On the other hand, I'm also open to the idea that it would have happened in exactly the same way, because of the advances in medicine and public health that ramped it up over pretty much the same time period in the US, even without a centrally managed economy that killed millions of people and enacted a barbaric system without many of the daily freedoms that I consider essential to a decent life, which even the US manages to provide in some reduced form.

Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that's like comparing an adult to a child.

Not true. Outside a handful of notable cities, the US in 1900 was a lawless and unelectrified wilderness with a life expectancy of 46, that none of the mighty established European empires took all that seriously. In the late 1800s, labor began battling for control of the US in a big way, and around 1930 a pro-labor government got powerful enough to tackle some big reforms, and all of a sudden, some things changed between 1900 and 1950 that catapulted the US onto the world stage in a way where it became the dominant power and has remained there into the present day. And, for white people at least, the conditions inside the country transformed into a sort of paradise life.

(The war was a big part of the US becoming a world power, of course, but the course of the US's/China's/USSR's contrasting economic developments leading up to the war are kind of hard to ignore as a factor.)

Also, the USSR crumbled and collapsed from its dominant position on the world stage into now being a backwards little land of tinpot gangsters and alcoholic misery that can't even effectively invade its direct neighbor which it outnumbers by at least 10 to 1. Surely that's relevant? If you're saying (and I'm not saying you are, just saying if) that you want to replicate parts of the Soviet model in the US?

Either way, with respect to what you're saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism.

Agreed. I think this natural tendency always exists within capitalism, and we're living in the dystopian results right now. I think we're just disagreeing about what counterbalancing factors need to be introduced to more effectively combat the cancer.