In most lemmy instances, the default feed is a mix of that instance’s and popular threads from other instances. Participating in such a thread that you find spontaneously is therefore not anything resembling “brigading,” even if other people on your instance also see it spontaneously and participate.

It’s a critical element of the financialization of the economy that has lead to it becoming even more irrational and unstable than it was before. Easy example, look up stock buybacks. It’s not just that though, it’s the entire system of obligation to shareholders to deliver quarterly gains with no concern for employees or even the long-term health of the company.

That’s not at all what the quote is and neither is the top level commenter’s interpretation, and I think it not being these is pretty obvious if you read No Exit. The point that he was making (and this is putting it crassly because I know jack shit about his Heidegger-based phenomenology) is the presence of other people forces us to be self-conscious, to regard ourselves as the object of someone else’s perception and judgement. That’s why Sartre goes out of his way to say the room (their jail cell in Hell, effectively) had no reflective surfaces, so that the character’s perception of themselves could only come from the people they are stuck with (this doesn’t entirely make sense, but I am pretty sure it’s what he meant). You can read him talk about some of the premises informing this by checking out his writing on “The Look,” like is quoted below this comic.

So it’s a slightly obtuse point about intersubjectivity that people have turned into a cutesy way of talking about their own misanthropy. It’s probably more emblematic of the meaning of the quote how people in this thread, original commenter especially, are talking about silently judging people for this and that action.

It’s been happening a lot longer than that, that’s a classic misspelling.

I already found (and in fact am coming from, this is an alt account) some more appropriate instances, but I appreciate your trying to be helpful.

Why in the world would you make this thread? Almost every single day for at least the last month (and still often beforehand) there have been threads where the liberals and the leftists aggressively talk in circles on this issue. The odds of you hearing anything new are incredibly low, and you might as well just go back to .ml’s c/news threads for the same material.

I just can’t keep having people yell the same nonsense at me over and over. If you’re really badly in need of leftist takes, I’ll DM you on request, but I don’t really want to talk about it publicly anymore except in more convincingly leftist spaces than .ml has been rendered by its federation.

compromising on social policy (especially immigration . . . )

That compromise has already happened. Harris is currently campaigning on a hardline border policy and touting that she tried to get essentially Trump’s 2020 border policy through the legislature.

If the Dems lose, they will move right. If they win, they will move right. Without a strong leftist opposition (not just voice, but opposition), they will keep moving right term after term after term while touting superficial bullshit to try to please people who have a conscience but very little political education.

There was a thread just yesterday about why the Democrats haven’t done anything progressive in so long, and people were seriously touting Harris being black like that at all matters in the face of her being a cop, or like it’s actual policy and not just the incidental identity of their prospective President. I wrote a whole thing on it before deleting it because I just can’t stand to talk to people like that anymore.

Is it a statement on how pets are animals turned into agency-less commodities, just like meat?

Is it really that hard to imagine that someone who loves you was hoping to see you happy instead of as a moldering corpse?

That is simply incorrect English, words have more referents than gender. Traditionally “it” is reserved for non-human things of all types, but definitely does not ever apply to a human, and calling someone an “it” without it first being requested by them is near-universally recognized as a dehumanizing insult.

No, gay marriage is what the US culture war pivoted on for a long time because it doesn’t involve disruption to normal cishet social currents and doesn’t require anything of the state actually be provided to people, plus it represents a benefit to the gay members of the bourgeoisie just as much as to the common person.

Furthermore, like in Taiwan, gay marriage in the US was not approved by referendum, it was basically a fluke from the Supreme court independent of other efforts. There are still nearly as many states as before where it is a large popular sentiment that if your kid is gay, they are sick, and state legislatures that are, as we speak, preparing to bring gay marriage back to the SC to get its protection removed.

Edit: As an aside, despite your chauvinistic, idealist view of cultures being “there yet” or not, using China as the example, lateral cultural differences also exist, and ignorance of these makes it very difficult to actively evaluate what a cultural attitude is. In China’s case, there is in most places a passive homophobia (which is still homophobia), but they generally don’t have the same homophobic culture war front that we saw in America. They are more like a broad, cultural “don’t ask, don’t tell”, which is in keeping with even Imperial Chinese traditions. There is obviously resistance to the existing movements to do things like legalizing gay marriage, but it’s a losing battle for the conservatives, who are mostly passive on this issue, and several of the practical benefits of gay marriage have already been won by other concessions, allowing gay couples rights concerning medical and financial decisions and so on through their guardianship system.

All this to say “Is gay marriage legal?” should not be treated as a binary for queer people having any recognition.

P.P.S. China also has multiple dedicated clinics for transgender people in various cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Most folks on the planet are Indian, Chinese, or in an Islamic country of some sort. Now do tell, dear blakeus12. How do all of those cultures treat LGBTQ+ people :|

China has cities bigger than New York that are pretty trans-positive. These entities aren’t monolithic in their values, and in fact I would say they are more diverse in their values for better and for worse, compared to the US. What you are referring to is a cartoon perspective on these ~dozen countries spoon fed to you by western chauvinists.

The whole article is almost certainly demeaning, as you would expect of a celebrity gossip rag.

Contrary to certain self-victimizing sentiments, I think that the problem is that the platform is more and more overtaken by the topic of the election (and Israel in reference thereto) and it just results in interminable arguing in circles that accomplishes nothing but wasting time. Regardless of the outcome of the election, I think less-annoying activity will increase afterwards.

Telegram is awful, but that’s mainly because it is readily bent towards the interests of malicious state actors like we see here. This headline is produced by two things being bad, not just one.

The formatting is admittedly not the most readable, but this is the best article I have seen on the topic.

I find this reply very strange because it’s the core point of Marxism that it’s dialectical but materialist. It has a lot of forebears, but Hegel is the most direct and obvious of them.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the “Idea”, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.

– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

i don’t think social change boils down to just one theory.

If we believe that the universe fundamentally makes sense, then it must stem from that that it can all be explained on the same terms. Furthermore, within a domain, the extent to which a theory is unable to explain some part of that domain is the extent to which it either fails or is in-utero just a component of a larger theory whose other parts can cover those other areas. Not only can social change boil down to one theory, if you believe we live in an interconnected, logical world, it must boil down to one theory. Obviously there are many competitors for that title, and none of them are yet developed enough to properly claim it, but it is a legitimate and even a necessary title.

Edit: Sorry for piling on about the dialectics part, I see Cowbee did go over it later. fwiw I think he didn’t represent materialism fairly, but part of why I included the Engels quote is because I think he does represent Hegelian idealism and its fundamental problem (How can this dialectic of humans – material beings – take place in the world of ideas?) fairly.

Most people will take “freedom” as an axiom, but how “freedom” is defined varies a lot. In a society where the commons are pretty much fully enclosed and you are homeless, the petite-bourgeois may very well be free, but you really aren’t.

I chose to avoid most of the bait so far, even with those cloying :)s that you like adding so much, but this one is too disgusting. It’s historical revisionism pure and simple that they were ever “allies” with Germany. They had a treaty to try and stall German invasion, but they never imagined things would go otherwise than one party defeating the other (though they did underestimate how soon the Germans would attack).

I’m really struggling to follow some of this. Are you saying the Soviets didn’t need to fight Germany and didn’t need to take as much time as they could manage to prepare to do so?