Marxism is literally just an ideological framework which is used to interpret, analyse and critique the socioeconomic conditions we live under. Discussion and implementation of socialism necessarily implies the application of marxism. What you wrote is a bit like saying that women’s rights advocacy is good but feminism is bad.

I’m guessing you may have meant marxism-leninism?

Socialism is when Linus does stuff. And it’s more socialism the more stuff he does. And if he does a real lot of stuff, that’s communism.

The far-left is the furthest possible environment from an echo chamber imaginable. We literally can’t stop arguing with eachother over the smallest details. I’m far left and my first instinct when reading your comment was to be annoyed and offended that you lumped me in with some other group that considers itself far-left but I just consider to be wrong.

Humans are literally the most co-operative animals alive, which is why as a species we have been so successful. The unique advantage humans have over other animals has been our hyper-cooperativity.

Humans regularly will make decisions which are costly to them individually, but which benefit a larger group. This is reinforced through cultural norms as well.

The modern era has been a bit of a deviation from the norm of humanity co-operating to advance our civilisation. I’m sure that we will correct for our mistake soon.

I guess it’s a bit of a lazy summary, because it sort of implies that the region has been fighting among itself just for reasons, rather than the region being conflict prone because of colonialist foreign policy. I wouldn’t say it’s racist though.

If your subreddit is big enough and you do anything disruptive they’ll just take your mod powers away and give them to someone else who won’t disrupt it.

The best thing to do is either over or under moderate the subreddit in a way that seems legitimate but leads to the usefulness of the community dying off while also migrating the most useful content off the subreddit.

Uhm, the worldnews subreddit is literally the most astroturfed online community I have ever seen in my entire life. Lemmy isn’t great because it still has Redditors on it, but it’s still nowhere near as bad as Reddit.

No way he read the book, but he’s immersed enough in that far-right shit scape that it’s not really much of a stretch to believe he picked it up somewhere. I’m sure people on Truth Social love talking about it.

Some are decent human beings that choose to use their money for the betterment of humankind.

Uhm, I don’t think this is a reference to the Purge, I think this is a reference to the Day of the Rope from the Turner Diaries

The world is not flat, stop spreading misinformation.

Imagine thinking this is a salient point, lmfao. “oh, you criticise people writing text prompts on large learning model tools to generate art based on an amalgamation of everyone else’s stolen art, for claiming to be artists, AND YET, here you are writing text.”

it’s so fucking stupid. a work has to be actually creative and novel to be protected by copyright, most AI prompts would not meet the threshold of creativity and originality to benefit from protection.

You’re so totally wrong. Storing passwords in plaintext is such a dangerous, obviously wrong mistake that it can only be considered wanton disregard for the safety and the security of your users, and it should carry the equivalent of a life-in-prison sentence for the corporation which breaks that rule. Not only should the company be completely fucking destroyed over this but the CEO should be criminally liable.

The legal system does not take corporate crimes seriously at all. Perhaps it’s time to take justice into our own hands.

“Oh right, it’s money!!” — Hbomberguy

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Thanks for the well-considered and thoughtful response - I appreciate it.

Just to clarify, I’m not trying to make some typical liberal argument that China is evil or anything like that - I’m very far left and I’m not here just criticising China just because that’s what the mainstream media has told me to do. I just think it does leftists like myself no favours to pretend that China is perfect and that we shouldn’t criticise it - and the essay linked above, in my opinion, seems to be a bit of a reflexive defense of China, rather than actually considering the criticism - to me it seems they are choosing arguments to support their position rather than letting the facts and their beliefs lead them to a conclusion.

I don’t think we have to accept that any amount of imbalanced transactions of value necessarily guarantee that billionaires are inevitable - plenty of systems exist where there are “winners and losers” but the system itself reaches an equilibrium state. There are so many solutions which could be implemented to prevent billionaires from existing, and I would say that billionaires can only ever exist when there is a fundamental flaw in the society which produces them. It should be impossible to so thoroughly capture and centralise wealth and power to a point where an individual can have that much.

I’ve re-read this comment and your previous comment multiple times and I’m not really clear on what you mean.

My point is that the essay’s argument is weak because it completely ignores scale and proportionality. It uses the language of marxism to justify capitalism.

I don’t personally agree with it, but I was willing to consider the notion on its own merits rather than in contrast with ideology - but even when I do, I find it a wholly unsatisfactory justification

This is pretty typical self-justifying bullshit. They’re justifying pre-held beliefs (china is good; china has billionaires; therefore billionaires must be good) rather than actually considering the claim based on the merits. (is it actually a good thing that china has billionaires, and what does that say about socialism/marxism as practiced in china)

You can believe that people have different needs and that we don’t all need to be absolutely 1:1 equal in terms of our material possessions etc. and that having some goal to work towards is beneficial to society (ambition) without having billionaires.

This essay is like trying to justify genocide by pointing out that sometimes, for the benefit of society, the death of an individual is preferable to the suffering of many. The issue with billionaires isn’t one of inequality in the micro - it’s the magnitude of that inequality, and the power it brings, which is the issue.

This is how fascism is successful, because liberals will lie for a lie, but they won’t lie for the truth.