Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
You’re absolutely valid and not overreacting. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you might not have many other options - but if you can look into other modes of transportation you should.
Driving is dangerous, and not everyone is cut out for it. The great thing about public transit is that it’s much safer and less stressful, it doesn’t demand focus and attention - and that benefits drivers too, because it means fewer bad drivers will feel like they have to drive and it reduces traffic in general.
It all comes down to what the alternative is. If your alternative to driving is relying on others to drive you places, it’ll reduce your independence or be expensive (if you use rideshares). But if the alternative is biking or taking a train, then by all means go for it. There’s lots of reasons cars suck, danger, stress, insurance, gas, traffic, pollution, lots of reasons to look into other options.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 4 days ago:
The wordplay is clever. Somebody’s big mad that people are blaming the British for something they did
Might want to examine why people making fun of a blatantly evil empire offends you.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 4 days ago:
Do you not understand that it’s a joke?
Obviously we all know the paper is talking about the microorganism, but since the real cause of the famine wasn’t the microorganism but the British, it’s funny to act like the paper is insulting the British rather than talking about the microorganism.
That’s the only way I can interpret your comment in any coherent way, that the joke just went completely over your head.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 5 days ago:
The British were responsible for those deaths while the Chinese were not.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 week ago:
Thank you, brainfart on my part.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 week ago:
tl;dr Because that’s communism.
Let’s look at the history of labor movements in the US.
At first, yeah, you started with a pretty broad cross section of society (the Knights of Labor, for example), as well as some more radical elements. Then you had the Haymarket Affair, where people were protesting for an 8-hour work day, and the cops started killing protesters, and someone (possibly a provocateur) threw a bomb at the cops. The press went wild with it and it kicked off a red scare where many labor organizations kicked out and distanced themselves from Anarchists and Marxists.
Fast forward to the Great Depression, and you’ve got a new wave of radicalization because people are seeing the failures of capitalism, and that led to the New Deal. There was another red scare as the US and USSR became rivals, and that served as “the stick,” while the New Deal policies served as “the carrot.” The labor movement once again distanced itself from the more radical elements on the promise of a cooperative government. All the communists, who were more concerned with a broad movement of solidarity, got kicked out of groups like the AFL-CIO, and the unions were considered acceptable because they were (at least to a degree) narrowly self-interested.
These unions flourished in the 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, during this post-New Deal, Great Society era. They weren’t necessarily the most inclusive, but they worked well for their members. However, in the 70’s an economic phenomenon emerged that was termed, “Shrinkflation” - a period of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. The Keynesian economic model (which had had a broad consensus up until that point) said that you deal with unemployment by having the government spend more money, and then when unemployment drops, you reduce spending to avoid inflation. It didn’t have a clear answer for what to do when both were high at once, that wasn’t really supposed to happen.
The Carter administration made the decision to focus on inflation instead of unemployment, which screwed over the labor unions. But this was a broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington elites, and when Carter was replaced by Reagan, he did the same and pushed it further. Under this new paradigm of “supply side economics,” people’s identities as consumers was emphasized over their identity as workers. Even having purged radical elements and having become relatively toothless, unions were vilified and blamed for making goods expensive, and they didn’t really have the power to do much about it.
Question of economics were increasingly moved outside of the realm of public accountability and influence, being left to “experts” and both parties having broad agreement about things, but we still had to vote over something, and so we had the emergence of the culture war. Around the 90’s you had some rather boring presidents and debates, because it was the height of “the end of history,” where there was this idea that all the big questions and conflicts had been resolved and it was just a question of little tweaks here and there.
However, in the 2000’s, as it became clear that conditions were declining and the wealth gap was growing, there has been a new wave of radicalization, on both the right and the left, which started to really manifest in 2016. But it is very much in its infancy, without a lot of experience or strength. It’s been over 40 years since we had strong unions, and even longer since we had unions that believed in broad solidarity. Now, we’re fighting against entrenched anti-union and anti-worker policies, practices, and beliefs. And progress is being made, but it’s a long, uphill battle, and a lot of it is young people figuring things out from scratch.
- Comment on Happy anniversary of the day absolutely nothing happened at nowhere square! 1 week ago:
Funny how extreme poverty starts racing down as soon as China adopted capitalist market reforms.
I wonder if there was any opposition to those reforms, like, maybe some kind of big protest right as they were being introduced 🤔
- Comment on Happy anniversary of the day absolutely nothing happened at nowhere square! 1 week ago:
When Kent State happened, surveys showed an overwhelming majority of Americans blamed the students for getting shot more than they blamed the guard for shooting them. There were all sorts of fake news stories going around on TV about how the protests were filled with outside agitators doing things like putting LSD in the water supply. It was only once the opportunity for a reaction was safely past that they said, “Oopsie, we made a mistake.” There have been many other cases where the government and media lied until it determined it was safe enough to tell the truth, including the justifications for several major wars.
- Comment on "And my dick fucks your wife more than you do. What's your point?" 1 week ago:
“Oh, well this gun costs less than your watch, and yet: hand it over.”
- Comment on The joy of quitting a shit job with an asshole boss 1 week ago:
This also happened to me once too. I was working at Amazon as a picker, and they unveiled a new tool that lets you put in electronically if you’re planning to leave. One morning, I put in that I was planning to leave in a month. Before lunch that same day, I was suddenly fired.
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 3 weeks ago:
This quote is from a later period, but it reminded me of it:
When he was a serf, they said to him, “Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else’s field.” But now he is a tramp they say to him, “You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else’s field: but I will not give you a field.” They say, “You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed.” If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn’t. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.
The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, “Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it.”
(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)
- Comment on 100% people who drink water die 3 weeks ago:
I heard that some people drink so much of that crap that literally more than 50% of their body is made up of water. I don’t even know how it’s possible to still be alive at that point, I mean, JFC it’s like you’re not even a solid at that point, you’re just gonna dissolve into a puddle. Like, get help.
- Comment on Speak American 3 weeks ago:
there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use
Well yeah, but these days, you say you’re English, you’ll get arrested and thrown in jail
- Comment on the young always think they have all the right answers but THIS eventually happens 4 weeks ago:
My father once yelled at me because he tried to to tell me a story about a friar in the 1600’s who had the power of flight and I assumed it was a joke. It was not a joke.
- Comment on We gonna fight 4 weeks ago:
The right has their fair share of infighting. They may all want heirarchy, but they disagree on who should be on top. They can all agree on scapegoating an outgroup, but disagree on which people fall into that outgroup. Like, the ultimate endgame of fascism is for the last fascist to kill the second to last fascist for not being white enough.
They appear to be united because most of us don’t go into their spaces and lurk, because, I mean, ew. If a Trump supporter came to Lemmy, they’d find people quite united against them, and if one of us went on Truth Social, we’d find them quite united against us, but that doesn’t mean they actually get along internally.
- Comment on We gonna fight 4 weeks ago:
I have seen people waxing poetic about Imperial Japan
What? Who? Where? That’s an absolutely wild take.
- Comment on Is it true that femboys are "fetishized" by right-wingers or something like that? Or is my friend(who told me this) tripping balls? 1 month ago:
All you did was barf on your keyboard, it’s not worth a response.
Please fuck off back to Reddit or 4chan or wherever you came from. We don’t want your kind here.
- Comment on Is it true that femboys are "fetishized" by right-wingers or something like that? Or is my friend(who told me this) tripping balls? 1 month ago:
Blah blah blah. The Nazis started by coming after trans people too, gay people wound up in camps all the same. Divide and conquer, you’re not as clever with this BS as you think.
- Comment on New to lemmy. Is there a version of /r/changemyview? 1 month ago:
It may have originated with trans people getting kicked out, shopping for cheap furniture, and then being pleasantly surprised to find a big soft friend at the furniture store - out of nowhere something fun and comforting appears just as they begin a new life.
However, that’s speculation. It just sort of became a meme.
- Comment on Is it true that femboys are "fetishized" by right-wingers or something like that? Or is my friend(who told me this) tripping balls? 1 month ago:
“trans rights” and gay rights don’t mix very well.
Classic right wing “divide and conquer” tactics, try to drive a wedge between trans and gay people, pick off the trans people first, then come for the gays next. This nonsense is exactly why the LGBT acronym was made in the first place, because we (the vast majority of us, anyway) stand together in solidarity and reject this idiotic nonsense.
- Comment on Is it true that femboys are "fetishized" by right-wingers or something like that? Or is my friend(who told me this) tripping balls? 1 month ago:
Yes, it’s true in some cases.
It’s not really that surprising. Just as there are straight men who are misogynist there are people who are attracted to femboys, trans people, and/or other gender nonconforming people who hold prejudices against the same group. It’s massively oversimplifying human psychology to think it just comes down to a single linear axis of like/dislike. For some people, it might be that simple, but it’s not always the case.
- Comment on Tattoos 1 month ago:
We should try giving the measles virus a MS-13 tattoo.
- Comment on The pipeline 1 month ago:
didn’t immediately solve all problems
I love how liberals constantly downplay shit like this. If you’re upset about your friends and family being shoveled into a pointless meat grinder and you’re experiencing mass death and oppression, then you’re just upset that “democracy didn’t immediately solve all problems.” In the same way that opposition to genocide is frequently framed as, “throwing a fit because you don’t get your way,” and such.
It’s literally just the Joker speech from The Dark Knight, as long as there’s a plan, it’s fine, even if the plan is horrible, the only thing that matters is that the norms are respected and the proper procedure is followed. You and everyone you care about can be sent to concentration camps, just so long as the decision is made by a legislative body following proper procedure. Systemic violence, like dragging people from their homes to die in a trench en masse, is perfectly acceptable, just so long as it isn’t disruptive, just so long as everything is going according to plan. The only problem y’all have with fascism is that it’s so rude and blunt, if it persued the same goals respectfully you’d be completely fine with it.
Yes, it did benefit the people immensely to get out of the war. Aside from the horrors of WWI, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that if they hadn’t dropped out and focused on rebuilding and industrial development at that point, there’s a fair chance that they lose to the Nazis in WWII and we’d all be speaking German right now. Besides, in the chaos of this period the so-called “democracy” wasn’t some kind of established, functional system, we’re talking about a provensional government, and one that completely failed to address ongoing crises (which is kinda the point of having a provisional government). Under the conditions of the time, sensible people radicalize, and then they force things to change and get rid of those conditions, and then people 100 years later to whom the conditions are utterly foreign waggle their fingers about it, but they don’t care because they’re no longer dying in a ditch.
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 month ago:
You’re correct, but in the end those same tankies are also the ones that want a fascist state because they’re basically a capitalist state on the brink of collapse – a good ground for revolution that tankies wish for.
This is the dumbest shit ever and not what we believe. Y’all don’t ever listen to the things we actually say, you just make shit up and repeat it to each other until it becomes accepted as obviously true, regardless of any basis in reality.
A fascist state is not “good ground for revolution.” There have been many far-right states that have successfully hunted down and exterminated the left and survived for quite a long while. And the conditions in the US are such that in an armed conflict the right would obviously have a major advantage. Should conditions decline, it’s far more likely that we’d have a right-wing revolution than a left-wing one.
The problem is that conditions are declining under both Republicans and Democrats. Neither party offers any possibility of actually halting or reversing the decline, or averting any of the many, many crises, some of which are looming and some of which are actively happening. Liberals are fully content to accept this state of affairs for some reason - they just want a more gradual decline which will still lead to crises, the far-right gaining strength and power, and the complete extermination of the left and vulnerable populations. As long as that gets pushed back 5 or 10 years, perfectly acceptable to them, and worth sacrificing any attempts to actually fix the problems - which is what us “tankies” would prefer to happen.
If I were an “accelerationist,” looking to bring about a fascist state on the bizarre logic that it would somehow be “good ground” for a left-wing revolution, then why would I have a problem with either side? Conditions will continue to decline regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in charge. What, am I just so impatient that I couldn’t wait a few more years? If that’s what I believed, I’d just disengage from politics and not give a shit what happens, confident in the fact that the inevitable decline will bring about socialism, somehow. Doesn’t really seem worth the effort.
Unfortunately, this “accelerationist” concept doesn’t actually track with history. People have lived - and do, currently live in worse conditions than we have in the US, often for generations. Slavery persisted for centuries, and yes there were slave revolts but they were often disorganized and put down. This idea that bad conditions automatically create successful left-wing revolutions makes no sense to anyone who’s actually capable of thinking beyond a meme level.
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 month ago:
“Not just fascists, but also those who oppose fascism and are trying to build an alternative to fascism” got it.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 2 months ago:
:::spoiler spoiler
Try adding a decimal after the 3
- Comment on It's a fun new game 2 months ago:
3141 5926 5358 9793; 2/38; 462
- Comment on 你好! 2 months ago:
This is a fair point. We are quite far along on the brain drain already. I suppose I should take the fact that you think I’m too knowledgeable to possibly be an American as a complement. There are, however, still some intellectuals with a basic knowledge of other countries’ history here, the stereotype that were’re all a bunch of backwards hicks and self-centered chauvanists is only mostly correct.
I used the phrase “century of humiliation” intentionally to draw a comparison between the two. If you talk to Chinese people (for example on RedNote) a lot of them will tell you that they care about science and advancement, not just for it’s own sake, but because they have the cultural memory of what happened when they didn’t. The century of humiliation is a big reason why the Chinese have got that dog in 'em when it comes to science, while Americans love toying around with antivax shit and similar anti-science ideas because we’re so used to being on top and none of our actions having consequences.
China had the same kind of backwards traditionalists back in the Qing that we have today, and everyone say that traditional approach get steamrolled by guns and battleships. But we never had that experience. So why not fuck around with forcing Creationism into science textbooks? “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Just as the Qing dynasty was committed to doing things their way and refusing to adapt to changing conditions or learning from other countries, you see similar tendencies in the US today. As your disbelief attests, people don’t look to other countries to understand why they do what they do or to take any lessons from their history. And those who do are regarded as traitors or spies, just like those in the Qing dynasty who advocated for studying and adopting Western science were. Really, there are a lot of parallels between the two, imo.
- Comment on 你好! 2 months ago:
The American brain drain is gonna suck for people living here but is also very justified and deserved at this point.
The Americans have gotten so complacent about being on top of the world that lots of people don’t think there are any real consequences to anything and just wanna fuck around. We used to be at the forefront of research but now nobody with half a brain would want to come here. We’re heading full speed into a century of humiliation and people are just gonna keep doubling down on ignorance and bigotry as things get worse
- Comment on From a purely political perspective, if you oppose the US tariffs as a US resident, should you buy or avoid buying products subject to tariffs? 2 months ago:
If you have an option that doesn’t involve giving money to the US government you should probably do that. You’re not going to own them by giving them cash.
