Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on 10 reasons why we should move Israel to Utah 22 hours ago:
Here!? This is where you want to rest!? This is the single most dangerous place you could be situated! There are so many other places you could be, Israel, that would be safer and would cause less problems! Why here!?
Israel shouldn’t have to leave! Everyone else should have to leave! They’re the ones who are stupid!
Fr though, they’re there to act as the West’s forward base to advance into the rest of the Middle East, the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. If Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent an Israel, to protect her interests in the region.
- Comment on the only thing that never trickles down is the money 2 days ago:
If we took their money, even if we just threw it into a hole in the ground and set it on fire, it would still be an improvement because reducing their resources makes it harder for them to hurt us.
- Comment on Nailed it 2 days ago:
I don’t think you should extrapolate from porn to irl views and I don’t think you should generalize all women as reading billionaire smut either.
- Comment on The conservatives are calling basic Progressive policies "Communist". 4 days ago:
So long as there have been communists there’s been people accusing everyone to their left of being communists.
Wikipedia describes the first Red Scare as happening in 1917, after the Soviet revolution and WWI. But you can also look at labor movements before that. For example, in the Haymarket Affair in 1886, someone in a crowd threw a bomb at a police officer during a protest, which has been speculated to have been a plant. The point was to smear the whole labor movement as anarchists and communists, as violent radicals, even though many of them were not.
But we can go even further back, in 1848, the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto are:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
**Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? **
Karl Marx himself is already talking about how every center-left opposition party is accused of being communist, and about how those same center-left parties will hurl the same accusations at parties to their left, and even against parties to their right (“reactionary adversaries”).
Yes, the Nazis branded progressives as communists, and the Nazis did come up with things like “Cultural Marxism,” but they were hardly the first ones in history to do it.
- Comment on The conservatives are calling basic Progressive policies "Communist". 4 days ago:
There were absolutely red scares before Hitler.
- Comment on The conservatives are calling basic Progressive policies "Communist". 5 days ago:
This tweet is extremely funny if you’re aware of the fact that Richard Nixon also instituted price controls.
Nixon is, indeed, too far left to be accepted by the modern RNC.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 5 days ago:
Well, there’s also anarcho-capitalism, or minarchism
“Anarcho”-capitalism isn’t so much anarchism as it is a rebranding of feudalism. Anarchism is opposed to heirarchies, so it’s incompatible with capitalism. Minarchism is an unrealistic, idealist ideology. Whichever class wields power over the state is going to use the state to advance their interests.
This general position against “the rich” is also slightly biased, but completely understandable given the current events.
It’s just that revenge taxing the rich will essentially accomplish nothing beyond satisfying the egos of a few people.
It’s not biased, and it’s not “revenge.” The rich are a class, which is engaged in class warfare against the poor. Weakening them would be worthwhile even if we didn’t get a direct benefit from it, because the fewer resources they have the less ability they have to impose worse conditions, and vise versa.
Now, are you going to ask the government to help you out, when they are essentially the enemy?
An anarchist might oppose taxing taxing the rich for that reason.
I would argue that the government is merely a tool, that can be used by different classes for different purposes. It is not the primary enemy, which is the rich, but the tool is often used by the rich to advance their interests. Imposing taxes on the rich would be an example of the working class wielding the tool of the government against the rich.
I care about addressing the real problems, the core issues. For example, the fact that the rich and the powerful seem to be above the law.
That’s what you just called a “pointless issue,” isn’t it? When we discuss politics, aren’t we discussing strategies for addressing the power of the rich? Is it pointless to discuss those strategies?
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 5 days ago:
That is an anarchist position, anarchism is a strain of leftist thought.
To me, it’s plain simple that we need both mindsets combined to be able to actually fight the rich and the powerful.
We need right-wing thought to fight the rich and powerful? What part? Cutting taxes on the rich? Starting wars of aggression? Kicking down doors and rounding up immigrants?
The right is completely wrong, has no insight on anything, mostly on account of being completely anti-intellectual. All of their policies are about reinforcing existing heirarchies, strengthening the rich and weakening the poor. Opposing those policies is not “tribalism.” I challenge you to name one right-wing position with any merit.
As a problem solver, I have less and less interest on this pointless topic.
Pointless topics! So you don’t actually care about fighting the rich at all.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 6 days ago:
Those who want to act against the rich and powerful are called, “the left.”
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 1 week ago:
Has anybody ever actually seen someone unironically wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt in the last 20 years? This is such a boomer meme.
- Comment on SmartphOWNED 1 week ago:
I see people in the comments complaining about the number of pixels in the image, so here you go:
- Comment on Don't 1 week ago:
“Vanguard” is not a class.
- Comment on According to the New York Times, Game of Thrones is the 6th best TV show of the 21st century 1 week ago:
"Seasons change, and so did I. You need not wonder why."
- Jon Thrones
- Comment on According to the New York Times, Game of Thrones is the 6th best TV show of the 21st century 1 week ago:
Biased mainstream media REFUSING to acknowledge the cultural significance of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic 😤.
- Comment on This woman has nothing better to do 1 week ago:
Tbh I think she handled it well. The customer was trying to start an incident and play the victim. The manager comes out looking incredibly calm and reasonable. I think almost anyone, even if they aren’t supportive of trans rights, would watch this and see an asshole customer trying to make scene and trying to fuck with an ordinary person who’s just trying to do her job. Only deranged weirdos like the customer, who are obsessed with harassing trans people, would take the customer’s side.
Maybe there’s a better way the manager could’ve handled it, but generally Burger King managers don’t have media training, and we shouldn’t expect people to handle these situations perfectly. And if she’d been more assertive than the customer could’ve edited the clip to make her response look disproportionate. Calmly emphasizing her name and pronouns was the right move to support the employee while getting rid of the customer and not giving her anything to work with.
- Comment on bruh 1 week ago:
The closest I know of is a manhua called, “Release that Witch.” I wouldn’t necessarily call it Marxist, but the hero enacts a bunch of progressive reforms, starting with ending witch hunts and instead working with them to use their powers to power new technology he develops, as he introduces an industrial revolution. His ideas and success are eventually seen as a threat to the powers that be, so even as he turns this random backwards village into a prosperous and advanced civilization, he also has to navigate the world’s politics carefully to prevent a backlash.
It’s been a while since I thought about it but I remember it being pretty good. It looks like they made an anime adaptation recently but I don’t know anything about it, might be about to watch it.
- Comment on The irony of arguing with someone who read about it in a history book vs. you having lived it 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Dog Love 2 weeks ago:
Thinking about how there’s gotta be some dogfucker out there going, “Hell yeah I voted for this!” and how he probably has one of the most coherent and internally consistent reasons for voting Republican out of anyone who did.
- Comment on Dog Love 2 weeks ago:
That’s Kristi Noem, a Republican who wrote in her autobiography about how she killed her dog after failing to train it and claimed it showed she was capable of doing “dirty, messy, and ugly” things in politics too.
- Comment on Was there ever a well-documented, widely accepted to be *false*, accusation of genocide? 3 weeks ago:
Of course. The Nazis accused Jews of committing genocide against white people. That’s why the 14 words are a thing, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” the implication that “the existence of our people” is under threat. It’s the same reason modern facists chant, “Jews will not replace us.” Nazis (not just the modern ones, but the OG ones) promoted conspiracy theories that Jews were trying to make white people become gay/trans to prevent them from reproducing, and communism was supposedly another Jewish plot to make white people too soft and tolerant to use force against Jews. And naturally, interracial marriages were another form of “genocide,” as they diluted the racial purity of of the Aryan race.
I have used the argument in the past, “If given all available evidence you’re still not sure a genocide is happening, you can probably safely assume that it is, because humans just constantly do genocide.”
That’s a bad argument regardless, because the default position on any claim or accusation should always be skepticism. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Some people seem to have gotten it into their heads that accusations of genocide are an exception to that, somehow.
Generally, historical genocides such as the Holocaust are incredibly well-documented, and the term “genocide denier” is meant to apply in such cases. There is nothing morally wrong with denying a genocide that doesn’t have the same kind of evidence backing it up, that’s just called due diligence.
- Comment on Yeah, fuck these two. 3 weeks ago:
black listed into oblivion
Meanwhile, the one who actually got blacklisted was Macklemore, while Ed Sheeran has a whole tour ahead of him.
If people don’t want to go to his tours because of his shitty behavior, tough shit.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 3 weeks ago:
You’re just nitpicking. You opened with “O my God. I cannot even begin to tell you how truly stupid this meme is!” Now it’s just that I haven’t sufficiently proven my premise. We’re back to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” where you’re rejecting the whole argument based on a sliver of a technicality. I’m not really interested in playing that game.
I’m established a clear and reasonable argument for why worker protections should be considered a necessary component of socialism. Your counterargument is that, just because workers have a clear means and motives to protect themselves, they might randomly decide not to. That’s hypothetically true, but only hypothetically. In practice, it’s pretty much always going to happen, and if it doesn’t happen, like I said, it’s a good reason to look very carefully about why it isn’t happening.
Also, for the record, the meme doesn’t even say that worker protections are a necessary component of socialism, only that socialism “protects the most vulnerable!” You literally said, multiple times including right here:
Obviously socialist movements have historically advocated worker protections
…that that’s correct! The only issue you have which it, that you’ve chosen to hyper-focus on, is that you’re claiming it’s not definitionally correct, but the meme never even claimed that it was part of the definition! Only that it was an ideology that did promote worker protections, which you just said is true! So on what basis was this reaction of “I cannot even begin to tell you how truly stupid this meme is!” at all called for?
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 3 weeks ago:
You still have to establish the premises and show that the conclusion follows from them. That’s exactly what I’m challenging.
If your position is that socialism necessarily entails worker protection, then demonstrate that from the definition or from the academic literature.
I’ve already explained this but I’ll spell it out very neatly and plainly for you:
Premise A: Socialism means worker control of the means of production (MoP).
Premise B: A class that has control of the MoP will use that power to advance their own interests.
Premise C: Worker protections are in the interests of the working class.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, in a socialist system, worker protections will be implemented.
Conclusion 2: Therefore, if a system does not have worker protections, workers are not in control of the MoP, and it is not a socialist system.
Conclusion 3: Therefore, worker protections are a necessary condition of socialism.
A system could theoretically have worker ownership while providing extremely poor working conditions, and it would still be socialist in the relevant economic sense.
This could only be true if either B or C are false. If one of those premises is wrong, then it’s you that needs to provide an argument or justification about why it is false.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 3 weeks ago:
to give that same government more power
No, absolutely not. Socialism has nothing to do with giving capitalist states more power.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 3 weeks ago:
Communism is the goal of socialism. The original democratic socialists, people like Eduard Bernstein, called it that because the idea was that communism could be achieved through gradually reforming existing political systems. It became more and more obvious that this was just a pretense, with things like the betrayal of the Second International and the demsoc support of WWI, and now we’re at a point where the pretense is often dropped entirely.
It’s been used to oppress millions of people.
Communism has never been used to oppress anyone because it’s never existed as a system (not counting primitive communism). There have only been socialist states that claim to be working towards communism. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not called The Union of Soviet Communist Republics.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 3 weeks ago:
But there is an important distinction between saying something deserves investigation and saying that something has been proven.
There is also an important distinction between what can be proven in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt (against the best lawyers money can buy), and what is likely to be true. There’s absolutely no reason why we have to hold all criticism to the former standard, and it’s completely unreasonable to do so.
It is not synonymous with social programs.
The fact that something benefits society does not make it socialism.
100% agreed, I never said anything remotely like that.
Socialism also isn’t simply a philosophy about “protecting workers.”
Agreed, however, protecting workers is a necessary (but not sufficient) quality of socialism. The goal of worker ownership is fundamentally driven by a desire to advance the interests of workers, which includes worker protection.
You can hard disagree with whatever you want it doesn’t make it any less true.
Yeah, it’s not the fact that I disagree, but the the arguments I made to support that disagreement that show your position is wrong.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 3 weeks ago:
You don’t need to invent a “parasitic pedophile class” or some grand conspiracy to make that argument.
How on earth is it a “grand conspiracy” to label the class known for extracting wealth from workers to fund child sex parties ‘the parasitic pedophile class?’ That’s just a straightforward description of the group of people who in practice have concentrations of wealth.
I genuinely don’t even know what part of this is supposed to be conspiratorial. Are they not parasitic? Are they not pedophiles? Are they not a class?
You can absolutely argue that collective economic power would provide greater protection for vulnerable people. But that’s an argument for socialism. It isn’t the original definition or purpose of socialism.
Hard disagree. Workers are vulnerable people, who, without organization, are taken advantage of by the ruling class. “What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong!” And vulnerable people are workers, many of them anyway. Socialism is not and never has been just about some stereotypical image of an able-bodied white guy in a hardhat and fuck everybody else. In order to achieve working class solidarity, especially on an international scale it is absolutely 100% necessary to overcome barriers such as race, gender etc, which means supporting and accommodating all sorts of vulnerable people.
- Comment on How are you going to never forget 9/11 this year? What are you never forgetful for? 4 weeks ago:
I will never forget how Osama bin Laden went on to host a game show
- Comment on How are you going to never forget 9/11 this year? What are you never forgetful for? 4 weeks ago:
What’s the difference between a cow and 9/11? You can’t milk a cow for 25 years.
- Comment on Nice Going Buddy 4 weeks ago:
Look, is it a pyramid scheme? Sure, maybe. But trying to pick the right religion to get into heaven, and even then there’s no guarantee, that’s like playing the lottery. You’re better off signing up now and getting a better spot in the pyramid.
