ssj2marx
@ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
- Comment on We're coming for you 4 months ago:
600,000 people die of malaria every year
Yeah but what countries are they from. The ones with money do not care about them.
- Comment on Golden 4 months ago:
The modern problem with replication is a problem of incentives. Science journalism and grant money all want big breakthroughs and original ideas, which doesn’t leave much room for confirming previous research.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 4 months ago:
Ah, so the difference is the weight that people assign the idea.
Do the gods exist for an atheist who contends that all of the things you called “mythical” are in fact purely “fictional”? Or does a lack of belief among some individuals not matter because the gods are a social construct?
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 4 months ago:
So then what’s the difference between “the gods” and something purely fictional, in your view?
- Comment on ‘Call the police, he’s on drugs': But the worker was dying from heatstroke. 4 months ago:
I can’t imagine working in a hot place and not having one person in charge constantly handing out bottles of water and reminding everyone to hydrate. I guess I’ve been lucky with my managers and supervisors over the years, never met one who didn’t take this stuff seriously.
- Comment on It's been so long 4 months ago:
Pretty much as soon as gen 2 came out 13 year old me said “yeah I’m not gonna remember all these goobers”.
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like fireworks are a complete waste of money and a ridiculous amount of unnecessary Pollution? 4 months ago:
I was being facetious
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like fireworks are a complete waste of money and a ridiculous amount of unnecessary Pollution? 4 months ago:
we should ban every single thing that’s dangerous to the user
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like fireworks are a complete waste of money and a ridiculous amount of unnecessary Pollution? 4 months ago:
I like fireworks, but I gotta say I like drone swarms making 3d pictures better.
- Comment on Measurements 4 months ago:
convert inches to miles
When will you ever convert inches to miles? One of these is for measuring things that you can pick up with one hand, the other is for measuring traveling distances.
The useful thing about standard measurements is that base-12 is much more useful in daily life than base-10, which is only easier to work with on paper. Make a footlong object and you can very easily make 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/6 and 1/12 versions of it, make a decimeter long object and you can only easily do 1/2 1/5 and 1/10.
- Comment on Measurements 4 months ago:
all base 10.
You see, this is part of the problem. SI seems more logical on paper, but in practice if you want to divide by anything other than 2 or 5 you have to pile on the decimals or switch to an unwieldly small unit of measurement, which hampers the ability to use those measurements. The most commonly used “standard” measurements are the way they are because they were the most useful measurements for actual craftspeople to standardize to, while the SI system was dreamt up by a bunch of rich French people.
- Comment on Measurements 4 months ago:
I’ve been fighting this battle on Lemmy for years, people who don’t make or repair things with any regularity just don’t accept the usefulness of standard units. The fact that they’re mostly in base-12 or -16 alone makes them far more useful than metric!
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
voting for liberals to keep the fascists out doesn’t work
our current system has already shown the tendency for liberals to let fascists into prominent positions of power
in the historical example, the Germans could have saved their country by voting for communists, therefore I advocate voting for communists in the present day
is that simple enough for you to understand?
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
Since Biden has done nothing to curb the radical conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, he doesn’t have to. The GOP has all the undemocratic institutional power they could ever ask for.
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
I read Stasi State or Socialist Paradise some years ago, I recommend it for anyone interested in a history of East Germany that isn’t written by West German propagandists.
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
We do know however that the Soviets had the most investigations of and prosecutions of rapists, so it’s a bit of a “Swedish rape crisis” problem where they look worse on paper than other countries simply because their record keeping of the crime in question is better.
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
East Germany paid war reparations to the Soviets while rebuilding itself into an industrial powerhouse - the people who “stole most of East Germany’s infrastructure” were the West German capitalists after reunification, when the whole region was forcibly de-industrialized and left a shadow of its former self that still hasn’t fully recovered over thirty years later.
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
They did do 80% of the fighting, though. So lets not give America too much credit.
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
I, personally, have learned from history, which is why I’ll be voting PSL in the upcoming election.
- Comment on Casual reminder 4 months ago:
Ah yes, another fantastic reason to vote for De La Cruz in this upcoming election.
The Germans in 1932 all voted for the “realistic” liberal candidate, Hindenberg, and he went ahead and appointed Hitler as chancellor anyway. The only option to preent the Nazis from rising to power was the communists, which is of course why the Nazis killed all the communists the first chance they got (with the help of the social democrats - don’t trust AOC is what I’m saying).
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
you deem the great Terror to have been necessary
Repression of the previous ruling class was absolutely necessary, the fact that it went overboard and also targeted comrades is the mistake. If it were possible to have a revolution that made absolutely no mistakes I would sign onto it no question, but I believe that such a thing is idealistic nonsense - and that forswearing all repression of the previous ruling class in order to not accidentally target comrades is far worse, because it takes an essential tool out of the revolutionary’s belt and replaces it with nothing.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
And yet the Soviet economy uplifted hundreds of millions from poverty and built the war machine that was critical in stopping the Nazis. People went from working on tenant farms to living in modern cities with all of the amenities of the time in a single generation, and the first man in space was the son of a farmer! The achievements of the Soviet Union - yes, even the Soviet Union under Stalin - far outstrip its failures and mistakes. I’m partial to Mao’s overall critique of Stalin, that he was 70% good and 30% bad (which also applies to Mao as it turns out), and I feel that Mark Twain’s quote about the French Revolution equally applies to the Russian one.
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
I never said mistakes weren’t made. Class war is war and war has collateral damage. The problem here is the total idealistic rejection of “authoritarianism”, where every single thing that has ever worked is classed as such and therefore made off-limits.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
If by “not falling in line” you mean “actively sabotaging the working class for selfish reasons” then I suppose you have a point, but I would argue that in class war those organizations which do not support the working class are fair targets.
the will of the proletariat during the 1917 and 1918 elections
By the time the Bolsheviks were disregarding the results of elections, the People’s Soviets were the state power in the former Russian Empire, and they were a hundred times more democratic than the Duma ever was.
amassing personal power and wealth
I’m sorry comrade but the Soviets simply never did this. The benefits enjoyed by even top Party officials paled in comparison to the lavish lifestyles of the former Russian Empire’s aristocracy or those of the ruling class of any of their contemporary capitalist rivals - even fucking Stalin lived in a shared apartment!
Objectively speaking the Soviet Union was one of the most democratic and equal societies on this Earth during the time of its existence, and you can very clearly see in the data how their system equalized wealth (not “perfectly”, just “better than everyone else has ever done it”), and how the destruction of their system undid all of their progress.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
To push the Dems left you can either a) reward them for moving left or b) punish them for moving right. Continuing to vote for them year after year as they continually move to the right accomplishes neither of these things.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
If every single incentive structure rewards the Democrats for shifting to the right, please tell me how on earth they are under any pressure at all to shift back to the left. The answer is that they’re not, and the people who believe that they’re engaging in the system and pushing it in the right direction are simply fooling themselves as they take part in the system’s unstoppable rightward movement.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
We have class war waged against us by the bourgeoisie, and thousands of people are casualties of that war every single day. Expecting to turn the tide against them without getting our hands dirty in turn is useless idealism.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
So you wouldn’t accept any system that’s not a direct democracy? Where every single person is involved in every single vote? It’s a coherent position I suppose, but IMO totally impractical and idealistic.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
As I said in another comment, this mode of thought is completely defeatist. If you rule out the possibility of a violent uprising and look at how to change our system from within the system itself, the ONLY way to push the country left is for a dedicated bloc of people to refuse to vote for centrist Democrats for multiple elections in a row until the party center aligns with that bloc. That’s the reason why every one of the last few elections has been “the most important election in history” and all the other crap.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
but I don’t believe authoritarianism is the best way to go about it.
Humor me for a moment, which of the following do you consider authoritarian?
- asking your boss for better wages
- using the power of a union to force your boss to give your coworkers better wages
- using the power of the state to force all bosses to pay all workers better wages
