mechoman444
@mechoman444@lemmy.world
I am live.
- Comment on Genius idea. Somehody should share this with the antivaxxers 8 hours ago:
Just calling the maga-vaxx ultra America freedom shot.
Or the Traditional Republican Universal Microbe Prevention or T.R.U.M.P. shot for short.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 14 hours ago:
I’m going to say a very unpopular thing here and it’s going to get downloaded specifically because of this but that’s okay because with the truth is the truth.
But let me preface I also believe that there is a undercurrent of significant child abuse in the upper echelons of American society specifically politics and amongst the ultra wealthy. I think it’s one of those things that we just don’t really talk about it’s the quiet part that nobody really wants to say out loud.
At the end of the day we don’t really have any hard concrete evidence we have a massive amount of speculation and conjecture and circumstantial evidence. So much so that it is not only worth investigating but it probably qualifies for a whole lot of arrests including people at the absolute very top if you catch my drift and it should have happened at very long time ago.
But it hasn’t nobody’s gone to court nobody’s been prosecuted nobody has made their case in front of a courtroom in a jury. Is a difficult thing for me to admit to that ultimately we’ve got a whole bunch of nothing.
So aside from foaming at the mouth with unsubstantiated rhetoric I can’t definitively say that there is a pedophilic class of people in the United States. Are there people committing horrific acts of child abuse yes could it be being performed in groups of people sure. Is there an entire class of people that are pedophiles extremely debatable probably not.
So understand I’m simply trying to be precise without degrading myself to propaganda like speak and misinformation to describe what is happening in the United States.
That being said I am opposed to any and all child abuse of any kind. Anybody who commits crimes be it a president or some homeless dude on the street they all need to be prosecuted and punished under the law. I condemn any and all abuse to individuals and groups of people. I do not support right wing conservatism I despise maga and there is enough circumstantial evidence for arrests and prosecutions to occur when it comes to child abuse please do not twist my words or make up positions for me that I didn’t take.
As for the second part of your statement I will tell you what I tell everybody else socialism is a stomach it is not social or public programs offered by literally any kind of government. Socialism does not protect the worker it simply gives the means of production to the worker. You can hard disagree with whatever you want it really makes no difference to me either way.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 1 day ago:
Cuba Vietnam Laos and North Korea currently.
Also Cambodia also Cambodia and Yugoslavia.
It’s actually every country that tried socialism…
Also China is a hybrid system with a thriving free market and many extremely powerful and wealthy mega corporations.
- Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism. 1 day ago:
O my God. I cannot even begin to tell you how truly stupid this meme is!
Building collective power and protecting the vulnerable.
Show me one example of a socialist or communist country that has actually accomplished what this meme is describing. And no, don’t just say China. China is a hybrid economy that has incorporated extensive markets and private enterprise alongside substantial state ownership and control. It isn’t some straightforward example of the socialism this meme is talking about.
More importantly, socialism and communism were never originally designed around “protecting the vulnerable” in the first place. The central issue was economic power and ownership.
The fundamental socialist argument was that the people who collectively produce wealth should have collective ownership and control over the means of production, rather than allowing those means of production to be concentrated in the hands of a relatively small class of private owners.
And ironically, wealth concentration is exactly the problem we’re dealing with today. You don’t need to invent a “parasitic pedophile class” or some grand conspiracy to make that argument. Concentration of wealth inevitably creates concentration of political and economic power, and that is a legitimate problem that deserves serious discussion.
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.
If you’re going to defend socialism, at least defend what socialism actually is rather than turning it into a generic synonym for “things that help vulnerable people.”
And can we please stop attributing every good thing a government does to socialism? Socialism is an economic system. Programs designed to help people are social programs run by the government, and they are not inherently socialist or communist. Providing public services and social programs is simply one of the basic functions of a governing system.
- Comment on Life 2 days ago:
O! Let’s see if I can stir up some shit!
AI is awesome! I use it all the time.
Socialism is bullshit and sucks really bad!
There are only two genders.
Reddit is a great place with really great communities. Spez is a nice dude!
United States immigration is doing a great job of deporting criminals!
Trump 2028.
😀
- Comment on This one time, at band camp... 2 days ago:
You’ve really shown your age with that reference.
- Comment on Two ICE agents in plain clothes punched and tried to handcuff an Australian man at Las Vegas Airport. When they saw they were being filmed, they quickly left. 2 days ago:
O God. So gross. I wouldn’t touch you with a dog’s dick.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 3 days ago:
Yes you do. Clearly you do. Since you think I’m a fascist or liberal words I have no doubt you don’t know the meaning of and have been responding to me steadily.
Let me ask you a question are you stupid?
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 3 days ago:
Disregard my previous comment if you can still see it.
You are intellectually dishonest, willfully ignorant, and apparently incapable of engaging with anything I actually said. Responding with incoherent babble instead of addressing the argument isn’t a discussion it’s a waste of my time.
Good day.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 3 days ago:
Because it is defensible. Capitalism isn’t a living entity that personally insulted you or wronged your family. It doesn’t have intentions, feelings, or a moral compass. It is an economic system. The people operating within that system are the ones capable of abusing it, exploiting it, or using it to enrich themselves at someone else’s expense.
And yes, capitalism has historically produced better outcomes than many of the alternative economic systems we’ve actually attempted. That’s not a defense of every aspect of capitalism; it’s a statement of historical fact. You don’t get to dismiss an empirical observation simply because you dislike the conclusion.
What I find particularly amusing is how you people seem to think that confidently declaring something makes it an argument. You haven’t actually refuted anything I’ve said. You haven’t provided evidence, addressed the historical record, or even engaged with the distinction between an economic system and the people abusing it. You’ve simply produced a handful of indignant declarations, apparently mistaking the intensity of your feelings for the strength of your argument. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological ventriloquism with the critical-thinking portion conveniently removed. If you want to disagree with me, by all means bring an argument. But if all you’ve got is “capitalism bad” repeated with increasing levels of outrage, you’re not actually contributing anything to the discussion.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.
Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.
That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.
Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.
There is already more than enough hatred in this world.
And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.
I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.
But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.
That distinction matters.
I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.
And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.
But here’s where I draw the fucking line:
“Kill the capitalists.”
No.
Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven’t transcended the system you despise. You’ve simply inherited its worst characteristics.
You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.
And that’s the part nobody seems to want to hear.
If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations—you haven’t built a better ideology. You’ve just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.
We have to be better.
Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.
You don’t get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.
If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from history.
You’ve just changed the uniforms.
- Comment on To be happy… 4 days ago:
Yes.
- Comment on To be happy… 4 days ago:
Yes. And I think it’s important to understand exactly what a convection oven actually is.
At its most basic, it’s an oven with a heating element and a fan that circulates hot air around the cooking chamber. That’s it. The circulating air improves heat transfer and helps food cook and brown more evenly.
Now, manufacturers have increasingly started calling a particular implementation of convection an “air fryer” and charging a premium for it, as though they’ve invented an entirely new cooking technology. They haven’t. Convection cooking has been around for decades.
An air fryer is essentially a compact, highly optimized convection oven: hot air is circulated rapidly around the food, usually with a basket or perforated tray that allows that air to contact more of the food’s surface.
So when you’re shopping for a range and you see one advertised as having an “Air Fry” function, don’t automatically assume you’re getting some revolutionary new appliance. In many cases, you’re paying extra for a marketing term applied to a convection system that has existed for generations.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
You’re making a prediction about a hypothetical future and presenting it as though it disproves a statement about the historical present. It doesn’t.
Yes, climate change, resource scarcity, geopolitical competition, and environmental degradation create serious risks. Nobody is disputing that. But “therefore humanity is gearing up for an enormous war” is a prediction, not an established fact. There is no evidence that some inevitable apocalyptic conflict is waiting for us around the corner.
And the capitalism argument is just as selective. I’m not claiming capitalism single-handedly created modern prosperity. Technology, science, medicine, education, infrastructure, and countless other factors obviously contributed. But pretending that economic systems have nothing to do with how those advancements are financed, produced, distributed, and adopted is equally ahistorical.
More importantly, you seem to have conveniently ignored the enormous number of countries that are both capitalist and extraordinarily successful. Countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea aren’t prosperous because they somehow escaped capitalism. They have different varieties of capitalist economies combined with different levels of taxation, regulation, social welfare, labor protections, and public investment.
That’s actually the interesting question: not “capitalism good” or “capitalism bad,” but which institutions produce the best outcomes and under what circumstances.
And yes, Western economic exploitation and economic warfare have contributed to poverty in some countries. That’s a legitimate historical argument. But “this country is poor because the West exploited it” cannot simply become a universal explanation for every impoverished country that doesn’t fit your preferred narrative.
Ultimately, you’re replacing one simplistic historical explanation with another. Capitalism doesn’t deserve sole credit for human progress, but neither can its critics simply remove it from the history of that progress because it complicates the argument.
And the accusation that I’m somehow a “capitalism fanboy” is particularly lazy, considering I explicitly stated that I do not outright support capitalism. You are arguing against a position I never expressed because it’s considerably easier than engaging with what I actually said. Recognizing that capitalism has contributed to economic growth, technological development, and improvements in living standards is not the same thing as worshipping the system or believing it is inherently good. If your argument requires you to invent my position before you can attack it, that’s not a particularly strong argument.
If you must know I support social democracy and further down the line democratic socialism. Which I assume you’ll
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
You’re an idiot.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
Ya. There’s always one of you. Don’t read it. I’m not going to force you to do anything. But thanks for wasting your time by telling me you wont read it.
But I’ll still leave you with my default response to this: go fuck yourself.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 4 days ago:
No it’s not. Advocating for the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people is morally reprehensible on every level.
- Comment on Fuckin CEO's and billionaires gotta go 5 days ago:
“And replace them with socialists, right?”
“Kill the capitalists.” What an absolutely deranged thing to chant as though it were some kind of political slogan worth celebrating. Apparently we’ve reached a point where people can casually advocate killing an entire class of people and then congratulate themselves for being morally enlightened.
For all the advancements humanity has made in medicine, philosophy, science, and morality, we still manage to say incredibly stupid shit like this and other people cheer it on because they seem to have forgotten what the word kill actually means.
And before anyone starts: no, capitalism is not perfect. Of course it isn’t. But pretending that capitalism has produced nothing but misery requires ignoring an enormous amount of history.
We are living through one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in human history. The countries that consistently rank among the world’s most prosperous, stable, and livable are overwhelmingly capitalist economies. Germany is capitalist. Sweden is capitalist. Norway is capitalist. Denmark is capitalist. They have extensive welfare programs, strong labor protections, and social safety nets, but they are still capitalist economies.
Even the United States, despite its very real problems, remains one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries on Earth. You don’t have to like that fact, but disliking it doesn’t make it untrue.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about hating an economic class. There is certainly nothing virtuous about fantasizing about killing people because of the economic system they support.
“Kill the capitalists” isn’t a serious political argument. It is virtue signaling dressed up as revolutionary rhetoric, a way for people to feel morally superior without having to articulate an actual solution to the problems they’re angry about.
If your political philosophy requires you to start by deciding which group of human beings deserves to die, perhaps the problem isn’t capitalism.
Disclaimer: None of this should be interpreted as me claiming that capitalism is some flawless or inherently virtuous economic system. I fully acknowledge its massive faults, including exploitation, wealth concentration, monopolistic behavior, and the increasingly corporatocratic nature of the United States. I simply reject socialism as an economic model and don’t believe that acknowledging capitalism’s failures requires pretending that socialism is the answer. You can criticize capitalism and we absolutely should without advocating for its abolition or fantasizing about killing the people who participate in it.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
The iron supplement.
- Comment on made with a pile of proctologists 1 week ago:
I disagree. Dr. Pepper is delicious!
- Comment on Minimum wage isn't survivable anymore 1 week ago:
Well… It’s not sustainable for the person making $15 an hour, but it’s certainly is for the person paying that person $15 an hour and I think that those are the only people that we should be caring about.
Listen you got to work 6 days a week and go to church on Sundays. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That extra 20-30 bucks. You got it there in a month, collection plate.
Then you can die quietly at 55 and somebody can take your place.
/S obviously.
- Comment on Two ICE agents in plain clothes punched and tried to handcuff an Australian man at Las Vegas Airport. When they saw they were being filmed, they quickly left. 1 week ago:
You didn’t make a pun, I didn’t commit a red herring fallacy, and your analogies don’t work.
You clearly don’t know what a pun is, you don’t understand what a red herring is, and you keep resorting to analogies because you cannot actually refute the argument I’m making. Instead of addressing my points, you’ve resorted to logical fallacies and straw-manning me into a conservative and a Ben Shapiro supporter—positions I never expressed and that have nothing to do with the argument.
Yes, you committed a straw man. My argument is that I am factually correct about the issue we’re discussing. Rather than addressing that claim, you’ve replaced it with a position I don’t hold because that version is easier for you to attack. That’s a textbook straw man.
But honestly, none of this even matters. This isn’t a formal debate where I need to keep cataloging every fallacy you commit. You’re arguing against an established fact, and I should have known better than to waste my time trying to reason you out of a position you clearly aren’t willing to reconsider.
At this point, you’ve become more than useless to this conversation. I’m done.
- Comment on Two ICE agents in plain clothes punched and tried to handcuff an Australian man at Las Vegas Airport. When they saw they were being filmed, they quickly left. 1 week ago:
Oh, trust me, there isn’t a universe where I have sex with you. So relax. I have standards.
Once again, I was correcting a factual issue. I was not supporting, condemning, or otherwise commenting on the implications of the facts at hand.
And, once again, the way the Supreme Court approached this issue is historically consistent with how the United States has functioned. The underlying idea is that courts are supposed to be impartial, so, on paper, the system should work. I have already acknowledged that, in practice, that isn’t always the case.
But that’s not the point of my comment.
It’s funny, this happens constantly on this platform. I’ll correct an objective factual error or fact-check a post, and people get all butthurt about it (no pun intended).
You don’t have to like the facts for them to be true. And I don’t have to agree with something to accurately state what the facts are.
If your response to someone correcting a factual error is to assume they’re endorsing the position behind it, that’s a problem with your reading comprehension, not with the facts.
- Comment on Two ICE agents in plain clothes punched and tried to handcuff an Australian man at Las Vegas Airport. When they saw they were being filmed, they quickly left. 1 week ago:
Okay — so we have an appeal to my “IQ” — an argument that context doesn’t matter — an offer for me to have sex with you, but only if I’m gay or bi — and a criticism of how our law works.
So — essentially — the ramblings of an idiot.
I have made my case — I stated my points plainly — and I have provided the relevant information without any emotional context attached to it. If you don’t like the information — you are perfectly free to continue not liking it.
I’m done with your dumb ass — good day.
- Comment on Two full raccoons y'all 1 week ago:
- Comment on Evil Bisexuals 1 week ago:
First, I have to say: that was an exceptionally well-written response. Concise, thoughtful, nuanced, and actually engaging with the substance of what I was saying. That is a refreshing departure from what I usually encounter on this platform, where discussions like this tend to devolve into people rudely dismissing the argument, accusing someone of being a simp, or throwing around “straw man” as though identifying a logical fallacy somehow constitutes a rebuttal. I genuinely appreciate the effort you put into your response.
And honestly, I generally agree with you.
The crux of my argument was intentionally simplified because the audience I am usually engaging with isn’t particularly familiar with the distinctions between the various schools of socialist thought. A significant portion of the people I encounter who describe themselves as socialists are actually advocating for social democracy without realizing that there is an important distinction between the two. That’s ultimately where most of my engagement on this subject comes from.
I’m not trying to argue that socialism begins with Lenin and ends with Stalin or Mao. Obviously, there are numerous socialist traditions that predate, coexist with, and directly oppose Leninism. Your point about material conditions is particularly well taken. Political and economic systems don’t develop in a vacuum, and attempting to judge every form of socialism through the lens of 1917 Russia is just as reductive as pretending Leninism represents socialism as a whole.
Where I think our distinction is primarily one of emphasis is that I’m interested in making sure people understand what they’re actually advocating for. If someone tells me they support universal healthcare, strong labor protections, substantial redistribution, public investment, and a robust social safety net, I’m perfectly happy to explain that they may actually be describing social democracy rather than socialism. If they then tell me they genuinely support social ownership of the means of production, that’s a different conversation.
Ultimately, my goal isn’t to convince everyone that socialism is inherently evil or that capitalism is inherently good. It’s to inform people about what these systems actually mean and the differences between them, so they’re not inadvertently advocating for something they haven’t actually considered.
And this is where I think the historical record matters. Social democracy has been implemented extensively and has produced some remarkably successful societies. Democratic socialism, at least in the sense of substantially restructuring ownership of the economy while retaining democratic institutions, has not been implemented on anything approaching the same scale. Whatever one’s theoretical opinion of democratic socialism, we simply don’t have the same empirical evidence demonstrating that it works.
So when someone says, “I support socialism,” I think it’s entirely reasonable to ask what they mean by that.
And honestly, I hope more discussions about this subject could look like this one. We can disagree about definitions, historical traditions, and economic models without immediately turning the conversation into a confrontation. I’d much rather have someone make a nuanced argument like yours and force me to refine my own position than have someone simply dismiss it because they don’t like the conclusion.
That kind of discussion is actually useful.
- Comment on Evil Bisexuals 1 week ago:
Democratic socialism is fundamentally and ideologically different from traditional socialism. It combines a democratic system of government with a socialist economic model to create a system where capitalism can’t run amok the way it does now.
She is not simply a socialist. She is a democratic socialist. One of the worst things about the English language is the word “social” and all of its various iterations, many of which have vastly different meanings. I wish they could have come up with different nomenclature, because it would save us from having these ridiculous discussions all the time.
Moreover, there are numerous wildly successful countries that practice social democracy, whereas there are essentially no countries that meaningfully practice democratic socialism.
Therefore, social democracy in practice is successful, while democratic socialism is a great idea that has yet to be implemented on any meaningful scale.
This is why the distinction matters. AOC isn’t a traditional socialist. She doesn’t espouse Leninist or Stalinist ideology.
It is so tiresome having to constantly make this distinction so people don’t immediately go down the “socialist” rabbit hole.
- Comment on Evil Bisexuals 1 week ago:
Democratic socialist not a socialist.
