I’m from the South and I always hated having to drive. I think it’s also nicer/safer to drive in a place with public transit than without, because some bad drivers know they’re bad drivers and will take another option if it’s available, plus it just means fewer cars on the road. No public transit just sucks for everyone.
I live near Chicago, and the worst I’ve experienced is someone yelling or playing loud music. I’m not saying bad stuff never happens, but it’s much safer than driving (admittedly a very low bar).
The means of production are mixed between public/state ownership, collective ownership, and private ownership, actually.
I take it that your metric for whether or not a state is socialist is something like, “Worker ownership of the means of production.” But that metric has a lot of ambiguities that make it difficult to apply practically in an objective way. Which workers own which means of production, and in what form? Suppose we have a system where everything is state-owned and the state determines who can use what when based on a truly democratic process - but then, an organization of trained professionals in a given field go on strike to demand things be done the way they want. If all the workers should own all the means of production, then the strikers are out of line, but if the workers in a particular field should own the means of production in that field, then the state is out of line.
And should the economy be transformed, fully and immediately, to that ideal? Historically, both the USSR and PRC attempted widespread collectivization of farms, like with the Great Leap Forward, which was an abject failure. That’s not to say that farming collectives cannot be successful, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect immediate and total transformation to that model or else a state isn’t socialist.
People use all sorts of metrics to determine whether or not a state is socialist or not, so it’s hard to find neutral terminology everyone can agree with. North Korea calls itself socialist and has a centrally-planned economy, and has been historically aligned with other countries that also call themselves socialist (such as the USSR and PRC), so it seems reasonable enough to me to call them socialist. Should I call them capitalist instead? Seems a little odd, especially since I live in the US which has a much larger proportion of the economy in the private sector.
This is what I’m talking about. The US not liking North Korea is an objective fact. But because people on the internet treat whatever you last posted as your entire identity and belief system, then you assume that’s the full extent of my position on North Korea. You expect me to do the typical signals to disavow and denounce the country as part of the strategy of the Western left distancing itself from AES states. But I’m not interested in signalling anything, for the reasons I explained. The strategy of allowing and repeating all sorts of sensationalist nonsense for fear that pushing back against it will tie you to the state in question just doesn’t work.
Is North Korea really “the worst dictatorship on planet Earth?” Are they worse than, for example, Saudi Arabia? Are they so much obviously worse that anyone who thinks Saudi Arabia is worse “should get their brain tested?”
It’s like talking about sexual abuse and someone saying that the person raped is now not “liking” the rapist, but a million times worse.
Ok, maybe you’re right. Perhaps it’s important to mention the horrible things the US and North Korea have done to each other. Like when the US invaded and killed 15% of their entire population (primarily civilians), carpet bombed the country, and deployed all sorts of chemical weapons, or when North Korea, er, sorry, what did North Korea do to America that’s “a million times worse than rape?” Gonna have to refresh my memory on that one chief.
Look they first thing I’m confused about is why you started your comment with a sympathetic viewpoint to North Korea, like I would’nt open my essay about how nuclear energy is good with Chernobyl wasnt that bad. Your basically delegitimising everying else after that
That’s a perfect demonstration of my point. The only thing I said about North Korea is that there are fake stories about it, which is true. I have no interest in saying or tolerating false claims just to make my position seem more appealing, or to avoid being accused of something. If speaking truth delegitimizes me somehow, if it makes people think I’m a bad person or something, then so be it, it doesn’t change what’s true.
And then I disagree with the false and exaggerated claims unchallenged part. What exactly do you mean. This seems like a catch all to dismiss anything that you disagree with.
I linked a video to give an example of what I was talking about. I recommend watching it, it’s a little long but it’s informative while being entertaining and well-produced (it has 3.6 million views with good reason). The video describes a story that was very widespread in the media with lots of mainstream sources talking about it, which claimed that everyone in North Korea had to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un. That story was completely and totally false, it was a wholesale fabrication. The two guys in the video travel to North Korea and get a perfectly normal haircut to disprove it. It also mentions several other stories that turned out to be fake news.
You’re jumping to conclusions when you say that I “use it as a catch-all to dismiss anything I disagree with.” I’m not going to dismiss claims that are actually backed by evidence, but I am going to investigate whether there is actually evidence backing up a given claim.
More importantly, because the only state you’ve mentioned is North Korea I’m now prompted to assume the AES’s you’re talking about is north Korea.
That’s a silly assumption, as there’d be no need for a term like that if it only applied to one country. AES states also include for example Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, China, and the USSR (prior to it’s collapse).
People being terrified of cities and public transit.
One thing I personally can’t understand is their defending to the death of every socialist government. But by that I mean every government that has called itself socialist or been called socialist by the US as some sort of justification for undermining them, not if they’ve actually done anything socialist. Like do we have to simp for North Korea.
There’s a couple of points I would make in response to that.
First, a problematic aspect of the internet is that your existence is defined by the last thing you posted. Which is to say, if someone says that a story about North Korea is fake, then to a reader they are a “North Korea defender,” regardless of whether they hold more critical beliefs about it that they didn’t happen to voice in that particular comment. And there have been plenty of sensationalist, fake news stories about North Korea, as well as about other countries the US doesn’t like.
Second, most Hexbears are Marxist-Leninists, and an important thing to understand about that ideology is that it isn’t about one specific set of policies that are universally applicable. When an ML defends a country, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they think that country should be held up as a model for other countries to emulate.
So if they’re not a model to emulate, then why defend them? First off, because the only means we in the West have of influencing their policies is through our government using military force, clandestine operations, or crippling economic sanctions. Second, because even if a socialist government is a failure, the extent to which it failed is important, because it will be held up as a criticism of socialism in general. Many Western leftists believe in simply putting as much distance as possible between themselves and AES (actually existing socialist) states, and will be some of their harshest critics to that end. But others, myself included, would argue that that’s the wrong approach, because it allows false and exaggerated claims to go unchallenged, which will then still be used to criticize the left no matter how much one tries to distance themselves from it. Like, people will call Obama and Harris communists, so it doesn’t seem to matter how much distance there is.
Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds is a good starting point for understanding the perspective.
No. Like you say, riots, and of course the ongoing epidemic of stochastic terrorism, possibly with more violence directed against politicians and the government, but it’s definitely not going to look like tanks shooting at tanks, and it’s also not going to look like people crawling through tunnels a la Vietnam. What American simultaneously cares enough about politics to risk their life over it, while also being willing to go live in a trench without their phone for a month? No, as long as it’s an option to live a normal life where you can return to your couch and watch or read the news while feeling righteously indignant and engage with social media however you like, that’s what people will do. Look at the January 6’ers, for example, who fully expected to return home and be able to post all about the exciting event all over social media.
Now, that all goes out the window if some lunatic decides to start WWIII with China and institutes a draft (assuming we don’t all just die in nuclear hellfire). You tell people they’ll have to give up their phones and go live in a trench anyway and maybe some decide they’d rather fight the people making them do that. Americans generally love war, but a lot of that comes from being completely and totally separated from any real life consequences from it. And of course, no insurgency would stand any chance of defeating the US government without foreign support.
immiserated possibly a billion more
Hmm, this graph must be upside-down or something, weird.
Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.
Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data’s worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that’s probably a skeezy place.
Absolutely it’s a clownshow.
If you ask me, the whole point of it is to get everyone to sort themselves into one of two horrific camps, where they’ll feel like any criticism of the people in power is an attack on them for voting for them - or, if they don’t vote, then they generally disengage from politics entirely. It’s probably the most effective system of propaganda ever designed, because you don’t even need to tell people that horrible people are on their side, they’ll happily convince themselves of it all on their own. It’s basically a race to the bottom where one side being dogshit allows the other side to be dogshit because there’s no alternative, and of course every politician wants to be as dogshit as they can get away with because that’s how you win favor with the corporate donors, who have no practical limit on how much money they can spend to influence the outcome.
There’s also this level of spectacle in our elections that’s above and beyond anywhere else in the world, we treat it like a reality show, and our debates are complete jokes where nothing substantive is ever discussed. We have absurdly long election cycles and entire industries around milking them for entertainment. It’s unlikely that we will ever even begin moving in the right direction in the foreseeable future, because the brainworms run so deep.
The worst part is when the spectacle becomes so eye-catching that people from other countries get drawn into it and start thinking in terms of our politics and what we define as normal or reasonable. Americans rarely learn from non-American perspectives and we have corporate influence constantly pushing in the direction of maximizing short term profits over all other priorities, and so our country is unable to understand or adapt to the changing conditions of the modern world, which is why we are in decline.
Look at us only as a cautionary tale of what not to do.
Right: Things are shit because of the people who are already marginalized (letting us take advantage of pre-existing prejudice and targeting the people with the smallest platforms to push back against our narratives)
Left: Things are shit because the people at the top are fucking over all of us together
Center: Things aren’t shit
In the absence of a leftist narrative, the most fundamental Center vs Right disagreement is just whether or not things are shit. As things get shittier and shittier, the Center will keep losing strength to the Right.
totalitarian control
Lmao y’all are wild. Why are you on a platform where people you don’t like have, “totalitarian control” over the structure? Is it, perhaps, because they used this “totalitarian control” to create a structure that was decentralized and allowed communities to form that operated on different rules and different views? Doesn’t sound very totalitarian if you ask me.
for the same reason I now understand better why some women would prefer the bear.
Now, please downvote me, you know you want to… just this once, I want you to know what it’s like to do something with the recipient’s consent.
Lmao wtf are you talking about? Am I violating someone’s consent by holding beliefs they disagree with? Completely unhinged.
My biggest problem with .world is that people will just make up whatever they want about the out-group and everyone just believes it without question and with no interest in examining the evidence. It’s a toxic element of the site’s culture that encourages circle-jerking and the automatic dismissal of opposing viewpoints while making intelligent and informed discussion impossible.
The moderation is also pretty heavy-handed with censorship and things get removed for “misinformation” pretty frequently just because the mods disagree with it. You don’t have to go very far back in the modlog right now to find removed posts from Cowbee and Alcoholicorn, despite both backing up their arguments with published books from respectable authors. It’s best to avoid engaging with the mods at all, I got banned from World News because a mod couldn’t defend their position so they just banned me. There’s a pretty clear bias towards NATO and the US.
But like I said my main issue is the first point, and I’ll stop judging .worlders when I start to see people actually ask for evidence when someone says, “I saw a bunch of tankies eating kittens” instead of just blindly accepting it as fact because it’s about an out-group.
Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have ‘communists’ arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin. Although that is more rare, it does happen.
If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
The culture where these sorts of blatant lies are accepted without question is my biggest problem with .world. You can have whatever actual beliefs you want, but lying like this is really despicable.
A one state solution doesn’t mean that everyone in Israel would have to leave. It would just mean that everyone in the region gets an equal voice in governance. Many people would probably choose to leave, in the same way many people left South Africa when their system of apartheid ended.
War profiteers. If you work for a company like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin then you are doing an incredible amount of harm to the world and I have even less respect than I have for people in the military. These companies are constantly looking to fuel conflicts, destabilize, and pump all sorts of weapons into every corner of the globe. These people are the true scum of the earth, they are among the worst people who have ever lived.
For one thing, virtually every country on earth claims to be democratic, whereas only some claim to be socialist. There are many countries that claim the label of democratic that don’t consider the DPRK to be a democracy, but the countries that claim the label of socialist, such as Cuba, generally recognize the DPRK as socialist. If would be strange to refer to a group of countries as socialist and then exclude a country that those countries recognize as being socialist.
It’s worth noting that one of the main reasons the DPRK is not considered democratic is not because of the way the government and elections are structured, but because it doesn’t allow its elections to be monitored by international observers.