I haven’t read the article, but be warned that 972 is an Israeli liberal Zionist rag.

I believe we need dedicated spaces for political discussion that are not based on algorithms optimized for engagement (aka outrage).

So do we, which is one of the reasons why Lemmy was created, and why Lemmy does not have algorithms for rage engagement. Lemmy is all cost and no revenue, so there is no financial incentive for it to “maximize ‘engagement.’”

The first is a way to limit bots or bad actors from participating in discussions.

Where are the actually-existing the “bot problems” on Lemmy? While it could happen, I don’t think it actually is happening to any significant extent presently.

Reappropriation is a thing.

How do you propose we get rid of them? Because that is our end goal, which we make our plans toward reaching.

A big problem with most other leftists’ plans are their prefigurative politics. “Be the change you want to see in the world” doesn’t cut it while the world is significantly controlled by imperialist states. Until those capitalist states are dispensed with, socialist states don’t have the luxury of prefiguration, or they go the way of Allende’s Chile.

A (long) excerpt from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds: Anticommunism & Wonderland. Here’s a snippet:

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism — not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience — could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? … Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life.

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe — and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them — all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. …

These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make].

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta);” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency — which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

BTW, the Soviet Union wasn’t a nation-state and neither is China, but rather multinational states.

Sure, why not have this “grassroots” youth movement—which is in no way another CIA/MI6/NED color revolution—ask Grok or Claude or ChatGPT—none of which are part of the US MIC—to select the candidate. Sound perfectly normal and not the least bit astroturfed.

Lemmy users

Not everyone here is on Lemmy, and this is a Redditism that I wish we’d leave behind.

Historically these laws exist because US law is based on English common law. I’d bet a Loonie that they exist in Canada as well for the same historical reason. If you live in a former British colony, it may be worth your time to get a basic understanding of common law.

• Duty Owed Trespassers (emphasis mine):

  A landowner has no duty to keep premises in a safe condition for the benefit of trespassers. An owner does not possess any duty to a trespasser under the traditional common law view except to abstain from willful or wanton misconduct or entrapment.

Capitalist states are authoritarian no matter how many parties they have. They are dictatorships of the capitalist class against the working class.

I write both Taiwanese and Chinese because my grandparents were Chinese nationalists (KMT) who fought and lost to the communists and left China with Chiang Kaishek when he retreated to Taiwan.

You understand that Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT party were fascist, right?

cultural genocide against the Uyghurs

That’s not a real thing.

dilutes Tibetan culture and wants to

Show me the Tibetans who miss living as illiterate serfs under autocratic feudalism and I’ll show you the CIA-backed, “suck my tongue” royal family and its deputies.

democratic Taiwan

Bourgeois democracy is a head fake.

Because pawb.social is defederated from hexbear.

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, “Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.” Fool me—you can’t get fooled again. — GWB

Russia already got owned once, and Putin helped get it un-owned. It’s still got oligarchs, but at least they’re not imperial core compradors anymore.

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Objectively false information

“Objectively.”

copy editor what are you doing

Not sure… Which do think would win in a fight?

If they’re tasty, no less unhealthy, and affordable, I’ll eat ’em. Grown muscle tissue isn’t connected to a nervous system, never mind a brain. They’re no more “animal” than tofu as far as I’m concerned.

But I can think of a couple of major likely problems:

1. They’ll probably still require more resources (energy, water, etc.) to produce than plants, so I’d probably limit my consumption.
2. Given the history of capitalism and the meat industry, I’d be suspicious of them still harming animals behind the curtain somewhere, somehow. The industry ought to be heavily regulated to ensure they aren’t doing that, but again, history shows that under late capitalism they probably won’t be.

Also the Russian feudal empire is hardly similar to the current Russian capitalist state, which had an 70-year socialist state sandwiched in between.

including a ranch to breed women with his DNA

wtf is with the gen-x broligarchy’s hyper-natalism? your genes aren’t special, dorks. you just happened to be in the right place at the right time and won the internet lottery. everything after that just came from having a scrooge mcduck pool of wealth, not because you’re a a special boy.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pronatalism-elon-musk-simone-malcolm-collins-underpopulation-breeding-tech-2022-11

If you use terms like “the liberal news”, you know you’re stuck in an echo chamber.

It’s almost impossible to be “stuck in an echo chamber” when living in a Five Eyes country. Or rather, it’s almost impossible to not be stuck in the Five Eyes liberal echo chamber. You would have to go full Kaczynski, living in a shack in the woods.

Or write a browser extension.