LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]

uncompensated driving, commute times, etc

people don’t realize how much their car is costing them. IRS rate is like $0.60 a mile. running errands for work all day? 45-minute commute? yeah you’re effectively making less than minimum wage now

very difficult to get people to understand though

lmao couldn’t be more obvious

Assuming this is coming from a lack of friendship:

Start with a pet, if possible. Then work your way up.

Getting my cat a few years ago helped take the edge off so I didn’t come off as so desperate or distant (oscillating between the two extremes).

Then slowly picked up effective habits and retrained bad habits in interacting with people. Still working on it.

If you mean you feel lonely within your existing friendships, there’s a degree to which that is “normal” or at least somewhat universal. Some philosophers would say true connection with another person is fundamentally impossible. But even if that’s the case, we can find meaning and beauty in the process of trying to achieve the unachievable. Happiness comes not from finally filling an unfillable lack (a mythical ideal), but the novelty or enjoyment of the process.

I get shitbox Toyotas for under a couple grand and run them into the ground. Whatever maintenance I can afford.

I don’t trust cars nor roads nor drivers

:michael-laugh:

Ironically I think 20 hours is about the estimate for reading it if you read 300 wpm, iirc

Of course it’s pretty dense theory so most people aren’t gonna be reading at a fiction pace. Took me a few months to get through it.

I agree with one exception:

There’s a certain type of person who has no coherent message, their whole purpose is to engage in bad faith. In that case any attempt to attack the message is futile due to the asymmetrical nature of disinformation. And the disinformation that spreads so effectively is often stuff that dials into people’s subconscious assumptions. So it’s not always obviously absurd to average people.

See Sartre’s description of how antisemites use this tactic:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

The difficulty people have, from what I’ve witnessed with federation, is differentiating good from bad faith users. And I see this very much from all sides: putting it broadly, people got used to a certain Overton window. Thus it’s easy to assume someone with a foreign opinion doesn’t actually hold that opinion, they’re just trolling or crazy. I think it’s best to assume good faith until proven wrong, otherwise the trolls have succeeded in their goal to poison all dialogue and exchange.

Another thing worth keeping in mind, Lemmy represents a major threat to corporate social media. The best way for this threat to be eliminated is if, in its infancy, it fragments and stagnates due to drama like this. It’s very easy to make an account on any instance, or multiple accounts.

It’s also been my impression that the meme of federation being impossible has taken up 95% visible discourse, with the perceived ills that the meme is based on only being like 5%. One of those things where a small problem is artificially blown up until it becomes the big problem it was falsely claimed to be. I’ve seen a few people voice this sentiment: that their only exposure to the drama is people complaining about the drama. I saw a similar suspicious phenomenon happen on Reddit a few times.

rarely anyone else

Like, the “iron fist” rule as you call it can be debated till the end of time, both the degree to which the characterization is true versus western propaganda/idealism as well as the degree to which it might be necessary to survive the omnipresent fascist and capitalist counterevolutionary movements, both external and internal.

Buuuuuut literacy rates, cost of living, infant mortality, income equality, life expectancy, gender equality, etc, these all tended to drastically improve in socialist states, compared to pre-socialism (and especially post-socialism when looking at the many states that were violently overthrown and liberalized).

international uprising

yes, and what is a post-revolution state supposed to do while waiting for the rest of the world?

also a pet theory i like (that isn’t actually true or provable) is that gifted programs are meant to remove children deemed smarter from their communities and funnel them into middle management and academia, so they don’t become agitators for change in their communities and workplaces

on the topic of iq, i have a lot of problems with the way people seem to interact with the concept. there’s a bunch of assumptions all baked into it:

• iq is a variable that actually exists in nature

• people’s iq is static and follows a standard distribution

• iq tests are capable of objectively measuring or at least approximating this variable

• this variable is a good stand-in or even synonymous with cognitive ability

• cognitive ability is univariate or single-faceted, able to be described with a single number

• cognitive ability equates to or correlates with usefulness, happiness, sociability, success, whatever

• finally, that any of this really matters, like in a materially impactful way, or is something that we should focus on

it’s not that each of these statements is 100% wrong, it’s that each shouldn’t be assumed to be true. but the way i usually see iq invoked kinda just uncritically runs with all of them, contained within a neat little ideological package.

So a rough estimate of 1600 kcals per pound of rice, 10 billion pounds, assuming daily intake of 2000 kcals, that’s roughly the yearly calories of about 22 million people (assuming I didn’t fuck up somewhere). To put it in perspective.

Yeah, to me it sounds like “even a tax collector, the worst type of person you know, is better than the Pharisee in this story”

Ha this is pretty good

Comics made with the sole intention of getting memed feel less authentic than memes naturally grown in the wild.

If you don’t like your feudal lord, you also keep them!

That’s just thought-terminating. There’s no universal truth that ends do or do not justify means.

Is locking up a sex offender to prevent further victimization justifiable? Is taking bread from a store to feed a starving person justifiable? Is banning false advertisement justifiable? Is requiring licensure for medical practice justifiable? Those actions are all means that directly violate some conception of liberal human rights.

Additionally, there’s often not a clear delineation, in the real world, between means and ends. The real world is made up of complex networks of powers and interests competing against each other, regardless of what can or cannot be justified. We believe in advancing working class power, interests, and rights, which by definition necessitates undermining the power, interests, and rights of the ruling class and its enforcers/enablers. Within that framework we accept and perform criticisms of the methods used to progress those goals, but only inasmuch as those critiques can help to refine strategy and inform future liberatory movements. Otherwise it’s either carrying water for US interests or squabbling about the moral standing of dead people.

any system could be free enough of flaws to be above criticism- or that it’s good enough to be worth the oppression of the few without hearing their voices and honestly considering their plight.

I don’t think there’s many MLs that would argue against you here, at least as far as ideals go. In fact you’ll find a lot of internal criticism of past socialist experiments. It’s just not really criticism if it’s not taking into account historical context and/or if it’s based largely on western misinformation.

What most western criticism of AES lacks is key historical context (this comment is very stream of consciousness so forgive me for being all over the place):

Threats of invasion, sabotage, espionage, assassination, etc have always been a threat to vested power, but even more so against revolutionary movements. Rosa Luxembourg was killed. Lenin was nearly assassinated (may have caused him to die early). Stalin may have been assassinated. Castro somehow survived hundreds of attempts and plans. Che was killed. Allende was overthrown (and maybe killed). Árbenz was overthrown. Malcolm X was killed. Fred Hampton was killed. Sukarno was overthrown. Sankara was killed. All this just off the top of my head, there’s plenty more examples.

The Soviet Union had 20 years to somehow industrialize well enough to face European invasion, withstanding both internal and external attacks. The alternative was quite literally death.

The absolute strength, size, and resources of the US empire are unprecedented, which significantly alters the material conditions and thus the strategies that must be employed by revolutionary movements for survival. US intelligence agencies have become very good at manufacturing or manipulating social unrest to destabilize a country and set up a coup. Check out The Jakarta Method for an overview of some of these strategies.

So yes, ideally we would all interact freely in the marketplace of ideas, and bad ideas would be refuted by facts and logic. But the unfortunate reality is that bad faith actors and saboteurs have proven incredibly effective at materially undermining revolutionary movements, and thus any criticism of those movements must take that into account or it’s a useless criticism.

People have lost sight of how much of our “free” time is actually just resting and recuperating in order to perform better during “work” time. Like, the 8 hours a day I sleep isn’t really my time. The commute to and from work isn’t my time. The basic maintenance and upkeep stuff, the unwinding from a stressful day, all that isn’t truly my time, it’s just preparing for and recovering from work time.

A two-day weekend makes this exceptionally clear. At least one of the days is usually spent catching up on all the stuff you couldn’t do because you were working. The second day is rushing to try and get any enjoyment out of it before you go back to work. There’s barely any actual agency or freedom, it’s all part of the cycle of producing value for someone else.

Even worse if you’re in a job without set schedules or weekends, like most service industry workers.

Someone paying $800 a month for their rent is gonna have paid $470,400 by the time they retire. That’s like two fucking mortgages for the “service” of not being homeless.

It’s just restructured feudalism at this point. We’ve abstracted away the direct relationship between landlord and serf, but over half our labor is still going to some third party doing none of the work.