FunkyStuff [he/him]

tldr the kind of repression and state control that @ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de notes in Cuba as disqualifying it from the label of ‘socialism’ and making it ‘communism’ instead are actually the precise things that make Cuba a socialist state, as opposed to a communist post-state society.

It’s an error to just use the words like ‘socialism’ = ‘cool and good’ while ‘communism’ = ‘bad and scary’ because that’s just 2nd grade tier analysis that doesn’t clear anything up at all, and just confuses you further.

One thing that’s worth noting is that Israel and the US are the two countries that voted against making food a human right at the UN and both are actively committing genocide via starvation.

These two processes are actually intrinsically connected and are part of a broader strategy I fear is only going to see more examples as climate collapse plays out. There’s going to be more groups that the imperialist powers will want to wipe out and ecosystem collapse will cause famines that a blockade can escalate into a mass death event.

That’s not how it works. If there’s an organized effort to exterminate a group of people because of their immutable characteristics (in this case nationality) it’s genocide. You can be guilty of the crime of genocide even if you don’t kill a single person. The US embargo absolutely meets the criteria and has already caused thousands of excess deaths (as well as underdevelopment) over the course of decades. It’s like Gaza, blocking off a group of millions of people from being able to get anything from the rest of the world and restricting the flow of basic necessities. They don’t have to kill any specific number of people for that to count as genocide, it just is.

There was also a famine in the 30s in Kazakhstan, not just Ukraine. A similar number of people died.

In the dark times, should the stars also go out?

It’s a protection racket. If they get the kind of left wing government that would even leave NATO in the first place, the US is presently showing off what it does to such governments.

I think the question isn’t “why are Western countries afraid of Israel” or “why does the West fear its citizens criticizing Israel,” but “what are Western countries planning to do in the near future (especially with the climate crisis) that requires them to support Israel and learn from it right now?”

I read comments and posts from Chinese posters who go through VPNs regularly.

I know it’s kinda weird to use words like “liberate” in this context because it does get pretty close to acting like it’s a good thing that this war is happening, but I’m curious to know, do you think it would be better if Russia didn’t advance in Donetsk?

Sounds like a bad way to do things. Won’t you end up with gore on your feed? Not to mention it would be hard to filter out really dehumanizing, gross porn (which is frankly a description that fits most of it anyway)

That’s not the point being argued at all. Linus Torvalds is a bit of a lib (though he has said some cool things over the years, not enough to outweigh his attitude towards Russian maintainers); the Linux community is itself full of libs. I’ve learned to live with that. I accept that. Why must you be a little piss baby about the Lemmy community having lots of communists when we all can clearly see it was made by communists to make sure there was a space for communists to exist online?

You should be able to contact your admins so they purge your account. Purged accounts have all the content they ever published scrubbed from all databases on Lemmy. I’m not entirely sure how it works if there’s an instance that is defederated from your home instance after you post something and it gets federated to them, I assume it wouldn’t be deleted in that case so it would still be available online there, but certainly a lot harder to track down.

But you still can’t provide any evidence that white people are systemically oppressed in South Africa? As the comment you’re replying to says, most white people in SA live in formal housing in suburbs. They still actually have the property, land, and wealth passed down from colonization and apartheid. Their government isn’t really even challenging that, they still facilitate the exploitation of the black population, especially those far away from urban centers who work in mining and farming (as in the farmworkers, not farmers). If the white farmers themselves weren’t being attacked, most of us probably would’ve never heard about the inequality that still exists.

Just to make my point clearer, in Zimbabwe they actually took the land away from the Rhodesian settlers and gave it to revolutionaries, and even that wasn’t genocide per se.

Why is the Stasi, a state organ responsible for countering all the fascist groups the US was still backing, comparable to the state organs of the Nazi Germany that the communists were intent on destroying?

Your electoral arguments are all empty rhetoric. Not one of them is based on reality

Since Occupy, what success has there been at carving out a space for leftists within the Democratic party? Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and Jamaal Bowman. AOC couldn’t be brought to call the genocide in Gaza a genocide until a few months before the ceasefire, and her support of Biden until the last minute just shows that she’s a lot more concerned with her personal career than doing her job as a “progressive” (meaningless term! and she still can’t live up to it). Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman were better at running opposition against the genocide but still were trapped within a party that is beholden to corporate interests more than anything else, so it was only Tlaib that ever actually said anything directly to Netanyahu. And all of this is just symbolic actions, because they’re powerless. To make matters worse, these are your most “progressive” figures in congress, and they’ll still bend the knee on every other foreign policy issue: they’ll go along with the Uyghur genocide claims, call Maduro a dictator, say almost nothing about the Cuban embargo unless Trump just put them back on the list (gotta #resist queens!), support regime change in Iran, etc etc. So there is no left in the Democratic party, there are only some figureheads that make “progressive” Americans feel like their job is done when they don’t represent any kind of threat or hold any kind of power. It’s an illusion, and you’d be much better off without these clowns at all so that regular Americans didn’t falsely believe they had someone in there fighting for them when the truth is they’re 100% on their own until they pick up a gun and join a union.

It’s not a strategy that will ever lead anywhere. The Democratic party is the death of any kind of leftward movement, and it is specifically designed to work this way. You’ll never change it from the inside, and every bit of effort you spend trying to reform it because it’s the “better strategy” would be better spent on building parallel power structures: unions that are independent from either major party, communist parties, mutual aid orgs, community defense orgs in minority communities, bail funds, etc. Because those things won’t win elections but they will create the conditions under which transformative change can take place. I would hope that the genocide in Gaza should illustrate the necessity for abandoning the Democratic party and adopting an entirely different strategy.

This attitude is exactly why nothing will be achieved in electoral politics and Americans will only get to know freedom when the rest of the world imposes it on you. If the blatantly antidemocratic actions undertaken by the Harris campaign still have you undyingly loyal to this party, you’ll stand by them even after they shoot your mother and run your dog over.