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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • My logic (I don’t live in the us but for the sake of argument, let’s pretend I do) is that if a politician can commit a livestreamed genocide, and they win the election, it signals to politicians that there is no line they can cross that will make their campaign unviable.

    It would be more ideal if the Democrats could have been punished for their war mongering years ago, but you never punish your representatives for crossing even the most egregious possible line, then you truly don’t have any power over them and have fundamentally given up.

    If tommorow, even 10% of the dems indicated in polls that they would not vote for kamala because of gaza, it would force the DNC to take a stronger stance on the issue because the race is too tight. If this had happened many months ago, the Democrats could have been forced in giving concessions. But the Democrat voter base has made sure that the demmocrat party has no need to give concessions. They have used themselves as meat waves to ensure that the genocide can continue smoothly.


  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyz...
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    15 days ago

    Some academics became liberals after having flirted with Marxism. This is relevant why exactly? I mean, I can cite many great minds who remained Marxists and even advanced the theory. Ever heard of Paul Cockshott? Alan Contrell? David Zachariah? Emanuel Farjoun?

    These guys (and some others) actually worked on Marxist economic theory and modernized it. They lived through the collapse of the USSR and remained steadfast in their beliefs. And I haven’t talked about countless other minds in anthropology, history, contemporary social studies and philosophy who have used dialectical materialism as a foundation to achieve great results.

    And so I want to emphasize something.

    every single one of them gave up and became an egalitarian.

    Is blatantly and literally false.


  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyz...
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    16 days ago

    I can perform a completely independent experiments in my house.

    And I can scream into the abyss, it’s just as relevant. The absolute majority of actually useful and relevant science is performed socially for social purposes.

    I make a hypothesis that my stove can boil 1L of water in 10 minutes.

    You aren’t even supposed to do a scientific experiment in the way you have just described. Or rather, there is neither a universally agreed upon scientific method, nor would your described experiment hold up to any standards.

    An actual scientific experiment into water boiling would involve at the minimum

    1. A model predicting the speed of boiling based on relevant variables
    2. A collection of many data, and preferably corroborated by independent sources
    3. Statistical analysis of the data (there are many methods to choose from) to gauge confidence in the model.
    4. Publishing or proofreading of the results.

    However, at each of these steps, you have a choice of how to approach the problem. And this depends on what you are trying to do, and what the best standards in the industry are. The process has also changed over time.

    And this reveals the problem of many people’s metaphysical approach to science. They treat it as if it were a platonic ideal, or floating constant in the human minds pace. In reality, “science” is an industry with its ever-changing standards, culture, interaction with the rest of society, and a million other complexities.




  • You still didn’t answer the question.

    He did, you just lack reading comprehension.

    The ruling elite was the Communist party, mostly people near the top who were able to obtain key government positions that they would exploit for personal gain especially in later years of USSR.

    The Latter years of the USSR are notorious for being fucked, but this does not address the middle or early years.

    Mentioning that some guy was Ukrainian with in the regime while not mentioning Holodomor is OG 🤡

    Ah yes, the famine which affected all of the Soviet Union (and Kazakhstan more in terms of deaths per capita) which even the inventors of the narrative of genocide (Robert conquest) no longer call genocide.

    Must he nice being a communist while enjoying benefits of western society lol

    I love the benefits western society! I get to enjoy half my income go to some landleech and fund war crimes in the middle east! I can’t wait to see which climate change fueled disaster kills me, or maybe the fascist death squads will be the ones to do me in!


  • I mean, if you get into any real depth with math, you are going to reach a point where you can’t use conveniently use words to describe the symbols being manipulated.

    As an example for the math I am doing literally right now, I very much prefer using C+R compared to “semi circular arc in the upper half of the complex plane with radius R”, or M+(f(z)) which means “Maximum of the magnitude of the function f(z) over C+R”, which if I were to write out in full, would just become a clusterfuck.

    Also you still wouldn’t be able to get rid of symbols because some symbols are placeholders and straight up don’t have any meaning in natural language. This occurs often in physics as well, not just pure maths. For example, the laplace transform of any function is written as a variable of “s”, but “s” doesn’t have a clear meaning (at least as far as I know).







  • As far as my understanding of the soviet style democratic centralist systems goes (I suppose DemCent could be implemented in many ways, just like liberal electoralism can), every country has a supreme soviet which convenes some times a year to appoint, remove and review the progress of the presidium. The members of the presidium themselves have a strong distribution of powers amongst each other, and so a dictator type like Putin shouldn’t really show up at all, and if he does, he should be removed by the supreme soviet. The supreme soviet itself was elected by lower level regional soviets, which were in turn elected by lower level soviets and so on until you had the fully local soviets, which were initially organizations the factory workers and soldiers during the revolution (so they predated even the USSR), and latter (after the 1936 constitution) became location based (so similar to the local councils in liberal systems).

    I have heard compelling arguments that any new DemCent system should take ideas from ancient athenian democracy like sortition and direct democracy. I agree with them, but implementing such a system in reality would likely be challenging and require many preconditions to be met (such as having a highly educated population with good amounts of free time and no worries about war or imperialism).


  • Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)?

    Liberal is a well defined category though. Liberalism as a self-described ideology opposed to both communism and monarchy has been around for centuries at this point. Most people being decried as liberals would themselves identify as liberals.



  • Congratulations, your ideology cannot be implemented in the real world because the ruling class interests will do anything in their power to stop anything like it from ever being implemented and you reject the use of force to displace these said ruling class interests, who are currently boiling the plane alive killing millions of people through pollution, healthcare neglect, war and disease.

    Capitalists societies have only ever implemented mixed economies with (relatively) low gini coefficients in the aftermath of WW2, when both the working class was armed (and willing to use force) and there existed an existential threat in the form of the soviet union. Outside of these conditions, capitalists societies have maintained extremely irrational forms of organization.

    It is not sufficient to have some idea of what kind of society you want, you also need to think about the kinds of conditions under which said society could actually exist irl.


  • Our definition of what is and isn’t a democracy is significantly different than that of liberals. We wouldn’t consider Europe and America to be democracies meaning that we have no sympathies for those style of governments and societies.

    To contextualize this, one thing you have to understand is that there are many formulations of democracy that have existed historically. Athenian democracy is very different from liberal democracy, which is in turn very different from democratic centralism (the formulation most used by Marxist states). And there were probably many forms of democracy that hunter-gatherers and indigenous peoples used (which I unfortunately don’t know much about).

    The main problems with how democracy is talked about in liberal philosophy (the hegemonic philosophy) is that only the liberal formulation of democracy is considered valid, even if its performance has historically been extremely subpar. Furthermore, class is completely ignored, as all “democracies” have existed in service of a class (in athens, for the slave owners, in liberal republics, for the bourgeoise, in ML republics, for the proles).

    Because we do not consider liberal democracies to be a valid form of democracy, liberals take this disingenuously as if Marxists hate all democracy.


  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre you a 'tankie'
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    5 months ago

    It gets very tiring trying to have a conversation with contrarians who think everything Western is bad and anything Chinese/USSR is good.

    Why do outsiders keep making shit up about lemmygrad and hexbear?

    Or worse, that their highly suspicious news sources (some random blog usually) are telling you the real truth, while using any mainstream news media source makes you a deluded Lib

    I use this instance regularly and more often than not, the articles posted on the news coms are from mainstream sites. And even the “random blogs” (not really, it’s a few relatively well known blogs) use mainstream news to get basic facts. As proof, !worldnews@lemmygrad.ml is a link to the world news com. Out of the 20 articles on the front page (as of writing this comment), 9 are from the typical mainstream sites (like reuters) and 5 are from sites that may be mainstream, but I don’t know them. Only 6 are from sources like FT or things like a youtube video (which again, may be from some mainstream author).