MeowZedong @ MeowZedong @lemmygrad.ml

(Any/Comrade, Tankie for the unserious)

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2 yr. ago

I once watched this nature documentary named "Princess Mononoke" and can confirm that wild pigs continue to live on even after physical death.

It is indeed compulsory.

I saw this in the comments somewhere recently. Frog.

Gotta have them treats too.

I've had the same experience. When it's pitched as education, no one comes, but if you integrate it into other activities (think the Black Panther breakfast program), it's easier to get people there and you can relate what you want to talk about to the other action you are taking.

Yeah, sorry. I'm notoriously bad about not fleshing out what I mean as much as I should the first time around in my comments. I agree that we are probably on the same page, I just don't see the education aspect focused on as much as I think it should be it talks about organizing.

I don't think they would fight a left militant movement until after the current rulers were toppled because I agree that it would be popular. It's the moment after this where I see the most danger of a revolution being co-opted by reactionaries. It wouldn't be hard for them to wrap the popular ideas you mentioned into their own platform that appeases the masses but doesn't reject capitalism. Social democracy is far more popular in the US due to propaganda-based fears of authoritarianism. I'm not saying that a popular movement can't support socialism and lead to a socialist revolution, just that people here are so lost when it comes to the subject of a revolution and where to go after that it would be relatively easy for them to lead back to liberalism unless there is some education along the way.

I don't think direct action cannot take place or precede education to some extent, but if we don't direct a portion of our efforts towards this simultaneously, we risk any mass movement outgrowing it's own roots. People need to understand where a movement is going and why if you want them to support that movement through the reconstruction phase It doesn't mean pushing theory reading onto the masses, but building education into our other programs, similar to how the Black Panthers did. The vanguard should read theory and history in order to pass this knowledge onto others, but that will mostly be by talking to them, in media meant to agitate, and in organizational meetings. It needs to be integrated into the movement early enough to head off the influence of reactionaries. You can't teach away all reactionary culture before direct action, but you can't have a revolution and then sit people down to explain why they can't just go back to how things were a few years before it got bad for them.

When you say people need a reason to want to learn, I agree. I'm just saying we need that education to flow naturally to them through our organization efforts and we need to be deliberate about integrating education into our programs now if we don't want a popular movement to be co-opted. Simultaneous efforts can be made to organize militant action, but if we ignore this problem now, we are going to run into major problems in the future.

The only place political violence in the US would lead to at this point is a right-wing coup. The left is not organized enough and the people in the US are neither class conscious, nor educated enough to even know what they should fight for and why.

Ask yourself how libs react to socialism in conversations and if that has improved enough that they wouldn't oppose it violently? So what alternative will they pick if there is an uprising that is successful? It sure as hell won't be socialism. They want a return to the status quo of a couple years ago. I have liberal (blue maga) friends who have started speaking up to me about when it's time for a violent uprising and later in the same conversation saying we need to be more like Israel.

What the people in the US need more than anything right now is education. Education + organization. Without this base education and a shift in culture, we'll just get USA 2.0 at best.

You collect it all in a giant pile that goes in your giant pocket like a big, manly dragon. This way your manly coin horde jingles as you walk, making the small pocketed people attracted to/jealous of you.

I enjoyed your manifold joke and hope you still use it when you get grief.

Shame. Thanks for the heads up!

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of differences between socialism and communism.

Modes of production aside, socialism is just the transition period between capitalism and communism but does not have fundamentally different goals from communism. The goal of socialism is to reach communism. The differentiation is just a matter of how far society has progressed in that transition and their modes of production. Socialists are communists. Any differentiation outside of the above context is colloquial or otherwise a result of the uninformed misusing the terms as you have.

Nationalized healthcare in the UK != Socialism and != a socialist policy, it is a social/welfare program. Social/welfare programs are agnostic of modes of production, which is why they can exist in both socialist and capitalist economies.

Please refer to the socialism entry on Prolewiki as well as the modes of production link I added above. This is one of the most commonly confused things about socialism and communism. If you really want to say you don't like the idea of communism, you should at least be informed about what it is you don't like and don't think applies to our modern society. These are short articles that collectively take <5 minutes to read through.

What you are advocating for is social democracy.

The first hint was mentioning Stalin's purges. It's always the Stalin strawman.

Yeah...I was just making a stupid joke about his appearance changing.

Sorry, I was still talking about Wyll!

Yeah, he ended up hornier than I expected despite me denying all of his romantic advances. Getting his ending with Karlach made up for all of his annoyances in the first act.

Many of the characters have serious flaws that made me dislike them to some degree when we first met, but as you get to know them and progress through the story, they grow on you or they grow into better people (assuming a relatively good playthrough), so I ended up liking all of them to some degree by the end.

Some of the most controversial/off-putting ones have the best character arcs such as Laezel and Astarion (ok, I always loved him despite his evil quirks).

The one I liked least was probably Wyll and I have to say, despite really hating his holier than thou attitude in the beginning, by the end I only avoided bringing him along because I never learned to build warlocks in a way that felt engaging to play.

I didn't hate anyone by the end, but I also tend to favor deeply flawed characters who grow into better people in all stories. They are just more interesting and realistic.

Second the Minsc comment. He comes in so late that I feel like I didn't get enough time in camp to see everything.

Get a hexbear in here and their emojis could fix this right up.

Please just cut yourselves off from the fediverse already. Even replying to this drivel has lost it's fun.

There are a few clarifications to be made and some fallacies in your understanding of communism and socialism here. I'm not the one to clear all of this up, because I'm not going to put the effort and time needed into these subjects, but I'll try to guide you in the direction of some resources to help.

Some quick clarifications:

Socialism and communism are the same thing. Communism is the end goal, but you cannot just jump directly to communism from capitalism, so we fall the transition period socialism. Communists often use the terms interchangeably, but any actual differentiation is a distinction of progress, not the goals of the project.

Communism is no more extreme than socialism and politics are not a horseshoe or circle where the far ends are the worst. This is a thought-terminating notion meant to keep you boxed within the status quo so that those who are currently in power stay in power, meaning you will remain relatively powerless. The same thing goes for trying to stay in the middle of a conflict: you end up not taking a side, meaning you remain on the side of the status quo, meaning you stay on the side of the oppressor. Your oppressor. As much as people argue communism is extreme, communists can argue that "the middle" or "liberalism" or "other leftists" are extreme. These arguments are always made for the purpose of getting you to stop thinking about those topics, to stop considering their validity. They are not trying to convince you those are wrong, but that they are not worth even considering. I implore you to do the opposite: do some reading and interact with what "extremists" are saying in good faith, then decide what you believe. I'm sure you'll agree with some parts and not with others. We are all humans and most of us are of the same class. The "extremism" of communists is that we say working class people should run the world and the rich leeches should be oppressed in a sense that they cannot oppress anyone else through the use of their extreme wealth. We want to flip the system on its head to use an overly-simplistic metaphor.

Capitalism cannot be mixed with socialist policies. What you are probably referring to as socialist policies are actually welfare programs and state regulation . This is what we call social democracy, which is still capitalism. Socialism is differentiated more by who owns the means of production, how the economy is organized, and what class is in control of the state. That aside, socialists think social democracy is insufficient to curb the problems of capitalism because you don't remove the roots of the problem. Most of the successes of social democracy in addressing wealth disparity and living standards are the result of countries trying to stave of socialist revolutions at home due to their workers seeing the success of nearby socialist republics in improving the quality of life of their people. These are capitalist concessions and if you look at the social democracies that exist in Europe, you'll see that all of these concessions started getting rolled back AFTER the fall of the USSR. They were temporary relief (at home, not in their colonies), but the profit motive always demands more. If capitalism can't steal enough from the global south, it will turn inward and eat itself like the US and UK are currently doing.

On entrepreneurs...most of the time people want to show the benefit of entrepreneurs, it is in terms of innovation and small businesses, so I'm assuming this is your point? Innovation and entrepreneurs do not disappear under socialism, but the way they function does. Innovation does not always need to be driven by profit motive as demonstrated within the USSR, but there is arguably some room for profit motive driving innovation in a mixed economy like China's. The main benefit of socialism is that innovation is not at the whims of the market, which tends to act as if it is allergic to innovation, ultimately stifling it rather than nurturing it. Small businesses (and thus entrepreneurs) still exist in many socialist countries and will not be nationalized unless they grow quite big or become central to controlling an important part of the economy. In some ways it can even be easier to start a thriving business because you are less at risk of being stamped out by the "health competition" of a mega-corporation with a monopoly on an entire industrial sector. Those get nationalized, fixing the money attracts more money problem. If you remove the profit motive, this power can no longer be abused for profit. Corruption can happen under any system and has to be handled case-by-case, but you'll find socialist countries have much harsher penalties for corruption to prevent it, unlike a paltry fine that is the cost of doing business. Jail time or up to the death penalty can be applied based upon the severity and circumstances of the crime. Vietnam and China have applied this last one to large-scale corruption within the last year whereas in liberal democracies, multimillion or even billion dollar fraud cases are widespread and normal with little to no repercussions. In some cases, it is even legal!

On education...if you want more, there are many sources available in many formats. I suggest Dessalines' crash course of socialism and his reading list but there are plenty of others on here who provide lists worthy of mention (but their links are harder for me to look up). Prolewiki is like Wikipedia for socialism by socialists. Search a topic there that you want to know more about. You can also ask for resources on specific topics in lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net and you will probably get more resources than you care to consume in a year, so long as you approach them in good faith. People in these communities will only troll you if they think you are trolling them. The efforts some of them will go to in order to educate others is ridiculous (in a good way).

I hope this helps.