What I don’t like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just an unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn’t trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it’s a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.

Unfortunately, steeply here doesn’t really capture the size disparity between Lemmy and Reddit. Lemmy has 60k active monthly users. Reddit has 450 million active monthly users. We have a looong way to go before we can really compete. But we just have to keep pushing. Now that we exist and have a sustainable userbase, the next time Reddit does something idiotic we’ll be here to attract disgruntled users. Something good that we can be doing is showing up to the threads on Reddit about the terrible things Reddit does and advertising Lemmy to people.

I did some digging and the two words have different etymologies. So it’s a coincidence. English has many words that share the same spelling but have different meanings/etymologies as well. “Fan” for example. For “tour”, the “tower” usage comes from the Latin “turrem” which also means “tower”, and the “tour” usage comes from the Latin “tournāre” which means “to turn”.

This is complete speculation, but I wonder if the less common inverted title (eg Lake Michigan, River Thames, etc) comes from English’s French influence. In French they usually invert the title in this way. For example, what we call the Eiffel Tower, they call the Tour Eiffel.

You are just a capitalist that likes welfare. Your ideology has absolutely no desire to change the ruling class or overturn the system that is currently burning the world and leading us to destruction.

I don’t think you help your case arguing this way. I’m not even dissecting socialism when I say that - just your approach to argument. You don’t know my ideology. Creating a strawman of my views isn’t going to convince me or anyone else that you have a good point. Hell, for a long time I did consider myself an actual socialist. I would love to lay out my reasons for my movement away from that, but I’m not sure you’re ready to have that respectful exchange of views.

The liberals obsessed with the “nordic model” still would’ve downvoted it. They don’t like having to wrestle with the reality of climate change. Our options are socialism or extinction.

Beginning an argument with “Your head is up your ass so far that I won’t bother arguing. I’m right no matter what.” is a sure way to have people dismiss your arguments outright. I say this all because I want my opponents to be good at arguing. I want to hear persuasive viewpoints. I don’t believe for a moment that I have all the answers, so I welcome any opposition to the beliefs that I’ve come to possess. If you believe that you have the answers, then I’m genuinely all ears. But unfortunately, arguing isn’t about being right - it’s about persuading other people that you are. The internet has made it easy to lose sight of this and argue with hostility instead of respect. I’m trying to be sincere here. Please consider the purpose of getting into these internet spats. I see so much hostility outright from people on the left and it genuinely sucks. I find that when I try to dig even a little bit into arguments for socialism or communism that I often hit this barrier of hostility. It’s not a good way of selling a viewpoint. And you can say that it’s not your job, but then I ask why we’re even here having this conversation.

Now, I’ll stop patronizing you. I’ll throw my argument out there so you can tear it to pieces. Back to labels - what socialism looks like to you depends on who you are. You say it’s when “the old institutions are thrown out and the new institutions are introduced”. I’ll take that to mean some form of government is in possession of the means of production across the board? My hesitancy towards socialism is mostly centered on my knowledge of history and the repeated trends of powerful institutions decaying into corruption and greed. I think socialism could genuinely work really well as long as the people in charge were kept honest. But my skepticism is towards the long term sustainability of such a system. Time and again we see institutions decay and fall prey to humanity’s worst impulses. The fall of the Roman Republic (and the regular chaos of the Roman Empire for that matter) is my classic go-to for this, but there are plenty of non-western examples as well. The best cases I’ve seen in my studies of various histories seem to be centered around cultures that dispersed their power into many smaller institutions. My problem with socialism is that it inherently says “we’re going to get rid of business corruption and government corruption by combining the two”. I think creating an even smaller, more focused center of power in society is a dangerous proposal - it becomes all the more easy for the wealthy elites to worm their way into that power and take control. Essentially you’re taking all of those wealthy capitalist greedy dirtbags and then moving them into the government.

Capitalism, on the other hand, removes business from government which allows, in theory, for the government to act as a counter-weight to business. Now, you and I both know that that hasn’t stopped wealthy elites from worming their way into capitalism and capturing government interests. But my main point here is that socialism isn’t solving that problem. It’s throwing fuel on the fire by cutting out the one supposed protection we do have, which is a separation of government interests and business interests. Ostensibly, when capitalism is working the way it should, the government is acting as a counterweight to business greed. I think there are better ways to strengthen that counterweight that don’t necessarily fall under the label of “socialism”. I think heavily regulated capitalism is better than outright socialism because in the ideal case the government is still acting as a tool of the people, flexing its power in opposition to businesses. The ideal case in socialism has the government acting as the businesses itself, which I believe would encourage greed and would actually cause even less incentive to address things like climate change.

Yeah. Like saying you believe that companies beyond a certain size should be legally required to seek a vote from their employees before implementing certain types of changes is a real policy to argue about. Call it democratizing business or whatever you want. And then that’s an actual concrete issue we can argue about. Or if you believe in the government buying out businesses beyond a certain size, that’s a specific conversation we can have and we can discuss the hypothetical implementation of that. Call it business seizure or whatever. Just saying “I believe in socialism” doesn’t dig enough into the details of how you perceive socialism or how you would implement it. And frankly, I think it hurts the socialists or communists or whoever is trying to persuade the current culture away from what we have more than anybody else. Ideas grow when you make real, concrete proposals. These exceedingly large scale labels usually end up killing a conversation rather than feeding it. Someone gets mad at a label and then everything shuts down on that sticking point.

I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to “socialism”? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say “well that wasn’t true x”. And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’ve been mostly telling people I’m a “social democrat” or that I support “capitalism with heavy regulations”. But even those words can get picked apart and don’t really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.

It’s a mixed bag. Having moved to Canada, even modern constitutions can be a shitshow. For example, Canada’s constitution allows premiers (the Canadian provincial version of state governors) to freeze certain rights from Canada’s version of the Bill of Rights (the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) on a whim until the next election. Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, recently tried to use this technicality to freeze the right to protest to stop a school workers’ strike.

The reason this ability exists is because when Canada first became an independent nation and created its constitution (in the 1980’s), the provinces would only sign onto it if these kinds of exemptions to their Charter of Rights and Freedoms were included. Looking at it from that perspective, the strength of the Bill of Rights actually looks pretty impressive by comparison.

The other factor I think is worth considering is that when it comes to the legitimacy of constitutions and governments, time is everything. When you reach around the age of a century old, the mere fact that your country had made it that long with that constitution starts to lend legitimacy and stability to it. Which is to say that if we had a brand spanking new constitution, everybody would be questioning it. Worst case scenario you get civil wars. Slightly better, but still bad scenario is a lot of disillusioned people that refuse to abide by the new document. America’s constitution is old enough that it gets a lot of respect from even the most fierce of rivals. That’s pretty invaluable, especially in times of political turmoil.

I believe that Trump would have had an easier time trampling over a newer constitution, regardless of how well thought out the document was. Having a constitution steeped in a national mythology and at the center of so many norms and traditions protects us from even some of the worst stress tests. The greater challenge isn’t a crazy stress test like Trump, but the gradual decay of those norms. Which is to say that I really believe our norms have been protecting us even still, after so many things have been thrown out the window lately. Creating a new baby constitution in the midst of this messy era of politics would be one of the worst moves we could make.

I know my brain is like at least 70% memes, but nooo, it’s gotta be the horrors in sleep paralysis. Always gotta be the horrors with those damned things. How much funnier would it be to wake up to like a confused Travolta or a doge in your living room.

Aren’t human brains fun? So kind of our brains to show us everything terrifying that it can cook up and place into our lived reality just to fuck with us.

My wife described it as having the vibes of quiet morning hangover sadness after a wild night of partying. I just picture a really sad hungover guy looking out a window at a rainy landscape and thinking to himself I was once a party rocker in the house tonight, but what am I now?

I know it’s hard to believe, but bare with me. Puppies are actually lizards. It’s a weight thing. They don’t have enough gravitational pull to keep their own internal heat, so they need to absorb it from the sun. You’re probably wondering why they’re okay indoors, but that’s because the light molecules reach them through the air.

Source: I read a LOT of /r/shittyaskscience back in my day and I remember how this works trust me.

Secondary Source: Scientists.

Tertiary Source: When I say scientists I actually mean the Bible.

Quaternary Source: When I say the Bible, I really mean the voices in my head.

Wait, didn’t you hear? You must be part of the lucky 10,000! Scientists discovered last year that dogs under 35ish pounds are actually classified as birds!

I’ll see your Jay-Z vs Bach and raise you my Hanz Zimmer vs LMFAO.

In the past I would have agreed with you, but in the age of increasingly sophisticated AI being able to nearly perfectly imitate people’s voices or images, I think we need to start asking more of social media companies. When truth starts looking indistinguishable from fiction we’re going to need to find new ways of parsing which is which. Fact checking will be extremely important.

God, I love song mashups. It’s sometimes shocking how much they slap. My favorite will always be Eye of the Tiger x Fireflies.

Ugh, I knew a lot of other European countries overreacted to Fukushima, but I hadn’t heard much about Italy specifically. Sounds like they didn’t have as much nuclear energy to start with (unlike Germany), but they had big plans to increase their usage of nuclear energy to around a quarter of their energy grid until they halted it all in response to Fukushima. The Wikipedia page about it is tragic.

Germany in particular pisses me off so much. No country bought into the fear mongering about nuclear energy after Fukushima as much as Germany did. Shutting down nuclear power plants in the face of climate change is so incredibly irresponsible. For all of their faults, I give a lot of credit to the US and France for not shying away from using nuclear energy.

You weren’t involved on early forums if you think that shitposting and cheap memes haven’t made their way into every social media platform ever. Shitposting is like the default human behavior. The wonder of the forum-style platform is the ability to isolate shitposting to select communities and harbor different types of deeper conversations within other communities. The people gotta have their shitposts somewhere. Best to create a mud pile for them to roll around in.

Not only that. You no longer exist. As you were at birth, that is. And after some amount of time every so often in your life, you will continue to be unrecognizable to the version of you from x years in the past. Your cells die off and new cells are created until you are literally composed of different matter than you once were. The closest thing to a constant thing tying you together would be the electrical signals in your brain. Memories. Like computer code sent from one PC to another. Also the DNA determining how your body is built.

It’s the classic Ship of Thesseus problem. If you replace a ship’s parts one piece at a time over many years until the old parts of the ship no longer remain, is it still the same ship? And in the same way, are you still the same you? Maybe our lives are full of many different people tied together only by our thoughts, memories, and genetic code.