The end goal is near-total eradication of the natives. Similar to native americans in the U.S. Israel is a settler state, much like the U.S was, and actively drove the natives out of their homes. They’re almost done though, we’re seeing some of the final acts of the ethnic cleansing/genocide.
Once there are barely any left, they’ll feign sympathy to garner support, and that’ll be that. Another win for imperialist settler states. Nothing unique or special about it.
Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.
If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.
I like your comment, but there’s an important note that needs to be made, I’m not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of “politics; not to be discussed at work” was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.
Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same “kind” of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he’s never stepped foot into).
The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It’s not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won’t intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. “right to work” ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it’d be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it’s better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.
I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it’s normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don’t believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.
Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I’ve talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn’t cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I’d be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).
Yup, just like it’s employment 101 to not discuss salaries.
Lack of communication and organization is a fantastic way to keep workers in line. Genuinely all it takes are a handful of socialists in an environment of heavily exploited workers to get a union going. They can all feel the material harm capitalism is causing, but lack the language and means to express and resist that harm.
When socialists provide it (via politics in the workplace), that harms companies. When communication takes place (salary sharing, organization tactics, etc.) you place a strain on the bourgeoise to behave more inline with worker expectations. This isn’t what capitalists want.
Mercantilism and capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive, but the U.S is the opposite of mercantilist. Our imports vastly exceed our exports. China is more mercantilist, but still capitalist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
Unless of course you’re using a different definition. If you are, feel free to provide it and then I’ll address your claims on the basis of how you intended to use those words.
The goal of semantics, and words in general, are to convey ideas. It was true in the past that socialism was a very concrete, straightforward thing. If you believed in worker control of the means of production, you were a socialist. Now there are people who say they’re socialist, and they advocate for private tyrannies for the foreseeable future (decades or sometimes even a century+). They want entire generations of humans to be wage slaves, serve the interests of capital, pay their reduced wages to land leeches and banks, and then die without having ever seen a better system.
Those systems, systems by which entire generations of people are subjugated to the interests of capital under authoritarian rule, are now called socialist or sometimes communist. And I no longer have the word to describe a system where wage slavery is immediately abolished (much like chattel slavery was), and workers take immediate control over the means of production.
Those societies/institutions were often overthrown and overrun by either conservative Marxists (e.g Lenin) or fascists (e.g Catalonia).
People say things for reasons, and those reasons aren’t always to express the true state of things. For example, it’s powerful to capture positive social sentiment around socialism without having to actually relinquish any power to the working class. It effectively destroys workers’ ability to communicate effectively about what we want to see in the world.
Back in the day, you could simply say “I’m a socialist” and that meant that you advocated for a system where workers owned the means of production, and private property didn’t exist. Now you can say the same thing, and what does it mean? Literally nothing, it’s an incoherent thing to say because it has too many contradictory meanings.
I still identify as a libertarian socialist, but every other person I talk to doesn’t understand what I mean by this (pro-China? pro-Bernie? interested in dismantling private ownership? want to slightly increase taxes on corporations and implement universal healthcare?). Most people that use the label libertarian socialist align with the original definition of socialism, and I find value in that. However for the purposes of communicating to people who don’t agree with the position, it’s effectively useless.
Destroying that avenue to communicate was definitely intentional, it subverts actual organizational efforts. The same thing has happened with unions. Essentially the entire 19th century socialist movement has been systematically destroyed through propaganda and language manipulation.
The only metric that page uses to define India as socialist is “makes a constitutional reference to socialism”. That can mean socialism is some end goal, or they just have policy inspired by socialism.
Words have definitions, so just saying “this country is socialist” is not enough evidence to declare that country is socialist, unless your definition of socialism is “a system which people call socialist”.
By that definition, America is socialist so long as I call it socialist. It becomes tautological and useless.
I haven’t read all of these, but I have read a good deal of Marx/Engles, and am working through Das Kapital currently.
I have written similar comments to this, going over the history of thought. It’s important, and not something to be taken lightly (though there is a fine line between being thorough and gishgalloping, especially in the context of forums like lemmy/reddit/etc.)
Maybe you’re of the view that communism is such a loaded word that trying to define it in just a few dozen or hundred words is a pointless exercise. That’s fine, but if the word is so loaded and complicated, you probably shouldn’t be attaching it to nation-states to try to succinctly describe part of their economic system. The only people you’d be transmitting information to are the people who have the dozen or so required readings under their belt to truly grasp what you meant by communism. At this point, the word provides no value.
No economic system can actually be totally described by a single word, ever. However, a single word can be used to describe a part of a system, and it can be used in a reliable way. I pointed to very common definitions of the words, ones you seem to disagree with, and even in the ~thousand or so words you wrote you didn’t provide clear alternative definitions. That signals to me you probably need tens of thousands of words to properly define what you mean by the word “communism”, and at that point the utility of the word is just completely lost.
It’s just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I’ll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn’t understand why people call China communist.
First, I’ll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
_
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
_
Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).
So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).
China isn’t even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.
Nobody is exactly aware of what will result from their actions, I think the absolute best-case scenario for Palestine as a result of this post-October 7th escalation is that American youth gain a vastly increased awareness of the horrors of the Palestinian genocide.
This seems to actually have happened. American congress people are super worried about the anti-Israel sentiment rising in youth, and this is a major factor, if not the sole factor, driving the tiktok ban/forced sale attempts.
If anti-Israel sentiment stays strong for say 1-2 more decades while boomers continue to die off, America could very easily turn anti-Israel, and vote in line with Palestine and the rest of the world on widely agreed upon 2 state solutions.
we have to take Trump at his word
No we don’t, I’ve never done this and I’m not going to start now. He’s already tried and failed to seize power as a sitting president. He’s proven he’s too incompetent to become a fascist dictator.
I won’t go as far to say as it’s literally impossible, but the fact that so many liberals now believe in Trump’s ability to overthrow the government just as much as his own supporters is baffling. He’s not a reliable source of information. He’s not intelligent, and he’s not capable. He’s an old, pathetic moron that is on the verge of dying due to age, not some capable fascist mastermind.
If the Democrats have any self-interest in holding power, they’ll actually try strategies to regain power. If they lose in 2024 by a percentage that is covered by the green party, they could conclude it’s easier to go left and get Green members rather than pull people from the Trump cult. I’d agree with these future Democrats, I think you’d have very, very little success pulling people from the Trump cult.
Especially if the people who voted green in 2024 have previously voted Democrat, it showcases that these people are willing to go Democrat if certain material concessions are made.
To continue on this, the spoiler effect is a shorterm strategic problem, not necessarily a long term one.
There absolutely is a strategic difference between
52% Republican
48% Democrat
and
47% Republican
43% Democrat
10% Green
The former tells Democrats their only option is to move right to resecure some Republican voters. The latter tells Democrats that they have the ability to also resecure votes from the left by making concessions that to Green Party politics.
People who say these two situations are literally identical are being disingenuous or ignorant. Even if the same number of Democrats/Republicans voted in both, and the only difference is people who didn’t vote instead voted green, this results in actual differences in signals and potential future policies.
tldr: voting third party is not identical to not voting, even strategically.
Bit of a strawman, the initial complaint wasn’t that he didn’t say some words, the initial complaint was the billions in military aid and actual physical support the administration gave Israel.
The only reason words matter is if they have any impact on reality. Israel knows the U.S is giving them a lot of leeway to commit this genocide because that’s what the administration’s actions say, hence they’re two-faced.
If they decide to stop materially supporting genocide, good. They were still wrong to do it at all, and they can’t undo that, so they’re still shit-libs, but better late than never I guess, and all those dead children will just have to stay dead.
Python’s disdain for the industry standard is wild. Every other language made in the last 20 years has proper filtering that doesn’t require collecting the results back into a list after filtering like Java (granted it’s even more verbose in Java but that’s a low bar).
If Python had modern lambdas and filter was written in an inclusion or parametric polymorphic way, then you could write:
new_results = results.filter(x -> x)
Many languages have shorthands to refer to variables too, so it wouldn’t be impossible to see:
new_results = results.filter(_)
Of course in actual Python you’d instead see:
new_results = list(filter(lambda x: x, results))
which is arguably worse than
new_results = [x for x in results if x]
In humans there’s a psychological phenomenon called “crowding out”, essentially it’s hard for our brains to attach multiple, powerful incentives to one activity. Generally the “lesser” ones get crowded out by the more important one.
I’m still young (26), and still feel the same way about programming, I deeply enjoy it. However, I know programmers who were passionate like me when they were younger, and that passion has been slowly drained as they continue to code professionally, and I’ve seen it come back when they move into non-programming roles (be it industry change or moving to management).
Generally you won’t find yourself wanting to program 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for 50 years without a substantial break, and yet that’s what capitalism expects of workers. Yet you’ll continue to work because there’s a more important incentive than passion, money.
You need money to survive (food, shelter, etc.) and your brain understands those are more important than fulfilling a passion, that’s why you’ll go to work even if you’re drained mentally. You’ll continue to do that forever so long as you don’t have the financial freedom to do otherwise (which is the goal of capitalists, this is why we have COL-based incomes, so as not to overpay people who live in cheaper areas as it’d allow them the freedom to leave).
Activists don’t need to be one-track minded. They rarely are. I’m a vegan, socialist, anti-fascist who is against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and for climate justice globally. There’s very strong overlap in these positions. There’s a reason you won’t find a lot of Republican vegans, or pro-Israel socialists.
Yes, sometimes people don’t put in the time to investigate these issues, and I commend you for knowing the limits of your own knowledge, I’ve recommended to people before that it’s better to just say “I don’t know enough about this issue” instead of arriving at an under-researched position. However, it’s not necessary to criticize people who are actually activists, learn about these issues, and go out into the world and advocate for change, so long as they’re advocating for the right thing.
The topic being brought up might ostracize people, but it will also put the topic into people’s minds. People like you might not know what the correct position is here, but you hear the constant pro-Israel propaganda pumped out by the U.S and might arrive at a subconscious conclusion that aligns with the imperial core.
If you hear people speaking out against the apartheid state of Israel, especially people who align with your values, you might be inclined to look into it more, or at the very least not automatically accept U.S propaganda on the issue.
They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.
Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.
I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.