this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Lefty Memes

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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.

If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.

Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!

Rules

0. Only post socialist memes That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)

1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.

2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such, as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.

3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries. That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).

4. No Bigotry. The only dangerous minority is the rich.

5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals. We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.

6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals. Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.

7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)

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[–] VictoriaAScharleau 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it seems that you are already trying to explain away exceptions rather than accepting that this myth lacks predictive power and may not, in fact, accurately explain any past elections at all.

[–] MisterFrog 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lets just focus on this particular election then.

Do you think anyone other than Biden or Trump will win? If you do, then your choice is clear, and as much as you question the existence of the spoiler effect (which is not being spread much by the media in the US, it's being spread by detractors of the current voting system), it doesn't really matter. People will vote towards those two candidates (hope we can agree that this is the likely outcome).

If that's the case, voting for a third candidate is as good as not voting because if your candidate doesn't win, and you COULD have voted for your next choice (why ranked voting is so much better, and it's the voting system letting you down), then the candidate you most don't want (assuming 3 candidates) has a better chance of winning (since you didn't vote for your second choice).

You say this isn't provable because it's about people's beliefs and it can't be tested, but sorry, elections are about human choices, beliefs are at play. I don't think it's a coincidence that democracies with ranked choice voting have more first preference votes to smaller parties, and that it's overwhelmingly so.

You can't really escape the fact that even if people just voted for their favourite candidate in first past the post, people would win with less than 50% of the vote (unless you're saying that the votes don't add up to 100% then I dunno what to say)

[–] VictoriaAScharleau 1 points 1 month ago

you're missing the crux of why it's not provable: there is no test for it. it's not that it's "about beliefs" is that you can't conduct an experiment to determine the validity