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, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!

Rules

Version without spoilers

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


That means 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).


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The only dangerous minority is the rich.


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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.

(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)


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.



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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Trump and the other Republicans will say a lot, but they aren’t going to act any different than what Biden and Blinken are already doing with Palestine

Muslim travel ban, Golan heights, and Jerusalem recognition + US embassy adoption there suggests that there are real world acts that the administration would do differently to me, what do you think?

What are they going to do, send more arms and money faster?

Precisely, afaik he doesn't give a shit about the people of Palestine, he's more worried about Israels bad PR and wants them to end it fast.

EDIT: just to check, did you read the JNS article? It's pretty bad, and he spells out exactly what he wants to do... A small excerpt is below.

“On day one, we’ll restore our travel ban. We had a travel ban because we didn’t want people coming into our country who really loved the idea of blowing our country up,” he said. He called the ban an “amazing success.”

“We didn’t have one incident in four years, because we kept bad people out of our country,” he claimed.

“I’ll also be implementing strong ideological screenings for all immigrants coming in,” he said. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you’re not going to be getting into our country.”

Trump also said he would cancel student visas of Hamas sympathizers.

“The college campuses are being taken over, and all of the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests this month, nobody’s seen anything like it,” he said. “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”

...

As president, Trump would “put every single university and college president on notice,” he said. “The American taxpayer will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers on American soil.”

That last bit is actual government thought policing.

[–] VictoriaAScharleau 1 points 5 months ago

bill clinton signed the recognition of jerusalem and the embassy move. all trump did was stop delaying it.

[–] TokenBoomer 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The, “Biden is bad, but Trump will be worse,” argument is tired. It’s not working, and may be actively making voters dislike Biden more.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's definitely not working, but all evidence I've seen suggests it's right.

Do you agree with me that "Biden is bad, but trump will be worse" is a correct statement?

I think the tiredness you're referring to is a result of people voting emotionally and not logically, or just being exhausted with this whole shitstorm.

[–] TokenBoomer 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You seem to have honorable intentions, but these exchanges are argumentum ad nauseam.

If you have to tell people why they should vote against Trump, instead of why they should vote for Biden, then he’s already lost.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm starting to suspect that the arguments seem as nauseam because I'm trying to reason people out of a decision they didn't reason themselves into - i.e. they're voting emotionally, and not logically. Inconvenient questions get ignored, and we're left with very surface level arguments.

I particularly saw some users comments reflected in this excerpt in the retrospective voting article you shared:

In his classic book “The Responsible Electorate,” the late Harvard University political scientist V.O. Key Jr. suggests that judging a president’s or his party’s performance in office presents a perfect opportunity for the voter to play “rational God of vengeance or reward.”

Perhaps they're voting this way to try and recapture efficacy in a world where they feel they have very little.

[–] TokenBoomer 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You seem genuinely interested in this topic. One I spent a considerable time researching last year and left me disillusioned. A study that may help is from professors Adam Dyne and John Holbein: Noisy Retrospection: The Effect of Party Control on Policy Outcomes. It’s quite a read but demonstrates:

Our results suggest that voters may struggle to truly hold government coalitions accountable, as objective performance metrics appear to be largely out of the immediate control of political coalitions.

Simply put, in large elections with millions of people, our votes count very little.

# An Expert Explains Why Your Vote Won't Matter

His study: The Brennan–Lomasky Test of Expressive Voting: When Impressive Probability Differences Are Meaningless

We should still vote. It matters for local elections, but when it gets to the state level and higher, the impact of our votes have little to no effect.