this post was submitted on 23 Mar 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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[–] trashgirlfriend 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's like the actual definition of gambling

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I know, my point still stands.

It's not lucky that they decided to gamble.

They bought the lottery ticket and won, not everyone buys tickets.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Even aside from the obvious point that the outcome of this gamble is luck, there's another more subtle point that I think is more important: For people will significant wealth and resources, it is very cheap to take gambles like this. For some people, dropping $10k into some high-risk gamble is just a bit of fun, but for other people that's their entire savings; and for other other people - they'd never be able to afford to do that even if they were starving themselves to save money.

How do people get into that kind of position of privilege and power in the first place? ... the luck of where they were born.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You're right, one thing I didn't consider is the vast majority of people investing are probably already significantly wealthy. Birth lottery is by far the largest contributor to chance of future wealth.

Makes you realise how many moving parts there are to this conversation. It's undeniable that those ones who were born lucky were not all gamblers though. I was born into a western family which isn't in poverty and I've never invested in a nothing company.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is a silly distinction you are trying to make and it serves no purpose. And I don't even agree it is a real distinction... The act of deciding to gamble doesn't in any way mean the payoff or losses are anything but luck.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You think the choice of deciding to play the lottery doesnt change your chances at winning it?

If you truly think that you're even more lost than I thought you were, not worth my time

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

"than I thought you were"? I'm not the person you were talking to before.

What is your actual point? Why do you think it is important for you to argue that "actually gambling isn't pure luck"? And what, in your estimation, is "pure luck"?

The way I see it people are talking about specific phenomenon, and how they have entirely luck based outcomes (ex like the lottery), and you are trying to increase the scope of the context of the discussion to, in this example, include people who do not participate in the lottery, to try and argue that phenomenon does not have entirely luck based outcomes. But you haven't proven your point, you've been socially obtuse and attempted to derail the conversation from where it was because you have a bizarre point you want to make.