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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • That’ll cause competition with the private owned stores and force them to push down prices / raise wages until their profit margins are gone, putting them out of business.

    The only entity that will buy the defunct stores will be the state , or maybe some actual non-profits , and now the state owns all the grocery stores and communism will be achieved. Then we get bread lines, is that what you want? /s.





  • This isn’t data security though. In a cyber security context, yes paranoia is a valuable attribute. It can let you catch threats before they happen which is good.

    In a political context though, paranoia, especially directed within the organization, is a corrosive and reactionary attribute. It divides and causes factionalism in political organization and brings energy away from making positive change and fighting the actual oppressors and puts that energy toward testing and purging your “allies”.

    If a group out of power gives into paranoia and conspiracies they just divide into smaller and smaller factions who don’t trust each other and can’t work together to gain power. If a group in power gives in to paranoia, the majority group tends to start purging whoever they can claim are “fakes” conveniently along with everyone else they disagree with.

    I can’t think of a single time in history where paranoia directed at secret enemies within has ever helped a progressive cause. Meanwhile I can name tons of instances where it destroyed a progressive cause, or at least it’s credibility and popularity: the reign of terror, stalins purges, mao’s cultural revolution, even in modern day Maduro loves to claim the CIA is out to get him.

    It never helps the cause, it is just used as a way for the leaders of the group to offload any anger directed at the people in charge of the organization towards some, often imagined, sabotoeurs. Collectivization failing and causing mass starvation? Is it stalins fault?, no it’s the kulaks and the trotskyists sabotaging the revolution.

    The democrats have failed us, twice now. Instead of recognizing there failure and changing tack they’re trying to direct anger at the enemy within, progressives and Palestinian activists who they claim are sabotaging the democratic chances and are probably agents of russia. Pelosi literally told a group of pro-palestinian activists protesting on her lawn to “go back to russia”.

    We need to stop focusing on finding the “Russian assets in our midst” and focus on reforming the democratic party and defeating trumpism with a positive plan for change.


  • In a sense yes, people generally tell the truth more than they lie so the default assumption should be that someone is telling the truth, otherwise you enter into paranoia. That assumption can be broken when there is a clear gain from lying. Eg. You catch a thief outside the store they robbed they have a very clear reason to lie and say they were just walking by.

    You’re explanation on why they’re lying isn’t very clear. First off, you fail to name who these people are and leave it ambiguous to let the person reading fill it in with their enemy (maga, nazis, russians etc.) just like every other conspiracy theory. Since the subject isn’t clear neither is the motive, you just sort of fill that in with "they hate the left, why do they hate the left? What are they gaining from convincing maybe a couple dozen liberals that the democrats suck on a very marginal social media? This isn’t the politburo for the comintern, there is barely any power on here to diffuse, so why put effort into doing so when there are far larger platforms to influence.


  • just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?

    This is the same kind of argument that the tankies use to dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as a CIA plant. At least they name the CIA, you seem to be pointing to an even more ambiguous “they” that are out to get us. This is a conspiracy theory, dress it up all you want but your pointing to some ambiguous “they” and blaming them for your problems with no proof.

    Occams razor is that they are leftists who hate the democratic party. They critique them more then the Republicans because the liberal side of lemmy covers that pretty well already, half the front page is shitting on trump right now. That’s good but at a certain point your beating a dead horse, everyone here already hates trump and thinks he’s bad, no point in reinforcing that past a point. A lot of people on here still have loyalty to the democratic party though that far exceeds the democrats loyalty to the left, so pointing that out can be effective and help change people’s minds instead of posting/commenting trump is hitler for the millionth time.




  • I get the focus is supposed to be on Elijah and how bad he is but the background is the lost cause myth and sympathizing with the common confederate troops. I guess you could say they didn’t want to make the confederates look bad so Elijah could look horrible in comparison, but you could’ve had Elijah just be even more racist then the troops.

    Like the only sort of funny part where he gives the sermon, if it were realistic he would’ve gone full race baiting and go one about how the unions gonna come and free the n*****s and slavery is in the Bible etc. to rile up the troops. But in this mythical confederacy racism and slavery don’t exist which is ahistorical.





  • Just going through the wikipedia and a lot of health organizations still recommend reducing saturated fat including the WHO, the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the British Dietetic Association, the World Heart Federation, the British National Health Service. These organizations are run by health professionals, not politicians with some vague anti-fat agenda.

    Here’s a study going over some meta analysis and finding that

    Saturated fat was associated with an 8% increase and trans fats; a 13% increase in total mortality compared with carbohydrate. Thus, replacing 5% of energy from saturated fats with equivalent energy from PUFA ( polyunsaturated fat) and MUFA ( monounsaturated fat ) was associated with estimated reductions in total mortality of 27% and 13%, respectively

    It goes on to say that there is less evidence for fat in general to cause cardiovascular disease and mortality, but saturated fat and trans fats definitely do.




  • America doesn’t work like that. Due to the way the electoral system is set up only two parties can be viable at any given time. The only time you can create a new party is in a realignment, eg. When Lincoln formed the republican party as an explicitly anti slavery northern party and the democrats became the pro slavery southern party. Prior to that it was the whigs and the democrats, which were aligned around issues other than slavery.

    So unless the progressives can force a realignment along some new issue and subsume a major party, creating another party would just be handing a lot of elections over to the Republicans.

    This is why lemmy was so vehemently against Jill stein and the greens even though most people on here agree with her politics more than kamala, because they saw her as sabotaging the democrats chances and handing the election to trump.

    Also hijacking a party is easier than building a new one and if you gain control you can use the power of that party to shift opinion. Most voters these days vote based on there team, or more recently against the other team. So if the democratic party started pushing a green new deal then the rank and file would fall in line, if nothing just to stop the Republicans. You can see this in how trump hijacked the Republicans. If you showed a republican project 2025 in 2015 they wouldve called it absurd, but now most are in support of it.