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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • mwguy@infosec.pubtoLinux@lemmy.mlI had a journey
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    9 months ago

    You don’t have to, but you should. Lenin and Mao practically worshiped Marx and they both attempted to implement his system faithfully to the spec he advocated for. And I know that viewpoint is somewhat controversial in non-Leninist/Maoist circles but I think it’s true.

    What’s more I think the historical records of economic collectivism outside of Socialism and political Authoritarianism outside of Socialism are numerous and expensive enough to justify an opposition to Communism as a system.

    I think the main realization that made me nominally support Capitalism is it’s performance in a “degraded” state. You can have the absolute worst scenarios (think Pinoche Chile) and Capitalism provides constant incentive to improve things and doesn’t seize up in the meantime. It continues to function even in the face of severe inefficiencies.



  • It’s odd to me that the reasoning given here and in the article for this problem for the Democrats is that they aren’t acting Republican enough and they are too leftist.

    For the most part the average Black voter doesn’t identify as Liberal. And that makes sense when you think about it. The median Black voter is a rural or suburban 50+ year old who left the Republican Party because they endorsed the Southern Strategy, not because of conservative policy support. So being “more leftist” isn’t really going to win more of the black vote. They’re already winning the black vote that cares about “leftist” policies.

    Also I’m sorry I can’t leave it, but are you saying that the BLM “cohort” prefer trump in there? I’m not going to say that anyone is enthusiastic about Biden, but Trump encouraged beat downs across the country and threatened to march the military on these folks.

    Added a highlight for the important part. The BLM cohort is not likely to vote for Trump this election. But they’re also not likely to be energized to vote for Biden. And history shows us that unenthusiastic support leads to low turnout. And part of why they’re so unenthusiastic is that the Dems ran the “Anti-BLM” ticket with Biden/Harris.



  • Many student loans have been forgiven. He can’t do forgiveness as broadly as he’d like, the GOP is fighting him on that, but he continues to fight for it and is getting more. My own mother is in her 60s and has another 10+ years on her student loan - but I am hopeful his student loan forgiveness will reach her - she has applied and right now it is just a waiting game (information over the past year has been very confusing regarding what to do and when).

    Biden negotiated away his ability to suspend student loan payments to get a temporary budget passed. He didn’t have to do that. He could have kept payments suspended until the forgiveness hit. He chose not to prioritize it.



  • That’s a fair point and it should be taken into account. But at the same time, this is Nate Silver. He’s essentially the pre-eminent expert on polling, polling errors, and best practices in that regard. And what’s more; when you imagine the different potential political factions amongst the African American community (a practice Dems try not to do); it’s not hard to see why 2016 to today could have soured them significantly. Some examples from my family, friends, and extended family:

    • As much as Republicans aren’t great on “black issues” under Trump Black Labor saw unprecedented gains in employment and income (until COVID hit). And a cohort of black voters are economic voters first.
    • The “vaccine mandate” talk from the left didn’t go over well in Southern Communities where the oldest (like my grandparents) remember. And Oftentimes knew people that were part of things like Tuskegee (which was also one of many experiments like this. It’s just that the exceptional journalistic work and integrity of several academics and journalists brought this one instance to light).
    • Student Loan debt affects people from lower and middle-class families a lot. The promise and almost delivery of student loan relief and then the total rug pull of it and sellout of the Biden Administration towards it soured lots of people.
    • It’s not like Africans don’t know what Alzheimer’s is. And Biden’s refusal to even address the concerns impact black voters as much as they do whites.
    • For the BLM cohort; running the guy who designed and championed the three strikes policy that has put so many blacks in jail for life unnecessarily and then running a prosecutor who knowingly tried to keep innocent black people in jail to maintain appearances doesn’t sit right. Especially when the other guy made it a habit to pardon wrongly or likely wrongly convicted men and women of color and did so at an exceptional clip.
    • Inflation is super high and FED interest rates are 59 times higher than they were when Biden was elected. For “low information” voters that’s just Biden’s fault. But even for “high information” voters they realize that Trump was willing to bully the FED to keep those numbers down. “Stagflation” killed Carter it can kill Biden too.

    It’s really not at all surprising that the current Dem ticket isn’t going to win black voters at 90% clips.




    • trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile

    In fairness it does have the PPA system which predates the AUR and does provide a good job of providing third party amd semi-third party software.

    But you’re right that Ubuntu has sold out on building snaps for software instead of ppas.




  • Stop saying holodomor dumbass

    No Holodomor is largely just a compound word in Ukrainian that translates loosely as “to kill with hunger” or “hunger plague”. Provide a different well known phrase to refer to this Genocide and popularize it. Additionally this phrase primarily arose in the USSR in the 1980s as domestic policy stopped censoring references to the genocide. It was Soviets who popularized the term, not Fascists.

    This region had a famine every 5 years for 1000 years and this was the last ever famine to occur in the region

    They didn’t have famines that killed 50% of the native population every 5 years. Restricting internal movement and discussion of the famines and preventing domestic and foreign aid was an intentional move designed to starve those people. And the acuteness of those famines was in large part because of Collectivism breaking the logistics of farming.

    Maybe you should be more concerned that there was a whole ass genocide you were unaware of in your model implementation instead of trying to hand wave the issue away.


  • Yes they do. You do not know any modern communists.

    Please. There are so many examples of modern Communists claiming that the USSR and PRC aren’t “true communism” that’s it’s become a meme.

    because what you probably meant to say here was kulaks.

    No I meant Khazaks. The Holodomor killed the Kulaks and news of it got out to the West so it got the headlines. But the same Collective Farming experiments were tried im Khazakstsn and led to mass starvation that killed over half the native population.


  • My apologies. Most modern Communists don’t view the USSR or PRC as examples of Communism. I falsely assumed you were in the same camp. Unfortunately for me, I can’t defend a Soviet Empire that caused the pain and suffering it did in Eastern Europe and Asia. Doing thing like killing half of all living Khazaks over a few years by intentionally starving them at scale, the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward which killed more people than the Holocaust in less time are the sort of things I can’t defend.

    The Communist system allows these genocides to happen in the name of Collectivism and hasn’t had a post incident process where it thinks and adds ways to avoid these problems for the next implementation is why I can no longer support Communism. When that changes I can reconsider.


  • Marx calls for exactly the same thing. A revolution that overthrows the current ruling class and installs a new ruling class. When the bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchs and their aristocracy they installed themselves as the ruling class, Marx calls for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and installing the proletariat as the new ruling class.

    This isn’t a downgrade to democracy it is an UPGRADE to democracy.

    This happened in Venezuela, Cuba, Russia (and in several of the Soviet satellite states), and China. In all of them but Cuba it was explicitly done by Communists in the name of Communism with the states goal of implementing Communism (Cuba was more of a Fuck Bautista thing that adopted Communism in the post).

    Do you believe Democracy was “Upgraded” in those places?

    No it isn’t because your description above is fucking wrong. I’m telling you what Lenin and Mao’s interpretation is literally right now. This is basic as fuck stuff.

    I literally liked to Lenin’s interpretation. Lenin literally followed that interpretation. How is it not Lenin’s interpretation?

    You’re acting like socialist countries don’t objectively provide a better quality of life than capitalist countries when compared at an equal level of development

    Because they don’t over time. The conclusion of WW2 gave us the ability to observe the development of nations over time split into two with one half being Communist and the other being Capitalist. West/East Germany, North/South Korea, pretty clear record there.

    Your understanding of any of these topics is incredibly vulgar

    I think you may have meant to use a different adjective there.


    Let me leave you with this. Do you without the benefit of hindsight in the 1920s would you have been a Czarist/Cossack or a Soviet? Would you have fled to Taiwan or stayed in China in 1945? Would you have fled to Florida or joined Castro in Cuba?

    Can you honestly tell me that you in those environments would not have supported the Communist revolution?


  • mwguy@infosec.pubtoLinux@lemmy.mlI had a journey
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    1 year ago

    Marx’s critique isn’t with democracy it’s with bourgeoise-democracy.

    Marx’s critique isn’t with democracy, it’s with democracy that disagrees with him.

    All you are doing here is demonstrating that you do not understand the difference between what marxists refer to as a bourgeoise-democracy and what marxists refer to as a proletarian-democracy.

    I do understand the difference. The difference is that to transition from the former to the later, Marx advocates for violent revolution and the establishment of a dictatorship to “re-educate” the populace. It’s practically hand waved over by Marx and modern Communists, but it’s the most important part of the process. Who controls that dictatorship has all the effective powers of a dictatorship and has the ability to make life for the people they rule hell. Essentially Marx unironically created a worse version of Feudalism where there was no check on the power of the ruler(s) on the assumption that compassion.

    a new dictatorship of class but one instead run by the working class (the vast majority) instead of the former ruling class (the bourgeoisie, the vast minority).

    Unfortunately, even in a post revolution environment; the working class will never voluntarily choose to rule in the fashion that Marx things they would. No matter the re-education instilled.

    You haven’t even read a pamphlet like the manifesto, let alone the Critique Gotha Programme that you’re linking to. I have though. And to anyone that actually HAS read these things that you’re pretending to have read you look like and absolute clown who is winging it.

    My interpretation of it is essentially Lenin and Mao’s interpretation of it, just with the benefits of historical hindsight. I imagine, a younger, more idealistic me in 1920s St. Petersburg would have been a proud Bolshevik with the utmost confidence in the party leadership to lead us into a glorious, worker led future. If that makes me a clown whose winging it; my only request is that I get some ranch dipping sauce so at least I can get my vibes right.


  • mwguy@infosec.pubtoLinux@lemmy.mlI had a journey
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    1 year ago

    You’ve not looked into Communism too much have you?

    Marx had the opportunity to see Communist movements rise in his own timeline. And he opposed the implementation of Communism in a Democratic manner. And wrote about it in his criticiques of the Germany’s Communist movements source. In his criticiques he lays out how he believes a transitional state should be laid out, how it should be organized. And later Lenin refers extensively to this blueprint in his written works and it’s clear to me upon reading that he truly believes what he says.

    In my experience about almost every modern day Communist hear arguments made about the USSR not being based in Communism and have failed to even hear of this critique of the mythic Democratic Communism they believe I’m so much.

    Read the critique, and given everything you know about human beings tell me honestly, do you truly believe a multi-generational dictatorship of the proletariat, led by you (or someone whom you’d champion), would really work?

    I’m saying that your political opinions and knowledge of history is based on vibes…

    I’ve been on the internet a very long time. But this is the first time I’ve seen a Communist (or anyone really) ague their position based on the vibes of the person their arguing against.