Lefty Memes
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
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).
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.
(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.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
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We are all wealth hoarders. What are the social consequences of wealth hoarding? Is it okay to steal? How much does a person have to have before it's okay to steal? Most of the people of the world live on a couple of US dollars a day. Is it okay for them to steal your wallet when you have 40 dollars?
Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".
Wow you just described all the conservatives I've ever talked with.
As an aside, i still remember someone on reddit going off their shits accusing me of sealioning when they kept spewing out highly specific buzzwords and i kept very genuinely asking them what the everloving fuck they were on about.
Not to mention that accusatory shit gets...problematic with people who are ASD.
Either respond to the question or 'nah bro'. Not every thing needs to be high dramatics.
If you have $40 to your name, the cops are just much more likely to beat you and take it, than they are to protect you from someone else taking it.
Cops don't actually spend much time on solving crimes, they mostly spend their time ticketing and harassing the poor in favor of the rich.
Much more likely? What country are you talking about? Assuming we are talking about the United States, this is just not true.
The police are not that cartoonishly evil like most posters here seem to think they are.
Let me introduce you to asset forfeiture, which is a thing cops do to steal from people by claiming that the property or money was guilty of a crime. The owner isn't actually allowed to argue in defense of their stuff, because the owner isn't on trial, their stuff is.
If you're poor and a minority, you have it much worse.
A quote from that last one;
Now, contrast that to this little article that says police solve about 2% of all major crime, and you see the reality of American policing.
They rob the poor and then ignore crime in favor of harassing the poor a bit more. So yes, if you only have $40 to your name, cops will not protect your money, they're more likely to take it from you.
I'm aware of what civil forfeiture is.
I read the techdirt article you linked, but it doesn't state how many people were affected, what percentage of people the police interacted with had money or items taken from them, or any data that supports your claim that police are "much more likely to beat you and take it". Moreover, the article did not mention any of the victims being physically beaten by the police before being robbed.
To be clear, I do not support civil forfeiture or the police stealing from anyone. I am just not convinced that a person is significantly more likely to be beaten and robbed by the police.
I said that cops are more likely to beat you and take your money than they are to protect you from someone else taking it.
That context is important. Don't try to strip it away.
As to backing that statement up, it's easy, It's the combination of article A and article B.
Or rather the Reason article that plots out the tens of thousands of times cops stole from poor people in Chicago in a 5-year period versus the 2% of major crimes that cops solve yearly.
Which make the statement, "much more likely to rob you themselves than save you from being robbed" true.
Because saving people from criminals isn't their real job. No, their real job is enforcing the status quo of rich and poor, and keeping the poor nice and oppressed.
In Chicago, sure. What are the statistics for Lafayette, Illinois? Harvel, Illinois? Kell, Illinois? I could go on, but astute readers already get my point.
Astute readers know that you're mindlessly pro-police. They also know that the police will never return the favor. Because we all live in the real world, not your thin blue line magic world where the police don't go out of their way to harass the poor and minorities.
Solving a crime and protecting someone from being robbed are not the same thing.
And yet, you have stories like this.
Note that cops are not required to protect anyone. They can and do, just fuck off when you need help. Because there's no legal requirement for them to do anything else. Some few might step in, but only to boost their arrest records.
You can just say you've never lived outside upper-middle class suburbia, it's ok
There's a difference between saving money so you can live and hoarding it. It's fine to want to have a secure future for yourself and to be able to help the people you care about. If you have so much money that you could trivially buy people out of poverty, but you don't because you'd rather have seven yachts and a bigger bank account, we have a problem.
The social consequences of wealth hoarding have traditionally been decapitation once they actually catch up. I imagine it's probably a little less extreme in this day and age, but we won't really know that until the hoarders push things beyond the tolerance of the average person.
Okay, what's the difference? 100,000? 500,000? 5,000,000?
Who has seven yachts? Most wealthy people invest their money. The only reason you know the names of billionaires is that Forbes magazine publishes their names. You have no idea who all the millionaires are and what they do with their money.
If we're speaking of social consequences and eliminating people, it makes more sense for the populace to go after crooked politicians and judges than rich people. Just saying.
Go away, capitalist bootlicker.
point: completely missed. Impressively so
How many of them did I throw into the gears of capitalism to get my $40?