Honestly, my reading of Marxist theory makes me look to the inverse of this. The uprising Marx and Engels talk about is a reaction to the injustice and instability of capitalism. As resources are consolidated, as capitalists become more entrenched, the forces that create a change increase. More people see it for what it is until eventually we reach a critical mass spontaneously.

Authoritarian communism doesn’t work because it’s trying to jump the gun. It comes from people seeing changes down the road, but they’re not changes that they can force to come too early. The fruit of the proletariat ownership of the means of production and the withering of the state literally isn’t ripe yet.

Ironically, it’s acts of suppression that ripen that fruit. From active attempts to keep it from ripening to socially destructive capitalist practices like elevating C-levels and chasing quarterly profits.

An authoritarian imposition, to my reading, not only won’t work, but slows down the process by essentially letting off steam as well as creating a negative association between communist social structuring and authoritarianism.

At least reform has positive results in the short term, potentially building greater association between distributed resources and greater social benefit at large. But even then, it may literally be the reverse that brings us closer to the end state of universal proletariat throwing off of chains and the eventually withering of the state.

Next they’ll call hiding in the woods ecoterrorism.

Presumably this will mostly affect Republicans. Nice own goal, Elon!

Awww is this headline too effective? 🤭

I honestly loved it. Wish there was more.

It would be nice to see a decent show in the GoT universe again. Something that isn’t just all rich people planning who is married off to who and blah blah blah blah.

Nah. It works. The fact that it isn’t true literally doesn’t matter. This is not the time to worry about what strategies come with the integrity of accuracy. If it works and has steam, at this point, we need it.

Fuck em. Flipper Couch-Fucker Vance doesn’t deserve our careful accuracy.

Also, like, have you seen this guy? There’s no way he’s not fucking couches.

I would honestly bet money that if someone shows up to a BBQ and complains about what’s available, 9 out of 10 times it’s going to be someone who eats meat and is upset that there either isn’t their favorite meat or like, that there aren’t eggs in the potato salad or something. Not much money, because I’m broke, but I’d put like five bucks on it no problem.

I mean, you shouldn’t expect anything particular at a BBQ that you’re not bringing yourself or like helping with the planning of. Like, hamburgers and hotdogs are pretty standard, but if I showed up at someone else’s BBQ and all they had was ribs I’d be kind of an ass for whining about it.

But like… why are vegetarian options specifically a problem? Is this something that’s coming up? Is there like, a rash of vegetarians throwing a fit about it? Did someone get invited to a BBQ and ask if there’d be a veggie option? You know, like, so they could participate in a social event with their meat-eating friends?

This kind of stuff usually feels to me like people who eat meat and don’t want to think about the cost in suffering pointing a finger at people who abstain so they don’t have to think about it. Like, I personally do eat meat. I find that my brain functions better with a little animal fat than without. Buuut I’m also well aware of how much torture goes on in the process of making that meat, and I at least try to minimize the calorie to suffering ratio.

That’s not to say that I’m going to spend my days criticizing people who don’t choose to push against the horrific system of factory farming that supports our societal penchant for meat, but I do think about it. And I have noticed that certain meat-eaters seem to be pretty defensive about it, which generally translates into being shitty to people who don’t eat meat.

Posts like this coming unprompted certainly seem like that kind of defensive behavior to me.

Anyway, food for thought.

Sure. Something like a poorly configured sprite sheet could be an appropriate metaphor too. Personally, I have PTSD. For me it tends to manifest as getting wrapped up in memories and in grappling with thought patterns that make it hard for me to process them or that leave me struggling with how I feel as a result. A lot of my own stuff is very internal, and often comes in response to my trying to process trauma. I feel less like I’m tinting the world than struggling with buggy internal processes. Not to say that interpretation of outside stimuli (social stimuli in particular) isn’t also a factor, but it’s not the main thing for me.

Where you put the error, whether in interpretation or in execution, is largely beside the point, though, to my thinking. The main thing is that you’re looking at an error versus a choice.

I do think that a lot of these destructive and malicious behaviors could certainly be seen as being the result of toxic thought patterns and compartmentalization, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as a buggy, error-prone brain.

Like, somebody who drives around in a massive pickup truck ignoring traffic laws and bullying their way around knowing that people will fear being hurt by their vehicle and will avoid them is just an abusive, dangerous asshole. There may be some underlying insecurity or discomfort that leads them to react that way, but it’s the reaction they’ve chosen and habituated to. We can discuss free will all day, but there’s a big difference between the guy who runs stop signs in a 2 ton vehicle and someone whose depression keeps them stuck in bed. One of those things is a pattern of choice-related behavior, while the other is someone struggling to have the energy to exist.

The fact that many of us seem to have a hard time conceiving of anyone making these kinds of choices on purpose, to me, is simply illustrative of it being related to volition. They make different choices because they’re a different person, who sees things very differently. When the behaviors are taken to their extreme and other people are hurt, it can be harder to see the volitional difference, but at a simpler level I think it’s a little more obvious.

Does knowingly blasting everyone with your high-beams indicate mental illness? Does being rude to service workers? Littering?

The volition aspect here is pretty obviously different in someone who, for example, dumps their trash in a river rather than paying to have it removed. We may not know exactly what’s going on in their heads, but we can at least sort out that they probably don’t really care about nature or pollution or the people swimming down-river. I think it becomes a little harder to see in those more extreme behaviors because it’s so extreme, but I don’t think the fundamental nature is all that different.

Someone carrying out a murder is not, in type, fundamentally different from someone who merely doesn’t care if anyone gets killed by their 8ft tall truck. They’re different in degree.

While I think this is a reasonable sort of surface-level interpretation, I think it misses a bit of what typifies mental illness versus just being destructive, malicious, desperate, or extremely entitled.

Mental illness is something your brain is doing to you. It’s not just a thought that you have and roll with, it’s a persistent pattern that you struggle against. Just deciding that the thoughts and feelings being produced are inaccurate or unhelpful doesn’t make it go away. It’s not just extreme emotion, it’s emotion that’s being switched on in a way that isn’t tied into the continuity of your more volitional patterns of thought and feeling. It’s not just that the thoughts and behaviors playing out are unhealthy.

To put it into metaphor, think of your life and your interactions with the world like a video game, with your brain being essentially your character controller, interpreting your actions and bringing them into the world. You can decide to do healthy or unhealthy things with your character, but those things are under your own volition. Mental illness, then, is like a poorly coded character controller throwing errors and causing unforeseen bugs. Like, for example, if I push the down button there’s a 30% chance that I randomly move to the left first, rather than moving in the appropriate direction.

That 30% chance might send me careening into a pit, but chances are that once I’m used to having this bug, I’ll be aware enough of it to try to compensate. It might not always work, and I might drift a little left occasionally, but if I give myself a bit wider berth for any obstacles on my left, I’ll probably be okay. This is distinct from someone who uses their volition to throw themselves into a pit on purpose.

Are both potentially bad for the character’s health? Yes. But only one is caused by a character controller error, and because my goal isn’t ‘throw myself into pit’, I’ll probably do a much better job avoiding pits than someone who’s jumping into them intentionally. These two problems are fundamentally different in that one is a product of a person’s volition, while the other is a problem with the means by which they interact with the rest of the world.

That’s not to say that people with mental illness are going to accidentally assassinate someone because they pressed down and went a bit left, but it illustrates the fundamental difference in making a bad decision versus struggling with errors in your brain.

That someone jumps into a pit on purpose does not imply that their character controller is bugged, especially if they smoothly beeline it while showing all signs of acting with intention.

Rip 'em apart! Make them into 6 different companies with single letter names and force two sets of two to share their letter to fuck with their marketing!

How cool would it be if Trump straight up killed the Republican party and they replaced it with something more grounded and centrist?

We might actually be able to push left!

Yes! What was that about unity?

Hah!

Too much thinking.

The right doesn’t care about accuracy, but they will pretend to to keep us busy. To counteract it, we can’t spend our time engaged in good faith arguments of carefully considered wording. We need to beat them on that flippant energy that shows we won’t take their bait and we know we’re right, so we don’t have to prove it.

Weird is perfect for that. They don’t want to be weird.

Now when they turn it around and try to call us weird? Then is the time to say ‘hey, that’s cool! I’m happy to be weird!’ and literally not worry about the contradiction at all.

They picked an arena where they can’t beat us. Let’s meet them there.

Imagine being so fucking lazy and uninspired that you outsource your political propaganda to an overgrown spell checker.

This honestly feels like the left taking back the social position we had in the 90s, which the right has spent the past few years attempting to be a pale, unfunny imitation of. Irreverence is our jam. Defiance is our bread and butter. The left does best when it saves the analytical brain for getting shit done and confidently mocks the presumption that some stuffy authority knows what’s better for us.

Don’t waste your energy arguing with these trolls, just call them weirdos and move on with your day!

That’s because they’re not leftists. Most of the tankies on Lemmy probably aren’t. I’m sure some of them are people who get swept up in the tide of favoring mockery over patience and compassion while actually believing leftist political positions, but it’s pretty clear what the bulk of them are doing.

They’re corporate or authoritarian government plants trying to break the coalition of left and center. They’re doing everything they can to make both look unreasonable and unhinged in the eyes of the other. Demotivating leftists from endorsing centrists who lean their way, while making centrists feel targeted and deeided by the left.

It’s way easier to break coalitions and sew chaos than it is to drive engagement and unity. It literally takes less thinking, less precision, and less strategy.

Dino Land for Genesis was a lot of fun!

This is the conclusion I’ve come to since reading the State and Revolution. The people who are capable of overthrowing the current system aren’t likely to be the same people capable of keeping true to an approach that’s legitimately socialist. There are problems with reformism as well, as it can result in an endless series of small concessions to distract from an equally endless series of measured power grabs.

If I take what I read of Marx and Engels as likely to be accurately predictive, my conclusion has to be that the circumstances they’re discussing haven’t occurred yet. Basically, Lenin jumped the gun with his support of imposing a revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. The power structure it creates is too centralized to achieve its goals.

This would suggest to me that if Marx and Engels are correct, a spontaneous and universal proletariat uprising is probably still down the road somewhere. Basically, we see hints at this state reflected in the microcosm of revolution, but have yet to see the circumstances that cause an actual change of prioritization and autonomy rather than simply a changing of the guard.