🏳️🌈 hi there, i'm blake! i'm a silly gay bear 🌀
All good, no worries!
Oh, sorry, I'm autistic and sometimes I struggle to read tone and implications and things like that. Sorry for preaching to the converted <3
Go eat some fucking salmon.
Hahah! I like your style, but I'm actually a vegan bear! So I suppose I should go eat some bamboo shoots :p
Those in power are often there because of the donations of the wealthy and lobbyist groups. Without that money, they wouldn't win their election campaigns. The wealthy are generally more comfortable with fascism than any kind of leftist politics, because leftist politics threaten their class interests - amassing maximal wealth and power - whereas fascism does not.
Thanks for your reply, I hope you don't mind me copying and pasting something I wrote to someone who replied something quite similar:
Actually, there are current and historical examples of very successful anarchist societies. For a couple of examples, at present, the Zapatistas exist, an anarchist region with at least 300,000 people living under it, and also that Revolutionary Spain existed, an extremely successful example of anarchism in practice which resisted Nazi Germany better than any democratic nation in mainland Europe.
I have now restored the original, unedited comic. Thanks for raising this!
Oh yes, good point! I will do so.
Do you think I should repost the original comic unaltered?
Believe me, the irony isn't lost on me, but posts on Lemmy.world has to comply with the laws of Germany, where depictions of the Swastika are forbidden. There are exceptions for artistic usage, so it might have been permissable, but I wanted to err on the side of caution. I hope you understand
OK, managed to re-read your messages using another browser, I wrote a reply to you in an edit to the first message where I explained my technical issues - here's a link. Sorry about the mess!
If I log out, I can actually see your replies, but not when I'm logged in... that's really strange. I've double checked that I haven't blocked you, I even tried blocking and unblocking you... really no idea what's causing it.
I'm using the Lemmy web app for my instance, basically it just shows up as if I have blocked you, but I haven't - it just says "1 more reply" and loads forever when I click it. Do you see the same if you view it through my instance link?
Edit:
OK, through the magic of using two browsers, I can now re-read your comments.
You're right, I completely misunderstood your comment. I apologize for that. I was on my phone and not properly paying enough attention.
I actually completely agree with you. The issue is that we need to actually abolish all forms of unjustifiable hierarchy - as you perfectly put it, "as long as there are positions of power within your system, sociopaths will continue to seek and attain them, and the cycle will start anew." This is, obviously, a very difficult task, which will undeniably require a great deal of effort. A "social revolution", as I would put it - where not the ruling class are overthrown, but the entire vertical structure, where people are in positions of power over others.
This is actually the foundation stone of my entire political philosophy - which is anarchism. If you haven't heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it's almost definitely nothing like what you think.
The term "anarchy" actually comes from Greek, basically translating to "without rulers", or "against hierarchy".
I personally believe that it's the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism (and hierarchy) makes inevitable.
Original message follows:
I would really like to engage with you in good faith, but I'm struggling to keep up with this conversation because for some reason the comments aren't loading, I can only reply to you through my inbox, and it's really messing me up. Do you know what might be happening here? Kinda need to fix this to re-read our conversation, if I have been unreasonable then I will gladly apologize though. I want to be fair.
So we can learn from that, too. You're 100% just saying "we shouldn't do socialism because it has failed in the past". Brother, capitalism is failing NOW. I can share examples of socialism succeeding.
You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with?
I'm sure they'll try, but there's more of us than there are of them, and we can fight them every step of the way. There are all sorts of ideas in anarchist theory of how we can mitigate these threats.
Are you saying we should just give up, and not try to build a better world, because we have no hope of defeating the ruling class? That's just nihilism. May as well just give up and make the billionaires emperors if that's what you truly believe.
The world needs to move towards socialism to respond to this moment, or fall into the grips of fascism.
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Yeah, the soviet union had a lot of problems, Stalin was a psycho. Let's not do that, but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.
I'd encourage you to check out an anarchist FAQ to learn more - If you haven't heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it's almost definitely nothing like what you think.
I personally believe that it's the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
This guy refuses to engage with the fact that the Zapatistas exist, an anarchist region with at least 300,000 people living under it, and also that Revolutionary Spain existed, an extremely successful example of anarchism in practice which resisted Nazi Germany better than any democratic nation in mainland Europe. I have pointed them out to him a few times now and he just keeps ignoring it, like an NPC in Westworld. It's more comfortable to deny reality when it lets you go on believing your existing beliefs. Admitting that you're wrong is hard.
Look, you can believe whatever you want, but you're just simply wrong about both socialism and anarchism. I have no interest in investing my time and energy into someone who is so clearly unwilling to hear me out. There are plenty of people out there who are curious and open to new ideas, enough that we don't need you. Don't worry, we are fighting for you, too, even if you want to resist it every step of the way, it doesn't matter. We will liberate the working class, with or without you. Stick your fingers in your ears and shout "la la la, I'm not listening" all you want. Rant about the soviet union all you like. Deny reality. Refuse to accept that you have been brainwashed. A bright socialist future is coming, whether you like it or not.
Much love and solidarity.
Anarchism is inherently socialist. With all due respect, I would encourage you to learn more, by asking questions rather than assuming your pre-conceived notions are correct.
I also mentioned elsewhere the Zapatistas is a functioning anarchist society with hundreds of thousands of people living in it. There is a sign outside Zapatista territory which reads, in Spanish, "You are in Zapatista rebel territory. Here the people command and the government obeys."
Do you give a shit or not? I will happily discuss anything you want with you but you've made it pretty clear that you aren't arguing in good faith. Take a minute, recognize that I am not the enemy, calm down, take some deep breaths, maybe go out into that beautiful Danish countryside, and maybe come back with a curious perspective, rather than an oppositional one, and I will chat the night away with you.
Someone once told me they tagged me as fake leftist before blocking me, so I assume there's some way of tagging people with some lemmy clients or browser plugins, but I don't know them, sorry!
I personally don't buy honey, I would consider honey to be non-vegan