FunkyStuff [he/him]

The problem with the lesser evil mentality is that you are trapped in a cycle of permanently choosing things that are marginally better than the other bad thing, instead of building power to impose our own thing.

I’d rather be shot by a 9mm than a 30-06, but if I can work toward being the one with the gun that would be preferable to both.

You gotta keep track of the big picture, because when you look back at the past 100 years of Western history it’s just been workers getting a carrot and a stick that tricks them into remaining complacent and not doing much substantial work to break the capitalist system. The social democratic mentality does nothing but keep that cycle going and diverts energy from building parallel power structures capable of actually transitioning capitalism into socialism.

I think the question isn’t “why are Western countries afraid of Israel” or “why does the West fear its citizens criticizing Israel,” but “what are Western countries planning to do in the near future (especially with the climate crisis) that requires them to support Israel and learn from it right now?”

I read comments and posts from Chinese posters who go through VPNs regularly.

The idea that the Iron Dome is only a defensive system (strategically) is severely misguided. Israel is mostly free of consequences from its genocidal actions because the only way to hit them is through the Iron Dome, and it costs their enemies a very heavy premium to make the kinds of weapons that can get through it, even in the age of drone warfare. Countries shouldn’t be immune from consequences, especially when the Palestinians don’t have anything like the Iron Dome to defend them.

Honestly, I’m reaching the point where I just can’t hold out any hope for a politician unless they clearly state that Israel is an illegitimate state.

Sounds like a bad way to do things. Won’t you end up with gore on your feed? Not to mention it would be hard to filter out really dehumanizing, gross porn (which is frankly a description that fits most of it anyway)

You should be able to contact your admins so they purge your account. Purged accounts have all the content they ever published scrubbed from all databases on Lemmy. I’m not entirely sure how it works if there’s an instance that is defederated from your home instance after you post something and it gets federated to them, I assume it wouldn’t be deleted in that case so it would still be available online there, but certainly a lot harder to track down.

What do you want to happen to the homeless people, then? If the thing the other states are doing is pushing homeless people to California, and you want California to push them elsewhere, where do they end up?

You didn’t ever say what makes the dems too far left? Is it the lip service to trans people? Spending a lot of money? DEI?

And if any of those are the reasons, you’re not only a coward for burying the lede, but you’re also extremely wrong about everything lol

Why is the Stasi, a state organ responsible for countering all the fascist groups the US was still backing, comparable to the state organs of the Nazi Germany that the communists were intent on destroying?

It’s cool though; if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime! And if you’re doing the time, you belong to the state to do with as it pleases. That’s cool and good.

If I’m trying to make a point, I try to substantiate it with evidence, not just generalizing about how I imagine the conversation is going to go. I’ve never talked with anyone from the USSR, but have known some from Cuba (as well as researchers who’ve worked there for an interval). There’s some variety in the perspectives, some are more negative, but there’s a clear throughline: even where the state takes a repressive position, these socialist countries are miles ahead of their comparable Western counterparts in all areas of social development. There’s a reason that after the fall of the USSR, there was a marked decrease in women’s rights, acceptance of queer people, and the safety of ethnic or racial minorities in the region. We can talk about the USSR’s shortcomings at serving these groups’ needs, but the myth of the USSR as a monolithic, socially conservative “redfash” state is laughable. It is simply untrue and any conversation with people who resided in the USSR or any socialist state, or just picking up a book by someone who isn’t sponsored by the Victims of Communism organization, should show that these minorities have benefitted from the proactive socialist state’s initiatives for their benefit much more than they’ve been held back by certain missteps (to be clear, there have been missteps).