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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Lemmy devs may have controversal political views, but their software is written with a good intention. KiwiFarms on the other hand use it to target instances.

    Let’s go even further than that. Let’s say that the most annoying people around the whole Fediverse are Hexbear. On the worst days, all they do is to organize to spam specific threads, which is indeed annoying, but that’s the extent of it. KiwiFarms is responsible for harassing people until they commit suicide for the heinous crime of being weird. Anyone aware of this who wants to associate with them has no place in civilized society.


  • The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.

    I mean, sure, that will solve some things. Not climate change, though. I think we can aim for a little higher, but when I say that perhaps seeking infinite growth in a finite planet might lead to an environmental catastrophe that’s somehow controversial.





  • Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that’s pretty rich.

    The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.

    To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that “since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok”: any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they’re too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren’t drown in liturgy.



  • The prisoner’s dilemma is a mathematical example to introduce students to different models where cooperation and competition have different outcomes. You can also design game theory systems where competition is generally a prefered action. The actual question is which model better reflects our contemporary realities, but regardless, there are great arguments to claim that cooperation is better most of the time if we assume that the participating actors are aware, intelligent and capable of taking free decisions.