☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 55 Posts
  • 350 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2020
  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What were or are your thoughts on the US Pres. Debate?
    93·
    5 days ago

    Completely and utterly masturbatory. The reality is that the US is extremely polarized politically because the living standards are collapsing. There are basically two competing narratives for why that’s happening, and people subscribe to one or the other. The democrats and republicans have fundamentally different world views, so nobody is going to be swayed by the debate. People subscribing to each respective view will hear what they want to hear.

    People who will vote for Harris are the ones who think that the dems have been doing a good job for the past three and a half years, meanwhile people who aren’t happy with the way things are going will vote against them or stay home. It’s that simple.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Why does it seem the world is all of a sudden concerned about sexual orientation? Especially America. Did I miss how far we came as a society to see it take a 40 year step backwards?
    72·
    10 days ago

    Michael Parenti addresses this well:

    Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploita­tive one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

    Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres­sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;’ "upper class;’ or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class.” The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion’s share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them­selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.

    Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a sim­ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into “conspiracy theory.” The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the “working class,” a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;’ for then one is talk­ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.

    The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth­ing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con­cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci­ety. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conve­niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu­ality of class power.

    The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza­tion: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.

    Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinc­tiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

    source

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How do you make someone understand that being drafted by force and ordered to invade another country is not a good thing?
    112·
    24 days ago

    He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

    Here you go ^

    This seems to be whataboutism. Do you have any evidence for the US causing the euromaidan and subsequent revolution? Seems to me like the people were fed up with the shit that ol’ Viktor was peddling.

    here’s a detailed explanation with lots of mainstream sources for you https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-credible-evidence-that-Ukraines-2014-revolution-was-due-to-a-CIA-coup

    If you think that US overthrowing a neutral government in Ukraine to put in a far right regime that allowed NATO to start building out offensive capabilities on Russia’s border is not relevant to Russia pushing back NATO, really don’t know what else to tell you.

    Did anyone from the West ever conquer anything that belonged to Russia? Russia answered with violence for nothing. Notice how there’s a string of attacks on territories that weren’t actually Russia’s in recent history.

    Ukraine descended into a civil war after a US backed coup. The fighting between the right wing western backed government and Donbas started right after it. You seem to be utterly ignorant on the history of the conflict.

    Classic distraction scheme. Attacking the person instead of the point. Not even sure why I have tried to give you the benefit of the doubt and engaged with you.

    Except I addressed your “point” which is sheer nonsense.