very_poggers_gay [they/them]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2021

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  • Everyone I know that supports Ukraine does so because they feel for the victims of the missiles launched by Russia at schools and homes.

    What does that support look like?

    I, and many others in this thread, are very out of the loop.

    Again, I have a hard time believing this is true. This is a war. People die by the hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, in wars. Providing uncritical support (as most liberals and “Slava Ukraine” types do) for any side in a war is still encouraging more deaths on all sides of the conflict. It is not a Marvel movie or gritty political sci-fi thriller that so many people seem to think it is.

    The longer the war goes on, the more people will die or be displaced, and the more money from working class people will get funneled into the military industrial complex. Nobody outside of the MIC is benefitting from the death and despair of this war.

    Most discussions about the conflict outside of leftist spaces is just liberals and conservatives fantasizing about Russia getting weaker (i.e., its people dying) and America/NATO/“freedom” getting stronger. The rare person will acknowledge that Ukrainian men must die for the latter to be true, but the reality of those deaths is often minimized or even celebrated. As well, anyone who dissents is typically accused of being pro-Russia, a bot, or a paid shill.

    See this freak

    This is a top comment on the top post of /r/UkrainianConflict fantasizing about making a Marvel movie montage of a war crime, and other users lapping it up

    Or click on any new thread and see all the highly rated comments like this, lusting for further destruction

    It took like two minutes to find these examples, and there’s countless more on lemmy, reddit, and the like. It’s almost undoubtably worse on Twitter or Facebook too shrug-outta-hecks






  • Richard Wolff, a prominent marxist academic, talks often about a socialist system where democracy is employed in the workplace. He focuses less on reforms or abolition at the state/government-level, and instead emphasizes the bottom-up changes that giving workers power and agency (i.e., making it so workers at all levels are involved in the decision-making process of the companies that require their labour) provides. He has a youtube channel and podcast called “Democracy at Work” that provides great introductions to how he views things, and he has worthwhile podcast appearances on other podcasts like Lex Fridman’s, for example.

    Consider how impactful countries like Wal-Mart or Amazon are in our daily lives. Their economic throughputs are larger than all but a few countries in the world, and their workforce populations are also larger than many countries. Clearly they aren’t organized as representative democracies?

    Another question I wonder related to this, is what exactly makes “representative democracy” the gold standard? Is it even the gold standard?


  • What about the absolute lack of “representative democracy” we experience under capitalism?

    I’d argue that the capitalist system is more at odds with representative democracy than other systems mentioned. Most workers have no say in what is produced, who produces it, how they are paid, how much products are sold for, etc. Instead, we end up with figurehead CEO’s and nameless investors making all of those decisions, and of course they do everything to minimize costs, maximize profits, and disempower workers so that they can collect billions of dollars at the expense of the workers who actually make their companies run. If we had representative democracy do you think we’d have billionaires?