Candelestine @ Candelestine @lemmy.world

Hello.

---

Read more

Posts

6

Comments

1,928

Joined

2 yr. ago

Agreed. We are not better in any way. We're only as good as we can stay loyal to our principles of freedom and equality, which is a big struggle for us.

... I mean, you think they're just better than us?

Really? By acknowledging the world has multiple powers that exist on it? I think you can see that just from looking at a map.

There's a lot of them. Unless you're a conspiracy theorist anyway.

To the contrary, many of us fight against American imperialism, in both its economic and military forms. Don't expect us to just bow to a different imperial master though, that's not equality. Just subjugation under a different master.

edit to fix a word

You don't sound like you're trying to fix things. You sound like you're trying to make things harder by increasing the amount of strife, which furthers the paralysis of the country.

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

-Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

We didn't understand it in time to save most of our own native peoples. Some still don't understand it, though they could if they wanted to try. But for those who do, the freedom and equality it represents is worth fighting for. Fascists don't really get that. I'd rather we didn't have to prove it to them. Again.

edit for formatting

There is a long history of generation gaps. We tend to forget that young people are observing us, but not just to mimic us. To learn from us in many different ways. They'll take our principles and ideas and push them further, they'll branch out in new directions when new directions become available, they try to succeed in places where we failed.

This can all be discomfiting when taken together, but it's exactly what most parents generally want, deep down--for them to have a better life than we did. We can't really help it if the nuts and bolts of that are uncomfortable and, if we're being honest, completely terrifying sometimes. In the end though, it comes down to faith. If you raised them right ... you might just have to trust them. Not to be perfect and always do the right thing, but to grow, learn from their own mistakes just like we did, and ultimately carve their own path.

We can't hold them back, trying will only result in strife. This is a key part of how we evolve as social organisms, it's part of what makes us so adaptable to all the different environments and circumstances of this world. If they always just came out as carbon copies, we wouldn't be able to accomplish all the stuff we do, as entire civilizations.

We're gonna need a free and intact world to hand down to them, though, if they're going to have any kind of real shot at success.

To bring this back to Jodie, if it were an older co-star, would she react the same? Ageism cuts both ways, and when I hear of an actor not showing up on set on time, my first instinct is "douchebag celebrity", not "kids these days".

To young people, we do envy you. Time can be an implacable foe, and we're much closer to face-to-face with it. We do remember what it felt like, and we miss certain parts of it. The same part of a person that wishes they could redo parts of their life, when it looks at your decisions, can become hyper-judgemental. Try to avoid that one, when you get around to being older yourselves. It's natural, but not unavoidable or anything. It doesn't have many benefits either, being hyper-judgemental seldom does, outside of a courtroom anyway.

...I really like the sound of that idea.

I'm also likely to switch to kbin at some point. Personally I take a fairly long-term view of this project, so I'm waiting to see which projects keep going, which fail, and which new ones haven't even popped up yet. I'm aware that devs can pivot and change their minds about things.

I picked lemmy initially more or less at random, and I do like it here, but I'm ultimately going to move to the most functional product. That broader idea of the Fediverse is why I'm here.

You sound radicalized, I'm sorry to say. It's all the exaggerated language. Try to remember that every side uses propaganda, it's not always all true.

Worth it was a different story. When there's better ways to accomplish something, there's terms for the guy that just wants the quick one that causes great suffering. I prefer the British model.

Ends don't justify the means imo.

Agreed. They show no more care for Gazan civilians than the IDF. Might actually be less, tough to say through the fog of war.

That's a good point. It's important to remember that each party is a huge coalition of different voters with different priorities, and there's even independents in the middle.

That said, I still think it's important that we stop hiding from and shunning what we perceive as evil, and start facing it down and punching it in the gut. With words, ideally, while we still can. It is possible to simply help people to see things in new ways, it's just hard and unpleasant.

Just to condense your two comments, it's true, the French Revolution was not all bad by any stretch. Very much a mixed bag.

I think you underestimate how much worse everything can, and quite possibly will, get. Unless you believe in some god that protects us, then literally everything is possible. Including a return to attitudes from two centuries ago, where slavery was enforced out in plain sight, with whips.

That was worse than what we have now.

One of the worst things we do is try to protect our children from the true horror of how ugly this world really is, and how rare happy endings actually are. This is why it remains so important to fight for real justice with everything we have, because what little progress we have actually made is trying to be stripped from us.

That said, I fully agree that unchecked capitalism is rapidly returning us to the era of the robber barons, and doing tremendous harm. But the opposite of that bad thing can also be another bad thing, life isn't so simple that the opposite of bad is automatically good. It's so much trickier than that in everything but our fiction, and what we really need is some godawfully complex and nuanced middle ground that will make very little sense to most folks.

Frankly, unchecked capitalism doesn't even sound good in theory. It relies on humans being rational, which they very clearly are not.

Unfortunately it's extremely geographic. We're pretty singular, but which "single thing" you get varies tremendously depending on where you are.

If you live in San Fran, "everyone" is a certain way. If you live in the rural heartland, "everyone" is the opposite.

On top of that, the number of people that can and are willing to speak the language of both sides is vanishingly small, due to the rhetoric and style of one side being extremely distasteful to the other.

I think ranked choice voting is probably our best, most realistic shot forward, by reducing the importance of the hard liners in the primaries.

Don't get me wrong, we have a number of independent communes that exist here in the states. It's a system that works well at small scales, anything around that village-size of human societies, where everyone knows everyone. It's just when it gets scaled up to millions of people that problems start to pop up.

I'm all for better systems. It's just that I have a limited risk tolerance for really dark times.

Ah, I see. If you can make a proof of concept work, I'll be interested. Until then, you seem to just have yet another method for accidentally installing dictators.

The French Revolution failed to get rid of the monarchy, they had their king back a generation later.

History is full of important details if you really want to know the truth of why the world sucks so much. It's not just easy.