mycorrhiza they/them @ mycorrhiza @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Medical cadavers and organ donors are, first of all, volunteers not raised for that purpose, and second of all, we do not view them as commodities. There are rituals of respect when working with medical cadavers. I have heard of the families of organ donors visiting the recipients in emotional meetings.

What about dog fighting rings where the motive is profit? Or workplaces that expose workers to carcinogens for profit?

Most people want to do good, they don’t want to hurt others

Ordinary people are not rich capitalists who can earn massive profits by cutting corners. That’s not just against animals either, think of the conditions human workers have been subjected to.

Their ultimate motives don’t make the question any less valid.

They are stealing sick animals of no commercial value in order to render medical aid. In cases where they have actually gone to trial for theft, they have won, because they show jurors footage of the awful condition these stolen animals were in.

Which was why the prosecutors dropped the theft charges, put a gag order on the footage, and instead threw a “felony conspiracy to commit trespassing” charge at the leader of the group, who didn’t even participate directly in stealing the animals.

They were stealing sick livestock that had no commercial value.

communism involves the abolition of the government. If you want to know what America does to communist movements undefended by government look at Indonesia in 1965–66

it is a requirement if you want to be a very rich social democracy

Economic liberalization is a defense against the kind of economic warfare that Cuba has been subjected to. Those are really the only two options: play ball with capitalism to some extent, or get strangled by sanctions.

I’ve been speaking with other more informed communists and they’ve told me

Lol this reads like social engineering to shift perception of ingroup mores. I guess I’m paranoid after seeing that Atlantic Council whitepaper calling for greater control of the fediverse.

The Sapply model runs into the exact same problem the video is focusing on.

When you take the quiz at https://sapplyvalues.github.io you get questions like "Agree or disagree: Only the government can fairly and effectively regulate organizations" — but what kind of government are we talking about? Who's in charge? Are there corporate think tanks running it? Is there a fossil fuel lobby? Are we talking about corporations regulating themselves?

When I get a question like that, I don't know how to respond, because I don't have a blanket attitude toward all government. My opinion depends on what is actually happening in real life. Which is ultimately the central criticism of the video. What matters most to most people is the material context, not some blanket feeling about the abstract concept of government

And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting.

The entire conclusion of the study I linked is that this is not happening.

There's nothing wrong with voting, I vote every two years, but it's dangerous to convince yourself that voting is enough. You need to also organize. You need to strike. You need to unionize your workplaces. If you really want to push the government into conceding real improvements in our lives, you need to apply direct pressure on a large scale. And when the crackdown comes, you need to collectively organize to help each other. Bail people out of jail. Help people pay rent when they're fired for trying to unionize. Doing this on a large scale is how you get actual fucking change, and it will never happen if people lie to themselves that voting alone is sufficient.

The point is, you're not going to hear a thoughtful explanation of what those people actually think or why on an instance where any such explanation gets you immediately banned and your comments removed.

You’re trying to dismiss the criticism by ingroup-outgrouping me. I’m not straight, I’m fucking pan, and numerically speaking I doubt most of the thousands of queer people on here know who you are or the intent of your username.

I’ve said my piece here and in our 1:1 conversation, and the more we talk the more you’ll probably dig your heels in. You got feedback from one person and a few upvoters. Take it or leave it.

The economically motivated NATO intervention in Libya was justified with false claims of a genocide. This was the conclusion reached by the British parliament report. Now Libya is a war-torn failed state with open-air slave markets. That intervention was less than a decade after “Iraq has WMDs,” a lie that has killed over a million people. When we have all witnessed these events in our lifetimes, I think we should be a little skeptical when enemy states are vilified. I don’t know if public backlash could have prevented the intervention in Libya, but I hope we’ll at least try to prevent the next one.

Both situations are bad, but I don’t think oligarchs hinder each other that much. They compete, but in their overall control of society they are fairly unanimous, because they all share the same basic material interest to pay us as little as possible for as much work as possible and to destroy any trace of meaningful working class political power that might challenge them.

what democracy?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[...]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.

In China it’s also illegal for gay couples to marry and adopt

Most American states only legalized same-sex marriage and adoption in the 2010s. Like America, China has socially conservative older generations and socially progressive younger generations. The country and its people are not monolithic, they're not some alien land where people are fundamentally different from here. Support for marriage equality is widespread and rising in China, they appear to be on the same track as America.

stop pretending like you care about LGBTQ rights

Stop making paranoid assumptions about people. How is anyone supposed to communicate when that is the dynamic?

God-tier title

the person you were talking to never said crypto was good

/u/Omega_Haxors you seem cool when I see you around, and I understand getting heated or defensive during an argument and saying some regrettable stuff, but it is kinda frustrating to see you misrepresent what happened a year after the fact, in a thread like this of all places, when hexbear users are already widely demonized and misrepresented.