And now infographics are memes… Shitposts has more memes than this community.
I’m about to leave Lemmy too because the main thing that shows up is /c/memes and half the time the posts aren’t memes and when they are they’re just reposts from 10 years ago.
Infographics have always been memes. They’re inherently meant to be memetic in nature. What they intend to do is literally what the word “meme” means.
This isn’t really a meme
No cars though. Fuck cars.
Note, the idea doesn’t support the idea of carry permits. Personally, dont have an issue with a hunting rifle or shotgun kept in a safe at home, but carry and especially cc permits are absolutely insane. You do not need a firearm that can be hidden for either home defence or hunting.
Colt didn’t call it the great equalizer for nothing. Imagine being a 90 lb woman facing rape or death by a 200 lb man. Don’t think for a second anything but a gun will allow her to save herself.
Ok, thanks for telling me that it’s impossible for a violent criminal to ever threaten me in my house. Handguns are good for home defense because they are short range, and quick to aim, not because they are easy to hide.(That too, but to a lesser extent)
It was normalized in the US because white settlers always had to be ready to commit genocide against indigenous people or put down slave revolts - that’s what the 2nd amendment was really all about. In a socialist community, firearms will be necessary because there will always be nazis about (not to mention their ex-cop friends).
I mean those are two reasons it was kept, but there’s also:
- It’s based on a historical English law
- Wild predators
- Police back then were sometimes days away (and still hours away today in some cases)
- Hunting for food
- Shooting the French
- Shooting the Spanish
- The revolutionists were tired of raiding garrisons every time they needed armament
- The founding fathers wanted to keep their war ships
What if I want to make my own farm?
You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you’d have to obtain a lot of land. Then you’d have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you’d have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.
I don’t think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that’s literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
you going to manage a 10 acre farm by yourself and eat everything?
you can grow a few vegetables in a garden, but as long as people help you do it, it’s not really personal property
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
How’s about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?
What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.
I’m not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.
“Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia”
Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today’s Russia “be said to be communist”, and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?
You can replace Russia with North Korea if it suits you, I forgot to include that one. Yes, the USSR was communist, while modern day Russia much less so. Doesn’t change my point and doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Modern Russian is a capitalist oligarchy. Your entire position is based on ignorance of how the world functions.
Stock market? The thing where you buy tiny fractional ownership of of a company, too small to influence it, then try to sell that legal construct for a little more to someone else later? Why would you need that at all?
The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
He developed the game on company time. If he’d lived in a capitalist country, the government wouldn’t have taken control of Tetris, but the company would have. Every software company contract I’ve ever heard of has a clause that says the company owns any code you produce while working there.
Yes, but you choose to work for a company. Don’t pretend that’s the same as the government of the country you happen to be born in taking ownership of your creations. In a capitalist country, had Alexey Pajitnov chosen to develop the game himself, he would have made much more from it. If he had done that in the USSR, he’d still have his creation and all its monetary proceeds taken away from him.
Under capitalism your choice is to sell yourself or become destitute. That’s not really a choice, it’s just indirect coercion.
No you can’t own a platform like youtube or facebook, but you could make content on it, intellectul propriety is not a thing as you don’t have to produce art just to get a monetary return, but just because you enjoy doing so, there’s no need of a stock market in an ideal communist world because everyone gets what they need based on what they can provide, but if it’s just a country i guess it’s the government who takes care of it.
Regarding those 5 countries i’m not sure of every one of them, but talking about China as you said it’s not a communist country but it is not a dictatorship of the proletarian either, as it’s not the proletarian class nor their democratically elected representatives who govern the country.
In the end i’ll add that greed is not more “human nature” that wishing to kill someone annoying.
We didn’t own Reddit’s platform, but we made content and engagement for that community anyway.
That worked out awesome. Let’s scale it up to an entire society.
Give me an example of a communist country that has not resulted in the creation of an authoritarian government.
You’re not wrong, but also give me an example of ANY country that doesn’t resort to authoritarianism when the government is threatened by a plurality of citizens.
Those websites are highly capitalistic and never brought any innovation, all technologies related to the internet were researched by public money.
Look into patent trolls. Patents are bad, publicly funded research is always better, but it doesn’t prevent people from spending money to do research, but it doesn’t entitle them for the profits.
I’m not advocating FOR communism, I’m just trying to dispel myths.
Socialism is soluble with capitalism.
Never brought any innovation? VP9, AV1, zstd, GraphQL, React, and many more were made/contributed to by Google/Facebook specifically to improve those services. We benefit from this as they release these programs/formats.
Programs and format are not research. Nothing new was invented, they’re just alternative to existing things.
If it makes money (or some equivalent) then you can’t own it. Parents aren’t necessarily, if you’re supported so that you can invent for the betterment of society or for fun.
Dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to be a temporary phase, but it is a fundamental weak point in the transition to communism that I think cannot be overcome, because once people get that power, they won’t be able to give it up (or they’ll be removed by people who don’t want to give it up).
So I consider communism sort of an unattainable ideal that we should strive towards rather than actually considering implementing irl.
Marx believed in the natural progression of economic systems, from feudalism to mercantilism, mercantilism to capitalism, and capitalism to… well, something else anyway. Socialism, communism, fascism, and really any of the other isms that came about in the late 19th and 20ths centuries were meant as post-capitalist systems. Marx of course was a proponent of socialism or communism, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that one of those will be the preeminent system after capitalism.
Anyway, my point is that the USSR et. al. were too early to the game. Capitalism hasn’t yet run its course naturally.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Under capitalism, how would fiefs work? I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that our grain reserves are pretty much dependent on it.
No you wouldn’t be able to own Facebook or Youtube as its private not personal property.
Patents could either not exist or be owned collectively depending on the flavour of your ideology.
There would not be a stock market as that would be private ownership even though most stocks on stock exhanges do nothing even if you own all of them.
This. Someone who knows how to use their brain.
There is no Paradise. There is no solution. Reality will always be messy and every solution will always end up creating its own problems. True for capitalism, socialism, or any other social order.
Which is not to say we should not always attempt to improve the world.
think communism is what we should be striving for.
Simple - it’s the ideal. Will we ever get there? Possibly not. Is it even desirable? Debatable. But it’s always better to know where to go and not know how to get there than having the option of going anywhere and not knowing where to go.
Simple - it’s the ideal.
Not in my view. I don’t want the State owning all sources of wealth and material goods. The problem with capitalism is that too much of that stuff gets funneled into too few hands. Communism is the same problem, just different people. No thanks.
