I agree with you 100%, and Marx was very clear that capitalism is filled with theft and oppression. It’s nice that Marx also at times rested his critique of capitalism abstracting all the crony-ness and analyzed capitalism with ‘good intentions,’ showing that even without the oppression/theft it’s a failed system.

edit: misread!

He’s seriously going full force on the Midas Touch.

I’ve gone long years without using any social media associated to my identity, as many others do, and i’ll eat my cooked shirt if I start thinking, “hey sure why not let me into this shitty internet”.

I’ll be fine without using the internet if it comes down to it, at that point it’d be a liability. Dinosaurs think they can control the internet which is a hilarious proposition in the first place.

It’s a damned shame bookchin wrote a terrible article filled with wild distortions of history of israel/palestine. It goes without saying that people should just not go to bookchin to have an accurate or rigorous framing of middle east’s history and society. Ok, he inspired autonomous democratic movements like rojava, but that’s beside the point of it all and more linked to his social theories of democracy rather than any concrete understanding of history - as far as I know he never studied the history of the middle east in any serious depth.

His social ecology essays are filled with interesting stuff and did have some very good critiques of different environmentalist currents, he did have some strange critiques of Marx at times, but I still respect some of that work even if I may not agree with much of it. His views on zionism is another story though, not excusable. The silver lining is (as far as I know) it was just that one article.

Not sure who Maknho is so thanks for the name drop I’ll check their work out, but as far as I know, Bookchin was a lefty anarchist. I always assumed his later ‘libertarian phase’ was just another label that he’d eventually disavow as well but that his critique of the state also went alongside his critique of the market.

Can you refer me to other libertarians who are particularly anti-market, in the American context?

In my opinion what defines libertarianism overall is being non-statist and a belief in markets dictating all of life.

Left libertarianism is just progressive on social issues.

have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water, mandrake?

lemmy is much smaller so far and I like the communities. I also don’t feel like i’m being psyop’d by a bunch of bots in the larger communities like on reddit.

Absolutely, kind internet stranger - I don’t want it any other way, I also appreciate your kind comments to me and willing to engage with my viewpoint, however imperfect they can be (no one is perfect, except for cats, of course).

I try my best to signal my intentions, and that any disagreements or points I make are in good faith and it is in the struggle against all forms of oppression, like sexism, ableism, racism, classism, and all sorts of hierarchies we experience in the workplace, public or private spaces, etc. that are well known, or also not well known, unwritten and novel.

It’s difficult enough for getting people to switch from whatsapp to signal.

I don’t know how successful i’d be to get people to switch to simplex.

Is there a particular reason that you don’t recommend signal?

yes i definitely agree with your point here, systems don’t just live in the abstract, but are carried out by people who carry on fucked up prejudices, and all that.

I 100% agree with this, but the burden should not be placed on the oppressed. Men must dismantle patriarchy too. They don’t get to sit around and do jack shit.

Obviously you don’t want the privileged to steal the cause and speak for the oppressed and marginalized, and this has always been an issue. But it’s not because of ‘men’ but because of capitalism and patriarchy that declaws any effective challenge to oppression. There are similar examples to this like green washing and the environmentalist movement.

I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s higher birth rates either. This falls into a neoMalthusian trap that assumes that we don’t have enough resources when it’s the privatization of goods and services that makes production and access to goods stagnant and inefficient.

The implication of saying it’s birth rates will shift the blame on those who have children, and those are historically poorer people in rural areas/less affluent communities/the global south.

Besides, if you look at consumption per capita it is the richer areas and less populated areas in the world that are using the most energy, polluting the most, and consuming the most.

or, you know, men who don’t cat call and consider themselves feminists and allies? This is not hard.

open borders does not lower wages when you consider the whole imperialist dynamic of wealth transfer that has forced migrants to find work elsewhere. Furthermore wages get lowered because of the capitalist profit motive.

yeah, and not just leftist. you can have the most liberal and bourgeois-backed nationalist project just to secure some kind of national sovereignty and there will still be a coup. Case point: Iran and Mosaddegh.

Imperialism will sap the wealth of countries and peoples for short term gains, regardless of the economic system.

Good explanation, and I figured the same.

I feel the ‘encrypted at rest’ is then a false sense of security. Alas it is much better than gmail, etc.

excuse me ignorance, but I understand that once you receive mail from someone with shared pgp keys, they’d have no way to read the contents.

But when I receive an email from any service that sends me mail, or from a friend that doesn’t use PGP, it sits encrypted in my account… but how do we know proton isn’t ‘reading’ the contents when it is delivered and before it is encrypted in the account?

Is there a possibility of data mining or them storing the contents on their end? like a mirror image?

i think the key is to have a certain balance. Stay positive in certain aspects of your life activities, have principles and interests. Be true to them. Cherish those that mean a lot to you and appreciate them everyday.

But to quote a rage against the machine lyric “if ignorance is bliss, then knock the smile off my face”

I don’t think many even know what a communist is or what communism is about. it just makes them feel upset when they hear the word because of constant corporate mass media conditioning.