Read “The State and Revolution” and then find your local socialist organization to help build mutual aid and alternative infrastructure so we can create a dual-power struggle to replace the gerrymandered rigged cheating bullshit system where your phone calls and letters are ignored. The next time they throw a No Kings parade, instead of marching in a circle and then going home, go talk to one of the organizations with a booth or table set up. If there’s not organizing in your town, then they’re in the nearest big city to you.

I’ve always felt like lsc was too trigger-happy with their bans. You were in the right. No one’s gonna convince the American people to listen to them by ostracizing veterans, and the American left has completely and utterly failed to get the American people to listen to them for decades. The Chinese knew that educating the prior emperor and winning him over to socialism would be a huge victory for legitimacy because of how powerful his status was, and these dumbies think that the key to American socialism is to ostracize a category of people considered borderline sacred to the average American. Americans will be far more willing to listen to a veteran explain the realities of imperialism than some dog-walking redditor.

Happy birthday Lemmy.zip! Happy to have you as my Lemmy home!

My brother in Christ, it is only twenty minutes long.

This video’s a good introduction on how that country’s reported on and how easy it is for misinformation to spread, even through mainstream sources.

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From what I’ve experienced here, it’s just ego and not being able to handle hearing that another country might be better at something than America. I don’t know how well known the burning of the original president’s house even is here. I’ve only ever heard it talked about a handful of times, and always as a random bit of history trivia from a long time ago, I’ve never seen anyone get upset about it. But I’ve watched right-wing Americans get very defensive around the topic of Canadian healthcare my whole life. “That’s communism, it doesn’t work, did you know that Canadians pay half their salary in taxes and whatever other made up bullshit about Canada that Fox News told me.” Narcissists don’t like hearing that someone else is better at something than them and would rather start attacking than defending their position.

For the majority of American libertarians that I’ve known, the logic at the root of it is that initiating physical violence is always morally wrong, and that because government must by necessity enforce its laws with initiated physical violence, or at least the threat there of, government itself is morally wrong. They argue that capitalism is a series of voluntary and peaceful agreements, and nobody’s physically forcing anyone to do anything, and so therefore it’s the best system that could ever exist.

The appeal of the philosophy is that it’s so simple. You don’t need any understanding of economics, social contract, history, or the living conditions of people you’ve never met to understand that initiating violence is wrong. Most libertarians I’ve known will inevitably fall back on the moral argument of initiated physical violence, the non-aggression principle, when all other arguments fail. Show them as many statistics as you want, and none of it will matter because government interrupts the peaceful natural order of capitalism, and therefore will always be morally wrong.

And so their political orientation becomes not to improve conditions for all, but to return dollars unjustly stolen through taxation to their naturally rightful owners, the bourgeoisie, and restore the world to its natural, utopian free market state where everything is a business and everyone has an equal opportunity to become a billionaire. Without the government violence of taxation and regulation, everything will just kind of naturally sort itself out. After all, no one would willingly do business with abusers or predators, so those kinds of people would never succeed or gain power, right?

It’s a brilliant trap because it disincentives people from studying economics, political philosophy, or non-American forms of government. Why waste time on any of that when you can cast it all under the umbrella of “statism”. I don’t need to learn how any of these systems work, because they all rely on the initiation of physical aggression, so they’re all morally wrong. And so the fact that American schools don’t teach any of these things isn’t a problem that needs to be corrected, because they think the existence of public education at all is immoral.