wallabra (🇧🇷)

It’s not really about having more stuff. It’s about having power relative to other human beings. It’s the raw pleasure of dominating and subjugating others, of knowing you can bend others to your will. It’s the sickness of the mind which draws to itself kings and oligarchs and plutocrats.

Persons like you and I are human; we want to uplift our peers and vice versa. We evolved to collaborate. But not all are like this. Some, by whatever mysterious circumstances there may be, become the opposite, addicted to the feeling of power and influence and control, even when it makes their lives objectively worse.

Unfortunately, there isn’t in society the rebellious collective spirit there once was which would summon the energy to defeat them. I love modernity just as much as my neighbor, and to a degree, that’s the problem. It is 2026, and I must apologize to Marx in saying that we have too much to lose besides our chains. I don’t know how much of each other’s suffering we must share until this calculus starts to tip away from inaction. Given that the reaction to impending geoclimate and political doom is, in societal terms, quaint, I’m not very expectant.

Coates and his coterie

Hah

Gigachad response

Don’t worry, they can just drive home! Oh wait…

what coffee maker has instructions so complex you need AI to understand it? :o

we makin the einstein coffee or smth

That’s fair and consistent with socialism as worker ownership of the means of production, which is my definition too.

That being said, a politician is not capable of doing that without being removed, which means socialist politicians won’t exist without a revolution. And a revolution is not currently exactly the most practical thing to get done without revolutionary fervor, which we don’t really have enough of, and without logistics like a stockpile of food and stuff for strikers to have, and… it’s just a whole can of worms.

Anyway I’d argue ‘socialist’ is someone who is IN FAVOR of getting there at some point somehow, and ‘capitalist’ is someone who is in favor of capitalism, and I don’t think Mamdani is someone who’s in favor of capitalism, just because he’s forced to play the cards he’s dealt.

But if you wanna go by Stafford Beer’s “the purpose of a system is what it does”, which is fair, then yeah, Mamdani’s not really going to be changing it meaningfully by himself. Then again we’re kind of about to see modern civilization go through a heck of a tribulation because of a severe lack of oil (oil bad but fully replacing it is hard and needs a proper transition, not this) and because of climate crisis and a ton of other stuff coinciding. So if anything’s going to be toppling capitalism, it’s itself from the inside.

Sorry if I was rude earlier. Just tired of purity tests within the left wasting everyone else (in the left)'s time and energy for no good productive reason towards any better outcomes. I suppose that that has made me a bit too prone to lashing out at signs of that.

…may you elaborate?

Well, what would Mamdani have to do in order to be a socialist then, by your precepts?

That’s not even AI in a coffee maker, that’s just… a coffee maker XD

Anyway, this 100%, you make great points.

I mean that I don’t really want to argue about this with you because it’s a waste of time. If being a socialist obligatorily means opposing reform or deeming it contrary to revolution, I don’t want to be a socialism, and neither would Marx.

They put AI moderators in charge and I have a feeling they’re whittling their own userbase down and that that might be having an effect on their stocks too.

Cool, have fun in the “Best Leftist Ever” corner over there, I’ll go do some more organizing and soup kitchen service.

I mean Zohran Mamdani’s victory seems to show a developing change.

If anything it did the opposite!

Microsoft apps have been incredibly terrible at, uh, working, lately. Outlook periodically logs me out on its own for no reason. The mobile apps are especially shitty, at least on Android - they either crash/segfault themselves out right after opening, or they just stay stuck infinitely while futilely trying to log you in.

See, this is the apex of dispute resolution

And that’s just the packaging part!

Yeah! You could even make like a business model out of… nevermind.

A lot of resources to be expended on domestic soil, eventually they’ll run out of both weapons and the very working people they need to keep the economy running to (among other things) keep producing weapons, no?