it was the greatest presidential campaign in history

Some warlord in Africa named Kony and there was this huge viral campaign to like, make people aware that he existed? I think he was already out of power by the time it got going or something. Really weird

This is a pretty good rundown.

September is coming up soon. We could argue about the merits of pumpkin spice culture.

yeah, the defederation drama is probably a good opportunity for self-crit

They certainly made the website spicier

It was pretty much the only other experience with meeting other vegans on this site tbh, I was legit excited about more vegans being on the site…up until they started posting lol.

Some hilariously unhinged statements did come from them like:

Hunger isn’t a real thing. It doesn’t exist. If you make conscious decisions about what to eat based on an informed view of nutrition, you will still feel hungry. It’s not some magic signal telling you that you’re not getting enough nutrients, it’s a dumb feeling that exists in your head. You ignore it, and it goes away. The feeling of hunger cannot harm you.

and

Delusions may or may not go away if you ignore them, I have no idea, I’m not knowledgeable on that topic. What I can tell you for sure is that hunger does go away when you ignore it.

Everyone should be vegan

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I’m just saying, you can be right about something but do it in a way where you alienate everyone.

I’ve always thought that the dirtbag left should be incredibly tactical about it’s dirtbagness. The fact that we didn’t entirely remove incivility from our toolbox was fantastic and certainly set us apart and up for a rollicking good time, but it did become a bit one note.

Anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk rip www.reddit.com/r/TweeLeft

here’s the full quote:

Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change — not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.

https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Moralist_International

it’s a quote from disco elysium

Lol agreed, definitely a translation attempting like a word for word/as close to the original wording as possible. My brain can think ok in romance language structure but not if the words are english. Still glad it exists and it’s not like I could do better from Italian

i’ve always called everyone dude, but I see what you mean. i’ll #bebest

Can’t believe Good Burger would lie to me like this!

My partner was assigned female at birth and is non-binary. They referred to themselves as dude on a daily basis even before coming out/transitioning.

The thing about social issues is that they change by society. In certain cultures where I live, it’s normal for cis women to be addressed as ‘dude’. The term is considered gender neutral by default in those circles, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was increasingly recuperated in more youth spaces.

It’s obviously different if someone uses it in a gendered context (e.g. ‘a dude’, ‘i fuck dudes’), that’s offensive and horrible to misgender with, and obviously it’s a dumbass gamble to assume it will be received as neutral when talking with new people. And, of course, this doesn’t excuse the moron who plays the “I have a friend who is fine with me saying this” routine. But what that user said isn’t as absurd as it may sound, because there are legitimate societies, some which are my day-to-day life even, where it already is neutral.

‘Knowing deep down’ or ‘at an emotional level’ is a common colloquialism but it seems to reifying a sort of compartmentalized cognition where there are multiple cognizers within and individual knowing different things and not communicating, which I don’t buy.

We know they know we’re right, though, because they’ll tell us when our ideas are separated from the material changes that are required to implement them. Ask a lib what they think of:

• Universal healthcare
• Public education
• Mass incarceration
• Rights to basics like food and housing
• Wars of aggression

You’re probably going to get supermajorities on roughly the same page as us, at least when they’re speaking in the abstract. They do value many of the things we do.

The problem, of course, is when someone whispers “property values” or “the price of gas” in their ear. Suddenly all those good intentions vanish because it could conceivably be a threat to their own material conditions. We know they know that’s wrong, too, because libs lionize people who put what’s right over what’s profitable.

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The cognitive dissonance thing is something I’ve been mulling on for a while as well, kinda neat to see a take on it that helps me sort out some thoughts.

it seems to reifying a sort of compartmentalized cognition where there are multiple cognizers within and individual knowing different things and not communicating, which I don’t buy.

People abuse it for their convenience and it oresents epistemological problems, but the dynamic you seem to be describing g is absolutely a real thing. Minds are not indivisible.

You can, with a sufficiently complicated yet wholely coherent and individually reasonable set of premises

Those premises are that a talking head or oped told them it was the responsible if unpleasant thing to do. You’re just describing layers of propaganda and contradiction-deflecting defense mechanisms: they know the costs of austerity and hegemony are wrong so they recoil from learning about the details and latch on to prevaricating bullshit from some propagandist to wear it as a shield. They want to believe that their team is good, and censor their consumption of information to stop that from being challenged.

You can, with a sufficiently complicated yet wholely coherent and individually reasonable set of premises justify things like sanctions that are going to starve a bunch of children.

They would not need to justify starving children unless they knew starving children was wrong. Compare libs to reactionaries here: the latter will openly say “yeah kill all them [slurs], I don’t care” at the drop of a hat, even when we aren’t at war with one of the Bad Countries. You need to bombard libs with endless propaganda for months before they come close to that.

I’m also not sure that propaganda justifies horrors like starving children so much as it diverts blame. Ask a lib if food shortages in the DPRK are the result of sanctions and they won’t tell you it’s sadly necessary, they’ll tell you we don’t sanction food, so if people are hungry they should blame it on their government.

which is why debate doesn’t work. no one can fit an entire description of the way they view the world into a forum post.

There’s no material benefit to being a leftist in the west

I disagree somewhat. If we’re to believe this map posted further up in the thread, any average person who does not live in one of the blue countries would benefit from global communism:

The US, Germany, the Nordics, and most of eastern Europe is a large portion of the West’s population.

I think that how this potential benefit is weighed against the real possibility of sacrificing one’s life, and potentially entire communities, for a revolutionary cause, instead of simply staying out of trouble and trying to survive, is the more challenging and important issue than a lack of class interest in socialism.

Even in the blue countries, the possibility of living an unalienated life with meaningful control over one’s work, community, and society could be more appealing in the abstract for many than simply making more money in a rotten, alienating system. There’s more benefit in socialism than simply meeting one’s basic needs, as important as that is. The problem for anyone is actually working towards a point where that possibility becomes real. That entails danger and instability.

You’ve gotten some good answers so I just want to say thanks for asking these questions and genuinely trying to learn. There’s been a lot of stubborn people who won’t listen to anything they don’t like on here recently but there’s also been plenty of open-minded people like you, and it makes me glad to see that

What is the imperial core?

The countries that are the center of (neo)imperial exploitation of the global south, ie the US and its other economically developed allies. So mostly the US, Canada, UK, EU, Australia, New Zeland, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. YMMV a bit on who counts, some EU nations are very poor and exploited by the more powerful ones. So Its probably better to say “Western Europe” than “EU”. Its a complicated issue, especially since the two Asian countries I listed are both exploited and exploiting at the same time. But they’re both developed and capitalist enough, as well as closely aligned with the west enough, to probably count. (I’m not super well read on this issue and may not be the best person to answer this ,but this is the sense I’ve gotten from talking to other socialists).

Does this mean things like mining lithium, or exporting labor to other countries because it’s cheaper?

Yes those are good examples! Not the only things, like another example are the general actions that the IMF takes with developing countries, or the way the banana industry tries to run South America, but you pulled two examples that are very good out of your hat even at the level you’re at so that’s pretty impressive.

ETA: Also thank you for asking these questions with genuine intellectual curiosity.

Just to add a bit of context, there’s a quote about how ‘fascism is imperialism turned inward’.

It helps to think of the imperial core as like a hierarchy of layers. The US ruling class is at the top of this hierarchy, and the ruling classes of other imperialist nations are next. As the contradictions of capitalism continue to pile up, there is a cannibalization that starts at the furthest periphery. This started with colonization/exploitation of the global south. But over time this has become less effective for various reasons (BRICS being the new big one). There’s a lot of mechanisms the core uses to affect it’s desires on the periphery (IMF conditioned loans, sanctions, embargoes, currency manipulations, capital flight, etc). As these mechanisms are dulled, the exploitation in the periphery starts to encroach up the layers of the hierarchy over time.

The 2014 coup in Ukraine was a clear step along this path, but it was not the first one by any means. Balkanization was one of the earlier ones, as was Greece. So this is something that will continue as BRICS and other elements of multipolarity increase around the world and particularly in the global south. Capital wants profits via exploitation, and if the profits in the global south become marginal due to the eroding of capital’s power, then capital finds new places to exploit. Often that means turning inward.