Lefty Memes
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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Like I said, arguably. Show me some data that says that the opposition has grown above 25% (arbitrary, you may understand what I mean) and then I’ll come down on the side that he probably doesn’t speak for the majority of the country.
The only way that they can secede is if we make a constitutional amendment to allow states to secede, yes. Personally, I’d vote for letting Texas secede, if they wanted to.
Now we are seeing eye-to-eye, Helix - that’s pretty much my point. There are diplomatic avenues to solve this problem, so maybe Ukraine can solve the whole thing, in the interest of preventing future wars. I say “solve” in the sense that they may be able to negotiate a plan for how to handle this in the future for the whole old Soviet bloc.
No argument with this paragraph, I agree, in principle.
The whole thing reeks of Putin trolling the West.
Point taken, however, instead of a little victimizing (by way of that hypothetical peaceful path that we outlined earlier) they are now getting a lot of victimizing (vis a vis, death and destruction).
Again, for the sake of argument, assuming that Russia itself was victimized during the fall of the USSR, and assuming that Putin is seeking to redress that, rather than him trying to take over the whole old-bloc, then is there any other peaceful path?
if we assume that he is trying to take over the whole old-bloc, then I’d be entirely in agreement with you on this topic.
I’m just not willing to make blanket assumptions like that - I prefer the probabilistic approach.
Thanks, by the way, for taking the time to discuss this with me. I’ll keep replying if you do.
In 2020, the support for Alexi Navalni was around 20%, which, as the article notes, was despite the fact that all of the available Russian media--which is entirely controlled by the state--demonized him as a traitor to Russia. If you had a reasonably free media in Russia that was free to report on what Putin was really doing, then it seems likely that support would have been higher.
But if opposition leaders keep getting jailed, or commit suicide, every time their public support breaks out of the single digits, then yeah, duh, of course you aren't going to see opposition about 25%.
You're missing the point entirely. Sure, it's not rape if you consent. And you can stop a rape that's already happening by saying, okay, sure, I consent to this. But, really...? That's the direction you want to go here? Russia could also stop this at any time just by pulling troops out, and giving Ukraine it's own land and kidnapped people back. Russia can prevent future wars by, I dunno not invading other countries. Why should it be the responsibility of the victim to negotiate with the aggressor?
Russia was victimized by Russians. Not by the west, not by Ukraine. These are all self-inflicted wounds, not some grand conspiracy by The West. The former Soviet states didn't want to be Soviet states, because the Soviet government had always been complete dogshit. When the USSR broke up, the politically powerful and connected systematically looted the country of wealth; it wasn't western governments and companies that looted the country. So if Putin wants to fix that, he needs to fix his shit, not blame everyone else for the problems that Russia created for itself. But that's not what he's been doing; he's trying to mask internal problems by claiming that it's an external enemy.