[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 55 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Exactly this. Right wing propaganda already portrays the LGBTQ+ community as child groomers who are sexualizing minors.

Forget gasoline or lighter fluid: allowing federation with "barely 18!" content would throw a whole propane tank on that fire.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

🤣 🤣

Look, I promise: I was just annoyed at people talking past each other on the question @o_o@programming.dev asked. And I just wanted to ask the question in a way that might address the problems that o_o's question ran into.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Sure. To me, ~~capitalism is any system that supports ownership of any property -- oil rigs, land, factories, assembly lines, burger machines, copyrights and patents, mines, farms, etc -- that is used to collect the products of another person's labor. (For example, when the oil rig worker is payed a wage, but the oil rig owner owns the oil that was pumped, that's capitalism.)~~

EDIT: Wolfhound pointed out that my definition ought to specify who is allowed to to control this property. And that's true.

Capitalism is any system that permits all people (or non-person entities) with sufficient wealth to own property -- oil rigs, land, factories, assembly lines, burger machines, copyrights and patents, mines, farms, etc -- that is used to collect the products of another person's labor. (For example, when the oil rig worker is payed a wage, but the oil rig owner or oil rig corporation owns the oil that was pumped, that's capitalism.)

The property used in the above manner is called capital, or private property. The person using it is called a capitalist.

As for whether it is conducive to workers controlling what they produce, my answer is that -- by definition -- capitalism allows someone else to control what workers produce. It does not guarantee a worker any power over what they produce, and in the majority of cases (where a worker must pay rent, health insurance, food, etc and cannot afford to start their own business or buy their own equipment) it actually pressures workers into situations where they do not control what they produce.

140
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

@o_o@programming.dev asked "why are folks so anti-capitalist?" not long ago. It got quite a few comments. But I noticed a trend: a lot of people there didn't agree on the definition of "capitalism".

And the lack of common definition was hobbling the entire discussion. So I wanted to ask a precursor question. One that needs to be asked before anybody can even start talking about whether capitalism is helpful or good or necessary.

Main Question

  • What is capitalism?
  • Since your answer above likely included the word "capital", what is capital?
  • And either,
    • A) How does capitalism empower people to own what they produce? or, (if you believe the opposite,)
    • B) How does capitalism strip people of their control over what they produce?

Bonus Questions (mix and match or take them all or ignore them altogether)

  1. Say you are an individual who sells something you create. Are you a capitalist?
  2. If you are the above person, can you exist in both capitalist society and one in which private property has been abolished?
  3. Say you create and sell some product regularly (as above), but have more orders than you can fulfill alone. Is there any way to expand your operation and meet demand without using capitalist methods (such as hiring wage workers or selling your recipes / process to local franchisees for a cut of their proceeds, etc)?
  4. Is the distinction between a worker cooperative and a more traditional business important? Why is the distinction important?
[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 16 points 11 months ago

That's a lot of the reason why Neosporin or any other antibiotic ointments help you heal faster. There's petrolatum in all those products.

0
[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 20 points 11 months ago

Like a lot of people are saying, if reddit comes up in a search result, I'm clicking it. You know that's your best shot at finding the answer you're looking for.

But opening the app? Scrolling and socializing? I checked my comment history just now, and since joining Lemmy on July 1st, I have commented 5 reddit comments; 1 of them was a reply to someone replying to me. 4 of them were specifically about ActivityPub social networks.

In that same thirteen days, I left 33 comments on Lemmy.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

... and car manufacturers, and oil companies, and tire companies, and the fast food franchises lining every freeway exit...

6
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

This isn't so much a support request as a piece of advice. I just wanted to pass along a heads-up to save someone else some work.

The Bionic Reader Firefox extension breaks my ability to comment and reply on Lemmy.

This Image is With the Extension Enabled.

As you can see, the reply button has been clicked. It's grayed out. But the page stays stuck there. And when I refresh, my attempted comment is nowhere to be found.

The Firefox error codes are also different between having this extension enabled and not having it enabled. I'll post those in the comments.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 92 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I will say that the short blackout was enough to get me onto the Fediverse. I didn't even use the apps that would be affected by the API shutdown, so I never would have noticed the controversy without the blackout.

But once the blackout was announced, I recognized how far reddit was willing to go in service of harvesting its users' data. And after that point, I just didn't feel good on the site anymore. (Granted, I first created an account on Mastodon because the people calling for blackouts never mentioned Lemmy. But still!)

Between Facebook's notification system repeatedly failing to direct me to comment replies, Twitter DDoSing itself, and reddit turning into the Eye of Sauron (which, again, I would not have even noticed happening were it not for the short protest), it seemed like the perfect time to exit the sinking ship of corporate social media.

Meaning they did something. Maybe they didn't avert the reddit apocalypse, but they still did something.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 17 points 11 months ago

Exactly this, yeah. Doing a little debugging.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 92 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Oh my god that was annoying! But yes. Now, I am okay.

Firefox wasn't letting me comment, reply to comments, or edit my comments. I even dragged my home instance's moderator into helping me debug which I feel terrible about. (Especially because I originally described it as a federation error, only later realizing that the glitch was happening on reddthat as well as federated instances.)

After various debugging attempts, he told me to deactivate my extensions... which I hadn't tried for some reason... and it worked instantly. My Bionic Reader Firefox extension in particular turned out being the source of the problem. And now I feel like I've wasted my mod's time trying to debug something that he had no control over, but other than that? I'm okay.

Thanks for asking.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 53 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

test comment.
edit of test comment
edit from culprit browser
edit with only one add-on deactivated

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 213 points 11 months ago

For everyone who told us that they’d never taken a single art class and they could mod this place better with their eyes closed… Well, consider this a golden opportunity! It’s going to be tricky doing it with your eyes closed ever since Reddit’s painfully botched rollout of “disability friendly” mod tools in their disasterpiece of a mobile app has caused nothing but crashes and bugs, but you seemed so confident in the many (many, many, many) times you’ve expressed this opinion that we can only assume you know something about modding that we don’t!

Is such a fun line.

[-] OwenEverbinde@reddthat.com 119 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know if this counts, since it's only a "true fact" if you are fine with carefully chosen words and the omission of crucial information...

But the 13-50 stat is dangerously misleading.

You know,

Black people make up 13% of the population, but 50% of the violent crime.

Black people in America do, in fact, make up 50% of the murder arrests according to FBI crime statistics

That much is true.

But certain people tend to use this fact to assert that police officers are far more likely to be killed by black people than by white people. Therefore, the stats that show them brutalizing black people at a higher rate -- since they fall short of that 50% number -- are evidence that they hold back around black people to avoid appearing racist.

The users of this stat heavily imply black people are more violent and murder-prone, and hence a greater threat. The argument also carries with it an implied benefit to eugenics or a return to slavery (to anyone paying attention.)

But no one using this stat ever explores potential causes for the arrest rate disparity, instead letting their viewers assume it comes from "black culture" (if they are closeted racists) or "bad genes" (if they are open racists).

There's no attention paid to the fact that black people make up over half of overturned wrongful convictions

There's no attention paid to the stats further down in that same FBI crime stats table that make it clear that black people make up 25% of the nation's drug arrests, despite making up close to 13% of the US's total drug users. (Their population's rate of drug use is within a margin of error of white people's rate of drug use). It should be strange that a small portion of the perpetrators of drug crimes make up such an outsized portion of the total drug arrests in this country. But the disparity doesn't even get a mention.

There's no attention paid to the fact that more than half of US murders go unsolved, meaning even assuming impartial sentencing and prosecution, we would only know black people committed 50% OF 50% of the murders -- 25%. And in a country where 98% of the land is owned by white people and the public defender system is in shambles? Which demographic do you think would be able to afford the best defense, avoiding conviction even when guilty, and ending up overrepresented in the "unsolved murder" category? If only 50% of murders end in a conviction, that means every murderer who walks into a courtroom has a solid chance at getting away with it. Even more solid if the murderer belongs to the richest race. The murder arrest rate by race winds up just being a measure of which demographics can afford the best lawyers, rather than any proportional representation of each demographic's tendencies.

They mention none of that. The people hawking this statistic intentionally lead their viewers to assume, "arrested for murder" is equivalent to "guilty of murder." And that 50% of the murder arrests is equivalent to 50% of the total murders. The entire demographic is assumed to be more dangerous.

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OwenEverbinde

joined 1 year ago