Right, isolating the US is good for everyone else, the more tied to us they are the more leverage we have over them and the worse we can hurt them if they don’t do the evil things we expect of them. Weakening the US is critical to the freedom and dignity of humanity.
I think there was a culture shock when federation first hit. We had a ton of ‘engagement’ from people who were using ableist, racist, and transphobic slurs, which brought out strong reactions from our community because we believe its important to shut that stuff down on solidarity with our comrades. And as things got heated I think our willingness to believe people wanted good faith debate eroded.
We do love a good dunking though, and I think overall the community has a lower threshold for going full pig poop balls on people than I would prefer.
"In their defense westerners love to share a meme about an Asian man being yellow. Maybe it’s not racist. "
Then why do it? You’re the only one in this whole thread with any issue, unless you can point to someone else who has had it. The most desperate form of deflection was using upvotes/downvotes as a point like populists always do.
But they aren’t the only person here with an issue. My comment wasn’t as confrontational but I also clearly raised a red flag at the question being asked and the reasons people start asking these kinds of questions. I also see what you’re doing. I just don’t want to spend the next week doing this thing you’re calling a debate.
Right, people miss this but its literally one of the basic ideas of capitalist production. Mom and Pop might be nice people but the market WILL destroy them if they don’t participate in the most cutthroat practices to stay competitive. Forces are at play that supercede the morality of any actor.
Because the two things aren’t actually the same and because of what it means in context to oppose a culture vs. a cult. You might oppose scientology in a variety of ways, they have a leader, buildings, staff, bank accounts, a documented history of infiltrating the government and harassing people, a curated list of members etc.
A cult may or may not have all of those but they’re a different kind of thing than a culture. Cultures are social categories that encompass a much wider range of human behaviors for one, they include things like sport and art and language. Festivals and practices and food and manners. They’re things a human can’t really help having even if you can choose to adopt parts and change others. Religion, which is a thing you seem to be conflating with culture, is just a part of culture. Egyptian Copts have Christianity like many Americans. They are also very different culturally.
But the bigger reason people should be very careful when people start criticizing culture is because we know what that means. What does one do about “cultural Bolshevism?”
What do conservatives actually want done about “Black culture?” What did bringing “culture” to the “savages” mean? How does someone stop being from a culture?
We know how those questions get answered. And that tells us something about why those questions might be asked in the first place.
I think that’s a slight exaggeration, although I get what you’re saying. But I think it’s important to demonstrate to libs that I’m being consistent so I’ll explain what I mean.
I don’t think the communal decision making bodies that spun up in the wake of the Japanese evacuation were necessarily completely aligned with Kim or the communists in exile, it was virtually impossible to maintain a functioning domestic apparatus and what I’ve read makes it seem like these were mostly improvisational.
That said, I think in the long run you’re right, I see it as similar to Vietnam later: because US foreign policy was aligned with elements that were naturally unpopular to the population of the country (in Korea’s case, the Japanese and domestic collaborators) a democratic resolution of the question of what sort of government a united Korea would chose for itself was not going to be an acceptable outcome to the US.
But we don’t know what they would organically choose for themselves because that decision was foreclosed by US occupation. I suspect a popular referendum was the best possible outcome but I think it would probably look very different from the current DPRK, for understandable reasons.
Yeah I don’t think they shouldn’t be allowed, but I also believe it would be a bad idea.
Yankees really lived through Afghanistan and Iraq and learned about Vietnam and still think they are being given accurate narratives of state enemies now. I had hoped by now we might see even the most rudimentary skepticism of US media but alas.
They were not though, neither the communists nor the Japanese collaborators believed the line was a legitimate or permanent division of the country. The plan was always reunification and no Korean party accepted the terms you’re talking about.
Ironically there was an independent government emerging in the wake of the collapse of Japan but the US occupation outlawed it when they came in.
I mean if you’re not positive that workers will reap the benefits of it it makes sense to resist. The poster is more specific: it says to fight the fallout of automation, less pay and more work for a smaller group of people. The Luddites are a joke to a lot of people these days but they correctly identified that automation was making their jobs worse and making everyone who did them more miserable.
Given how automation has impacted other communities in this country (take a trip through coal country some time) I think it’s wise to be skeptical. I’d love to live in a world where we don’t have to work because it’s all automated and I can go paint landscapes or whatever, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen.
What the fuck even is this question? Is it a joke I don’t understand?
I can’t in good conscience make a worker’s day worse because of something they don’t control, but I understand the sentiment. I agree though that collective action is probably our best shot at seeing change.
The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don’t answer the phone unless I’ve told someone to call me because it’s always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn’t ask for so I don’t check in much, now they’ve got robots texting me scams. I can’t even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole’s quarterly report.
Hell yeah! 
Forreal your instance might be the one I’m most confused by, you’ve got like a 50/50 split of chill people who are okay with conversation and people who drop slurs and reply to any attempt at engagement in memes and 
gotcha one-liners.
I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.
When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.
So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.
The function of a ratchet is to make an object go in one direction more easily. Democrats fulfill a function in propeling the country rightward. This was arguably not true 80 years ago but post-Reagan they are part of a process of rightward movement. Voting for and legitimizing them is moving the country right and making things worse.