• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • BrotherL0v3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Be Wholesome@lemmy.world•Everyone deserves a joyful life
    61·
    1 month ago

    Been thru most of these. Lived with chronic pain. Wife and I lost our jobs this year within a few months of each other. Had someone credibly threaten to sue me for more than I could afford. Dealt with depression & suicidality. Worked from home with a gun on my desk because the cops wouldn’t do anything about my batshit insane neighbor.

    The list of problems I have proven to myself I can survive grows longer every day. I have the contact info for a good psychiatrist, lawyer, and physical therapist. I know who my support network is, and exactly how far I can stretch a dollar. Yes, bad things happen now that are worse than when I was younger. But I am stronger and more in control of my life. Problems that would have broken me down when I was just starting out are things I can now handle without so much as elevating my heart rate.

    And, there are new joys that have only become accessible to me through the benefit of experience! Fears I have conquered, hangups I have gotten over, people I have warmed up to.

    Getting older doesn’t just suck. I think it just seems that way because people (on the internet at least) find it really easy and relatable to complain.

  • BrotherL0v3@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•rule
    2·
    5 months ago

    Yeah! Kropotkin argues a couple points:

    • People are generally pretty good at self-organizing to solve problems, and have done so effectively in small communities for thousands of years.

    • We have the technology* and productive power to ensure everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.

    • Much of the scarcity we face today* is artificially created and entirely avoidable if we produce to meet needs instead of maximize profits.

    • Things like laziness, corruption, and greed can largely be addressed by ensuring that all of a person’s needs are guaranteed to be met. Many people we currently* call “lazy” are either stuck in a hyper-specialized job that they can’t leave because they need to sell their labor to survive, or unmotivated because much of the wealth they produce is absorbed by someone else. And people tend to take more than they need more often than not because they are stuck competing with their fellow man for resources instead of cooperating for the common good.

    He also does some back-of-the-napkin math to show that it takes less than a year’s worth of labor to produce everything a household needs for a year, and that the remaining labor time of that year should be open for people to cultivate different skills and pursue their passions. He argues that the distinction between what we today call blue-collar and white-collar work is unhealthy, and that everyone should do a bit of both.

    His central thesis IMO seems to be that in the event of a socialist revolution, people shouldn’t be afraid to immediately start doing socialism. Take inventory of the food & start giving it to the hungry, figure out how many empty houses the community has & start housing the homeless, stop growing cash crops / producing niche luxury goods and start growing food / manufacturing necessities until everyone’s needs are met. He sternly warns against half-measures: maintaining the state’s use of violence or keeping track of some kind of currency or propping up political leaders are all things he claims will spell the end of a revolution before it gets off the ground.

    I really loved the book. I feel like it provided a great example of what communism could (and IMO should) look like without all the baggage of so-called communist states like China and the USSR.

    *= The book was written in the late 1800s. I think a lot of it holds up really well and some points seemed like they really called events that would happen in the next hundred years. That being said, it’s probably not as airtight today as it may have been in 1894.

  • BrotherL0v3@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Why is coloring your face considered racist?
    212·
    5 months ago

    In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

    The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.

  • BrotherL0v3@lemmy.worldtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com•Thugs.English
    151·
    6 months ago

    Just to add onto what others are saying: to what extent do you think cops prevent crime? Most of what they do is catch people after the fact, and even then many (if not most) cases go unsolved.

    I don’t have the statistics in front of me at the moment, but the comparison that should be made is crime prevented by cops vs. crime that only exists because of cops, including things that cops just never get prosecuted for. I understand the impulse to think that cops are at least better than nothing, but I don’t honestly know if that’s true.