Marxism itself wasn’t necessarily tainted, but his ideas of socialism and communism definitely had a social stain associated with them. So by association it had a black mark.

I think it’s pretty clear that we haven’t seen it for what it was supposed to be, when it was weaponized by authoritarians and then attacked by capitalists. It’s supposed to be a grand thing of the people coming together, not stained in blood.

I think you may have misread what I said there about the reformist part. His ideas were revolutionary for the time, but many of the ideas could be applied by reformist.

I think his ideas can reform a capitalist system. It’s probably one of many ways his ideas get off the ground. The big thing was changing the system, it’s not necessarily all about how you get there.

What do you mean? A reformed and reforged system is a new system.

I could give you a multi-hour long breakdown of my views but something tells you’re not interested in a long-form dialogue here.

I think you’re spot on, Marx specifically has a lot of connotations the general, uninformed public is terrified of.

I remember when I had to read it for a class the first time and the vibes in the room was exactly like you’re opening some of book of sin. I was scared of a book, as a college student at the time. Then we actually started reading it, and it was like “wow this guy gets the issues of the system”.

While I personally have agreements and some disagreements with Marx, I think he helped give me a lot of solid ideas that the system itself could be reformed and reforged.

I think it’s a shame that his ideas had carried a public taint to them for so long, due to several authoritarians co-opting his message. I have no clue why it’s not required high school reading at this point, since I feel it’d go a long ways towards helping more people get curious about improving and changing the system for the better.

Teaching them about logical fallacies and how to spot them may be the best defense against these types of personalities imo. Many influencers that you’re concerned about try to prey upon these fallacies, so teaching your kids to spot them can help them to realize those people are full of shit.

Curating their content a bit to include more people you want them to be like can help as well, at least then they can have good people to look up to.

If your kids think you have their best interests in mind, I feel they’re less likely to push back and more likely to respect the boundaries you put down.

I’m all in on trying to reform tbh. If we want to do it right though, we need to change the voting system on in each state, like Alaska and Maine did.

Having an alternative voting system is how we can get more candidates like Mamdani in office, since we don’t have to worry about vote splitting between our preferred candidate and the incumbent.

First Past the Post voting is the predominant method for how voting is done in the US. It’s a winner takes all system where you can only pick one of the candidates on the ballot. I feel alternative voting makes way more sense since you can pick your preferred candidate(s) first and then have some back up options you’re personally okay with winning. We end up with so many do nothing incumbents since people worry about splitting their vote so much and letting the worst candidate win, due to the flaw of the system.

Let’s get the word out about alternative voting systems and organizations that promote them. Get involved locally can help scale it up as well. NYC uses an alternative voting system for instance.

Underrepresented BlueSky Social Media Accounts:

• Equal Vote Coalition - Social Media
• STAR Vote - Social Media
• Fair Vote - Social Media

Involvement Links:

• Equal Vote Coalition
• STAR Vote
• Fair Vote

Some of it had to do with there not being enough admins to go around afaik. Lemm.ee for instance couldn’t find enough admins so they shut down. Moderating an instance seems like one of the hurdles that go along with running an instance. I could imagine some people dipped out of Lemmy for a little while if their server was deleted since they’re starting from scratch again. It took me a good month or so to make this account and ramp back up my own activity here for instance.

The admins across the servers do a good job of keeping bots out imo. If it ever becomes a problem the admins could look to adopt BlueSky’s moderation tools down the line, I feel. As BlueSky makes it easy to filter bots, misinformation spreaders, and have user level content controls.

It is with my in-laws at least; well for some of them. It’s how they envision coming on top in their American Dream. They get to spend their weeks pumping themselves up thinking it’s their turn next to win and envisioning all the things they’ll get to do with all that money.

I would say the scam is convincing people that they are lucky and that they specifically will eventually hit it big in their lifetime. This exact gimmick is what prevents some people from voting against their best interests because they could one day hit it big at the lotto and be in the big leagues! Assuming they don’t blow all that wealth on poor financial decisions in the few years thereafter or win at all for that matter.

It’s not the solution, but one of many I would say and an important one at that.

Also, the UK uses First Past the Post for the House of Commons, mayoral elections in England, Police and Crime Commissioner elections and local councils.

They use Alternative Voting systems for some of their elections for like the chair of committees in the House of Commons and the Lord Speaker.

The system needs to change for it to not be a bifurcation, for all practical purposes. The system of voting needs to be changed from First Past the Post to be something like Ranked Robin voting, STAR voting, or Score voting. All of those are my preferred alternatives, but Ranked Choice is still solid over First Past the Post as well.

A different voting system enables third parties to hold real power and to grow in influence.

Oh for sure, there are a lot of different areas in education that need to be changed. We need to go back to teaching people how to think rather than prepping them to just memorize for the test. That’s not even mentioning the issue that AI can have on the learning processes.

If I recall correctly, Aristotle proposed something like only the educated being able to vote. I think if everyone was guaranteed free access to both a high school and college education, along with all food and living costs covered for anyone studying, then I could see having at least any associates level degree being an okay barrier of entry to voting.

However, such a thing would need to be protected by some unremovable barriers. For instance, education would need to continue receiving appropriate funding, food and other living costs such as renting a room would need to be covered even as the cost for these things change. People with disabilities would need to receive proper accommodations.

A caveat I’ll add is that there would need to be more community colleges built and much more funding for pre-K thru 12th grade as well.

No, no, no I think you’re confusing something. Subtitling trans people is actually turning the ants gay.

Such days don’t need to be so far away. I feel that taking in the joys of the moment has helped me a lot with being able to thoroughly enjoy the small things in life again. There could always be unpleasantness in front of me or behind me, but in this moment I can make space for the life I want to be living and being the person I want to be.