The only way that could conceivably work out is if everyone collectively protested their student loans together since it’s such a massive problem for so many people. Even then, the government would probably buckle down and try to destroy half the country’s financial viability before they caved and admitted this toxic industry preyed on kids that didn’t know what that debt meant when they signed up for it.

Lmao, unfortunately not. Thanks for catching the typo.

isn’t**

Oh it definitely happens. I’m a young millennial and I have a friend my age who deals with mental issues because he ate lead paint leftover in their old house as a child. Lead was so prevalent at one point that getting rid of it all isn’t as simple as flipping a switch.

Edit: [wasn’t -> isn’t] There does not in fact exist a switch that we can now flip to remove lead. Thanks @Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works.

How a person reacts to being asked about the version of these things most close to them is telling. If they get defensive and deny the event happened, I would hesitate to trust their opinion on other things. Clearly that person bases their opinions on what they want to be true rather than reality. That’s the kind of person whose ideology would likely lead to another event to be ashamed of. If, on the other hand, they admit it was a horrible thing and agree that people should be educated on it and that steps should be taken to prevent it from ever happening again, then I’m more likely to take their opinion seriously and believe that they can be part of the conversations we need to happen to create a better world.

From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it’s actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they’re circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we’re going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren’t available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that’s going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.

I don’t think this is all that dissimilar from how Reddit was though if you were subscribed to two world news subreddits and two technology subreddits. I think the key is picking out the more popular communities and only subscribing to those. Eventually the goal would be for the less popular communities to fizzle out in favor of bigger communities.

You are just a capitalist that likes welfare. Your ideology has absolutely no desire to change the ruling class or overturn the system that is currently burning the world and leading us to destruction.

I don’t think you help your case arguing this way. I’m not even dissecting socialism when I say that - just your approach to argument. You don’t know my ideology. Creating a strawman of my views isn’t going to convince me or anyone else that you have a good point. Hell, for a long time I did consider myself an actual socialist. I would love to lay out my reasons for my movement away from that, but I’m not sure you’re ready to have that respectful exchange of views.

The liberals obsessed with the “nordic model” still would’ve downvoted it. They don’t like having to wrestle with the reality of climate change. Our options are socialism or extinction.

Beginning an argument with “Your head is up your ass so far that I won’t bother arguing. I’m right no matter what.” is a sure way to have people dismiss your arguments outright. I say this all because I want my opponents to be good at arguing. I want to hear persuasive viewpoints. I don’t believe for a moment that I have all the answers, so I welcome any opposition to the beliefs that I’ve come to possess. If you believe that you have the answers, then I’m genuinely all ears. But unfortunately, arguing isn’t about being right - it’s about persuading other people that you are. The internet has made it easy to lose sight of this and argue with hostility instead of respect. I’m trying to be sincere here. Please consider the purpose of getting into these internet spats. I see so much hostility outright from people on the left and it genuinely sucks. I find that when I try to dig even a little bit into arguments for socialism or communism that I often hit this barrier of hostility. It’s not a good way of selling a viewpoint. And you can say that it’s not your job, but then I ask why we’re even here having this conversation.

Now, I’ll stop patronizing you. I’ll throw my argument out there so you can tear it to pieces. Back to labels - what socialism looks like to you depends on who you are. You say it’s when “the old institutions are thrown out and the new institutions are introduced”. I’ll take that to mean some form of government is in possession of the means of production across the board? My hesitancy towards socialism is mostly centered on my knowledge of history and the repeated trends of powerful institutions decaying into corruption and greed. I think socialism could genuinely work really well as long as the people in charge were kept honest. But my skepticism is towards the long term sustainability of such a system. Time and again we see institutions decay and fall prey to humanity’s worst impulses. The fall of the Roman Republic (and the regular chaos of the Roman Empire for that matter) is my classic go-to for this, but there are plenty of non-western examples as well. The best cases I’ve seen in my studies of various histories seem to be centered around cultures that dispersed their power into many smaller institutions. My problem with socialism is that it inherently says “we’re going to get rid of business corruption and government corruption by combining the two”. I think creating an even smaller, more focused center of power in society is a dangerous proposal - it becomes all the more easy for the wealthy elites to worm their way into that power and take control. Essentially you’re taking all of those wealthy capitalist greedy dirtbags and then moving them into the government.

Capitalism, on the other hand, removes business from government which allows, in theory, for the government to act as a counter-weight to business. Now, you and I both know that that hasn’t stopped wealthy elites from worming their way into capitalism and capturing government interests. But my main point here is that socialism isn’t solving that problem. It’s throwing fuel on the fire by cutting out the one supposed protection we do have, which is a separation of government interests and business interests. Ostensibly, when capitalism is working the way it should, the government is acting as a counterweight to business greed. I think there are better ways to strengthen that counterweight that don’t necessarily fall under the label of “socialism”. I think heavily regulated capitalism is better than outright socialism because in the ideal case the government is still acting as a tool of the people, flexing its power in opposition to businesses. The ideal case in socialism has the government acting as the businesses itself, which I believe would encourage greed and would actually cause even less incentive to address things like climate change.

Yeah. Like saying you believe that companies beyond a certain size should be legally required to seek a vote from their employees before implementing certain types of changes is a real policy to argue about. Call it democratizing business or whatever you want. And then that’s an actual concrete issue we can argue about. Or if you believe in the government buying out businesses beyond a certain size, that’s a specific conversation we can have and we can discuss the hypothetical implementation of that. Call it business seizure or whatever. Just saying “I believe in socialism” doesn’t dig enough into the details of how you perceive socialism or how you would implement it. And frankly, I think it hurts the socialists or communists or whoever is trying to persuade the current culture away from what we have more than anybody else. Ideas grow when you make real, concrete proposals. These exceedingly large scale labels usually end up killing a conversation rather than feeding it. Someone gets mad at a label and then everything shuts down on that sticking point.

I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to “socialism”? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say “well that wasn’t true x”. And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’ve been mostly telling people I’m a “social democrat” or that I support “capitalism with heavy regulations”. But even those words can get picked apart and don’t really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.

Honestly, I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to “socialism”? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say “well that wasn’t true x”. And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’ve been mostly telling people I’m a “social democrat” or that I support “capitalism with heavy regulations”. But even those words can get picked apart and don’t really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.

Honestly it would probably take around five minutes for FOX news to 180° flip the minds of most American conservatives these days with how little commitment they have to ideological consistency. I could absolutely see Republicans hating Russia tomorrow for some stupid reason like Putin saying something bad about Trump or Russia accidentally helping their gays be slightly less miserable.

God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant

My grandma fell for a scammer that was pretending to be one of her grandchildren stuck in a jail in Mexico over a mixup. No AI voice or anything, just an actor and a vulnerable 90+ year old woman. She sent the scammer $10,000. I cannot fucking begin to imagine what AI is going to do to the scamming industry.

Okay, so think of every website that is part of the “Fediverse” (aka uses “ActivityPub”) as just being different ways to display the exact same data. Sometimes their data works really well between two of them and sometimes it’s a bit more awkward. Lemmy and Kbin are both trying to imitate the “forum-style” UI that Reddit uses, so they integrate really well with each other. Same data, slightly different UI. Mastodon, on the other hand is imitating Twitter. So trying to read Mastodon in Lemmy is like trying to read a Twitter feed as Reddit threads. It’s messier. Kbin seems to be trying to find a way to better display Mastodon-style threads within their UI. Otherwise, I think the big picture way to understand the difference is just that it’s a matter of UI and which one you prefer more.

I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There’s also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here’s the Axios article they banned a user for posting.

All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of “Orientalism”. Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.

It is known.