Well, that's why they call it Gas Giants.
Lefty Memes
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, discussion and agitprop/stuff that's better fit for a poster than a meme go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme. Please post agitprop here)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Try to use alt text or image descriptions to allow for greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We encourage alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
We are committed to social equity and to reducing barriers of entry, including (digital) communication and culture. It takes each of us only a few moments to make a whole world of content (more) accessible to a bunch of folks.
When alt text is absent, a reminder will be issued. If you don't add the missing alt text within 48 hours, the post will be removed. No hard feelings.
0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms
When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
- ofc => OFC
- af = AF
- ok => OK
- lol => LOL
- bc => BC
- bs => BS
- iirc => IIRC
- cia => CIA
- nato => Nato (you don't spell it when talking, right?)
- usa => USA
- prc => PRC
- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" (read: Dengists) (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
6. Don't irrationally idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Sexual assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
It's hard to know if the world would still suck the same under a different system.
But I agree lol
To be fair, what we have in most of the world isn’t actually raw/pure capitalism, most of the time called Laissez-faire capitalism. Most of the world has a mixed economy of different capitalism implantations across the board in different areas: state/regulated/corporate capitalism and best of all crony capitalism.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws. But I don’t have that much faith in human nature to not keep fucking it up like we’ve done so many times.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Here's the thing....that's true for literally every form of governance/economic planning you can conceive.
The problem with {socialism|capitalism|communism|anarchism} will always be "the ones with all the {de facto|de jure} power".
I'd go one further and note that environmentalism isn't exactly endemic outside the capitalist sphere of influence. The USSR was dirty af. Chinese Communists were openly antagonistic to environmental movements until the early '00s, when air quality in Beijing got so bad that the national leadership was forced to reconcile with it.
The real virtue of socialist policy is in it's ability to adapt democratically, while capitalists are bound up in authoritarian modes of production. But if the public at-large doesn't see the benefit of a good policy, there's nothing inherent to the mode of production that makes it cleaner.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Regulated capitalism is just a tiger by the tail. As soon as you lose you grip, it eats you.
The only way to keep mega-corps from writing policy is to abolish them. Otherwise, why wouldn't wealthy people try to beg, browbeat, or business plot a state government?
At some point, you need to eliminate the bourgeois class entirely. It's us or them, over a long enough timeline.
They lied to you. They made you believe the end goal looks like Coruscant or Trentor. Told you modernity and civilization will sacrifice nature but that something more beautiful will emerge. That it won't be easy for everyone, but overall, all will benefit from a planetary society. That is the lie. The end goal is Salusa Secundus. You will live in hell. We will turn on one another. You cannot escape. If you survive you will be fit enough to fight for the emperor. The emperor and his nobility don't live here, they are tucked away on Elysium. Good luck.
To be fair, taking Coruscant of all places as a golden centre is pretty laughable considering that even in the movies the planet was presented as a shithole for galactic politics.
Expanded material basically affirmed that there was entire landmasses of galactic shitfills underneath the surface.
unregulated captialism..
it wasn't always unregulated.
Okay but why does the picture look like someone put their phone on a flatbed scanner
Or they took a picture of another screen and the camera's refresh rate caught the display's scan line.
Do LCDs have scanlines? I thought that was a CRT thing.
When I take a picture of the radio LCD in my car it has those exact same lines unless I angle the phone in a very specific way.
I don't know if it's the reason for this but even with modern screens you can get screen tearing, which is why stuff like vsync exists. It happens when there's a very brief mismatch in refresh rates. 
IDK if capitalism is evil on its own. It's just an idea. I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think if a better system is implemented in the future, that that would be a permanent solution for all of our problems either. It's all just the same cycle repeating with different faces and places.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't still strive for a better life for those who come after, and to take care of this planet like we can and should, but I think it's kind of silly to blame some ideas when we can just look in the mirror and see what the problem really is.
Well... what the past hundreds of years of capitalism has shown us is that it has many faults in practice and is causing the destruction of the environment, no? You can have the greatest, most amazing idea in the world, but if it sucks in implementation it's not a good idea. You may be on the right track though, I would recommend you watch some videos by the youtube channel Second Thought on socialism
The issue is there's no real reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism. Countless societies over the ages have faced environmental collapse. The Maya were hardly devout capitalists. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea. Prehistoric stateless humans drove most of the planet's megafauna to extinction.
We seem pretty capable of decimating the environment regardless of our economic system. A worker-owned co-op can tear down a rainforest just as well as a regular company can.
There is actually plenty of reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism, given that capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences. The two prehistoric examples you gave don't really make much sense anymore, given that we now possess significantly more knowledge about how our actions affect the environment, as well as the tools to alter the environment in general. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea because they were in need of cotton, but this doesn't really have much to do with what economic system the soviet union used, just that they were a country that made mistakes. Simply put, capitalism actively incentivizes the destruction of the environment while socialism does not. The People's Republic of China is the world leader in renewable energy production, has significantly increased its forest coverage, and its CO2 emissions have already peaked.
A better question for the last example you gave might be, would a worker-owned co-op, with the interests of its workers in mind, want to tear down a rainforest to the same degree as a regular company? Or would they deforest at a more responsible level, planting replacement trees in order to guarantee a stable resource and not destroy the environment the workers live in (assuming the workers are owning a co-op in their own rainforest)?
It’s not capitalism per se. It’s the lazy, stupid populace that allows the system of regulatory capture we have.
The fossil fuel industry also gets a metric fuck ton of tax payer funded subsidies. That’s not capitalism. That’s a quasi state economy.
In a true capitalist system, we’d see more competitive forms of energy taking off, like solar and wind which are cheaper than fossil fuels at this point. But because the government keeps fossil fuels going, we’re not getting off them.
The word 'competition" here is the trap.
Competition encourages you to seek every loophole and exploit to keep ahead, even if it means kneecapping yourself in the long term. It's no different than an athelete drugging themselves up for the Olympic Gold Medal just to end up hospitalised for the rest of their lives.
Regulations are just another barrier to be bypassed under the law of competition. Why? Because optimising fun out of the equation is the meta.
I think it's inevitable of any human system that it eventually is undermined by greed and selfishness. Some systems are just more prone to it.
If a system were to work, it would have a way to deal with the psychopaths and other cluster b folks. It's always been us vs them, throughout history.