orca

orca, 1 day ago

This community is wild. Any time you criticize Biden, all of the leftists suddenly turn into liberals. The meme is funny as long as you don’t take it too serious. I mean, it has Netanyahu as the Kevin James meme lmao.

orca, 1 day ago

“Voting is your right and your freedom!”

votes third party

“Noooo! Not like that!”

orca, 1 day ago

The problem is that the whole thing has been hijacked to always be an endless ping pong match between two parties that ultimately benefit from the same things. It’s essentially varying shades of fascism. Bernie was made an example when the rug was pulled out from under him and he had to back Hillary of all people.

orca, 1 day ago

That probably explains it. The same old knives come out whenever you criticize the shitty D candidate every 4 years.

orca, 1 day ago

I don’t know how far anything in the Democratic party is going to fly now that it has bankrolling and supporting a genocide under its belt. Any chance they had to prove they aren’t just corporate warmongers has been shredded. They’re going to be a hard sell for the new generation unless they can do some magic.

orca, 2 days ago

Looks at the list of partners**762 partners total🤯

orca, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I think what annoys me is when people assume I support shit like the CCP or Putin just because of my leftist views, or because I didn’t make sure to criticize them every single time I criticize anything/anyone else (good ol’ whataboutism). The amount of times I’ve been attacked by supposed leftists that are really just liberals in disguise, is far too high.

“Hey, you didn’t criticize Putin in your comment that clearly isn’t even about Putin in any way, so I’m going to make a sweeping assumption and say that you support him.”

Don’t criticize Biden here, or they automatically say that you want Cheeto Hitler to win and you’re actually a fascist. So many people fail to see that their commentary and childish reductionism is counterproductive to a leftist movement. They also fail to see that what they’re doing is a tactic of neoliberals and fascists. It’s divisive language that solves nothing, and is used to always keep the opposition in a defensive stance. We’re seeing it first hand today with Israel and the US government repeatedly stating that defending Palestine is considered antisemitism. They went as far as redefining the word entirely just so they can drown out the peace movement with noise.

orca, 4 days ago

The left should start arming themselves. That’s my takeaway anyway.

orca, 6 days ago

This is actually a thing. It’s called “Model Collapse”. You can read about it here.

orca, 7 days ago

No matter what choice you make, fascism still wins. That’s just the American way. You can have covert fascism, or overt fascism.

orca, 7 days ago

Fascism is already winning. It’s going to win regardless of whether we vote for Trump or Biden. That’s just the reality of it. Vote for whoever the fuck you want. That’s your freedom. Just know that in America, the ruling class will never part with even a shred of their power.

orca, 6 days ago

It’s not giving up though; it’s acknowledging a reality and making a decision with that information. The alternative is that we get stuck in this nauseating infinite loop of voting for “the lesser of two evils,” while the working class bicker. Both sides aren’t the same, but they lead to the same outcome—as we’ve seen over and over. This is the trap they have put us in and these are the intended results.

orca, 6 days ago

It’s not giving up; it’s acknowledging the reality of the Groundhog Day movie we’re stuck in, and doing what you will with that information. This endless circle of the working class bickering over “the lesser of two evils” every 4 years needs to end.

orca, 6 days ago

It’s a situation with no correct answer, and that’s what makes it so frustrating. That’s generally why I point out that we’re just looking at different flavors of fascism, but people should still vote however the hell they want, or don’t.

orca, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

We should remember who is parroting the “unskilled jobs” thing over and over. It’s always capitalists that benefit from paying these folks poverty wages like the meme states. So while the category can be called “unskilled” to differentiate from jobs that require months/years of formal (or informal) training, capitalists use it as an excuse to exploit. Both things can be true at the same time for different reasons.

I learned how to drive a forklift in a day for a stock room. Capitalists would still call it an “unskilled” job because I didn’t put myself into massive debt with a student loan, spending time I don’t have in a classroom. When does that job suddenly become “skilled”? Is there some imaginary threshold capitalists will accept?

Anyone that is contributing to the pool of labor is using a skill of some sort. Whether you think your job is easier than another or not doesn’t matter. All of the voids are filled with people willing to do a skill. CEOs and landlords, on the other hand, are contributing nothing to the labor pool. Simply owning a thing is not skilled work, but they will tell you otherwise, just like they set the standards for what is “skilled” vs “unskilled.” It’s all skewed to benefit the ruling class and give them an excuse to not pay a living wage.

For context, I’m a programmer that has been in the field for 18 years. Until the working class undoes this conditioning and equally supports each other, nothing will change for the better.

orca, 8 days ago

Yeah, exactly. There are tons of people out there that have amazing soft skills and curiosity they don’t get paid anything extra to put forward. Now we have this stupid phrase “quiet quitting” for people that are doing exactly what they are paid to do, while contributing nothing over and above. Capitalists will constantly demand the “over and above” in things like annual reviews etc, but they rarely compensate to match it. It’s a system where one side holds all of the leverage.

orca, 9 days ago

Temu?

orca, 10 days ago

Oh shit, I forgot all about Telegram. Bluesky is in the ring now too, but I don’t really know much about it.

orca, 10 days ago

It’s not about trusting TikTok. It’s about understanding that we have a terrible tech company, vs a terrible government. But at the same time, it has helped radicalize and inform so many in the ranks of Gen Z, amongst other generations. Even if you skip past the 24/7 stream of Gaza coverage ( which we absolutely need since Israel has murdered something like 121 journalists in Gaza), you’ll find videos of Gen Z and other folks making videos that layout documented history, protest methods, agitprop, and their own amateur journalism to others. That has value, even if the source is just in it for the notoriety and money. It’s an awkward position where it becomes a tool to the revolution, because it’s in opposition (for its own gain), but is never trustworthy.

orca, 10 days ago

It didn’t invent it. It just caught on at the right time and amplified that knowledge. It’s also a network. I don’t get TikTok but I’ve seen how popular it is in the new generations. This isn’t new knowledge; it’s just new packaging for a plugged-in-since-birth generation.

I’m too old for TikTok. Old Twitter, Reddit before it went to shit, niche message boards. That’s where I used to hang. Now it’s gathering communities I like on my own Lemmy server.

orca, 10 days ago

I have a feeling these questions are trying to feel out whether or not I’m a fan of the authoritarian flavor of communism and that’s a nope lol. I’m not on Lemmygrad or Hexbear. I don’t like police regardless of the continent or any other factor. We are seeing power vacuums in 2 very different types of authoritarian structures and none of them pan out to anything good for the working class.

I keep it simple: it’s always the working class vs the ruling class.

That said, refreshing myself on the Uyghur internment camps and then comparing them to the recently uncovered concentration camps that Israel has in the desert, and seeing the similarities, is unnerving. One exists to allegedly indoctrinate a population, while the other exists to exterminate it. There is a Venn diagram here somewhere.

orca, 10 days ago

The TikTok ban is a weird gray area. It’s one of those things where I don’t like any of these tech companies or the fact that they are essentially monetizing terror, and I will never have allegiance to them or the entities that influence them to deceive and profit themselves, but it’s also a pipeline for information either way—which is something we are lacking more and more of every day with the constant deaths of journalists and journalist outlets. People need to remember that no one is immune to propaganda and we should take all of the information with a grain of salt.

But if we’re talking about the things happening in Gaza, any eyes we can get add value. It’s not like this is some new event that we don’t have documented history on. We’re witnessing the next stage of the genocide, and TikTok (hate it or love it) has helped expose a lot of the atrocities (in the same way that Twitter used to).

It’s really not a stretch to say that anti-imperialist governments and individuals benefit from this because it exposes the atrocities the US and Britain have been perpetuating for years. Of course that’s a benefit to them. It’s also a benefit to the people forced to live under the governments committing those atrocities.

orca, 10 days ago

I’m against both of them. It’s imprisonment, torture and forced assimilation. It should be an easy decision for anyone that is also against what the Nazis did and Israel is doing.

orca, 9 days ago

As soon as I smell authoritarianism, it’s a no from me. Even as someone that reads communist and socialist theory. I think people take too much of the past and try to apply it as-is to the world of today. But it doesn’t work. Modern times require modernized ideas, and I sometimes wish people had more imagination.

orca, 9 days ago

The “bad” ones just float to the top when a government is around long enough. It’s human nature. The ones seeking power and money see others seeking the same, and they look at them as a rung on a ladder. They help each other because it benefits them. They actively work to shut out the “good” ones because they know they’ll lose their spot to them if they aren’t careful. Suddenly the “good” ones are lost in the noise. The incorruptible become powerless.

It’s similar to the police force in the US, for example. People go in with good intentions, but the force has been around long enough that the mad dogs have already permeated all of the top ranks. So the “good” ones either wash out, or they assimilate. One of my relatives washed out, while the one that had been there much longer turned into a massive racist. Which one do you think climbed the ranks quicker?

Power structures automatically attract selfish, self-serving people that just become worse offenders the more wealthy and powerful they become. Power is a vacuum after all, and there are plenty of bad people standing in line to fill it. This is why I don’t trust a single politician. Whether they want to admit it or not, under that facade of wanting to change their city or “do good,” there is some underlying desire for power and attention. That doesn’t mean none of them do anything good in their time though; it just means we should be cautious.