• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • I used to think this way when I was miserable and disillusioned with society in general. When you approach life with the assumption that people are evil by default you tend to only notice things which affirm that belief. I’ve since made a lot of changes in my life and gained a new perspective, and I’ve found that I more frequently notice people doing small acts of kindness when they think no one’s looking. Most people want to do good, it’s just that they don’t often succeed.










  • I agree with your broader point but the bit about supporting auth-left fighting Nazis is a risky bet. I don’t think we’re close to having a marxist-leninist vanguard party overthrow the regime here in the US, but historically when they have been empowered to enact violence against fascists they end up taking the state monopoly on violence for themselves and turning it on anarchists and other socialists with slight disagreements.

    But Iike you said, they’re not the ones controlling the state at the moment. It’s just something to keep in mind for the future in case an ML vanguard party leading a revolution in the US actually ends up being on the table. Depending on how bad things get a lot of people might consider it worth the risk.




  • Late 20s, moved to lemmy during the Reddit API scandal like a lot of others, so it’s a deliberate anti-corporate choice. I’ve always been techy (I worked as a software developer at the time I made the switch) and I’ve always hated the corporate social media platforms. Reddit was the only social media that I ever used extensively and the API fiasco was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This may or may not be true for others who switched around the same time but it coincided with my political views becoming more radical; I used to consider myself a social democrat but by the time I fled Reddit I fully considered myself socialist and was on my way to becoming an anarchist.


  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldReporting an absence
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    24 days ago

    It’s hard to tell with the low resolution, but this looks like AI to me. The guy on the left’s feet look weird, and also the bricks don’t appear to have a consistent pattern. The layout of the house with the two garages separated by what I guess is a hallway also doesn’t make sense to me.






  • I think the world is more complex than any individual person can possibly comprehend, but that doesn’t make us incapable of moral judgement or unable to imagine radical alternatives to the status quo. Yes, things are the way they are now for a reason, but rarely a good reason. I see the appeal to complexity as a cognitive trap serving as a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s the trap that a lot of social democrats have fallen into. It is easier to stick to what you know than to speculate about a world you’ve never experienced, but I promise you the latter is more fulfilling and a great antidote to cynicism.

    I won’t speak for you, but when I was a social democrat I was pretty miserable and cynical. I recommend the book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, as it is what snapped me out of being a social democrat, personally. That sent me into the world of radical politics and I found footing by reading David Graeber (The History Of Everything, Bullshit Jobs, etc.) which helped me put my thoughts into perspective and realize my beliefs had already been fairly anarchist for a while. I’m not an anti-realist like a lot of anarchists are, my worldview is still grounded in materialism, but I have become a bit more agnostic in that regard over time.


  • Alright, I’ll have a go at guessing your ideology since you asked. Given your status quo preference (“the generations before us aren’t stupid and things are the way they are for a good reason”), you’re not a radical so that leaves conservative, liberal, or centrist. Given you’ve implied that you used to have some anarchist beliefs it’s unlikely you went from that to conservative, so most likely you’re some flavor of liberal, like a social democrat. You’re vaguely sympathetic to some socialist and anarchist ideas but think you’re too smart to commit to them because the world is “just more complicated than that.” Capitalist realism has pulled you back from becoming a radical as you’ve gotten older.