Is because communists seek consensus, not just majority.

Voting in liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) is like everything else you experience in capitalism; it's alienating and alienated.

We'll focus on the alienated part. The liberal vote goes like this: here's the question, you can answer yes or no, knock yourself out.

They don't care about anything else. They don't care if you're educated or not about the question, or the reasons you might have to be voting one way or the other. All they care about is the box checked on the ballot, and then whichever option gets the most votes, even if it's one single extra vote, wins.

The communist vote goes like that: here's the question, why do you want to vote yes or no?

We build consensus. Build is the keyword here: consensus is not reached by random luck or letting enough time pass, it's a conscious effort that you have to make.

We educate people about the question and their choices, we try to understand why they lean one way or the other, and then we talk with them to give them all the facts they need to make an informed decision.

It's something we naturally started doing on ProleWiki, we try to reach a consensus for most decisions (the most common ones being account requests). If someone votes no, we want to know their arguments for it, and that's why most account requests end up with a pure 9-0 result or similar; we talk and convince people to reach one decision or the other. We motivate our own decisions as well; whether you vote yes or no, you're encouraged to explain why -- votes are not yet anonymous in our case.

But there is debate happening, which is healthy and helps reach a better solution.

It's also what Cuba did for their new constitution. The way these votes happen in liberal democracies is, again, they give you the question, they give you the changes that would happen, and they ask you yes or no and that's it. The way Cuba did it was to first talk with communities and their citizens, before any vote even took place. Then they refined a proposal based on these discussions, submit drafts for auditing by the population, and then finally the vote happened.

-> Prigozhin claims russian military hit Wagner camp

-> in an audio recording, says his men are marching to the MoD and will attack anyone that stands in their way

-> MoD denies the accusations

-> FSB (security service) puts warrants for Prigozhin's arrest, the charge being inciting a coup.

Sputnik News article: https://sputnikglobe.com/20230623/russian-ministry-of-defense-denies-media-reports-of-strikes-on-wagner-positions-1111429344.html but if you click on the twitter link you can like our tweet uwu

can't wait to see the results!

spoiler

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1e/92/14/1e921456d6fac9041e7dcd09c926f720.jpg

This is the only reasonable argument, but I know rabid liberals frothing at the mouth over more dead Russians don't want to see it.

Still, for those who are still reasonable in their goals and ends, and the outcome they actually want to see, there's only one solution.

The argument on the pro-UA side is that Putin has the "choice" to just up and leave Ukraine at any time. I've written before about why he doesn't -- not after all the sanctions, not after all the resources and troops committed. NATO/Europe will not say "alright you're a good sport mate, we'll drop the sanctions and pretend this whole thing never happened, deal?". There's a "warrant" out for Putin at the ICC, what makes anyone sincerely believe things can go back to where they were before for Russia?

It should hopefully be clear that the people calling for Putin to just "leave Ukraine" know they're not being reasonable. These are some of the same people who also cheer when Ukraine gets new weapons to kill more Russians with. The goal for this segment is not peace, it's actually to prolong the war.

I'm addressing the reasonable side, however, who might have been inadvertently taken in by this psyop. I mean, isn't it weird how NAFO suddenly popped up everywhere and got media coverage? After they're doing the exact same thing as the Lithuanian elves (because elves fight against orcs) did back in 2014, and it turned out the "elves" were NATO?

Saying Putin can just leave Ukraine is impotent rage. Yeah, sure, I'm just gonna give him a quick call. He really cares what some westerners think about his war, especially now that he has to contend against NATO intervention. I'm sure we can totally convince him he's being a total nerd if we just yell about it on Twitter.

So if you actually want peace, what's the reasonable solution?

Organise locally, petition your government to stop sending money and weapons to Ukraine. Organise and protest for a peace deal. I know it's probably not what you want to hear.

But these weapons prolong the war. Just earlier today I saw a video of an APC full of 8+ Ukrainians get obliterated by a missile strike. Where did they get that APC do you think?

Do you want Ukrainians to stop dying? Me too. The most pragmatic way, the only one towards which we can actually do something, is to protest against our governments sending equipment that prolong this war.

Otherwise you have to realise this war is going to be fought to the last Ukrainian. Do you really think it's weakening Russia in any lasting capacity? The fighting is happening in Ukraine. Ukraine has been losing population consistently since 1990 (a whole fifth of it lost, mostly, to emigration). What exactly is weakening in Russia? It's Ukraine that's being destroyed and will need to be rebuilt. It's Ukraine that's losing their population by the thousands. It's Ukraine that's shooting depleted uranium bullets on their own soil.

What you're advocating for, when you advocate to prolong this war, is to kill every last Ukrainian and turn their country into a wasteland. The UA army is even using depleted uranium bullets now (courtesy of US and UK), which have polluted the land when they were used in Iraq. This is backed up by data, right? Depleted uranium has data behind it, it's not speculation.

The reason the war is being prolonged is because it makes a lot of money to the military-industrial complex. It makes a lot of money to corporations due to the inflation. A blackrock affiliate said on hidden camera recently that when Russia blows up a grain silo, the price of wheat goes up. War is a great business opportunity, always has been. And then when Ukraine will need to be rebuilt, it'll make Blackrock a lot more money.

But I'm not sure who they will rebuild the country for if there's no one else left to live in Ukraine.

My solution is the only one that makes sense. Any other is purely impotent and just venting frustrations, not effecting any actual change.

Link: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/479221

It's our duty to make sure fascism does not spread on the fediverse, comrades.

This is a hypothetical.

I literally said this yesterday, Lemmygrad is the instance preventing fascists from invading Lemmy, and they will never forgive us for it.

We heard you loud and clear comrades, and we're designing a survey! Any suggestion for questions as well as options to pick from can be made in this thread.

We were talking about the demographics of Lemmygrad yesterday, and someone pointed out the possibility of doing a survey.

Is that something you'd be interested in? We can ask stuff like how long you've known about lemmygrad, gender identity, nationality, etc. to get an idea of exactly how many of us here are minorities in some way.

But in proper survey format and everything. It would be anonymous, at best we get your country code (automatically sent to the survey software on top of your answers) so you can use a VPN if you want to.

[to be clear this is not official leftypedia stance but, you guessed it, wisconcom striking again]

Apparently we claim to have 10k users (despite the auto-generated widgets saying 7.77k total). Not even one paragraph in and there's two lies already lol

But the best part was this:

!

Which I guess is part of our lore now.

But I urge you to read the whole page because the whole thing is pretty funny. Like linking to a lemmy thread to talk about our rules lol

Also once again I know wisconcom reads this so hi. Please find something better to do with your time. Leftypedia lets you edit and clearly doesn't care enough to ban you after repeated warnings, why don't you edit stuff about history or anti-revisionism? Like who actually spends this amount of time writing an entire essay full of fabricated facts and bad faith lies?

So documents were uncovered recently that show "Beau of the fifth column", a breadtuber, was convicted on federal charges to 60 years in prison commutted to just 60 days. Then the government gave him back his properties, and he reappeared sometime after that as "Beau", a fake name with a fake accent he uses to sound like a conservative blue-collar type guy.

Usually if the government hands out seized property, they need to give a reason, but they didn't. Additionally the prosecutor did not charge crimes they could have probably charged, like assault (not battery) and possibly kidnapping.

The charges were on human trafficking, which however doesn't mean much: the government considers that bringing people into the country under the wrong visa is human trafficking, even if you do it for selfless reasons.

It seems the reasons were not selfless though. Beau and three others formulated a plan to bring in female workers from Slovenia, Croatia, and bordering countries to the US to subcontract them as hotel staff. Temp working is of course legal and many people do it already, and I still think bringing people into a country so they can have a better life (and they consent to it) is a based thing, but what the suit doesn't show (because they didn't charge it) is that:

• They would house the workers and make them pay for rent, I think also preventing them from finding their own place.
• They would also bus them to work and make them pay for it, again with no other option.
• Testimonies allege verbal abuse, threats and insults to the workers who sometimes lived with up to 15 other roommates in a hotel room.
• They made the workers pay 2500$ for a visa application that usually costs up to 200$.

What got him in hot water was the visas, since they falsified the employer as the hotel instead of their company (Eurohouse). This was in 2003 up to 2007 btw.

It's becoming clear that Beau is an FBI informant. Why else would they reduce his sentence and give him back his property? He was not on the left before, he used to write about Anonymous and that's about it. Then he reemerges with a fake persona, a "socialist" outlook, and starts saying fed stuff like that people should not apply for a permit before a protest and the organisers should not tell this to participants (a cool way of getting everyone arrested and give them a criminal record!)

Honestly there's nothing to salvage with "breadtube", I can't wait for its demise.

If you think it's bad now, it's gonna get worse in the coming years.

Reading and analysing what's been happening around us for the past 10-20 years, it's clear that we're in a Nazi Germany situation. And when fascism will be here, we will ask "how did that happen?"

The future looks bleak.

We're in 1530 and there's not going to be a colonialism institution for a long time. It's supposed to spawn around 1500.

Essentially I got to PU Portugal and Castile (as Aragon) before they got their first idea, which means neither wanted to take exploration because it wasn't useful to them.

I always start with inno and offensive (best combo) so I don't have it either.

I'm in the process of annexing France and England and neither of them took exploration either. Castile did take expansion, but this is worthless unless you actually have provinces to colonise. Weird first choice tbh even for the AI.

Very weird situation, I'll have to take explo as my third idea group and start colonising. At least it means I get to spawn it. Though I was hoping Portugal would colonise for me and I would just integrate them later, but apparently not.

Still very good Mare Nostrum run, on pace and everything.

I'm going back to it after Vic3. I made a post previously which you can see on my profile, but basically you'll have to wait for DLCs and patches to see Vic3 have more depth.

EU4 remains the benchmark and top-tier game.

Anybody else playing?