Nevoic @ Nevoic @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This was essentially our approach for slavery, but it's fundamentally flawed. Allowing exploitation and bigotry in some other location isn't a fix.

I didn't tell anyone how to run anything, I pointed out how they're an entirely capitalist nation that pretends to be socialist. Maybe the current authoritarian regime will suddenly revert all the market reforms they've implemented over the last 3-4 decades, seize the means of production, and then dissolve the state when it's no longer needed.

I don't believe this will happen, and I don't think many people do. Most of the "socialists" that support China are more than happy with the bourgeoise class existing and exploiting working class people "for the betterment of the State". This kind of thinking falls much more in line with Mussolini than Marx.

"core values of socialism"? Like reintroducing landleeches after they were outlawed? Like allowing the bourgeoise to own the means of production and exploit the over a billion working class Chinese people in horrible conditions? Using the profit motive to "incentivize entrepreneurship"?

China is the epitome of SINO, they're an authoritarian capitalist regime.

On this note it's crazy there are people who will spend over $100 on a Windows license, when all they do is use a web browser or simple productivity apps like spreadsheets or word.

I can get if you're using some adobe products, or some game that hasn't been updated to the Linux compatible EAC, but for the vast majority of people paying over $100 (or having that cost passed onto you from the manufacturer if Windows is preinstalled) is crazy.

Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.

Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don't restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there's a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.

We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it'll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren't needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of "giving them stuff for just existing". We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don't deserve enough food.

People should separate the quality of the products, produced by the workers, from the batshit insane politics and mindset of the owners. I have a Tesla, and I recognize Elon is a protofascist dick, but the CEOs of other companies are just better at maintaining their image, they're part of the same parasitic class that Elon is a part of.

I bought a Tesla for the power, infrastructure, etc. but I don't generally recommend Teslas. If you don't care about 0-60 time, and you can hold out until 2024/2025, lots of EVs will adopt the NACS standard and be able to use almost the entire supercharging network. Other vehicles will likely be better and/or cheaper.

Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it's a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.

Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it's not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.

Mostly agree, but the "incentive" focus is a misnomer. Humans don't just sit around and stare at walls when they're not "incentivized". Incentives in sociopolitics is just a rebranding of coercion, getting people to do things they don't want to do. People are incentivized/coerced to work at McDonald's because otherwise they'll live on the streets, the housing scalpers will make sure of it.

FOSS exists and isn't at risk of dying. Yeah, it's ideal if the people working on FOSS things don't have to also work a soul crushing day job, and yeah maybe when their soul is crushed they'll lose interest in the things they enjoy doing, but we shouldn't frame that as them getting jaded towards FOSS projects. It's actually just depression, and it impacts other hobbies too.

All that being said, I'm all for donations to people who do FOSS work so they can escape and do the things they love, it means better FOSS products and happier developers.

I didn't equate them all to Nazis, you have an incredibly simplistic black/white view of the world.

The people who voted for Nazis weren't a uniform mass of people. Some voted for them on promised economic reforms, some voted on the basis of making Germany great again, some voted for them because they disliked the Lügenpresse (lying press), which the Nazis talked about all the time. The thing all Nazi voters shared was that the anti-Jewish/anti-communist rhetoric didn't turn them off to voting for the party.

Similarly, there are a ton of Republicans who vote Republican for many reasons; promised economic reforms, making America great again, a dislike for "fake news", etc. The thing all Republican voters share is that the anti-Mexican/anti-trans rhetoric doesn't turn them off to voting for the party.

They're fine with the promise of building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. They're fine with legislating against trans people. They're fine with the rhetoric many southern Republicans are using about "solving the trans problem", similar to the final solution rhetoric Nazis used.

Republicans in 2023 are about as bad as Nazis were in 1930. That is to say, they've only done very lightweight rounding up of minorities and haven't started killing them en masse. Whether or not the fascist wing of the Republican party wins out and successfully genocides minorities is anyone's guess, but ignoring the similarities and history here is incredibly foolish.

Not all people who voted Republican are horrible. Not all people who voted Nazi were horrible either. The platform can get better or worse, we've seen a history where it can get worse, but it's also been shutdown before.

Either way, having spaces online that disallow protofascist or fascist parties is fine and not "unhealthy". Not every part of the internet has to allow for hateful rhetoric, it's fine to have spaces geared towards gaming, community, or just people in agreement that people supporting a bigoted party shouldn't be there.

There were people who voted for Nazis for "non-hateful" reasons, but it meant they didn't care enough about the anti-jewish rhetoric to vote against it.

It's the same for Republicans and trans people/Mexicans/etc. The party is full of hateful bigots, yes there are some people who are indifferent to the hatred spewed and stand with Republicans on some other basis, but indifference towards bigotry is an issue in and of itself.

Having a community explicitly ban people who support these bigoted groups (Republicans/Nazis/etc.) is not a problem. I prefer a space that allows people to share their views, I've debated self-identified fascists before, I'm fine in that environment, but I respect that some people aren't.

Just because someone doesn't want to engage with hateful communities only makes them "too sensitive to go outside" if "outside" is sympathetic to these hateful groups.

Was curious what was happening, was using libreddit and figured they were just being bogged down, but my mobile app doesn't work either. Also anyone know why the upvotes on this post are fluctuating between <10, ~20, 150, 400, etc.? Are they upvote numbers for different instances?

A utilitarian and an egoist can often align on what is "just" so long as the pleasure of some action outweighs the pain it inflicts. Of course there's no actual way to measure X pleasure or Y pain, but people will make claims to how much pain/pleasure they get in some scenario and use it as justification for whatever they want.

We'd agree that the pleasure of egg consumption is small, but I know many people who will say things like "I can't give up cheese" or "I can't give up eggs". They'll go as far to say the only pleasure they get out of life is eating food, and that no amount of suffering could outweigh the raw pleasure they get in a utilitarian calculation.

Since there's no proper test we can do to say "no you're only getting 4 units of pleasure but you're inflicting 80 units of suffering for that egg", all we can go on is people's own judgement about their own pleasure, and their guesses about the pain they inflict. It's a very ad-hoc and non-principled approach, that anyone can use to justify anything so long as they say they've hit some required pleasure threshold.

This is all an argument against utilitarianism, not negative utilitarianism specifically, which does alleviate some of these issues. You'll still come up against moral issues that deontological ethics can solve but negative utilitarianism cannot (e.g why is it unethical to kill a person who has no connections and whose death will not produce any negative utility in the world). A rule utilitarian would say yes this is fine ethically, but the rule should be that killing is unethical because that'll produce the most positive utility/least negative utility. This would allow people to justify isolated murders so long as it's not setup as a rule for society that murder is okay, and that the murders produced no negative utility (e.g painless killing methods etc.).

As for more practical considerations in regards to animals, I'll allude back to my point about being unable to actually quantify pleasure/pain units. Someone right now might say that a "family farm" of chickens is ethical because the positive utility outweighs the negative utility of the chickens, unaware of the kinds of pain the chickens go through or the maceration of the baby males required to allow the females to survive in a profitable environment. But you might be able to find a more "ethical" form of exploitation that you might find okay that still produces negative utility that you just don't recognize as such.

The safe way to go about the world is to recognize the rights of these animals the same way we recognize the rights of humans. Whether you want to call them natural rights or human-constructs, it doesn't matter. These animals shouldn't be exploited for their byproducts even if we can't find any negative utility being inflicted. Life is always going to have some kind of suffering in it, so veganism usually implies an antinatalist stance for non-human animals. As a negative utilitarian yourself, you should recognize that we don't have the right to birth animals as they might experience negative utility as a result of our exploitation, even if we try our best to mitigate it.

There are a number of different branches I can go on here, but I'll just post high level thoughts to start.

The issue with trying to define these lines in a capitalist society is they'll always be blown past when any leeway is given. If you say "eggs can be harvested ethically", what you'll end up with necessarily is the egg industry we have today, where we macerate 10s of millions of baby male chicks a day because they're not profitable.

If it's done outside of a capitalist system, then you still have to contend with the idea that permitting these types of exploitation will mean that the people who want the things (eggs/wool/etc.) will do the exploitation on the grounds that they want those products, not because they want to take care of these animals and they have some byproduct you happen to use. The "caretakers" will be focused on their productive output instead of caring for them as pets. This is bad.

More abstractly, utilitarianism has some issues. Approaching morality as a simple math equation can lead to justifying atrocities much easier. When you can just say "the pleasure I get from this is more good than the pain you get is bad", then you can justify exploitation from a utilitarian perspective. If you take a step back though, it should be obvious that the idea of justifying suffering with pleasure is horrendous, yet this is the core calculus of utilitarianism.

A focus on rights and their violations leads to a moral view that doesn't allow you to use your own pleasure, or pleasure more generally, to justify inflicting harm. It's a better system for the oppressed, while utilitarianism is better for the oppressors.