Thank you. I’m actually doing pretty good in the large, just having a rough day in the small.

Do we count relationships with one person as valid relationships? Because I don’t want to be in my skin but I’m terrified of leaving 🤣

I did it all for the gnocchi

Yeah it hasn’t been remotely long enough 😆

Imagine financing Dominos or Papa John’s. If I’m gonna finance a pizza, it better be local 😆

Yeah I feel you. Personally I have almost 0 martial arts training, almost 0 self-defense experience, and an utterly ambivalent will to live. So if I’m at the point where I’m willing to get physical at all, then I’ve already flown off the handle and my personal safety is just not a factor in the calculation anymore.

Not the death penalty, but the lost prophets guy who got stabbed to death recently got off easy. Death was too good for him.

Yeah I’m 1000% against the death penalty but I also reserve the right to feel that people like him deserve death or worse. I reserve the right to feel schadenfreude and to celebrate when monsters are destroyed, even if I think that rehabilitation would be a better outcome if possible in finite time.

not killing someone actively engaging in murder would be immoral

Are you sure? Like I wouldn’t condemn you for stabbing a murderer frankly, but let’s say you can tackle or distract or knock out the murderer, or just do something that isn’t stabbing them but still stops them without hurting you, then only if it is feasible to do so, then surely that’s a better outcome? Again, I would 1000% not fault you for acting quickly in a real situation and stabbing a murderer, but since we are in the proverbial armchair we can afford to be a little bit more subtle here.

IMO I think “could be” is more accurate than “would be”.

The death penalty is wrong because life is precious and even the worst people can change if given enough time and help.

However, if it is strictly necessary to kill someone currently engaging in murder to stop them (i.e. the capitalist class), i.e. the situation is so time-sensitive that innocent people are going to die if the murderer isn’t stopped, then I’m 1000% cool with killing the murderers until they stop murdering or are dead, whichever happens first.

Trussy

There are absolutely legitimate places and reasons to ban weapons (i.e. schools), but we need to have weapons as communities and individuals in the short term to defend ourselves against monsters, in particular capitalists.

Thank you skateboard for your service 🫡

Well I can’t say that being a graduate student is a stable job, but my research is absolutely fueled by technical death metal and sugar 🤘😈🤘

Octagon deez nuts

I mean minus the feathers that’s an accurate description of the average house cat 😆

You do realize that just makes it even cuter right?

As a child coming from communism, I know it’s not that bad as it was there and I believe or think the problem here is more about fascism but either way, I think I am just confused???

Full disclosure #1: Lemmy has a lot of communists and anarchists. The Lemmy developers are communists and IMO it informs the design of the site. Lemmy.world has a liberal anti-communist bent IMO.

Full disclosure #2: I am an anarcho-communist, i.e. a libertarian communist in the vein of Peter Kropotkin. The main difference between anarcho-communists and state communists is that anarcho-communists do not support States, in particular “”“communist”“” Marxist-Leninist regimes or any other existing States. For this reason anarcho-communists and state communists have a glorious history of fighting like cats 😆.

These first two disclosures I’m telling you because I’m against capitalism and pro-anarchism and I don’t want to spook you, so I want to be transparent about my biases.

Full disclosure #3: I had a nice upbringing with a white family and I have lived in a rich American suburb for almost my whole life. Most people in my position are simply too comfortable to talk about changing the status quo like I do.

So here is what I actually want to talk about: it’s pretty bad here in America for most people! It’s worse than a third-world country in the rural deep South. Everywhere in the US, black and indigenous people are at best second-class citizens everywhere in the country, a system designed from the ground up to keep black people subservient and destroy indigenous people and uphold white supremacy. And Sinophobia has been a driving force in American politics since the 1800s. And we interned Japanese people during WWII, and even some Democrats use that historical comparison to justify what is happening to people detained by ICE. Healthcare is hard to get even for wealthy people. Mental healthcare is almost non-existent. Homelessness is answered by cops. School shootings are so routine that they rarely make national news anymore. Almost everyone is one big medical incident or one missed paycheck from homelessness. Our privacy has been gone for decades; we voluntarily carry mobile surveillance devices (cellphones) in our pockets. Workers have almost no rights. Dissent is only tolerated if it doesn’t threaten power, and while it’s worse under Trump, it was never really tolerated under any administration. The cops are tyrannical and completely unaccountable. We have the highest prison population per capita on the planet. We spend the most money by far on our military. Schools are physically crumbling and there is a teacher shortage because we don’t pay them enough. Infrastructure is crumbling and needs to be repaired, and even if we do repair it, it’s car-centric infrastructure so you basically have to have a car to survive in this country. Higher education is incredibly expensive but simultaneously expected even for entry level positions…which people aren’t even hiring for anymore, even in traditionally “safe” fields like engineering.

I could go on and on and on. And everything above applies during and before the Trump administration, and it will almost certainly apply afterwards as well, because we don’t have an organized left and the Democrats are basically diet right-wingers who are literally paid not to rock the boat.

Honestly: everything sucks here, we’ve been on the brink of a civil war for decades, and the only reason I haven’t left yet is because I don’t have the money to make the move. If I ever found the money to do so, I’d drop all my shit and be on a plane out of this shithole without even kissing my parents goodbye. I genuinely do not understand why people come here (although I welcome you nonetheless!) if you could go almost anywhere else.

And all of that…in the richest country on Earth! All of the problems in this country are solvable; the ruling class chooses not to solve them, and the working class is too desperate to rise up and solve the problems ourselves.

I’m not saying it’s not bad wherever you’re from. Just that it’s not good here and that you kinda need to expect that things are going to be trash in order to not get trampled.

ICE is out of control right now. (My mom was born here)

That fucking sucks 😞… Fuck ICE

I appreciate you comment because I am over her reeling, my family left all that government because it horrid and came here legally unlike Trump’s family of war dodgers, both him and Elon’s family came here illegally so what he is doing is so savage!

Personally, I don’t oppose Trump for being a draft dodger or Elon for being an “illegal immigrant”. It’s… literally everything else.

IMO when the drafts were active, Americans had an ethical duty to get out of them because the wars America fights are for private interests. And no one should be illegal, i.e. following the law with respect to immigration only shows the wealth of the immigrant and says nothing about their character. For example, if I was to propose a law that instantly made all immigration legal, would you oppose that?

I just can’t wrap my head around everything going on.

American politics is weird and complicated. Take it slow.

Mao didn’t invent the phrase, he only used it. The phrase vastly predates communism in China.

Trump is not any kind of communist, Maoist or otherwise. For example, he’s not nationalizing any industries or making them worker-controlled in any way, he has not abolished private property nor promised to do so, he has not supported workers’ rights, he has not attempted to disempower the capitalist class nor has he promised to do so, and the de-facto redistribution of wealth is from the poor to the rich, i.e. the opposite direction of what communists call for.

Trump is a fascist like every other US President. However, Trump is accelerating the decay of American capitalism into full fascism at an alarming clip.

Real talk for a second: you basically made this post because Donald Trump said a Chinese thing and that spooked you, right? IMO you have some ingrained Sinophobia you need to work on.

Toss the homophobes into the sea and move on? Easy fix!