My guy, you commented on my thread. You’re the bother.

I think you’ve missed that the assuming is kinda your whole problem here.

Yes, and it would be exhausting to entirely explain how flawed and ahistorical this is. For starters, you ignore social and property relations entirely when you imagine capitalism as “wealthy hoard money, empire make money.” Wealth disparity and imperialism are certainly elements in capitalism, but do you think all these scholars are just big dumdums who didn’t think of Rome?

I instead chose to encourage you to consider how you know what you know and that maybe you don’t actually know enough. You should consider now if that level of self-accountability is a waste of time.

Could you explain where you got your information on the historical conditions of capitalism? Is this just you interpreting what you’ve seen passively, or have you gone through the effort to find historians who have spent careers answering this question?

They said “tens of thousands of years” and you thought that meant two centuries before the Russian Revolution. I think you’ve mistaken dominant narratives of history as a European discipline with what has actually happened in the past. Yes, there are very many accounts of hierarchal violence, but that isn’t descriptive of how human beings behave. Most of what we’ve built has come from cooperation (think about how dependent the internet infrastructure is on free labour and cooperation) and the greatest obstacle we’ve faced as our communities grow is the exploitation that arises from patriarchal hierarchies. Exploitation is the site of those brutalities youre referring to.

Marx also wasn’t a historian, and wasn’t very knowledgeable about societies outside of Europe at all. That isn’t something we can fault him for as though it was his responsibility, but it is something you need to take into account if you’re going to engage with this progressive history model (Hegel didn’t know about’em either).

Kathleen Duval makes an interesting argument in Native Nations that we have evidence that indigenous Americans, in particular those who lived in relation to the Cahokia (Mississippian) civilisation, intentionally altered the trajectory of their social organization in response to this same exploitation. This isn’t to say hierarchy never existed again, though certainly in a less stratified way than the European settlers that arrived a couple centuries later, but it does teach us that humans do not want to live that way, which means they do not have to.

Yes. I am pointing that out. That is the imaginary thing.

“Somehow,” looks behind us at five centuries of European settler-colonialism.

“Everyone,” looks ahead at the millions of people who defy hegemonically enforced constructions of human nature despite the overwhelming power those systems possess.

Liberal doomerism based on imaginary restrictions, how new.

Damn, I wonder if anyone else has noticed this. 😳

Wow, they really are just gonna make you kill them eh, for like, no good reason.

Did you seriously not read my explanation and then called it disingenuous? That’s in there.

My guy, you’re the anti-intellectual person here. I’ve been nice and here you are getting to extreme levels of arrogance.

Could you tell us all how you learned about what these words mean? Have you gone to university for it? Are there any professional educators you follow that offer free courses or lessons? Could you name any books you’ve learned from? You mentioned looking it up earlier, where?

Compadre, I don’t know how you could think someone would spend that much time trying to explain something to you and be completely faking.

Yes, that is what it is. It is not my definition, it’s how the people who study these topics professionally use the terms. You can take your time to live with it.

Okay, what you’re misunderstanding is that what a political or social philosophy is differs from how it is colloquially referred to. It does not mean, “a person who values people” and if you knew the history of this brutal system you’d see just how insidious such an assertion is. Yes, “liberal” is an abused term in NA as it benefits liberalism (yes, capitalism is liberalism and vice versa) through the occlusion of any alternative way to understand the world. When they say that liberals are radical socialists, they are purposefully misrepresenting what socialism and social justice is. They are not talking about liberalism when they use it that way. Liberalism is fundamentally an individualist way to understand the world that emerged through the processes of European imperialism and settler-colonialism after the sixteenth century (but we really consider it recognizable once they start talking about republics and individual liberties at the turn of the nineteenth century. You’ll see why in a moment). Private property is at the center of its way of organizing and the value of individual human bodies (not beings) is built not despite of that but to facilitate it. Racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are all systemic constructions that emerged to devalue human bodies relative to their position in the hierarchy and consequently the form of exploitation they experienced in the service of white-settler-colonial reproduction. (i.e. Slavery preexisted chattel slavery and racialization. Chattel slavery was made possible through the naturalization of an othered group as deserving of generational forced labour, and so racialization emerged as a means of rationalizing that violence).

“Capitalism” refers to a social order wherein capital is the primary organizing principle in society, which is to say individual pursuit of capital. It is described economically by its imperatives of profit maximization and infinite growth, both hallmarks of colonial perceptions of land and bodies as commodities. It is the economic system that settler-colonial countries grew into because it is already consistent with how they viewed the world.

Liberalism’s appropriation of “progress” and civil rights (“equality”) is how this social order effectively responded to challenge of the hierarchy. The narrative that people “earn” their rights through civil disobedience presupposes that what we imagine to be rights is in fact an absolute truth that we either restrict or permit access to. Conveniently, those rights are legally constructed in terms of pursuit of capital and private property as a metric of human fulfillment. The black Civil Rights movements of the mid-twentieth century is imagined to end when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1968, which intentionally secures the state’s authority over the determination of inequality and redirects challenges to racism into the legal framework of the state. When Black Liberationist militant groups persisted, you get the War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex (which is itself enabled through the legal end of slavery that still permitted forced labour of prisoners). There are many other examples of how this works, but slavery and racism tend to be very clear demonstrations. Message me if you want a reading list.

What you have done here is made the understandable mistake of assuming how the words are used is exactly what they mean, and yes language is fluid which is why they push these misuses in the first place. Make no mistake though, these are not distinct ways of organizing society, they are cooperative in their endeavour to reduce the living world to property. When you see this, liberal inaction at climate change is not only comprehensible, but expected.

What exactly do you think liberalism is?

We really have to start talking about the reality that capitalists will never concede or negotiate. The more real this becomes, the more the privleged people will convince themselves that it is too late to change and therefore it is a fight for survival. Settler-colonialism and imperialism are are very good at generating rationalities for brutal violence and genocidal narratives have emerged from far less dire circumstances. You think it’s a coincidence that doomer narratives appeared in the metropole once the effects of climate change became undeniable?

Climate change mitigation is a death threat to capitalism. There is no world where they coexist as a capitalist system will never accept the material constraints of our world and will seek to dominate any alternative in its imperative for infinite growth. Liberals will always choose a dead world over a living one because their entire way of life needs to construct the world as an object to extract from. When they lie and say they want change, they hope that it will buy them enough time for the genocide to be acceptable in metropole.

That was a major motivator behind my switch. If I had to fiddle anyway, might as well use something where the fiddling has more payoff. Also don’t want to whack-a-mole AI surveillance from a company close with the fascist regime.

I’m honestly more concerned with them misrepresenting its ease of use than anything else. I ran into a lot of guides and videos that wanted to make it seem more aporoachable so as to not discourage potential users that significantly downplayed the amount of extra work it would take to use Linux. Bash is typically sidelined if they’re promoting Mint or Zorin for example. I study humanities, but I have a good amount of experience with terminals and so learning a new CLI wasn’t s big deal, but I know that’d be a deal breaker for a lot of new users who would likely feel bamboozled by the insistance that it’s “just like Windows.”

Yes, I know there are queer people and women on Linux, it wouldn’t exist otherwise. Their use of it doesn’t explain why it’s so prominent on Lemmy though. Most evangelists are STEM men and I used the word “libertarian” very intentionally as most also would not consider the surveillance bad because of its danger to vulnerable groups but rather because of a discomfort with any challenge to private ownership. I do agree with them that the user experience is significantly better on Linux and that alone is a good reason to switch.

I agree, the ability to better control my visibility to an increasingly fascist state is a major benefit of Linux. With that in mind, I think it is very important for antifascists to practice internet sovereignty and build infrastructure that exists independently from the interests of capital.

I reckon a result of its reputation as an alternative to “mainstream” sites like Reddit, which is also a STEM-oriented gamer-nerd site disproportionately represented by men. So, tons of dudes on here use Linux professionally and are also of a libertarian mindset that is conducive to Linux evangelism on the basis of an ever-encroaching capitalist authoritarianism. edit: Also adding that I’m sure age is a factor in both the decision to leave other social media sites and a particular intolerance for the surveillant, bloated state of consumer PC’s at this point.

They’re not wrong, Linux is honestly the best route to a decent desktop experience now that Windows is caught in an AI deathloop and the Linux community is expansive enough to support casual users (I don’t care about Apple stuff, but the cost would detract from the experience certainly). I made the switch when it got to the point that Windows literally took more work to use on a daily basis because of how hostile it has become to the user.

Another good thing to point out. If you have the time to interact with those communities, it’s demonstrably populated primarily by bot-like content. Even more, moderation tends to be more opaque and aggressive against leftist comments or posts.

You sound so desperate for me to not block you dude.