Nah, it’s way easier than that: pirate everything, give as much money as you can afford to small creators. Intellectual property is a fuck and the vast majority of any money you pay for media goes directly into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the people who actually make the media you enjoy.
Thanks for the response, legitimately. I haven’t done enough reading and thinking to have a principled position on sex work. I really don’t know where I stand. I really should read more about and by sex workers, because these issues are indeed important.
I do want to say that I haven’t actually seen leftists wanting prostitution for the same reasons as incels. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, I’m sure it does in some circles and I’m certainly not trying to cast doubt on your assertions that you’ve seen it. I believe you have. But I haven’t, not from people I’d class as reasonable leftists. Part of this, of course, is I just don’t go out in public much or talk to very many people, and when I do, the topic of sex work doesn’t come up. So you and I have very different experiences with the types of people we’ve seen defend sex work, and I think that difference is relevant here. I think I’m much more likely than you to assume that someone I see arguing a pro-sex-work position is doing so not because they’re reactionary or misogynist, but actually from a place of genuine feminism. Because those are the kinds of defenses I’ve seen most often, including in this very thread. Also, and this is a small thing, but unless I’ve missed someone, none of the people talking to you about sex work in this thread are cis men. So yeah, this thread is a total exception to the general rule that people defending sex work are mostly cis men.
Another very small thing I disliked about the first comment of yours I responded to is the line “Orgasms do not increase productive forces.” I don’t believe labor must necessarily exist for the sole purpose of increasing productive forces. Art, conversation, hell, even cooking a nice meal are all examples of labor that doesn’t increase productive forces. So to say that sex work is bad because orgasms are unnecessary, well, I just don’t think that follows. I don’t really see how that argument is any different to the argument that says a barista isn’t really a worker just because they’re not producing something.
Ultimately, I don’t know if this conversation is worth continuing much longer. I haven’t done enough thinking and reading to say anything beyond what I’ve said, so I think I’ll probably bow out here. I mostly commented to point out the unfortunate reality that so many people on the internet make the (shitty, sexist) assumption that everyone they’re interacting with is a straight man. And I want that assumption to die already. I admit I did slightly misread your initial comment and I see now that you weren’t exactly making that assumption, I just read my own shit into what you were saying. You’re also proudly ML (I can’t fault you for that), but since I’m coming from hexbear, the fairly extreme anti-anarchist sentiment in your first paragraph was a bit off-putting. But hey, that’s fine, this thread is on lemmygrad, not hexbear.
Sorry, much of this response is me trying to work through what I found off-putting about your initial comment. There’s likely not a lot worth engaging with here. Still, I’m going to post it because I’ve spent 10 minutes writing it. (I need to stop procrastinating the actual work I need to be doing today! Life is hard!)
I’ve been marinating on your response here. There’s something off about it that I’m having trouble putting words to. I think maybe the “offness” that I’m sensing is that your comment sort of treats men as humans and everyone else as potential trafficking victims. I don’t think you meant to do this, I suspect (hope) you don’t actually believe that non-men are not human in the same way men are, but this comment of yours still kind of reads like that.
For instance, you end it with the following line:
Fix your attitude toward women, and get a girlfriend, ya horny losers.
This line really rankles, for two reasons. One, there are women who have read your comment and it just feels weird to tell a woman, especially a marxist woman, to fix her views toward women. Two, there are people who have read your comment who don’t want a girlfriend, because they’re not into women, because they have a long-term partner already and are monogamous, or because they’re ace or aromantic. (Probably other reasons too.) And yet, here you are, implicitly acting like everyone reading your comment is a straight man. But we aren’t. I’m not. The people arguing with you in this thread about sex work aren’t. You’ve made an incorrect (and sexist) assumption about the people reading your comment.
I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They’re a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It’s weird to say the least.
My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they’re humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.
It seems to me you want magic. You don’t want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that’s completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?
There’s a pinned post at the top of this very comm talking about exactly this issue: https://hexbear.net/post/403920?scrollToComments=false
Long story short, yes, it’s a racist term with a racist history and should not be used. Please change it
You could try spacemacs (what I use) or doom emacs. Both have vi-like keybindings as a default and are slightly easier to get going with than vanilla emacs. On the other hand, especially with spacemacs, there’s more to learn than vanilla emacs and more that can go wrong.
what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask
I don’t think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I’d like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that’s rather more effort than I’m willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I’ll just decide I don’t need the account that badly. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
For years I used vanilla vim before finally switching to spacemacs like 4 years ago. I’ve never used neovim, because it just didn’t seem stable and mature enough before I switched to spacemacs and at this point I’m happy with spacemacs and will probably stick with it for the foreseeable future.
My issue with vim, and the reason I switched, is that vimscript was an absolute nightmare. I was doing easy stuff, writing LaTeX, but getting vim to compile LaTeX and talk to my pdf reader (as you need if you’re going to be working with LaTeX in any kind of serious way) took way too much configuration and my setup would break fairly often as well. Spacemacs is significantly easier. I was shocked when I went from “I’ve never used spacemacs before” to “I’m comfortably writing LaTeX here” in about half an hour. My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it, but it’s much easier than vim was, that’s for sure.
I also just like the emacs workflow. I like helm, I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere, I like how easy it is to access the documentation on functions, variables, keybindings, whatever else you might need. I like org-mode. I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.
I’d never heard of doomemacs. I’m pretty happy with spacemacs so I probably won’t switch, but I’ll at least read about it some more.
Sometimes the 3 second emacs startup time is annoying so I use vim then.
The way I get around this is by using emacs in daemon mode. So it only has a long startup if I’ve just rebooted my computer or if I needed to change my config and manually restart emacs. You probably already know emacs can run as a daemon, but I thought I’d mention it anyway!
Three things:
Russia isn’t communist. I don’t know why I have to remind libs of this fucking constantly, it’s infuriating. You remember in 1991 or so when the Soviet Union fell? Yeah, Russia hasn’t been communist since then.
The DPRK is how it is because of the actions of the western world, especially the US. The DPRK has tried to open itself up to trade and immigration and has been stopped from doing so by the western world, especially the US. That being said, life there is fine. It’s just a normal country that’s suffering a bit because it has not been allowed to trade freely with the rest of the world. Maybe watch the Boy Boy video where they go to the DPRK to get haircuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
What exactly is your issue with China? Can you please explain what you’re actually getting at here? Lots of other people have brought forth some pretty decent evidence that life in China isn’t as bad as a western lib thinks, but I am curious about your thoughts and feelings on the matter. What is your issue with China? Why would you not want to live there?
Ubisoft says it was trying to put an ad for Assassin’s Creed Mirage in the main menu of other Assassin’s Creed games. However, a “technical error” caused the promotion to show up on in-game menus instead. Ubisoft says the issue has since been fixed
So they fully planned to roll out full screen pop up ads, it was just supposed to be in the main menu, not in-game. Fuckers.
This is why I don’t play AAA games.
Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.
Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.
Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you’re defining democracy as “a system in which people vote”, then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don’t think that’s a great definition and I don’t think China is a “liberal democracy” like the US is, but at this point, we’re getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don’t think now is exactly the time for that.)
Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the “all” feed aren’t going to be the ones where we’re talking theory, they’re going to be the ones where we’re dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That’s true. It doesn’t mean that theory posts don’t exist, just that they aren’t as contentious as dunking posts. That’s an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.
Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It’s probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say “libs suck”, we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it’s not that we ignore republicans, it’s just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think “liberal” means “democrat”. It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think “liberals” and “democrats” are synonyms.
And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn’t mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It’s to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It’s fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make “communism” a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?
even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.
What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?
There isn’t any discussion on political theory
There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there’s a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I’ve learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you’re reading, you’ll get engagement and answers. It’s pretty cool.
the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.
Yes, we’re communists. We aren’t going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you’re an actual leftist and not some “just vooooote” liberal, you’ll probably enjoy hexbear.
(They got banned)
Why do I always end up reading so deeply into these threads started by fucking ghouls who seriously believe poor people are poor because they’re just too stupid to understand how money works? I should have backed off when I saw how deep this goes, but no, I must hate myself, because here I am, having just read your ridiculous comment how some sort of nebulous “education” will solve poverty somehow. Fuck off until you learn some damn empathy. I hope you end up neck deep in debt through no fault of your own.
Dude you’re still fucking going with this shit? Give it a rest, take the L, move on with your goddamn week, holy fuck.
Can you blame me for thinking you care what hexbears think about you? Like, look at this thread we’re posting in, look at the meme you started it with (I’m assuming you made this one). It sure seems like you care, and that’s ok! I also care what hexbears think about me, even though I’ll never meet these weirdo nerds in real life.
Also, if you didn’t make the meme and you agree it’s anti-communist misinformation, then why post it? And why defend it so vigorously when people point out the misinformation?
Anyway, I have to actually stop putting work off now, so I likely won’t be responding to you for at least several hours. I sincerely hope you have a good day, don’t let internet arguments get you down too much, ok? The internet is a toxic shithole and it’s very, very easy to escalate arguments way too far, even with people who you really have more in common with than not. I know I do it.
There’s plenty examples of tankies directly sabotaging and killing anarchists
Then put those on the meme instead of the blatant falsehoods that are there. Like, sorry, but “oh, it’s a meme it doesn’t have to be accurate” is a terrible argument for posting a misleading, anti-communist meme. Just make a better meme, it’s not hard
Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.
I’m a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn’t something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they’ve been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn’t really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don’t just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.
I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that “The world can handle a stable population of pirates.” I don’t think that’s a meaningful statement. It’s not like there’s some “carrying capacity” for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.