Cmon guys, this is c/memes and not c/politics yet you make it look like we’re in a fucking civil war lol
This site is in the process of fighting its own culture war. You have the hardcore communists, anarchists and tankies who were here the longest, and the meme page is on one of their original domains (the ml in lemmy.ml is supposed to stand for marxist-leninist ). And then you have the twitter and reddit refugees who in general lean more center left, liberal, or libertarian. ml was the domain that was advertise the most to people on reddit, and world was where people were directed to once ml’s sign ups were limited.
memes@lemmy.ml is kinda going throught the gaybar effect with the influx of redditors. Like sometimes when a gaybar gets popular, it attracts non-queer customers, who tell their friends, who invite their friends, to the point the original queer customer base gets crowded out. I imagine that’s what the marxist-leninist community base is feeling now that a lot of former redditors call their instance home, and their meme page is the defacto meme community of lemmy.
As long as the mods here allow it, and as long as people keep upvoting, this problem isn’t going away, no matter how many complaint memes get posted. The best solution I can think of is boost other meme pages on different instances, maybe with mod teams that are more willing to keep the page apolitical (which is hard to do in general cause everyone’s definition of political is different.) kbin has a fairly large meme community that could use some more love, same with memes@sopuli.xyz. Hell, considering most users are from world or shitjustworks, I’m surprise I don’t see their local meme pages get more use.
Some claim .ml stands for marxist-leninist, some claim Dessa didn’t choose it for that purpose. Personally idk but I’m mentally preparing for another round of this debate :')
Considering what is known about lemmy, its creators, and the original instances, it seems to hold up. But regardless of the true meaning of ml, the political leanings of lemmy.ml were very far left before the reddit migration, and I feel that’s the reason why you see such an aggressive presence of communist memes on ml’s meme page.
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I’m kind of shocked that ml is marxist-leninist. I thought it was Malaysia or something
The domain is, but the reason they chose the domain is because it shares the initials of marxist-leninist.
Oh, makes sense. Are all two letters TLDs countries (I kinda always assumed they were)?
At least in Latin script it looks like yeah (just looked at a list)
I think most are, such as jp for Japan, or ca for canada. I’m not a web designer though.
The domain is from Mali, which was chosen for cost reasons.
the ml in lemmy.ml is supposed to stand for marxist-leninist
That’s not true. It was chosen because it was a cheap/free TLD.
I totally agree and I find it weird that some people (very loudly) don’t. You can make a community for it, but right now this one is the largest general community for people who just want to laugh and politics sometimes can make me cry.
Yes, I wouldn’t care if it was occasionally (1/20 or 1/30), but it’s more like 1/3 and always the same sub narratives and the same people joining in with their pre-written comments they already used in 5 memes or so. And I don’t want to tackle someone specifically as I have seen various examples on all political sides.
And it’s not that I’m apolitical. I just don’t think I need to convince anyone that my personal beliefs are the only correct ones out there. Our fundamental views and beliefs are being shaped by our environment and our personal experiences alongside many other factors. You may have certainly had other experiences in life than me and that’s perfectly fine.
Sometimes when seeing a political comment I’m thinking about only replying “Cool 👍” regardless of whether I agree or not… Better than writing half an essay wasting another hour of valuable life time for literally nothing.
It’s especially awesome how Americans won’t shut the fuck up about their godawful politics. I so sick of hearing about trump.
Fuck it, this one time imma say sth:
Ah yes, now decide between unelectable and literally unelectable
I love this take. I feel very similarly and understand that everyone has their own reasons for their political beliefs. But at the end of the day, politics are usually just depressing and I just wana laugh at some funny, non-policical memes.
Thanks for the compliment kind Lemming :D
Can’t agree more
If you don’t want to see politics just elect me and I promise I will handle everything for your sweet little head. Just keep playing with your toys now, no I earned all this money.
If we burn you in the town square, do we get the same benefits?
Sorry, most I can do is treason charges and life without parole. Don’t mind that I myself burned my oppoenents in the town square last week.
But but… you have to kill your landlord and your employer. Please. image of pig pooping on its balls
I think the best politicised meme is this one
Its got what plants crave.
Every community on every platforms has the same problem; very frustrating!
“People are discussing the reality around them, it’s so frustrating to privileged people like me who are not yet experiencing it in personal enough ways to give a shit”
Straw man argument.
Yawn
I like this meme. That’s a nice meme
Thanks kind Lemming :D
Is this where we say all the NATO nations are Nazis and that Putin is just trying to save Ukraine from them? From what I gather it’s appropriate to make anti-west, pro china/Russia comments everywhere. When the yuan hits my account I just start blasting.
You can acknowledge both that NATO has imperialist tendencies and that Putin is a capitalist oligarch pig. It doesn’t have to be either or. Not everything is black and white.
Lots of keyboard warriors. :)
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They usually lean a certain way too…
Perhaps the tankies are making you question some deeply held beliefs you have and that’s making you uncomfortable?
It’s easy to dismiss most of their rhetoric, I do as well (I.e. running people over with tanks is a bad idea), but it’s harder to ignore the fact we have a significant portion of the value of our labour taken by capitalists.
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You’re not wrong.
Reading the communist manifesto made me realise the flaws in Marxist thinking as well.
Don’t misunderstand me, Marx was right about a lot of things and still is. Das Kapital is still 80%-90% relevant and accurate but the parts Marx is incorrect about (that capitalism naturally trends to socialism and the worker will have necessarily poorer conditions under capitalism) are addressed through other political philosophers who built upon his and Engels’ work.
Socialism as a political ideology has evolved considerably. Tankies are stuck at a point in time and it’s sad they stand in the way of a socialism without authoritarianism.
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Hmmm well maybe we are talking past each other.
I see it like this, the manifesto was a call to arms for the factory workers of Europe; join our revolution and your life will improve.
And some did, and their lives did improve for a while, but most importantly the majority of workers (ie European workers who didn’t have a revolution) did not join and their conditions still improved (WHS laws, working hours, sick leave, PTO, pension, healthcare).
How does Marx explain this? This shouldn’t be possible according to Marx.
When I was saying people have built on Marx I was alluding to revisionists like Bernstein.
He points out that self interest is a motivating factor, once a worker has a certain level of condition then they are no longer willing to risk that in a revolution, capitalism has effectively satiated them. Revolution is no longer possible in this situation.
This is the western world I see today, a lot of people who aren’t willing to risk what they have to get something better.
My solution (which isn’t really mine) is to appeal to their self interest, sure it’s nice now, but it would be even better under socialism etc.
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Yeah that’s where we disagree.
I don’t think you get to say ‘hey those nice things you got while under capitalism will disappear at some point - source, trust me bro.’
That arguably hasn’t eventuated for western workers as we haven’t returned to the original or worse conditions than when we were at at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Too few are interested in dying to improve their conditions further which disarms any vanguard party.
I don’t know much about Hegel, but the bit I do know makes me very skeptical about historical materialism. Socialist philosophy is better without Hegel IMO, yes I assume you disagree with this strongly.
I’ve decided to answer your, likely rhetorical, question from your first comment and this one in one comment instead of two:
Perhaps the tankies are making you question some deeply held beliefs you have and that’s making you uncomfortable?
You’re not wrong here. Even if my views don’t differ that much in many ways from even the lemmygrad or hexbear users (at least on economical terms) there’s still some topics that I just do not share their views on (You mentioned their stand on authoritarianism) and it does make me uncomfortable because very often you either have to 100% agree with them or are instantly excluded.
In the end, I’m usually hopping on to see memes to give my brain some distraction, enjoy some good banter or laugh at some quality memes and not see yet another online civil war unfold.
And for the last I’m often just too tired to participate in after 8hrs of work
I’d actually put forward Engels before Marx. Much more easily digestible, at least in my opinion.
What is a tankie, you sound like a little baby
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They have brought up some good points, but the good points they make are over shadowed by the whole genocide denial and “dunking on libs”.
The following example is not meant to represent hexbear users, but to show an example of how I could see it.
Think of a fascist who brings up some good examples of modern problems in about 1/10 of their messages, while the rest are talking about how Mussolini was actually good, since he brought up the living standard in Italy and expanded the public sector. And when someone brings up the bad things Mussolini did, the fascist just says “It’s clearly western propaganda”.
You wouldn’t want to read their messages, since they are full of this fascist apologetic garbage, and the good points they bring up are ignored because of their other opinions.
It doesn’t matter how good willed your opinions are if no one wants to associate with you.
Exactly this.
I’ve told them this before. I agree with them on about 60% of the stuff they believe. But they are really, really hung up on the genocide apologetics. I’ve tried reasoning with them, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m pretty sure they banned me haha
Mussolini did not make living standards better though, and his crimes are well documented and aren’t just propaganda. So it’s a false equivalence.
It was never meant to be an equivalence. I made it to draw a rough picture of how a person can have some good ideas, but be a person no one wants to associate with due their other ideas.
Sure, but it may be the case that the “other ideas” also aren’t actually wrong and the people who don’t want to associate do so out of not wanting to challenge their own wrong ideas about things.
Also a political message
It’s almost like those complaining about “politics” only have an issue when it isn’t their politics being discussed…
Everything is political.
A space that shares memes that are created based on current events is always going to bring up political issues, the two are literally inseparable - the whole fucking point of memes is to be snippets of shared cultural and social experiences that get shared around and evolve accordingly.
What the fuck do you expect?
And you know what? I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint which memes OP is talking about because as oppose to them, when I see content I don’t like I simply block the poster or the community or both and move on with my life (like I will be doing now). I advise they do the same instead of making yet another whiny post about the content in a community they probably never contributed anything to before this point.
As long as politics is not based on the sovereignty of the people but on that of an elite and large corporations and as long as politicians are not employees of these people, but rather see themselves as their bosses, any political ideology is a mere label and becomes a feudal dictatorship. It only deserves a debate between different opinions when this pyramid scheme is reversed, before it leads to nothing.
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