Lol.

If only I read theory, I’d understand how much the children yearn for the mines.

What incredibly self-serving bullshit. The fact that you call yourself a leftist disgusts me. You’re a consumer and nothing more. Everything else is just to justify your habits.

Jesus Christ. Actually justifying buying products with child labor. No wonder anarchism is so popular with Western “leftists.”

Just because a demand exists doesn’t mean we need to fulfill that demand

So then, much less meat gets produced, which means much less meat gets consumed, which means, people will have to make major changes to their dietary habits. And given the unlikeliness of convincing everyone of cutting out the vast majority of meat from their diets, those of us who actually understand that situation should probably just cut it out entirely.

Once the working class has control of production we will no longer be constrained by arbitrary concerns about efficiency for the sake of producing obscene profits.

That’s not how any of this works. Remove money from the equation: factory farms produce more meat per labor hours. If you’re not reducing meat consumption, then you’re calling for a massive increase in the amount of farm labor.

We overthrow capitalism and change our methods of production away from factory farming to more ethical and sustainable models because we will then have the control and authority to do so.

How? You gonna force people to work on these farms? How are you gonna get that labor?

We simply do not currently employ these practices because of the interests of capitalists blocking their accessibility through their control over our societal structures and the means of production.

I think you don’t understand what the word “efficiency” means.

Please, for the sake of our collective future, read theory.

I do. What theory is it that will provide me with a convincing argument for why it’s actually perfectly fine for me to buy chocolate harvested with child labor? Be specific.

Or we could just

Again, you’re making this a false dichotomy. We can go vegan and fight capitalism at the same time. Avoiding unethical products and encouraging others to do the same is in no way an endorsement of capitalism.

Even if we overthrew capitalism, either we would have to keep factory farms going or we’d need a drastic reduction in meat consumption. Because they don’t just do cruelty for shits and giggles, they do it because it’s efficient.

You go ahead and tell yourself whatever lies you have to as you run from the truth. Fucking, Reaganite supply side “class consciousness.”

So if I bought a shirt made from cotton picked by slaves, that would’ve been perfectly fine? If I buy chocolate harvested with child labor, or blood diamonds, that’s all fine?

This whole production-focused morality is entirely self-serving and has nothing at all to do with class consciousness. Many people involved in the meat industry are workers just trying to make a living. You just don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of these issues yourself.

Don’t buy into the myth of supply-demand

Even if it’s theoretically possible to create a system that doesn’t depend on supply and demand, it is very much a thing in the world we actually live in.

and just have the difference subsidized like they currently do.

Complete nonsense. If they could just “get more subsidies” whenever they felt like it, they’d get them now, until they couldn’t get anymore. Which is… where we’re at. This is magical thinking.

If workers owned the farms, and decided to only produce ethically and sustainably, then people who demand more than what is available can go shove it or start hunting for themselves.

Even if one particular worker-owned farm decided to do that, it wouldn’t change anything. The consumers looking for cheaper meat would simply go to the farms willing to use harmful treatment.

Why does that logic only work one way and not the other?

They already account for waste, so they will simply adjust to it.

They will adjust to it by making less. Because that’s how price signals work! This is extremely basic economics.

When people stopped buying pet rocks, did the company continue making them? Are there still as many pet rocks being made today as there were in 1975, and they’re just piling up in a warehouse somewhere, as they get bigger and bigger subsidies from the government? You know as well as I do that’s not how anything works.

There are also plenty of arguments against agricultural practices to how many of these vegan alternatives are produced themselves that you’re not actually mitigating harm, you’re just choosing a different product that was produced through equally harmful and unethical practices.

And those arguments are nonsense. Producing meat means growing vastly more food to feed to animals which you then eat, so even if growing vegetables was comparable in harm to the meat industry, it would still be more ethical to be vegan because less food would have to be grown.

“No ethical consumption under capitalism” is not an excuse to engage in avoidable, harmful consumption.

Wasn’t that pretty much the exact logic used by a bunch of slaveowners? “I oppose the institution of slavery, but it’s a systemic problem, sure, I could free my own slaves, but that wouldn’t solve the systemic problem.” Surely there’s a line to be drawn somewhere.

Also, “blaming the consumer rather than the producer” seems like a very backwards way of applying class consciousness. The consumer generates the demand. If a farmer, the worker who produces the meat, quits his job, the demand will still exist and will likely be filled by someone else. But if the consumer quits demanding it, then it’ll cause production to be reduced.

Of course, there are larger systemic solutions that we ought to look at, but that’s not either or, any more than it would be either or to criticize a slaveowner for not freeing their slaves while at the same time calling for systemic change.

Now, now, don’t confuse “thinking watching porn is immoral” with “not watching porn.”

They don’t, they just like telling each other campfire stories about their favorite boogeyman.

No one on .world knows anything about Hexbear. They’ve never been federated with it and they love to pass around campfire stories where the bear gets taller with each telling.

Hexbear spent several years as its own community after r/chapotraphouse was banned. It developed technically in its own direction before being integrated with the fediverse. This also produced a distinct, insular site culture, where many topics have been discussed to the point that userbase ends up arriving at a consensus.

Politically, the instance opposes the US, critically supports China and other “AES” (actually existing socialist) states such as Cuba and Vietnam, and generally views Russia as an “enemy of an enemy,” useful for breaking Western hegemony and moving toward a multipolar order, but not any sort of model to emulate.

They tend to not like it when people come in and assert their opinions without first hearing the community’s perspective. And as I said, the culture is pretty insular with some people not liking the idea of federation at all. If you’re strongly supportive of Ukraine, you’re unlikely to fit in there. If you still want to see the memes and stuff, then I’d suggest dbzer0.

Both of those positions are reasonable and tame compared to the majority of Their beliefs.

Love, You have an actual cult that claims to be able to alter the laws of physics through belief and that anyone who doesn’t accept that is being “authoritarian.”

What is the problem with their methods? You can’t just link to their methodology and be like, “See? They’re full of shit!” I skimmed and nothing jumped out at me, so how would I go about evaluating or refuting such vague claims?

Some people see it as a form of cheating, others see it as exploitative or objectifying. Religion isn’t the only reason a person might have a problem with porn.

I don’t really see a problem with an instance banning large numbers of users.

The ability to make exclusive spaces is part of the fediverse’s design. Suppose a queer space kept getting flooded with homophobic users, or a Muslim space got a bunch of people shitting on their religion, or something like that. Naturally, such spaces would have a higher number of bans. That doesn’t necessarily show an “echo chamber” especially since users of such communities may be federated with other communities. People complain about censorship on .ml creating an “echo chamber” but half the time I’m arguing or discussing things on other turfs like .world.

The idea that those sorts of enclaves or exclusive spaces shouldn’t exist, as is implied with the framing here, is to impose what us evil, dastardly “authoritarians” sometimes call “the tyranny of structurelessness.” No one would have a space to discuss things outside of the most prominent, hegemonic view, which would more easily sideline and overwhelm other perspectives.

As an example, I once frequented an utter cesspool on Reddit called r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created and promoted by An-caps and where that perspective was prominent (though not exclusive). I found it was virtually impossible to have a discussion with anyone about anything, because even if you weren’t talking to an An-cap, they were always there waiting to latch on to some turn of phrase and use it against you, and everyone was too preoccupied with countering their nonsense to reach any kind of high-level discussion. I eventually got fed up with that and found that my beliefs were more challenged by going to explicitly leftist spaces because we had shared assumptions and were speaking the same language, and didn’t feel the need to be as defensive. I was never going to be convinced of anything by the An-caps and all talking to them accomplished was pissing me off.

The fediverse’s design is actually quite brilliant, because you can have a space to discuss things substantively among like-minded people while at the same time interacting with other groups.

Marxism-Leninism is by far the largest strain of Marxist thought. Like there’s Trotskyists (who are just contrarians and sometimes use terms like “Marxist and Leninist”), there’s some confused anarchists who missed the breakdown of the first international, there’s maybe a handful of confused social democrats who would be Kautskists if they knew who Kautsky was, there’s the ultraleft Maoists like Shining Path, and there’s, uh, what else? Bordigaists?

Is there any actually significant “Marxist but not Leninist” ideology?

So why don’t the Republicans get rid of it then?

The only reason either party has to maintain the filibuster is precedent, to restrain the other party the next time the other party wins. If the filibuster is the only thing standing between the Republicans and a dictatorship where they will never lose power again, then what’s stopping them from getting rid of it themselves, right now even?

If the goal of the war was to increase gas prices by about 50%, murder a bunch of random schoolchildren, and accomplish nothing else, then they’re doing a real bang up job of it.

I realized some years ago that most Americans view “morality” as almost exclusively being about sex. Raising moral concerns about things like having a job where you build missiles to be dropped on schools is likely to be met not so much with disagreement as confusion, about how that could possibly be a moral issue if it’s both legal and doesn’t involve your genitals.