There’s a concept, ‘conspicuous consumption,’ that people will use products in such a way for their social power regardless of anything else. So getting higher quality diamonds, whatever imperceptible difference it has, is still worth it to be seen as affording the higher tier. One of the ways in which market economies poison the brain.

That’s a great point about moderation, plenty of forums outside of just banning would have mods post in the thread and say ‘knock that shit off, try to be nicer’ or whatever to discourage a toxic atmosphere.

There can be appropriate times for a range of civility like you said so having nuance is important, but I’ve rarely seen a forum outside of something like Stormfront afraid to ban Nazis or racists without question, unlike some big venues today that try to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘free speech absolutists’.

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The idea of climate change and it’s causes IS falsifiable though, which is why taking actions related to that cause is a bit different than something that has no way to be proven.

Let me ask you this, if you had a website with a community that relentlessly mocks communism and/or socialism, and lets some nazi posts rise to the top, what would you call that website?

Reddit?

Do you doubt that? What is your idea of the left? What is seen as ‘left’ or even what conservatives call ‘the radical left’ in the US would likely be seen as center or center-right globally.

Let me preface with the fact I somewhat agree and I in no way doubt your knowledge about politics, this comment is mostly for other people that might read this.

But anyway, it’s used in an inaccurate way a lot of the time in the US but right vs left have been pretty useful terms for the concepts of fluid decentralized, bottom-up political structures versus rigid top-down hierarchical structures. Like, if someone says a place is left vs right, it is simplistic but there are certain differences that are important to distinguish.

The terms “left” and “right” first appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the Ancien Regime to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left.[6][7][8] One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: “We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp”.[9][10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left–right_political_spectrum

The world isn’t black and white, but if there is a potential for political revolution in a given society, there are usually key issues that you are able to somewhat differentiate two camps into, with smaller numbers of supporters falling towards the middle. At different times there are more moderates than the wings of the spectrum so it would be less appropriate to use the terms, but in US politics there are many issues that are maybe irreconcilable as it stands.

It’s considered ‘left’ to support queer and trans rights, and there are a good number of people that seem to have a problem with that whether my queer self is political or not.

That’s true about ‘in the style of’, I did get some interesting responses when I said in the style of Allen Ginsberg, but it would just rip lines straight from him at times. As someone who enjoys creative writing I don’t see a necessarily beneficial use for AI to be extremely capable at creating poetry haha but I am interested in the mechanics of it and how it could be improved.

When ChatGPT was newer I saw a lot of posts about raps made by it, there were always this same flow. I tried to get it to make decent rhymes, but it cannot get out of the most cheesy typical rhyme scheme possible. This was 3.5, maybe 4 or other models are better. I found I could make interesting lines if I said something like “write a paragraph with as many words that rhyme with ‘taken’ as possible”, and then you could do that with a few rhymes and twist those around to make an interesting verse.

That is one of my biggest gripes with political discourse of all varieties, lack of creativity. I admit don’t know enough about the ‘democratic confederalism’ to fully support it, but from what I’ve heard it is compelling, it just comes to mind when I think of the question of capitalism vs communism.

You said a state must have control to stop thievery and murder, but I’ve never heard of a state that successfully stopped those things, is what I was getting at. The point about conditions where violence is common or less common is that there are more primary factors to violence than whether or not someone will be punished by state forces for that violence. There are more effective ways to combat violence and theft than a police state.

We have a state now though, has thievery and violence been stopped? How many thousands are in poverty, how many are killed in global wars waged in the name of profits? There are states where theft and murder are extremely rare, and states where it is common. What is the difference between the conditions where it is common and uncommon? Is a top-down control and manipulation the only way to reduce violence?

Anarchism works all the time. It’s more than a political structure, it’s an idea about how to organize relations between people, and there already are many groups that are active that function on anarchist principles.

Any group that collects itself in the modern world as anarchist, like anarchist groups in the Spanish Civil War, are heavily repressed by state forces. Capitalist states work together to discourage anarchist ideals even more so than communism because of the possibility it has for threatening traditional power structures.

Yeah, it would be a good thing if Lemmy AND Reddit were more left, but what can ya do.

A socialist system doesn’t have to be state-based. Socialism can encompass anarchism, anarcho-communism and many other left ideologies besides state-communism.

The politicians and bureaucrats don’t know better, which is why people tell them what paths we should take as a society. Then when organizations are funded by public dollars they hire experts in the relevant fields. If the public were to take over healthcare for example, experts in healthcare policy would be hired to consult on how to overhaul the medical industry.

Just one example, Democratic Confederalism. There are endless possibilities, even within the scope of ‘communism’. To think free-market capitalism is the best that can be come up with is a severe underestimation of the powers of human ingenuity.

What system do you think they are referring to as an anarchist? Anarchism is simply opposition to hierarchies that allow control over others, such as the control capitalists have over workers by owning the means of production and political forces. The system that anarchists advance in place of that can take an unlimited number of forms.

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The structures of society are created by human will, but the structures in place and the interactions they require also shape our values as cultures. Capitalism is a system in which by owning capital, wealth and the means of production, a capitalist derives profit from the workers who are the producers using the tools and facilities owned by the capitalist. To be successful in this, or to raise yourself above the working class, you must own capital and use it to derive profit to increase your capital further, or else other capitalists will take your place in the market.

Capitalism and market based economies have only been a part of the global structure for a small minority of the total time that humans have created societies. There are thousands of years we have very little information of, making it difficult to derive what sort of social structures were in place in different societies.

In the absence of pressures like poverty and economic competition, people help each other. When someone trips in front of you, the vast majority of people will be concerned and help them up. I truly believe altruism is a core aspect of ‘human nature’ as much or more than greed.