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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Generally you should do what:

    1. Maximizes your personal well-being (though note I’m not saying “wealth”, because they two are not always the same), and
    2. Satisfies your personal and ideological principles as well as possible, at least to the point where you can live with yourself.

    Just because we have systemic critiques doesn’t mean we should go live in a cave and eat bugs. To the degree possible we should prefigure the society we want to build, but torturing ourselves individually to do it is both unproductive and likely takes away from our focus on more important things like organizing and taking direct action that impacts the system. We do tend to make personal sacrifices to further our ideological goals, but there’s both a practical limit and one where we shouldn’t be cruel to each other in our expectations.

    Many of us are vegans. Most of us probably avoid buying shares in oil companies. But all of our circumstances are different. Perhaps people salting Chevron to radicalize union organizing there will wind up with its stocks in their retirement accounts that are difficult to divest from without harming their ability to retire, due to their particular circumstances. It seems pretty shitty to expect someone to just get rid of them without us having some kind of dependable (e.g. mutual aid) infrastructure in place to take care of each other in our old age.

    TL;Dr: Yet you participate in society. Curious!






  • This is a terrible take by someone who has heard plenty of propaganda by the arms industry but knows absolutely nothing about physics. Many of the products of the primary and even secondary nuclear reactions from a nuclear warhead are themselves radioactive and have long enough half-lives to do tons of damage in both the short and long terms. Whether or not there is radioactive material spread around is not simply a question of whether some of the original fuel remains unspent.

    If all you’re doing is spreading war propaganda, log off and go rethink your life.

    EDIT: Folks, start here and read other materials by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Don’t let this bullshit whitewashing of the dangers of nuclear weapons, their use, and their testing go unaddressed. And speak up against this kind of propaganda showing up in our communities—especially leftist ones.






  • StrayCatFrump@slrpnk.netto Anarchist Memes @lemmy.mlCapitalism can't be anarchism
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    8 months ago

    OK liberal.

    You have no clue what private property even is, dude. It’s not simply some kind of thing someone claims for their own. Private property is literally property which is used to exploit other people’s labor and material needs. Your toothbrush is not private property. Your car is not private property. The house you live in is not private property. That land you rent to someone else just so they can live is private property. That factory you force people to work in so they can put food in their mouths because they have no access to land or other sources of sustenance…those are private property.

    So yeah: good fucking luck protecting land and infrastructure you don’t have the capacity to even use on your own with a gun. Again, NO: the capacity to do violence, alone, is NOT sufficient to protect private property. You need a lot more than that. Your ability to beat your wife doesn’t make you able to patrol a large swath of agricultural land and make sure nobody encroaches on it. Your ability to shoot someone doesn’t make you capable of keeping workers out of a factory that is rightfully their collective property by virtue of the value of the blood, sweat, and tears they used to build and run that factory, especially when they have the capacity to do violence themselves and there’s no state to keep them from exercising it in self-defense.

    You fucking ignorant dope.