You do, but you don’t see it as that because the millions dying are in the Middle-East where you’re getting your oil, Africa where you get your diamonds and coffee, South America where you get your minerals and oil, and Asia where they’re assembling your manufacturing. And it took wars and imperialism and installed authoritarian puppet regimes to extract the wealth from all those places. Not to mention what do you think the monarchies of World War I and fascist regimes of World War 2 did? Give out puppies?

You guys are better than the US, but only because you’re balanced by actual socialist and communist political parties and labor unions that are able to extract concessions like that universal healthcare. Looks like a few of those countries are turning fascist again, so just give it some time, and those human rights will be gone, too.

The people probably.

Sure you can bribe people, but it’s a harder when the wealth isn’t concentrated in a few people, and the companies are owned by the people instead of private interests. USSR politicians weren’t known for being rich, but compare that to modern Russian oligarchs, or even US Congressmen. A majority of the US Congressman are millionaires, not at all true for the common populace.

I’m going off statistics and surveys, not anecdotal evidence.

http://thetrumpet.com/6322-eastern-germans-feel-life-was-better-under-communism

http://pewresearch.org/short-reads/2010/04/28/hungary-better-off-under-communism/

http://reason.com/2009/11/16/the-rise-of-communist-nostalgi/

http://voxukraine.org/en/the-strong-hand-curse-why-ukrainians-do-not-like-capitalism

http://balkaninsight.com/2010/11/24/macedonians-deem-communist-past-better-than-present/

http://themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/25/majority-of-russians-regret-soviet-collapse-poll-says-a60039

http://rt.com/news/ussr-collapse-mistake-poll-585/

Don’t I have the power over my happiness in capitalism because I can work towards higher wealth extraction to achieve my own goals?.

If you’re lucky, but you can’t work your way to being billionaire without exploiting people on the way. So, chances are, no. Statistically you’re probably one of the people having wealth extracted than the other way around unless you have a supportive network, friendly investors or parents loaning you money. If not, chances are you’re making it harder for other people, either who work for you, work with you, act as a reserve army of labor, or are victims of your country’s imperialism. It requires some people to suffer as part of the system, but that’s not sustainable. There’s a reason the US has a shrinking middle class, and a growing fascism problem, and economic crises every 10 years. The UK and Canada aren’t far behind, with some groups trying to privatize their health services and such. Europe will be next, with the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries probably last. So it may seem fine where you live now, but give it some years and you’ll be right where we are, with someone trying to sell off your health services or other state assets. I’d be willing to bet.

Because once you reach a certain level, growth isn’t required, you just divide the resources you have to give everyone a happy life. People don’t need infinite money to be happy, but they do a need a minimum amount, studies have shown that. Capitalism denies that minimum amount to a lot of people because of its focus on accumulating and concentrating that wealth.

It had some of the same problems but not all of them. It had universal healthcare, better rights for women, faster increase of education and literacy, less homelessness, less problems with religion interfering with politics, or companies buying politicians, etc.

It also had some new problems we didn’t have like lack of focus on small commodities or suppression of religion, but that’s not fixable or required for communism, it’s just a focus they had specifically. It also had of the same problems we have just from being human, like anti-LGBTQ attitudes, racism against certain groups, bureaucrats, and wars. But communism’s implementation changes between countries, none of those problems are necessary, it’s just stuff that has to be learned from. For example, Cuba is communist but has made great strides towards fixing LGBTQ and racist attitudes, and has eased up on religion. China is communist but has a bigger focus on small manufacturing and as a result has lots of small commodities.

Imagine if we abandoned democracy the first time it “failed” in Greece thousands of years ago or the republic in Rome. I don’t doubt that you have some relatives that suffered, but by comparison, the US and it’s capitalist allies destabilized basically all of South America and Africa. While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs.

The important part is that it’s a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective. Just focusing on that would go a long way, no matter which implementation we used (but imo it probably has to be an implementation of socialism or communism, because capitalism can’t imagine a society without those money and growth metrics).

Right? It seems repetitive.

Thanks! I’ll look for that one! And you can tell, I really want to avoid returning to my reddit level of online addiction I was at previously. I’m close with Lemmy, but there’s not enough content for me to get there yet lol.

Haha ya, I totally get that. For me: I’ve been doing more little projects on my phone (designing games on my off time, researching work problems, etc), started carrying around a journal to write in on my bag, I downloaded the Shonen Jump app and started reading manga for anime I’ve wanted to watch but haven’t gotten around to, and I listen to podcasts not just when I’m driving. Hope some of those suggestions help or kickstart your own idea.

I also want to start carrying a book around with me like I did when I was a kid, because I have such a big list to get through and I have lots of pdfs for rpg books I’ve downloaded but haven’t read. I’ve tried to read them on my phone, and I succeeded with one book but the screen is so small lol. Maybe I need to look for a good e-reader that reads pdfs without straining my eyes, like I heard e-ink readers or something like that do, but apparently not with pdfs, I guess?

Unless you don’t vote political opinions do often matter, and they affect people’s lives in real physical ways, especially for oppressed minorities, like LGBTQ people or currently Palestinians, which is why you’ll probably see people speak up for groups like them the most. I’ve never seen anybody be mad at someone for driving an EV car on Lemmy, though. That feels kind of like a straw man.

I like to switch between different sorts, because like you I haven’t found the perfect one yet. I do think you should try scaled every now and then, though, just to help boost the smaller communities. It’s fine way to find newer ones when I’m out of content from active or hot.

That’s fair. The last paragraph I should have attributed to the Zionist thought instead of that commenter in particular. I mostly just wanted to demonstrate how the “They want to do an October 7th over and over again!” scare tactic leads to the genocidal thoughts and actions we see happening now. I was commenting while emotional, I’ll edit it so it’s not so harsh and personally aggressive.

Hamas is a response to Israeli violence and colonialism for the last 70 years. You can depose them but another group will rise up with arms to resist colonialism as long as Israel keeps doing the same thing. And they did before Hamas, so of course they will after. Plus, it will be even harder as these events drive recruitment for Hamas. America didn’t get rid of the Taliban by bombing Afghanistan for 20 years, either. It doesn’t work.

Israel has been occupying Gaza the whole time despite their rhetoric. They control all their infrastructure and built a big wall to keep them in, and control all travel in and out, plus they constantly spied on them with everything from drones to listening devices to taking random hostages and trying to get info out of them. Gaza doesn’t have control of their own food, power, trash, travel, water, sea territory, money, etc. That’s basically an occupation, no matter what they say. The only reason to need to take it a step farther and put troops on the inside instead of all along the wall outside is so they can kill more Palestinians.

The scare tactics of claiming they’ll never be safe is how you get a genocide, both now and in the past. It’s that thought in WW2 that leads to rhetoric like, “We tried to let them live in peace with these stars and putting them in their own spaces in towns, but they keep causing trouble. They even want to do a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising over and over again. We’re going to need to kill all the Jews, it’s just the only solution.”

This is incredible. Like, it was always obvious from a gut feeling or seeing comments reposted in the exact same thread, but this makes it even more obvious.

I haven’t been paying attention. I can’t believe it’s so soon. Are you nominated for anything, movie superstar Margot Robbie?

Beautiful

Oh weird. Should I reinstall my app or something?

Personally I am missing Scaled sort, a new sorting options for instances on 0.19 that I don’t think Sync has but some other apps like Thunder and Voyager do. But other than that, I still like Sync.

That’s Reddit, too. World News there is basically all Israeli propaganda right now. It becomes a lot more diluted with more users.

Honestly, there’s a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.

After the initial hype, it’s only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy’s federation partners and T_D’s exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it’s just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of “biggest extant reddit alternative”, lemmy doesn’t take first prize.

Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.

Reddit’s killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that’s not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it’s not a viable alternative.

Competition: Sure, it’s federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it’d get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the “dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people” problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.

This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It’s so dumb. “Lemmy isn’t as good as Reddit because everyone isn’t there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks.” /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there’s not enough people.

When I was leaving Reddit I heard of Kbin (which I do have an account in and still check all the time), raddle.me, Tildes, squabbles, and I think another. So many!