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Ruzihm posted:Technically, national bylaws prohibit DSA members from also being members of democratic centralist organizations. Your local chapter can override these, though! Is being registered as a Democrat (to vote in primaries) a problem?
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Feb 1, 2017 18:41
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Like I've said before (in a very different context): it's not that nerds are nazis, it's that nazis and fascists are basically Roman Empire cosplayers to begin with.
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Feb 9, 2017 18:22
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Nerds are victimized because they're lovely people. Being a "nerd" only started being cool, because nerds have a ludicrously high disposable income and they develop identities around their consumption. with a pre-emptive disclaimer that it isn't remotely on the level of actual oppressed classes, this is laughably untrue on a whole bunch of levels
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Feb 9, 2017 21:53
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Ace of Baes posted:*While beating the poo poo out of a short kid with glasses and calling him a fag for answering questions in class* goon self-loathing runs deep
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Feb 10, 2017 01:59
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rudatron posted:that's a really stupid thing to say dude, in general the people doing the victimizing were way more likely to be nazis i mean there's a very small kernel of truth to it, in that what actually defines nerds is alienation and really narrow interests, which produces young people who are often angry and whose limited experiences can lead to a pretty myopic view of politics and the world. this is a easy pool for any political movement promising change to recruit from. the answer to that is not "gently caress nerds" though, it's "goddamn well get there before the fascists do"
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Feb 10, 2017 06:56
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I never said that anybody should dunk a nerd in the trash can or anything, unless they're Nazis. They are certainly not good people though, and there are reasons why they get picked on. they get picked on for the same reason as everyone else, which is "because children are half-socialized at best." it has nothing to do with their moral caliber, which is unremarkable, because "narrow interests" and "being alienated" have no bearing on goodness or badness. basically: rudatron posted:What got me more was the excusing of the victimizers, because in reality, that group is a very small minority, and the reason they target nerds, is because they know no one will defend them. They enjoy the process of abusing others, and they target the vulnerable because they know they can get away with it.
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Feb 10, 2017 07:12
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Granted, I'm coming at this from the position that anybody who isn't at least a socialist is not a good person. I don't care if they're charming individuals, or good parents, or charitable, or whatever other qualities you think comprise a good person - because so were a lot of aristocrats, or slave masters. Yeah, that's nuts. Not least because you're not talking about the equivalent of aristocrats, you're talking about the equivalent of peasants, even before you get to whether morality should be defined exclusively in terms of political ideology, and even before you get to whether reality backs up your generalizations.
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Feb 10, 2017 07:33
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I never implied that morality is defined exclusively in ideological terms either, although I'm hard pressed to see how somebody whose ideology involves mass murder and ethnic cleansing could somehow be a moral person. Perhaps that's just my political bias speaking. Your average American's ideology does not involve mass murder and ethnic cleansing. That's not to say it doesn't involve retributive justice, petty tribalism, and a really warped sense of what "work ethic" means, none of which are good things, or that our susceptibilities to fear, selfishness, and ignorance aren't profoundly exploited.
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Feb 10, 2017 07:58
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Ethnic cleansing maybe not. I keep thinking about Nazis while trying to avoid those comparisons, but that's where the conversation keeps steering back towards. It's certainly hard to believe that the average American gives much of a good drat about all of the mass death that follows in our wake as an imperial power projecting force abroad. I don't care if you steer the conversation to nazis, it's relevant if we're talking about collective responsibility for a nation-state's actions. That said, the reality of voting in American elections is that most of the time the most moral option in that context is to vote for the imperialist who's going to do the least harm. Plenty of people can't stomach it and don't vote or protest vote, which is probably worse from a utilitarian standpoint but doesn't indicate support either. Vastly more don't ask the questions you want them to ask out of ignorance, because our education system is awful. American popular support for foreign intervention is ambivalent at best and becoming more so over time. Anecdotally, I'm surrounded by people who feel trapped between bad choices, which probably has something to do with the rehabilitation of socialism in the public eye despite decades of deliberate fearmongering and misinformation. This isn't a country that turned itself over to a fascist strongman happily or with overwhelming support -- it's a country where an undemocratic system imposed a fascist strongman on us despite his losing the popular election and despite even a significant minority of Republicans being repulsed by him and not turning out. And it's a country that is presently kicking, screaming, and biting every step of the way, as it should be. Tuxedo Catfish has issued a correction as of 08:31 on Feb 10, 2017 |
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Feb 10, 2017 08:29
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:How far are you willing to take this line of reasoning? If the DSA starts running its own candidates on a separate ticket, are you still going to vote for Democrats even knowing that their policies are toxic to people at home and abroad? There has to come a point where you're willing to actively resist a system you admit is inherently immoral. The DSA can try to get its candidates nominated to positions in the Democratic party, but what if you're shut out? What then? Keep voting for the Democrats because you think the DSA might lose? Well, I don't intend for voting to be the beginning and end of my political life, for starters. That said, yeah, I would vote Democrat until I saw evidence that it was possible to supplant the party entirely. Eight years ago I would have preferred Stewart Alexander to Obama, but I didn't vote for him, because without a critical mass of support all it would have done would be to increase the likelihood of a Republican victory, which would have been more destructive both for friends and family here and for people I've never met around the world.
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Feb 10, 2017 09:03
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The system is designed to count electoral performance as a threshold of access. If you're only ever willing to not vote Democrat until you're sure of the possibility of supplanting it then you'll be waiting forever. At some point you have to be willing to eat a big loss to create a space for a truly transformative politics. Liberal and left leaning voters weren't willing to take any kind of risk this last year, and they lost big anyway because the opposition was far more motivated. That's what I mean about the utilitarian calculus being wrong. Kind of looks like we're getting that anyways.
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Feb 10, 2017 09:49
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quote:If we were socialist in 1975 would we have Apple today Sounds like a pretty good argument for socialism to me!
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Feb 18, 2017 01:01
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 Put me down for PA in the OP.
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Feb 22, 2017 21:37
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logikv9 posted:learn the rules slacker!!! I don't need the gang tag!
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Feb 24, 2017 00:05
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We're all intelligence agents, we just don't know that all the other members are too.
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Mar 2, 2017 07:05
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Doc Hawkins posted:oooh so those are the malays of late capitalism everyone's always talking about. i guess they were pretty influential? 
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Aug 7, 2017 07:21
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Al-Saqr posted:what is it about alaska that makes the best socialists. They can see Russia from their houses. 
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Aug 16, 2017 19:14
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Vhak lord of hate posted:i love going to dsa sf meeting that is packed with people interested in socialism after last weekend and spend half of it with the same 4 anarchists and labor dems arguing about bylaws and rules that have been arguing about bylaws and rules for the entire existence of dsa sf and seeing people's interest slowly die after the tenth time a man with a pony tail whips out his masterful grasp of roberts rules of order. I haven't been back to a DSA meeting since my first, which went two hours over the scheduled time. I'll still show up to marches, vote with the DSA as a bloc, and I'm in grad school pursuing a career specifically in order to combat economic inequality on the ground (I want to practice housing law) but a lot of my initial enthusiasm for the organization itself kind of evaporated for the reasons you describe. Also my question would be more "is all political organizing like this?" which, I mean, nobody ever said it'd be easy.
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Aug 17, 2017 16:06
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China Mieville owns and like 95% of the "made-up" words are actually real English words used to mean more or less the same thing they mean in real life, just in a fantasy context.
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Aug 25, 2017 03:16
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Shear Modulus posted:look man i was in the mood for some dick alright? I hear you but man, nobody but Philip K. Dick writes Philip K. Dick. You were setting yourself up for disappointment.
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Aug 25, 2017 03:19
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Anyways the beginning of Perdido Street Station is the best part because it's just this perverted scientist and his bug-headed lover going about their everyday domestic lives under an oppressive early industrial Capitalist regime. Later on it turns into a much more conventional action-adventure story and isn't nearly as unique or interesting.
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Aug 25, 2017 03:21
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TrilliontonNixon posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism well, if nothing else, the name is a devastating self-own by anarchists
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Aug 31, 2017 04:10
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Serf posted:tell him that under socialism he would be skinny redistribution of health
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Sep 27, 2017 23:54
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can someone summarize this to me in a way that doesn't involve having to try to understand twitter threads
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Oct 17, 2017 19:42
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Raskolnikov38 posted:PSL ejected people taking a smoke break as splitters thank you
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Oct 17, 2017 19:45
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freckle posted:these forums are one giant, collaborative, ebook. yeah but who reads other people's posts
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Nov 7, 2017 01:22
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anyone post this one yet https://twitter.com/AP/status/928087554477514753
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Nov 8, 2017 03:36
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Raskolnikov38 posted:two rabbis were once arguing about something or other to the point that God intervened and said 'yo Rabbi Y is correct and Rabbi X is wrong'. to which Rabbi X told God to gently caress off and then won the argument more specifically he told God to gently caress off because God had already told them to follow the majority rule in cases like this and Rabbi Y was a lone holdout
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Nov 13, 2017 15:36
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please don't get us LF'd
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Nov 13, 2017 23:33
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Halloween Jack posted:Hope you like beards. and this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no DSA women, and that socialists just spring out of holes in the ground which is of course ridiculous
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Feb 1, 2018 18:31
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Epic High Five posted:lol everything proceeding on schedule I see. Pitt? Nah Pitt's the one going "actually, grad student workers aren't workers and shouldn't be allowed to unionize."
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Mar 16, 2018 02:32
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Shear Modulus posted:thats every college though Doesn't make it any less bullshit.
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Mar 16, 2018 02:37
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Coolness Averted posted:Eh, kinda it's more there are anarchists who view it as antithetical to their true goal. Any energy spent building up the state is wasted especially since reducing the harms of the current system means you're stalling revolution since you're making it that much more livable. Ace of Baes posted:Anarchists who think this haven't actually read anarchist theory and describe their anarchism as an aesthetic Yeah, I'm not an anarchist and think their entire outlook is kind of dumb but this in particular isn't anarchists being dumb, it's just regular dumb. Big social upheavals don't happen by a mechanism whereby people are crushed until they can't take it any more and suddenly spring back -- they happen when the balance of power shifts in some crucial way and society doesn't adapt fast enough. If anything food banks / shelters / legal aid / etc. help the process because they give people the time and energy to focus on why their lives are like this and what to do about it instead of focusing on survival 24/7.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:21
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Like setting aside straight-up psycho Ayn Rand types, there's a reason so much conservative rhetoric is wrapped up in this narrative about who deserves help and who doesn't, praising the idea of "charity" while always casting the receipt of charity as shameful and temporary, and it's not just racism. If people start getting the idea that they're morally entitled to a certain standard of living, they'll dig in to try and keep it, and that kind of resentment and entrenchment is a powerful political force.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:30
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Baby Babbeh posted:It's a joke, but his other point about the Leper's Colony is a good one. Having a transparent moderation queau is one of the best things SA did for its community building and it's always amazed me that it was never copied by other sites. Probably because having all your decisions exposed for public review is a huge burden. It works on SA because SA moderation more or less disregards criticism from below by design and has "the moderators' whims are law" written right into the rules, but that creates bad blood and resentment even here and would be worse in an organization / community that's expected to be accountable to its membership. None of which is to say that it's a bad thing to have a transparent moderation queue, it's just very much for the benefit of users rather than the other way around.
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Apr 23, 2018 18:40
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IM DAY DAY IRL posted:what happened to this thread eating itself over literally the smallest possible disagreement between decorum and candidness
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Apr 24, 2018 17:31
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Top City Homo posted:counterpoint expand the US empire until it collapses Dig dugS of America
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Apr 29, 2018 19:17
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Captain Queernabs posted:January loving 2017 this is already gone, what was it
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May 12, 2018 00:54
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Solid Poopsnake posted:"Your honor, if you'll just look at this elaborate train set I've constructed here on the floor of the courtroom" man i'm all aboard the "gently caress Conor Arpwel" train, but, as a law student on the spectrum, I'm actually fairly concerned that I'll be at a disadvantage in litigation due to the whole "impaired ability to recognize others' emotional states" thing and i'd rather people not joke about it
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Jun 21, 2018 00:26
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Phi230 posted:Just do estates and trusts or like real estate transactions or something not litigation It's a lot harder to do social good that way. Like right now I'm working for a Legal Services firm, helping people who normally wouldn't be able to afford an attorney to fight eviction suits. And I do all right at it, it's not like my disability is insurmountable, it's just something I worry about because I want to give my clients the representation they deserve. I might end up going into the more academic side of law (I've had multiple professors basically tell me I was born for it) but unfortunately the cost of further education might decide that question for me.
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Jun 21, 2018 00:37
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