The whole myth of the American Revolution was that the Americans were fighting for their individual freedoms from the European colonial powers. They wrote a masturbatory declaration of independence about how this will be the land of personal freedom and individual rights. It’s America’s big thing, its source of national pride.
The same people who believe that, the people who fetishize Benjamin Franklin and blabber endlessly about the Federalist Papers and watch the Hamilton musical weekly, will then turn around and say America was not even intended to be democratic from the beginning. They hold two wholly incompatible mythologies.
Quote from the American Declaration of Independence:
… to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
This is clearly a call for a democracy. Chuds can squabble about what kind of democracy it was intended to be (no need to bring up the practical absence of genuine democracy) but the intent has always been unambiguous.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).
Albert Einstein agreed and he seemed like a pretty smart dude:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
Stalin, really? But I thought he would be critical of Stalin, considering he thought Lenin's policies were unadvisable but necessary as a last resort, and he supports Lenin, so I thought Einstein wouldn't be too keen on Stalin but just rather critically supportive...
if they want they can fork lemmy and do their own thing. heck who tf cares if lemmy has a communist dev, you can selfhost it ffs. no one fucking cares.
The design of social software is never apolitical and problems with many open source projects boil down to liberal misconceptions about how governance of their project needed to work. The devs being communists is cool and good.
They’re literally getting pissy because the devs won’t build a block of hexbear into the software itself. Great liberal values. (And an incredibly poor understanding of how FOSS development works.)
The server returned this error: couldnt_find_post.
Fucking loser deleted the post. Moron probably realized how stupid this shit is, maybe I really should make an account on lemmy.ml or something so I can bully them (or they stop being a coward and make an account in an instance that doesn't defed lemmygrad would also work )
(also yes I checked, they deleted it, not SJW admins):
Capitalism is fully democratic for the bourgeoisie. Liberal democracy was conceived as a means of self-rule for the emerging bourgeois class. It’s a mechanism for resolving intra-class conflict. In the US, the inclusion of proletarians, POC, and non-men are completely incidental results of class war, allowing political mechanisms to take a hit in lieu of economic mechanisms.
It was, but even this is breaking down due to the increasing wealth inequality even within bourgeoisie and the mechanisms that were created to control lower classes' participation in politics like capitalist media, electoral college, anticommunist, pro-status-quo propaganda and similar things that had got a life of their own and are eating even into mechanism of bourgeois self-rule, hindering their effectiveness. Like old realistic ghouls like Kissinger being replaced with complete idiots who have bought into their own propaganda.
With that framing it’s no wonder the US is producing mainstream fascist politicians left and right. The downwardly mobile petit bourgeoisie are some truly volatile fucks.
@goat@sh.itjust.works I think you should come talk to us, you have been at this for a while. Make a lemm.ee alt and post a thread here. This is getting silly.
back when hexbear did a whole big vote to federate with SJW you guys were all like, 'yeah, that's great, we can dunk on so many libs!', but then you had to call out to be defederated in less than a day. :(
how about you come over to a neutral instance so that way neither of us can get banned? :3
hey there he is! That was fast goat, how often do you check hexbear?
Gotta say I'm suspicious of anyone who can lurk this site as much as you have the past few months, see all the horrors of capitalism we discuss, and still support capitalism
I'm preoccupied tomorrow but how about tuesday on lemmy.ml?