They should replace workers and people should deserve to live without being workers, but it should also be painfully obvious that our current economic system won’t support this idea, and won’t until we do some pretty drastic things.
It’s not that we couldn’t build a post-scarcity society probably even right now given some pretty radical adjustment of resource allocations, we just don’t want to build one – “we” being the 0.01% that have such insane amounts of wealth that they’ve essentially taken over the whole economic system, largely thanks to eg. dumb fucks like Reagan and sociopathic fucks like Thatcher and the people who idolize them buying into the idea that they too can be that rich because the wealth will somehow magically trickle down.
Beehaw was around much before the current “population explosion” of the Fediverse, though, and by all accounts was doing just fine. Naturally it didn’t have as much content as it currently does, but the sort of reddit-esque content flood that some people seem to need really isn’t a requisite for sites to thrive.
I’m on a small lemmy/reddit -like content aggregator / forum that has maybe a few hundred users, and while it’s certainly quiet compared to Lemmy nowadays, it’s got a small active community and nobody feels like it would need more “volume” to be a nice place to be.
I lost the game years ago, and soon you will have lost it too. It’s a 20 year old meme, but basically:
The Game is a mind game in which the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game. Depending on the variation, it is held that the whole world, or all those who are aware of the game, are playing it at all times. Tactics have been developed to increase the number of people who are aware of The Game, and thereby increase the number of losses.
That was well said. Recontextualization is exactly the thing; it’s not that I think the Soviet Union was absolute evil with zero redeeming features. They got more right during the early years although I’m not necessarily a huge fan of that period either, and to a large extent it was Stalin who fucked them up pretty severely with the frankly sociopathic system that the Union turned into.
Russian political culture has been outright brutal for a long time. Eg. these KGB-like secret police organizations have been around for a while and have invariably had brutal methods of dealing with politically displeasing individuals or just who-the-hell-ever in many cases. This, coupled with the cultural ethos that Russia and Russians – and specifically meaning ethnic Russians – are superior to anyone outside their borders and a tendency for imperialism, means that Russian rule has nearly invariably been a shitty time, with Finland being one of the few exceptions as we mostly faced little repression or cultural erasure compared to other Russian “colonies” and this was done intentionally; most of the Russian Emperors during our time as a Grand Duchy in some ways thought of Finland as way to show the European powers that they can run things in a “western” way, and to work as a kind of window to the West. For the last 20 or so years they did try to Russify us, which we – being stubborn fucks – did not take well. We also kept our previous Parliament for the most part even though even starting from Alexander I the Emperors wanted to have autocratic rule, but – again in parts thanks to us being stubborn fucks – it took something like 4 emperors for it to happen. Their other historical or the currently existing colonies (nobody seems to think of Russia as a colonialist empire because their colonies are inside contiguous borders) weren’t quite so lucky, as Russification and “Russian supremacy” has been the standard.
This political culture played a large part in the problems with the Union. It was nominally multicultural (and korenization was briefly a thing until they went back to Russification as usual) but it wasn’t exactly unclear who were ultimately in charge.
And before some smartass barges in asking me why it’s OK if the US/UK/France/whoever does this stuff: I don’t like imperialism any more regardless of who’s doing it.
I did specifically say that yes, being a snarky asshole was stupid of me and I could have not been one in my initial answer. So, yes, I was an asshole and that’s not something I or anybody else should be doing. That’s not defensiveness, that’s me saying I screwed up.
But can you honestly tell me that you think it’s sensible behavior from this other person to compare a completely random onlooker who’s trying to defuse this scene to a pedophile defending Nazi war criminals? Like, does that strike you as a good way for someone to handle it when there’s a conflict and someone from the outside tries to be diplomatic and calm things down?
I also really don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish with these replies. Just popping up replying to my comments with petty insults doesn’t seem to paint you in a light that’s any better than my initial twattery towards the original commenter. If you want to actually say something, take a moment and formulate your thoughts? Because this… whatever it is you’re doing really isn’t any better than my original snark, so if you agree with the original commenter than I should have done better (and frankly I agree with them on that point at least), maybe don’t take your turn at being an antagonistic asshole just because you feel like venting – the way I did?
But hey, it’s not just you though; here in Finland we’ve had eg. multiple literal neo-Nazis in the government – one had to quit because, you know, he is a neo-Nazi, but the extremist right wing party he’s from replaced him with a pedophile neo-Nazi – and our Speaker of the Parliament has publicly fantasized on his blog about murdering gay people. And that’s just the highlight reel, it gets so much worse.
Yeah, if I woke up tied to train tracks and had someone explain that to me, I’d zone out and then panic because I had no idea what the fuck was going on