“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon”

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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • frippa@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre you a 'tankie'
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    1 month ago

    And they sometimes get called “tankies” too by people to the right of them. That’s why I both think it’s a useless term (if everybody is a tankie, then nobody is) and why I think I fall in the definition (as most leftists do, I’ve seen pretty mild social democrats being called “tankies” by liberals)

    Plus ultimately these blanket descriptions are pretty useless IMO, you’ll find extremely heated debates between “tankies” themselves on many topics, there’s no consensus, and there are many different ideologies “tankies” subscribe to. It would be like saying that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are all the same thing. We could call them “dronies” maybe.

















  • By that logic all of America should still be partitioned between the Spanish, British, Portuguese and French.

    I understand this is an hyperbole, but still, let’s take for example the French revolution: sure Napoleon crowned himself emperor and in the end left France in a worst state than before, but he gave the whole world some important advancements that in many (often subtle) ways still reverberate today:

    for example, his monetary policies are the reason we have 1,2,5,10,20,50 of a given currency and the respective cents, and not an arbitrary system of fractions (old European coinage could get absurd, I suggest who’s interested to go on numista.com or a similar site and check for yourself) .

    He helped introducing the concept of separation of church and state to the general public (not much considerated before).

    He helped the nascent industrialist class to emerge and impose itself, gradually stamping out the remains of feudalism from Europe.

    He advanced history in many ways I can’t even start to mention.

    Let’s take another example, you can think what you want of the Soviet Union and I can agree to various criticisms, but living in the Russian empire in the 1900s (even before WW1) was like living 3 centuries in the past. People lived in misery and died young, servitude was abolished only 50 years before.

    The Communists took a country that barely surpassed feudalism (in the cities) and gave basic dignities to its citizens, arriving to compete, militarily and economically, with the strongest superpower in history.

    Can be argued it degenerated after Lenin’s death, but it’s undeniable that, even under stalin’s time, life was magnitudinally better than even 30 years prior (and to be fair that’s an enormously low bar)

    Essù, anche noi abbiamo fatto ben 3 (tre) guerre per ľindipendenza contro ľaustria, evidentemente la gente lo voleva! Concordo che non sempre quando rovesci il governo vai a finire meglio (vedi Hitler, giovani turchi) ma gli Italiani lombardi/veneti/friulani sotto cecco Beppe non se la passano proprio bene… Non che i SaBoia fossero meglio, ma ľautodeterminazione dei popoli è una cosa importante per cui (a mio avviso) vale la pena combattere se si è oppressi.



  • Some kind of marketplace like eBay.

    Having bought and sold there the rules are quite arbitrary, and their cryptic algorhitm is a nuisance to buyers (you clicked by accident on a stove? You’re gonna see a ton of stoves in the recommended for a while!) and periodically harms sellers (if you don’t post daily and basically make it your day job, good luck making money!)

    a federated alternative, with different instances for various interests and categories, meta-categories even and so on. Maybe regional instances like we have on here, one for the EU (quite convenient to ship and receive packages from inside of it, no customs wasting time and money) one for North America, one for East Asia, etc. With one being able to purchase from all of them.

    Federation would also ensure that rules are properly enforced without abuses or other malpractices like eBay does (did you know eBay shipped a pig head to somebody who publicly criticized them?) since those instances would naturally be avoided and new ones would be made. It would also prevent excessive fees, as the fediverse is generally not a for-profit endeavor, and still, there will always be the option to shop around from other instances.