These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to express a nuanced and complex viewpoint. You’re exactly the kind of person who gets lumped in with Nazis by the divisive, black-or-white stance championed in this post.

I’d hoped that Lemmy would have more mature discussion like this, but as you can see in this thread, it’s the same style of “join in the simplistic hatred or be considered the worst kind of enemy” bigotry here too.

There’re two claims being made here.

1. Nazis are bad, we don’t like them, and

2. anyone who expresses disagreement with the statement “fuck Nazis” must be a Nazi.

Most people agree with (1), but to many, me included, (2) is obviously false. There are many, many reasons people would disagree with “fuck Nazis or you are one”, besides being a Nazi and wanting to defend them. Some just dislike profanity. Some don’t want to generalize a historical term to today’s distinct political factions. Others, like you, recognise that reality is complex, that this finger pointing, name calling strategy is something Nazis do too, or simply that it’s not the way intelligent progressives should act.

I genuinely believe that this"call everyone a Nazi" bullshit is part of what’s fissioning our social network into antagonistic factions and causing us to waste our meagre collective political capital arguing about which bathroom a few people should use instead of solving our real, pressing global economic and environmental crises.

Now, queue someone replying to insist I must be a Nazi because I didn’t just jump on the hate bandwagon…

LOL

Joke’s good enough it deserves a comment in addition to the upvote.

Derp. Now I get it. In my defence, I’m also an Aussie so understandably thick. But I live in the Arctic now, where we’ve got all three bears. But the scary white ones stay away from the woods.

Thanks, this is really interesting!

I mean, if your partner’s right and has demonstrated it, you could just update your perspective and be right too…

Got a source for that claim?

Hard to believe a song with such a shallow theme could be become that famous?

Meanwhile, other themes of most famous songs:

• I’m so in love
• My relationship ended and I’m hurt/angry
• Yay, let’s party!

Pretty sure it’s the feeling of the music, not the meaning of the words, that made it popular.

A polar bear in the woods? They’re an aquatic mammal that lives on sea ice… Where are you from?

I need the home-work separation, or both suffer. I constantly get distracted from work with home stuff, and can’t be fully present with family at home because I’m thinking about work.

I regularly move between countries with different road side norms. Handedness is not an issue. Makes no difference.

Only problem is if you set off with no other cars on the road, to use as a cue, and so accidentally go on the wrong side until you see someone coming towards you.

Please share if you set it up

Each physical store can have different prices on the same goods, to exploit the average differences between the populations in each area. Already happens between countries/continents, now it can happen on a neighborhood scale.

I’ve got some surprise gas, just pull my finger…

What’s the first rule of conspiracies? What are the other ones?

Yeah, because why blame the corrupt leadership for offering people shit to eat, blame the people for not being happy eating their shit, because look how much worse shit can be shoved down your throat if you don’t like it!

The US controls the ocean. They don’t need to fight a ground war. Trump’s play is very clear: “Give it to us, because you can’t stop us taking it.” So it’s weird he’d sell weapons to Denmark. Makes it look like he’s bluffing. I wonder if he’ll now very publicly stop the sale. That’d be the right move, even if he is bluffing.

How will you get them there? The US controls the ocean. I suspect they also control low earth orbit and so will be constantly watching.

Centrist here.

1. Fuck off with your anti-centrist bigotry and caricatured centrist views.

2. It is a both sides thing, because your fucking pussies of a Democrat party are showing what wealth hoarding, vote chasing cowards they are, by keeping their heads down and mounting zero opposition to your government being seized by a populist dictator. They are clearly not a viable alternative to this atrocity. We need to replace the whole two party, capitalism-corrupted system, not just ensure that your supposed “good guy party” wins the next election.

3. Being a centrist doesn’t make me a milquetoast appeaser. It means I reject the dichotomy that the only alternative to this populism is more capital-first liberal greed.

4. Your view of centrists, casting them all as people who can’t decide between the two obvious alternatives, rather than people who reject both, is the one thing that both the left and the right agree on. It’s propaganda to keep one of the two extractive elites in power and prevent us from ever even discussing actual alternatives.

5. Same thing, for math lovers: if you take a 1D slice through a n-dimensional normal distribution of views, the more perpendicular a dimension is to yours, the less correlated they are, the more those views will tend to map to the center of the dimension you’re insisting on, despite being actually just as distinct. It’s your insistence on this 1D view that creates centrists, and your dismissal of them is propaganda to prevent real change.