In Brazil we call that “lapada seca”. I don’t think I know how to translate the spirit of it, but literally it’s something like “dry slap”.

You say that when someone got slapped so hard you can feel the pain from afar.

libertarian

So. As he said, white supremacists.

I love how people use this kind of metaphysical argument, invoking human nature and such, and then have the nerve to call Marxism idealistic.

Marxist logic is literally about eschewing idealistic metaphysical arguments and focusing on the material conditions that influence history. Go read the Misery of Philosophy, people ffs.

Fucking unionize then.

Oh! I see. Thanks!

Good old Mike! This guy is so fucking good to listen to. We need more comrades with that perfect rhetoric.

Can anyone explain the meme for the poor non-native english speaker?

Thanks :)

I’m not even going to comment on the EU being « authoritarian ».

As one small and simple example, ask the people in Niger if it doesn’t feel authoritarian that they can’t enjoy the material wealth of their country because France steals 80% of their Uranium, paying peanuts for it. Go ask France’s former colonies how democratic it is for a foreign central bank to control their currency, artificially keeping it favorable for France to steal Uranium for peanuts. How nice it is for them that the material wealth that should be making their country rich, is going to subsidize the electrical bill of someone’s fancy apartment in Paris.

Go ask people who live near mines owned by Swedish mining companies how much those companies bribed the local governments to allow them to pollute the fuck out of their countries, deregulate the fuck out of their labor laws, etc. See if they consider this democracy.

Go ask someone in Libya how democratic it was when a government that provided them with the best standards of living in the whole continent was bombed and removed from power because some French and American folks decided that it was time for his counter-hegemonic ass to go. And left a fucking mess of warlords and civil war in his place. Super democratic I guess. Not authoritarian at all.

The EU can only maintain itself relatively open and prosperous by fucking over their former colonies in ways their population mostly ignore. If your democracy at home depends on autocracy and destruction elsewhere to be maintained, how is it real democracy?

I’m a relatively old (let’s say more than 40, less than 55) guy living in a dependent country in the periphery capitalism (Brazil). It always felt to me that building strong socialist movement in core capitalist places like the US or in Western Europe would be damn near impossible.

Back 20 years ago it felt like those countries had a very solid way of providing life’s necessities and a more or less comfortable existence for a fraction big and politically strong enough of their populations that it would be really hard for organic movements to raise and make people see the exploitation. Hell, it’s hard to talk about radical politics with workers here, who see the exploitation first hand and are mostly aware that the game is rigged against them. I imagine how hard it would be in a place where everyone you know have a car, a house and so on.

Of course that was built on the backs of the Global South. But it felt like exploitation had been exported to places where it was invisible and wouldn’t make any waves back in the places to which this wealth was flowing.

I’m not a well versed in marxist theory to be honest. Just enough to understand we’re all being fucked and need to take over. But I always thought that any next big revolutionary movement with international impact would start in super-exploited places like Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, … I made an analogy with the Russian Revolution. The first revolution happening in a rich but relatively relatively peripheral country. It was Russia, not Germany or France. It wasn’t the most advanced capitalist country. It was a place where there was enough capitalist development for a proletariat to emerge and material conditions that made proletarians more readily radicalizable for whatever reasons.

So, I thought, maybe it will be India or the Philippines, places that already have active revolutions going on. Maybe it will be Brazil, Malaysia, etc…

But this right-wing turn in politics in the last 10 years, the successive crisis and the need for more and more exploitation to keep ever increasing accumulation seems to be bringing over-exploitation right to the core of the system. More and more the working classes of Europe and the USA are being impoverished and denied what used to be available to them.

I wonder if that doesn’t make those places a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

It’s nice that neoclassical economics is now verifying with their methods what we know since… the 1830s maybe?

I mean, yeah I’m being ironic. But it’s nice to have quantitative verification.

I used the API to overwrite and delete all my messages and deleted my account today.

I’m slowly deleting all my social media accounts and stay only on fediverse stuff. I think the slower, less FOMO driven nature of Lemmy will make it a more healthy to find people to talk with.

I don’t have time for a longer answer but I think you misunderstood me. My whole point is exactly that those religions do not focus on metaphysical beliefs.

They focus on ritual aspects, practice and social activities. It’s exactly because they focus on the material aspects of worship that I don’t think they matter much in terms of being a materialistic socialist. They don’t impose metaphysical explanations for why society has a given structure or how to achieve such and such goal as a society.

They focus on activities and practices, both social and individual. They don’t require that you adhere to specific metaphysical beliefs to engage in those practices.

For example: I don’t believe in the actuality of metaphysical spirits and yet I find the practices of Umbanda tremendously meaningful for me as an individual journey of enlightenment and the social activities very fulfilling culturally.

About your last comment (imposing social behavior norms with threats of spiritual punishment) that’s so incredibly Christianity centric. My religion has nothing of the sort, for example. Judaism doesn’t even have a concept of hell. And although Islam have something similar for some branches, it’s much less important than it is for Christianity.

What I mean by sociality is nothing of that sort. It’s simply social activities. Festivals, collective worship, social gatherings, communal rituals, etc. Those things are tremendously more important for most religions than merely specific sets of metaphysical beliefs about the nature of things.

I’m not Muslim but I’m a religious person (I follow a Brazilian-African religious tradition called Umbanda) so I think I can try to respectfully chime in with my perspective.

For me personally it all boils down to recognizing that different spheres of your experience can be governed by different processes, with different rules.

When it comes to material interaction with the sensible world, I’m thoroughly and 100% materialistic. I don’t attribute metaphysical explanations to material processes.

And honestly I think presuming that religion necessarily means attributing metaphysical explanations to stuff is a very stubborn miscomprehension of how religions other than Christianity works. Most religions are really not very interested in building systems of reasoning about the world and doctrinal orthodoxy like European Christianity is.

They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

EDIT:

Sorry for editing, but I think my answer wasn’t complete enough.

I think looking at religion as a system of beliefs is a fundamental eurocentric misunderstanding of those things we call religion that aren’t western european Christianity. Specially protestant Christianity, which is a very specific practice, extremely focused on belief, and rationalistic systems of thought.

Most of the things we call religions: eastern varieties of Christianity, Buddhism, a lot of branches of Islam, Judaism, etc, etc are decidedly not about belief, but about practice, sociality and experience.

Think like this: what you have to do to be a good protestant christian? You have to have specific beliefs about who Jesus was, what he did, the significance of his actions, what is sin, what is salvation, what is grace, etc, etc, etc. It’s a whole system of thought.

What do you have to do to be a good Muslim? Practice the tenets of Islam. Practice the pillars. It’s not a person who adheres to a long list of beliefs. As a system of belief it can be summarized in a single phrase: there’s only one God and a specific person is a prophet of this god. That’s it. The rest is about practice, ritual, sociality and experience.

That is not incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how society organizes, of the processes that create exploitation in capitalism, etc, etc.

EDIT 2:

That’s the last edit I promise.

Just a quick comment that there are those who argue that the word “religion” is a bad category. That lumping together all those different human experiences as instances of the same phenomenon is kind of unhelpful. Precisely because it necessarily draws an eurocentric comparison with Christianity which is prone to cause misunderstanding of those phenomena.

That made me smile! :)

It’s good enough.

If you’re a working class or non-white person interacting with the police, an emotionally unstable cop might decide that we have it. But officially, in the books we don’t have it.

But TBH, Bolsonaro’s health is already faltering. A prison sentence will probably mean he’ll die in prison. Which is good.

Today we’re celebrating in Brazil because the fucking fascist (Bolsonaro) that was our previous president had his political rights stripped for 8 years for abusing power in the previous election.

You know what’s better? Dude did EVERYTHING he could to rig the elections and LOST. That’s how incompetent those fucking fascists are today. Even the libs saw through him.

Yep, bourgeois justice sucks but at least it brought this to the table today. :)

We’re still far from where we should be, with our “center left” conciliatory government defending basically a continuation of liberal economic policies. But at least that particular fascist is out of commission for a while.

We’re going to celebrate like carnival or world cup today.

FUCK YOU, BOLSONARO. I’ll still live to see you ROT IN A FUCKING JAIL CELL, YOU FUCKING GENOCIDAL MURDERING PIECE OF SHIT.

They don’t even pretend anymore hahahaha…

I was thinking the other day. Ancaps should love Wagner. Don’t they say private armies are the only way to go for defense?

There you go, ancaps. You should have a poster of Prigozhin on your bedroom, right beside Rothbard.

The level of delusion is amazing. Guy believe he have specific intel about the quality of Russian defensive structures in a particular region.

Dude…

there’s a whole issue of is their system secure? Is it noncorrupt? Does it meet all the standards … every other nation in NATO does.

Uh… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This is a joke, right?

Is Turkey noncorrupt? Is the US noncorrupt? Is the UK noncorrupt?

Even by capitalist standards of “noncorruption”? Gimme a break…

Even most right-wingers, even people who believe in capitalism would readily admit those countries are highly corrupt.

Todos já fomos :)