The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings.

Moreso that we replaced kings with a new form of ownership, and therefore new owners. And, in every era, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas - the idea of the divine right of kings seems to have been replaced with the divine right to profit, and to use “earned” money however one wants, with no regard for society.

I know others have already replied with counterarguments, but as a simple partial counterpoint, the fact that everyone alive are decedents of those who survived the hunter-gatherer stages of their society, for a long long time, is evidence that we’re generally capable of learning to be caring, smart and sane, it’s not some utopian advanced stage beyond our grasp. Prior to our technological developments like food preservation, individualistic societies were not viable.

• The most meaningful reforms, like large-scale climate action, won’t happen until citizens present a credible threat to the owning class’s dominance, making reform the appealing compromise.
• The owning class, at least a large section of it, along with loyal reactionaries will wage violent open war before ceding power leftward. They have the option to decide if a peaceful road forward exists, and historically, then tend to mass murder citizens instead.

What’s your most cynical opinion about the world?

The Earth will, eventually, long after we’re all gone, be incinerated by the sun. If life co-exists elsewhere in the universe, I suspect it will be too distant to have much impact on us nor them. So I believe that humanity will inevitably have no meaningful legacy in the long term. And I also believe there is no objective meaning to existence, it’s just a neat little quirk of chaos.

That doesn’t imply I think nothing is meaningful, it doesn’t take long to notice I care deeply about people and what we do. But, ultimately, meaning is temporary and subjective. (I haven’t explored much of formal philosophy but I’ve heard my perspective aligns with absurdism or existentialism)

edit: I didn’t realize this isn’t actually cynicism (a prudent distrust), but more nihlism (a distrust upon belief in meaning)

oof!

gel electrophoresis

Thank you, this is the kind of answer we’re looking for :)

why not just … make art that looks like this?

The value of this kind of art, to them, is that it represents something real and personal.

You could always submit DNA from a pet or something that wouldn’t be a privacy issue

Good idea!

I believed the first one when I was, idk, 6 years old. No idea if I assumed it myself or was told it from someone.

Some options:

• Hypothetically, […]
• Theoretically, […]
• It’s hypothetically possible
• It’s theoretically possible
• It could be possible
• It’s not impossible

• It’s not mandatory
• It’s optional (only applies to the first example)
• You don’t always need to
• It’s not always necessary
• It might not be necessary

I’m not thinking too hard on this, but since you say each of the words convey distinct meanings, maybe try and find a synonym for each meaning of that word. That could work.

Electoral methods are important and FPTP is an atrociously bad method for a representative election, but the US is beyond that. You can’t vote away this level of corruption without first wielding real worker power outside of the electoral system. Reform is a last resort for the corrupt.

It echoes of China before their ~2011 anti-corruption campaign, they had a serious issue in previous decades where the CIA would basically pay-to-win, bribing officers to give promotions to their confederates. The point being, a corrupt system is easy to exploit, for any country that has some spare change to use.

Who is “we”? The corrupt government? The corrupt legal framework? The only way to fight a corrupt system like this is to develop political power outside of the system - we must all organize with fellow citizens to wield collective worker power.

After their downfall, we’ll have plenty of material to indict & ultimately lock them away with.

Who’s this “we”? You can’t use a corrupt system to solve the corrupt system, the corruption involves the legal system (remember who is designing and passing the laws!) and the law enforcement officers. So if you want to have the power to lock them away, you’re going to have to organize with fellow citizens to develop worker power outside of the state.

The liberalist faith in law is a huge blind spot. The system is corrupt. It’s been corrupt for a while now, but it’s unmissable obvious now, and it disturbs me how many people are still saying strange things like how the constitution will stop this, the judges will stop this, the police will stop this. Corruption is systemic, not individualistic. The corrupt system isn’t coming to save people from the corrupt system!

If you aren’t already, organize locally with others to perform real political action through our worker power. Even if your local area has to build from scratch - the sooner we as citizens develop political power, the more lives are saved.

Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.

I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)

On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.

I’m picturing “Affirmative. Dollar 1299 now proceeding to window, over.”

Hold the wealthy accountable and stop letting people get that rich.

Governance is one of the tools we can use to hold the wealthy accountable and stop letting them get that rich. Not the only tool we have, but a powerful one.

deleted by creator

Agreed

Welcome to the magic of federation! This is how I’m seeing your posts: https://lemmy.ml/post/38812210/22162387

Basically, the Fediverse are lots of different sites that all use the same language (protocol), and some are able to talk to each other. So a Mastodon site (instance) like mastodon.world

• can talk to another Mastodon instance (like mastodon.art, or techhub.social)
• can talk to some other twitter-like platforms like Pleroma and Akkoma
• can talk to instances of some other platforms including Lemmy and Mbin (reddit-like), Pixelfed (Instagram-like), Friendica (Facebook-like) and more
• I’m not sure but I think you can like, comment and subscribe on PeerTube instances

I haven’t kept up-to-date with what’s possible and what isn’t working yet, so I might have missed something.

I wouldn’t even call it purity testing, they’re just testing. I’ve seen obsession over purity taken to a counterproductive extent, and I maintain that it can be a problem when dealing with a complex unideal reality, but what BadEmpanada is talking about here is fine. That’s a healthy level of testing, and important in preventing recuperation or sanewashing. Democrats are a bourgeois-controlled party and don’t share our class interests.

To give an example of the kind that is counterproductive, I know of a (small) socialist organisation in my country which has been banned from worker strikes after counterprotesting one, insisting that since industrial unions are bureaucratic, the workers should all just boycott the strike and make their own union. This group claims all other socialist organisations are impure and pseudo-leftist whenever they compromise with material reality and present conditions.

And, obviously, that’s a whole other world of purity testing to what you’re talking about. The problems are when it reaches no-true-Scotsman levels.