Israel =/= Judaism

There are Jews who don’t like the government of Israel, and Israelis critical of their own country.

Lemmy devs may have controversal political views, but their software is written with a good intention. KiwiFarms on the other hand use it to target instances.

Let’s go even further than that. Let’s say that the most annoying people around the whole Fediverse are Hexbear. On the worst days, all they do is to organize to spam specific threads, which is indeed annoying, but that’s the extent of it. KiwiFarms is responsible for harassing people until they commit suicide for the heinous crime of being weird. Anyone aware of this who wants to associate with them has no place in civilized society.

That’s because you’re weak and uncommitted. Jack up those vaccines up your forearm and minmax your autism until the build starts paying off.

The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.

I mean, sure, that will solve some things. Not climate change, though. I think we can aim for a little higher, but when I say that perhaps seeking infinite growth in a finite planet might lead to an environmental catastrophe that’s somehow controversial.

My siblings in Christ just because you have an unhealthy relationship with porn doesn’t mean that everyone else does too. Stop projecting your problems into pathologizing everyone else.

If it’s a crime, do not fire them, lock them up in pris-

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the actions “treason” and has initiated criminal proceedings.

Oh. Oh well.

Newspapers and TV channels know how to use their teeth - and can be bought. Buying the internet might be a bit beyond their budget.

Holy shit your title was a punchline and it was a good one

…That’s disgusting.

I’m not sure I got the message Tyrone is trying to tell. Could you have him say it 77 or 87 more times?

Removed by mod

…There is no purple though?

And the modern political class is far more aligned with employers than current and future workers, because politicians need the large financial and media networks that investors and owners control.

So you’re not going to see any kind of top-down policy change to this effect.

I disagree, actually. There are a few parties in Spain that have been supporting expansion of social security and reinforcements of worker rights during the last few years, and even though they’re either the minority part of the government, or are supporting the government from outside, they have made consistent progress. The mass media are indeed almost always pushing these parties and their positions down, but that doesn’t mean you should renounce to seek reforms within a liberal democracy - just be aware that it shouldn’t be your only field of action, and that building base level organizations are the most important stepping step to ultimately achieve country-wide changes.

Hiring practices are broken from its very basics. The vast majority of businesses consistently discriminate against people who deviate from the norm in presentation, even if the candidate meets the technical requirements or would otherwise be productive, which results in millions of people who are capable of contributing to society being pushed aside.

Anon is one step away from discovering why dirty talk was invented, and two steps away from discovering why BDSM is a thing.

Introduction to Spanish politics in 2023 for lemmytors:

Simplifying everything, the Spanish speaking right-wing is led by the mainstream right party Partido Popular or PP, which needs the support of the far right party Vox. However, Vox is radically centralist and wants to take away functions from Comunidades Autónomas or regional governments (similar to the US’ individual states), which makes it impossible for a PP-Vox coalition to reach any agreement with the Catalan or Basque parties, for which autonomy of the regional governments is a core issue.

This means that the only viable government is one formed by PSOE (socialdemocrats/liberals) and Sumar (democratic socialists/anticapitalists), supported by ERC (Catalan left wing), Junts (Catalan right wing), Bildu (Basque left wing) and PNV (Basque right wing), which is a very similar composition to the government we had before these elections. This means a parliament that isn’t too shaky, but also not too stable, because these parties have a lot of divergent goals and are mostly united by not wanting PP-Vox to reach the central government.

What has the government done during the previous 4 years?

These years have been fundamentally marked by the pandemic first, and by the war in Ukraine later. The pandemic was met with a moderately strong lockdown, which likely contained a potentially far more difficult disaster but badly damaged the tourism-based Spanish economy, while the right-wing opposition was promoting denialism and COVID conspiracy theories. In order to protect companies and employment, the government issued processes of temporary suspension of employment, where companies were forbidden to fire workers during the lockdown but their salaries were subsidized.

The sanctions on Russia shouldn’t have affected Spain too much, since we mostly get our gas from Algeria, and this is backed by the fact that Spain got one of the lowest inflation rates of the EU in 2022. However, this didn’t stop energy distribution companies from getting embroiled in a speculation process that has fundamentally affected basic goods, so even though in macroeconomic terms we have had a low inflation in comparison with other European countries, that inflation has been unevenly distributed and damaged humble families the most. A criticism that should be made here is that the government didn’t do enough to regulate and/or punish distribution companies that engaged in speculation that wasn’t driven by real cost increases.

These two matters aside, the government did also:

• Enact a relatively ineffective minimum income, which according to official statistics has supported almost 2 million people, but looking deeper into the data you find plenty of bureaucratic traps that provoked these grants to become far too difficult to get and somewhat easy to lose.

• Several feminist reforms, such as allowing 16 year olds to get abortions without parental permission, allowing doctors to grant paid medical leave due to particularly painful periods, and a reform on the law regulating sex abuse crimes. This measure has been particularly controversial as it provoked roughly 100 sex offenders to be released early, which according to the responsible minister was provoked by judges wilfully misinterpreting the law.

• The “Trans Law”, which grants the right of gender self-determination, allowing people to change their legal gender without permission from a doctor or a judge, making Spain one of the first countries of the world to recognize this right. While this provoked a lot of controversy in mass media and social media, voters mostly supported the reform, with over 50% supporting it and barely 20% opposing it.

• A not too successful reform on rent, allowing cities to enact zones where landlords are forbidden to raise rent if they notice sharp increases. However, this hasn’t prevented rent prices to continue raising. Near the end of the period, the government has started drafting plans for increasing public housing, but it’s undeniable too little and too late.

• Continued increases of minimum salary, aiming to get closer to France’s, gradually increasing from 900€/month in 2019 to 1080€/month in 2023. During the same period, unemployement has decreased despite the pandemic. Inflation was within control until the start of the war.

It should also be mentioned:

• Stagnation of Catalonya’s indepedence process. While PSOE promised to negotiate with Catalan parties, the idea of a referendum has further slipped away across the years. While it remains unclear how aggressive Catalan parties will be during the incoming rounds of negotiations, their loss of support during these elections leaves them at a weakened position. It could be argued, after yesterday’s results, that many Catalans have decided independence isn’t too important for them as long as the Spanish-speaking right wing isn’t ruling from Madrid.

• Looking forward, there will likely continue to be tensions between PSOE’s extremely moderate economic views, and Sumar’s ambitions for wide reforms. One of the core measures Sumar has campaigned for was a reduction on the workweek. The ever rising price of rents will likely make housing a hot issue, but PSOE will find itself in tension as many members in the higher echelons of their party tend to appeal to landlords’ interests.

What has the right wing campaigned for?

PP, the mainstream right wing party, has ran a rather dull campaign based on common talking points for any opposition party, such as the ideas that the ruling party has mismanaged the economy, but haven’t been too explicit regarding their actual plans.

Vox, on the other hand, has a very strange tendency to straight up copy the talking points of the US’ republican party, regardless of how well accepted they are in Spanish society. Two particularly notorious examples would be their denialism of climate change and their attempt to capitalize on transphobia, despite Spain being one of the European countries most acceptive of trans people:

After the recent local elections a few months ago, many town councils now ruled by a PP-Vox coalition have engaged in a variety of measures such as the early removal of LGBT flags, and the censorship of media pieces that display LGBT realities in local services.

Edit: What the hell is this about me having a newsletter lmao. Thanks for the supportive comments though.

Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that’s pretty rich.

The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.

To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that “since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok”: any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they’re too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren’t drown in liturgy.

Because they’re very vocal online, are annoying, and also give actual leftists bad rep. If you’re promoting egalitarianism and distributing social power among everyone, you wouldn’t like people who support authoritarism to share a label with you.

The comment above mentioned progressivism in general

my experience of Reddit was that it was progressive and feminist to an extent rivalling Tumblr

Since you’re asking, I find that blatant transphobia also tends to go hand in hand with some sort of sexism, but that’s an unrelated point.

Depends a lot on which subreddits you frequented. Some subreddits were alright, but many of the largest ones would frequently have uncontested ableism and transphobia.