An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
ID: A scene from Legally Blonde of a conversation between Warner and Elle in the corridor at Harvard, in 4 panels:
Warner asks "What happened to the tolerant left?"
Elle replies, smiling "Who said we were tolerant?"
Warner continues "I thought you were supposed to be tolerant of all beliefs!"
Elle looks confused "Why would we tolerate bigotry, inequity, or oppression?"
I like this but I'm not even sure it's such a paradox - if you are tolerating people who do not follow that social contract then can you call yourself a part of the tolerant group yourself? It is a necessary part of being tolerant to reject the intolerant.
It's not a paradox because nobody says that absolutely anything anyone does is fine. There are always rules to acceptable behavior in society. The "paradox of tolerance" is a strawman.
I once heard a professor of physics tell us that paradoxes were just questions posed incorrectly (paraphrasing since we weren't speaking English, sorry if I wrote it in a confusing way) and I've never stopped thinking about it that way
The liar's paradox would beg to differ!
If one tolerates all actions other than those causing harm to non-consenting others (basically "adults can do whatever they want with themselves and with other consenting adults") which is sort of the traditional maximum tolerance boundary, one will tolerate many practices which, whilst not amounting to causing harm to non-consenting others, do spread intolerance.
From where rises the Paradox that such choice of putting one's boundary of Tolerance at the maximum level possible actually ends up in aggregate reducing Tolerance.
Making it a social contract reduces the boundaries of tolerance by the minimum amount possible that's needed to just stop Tolerance from allowing the very tools of its destruction to work.
Under "social contract rules", at a personal level those who are NOT tolerant of intolerance are, very strictly speaking, being less tolerant, but at a Systemic Level they are actually making there be more Tolerance in aggregate than if they had tolerated the intolerant.
PS: I actually work in Systems Design (amongst other things) and it's actually quite common for certain ways of doing things which are perfect at the individual level will in aggregate cause systemic problems making the whole function worse, so the optimal choice for the whole is actually to use a less optimal individual choice. Thinking about it, I would say that pretty much all Tragedy Of The Commons situations are good examples of that kind of thing.
Mind you the actual tragedy that happened at the commons is that the rich fucking stole them.
Any "solution" to "protect" the Commons that involves private ownership of it is always meant to make somebody very wealthy from it.
The original Commons (things like pasture spaces with no owners and shared use by the community) were all stolen from the community and given owners already way back in Monarchic times (for example, via Inclosure Acts in England) and Capitalism is just a continuation of Monarchy were the reduction of choices for the riff-raff is a bit more disguised so that people think they are free and hence are more productive for the Owner Class.
The left doesn't even tolerate the left.
Damn Leftists! They ruined the Left!
I thought that was millennials. What's the latest thing MSM claims they've ruined now?
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing
~ Malcolm X
Tolerant left? Leftists barely tolerate other Leftists!
The problem I found with the American left this past year as an outsider looking in, is that they all splintered into groups and started seeing the other group on the left as “just as bad as trump”, nobody was “left” enough to be an ally for anyone’s rigid tastes. The left fought among itself for labels, while the conservatives on the right were united.
I understand a lot of it for the younger left had to do with gaza but to anyone else, it’s clear Netanyahu and Musk and other oligarchs planned this out and the American left bought it and let Trump win.
All you can do is unify and strengthen and cut out fascists and fix your country, stop trying to be world police if you can’t even fix yourself.
'But being world police is the only thing that helps us forget about our problems!'
-People who consume too much propaganda
The best solution I found for the Paradox of Tolerance (or, more accurately, for a bigger class of problems that contain that problem) is https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/24/nominating-oneself-for-the-short-end-of-a-tradeoff/
The gist of it is that we decide on the following maxim: in conflicts of interest we should favor that cannot easily back off over the side who can.
For example - we want to tolerate a black person existing and we also want to tolerate[^1] a racist person being racist. These two toleration are conflicting. The black person can't stop being black - they were born that way - but the racist person can choose to stop being racist. So we favor the black person's existence, and do not tolerate the racist person's racism.
[^1]: You may argue that we should not tolerate racism at all to begin with, to which I'd say the reason we should not tolerate racism is that there are people who get hurt from it, which is what this maxim is all about.
This maxim is not perfect, of course. It does not apply to all cases, and it does leave up to debate the question of who is forced into the conflict and who is doing it out of choice (e.g. - a conservative may claim that LBGT people are willingly choosing to be so while they are forced, by word of God, to hate them). But I still think it's an improvement:
The whole idea that Tolerance is a Social Contract seems to be what works best: One is Tolerant towards others who are Tolerant and those who are not Tolerant are breaking the Social Contract of Tolerance and thus are not entitled to be the recipients of Tolerance from others.
Tolerance as a Principle doesn't work well exactly because of the Paradox Of Tolerance which is that by Tolerating the Intolerant one is causing there to be less Tolerance since the Intolerant when their actions are tolerated will spread Intolerance (as painfully demonstrated in Present day America, especially with Trump).
The paradox of tolerance doesn't lead to a unique conclusion. Philosophers drew all kinds of conclusions. I favor John Rawls':
Either way, philosopher John Rawls concludes differently in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, stating that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls qualifies this assertion, conceding that under extraordinary circumstances, if constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, a tolerant society has a reasonable right to self-preservation to act against intolerance if it would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution. Rawls emphasizes that the liberties of the intolerant should be constrained only insofar as they demonstrably affect the liberties of others: "While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger."
Accordingly, constraining some liberties such as freedom of speech is unnecessary for self-preservation in extraordinary circumstances as speaking one's mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty. However, violence or violations of rights & regulations could justifiably be constrained.
I was talking only about the individual tolerating or not the intolerant (in ways such as speaking or not against them).
As soon as Force is also thrown into the equation (which what a Society would use to stop the intolerant) it's a whole different thing because Force itself has its own much more complex moral framework.
It's easy to see the conundrum that one gets around using Force against intolerance by considering that it wouldn't be acceptable to kill somebody (an extreme use of Force) for merely saying something deemed racist. If there's an unacceptable use of Force against the intolerant, then is there one which is acceptable and if there is, were does the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable lie in the use of Force against intolerance and who gets to set it?
Add Force into the equation and it's just not the same thing as an individual's moral guidance for nonviolent reactions against nonviolent intolerance.
If there’s an unacceptable use of Force against the intolerant, then is there one which is acceptable and if there is
I don't see how that follows: spell out the logic?
use of Force against intolerance
I'm mostly confused, because I was thinking of violence/force used by the intolerant for intolerant acts: that can be justifiably constrained.
Legal constraint implies force by legal authorities: violators go to jail or get legal penalties.
Tolerance by itself already does not tolerate harming non-consenting adults, quite independently of the agressor being an intolerant or not.
Further, violent intolerance is already covered by the rules against violence in general (there is a case to be made about the punishment for intolerant violence being greater than for similar violence which is not intolerant, but I'm not going into that here).
I was only talking about personal acts in the framework of non-violence, for example speaking out or not against non-violent displays of intolerance, allowing the intolerant to use a space you control to spread their intolerance in a non-violent way and so on.
So yeah, as soon as Force (be it via a social structure for the exercise of Force such as the Law or outside such structures) is considered against non-violent displays of intolerance, merelly Tolerance as a Social Contract does not suffice to cover it since the initiation of violence against other human beings who are not being violent comes with its own rules of morality.
That clears it up, and I missed it earlier: we appear to have a merely verbal dispute over the word tolerance.
You mentioned speaking out against the objectionable (an act lacking force) as an instance of not tolerating it. This is not the notion of tolerance defined in the wikipedia article or SEP article that discussions of the paradox go by. Tolerance is permitting ideas, action, practices one considers wrong yet not worthy of prohibition or constraint. Typical formulations of the concept consist of 3 components:
Not tolerating something—not permitting it—implies prohibiting or constraining it somehow. Wherever someone could express/do/be something intolerable that usually means force to prevent/limit them from doing so. Acts (such as speaking out, not sharing your things) that don't prohibit or constrain the objectionable still permit & therefore tolerate it.
Tolerance has a number of paradoxes identified in the SEP, and the paradox in discussion is more precisely called the paradox of drawing the limits. By permitting the objectionable & merely objecting, it's still tolerated & the paradox of drawing the limits isn't really an issue here.
As you point out, general rules (on harm, violence, force, etc) mostly resolve these paradoxes without special embellishment needed.
Every time I hear or read that phrase, all I can think is "BITCH I NEVER SAID I WAS TOLERANT OF YOUR SHIT"
We tolerate the shitty uncle who gets drunk and says stupid shit at thanksgiving.
We punch Nazis in the face.
I don’t tolerate maga folks. I just kind of ignore them, and don’t allow them to be a part of my life.
I do have republican and conservative friends. I do not have any maga friends.
Honestly real talk for all my inclusion and belonging folks: we really gotta work on our vocab.
Was the term “tolerance” ever anything but confusing? In my lifetime I’ve only ever heard it used by conservatives dragging out this straw-man. Did “tolerance” once connote open-mindedness, graciousness, charitable judgment, acceptance/inclusion, or anything other than “weary endurance of something unpleasant?” Legit curious.
Similar examples include “consent” (sexual). Why are we pretending its primary non-figurative meaning isn’t legal or contractual when literally trying to say it’s the opposite? It has a strongly passive connotation, to acquiesce to a request, allow an event to occur, or go along with a plan — as in “tacit consent,” “consent form,” “consent to search,” and so forth. So it sounds gross, like “fine I guess you can do sex to me.” I know we tried to fix it with “enthusiastic consent” but seriously has anyone ever filled out a consent form with enthusiasm? What we really mean is active, reciprocal desire. The point is to give someone what they want if what they want is you, not to secure their consent to get what you want from them, so why the fuck do we insist on still using a word that’s in so many ways the opposite of what we mean?
I even think Crenshaw’s identity is confusing, because most people want to think of personal identity as something discovered or self-actualized, but intersectionality’s dependence on lived experience implies that to some extent it’s always something that happens to you. It’s how other people perceive you and the labels they give you that furnish these identities. But that probably sounds like a good thing if wearing those labels helped you bond with others similarly labeled, offering you a community or roots. Otherwise, calling these labels “identities” might sound like letting others define who you are instead of deciding for yourself. Gender identity for example is usually approached as an outward expression of one’s true self which can entirely reject the labels others give. But to ask someone “how do you identify” concerning something like ethnicity or race is not treated the same at all. To an outsider, these theoretical constructs might sound preposterous simply because we insisted on using the wrong words for our ideas, then overloading or bending their definitions to the point that a person needs a graduate seminar to actually parse the intended meaning.
Edit: to be clear, I’m only against the word choices, not the ideas. It’s because it feels like our messaging is hamstrung by insisting on using the wrong words as jargon with wildly different in-group definitions that to outsiders can make us sound inconsistent, confused, or at least difficult to understand. /rant
No, it was never confusing, the right's propaganda engine ceased on it, called it confusing.
Whatever message we put out will be "mired" in confusion as long as the right media factory deems that a useful statement to make and their undereducated masses will just blindly agree.
They steal our vocab and twist it.
tolerance /tŏl′ər-əns/ noun
consent /kən-sĕnt′/ intransitive verb
Dictionary definitions are nice but rarely capture the full meaning of the word. Connotations of the word are pretty important.
If I say "I tolerate that behavior," you can probably infer that I don't like that behavior based on the connotations of the word tolerate. It invokes a negativity toward the subject.
Similarly for consent. The examples bear this out: medical treatments, business trips, and short notice are generally not pleasant things.
Polysemy is a regular part of language, and rather than accept Warner's assumptions, Elle could have countered that tolerance (in the stricter sense of allowing or overlooking an objectionable matter) is satisfied.
That said, tolerance is not that confusing, and a looser sense of tolerant (meaning not intolerant) was commonly understood as more live and let live, open-minded, gracious, charitable, inclusive, etc. In the 90s & early 2000s, leftists were more commonly easy-going, freedom loving, unconventional, uncritical like the Dude while rightists were more rigid puritans critical of any provocative influence (non-judeo-christian) they believed would corrupt society & children. When rightists claimed to be tolerant (stricter sense), skeptics might wonder if they're really that tolerant of objects they frequently complain about. Leftists, in contrast, were largely more tolerant in that looser sense. Later, more critical leftists gained influence and may have increasingly distanced themselves from people with disagreeable ideas even on technologies that could bring people together (can't platform those pesky ideas).
Consent can have a more open meaning, though it seems you're trying to load a biased definition. It's an agreement to participate where rights are at stake. Your negative connotation isn't necessary: people can consent to share something fun together or take risks. There are certainly other words that could better fit your idea like interest, eagerness, or willingness.
I don't know what identity is doing here. I think we already knew without much explanation that social identity is made up of multiple, diverse factors: some personally determined, others inherited or socially determined. Buzzy intersectionality isn't needed to understand that, and it doesn't blow the imagination.
The farther left I lean, the less tolerant I become.