American racism is pervasive and there are idiosyncratic ways in which it is expressed here, but Europe and Asia, for example, have their big and small ways of expressing it too. look at how people from Africa or Turkey are treated in Europe, or groups like the Sami, Romani, Uighur, and indigenous peoples everywhere. As another example, Latin America has pervasive colorism, which can also appear in pseudoscientific ways.

none of this is to excuse or minimize American racism. it’s one of the nation’s core atrocities. I just want people in other places to admit how much of a problem it is where they are too.

no one deserves this. voting patterns aren’t simply “ignorance”, they’re complex. because you dismiss it so easily, you can’t fight it.

structural racism and overt racism exist in America and most other places too.

all Americans grow up in the racist society that exists here, some of them attempt to fight it, many others don’t like it but don’t find a way to resist. others actively build and support it.

racist Americans voted for it, but are finding out how much it sucks. the majority of America never wanted any of this

I’m no expert, but if we have a hierarchy of beautiful/youthful looking people above regular folks, then yeah people are going to do some wild, desperate stuff to try to get that edge. capitalism and hierarchy pressure us all to get every advantage we possibly can.

looksmaxxing itself is based on incel delusions about how women choose men, taking societal hierarchies and pressures I’ve been talking about and viewing them as biological/evolutionary (which is nonsense)

What we view as attractive is socially constructed and varies over time and place. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738081X23000251

Youth and health are probably a proxy for fertility, so that would be related to physical attraction, but why should that affect how we treat people? That’s not a reason to favor the young or to disfavor the old. Not only that, but community care of children meant everyone had a role in the greater sense of “fertility”.

The wealthy surround themselves with beautiful people, get blood transfusions from young people, get cosmetic surgery. In our stories, good characters are usually portrayed as beautiful or handsome and often young. Successful characters, whether good or evil, are often beautiful or handsome. Regular-looking folks more often appear as side characters or comedic characters instead.

this view is encouraged by the fashion, skincare and cosmetics industries (not that there’s anything wrong with fashion, skincare, or cosmetics per se).

So we are all being conditioned to worship or favor beauty and youth.

you can’t escape the system, you have to organize to change it

social democracy’s inherent weakness is that it’s still capitalism, so capital is always trying to undermine it

actively support, volunteer for, and fund what you do believe in, to the extent possible. note that some people will still blame you for what “your” country does, as a means of expressing frustration.

this article is so stupid.

The new socialists thus want the state to dictate the prices of many goods and services, especially essentials such as food and rent. Where money is required it will come, almost exclusively, by squeezing the very wealthiest. It is a form of retail politics that appeals not to notions of the common good, as in prior waves of socialism, but to people’s narrow self-interest. Lower my rent! Cut my bills! Give me free buses! Protect my job! The solutions are naive, and often unworkable. But the message is so simple, and so attractive, that this Gen-Z socialism is gaining adherents across the democratic world.

None of that is socialism. it’s social democracy (aka gentler capitalism) at best. lower rent, lower bills, free buses, and job protections are not “selfish”, they apply to everyone.

that’s the point. the capitalists want every minute of your life they can get to work for them, then make you scramble to fit the rest of your life in the gaps. they make more profit and you have less time and energy to educate yourself, think, and organize

maybe? still, it is worth looking at the negative effects it will have on worker power, the planet, data centers sucking up water and electricity, and destroying skills and critical thinking.

more Linux users for gaming = more native Linux games

proton = more Linux gamers

people do hate it irl

hm. so im hearing that you’re in favor of freedom to engage with, change, or not engage with traditions. This is the same position as is held by people who call themselves liberals and especially leftists of various types.

you are religious, but so are people all across the political spectrum, so that doesn’t require conservatism on its own. you also don’t seem to push your religion on anyone else.

you are clearly worried about the planet and ecology but don’t tie it to a specific ethnic group, like when the right takes it up as an excuse to exclude others (e.g. Malthusian perspectives, ecofascism). an earnestly ecological outlook I’ve seen mostly in the center and on the left.

I think your positions make you more of a leftist. maybe you’ve been shown the left or individual leftists in a bad light… that happens a lot in media. or maybe you live in a former Soviet bloc country, which makes the left in general and “socialism” especially look bad (though I’d argue the ussr wasn’t doing socialism).

if you’re curious at all, I’d be glad to give you some materials on leftist positions as they actually are and not as they are portrayed by the right and the center.

It means to conserve the ways that your peoples historically had, not a specific universal way.

So then everyone is essentially trapped in the traditions of the family they were born into? The details here can be complicated: Do children of blended families get to choose from among the cultures of their parents, or what about children in group homes or foster care? Should we not have the freedom to replace or modify the traditions we don’t find meaningful, assuming we are not harming anyone else?

I grew up with a sense of resentment towards traditions i grew up with because they were done in a rote, check-the-box way. i saw no meaning in them. maybe a version more relevant to modern times would have given me more to appreciate.

Hey, good faith reply here. Conservatism doesn’t simply mean “to conserve”: it has different, specific political meanings depending on what country or political system you’re referring to. Not only that, but plenty of political movements use labels that are more about sounding good than a truly accurate description of what they are. For example, Murray Rothbard deliberately stole the term “libertarian” (for American right-wing “libertarians”) from its original connection to anarchism and libertarian socialism.

Also can you clarify your point about “traditional values”? As you said, different cultures and different time periods have had different traditions, so which ones are we conserving? If the answer is “any or all of them”, then isn’t that the same as “do whatever you like”? If the answer is a specific set of values, why those? That’s not meant to be a gotcha, I’m legit interested in where you’re coming from.

Thank you for explicitly banning nazis, fascists, and similar groups, along with other forms of bigotry. They are a plague on us all and have no place in any political camp.

if it were built outside of a capitalist system and in a way that is in ecological balance with the planet

you may be able to find them on matrix, mastodon, or even start a piefed community. good luck