this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Lefty Memes
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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.
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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)
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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).
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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.
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So everyone just gets guns? I should carry a gun with me at all times and live in fear of my neighbor? This is an absurd viewpoint, guns don't deter shit, if someone wants to shoot me, owning a gun won't stop them. Nuclear deterrence doesn't work with gun ownership because if I own a gun, and you shoot me, I'm not shooting back because I'm dead.
If all your neighbors have guns, you might want to get one too, or you're at a disadvantage when they gang up to kill you.
That's why it's like nuclear proliferation.
Why would they need to gang up to kill me? They have guns, they can kill me damn near instantly even if I have a gun myself
This.
Gun fetishists live in this wild west fantasy where someone planning on shooting is going to slowly and deliberately approach while announcing their intentions so you can respond and have a showdown ensuring only the gunliest gunner wins. If somebody's going to shoot you, you're just going to get shot - probably before you're even aware, or at least without sufficient preparation time to grab your gun or pull your gun and aim.
These people just tell themselves fairy tales to justify their hoarding.
Pretty much yes. Literally the only reason you live in a peaceful society is because you have delegated all violence to a specific group of people and armed them to ensure everyone follows the rules: it's fucking called law enforcement.
The cops are allowed the monopoly of all violence; if you need help, you call them because they have guns and can compel people (i.e. criminals) to do things by leveraging this fact, otherwise no one will listen to them.
Do you seriously trust ALL cops to all maintain the idea that all gays and trans people deserve life? Most of them would not mind if society leaned extreme right and imprisoned all the "undesirables". You are fucking delusional to put all your trust into them.
I don't trust a single cop, but I also don't trust many people to be allowed to have guns either. If you look at countries where guns are not readily available there is much less gun crime, and any guns that people get are coming from the US because we hand them out basically for free. If the US has stricter gun control it would most likely lower gun crime around the world even.
Edit: another thing I want to mention, I don't call cops if it can be at all avoided precisely because they do carry guns. Once you I produce a gun into a situation, it becomes instantly more dangerous and unless it is something like a mass shooting or a violent robbery I'm not gonna call the cops for shit.
Basically this, people should consider disarming when the police and military do as well
Until then, nobody should have a pure monopoly on violence