So glad that we live in the free world, where if someone is assaulted by a hate group, the victim can use his lawyer money to ensure that the hate group is punished <3

wow, I had no idea we let project veritas on here

I hate to rain on y’all’s parade, but the US measure of literacy is much more stringent than China’s. America is counting literacy as the ability to use print materials like brochures and manuals fluently, the rest of the world just bases literacy on the ability to read a handful of test sentences in a controlled testing context. That’s the reason that America appears to have gone down as well, they switched literacy measures. The 79% measure is people who are “at or below level 1 literacy”, meaning it counts people who met level 1, people who didn’t meet level 1, and people who couldn’t even take the test at all because of a language barrier or disability. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

I’m all for dunking on America but the apples to apples here would be comparing America’s 96% (just excluding those below level 1) to China’s 97%. Historical materialism requires a true material basis to work.

Hi yeah YTA, this is sexual assault and she probably has trauma from this experience. I don’t know if you’re going to receive this well based on the fact that you didn’t understand that you’re in the wrong and the language you’re using here, but because you clearly need it broken down:

• Never, ever, make any kind of advance on someone, sexual or otherwise when they do not have an opportunity to exist the situation if they feel uncomfortable.
• Never, ever, make any kind of advance on someone who is in distress.
• If she was receptive (she isn’t and will now never be because you assaulted her), this is a work relationship and you would need to be extremely communicative - absolutely do not make advances without discussion first.

Any one of these mistakes followed by a groping without consent would constitute sexual assault. The trio is especially egregious. YTA, and if you love her or respect her, you will never speak with her again to avoid continuously retraumatizing her.

D₂O, and then make a living selling my piss to chemical manufacturers

e:

How Drinking Heavy Water Could Kill You

Algae and bacteria can live with 100% heavy water and no regular water. Plant and animal cells are more complex, so too much heavy water results in sickness or death. One key issue is that heavy water disrupts mitosis, the type of cell division used to repair injuries and grow new cells. The mitotic spindles of cells containing too much heavy water simply aren’t able to equally divide a cell to form two identical new ones.

But, you have to continuously drink and eat only heavy water for several days to see an effect. Replacing 20% of regular water in cells with heavy water is survivable for humans and other mammals (although not recommended). Swapping 25% of water with heavy water causes (sometimes irreversible) sterilization. Replacing 50% of water with heavy water is lethal. It’s not a pretty death, either. Heavy water poisoning resembles radiation poisoning or cytotoxic poisoning from chemotherapy.

https://sciencenotes.org/can-you-drink-heavy-water-is-it-safe/

fuck I changed my mind can I do green tea

downvotes do actually suck tho

with downvotes, everything that is not agreeable by the majority goes below threshold and is hidden. Without downvotes, the more liked something is, the higher it ranks, simple as. If a comment or post is disliked, its replies correcting it will be ranked higher than the original content itself, which is a great way for content to be ranked.

Blahaj zone still sucks for other reasons tho.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU92qySuF6I

not “fuck unchecked communism”, “fuck communism”. You have picked your side, it looks like

https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx

???

https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx

???

One random guy said that. That doesn’t really hold water.

friend, just leave it alone, the single best thing you could do for reddit is to keep it relevant like this. Just start settling in to your new home.

You’d like Marxism. The whole point is that Capitalism is our dominant ideology because it was more efficient than feudalism, but now e have the tools to build a system more efficient than capitalism and we should build that instead. Capitalism is the most efficient system we’ve built so far, but it’s very obviously not the most efficient system we can build.

Capitalism will always ensure that the greediest are seated at the highest point. Wanting more resources gets you more power under capitalism, so those who are willing to go to the greatest lengths to take capital from others are the ones who will end up with it all. That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s rotten to the core.

crypto still exists? crazy

These are the people who say that the closer to the center you are, the more right you are, and then base “the center” on the discourse taking place between the left wing and the right wing of the most right-wing nation in the world, right?

positively goofy. Imagine the idea that no media source that splits the difference between fascist and liberal is worse than “pretty good”. This fails the smell test from a mile away.

Don Lemon Tonight is “hyper-partisan left”? OAN “skews right”? Nothing left of Rachel Maddow is factual information? Ironic that a site that writes about how to call out bullshit news is bullshit.

“Democratic” and “Authoritarian” are extremely loaded here. The tankie line, that I believe, is that modern Marxist nations face ruthless ideological attacks from both without (imperialism, foreign influence, infiltration, demands to liberalize, war) and within (vestiges of the former bourgeoisie). Two schools of thought exist in how to go about implementing socialism: the friendly, open process that allows external and internal forces to collude and infiltrate and institute genocide, pain, and destitution (Sukarno’s Indonesia, Allende’s Chile, Revolutionary Catalonia, Iran, anywhere touched by Operation Condor…) and the more aggressive form of socialism that clamps down tightly on dissent and develops socialism with ideological protection and close management (Vietnam, Cuba, the USSR). Nations in the category of the former invariably see mass death, starvation, and the ultimate repurposing into a state managed by imperialist powers (Suharto, Pinochet, Hitler…). States in the latter category (verify this information for yourself, I don’t want you taking what I say as gospel) invariably see world-best ascents in literacy, employment, public health, GDP, life expectancy, gender equality, income equality, and more.

This terrifies the imperialist powers. These actually existing socialism (AES) countries demonstrate an ability to thrive despite America’s and the west’s interests and attempts at destabilization. So what can be done? You lie about them. There is absolutely precedent for the US lying to its people about their enemies, in fact there is no precedent for the US not lying about their enemies. So us tankies decide that the truth exists somewhere between the US state line that Stalin is more evil than Hitler, and that the Soviet Union was a Utopian paradise. It is just as foolish to go with one side as it is the other. The only thing we know for sure is that the US has a long track record of genocide, torture, propaganda, imperialism, and lying about all of it, so why would we trust them?

So to sum it up, if I were to believe the line that reactionary insurrection is “Democratic” like the US state line says, and if I believe that AES states are “Authoritarian” and forcing policy on the people without consent like the US state line also says, then no, I don’t support bringing in the tanks. I also believe it never really happens like that. I believe that AES countries make lots of mistakes, and I’ve never met a tankie who doesn’t, but I believe that countries that are hard on reaction are better for it.

btw, thanks for engaging in good faith discourse. It’s super hard on this topic and while I don’t like your framing I recognize that it’s not because you’re trying to antagonize me, it’s because you’re faithfully portraying your beliefs.

It really does. That is one upshot of anarchism for sure, it provides a framework for individual liberty that right-libertarianism kind of falls flat on by allowing corporate power to influence individuals as a stand-in for a state. Marxism also doesn’t scratch that itch, you have to buy in to the need for a balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective (which then come back around and benefit the individual, if all things go according to plan)

I prefer to think of this as the liberal safe zone and the rest of lemmy as leftist, as it has been for years before lemmy.world exploded from the massive influx of reddit refugees

Have you ever made an effort to try to understand why us tankies believe what we do, or even what we actually believe? I’d be happy to talk with you about it if you’re curious.