this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. 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, discussion and agitprop/stuff that's better fit for a poster than a meme 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!
Rules
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. Please post agitprop here)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We require alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
We are committed to social equity and to reducing barriers of entry, including (digital) communication and culture. It takes each of us only a few moments to make a whole world of content (more) accessible to a bunch of folks.
When alt text is absent, a reminder will be issued. If you don't add the missing alt text within 48 hours, the post will be removed. No hard feelings.
0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms
When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
- ofc => OFC
- af = AF
- ok => OK
- lol => LOL
- bc => BC
- bs => BS
- iirc => IIRC
- cia => CIA
- nato => Nato (you don't spell it when talking, right?)
- usa => USA
- prc => PRC
- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
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" (read: Dengists) (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 irrationally 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.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Sexual assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
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Don't recommend that community, it's full of trolls who outright harass people members on our instance, many people have already been harassed by them (me included) including literal death threats. People can have their own opinions, and for the record I agree with them that corporate AI companies suck and are doing more harm than good, even for the AI space and AI development in general, but brigading spaces, harassing moderators, or even impersonating mods and users who use AI is not the way to fight the problems related to corporate AI or misuse of AI in general.
I'll shed some light on the nature of the harassment, they were making fun of one of the mods for being a recovering alcoholic (they literally encouraged that mod to get drunk and kill themselves), they impersonated the mod and acted stupid. They made a lot of spam accounts and posted porn in threads discussing the mod. Many people also harassed me as well in my DMs (porn, death threats, the works). Absolutely inexcusable.
Let's be very clear here. dbzer0 is anti intellectual property. We do not support IP laws or arguments here, they and their apologists are seen as liberal garbage here. So any of the arguments about plagarism or "sTEAliNg aRT" are not only invalid arguments here, they are not respected by this community, and people here will laugh at you (and probably ban you) for spouting such liberal nonsense in a leftist space. It is baffling how many people come to dbzer0 with these arguments when it's written on our front page that we are leftist-anarchist and fundamentally against intellectual proptery.
Arguments about power and water usage are valid concerns if we're talking about openAI or datacenters. However on dbzer0 people almost exclusively use their own hardware (their own GPUs) or they use computing power from volunteers. That's to say they use consumer hardware. So the environment arguments don't work here. Unless you also believe gaming is hurting the environment, and that we should all conserve our computing power.
Me, @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com and many others have had these arguments often, and no one has presented any other compelling reasons beyond:
Then may I give you three more reasons:
If you think the chance is sufficiently low, I implore you to write down what the lowest hurdles would be that an AI would need to pass for you to suspect it's as sentient as an animal you wouldn't want to consume or enslave. Whether you find that AI does pass those standards if you make it concrete, or you check your list a couple years from now and find that AI has grown to meet those hurdles, it might prove useful.
Bad prefiguration. The use of AI replaces creativity, learning, and interpersonal connection with an alienating algorithm. Viewer and artist are alienated from one another by the intercession of the inscrutable algorithm that makes many artistic choices in the artist's stead. The artist is alienated from themself by replacing creative thought with an external algorithm.
I realize that this is the same argument that has been leveled against new technologies throughout human history, the same argument Plato leveled against writing. And yes, writing did alienate speakers and listeners into writers and listeners, and it did reduce our capacity to remember large amounts of verbal information and yet we are richer for it. So what's the difference?
Writing took our memory and gave us the capacity to communicate across time and space. Generative AI takes your creativity and gives you... what? Something that is specific to your situation without reflecting the feelings of anyone in your situation but that looks a bit more professional? I don't want that. I don't want to be friends with people that want that. I want friends who understand that our mutual bond is more specific than an AI's amalgamation, more personal than a prompt.
You are free to make your society like you want, but people are also free to disassociate from you or to call your stuff AI slop whenever they notice.
Personal information. While intellectual property isn't real, privacy is. Unfortunately AI are partially trained on dumps of personal information such as leaked nudes. Sharing someone's nudes is sexual violence because of how it relates to their body. GenAI have millions of women's nudes encoded into their weights without those women's consent, so sharing a GenAI model is sexual violence.
I don't know how possible it is to retrieve a specific victim's nudes from the weights. I've seen people fetch famous cartoon characters, so maybe famous people who had their nudes leaked a lot? If it isn't possible, then the horror is lessened because we can at worst get thousands of generic amalgamations of thousands of abuse victims each. But it still isn't great.