Lefty Memes
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] Try to use alt text or image descriptions to allow for greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We encourage 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.
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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Not really, it's highly misleading and is used to justify bigotry.
I've seen enough court cases where people did not have the reasoning capability to understand the situations they were in. Not bigotry, I do believe IQ can be increased and has a lot to do with upbringing, access to info, and opportunity.
But there are people who are unfortunately dumb. Not to mock them, but understand we need to come along the simple to assist them. Because it makes for a better society.
People can have less or greater cognitive ability and understanding. Trying to quantify it as IQ does, however, results in extremely misleading outcomes.
Yup. But it is not a horrid starting point. There is always a better everything.
Just because one finds fault does not mean that one can not also find use.
The problem is with how it's used in general, which results in ableism and bigotry.
By a few. Don't let a few bad apples ruin the bunch.
I don't see the actual utility in IQ outside of very fringe use-cases. It's over-utilized despite being a poor metric itself.
The point of that saying is once you find bad apples it's too late for the bunch. You have to throw them all out.
Problem is there are better ways, more specific ways.
Frankly, in my life experience people with cognitive disabilities don't need a specific numerical grade, a broader categorization is good. So the IQ metric just doesn't tell us enough (no indication of specifically how the impairment would be, nor indication about potential other developmental issues that may require accommodation).
Lots of things are used to justify bigotry. If you assume that subjectively negative attributes are a result of heritage rather than upbringing, you can use anything to justify bigotry.
For native English speakers, IQ largely correlates with general intellectual ability. People with higher IQs are generally more capable of understanding more complicated topics. It's not a moral failing to have a low IQ, and there's no reason to assume it's genetically heritable or innate and immutable.
The problem is that IQ is very poor at actually identifying "general intellectual ability," as "general intellectual ability" is not a linear spectrum but a highly complex and multi-faceted phenomena.
Yeah, it is a single one dimensional number that attempts to represent a multidimensional system. But also you can pretty well predict whether someone is capable of, like, standing trial or something if that single number is particularly low. It does correlate with a real phenomenon, if not perfectly.