DMBFFF

Bernice

https://vimeo.com/207020938

4:05

What if the company openly said they weren’t selling you actually Disney-approved stuff, but your friends don’t have to know that?

wp:Mickey Mouse

Although Mickey Mouse entered the public domain in 2024, the character, like all major Disney characters, remains trademarked. The trademark lasts in perpetuity, as long as it continues to be used commercially by its owner. So, whether or not a particular Disney cartoon goes into the public domain, the characters themselves may not be used as trademarks without authorization.

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The latter could constitute fraud, but instead let’s say instead of a dude in his garage it was a company that made generics?

Why should I care if a Mickey Mouse T-shirt is Disney-approved?

IP trolls are holding back progress.

It isn’t.

Well said. 😁🙂

Maybe if I block you the notifications will stop.

What I find quite annoying is how people created these monopolies.

50 years ago, there were 3 (arguably 4) American car companies—still a de facto oligopoly, but 3 is better than 1. The Japanese and VW added to it.

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Today we essentially have one search portal, Google; one social network site, Facebook; one video-hosting site, YouTube; and one micro-blogging site, Twitter/X.

If people spent perhaps 1/10th of their micro-blogging time on other sites, Twitter might not have been as attractive to Musk and his backers, but they chose ease over choice, and now they’re wailing over what he’s doing with it.

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I’m off-topic.

I mostly agree with your statement. Maybe Amazon likes the internet, but probably most others in big business in the US don’t: it might account a bit for the shitty websites of many of them.

They might say things like “triage,” “greater good,” and “ends justify the means”;

or as the Vietnam vet joke goes: “You don’t know, man! You weren’t there!”

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Kerensky failed.

Lenin died.

Trotsky lived in a client state of the Capitalist US Empire.

Stalin got things done, and Brezhnev, for whatever his faults, continued it.

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https://youtu.be/QuN6GfUix7c?t=409 (cued, for about a minute)

(and the thing supposedly in Camaroon apparantly didn’t happen)

So how is he leftist, again?

from an Argentine view (if not quite a Latin American or world POV)

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a fact the people writing these kind of definitions constantly gloss over. And that’s just the start… these pop definitions only become less and less useful from there on in.

Yes, and many on the far right and far left don’t like Wikipedia, and presumably wouldn’t its sister Wiktionary, but I tend to defer to the authority of WMF projects more than to those I know even less about.

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As a purely propagandistic buzzword, socialism served the same purpose in the USSR as the term “democracy” serves in the west - an empty word, with accompanying empty definitions, that purely exists to justify the power and privilege of the people at the top. The majority of the “definitions” you posted can be classified as this.

I suppose they might say something like that they got things done.

Russia in 1916 was a dying empire with much suffering, while in, say, 1978, all, or nearly all, Russians, and others in the USSR, were fed, clothed, housed, medically cared for, educated, and had higher life expediencies. Ditto China. Ditto Cuba. Ditto Yugoslavia. Maybe even ditto Albania and North Korea. As for Cambodia, Chomsky says it wasn’t 2 million, and they lasted only a few years. What if the Khmer Rouge lasted, say, 20 years? How would Cambodia be in, say, 1996? It’s been run for over 40 years by one who was in the Khmer Rouge.

Meanwhile Western bourgeois supposed-leftists spend much time arguing or doing ineffective things.

Noam Chomsky and Fidel Castro were both born around the same time.

Who has accomplished more for leftism and socialism?

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But they don’t get to change the basic idea behind it.

Whatever, Western bourgeois pseudo-anon individualist: the USSR and PRC did great things, while you still live in a shitty capitalist empire. 😁🙂

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Christ was never philanthropic - he wasn’t some capitalist laundering his public image, and he never separated himself from the class of people he was born into. What Christ was doing is more accurately described as mutual aid.

wt:philanthropy#English

Noun

philanthropy (countable and uncountable, plural philanthropies)

1a. (chiefly uncountable) Benevolent altruism with the intention of increasing the well-being of humankind.

2b. (uncountable) Charitable giving, charity.

He was supposedly God incarnate performing a miracle.

What he did, no one could do, i.e. feed to their fill 5000 people with only 5 loaves and 2 fish, with 12 baskets of leftovers.

Again, your analogy is a poor one: it doesn’t prove Jesus was a leftist or socialist.

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We also don’t know what he did in his later teens or 20s.

Presumably the people he hung out with most were his disciples who saw him as divine.

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You’d be surprised how many non-white people embrace the hierarchies that enable and require white supremacism while pretending to reject it - just look at people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas.

True, but I don’t think billionaire Winfrey would endorse either.

I was replying to u/masquenox.

Besides, I think it’s over or almost over.

The leaders of countries such as the PRC, Modi’s India, Putin’s Russia, ans Iran might not like the idea of decentralization.

Indeed, they might not like the internet itself.

So according to your definitions, Javier Milei is a leftist because he threatens the status quo, and those who oppose him are rightists.

I agree: it doesn’t have a hard and fast definition.

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wt:socialism#English

(my bold)

1a. Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

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1a. A system of social and economic equality in which there is no private property.

2b. A system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.

2b. (Marxism-Leninism) The intermediate phase of social development between capitalism and communism in Marxist theory in which the state has control of the means of production.

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3c. Any of a group of later political philosophies such democratic socialism and social democracy which do not envisage the need for full state ownership of the means of production nor transition to full communism, and which are typically based on principles of community decision making, social equality and the avoidance of economic and social exclusion, with economic policy giving first preference to community goals over individual ones.

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4d. (chiefly Western, often derogatory, colloquial) Any left-wing ideology, government regulations, or policies promoting a welfare state, nationalisation, etc.

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Your definition seems to apply more to syndicalism.

wt:syndicalism

(socialism) Control of government and industry by labor unions, usually achieved through revolutionary direct action.

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Your definition of socialism is so general as to be a bit vague.

Christ wasn’t being a socialist as much as philanthropic.

He told the rich man to give everything he had to the poor and follow him, or his remark of the camel through the eye of the needle was anti-rich.

He also had the parable of the 3 people with their talents.

As for rejecting white supremacism, this might be the case of any POC billionaire—presumably Oprah Winfrey rejects the tenants of white supremacism.

FAIK, the US under Jefferson might have been America at its most socialist. Perhaps most of the people were independent farmers and artisans; slaves didn’t but presumably they were a minority. Presumably the Indigenous were socialist too. As for women, they might have had more de facto independence and control over their means than de jure.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, probably Tito and Castro, arguably Pol Pot, Guzman, arguably the PFLP.

Why are you getting notifications? You aren’t the OP.

We have a biological kinship with all mammals.

…and deep down we’re all just stardust. What is your point?

You have to be more specific.

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That’s because it’s utterly impossible to be “socialist” or “leftist” in the same way Rand was ideological - being an unhinged bootlicker has decidedly never been the point of leftism.

Do socialism and leftism have definitions, and if so, what are they, and did Pauline Hopkins, or her fiction, fit those definitions?

The most successful socialists on the planet used fascistic methods.

Yes, it does make fascists better targets.

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RATM’s previous support of Shining Path, or for that matter the USSR, would probably be quite forgivable if they admitted that they made mistakes—confessions, if you will.

Have they written anything about their beliefs, and explaining such, besides very generalized stuff like “fuck capitalism,” “fuck imperialism,” “fuck fascism,” “fuck American foreign policy,” “fuck this,” “fuck that,” whatever?

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It’s why I’m still ticked at Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam, and his endorsement of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, and his later denials of such.

We have a biological kinship with all mammals.

You have to be more specific.

This is not to denigrate her work, and she might have had at least some sympathies with socialists and leftists, but it’s probably neither socialist nor leftist in the same way that Rand was ideological, much less “Fascist.”