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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Used to dismiss it out of hand because all the ‘socialist countries’ are complete authoritarian hellholes. But in hindsight this is a kind of thought-terminating cliche. I never really knew what the idea was apart from some vague notion about sharing or something that’s well intentioned but never works out in practice. I think most people share this belief.

    Turns out the idea is pretty simple: Worker ownership and control. Places like the USSR and China fail this definition because they don’t have any of that. Therefore they are not socialist. Those countries replicate the worker/owner dynamic of Capitalism, so it is ‘State Capitalism’. And they both have the same problem: A small group of people have all the power and they fuck over everyone else.

    I had to get sold on the specific idea of ‘market socialism’ / ’ workplace democracy ’ before I learned and realised this. The general idea is that if you can run a country like a democracy, you can run a business like one too. In fact, many are. So lets do that as much as possible in order to wrestle power away from the owner class who spend all of their money bribing politicians and ruining everything.


  • The Kurzgesagt climate videos explicitly encourage political action to combat climate change. I think they even encourage it as the most important thing an individual can do. They don’t push ‘let capitalism solve everything’ , they push ‘vote in green candidates + regulation’.

    I saw one of those videos taking them down for receiving Bill Gates money and frankly I think it’s a pretty empty hitpiece.

    Don’t get me wrong, the Gate’s foundation does push this ‘never question the market’ ideology, and any organisation that relies on their funding deserves to be scrutinized to hell and back. But Kurzgesagt does not push this ideology.

    ’ The problem with Kurzgesagt’ never found any factual issues with their content, AND the broad message of their videos is ’ lobby the government for regulation + here’s the technology’ . If Gate’s Foundation money has caused them to compromise their values, it’s not done a good job of it.

    Funding is not the same as editorial control, and the amount recieved from the gates foundation is not even a large portion of their income, so it’s not like they have much leverage.

    Gate’s Foundation and similar spend money literally everywhere, so I worry about people writing good orgs off so quickly.