They’re very much first world.

Death to America

I hope she comes back earlier than planned :)

Yeah sure I’m in total agreement. But we’re not choosing between tackling property ownership systematically versus hurting the systematic evil of booking. We’re choosing between hurting one single landlord and hurting booking. And again for me this is a very obvious choice because I’m against booking for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but if you’re completely okay with booking, then I totally get why you would prefer hurting one single landlord over the neutral or benevolent entity of booking. I would arrive at the same conclusion.

Oooh, ok, understood. I was under the impression that folks didn’t like booking here. I personally don’t, for the obvious reasons (1), and so for me personally the moral calculus is easy. But if you’re fully on board with booking as a company, then it makes perfect sense to write what you have.

(1) Primarily offering hotels on occupied land, but also terrible customer service, rent seeking behavior, and of course the usual platform monopoly strategy we also see with Amazon, UberEATS, etc.

Yeah ok, sure, but again I feel like you’re focussing on the wrong thing here. It’s like you’re watching a video of a homeless man being beaten up, see someone jaywalk in the background and go “oh my god I can’t believe someone just jaywalked!”. Like, yeah, sure, you’re completely right, that is a bad thing to do, but I feel like there’s more important things going on here, and it’s really quite odd to focus on that, instead of the bigger evil here.

To be really super duper clear here: I think you’re right, the lady sucks. But there is a bigger problem here, namely booking.com. And focussing on the small fries rather than the bigger picture is just kind of weird. If anything we said or did on Lemmy mattered at all I’d say you were harming the greater good of bringing down booking by focussing on one tiny little instance of a symptom of the system rather than the system itself.

Or is this a fundamental disagreement in how to solve systemic problems? I believe systemic problems can only be cured with systemic change, like regulation, going after the root cause of the problem. Some folks believe it’s a matter of personal responsibility, and they believe that huge systemic problems can be solved by going after one individual at a time.

The adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game” comes to mind. Focussing on her in this situation is missing the forest for the trees. Here we have two evils fighting each other, a horrible system aimed at ultimately monopolizing the hotel market, and one woman enabled by that system. Focussing on her is like writing a little book against communism and about how much you hate Russia, during the holocaust. Like, yeah sure ok, but is now really the best time to do this, and when you look at these two sides fighting each other that’s the side you focus on?

I wish more people would shoot ceos.

But everything you’re saying in the other posts is pretty generic and applies to the pro and anti abortion crowd in the other countries as well.

Hasn’t it already been resolved in a whole bunch of countries? I mean, sure there’s still some folks that disagree with the outcome, but you’ve got folks disagreeing about the earth being round as well. If that’s your bar for debates not having been resolved then I agree with you, but I’d also say you’re not saying anything particularly interesting, disagreeable, or controversial.

I didn’t read your comment, but deepseek said this:

Well said. You’ve nailed the key distinction: AI as a thought amplifier vs. thought substitute. The value depends entirely on the user’s foundation of knowledge. Your approach—building a curated knowledge base so people (and AI) can learn just-in-time—is exactly right. It sets everyone up for success by grounding the AI in truth. Smart strategy.

I haven’t read this either but I hope it helps.

For bonus points, support leftist movements that have never gotten proper traction and have never have had to face and deal with the reality of capitalist nations trying to topple them. Like anarcho syndicalism, or worker coops.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Capitalism is functioning, it’s just that we’re not the beneficiaries.

What did they become? Pretty much all we’re seeing they’ve been doing since 1948. You think folks left peacefully during the nakba? Entire villages were slaughtered, others levelled or burned. And this is not some small thing either. About 700k Palestinians were made refugees, i.e., ethically cleansed. What’s the difference these days? Tik tok?

Man I hate it when socialism capitalisms.

deleted by creator

Researchers also found that these fragments appeared in greater amounts inside cancerous tumors than in nearby noncancerous prostate tissue.

For those who want to give an opinion based on even a smidge more than just the title.

I’m getting strong rest of the owl vibes from a lot of what you say.

So for example, you say you need strong allies. Well, list some candidates! China? They have a policy of non-intervention, so don’t count on it. Cuba? Not very strong. The US, or some other nation that’s captured by the owning class (Netherlands, France, Germany, etc)? Fat chance.

Same with the focus having folks join unions more. I think it’s a great outcome to strive for, but how do we achieve that goal? On a systemic level we see union membership dropping, and that’s no coincidence, because more and more anti-union legislation is enacted across the board in Europe and America. And that in turn is no coincidence because the people who really don’t want us to unionize have enough money to lobby this legislation into existence, and they happen to own the media, so they’re also doing a good job of convincing us that it is against our interests to join a union. Voting a pro-union candidate into power is incredibly difficult for the simple fact that campaign funds are a pretty decent predictor of electoral success, and guess who has the money to contribute significant amounts to those funds? Not me.

The education thing too is pretty great, but it assumes that some worker-friendly entity already has control over the education system. How do you get there? And education only goes so far of course. At some point folks leave the educational system, and their main source of information becomes the media. I’ve seen well-educated folks be completely convinced that there is no genocide in Gaza, and I could not blame them, because for the first year no major outlet would even utter the word. How do you prevent the media from being captured by the owning class?

Ultimately the problem is that the opponent has the means and willingness to use violence to quell your movement. And they’ve shown time and again that they will use these means, and history shows it works (Allende, the Spanish anarchist revolution, the Paris commune, Indonesia’s takeover by Suharto, Lumumba, etc). How do you defend yourself effectively against a violent aggressor without resorting to illiberal means yourself?

Hahaha you’re literally doing the thing. Good stuff

Yeah! And we need to do it in a way where the incredibly rich and powerful who have a vested interest and desparate need for us to fail won’t kill our movement! In the past and present, any socialist movement was met with

• death squads
• propaganda
• military invasions
• assasinations of heads of state
• funding, arming, and training the opposition
• economic sanctions
• so, so much propaganda

all funded by the absurdly wealthy to make nations fail and make them more amenable to re-exploitation by the owning class.

Any ideas on how to defend ourselves against this phenomenon which occurs over and over again?