comfy

I don't disagree that reading and writing are the basis of scholarship (as we know it), but I reject any suggestion that comprehending critical Marxist concepts should require a scholarly barrier of entry. If someone wants to become a theoretician then sure, it makes sense to analyse Marxist theory from primary sources with all its historical overhead, but if our goal is to promote efficient learning, then we shouldn't be recommending archaic texts written for a whole different target audience. People don't really need to learn French or German words to understand what the worker class and owner class are and their resulting material interests, or what alienation is. How many people need to know who exactly Kautsky was anymore? Can't commodity fetishism be defined in simple terms? Archaic works absolutely still have value and relevance, but the Marxist ideas relevant to most workers can absolutely be made more accessible to your local audience while retaining its analytical value.

An interesting example I saw was in Archer. During an agitated rant, Archer finally interjects demanding someone answer the phone. The next shot is a plain still shot of the telephone, which the captions helpfully emphasise [PHONE NOT RINGING]; a recurring joke is Archer's constant ear-ringing due to careless gun use.

Having seen other, more careless translations, I can easily see jokes (or in other contexts, important clues) like this being missed and it made me think about how film techniques can imply audio silently. If there's a plain shot of a phone, a hearing impaired person might reasonably assume it's a visual implication that the phone is ringing.

One trend which annoys me is having meaningful non-English simply listed as '[speaking language]'

Even worse is when, despite being another language, a common word (whether homophonic or loan words) would by understood regardless, just isn't present in the captions.

Ones like Lemmy fit in fine to my threat model. They enable me to use privacy tools up-to-and-including Tor routing, without a phone number or other personally identifying info (you can't do those with many other social media platforms). I can use the Fediverse pseudonymously, and if I ever want to, anonymously.

I'm not hiding this conversation from you, but I am hiding my identity from companies.

That's a great point. While not the same, I think this relates to the bullshit assymetry principle (aka. Brandolini's law), where as a result of the time it takes to respond to basic repetitive questions, especially those which are pretty easy to search around for existing answers, then entire communities can get tired of tolerating them. In some cases people just become rude and dismissive and in other cases staff actually just ban the person asking the question, which is already the case in some Lemmy instances.

One potential way around it I've seen is having a decent FAQ available and well-known within the community, so one literally just reply with little more than a link to a page with the answer already written. In fact, one site used to (not anymore) have a culture where people would just attach a whole book as a PDF and simply reply 'read this', maybe listing a chapter if you're lucky, which isn't very tactful but it's pretty funny and still provides a low-effort, high-detail answer (albeit maybe too high-detail for the kind of person who asks such a common question to reddit instead of trying to find the answer themselves).

If we consider that phenomenon you described to be a problem, the solution is being able to make it extremely quick and easy to give a canned response and politely tell them to RTFM.

There are systematic reasons why Bernie (again) wasn't able become the nominee, and I believe these reasons will apply to anyone with similar views trying to become a Democrat nominee. The party doesn't want SocDems to be their leader.

I don't think that's nihilistic. But it is rejecting the electoralist approach as futile for people who want Bernie's policies in the USA. We must look at other ways, established ways of moving forward and bringing progressive change. After the past two elections, insisting that Bernie or AOC can win the nomination next time, being in denial of how the Democrat Party works, is not just unhealthy discourse but counter-progressive in practice.

This reads like someone who hates their own country, thinks everything sucks and is hopeless

I don't get that impression. I see someone who doesn't like how their country runs, and understands the way its run is systematically harmful and ineffective. There's a huge difference between politically critiquing a country and being a hateful nihilist!

I’m okay if I still hold a goal of America being better than that.

I think they do too. It just might not be an America as we know it - the problems go far deeper than who is in power. America wasn't good under Obama, they just hid away the horrible parts very well.

Apparently it was popular in US prisons until it was banned.

Because of the colonization and mining? Didn't bother me, similarly I don't like most armies but I can still find a military FPS fun to play.

Yes. They should have voted the dictator puppet out. That's how we got rid of Hitler and Mussolini, and besides, their close neighbors are all democracies who would never interfere in any other country's elections. Fruit companies aren't that important, you know.

Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Free market trade! Except Cuba, they don't get to trade.