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Lefty Memes
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. 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, and discussion 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)
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" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (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.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't 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
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
What if trains weren't slow? π€
Wdym? In what clown world are trains slow?
Me watching the cars crawling on the highway at 120 km/h when I zip by at 330 km/h in my comfortable TGV seat, playing on my Steam Deck.
Playing online on the steam deck even
The future is now
THE LAAAAAAAND OF THE FREEEEEEE! πΊπΈπ¦ π»π«
The US
"Oh no! Trust me. Free market capitalism is gonna bring us so much innovation! "
If I wanted to take the train from my city to NYC, I'd end up spending about as much as a flight and I'd be on the trip for about 34 hours.
Freedom! Prestige!
They are slower than driving except in peak traffic. Caltrain san Francisco to san Jose is about 2x driving time, and on neither end does the train get you into real downtown. San Jose is close but still a 15 minute walk before you get to anything interesting. Francisco is in a relatively shady area near a stadium, also 15 mins from market.
If you don't have to park, getting to the airport by transit involves switching from Caltrain to BART at a random suburb so as an example San Jose to SFO is 30 mins by car, 1:30 by train. Note the tracks for the Caltrain and Bart are parallel here.
Ah, American trains. Outside of the USA and Canada, trains are fast.
If you mean to say "trains with high average speeds have high average speeds" I'll agree, but even in countries trying to get faster average speeds it's still relatively new outside of Japan.
There's also cost to consider. You can get a fast train Paris to Berlin and it's 4 hours faster than driving, but costs more than 4x to transport 1 passenger vs a car which can bring 5. The main route is slow, matching the speed of a car. (If you had a family, would you pay 60 euros to drive, 520 euros to train at car speeds, or 932 euros to train faster?)
However the "fast" train is still only reaching normal highway speeds (120-130 kmph) on average...it's just the roads are so bad google is estimating an average car speed of less than 80 kmph which is essentially like...suburb/business area street speed here in this country.
is the paris-berlin route really that slow?
vienna-munich travels at around 200 km/h...
I'm cheating slightly because I'm considering distance in terms of the direct train. The other is faster but goes another few hundred km wayyyy out of the way so I'm considering that to be the average speed for comparison purposes.
The other fatal flaw in the analysis is that while gas (actually I used VW+diesel) is pretty flat rate, trains can be cheaper off-peak. But I was mostly looking to confirm that the general economics aren't that different.
Where the us is real dumb is we actually have a shitton of space. Like the whole LA-SF train if we built it would be literally just next to i-5 in the middle of a redneck wasteland....plenty of space to get up to speed, and pretty much no reason to stop between sf and la. But we don't do it because we suck.
Train should take the German highway to go faster
Amtrak has entered the chat
What if they didn't have to run on tracks either? And then there could be smaller personal sized versions that families could own too!
why the fuck would any family want to own their own trolleybus