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ALAT.
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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Lefty Memes
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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!
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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.
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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).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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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.
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Oh. I know. I'm just saying that since it heats and cools, it's not a priority.
Where I am there's no legal requirement to provide AC to tenants, so whatever heating system is cheap, that's what landlords will install. Natural gas is usually cheaper per unit of heat output than anything based on electricity, mainly in up front costs. A forced air furnace with no AC which is heated by natural gas is so common and therefore ridiculously cheap by comparison. For larger apartment systems, it's usually a central boiler that heats dozens of units. It's difficult and certainly not cheaper to cool the same amount of space.
Electricity being included is usually for smaller rentals, like rental homes or multi-rental properties, which haven't been outfitted with the required energy meters to individually separate electricity per rental, so, because doing that would require rewiring the property and adding several new service panels/electrical meters, which would easily be thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars (maybe more), most smaller landlords just don't bother. Since they can't differentiate power usage between tenants, they just charge a bit more and include it in the rent.
That was my situation.
I moved to a larger apartment building, that was built from the ground up to be exactly that, and each unit had its own power meter and service panel. I paid my own electricity there. Heat was brought in from a boiler, but air conditioning was up to the renter. No HVAC system was built into the unit. Newer apartment builds and especially condos here can have air handlers installed per unit (though, not always), which may or may not have AC.
It's very hit and miss, but the vast majority of portable AC sales is to renters, since they don't have another option if they want to stay cool.
Presently, I live in a house (we're not renting it), and this house has central AC. I'm planning to move to a heat pump eventually, and hopefully also install solar to offset electricity costs around the same time; probably in a few years when the roofing needs to be redone. Once the roofing is done, install solar, and then, hopefully in the same project, upgrade the forced air furnace to a heat pump system. Right now it's natural gas. I'm not keen on that.