dandelion (she/her)

Message me and let me know what you were wanting to learn about me here and I’ll consider putting it in my bio.

  • no, I’m not named after the character in The Witcher, I’ve never played
  • 5 Posts
  • 123 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 2nd, 2024

help-circle
  • It’s just wild to me that people are invested in Marx’s “scientific” application of Hegel’s dialectic, esp. considering how badly Marx’s theories have failed (even before his death, Marx found “primitive communism” in anthropological accounts he was reading, which invalidates the “evolutionary” way he and Hegel thought about history as linear), and even worse, how little relevance Hegel and German idealism in general has maintained … Of course Mao didn’t invent these ideas, but they’re not even great ideas to begin with, Marx is a terrible philosopher tbh. He was much better for his sociology and analysis of capitalism than his ability to predict the arc of humanity.

    Mao is poetic in ways Marx and Lenin are not, though - I agree with that.

    Either way, I am not a Marxist-Leninist, and as far as I can tell Marxist-Leninism is a misnomer since it seems to betray both Leninism and Marxism 🤷‍♀️ It’s a bit of irony, really, that Stalin would name his state ideology “Marxist-Leninism”, esp. as he lost in the power struggle to Stalin.

    I’m always open to being wrong about this, but my past experiences with Marxist-Leninists have generally not been productive, and I have yet to understand why people are MLs today other than as a kind of pragmatic alignment against Western imperialist powers, though even then I don’t understand the ML love of contemporary Russia, since Russia does not even promise itself to be socialist the way China, Cuba, or North Korea do. I’d love to hear your thoughts, though!






  • we seem to be popular with reddit users that were banned from reddit, which on average seems to translate to less than wholesome behavior - so maybe lemmy’s whole reddit-alternative branding works against us that way.

    maybe developing a distinct UI so it’s not just a reddit clone, and directing features in a way that is appealing more to particular communities or people we wish to attract would be a good idea, rather than trying to directly replace reddit as a whole?

    for example, attracting academics by supporting built-in LaTeX syntax rather than requiring a browser extension






  • I think so! At least those are things you can actually dig into and get the know the bodies of evidence, but it does seem like accepting them on authority is the default. I also don’t have much knowledge about many areas of science I still accept as true, but at least with both vaccines and climate I am familiar with the basic evidence, e.g. I know how the COVID mRNA vaccine generates the protein cap that your body then attacks and trains to help recognize COVID, or with climate the way carbon emissions heat the Earth through the greenhouse effect.