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> I'm surprised there are people here who are skeptical that long covid is real

I'm not surprised at all, considering there's been a consistent drive to move past COVID in the name of our poorly designed consumption-based economy and political expediency:

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-a...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...


These articles are astonishing to me considering my lived reality; that people in my municipality were readily willing to move past COVID (and yes, accept it’s Rick’s), in hopes of gaining back their mental health and livelihoods. Much, much sooner than media and government institutions let them.

thegauntlet.news does not seem to be an especially credible source, and OP's account is just over 1 year old with only 68 karma. most of the posts appear to be a handful of sites like the jacobin or thegauntlet, and all happen to have socio-political axes to grind.

and a couple of basic posts about jellyfin to look legit. color me skeptical.


The blog includes original sources. Readers can draw their own conclusions, which was always the only sane option anyway in a media landscape captured by capital.

Why does consistent criticism of capitalism read as "fake" to you? Is it surprising that socialist/communist media outlets are few in number and struggle to thrive in an environment programmed with capitalist default assumptions?

Also, I lurked HN for almost a decade before creating an account. Sue me.


> It’d be great to find a new economic axis that can break us out of the planned economy/radical free market axis.

Here's one start:

https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...


That seems to be more a guide on how to sell socialism rather than providing another economic axis.

Did I miss something?


> socialism

That's too broad of a term to carry universal meaning without the context provided by the article.

The piece is more of a modern translation based on present conditions, and it isn't to be confused with "the Nordic model" or any other instance or attempt that readers might instinctively cling to when hearing the word.


Yeah, it would have been more accurate for GP to say "liberal" instead of "left" since mastodon (and large parts of lemmy) have been overrun with liberals who label any leftist a "tankie"


Oh no, I do mean that the lefties are the problem. They're the ones making it sterile. I'm glad the libs are pushing back.

Disconnected keyboard lefties who don't touch grass calling me a Nazi because I also still use Twitter, being completely clueless as to the fact that a lot of Black folks like myself are still there because, well, we're used to surviving and thriving in hostile spaces.

(and then also snowflake hard-left Black folks who -- and I've literally NEVER seen this in my life until Mastodon -- really do "play the race card." It's wild)


It sounds like you're using the liberal definition of leftist.


Probably?


In other words, what you call liberals probably are, but they're engaging with faux leftists who are just a different flavor of liberal, not actually left. If they were actually left, they'd be focusing on class based issues instead of amping up division with the race etc issues that you mentioned.


Unfortunately the passage of time has shown that lesser-evils "vote blue no matter hoo" is not even close to sufficient in addressing this crisis. Capital interests are to blame, and in the US, we have two political parties entirely controlled by capital. Other countries aren't much different.

https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...


You do realize of course that this is exactly the claim that someone who wanted to get the worst candidate in the history of the presidency (by a few orders of magnitude) elected would make?


You do realize that this is exactly the kind of feedback that people who are tired of the 'vote blue no matter who' refrain have been giving for years, that has been ignored.

Like the people who are getting voted for need to actually turn around and justify the vote we're making for them. And they've been failing to do that, and pointing to the thing that is clearly worse as a reason why they don't have to do better.


Like I said for the other message, this just reads like a cheap trick to suppress the vote that can help address climate change.

If it was 2008 or 2012, maybe. It would have been stupid just the same, but McCain or Romney might not have been a death spell.

This time around, 95% of messages like this are from Trump/Putin/whatever trolls trying to get their guy in, to hell with the climate. If that's not you, apologies, but good luck convincing people you're just being misguided rather than disingenuous.


Except this has been the rhetoric of the Democratic party since 2008. And people are tired of it.

This is not 'gaslighting from a republican troll'. This is legitimate criticism from someone who has been holding their nose and 'voting blue no matter who', for the past 4 election cycles, and wants the Democratic party to wake up and not take their voters for granted. Cause every single time they do this, they have been alienating their voters, and making races that should be slam dunks into 'close calls'.

DJT shouldn't have 'toss up' odds, but Democrats won't grow a pair and deal with him like the felon he is. Instead they keep putting it back to the voters and doing the bare minimum to try and make themselves "slightly better than the worst people on earth"

I want real options, but that doesn't happen until democrats can actually make the legitimate policy changes they've been half-assing for the last 30 years.


You're basically saying "there must be a third button here somewhere." The third button is in the primaries.

Right now you're just courting the self-destruction button. You're doing so on behalf of the self-destruction team, whether you're aware of it or not.

Misguided and disingenuous look the same and have the same effect.


The argument, is that sometimes you need things to break before you can build something new in their place. I have considered it, and determined I don't want things to break that badly.

And again, I'm not courting the self-destruction button. I'm giving you feedback on why this message is losing its efficacy, and you're ignoring that feedback. This is your wake up call that people are tired of the race to the bottom. Give me a convincing reason to vote for you. Not just a convincing reason to vote against the other side.

Democratic primaries are hella corrupt. Which is why they're not a valid 3rd button. See Pelosi pushing against people getting primaried, only to primary the more progressive wing of the party.


The other people on the boat don't have a duty to cater to you. You can't just threaten to sink it if the primaries don't go your way. If you fail to find allies and fix the primaries, you still have a duty to keep the boat (ie. planet Earth) afloat.

Making sinking threats is just what the Martians want. And you still haven't even proven you're not just a Martian in disguise.


You're a needy crewmate. If I didn't think you were too sincere to be believed as anything else I'd guess you'd found the most effective way to scare people off from voting for Democrats. How do I know you're not a troll? I don't care if you think I'm a troll. I'm definitely just like 10x further to the left than you, and you're so bought into the party line, that you think I both "HAVE TO VOTE DEMOCRATIC" and I can't want things from my elected representatives.

I'm sure you're converting hundreds and thousands with your philosophy of "you have to vote my way or the world will end" and "don't complain about the things you don't like to the elected officials or we might not win."

If Democrats want to have a guaranteed progressive vote, they should make good on some of their promises to the progressive wing of the party. Progressives are more reliably democratic than anyone else, and yet we take the most shit from assholes like you who think that criticism == voting for the other party.


Dems propped up Trump using their Pied Piper strategy coupled with Hillary's lousy campaigning "efforts." They dug their own grave, and it doesn't matter to the revolving doors of the machine in the grand scheme, since back to my original point, we have two parties of capital. Democracy is illusory.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...


OK tovarich, my regards to Vladimir.


Laughs in Chinese


Agreed, and that goes for capitalism at large.

Here's a rough outline for one proposed alternative to capitalism and the failed central planning alternatives of the past:

https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...

Some relevant snippets:

> Though planning and worker control are the cornerstones of socialism, overly ambitious planning (the Soviet case) and overly autonomous workplaces (the Yugoslav case) have both failed as models of socialism. Nor do moderate reforms to those models, whether imagined or applied, inspire. With all-encompassing planning neither effective nor desirable, and decentralization to workplace collectives resulting in structures too economically fragmented to identify the social interest and too politically fragmented to influence the plan, the challenge is: what transformations in the state, the plan, workplaces, and the relations among them might solve this quandary?

> The operating units of both capitalism and socialism are workplaces. Under capitalism, these are part of competing units of capital, the primary structures that give capitalism its name. With socialism’s exclusion of such private units of self-expansion, the workplace collectives are instead embedded in pragmatically constituted “sectors,” defined loosely in terms of common technologies, outputs, services, or simply past history. These sectors are, in effect, the most important units of economic planning and have generally been housed within state ministries or departments such as Mining, Machinery, Health Care, Education, or Transportation Services. These powerful ministries consolidate the centralized power of the state and its central planning board. Whether or not this institutional setup tries to favor workers’ needs, it doesn’t bring the worker control championed by socialists. Adding liberal political freedoms (transparency, free press, freedom of association, habeas corpus, contested elections) would certainly be positive; it might even be argued that liberal institutions should flourish best on the egalitarian soil of socialism. But as in capitalism, such liberal freedoms are too thin to check centralized economic power. As for workplace collectives, they are too fragmented to fill the void. Moreover, as noted earlier, directives from above or competitive market pressures limit substantive worker control even withinthe collectives.

> A radical innovation this invites is the devolution of the ministries’ planning authority and capacities out of the state and into civil society. The former ministries would then be reorganized as “sectoral councils” — structures constitutionally sanctioned but standing outside the state and governed by worker representatives elected from each workplace in the respective sector. The central planning board would still allocate funds to each sector according to national priorities, but the consolidation of workplace power at sectoral levels would have two dramatic consequences. First, unlike liberal reforms or pressures from fragmented workplaces, such a shift in the balance of power between the state and workers (the plan and worker collectives) carries the material potential for workers to modify if not curb the power that the social oligarchy has by virtue of its material influence over the planning apparatus, from information gathering through to implementation as well as the privileges they gain for themselves. Second, the sectoral councils would have the capacity, and authority from the workplaces in their jurisdiction, to deal with the “market problem” in ways more consistent with socialism.

> Key here is a particular balance between incentives, which increase inequality, and an egalitarian bias in investment. As noted earlier, the surpluses earned by each workplace collective can be used to increase their communal or individual consumption, but those surpluses cannot be used for reinvestment. Nationwide priorities are established at the level of the central plan through democratic processes and pressures (more on this later) and these are translated into investment allocations by sector. The sector councils then distribute funds for investment among the workplace collectives they oversee. But unlike market-based decisions, the dominant criteria are not to favor those workplaces that have been most productive, serving to reproduce permanent and growing disparities among workplaces. Rather, the investment strategy is based on bringing the productivity of goods or services of the weaker collectives closer to the best performers (as well as other social criteria like absorbing new entrants into the workforce and supporting development in certain communities or regions).

...

> No one paid greater economic homage to capitalism than the authors of The Communist Manifesto, marveling that capitalism “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” Yet far from seeing this as representing the pinnacle of history, Marx and Engels identified this as speaking to a new and broader possibility: capitalism was “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about.” The task was to build on this potential by explicitly socializing and reorganizing the productive forces.

> In contrast, for Hayek and his earlier mentor von Mises, capitalism was the teleological climax of society, the historical end point of humanity’s tendency to barter. Hayek considered it a truism that that without private property and no labor and capital markets, there would be no way of accessing the latent knowledge of the population, and without pervasive access to such information, any economy would sputter, drift, and waste talent and resources. Von Mises, after his argument that socialism was essentially impossible was decisively swept aside, turned his focus on capitalism’s genius for entrepreneurship and the dynamic efficiency and constant innovation that it brought.

> Despite Hayek’s claims, it is in fact capitalism that systematically blocks the sharing of information. A corollary of private property and profit maximization is that information is a competitive asset that must be hidden from others. For socialism, on the other hand, the active sharing of information is essential to its functioning, something institutionalized in the responsibilities of the sectoral councils. Further, the myopic individualism of Hayek’s position ignores, as Hilary Wainwright has so powerfully argued, the wisdom that comes from informal collective dialogue, often occurring outside of markets in discussions and debates among groups and movements addressing their work and communities.


Maybe it should be a non-profit endeavor, where the actual profit is a society of happy, lasting relationships.


ctrl+f for "dialectical" yields no results in the OP. What are you referring to?


This spells out the difference pretty clearly

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/pesticide-cancer-lobbying-lawsui...


Probably something to do with the typical series of events that unfold before becoming the "owner" of a $128K yacht.


Sorry but 128k for a yacht is not a lot of money and should be achievable by anyone who is willing to work hard.


I think you mean to say "is currently achievable by anyone willing to exploit hard" considering most of these people own far more than just the $128K yacht.

These acts have lasting repercussions on everybody else in the world, and very rarely ever originate from "hard work."


Are you serious? Many of the people yachting with (fairly midrange) boats are retired professionals with a passion for sailing.

Many times people pool their money together.


It's a good predictor of class, and most in that position exploited their way upward, and/or inherited from those who did so. It's not so much a moral failing as it is a systemic one, because we can rearrange the pieces on the Monopoly board and still get the same predictable rent-seeking behavior.


I don’t think you ever met real oceanic vagabond. People you see in marinas isn’t them - marinas are super expensive.


I think you'll find that the vast majority of people who work very hard have no hope at all of affording $128k for a luxury item.

Maybe you just mean it's not a lot of money for very well paid people?


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