They absolutely are, and many people would be excited to answer questions you have (including me, depending on the question). You just need to be careful not to come across as combative, because they’ll meet you in kind and it’ll be a dogpile.
c/askchapo , depending on the question
Don’t you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!? 
I don’t see what the Zionist entity has to do with this, it’s not like they claim to be communist (though that would be a funny bit). I was talking about your reference to “dictator states” since Cuba surely is one of them, being communist.
I wish you wouldn’t believe what those very plutocrats you disavow tell you about Cuba.
Literally just read the list. It’s not ahistorical because it gets history wrong, it’s ahistorical because it has nothing to do with history. It has no ability to explain how and why fascism emerged when it did rather than sooner or later and thereby has very little understanding of what it actually is. It’s like defining a disease by a very loose checklist of symptoms, the fundamental causality is completely absent, so there is very little you can even do with it besides make a shaky diagnosis.
Incidentally, Trump isn’t a fascist. He flirts with being a fascist and in many ways has lit the way [something something tiki torches] for future fascists, but fundamentally, he’s just doing fascist-like rhetoric as a way to sell people on relatively normal neoliberal policy. Probably the most strange thing he did was bomb Qasem Soleimani, something that Democrats didn’t even really oppose on any grounds other than it being rash, despite Soleimani being a leader in the fight against ISIS. If I had to pick a second thing, it was probably lowering military funding to South Korea, which was just him being stupid and accidentally a clearly good thing to do. He’s not harder on immigrants than Democrats, he’s not harder on China or Russia, he’s just a normal rightist wrt to queers, he likes giving tax cuts to rich people, and he’s fussy in diplomatic meetings. He had very few policies that Biden didn’t immediately perpetuate. If you want to call the whole neoliberal edifice fascist, fine, whatever, but he’s not special in anything but aesthetics.
Eco is not a definitive authority and his little checklist is extremely ahistorical.
None of its supposed assets make up for the corporate overlords who run it and promote or permit all sorts of terrible things
Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi
Citations Needed, excellent reporting on the way corporate news distorts various issues to shape public opinion, occasionally with historical examples going back to the antebellum period.
Reddit is notorious for astroturfing. The lemmy hivemind(s) is the lemmitor hivemind from people socialized on Reddit who came to lemmy and brought that shit with them. Same with other instances like .world, but worse because they have fewer legacy users.
tl;dr: You’re deeply disingenuous and talking to you is a waste of time.
Maybe spend . . . more time getting a sense of humor
It wasn’t a joke
Never believe that [reactionaries] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [reactionaries] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I called it! Though I suppose it was plain enough by the time I came across it.
Faux-populist rhetoric is not a Marx thing and Magats are absolutely not opposed to big business. It’s like Trump’s only thing that he’s a billionaire due to real estate and other related fields.
Have I finally met that unicorn of perfect ignorance for whom the “Trump Is a Leninist” thinkpieces were written for? I’m just dying to know what part of Marx is used by Republicans!
What do you mean fiat doesn’t work on a finite planet? Current economic models certainly don’t work on a finite planet, but fiat was here before them and will be here after they are long gone.
what is a good way for the working class (90%+ of all humans) to save and succeed in this current environment?
There isn’t one. A big chunk of that class can do just fine and you probably already have good normative answers in that respect, but the current economic model is one that demands poverty. Even with all of the ridiculous developments in production we have, the available infrastructure even with the qualms we might have with it, and all the other things going for us that you might want to list, the closest that the current economic model has achieved to escaping its age-old need for having a sizeable portion of the able-bodied population unemployed is by slightly expanding that same portion and then having them sell themselves by the hour and minute in the Gig Economy. If you want that whole 90% of the population to all be able to do well, you need to change the system they are operating within.
tl;dr I don’t have an answer for your problem, but I have some thoughts on it that hopefully might contribute to you finding an answer.
I think it’s probably bad to think of the homeless, etc. as being drug-addled and especially as being dangerous. Usually, if they do have a drug problem (especially alcoholism) it came after becoming homeless and not before, and functions as a way to self-medicate to ease the pain of their terrible conditions. There is, of course, a strong correlation with mental illness that they are often also self-medicating, but “mentally ill” does not mean the same thing as “dangerous”. You probably don’t want to have them as a baby sitter, but that’s much more because of mental illness impairing their ability to care for others (and often themselves) rather than there being a realistic chance they would actually hurt the child directly.
People, religions, politicians, corporations and so on speak of charity as a great thing, and it’s certainly not a bad thing, but there being a need for charity for people to survive is a symptom of a system that doesn’t care for a substantial portion of the population that lives in it, and typically brutally exploiting those people. Charity is like a bandage, it can help to tend to a wound that has been inflicted, but we must ask “Why is there a wound in the first place? What inflicted it? How can it be prevented?” Your society, like mine, is organized in part to hurt these people in order to exploit them. No amount of charity can change that fact, only a change in social organization can change it.
It might be helpful to the survey to include a y/n so they don’t need to guess whether you are a dom or a sub in that situation
Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in