The left does ignore this problem or get wrapped up in their useless “big picture” rhetoric that leads nowhere when this is a very practical, tangible problem. Dominating over the right-wing propaganda machine is the obvious answer. When I suggest the left needs their own propaganda bots & troll farms flooding social media, their own podcasters & influencers to propagate their propaganda, better engagement through local organizations to answer & counteract right-wing bullshit & push some of their own to keep the right-wing occupied, I get responses like

This is such a boomer take. This is like trying to claim Clinton lost in 2016 because she didn’t tweet enough or use the right young-person slang, skibidi

or digressions like the comments here that dismiss everything as another problem to pin on capitalism without offering constructive ideas that could seriously lead anywhere. A left-wing propaganda machine to outdo the right-wing is doable, I doubt propaganda bots would cost a fortune to set up. The loser mentality of just venting about impractical shit instead of organize & reach for practical solutions is a major part of the problem.

By diminishing people’s ability to complain

No one’s diminishing. A critique of dumb complaints is also a complaint. Are you diminishing their ability to complain? Welcome to complaining.

lol, you make lemmy angry with delicious ragebait. that beehive is worth striking. 🍿

self-cleaning/pyrolytic oven on wheels

I think Adam Smith would have a lot to say about this. Specifically, he would probably point out that the slave states really had an awfully small economy compared to the free states, and that most of the wealth generation which occurred in the US occurred due to productivity gains driven by technological innovations which were most aggressively exploited in the north. In the long run, few people could claim to have really benefitted noticeably from american slavery - it was just a shitty thing to do for no reason.

Some historians appear to agree with additional support. During the 18th century, the slave economy was significant in the expansion of industry & commerce, but its value declined & was no longer needed by the 19th century. Slave-intensive sugar production that dominated the 18th century became less important in the 19th century as shipment of cotton products to international markets grew in significance. Unlike sugar, cotton had less need for slaves, and early cotton growers used slaves primarily because they were already slave-owners.

Insurgent scholars known as New Historians of Capitalism argue that slavery, specifically slave-grown cotton, was critical for the rise of the U.S. economy in the 19th century. In contrast, I argued that although industrial capitalism needed cheap cotton, cheap cotton did not need slavery. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Early mainland cotton growers deployed slave labour not because of its productivity or aptness for the new crop, but because they were already slave owners, searching for profitable alternatives to tobacco, indigo, and other declining crops. Slavery was, in effect, a ‘pre-existing condition’ for the 19th-century American South.

Slavery restrained economic development of the south, causing it to underperform economically: while it unevenly concentrated the lesser wealth produced there, the lesser wealth produced there benefitted the rest of the economy less than it could have. Free states didn’t benefit from the less wealth concentrated elsewhere.

To be sure, U.S. cotton did indeed rise ‘on the backs of slaves’, and no cliometric counterfactual can gainsay this brute fact of history. But it is doubtful that this brutal system served the long-run interests of textile producers in Lancashire and New England, as many of them recognized at the time. As argued here, the slave South underperformed as a world cotton supplier, for three distinct though related reasons: in 1807 the region closed the African slave trade, yet failed to recruit free migrants, making labour supply inelastic; slave owners neglected transportation infrastructure, leaving large sections of potential cotton land on the margins of commercial agriculture; and because of the fixed-cost character of slavery, even large plantations aimed at self-sufficiency in foodstuffs, limiting the region’s overall degree of market specialization. The best evidence that slavery was not essential for cotton supply is demonstrated by what happened when slavery ended. After war and emancipation, merchants and railroads flooded into the southeast, enticing previously isolated farm areas into the cotton economy. Production in plantation areas gradually recovered, but the biggest source of new cotton came from white farmers in the Piedmont. When the dust settled in the 1880s, India, Egypt, and slave-using Brazil had retreated from world markets, and the price of cotton in Liverpool returned to its antebellum level. See Figure 2.

Here’s how to quote

> quoted text

how to write a list

1) point: spaces matter
2) another point

how to do both

1) > quoted text

   discussion of quoted text

   another paragraph
2) another point

You can learn this & more from any markdown guide like the one shown when using the help button in the lemmy toolbar.

So, you’re digging into breaking web accessibility. What did the disabled do to you to deserve this abuse? Do you kick crutches & obstruct service animals, too?

Here is an historic graphic of Social Mobility in the US.

Here is the Gini Coeficient that measures inequality (the higher the more unequal), which actually understates the reality because it’s not that great at reflecting internal inequality in the top quintile (i.e. things like how the top 1% are now way much richer than the top 10% than before).

A problem with these graphs & your inferences is it’s objectively unclear what to expect. What do they look like for other countries? What part of this is explained by other factors like unique historical advantages (eg, an industrial base untouched by war during the postwar boom) dissipating as other countries rebuild & catch up? Can we decouple these time-dependent factors to get an expected baseline performance apart from them?

With that social mobility graph, should we expect nearly all children to earn more than their parents every subsequent generation indefinitely? The remarkably similar graph provided by the source cited by yours shows birthyear of the child starting in 1940. Couldn’t their parents earning substantially less, perhaps by living through the Great Depression, and the postwar boom significantly explain the high proportion earning more than their parents? And as GDP per capita growth rate declines, wouldn’t we likewise expect a declining proportion of children to earn more than their parents? A base of reference would really help here.

As for the Gini coefficient, we see a 7% range from 35% to 42%. While this is an increase, it doesn’t seem staggering & needs evidence to distinctly support your conclusion.

Some problems you mentioned were always present or worse when that Gini coefficient was lower: gerrymandering, obstructions to vote (felon disenfranchisement, intimidation, poll taxes & tests), discriminatory incarceration, 2-party system due to plurality voting, etc. They’re not new developments systematically leading in the direction you claim.

It looks like you started with your conclusion & worked backwards to confirm it with evidence that is not as conclusive as you claim. An open-minded skeptic wouldn’t be convinced.

“harmful”

You could have done

1. The extra…
2. The like/dislike…
3. The flow…

Instead, you went with the counterintuitive & unnatural

1 . The extra…

2 . The like/dislike…

3 . The flow…

which takes special effort. This ain’t making sense.

Welcome to democracy & divided, partisan voters.

1 .

Bizarre. Did you mangle lists on purpose to impair web accessibility just because?

Vote enough non-Republicans into Congress, impeach, and convict? Wait for whatever is turning his skin purple to take its course?

An explicit argument consists of citing the relevant rules, stating how they’ve been violated, and providing evidence. It shows you’ve done the bare minimum to show your claim is plausible. This is in everyone’s interest, especially yours as the interested party.

As basic advocacy, an explicit argument should be expected: if you’re unable to articulate a decent argument, then how can you expect others to do so for you? Leaving that guesswork to others may not necessarily work in your favor. Do you really want to leave the best argument to chance & the unreliable charity of others?

An objective, sound argument may draw popular support by convincing them your claim is legitimate & just and demands action regardless of where admin decision ultimately settles. Not attempting one, however, draws all of it into question.

I saw: still needs a proper argument.

Per site bylaws on community mod removal, can you provide an argument for this case addressing the relevant rules directly?

I find doing AI impressions an effective trolling technique: beep bip boop & some fun punctuation ‒−–—―…:.

Is that another way to say you can’t? It is.

We can all see you’re making unfounded assumptions. Making more when your ego is threatened (by claiming anyone who calls out your baseless assumptions is right-wing in lemmy of all places), tossing insults, and refusing to rationally support your point doesn’t help your credibility. It just makes you a sore loser.

Stay mad: your opinion remains worthless & you need to work on your narcissism.

They can also be funny with them. Comedy doesn’t need or care about preconceived constraints. Irreverence that challenges our arrogant conformity & self-indulgent vanity that anything is sacred or off-limits is a goal of comedy. It’s part of gaining humility to question & laugh at ourselves & conceited ideas.