Ask Lemmy

"This", honestly.

One thing I personally can’t understand is their defending to the death of every socialist government. But by that I mean every government that has called itself socialist or been called socialist by the US as some sort of justification for undermining them, not if they’ve actually done anything socialist. Like do we have to simp for North Korea.

There's a couple of points I would make in response to that.

First, a problematic aspect of the internet is that your existence is defined by the last thing you posted. Which is to say, if someone says that a story about North Korea is fake, then to a reader they are a "North Korea defender," regardless of whether they hold more critical beliefs about it that they didn't happen to voice in that particular comment. And there have been plenty of sensationalist, fake news stories about North Korea, as well as about other countries the US doesn't like.

Second, most Hexbears are Marxist-Leninists, and an important thing to understand about that ideology is that it isn't about one specific set of policies that are universally applicable. When an ML defends a country, it doesn't necessarily mean that they think that country should be held up as a model for other countries to emulate.

So if they're not a model to emulate, then why defend them? First off, because the only means we in the West have of influencing their policies is through our government using military force, clandestine operations, or crippling economic sanctions. Second, because even if a socialist government is a failure, the extent to which it failed is important, because it will be held up as a criticism of socialism in general. Many Western leftists believe in simply putting as much distance as possible between themselves and AES (actually existing socialist) states, and will be some of their harshest critics to that end. But others, myself included, would argue that that's the wrong approach, because it allows false and exaggerated claims to go unchallenged, which will then still be used to criticize the left no matter how much one tries to distance themselves from it. Like, people will call Obama and Harris communists, so it doesn't seem to matter how much distance there is.

Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds is a good starting point for understanding the perspective.

Some days, like once every two years, you actually do it by accident; you come in, get shit done all day, and you get like a months amount of work done.

And then you get all nervous that someone might find out and set new expectations for you, so you have to kind of spread out the results of the work you did on that miracle day.

I am productive for less than an hour a day. I don't do anything. I have nothing to do. I drive for an hour each way to sit and do absolutely nothing so I can feed and house my family.

Some days I have to convince myself not to drive my truck into something at 85 mph. No person is meant to live like this.

It's fun to play and complete in your local sportsball league. It's exercise while being fun. Spectating is fun when watching a sport that you also play. Seeing the pros play is it properly lets you bring something back to your own game. I don't actually care who wins. That's tribalism.

Going to a "sports" bar to watch fat people get drunk and place bets makes no sense to me.

I also hate sports trivia. It's just celebrity trivia but for people to star on the field instead of in movies. If I get asked who won a particular award in a particular sport in a particular year, I would have absolutely no idea. If you aksed me to explain the "infield fly" rule, I've got that covered.

And yes, a full 8 minutes of the nightly news covering sports is just insane. I just don't care.