SloppilyFloss

Classes are not created from differences in people's abilities that make them better or worse than anyone else, and the Marxist goal is not to make everyone "equal." Classes are made from people's relations to the means of production and "the abolition of classes means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole" (Lenin in his address to a liberal professor).

Stalin has also discussed this point before:

The kind of socialism under which everybody would receive the same pay, an equal quantity of meat, an equal quantity, of bread, would wear the same kind of clothes and would receive the same kind of goods and in equal quantities—such a kind of socialism is unknown to Marxism.

All that Marxism declares is that until classes have been completely abolished, and until work has been transformed from being a means of maintaining existence, into a prime necessity of life, into voluntary labour performed for the benefit of society, people will continue to be paid for their labour in accordance with the amount of labour performed. “From each according to his capacity, to each according to the work he performs,” such is the Marxian formula of socialism, i.e., the first stage of communism, the first stage of a communist society.

Only in the highest phase of communism will people, working in accordance with their capacity, receive recompense therefor in accordance with their needs: “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.” .. It is those who know nothing about Marxism who have the primitive idea that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally.

• Stalin, Interview with Emil Ludwig, 13 December 1931

What "old" things specifically do you watch that you'd recommend?

MLM in this case refers to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism or Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, not Multi-Level Marketing.

No, not yet.

Sorry, I got a bit carried away. I hope you find my responses to be adequate. Feel free to ask any questions here or on any of the Lemmygrad communities.

Sure! Here are a couple of books that discuss some of the history of liberalism and its wrongdoings:

One's I've read:

• Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend (this has sections that describe the genocidal history of liberalism. You don't have to like Stalin to read this, and if you want just skip to the parts about liberalism's history)
• Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
• Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (this is a more US-centric book that talks about liberalism's shortcomings in the US rather than its genocidal wrongdoings. I'm assuming you're from the US.)

Ones I haven't read:

• Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History
• William Blum's Killing Hope

For a starting point in learning about Marxism, I'll point you to a comment I made the other day. I very very highly recommend reading anything in these lists that discusses historical or dialectical materialism, including Georges Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy. Dialectical materialism is the tool Marxists use to analyze the world. Marxism without a good understanding of dialectical materialism won't do you any good. Huey Newton said as much in his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, so I think more importance needs to be placed in teaching newcomers dialectical materialism.

On the topic of Huey Newton, I think reading about his life and the life of all other black revolutionaries is incredibly important to understand liberalism's wrongdoings. They all had to live through those wrongdoings and were able to understand them well.

Finally, just read philosophy in general. It's fun, it helps you see the world in new ways, and it's just mentally stimulating.

Huey Newton on his journey learning philosophy in college and how he incorporated it into his revolutionary programs:

I was also impressed with A. J. Ayer’s logical positivism, particularly his distinction between three kinds of statements—the analytical statement, the synthetic statement, and statements of assumption. These ideas have helped me to develop my own thinking and ideology. Ayer once stated, “Nothing can be real if it cannot be conceptualized, articulated, and shared.” That notion stuck with me and became very important when I began to use the ideological method of dialectical materialism as a world view. The ideology of the Black Panthers stands on that premise and proceeds on that basis, to conceptualize, articulate, and share. Some key aspects of Black Panther ideology and rhetoric, like “All Power to the People” and the concept “pig,” developed out of that. They were not haphazardly introduced into our thinking or vocabulary.

When you say "extremist" belief, while you may assume a view is extremist based on how far down some imaginary political number line it is, that's not the case. What you truly mean is someone whose ideas are outside of the acceptable list of ideas put in place by liberal hegemony.

From my perspective, however, a liberal is just as much of an extremist as I am. Liberalism has left in its wake untold destruction, death, and genocide and done a very good job of obscuring or whitewashing that history to declare itself the superior moral ideology. To support that is extreme, in my opinion, but to go around declaring liberals extremists outside of communist spaces would only get me funny looks.

At this point, anything I say or learn about communism and history outside of the mainstream liberal interpretations of it will get me labeled an extremist, so why stop trying to learn about these different perspectives? It's not like it makes me close-minded. On the contrary, it takes a pretty open mind to even begin to learn about communism in good faith.

I do self-doubt and self-criticize what I believe in, by the way. You would assume I don't because why would "extremists" do such a thing? Well, think about how much self-criticism and self-doubt pave the way when learning about communism in a world dominated by liberalism. You learn the Cold War narrative of communism all of your life and it's not something you can easily escape, so I always have self-doubt in my mind about what I believe in, but that's why I have to keep an open mind and be both critical and self-critical when I learn. It's self-criticism, though, not present-your-criticism, so it's a private process, but that doesn't mean you should assume it doesn't happen.

Anyways, I didn't address any of your specific points. I really just wanted to paint you a picture of why some people may be the way you're describing and how the term "extremist" in this context is loaded with a lot of assumptions about people and politics. People like to immediately jump to psychologically profiling "extremists" and I think that's rather annoying.

I've been advised to use this ref file instead

https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/blob/master/nheko-nightly.flatpakref

I get this error when I try to install the Flatpak nightly file

Warning: Can't pull from untrusted non-gpg verified remote

How do you switch to the nightly build on Flatpak?

Honestly, I'm tired of discussions of Lemmy from outside the Lemmy community. It's always the same stuff: "blah blah slur filter so use Lenny, blah blah against free speech, blah blah full of leftists and not centrists like me, blah blah admins are anti-diversity." For as much as HN complains about Reddit sometimes, these HN comments essentially mirror Reddit comments about Lemmy.

All these topics have been done to death at this point, but it's even worse when it's clear that some of these people aren't even a part of the community and yet there they are criticizing it in the same way everyone else has already.

It would just be nice to see discussions and criticisms of Lemmy from other angles. Something like talking about its place in the current iteration of the Web, or about its UX, or even its community, but from an non-reactionary angle. To me, Lemmy is an experiment, a social one that's currently seeing how communities form and change through federation, moderation, and community feedback. It's not perfect, but dismissing it as a project and experiment just because of something as simple as a slur filter is reductive and ridiculous, to be quite honest.

Ultimately, though, I'm not obligated to read what these people write, and they're not obligated to write how I want, so my complaints are useless, unproductive, and mostly me being defensive because of criticism thrown toward a community that I'm a part of. Still, though, it would just be nice to have something more refreshing.

The new app bundles format is a worrying trend! If it's truly exclusive to the Play Store and can't be brought to Aurora Store or the Android package installer somehow and APKs start to fizzle out, users of degoogled Android ROMs are going to suffer. If some big name apps are only available as AABs then tough luck.