mozz

Whatever user: I can't wait for the revolution, let me challenge the status quo with my iconoclasty, no politics is gonna be enough until we can battle in the FUCKING streets

Me: Dude I don't think opinion X is correct

Whatever user: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA shaking and crying ban ban ban

I feel like that whole diagram is the result of a long evolution of, what are all the possible ways that somebody can fuck this up and what’s literally everything possible we can do to prevent it

I am mocking the essentialist and attitude that suggests [voting] is the only thing that matters

those who seek to enforce support for a candidate and discourage dissent

discouraging the propagation of news coverage that is unflattering to that candidate to a point that is threatening to consensus opinion

launching crusades against those who are insufficiently emphatic about the need to vote

I just don't think any of these things are happening. I think you're mounting this grand challenge against an enemy that 99% doesn't exist on Lemmy, and the people who actually are reading your messages are in a very different place than you're describing here. When they say "yes Gaza sucks please can we get a better president in the future but in the meantime also Trump is 10 times worse for Gaza among many other things so let's not elect him, also let's go to the Palestine protest this Saturday" and you scream in their face "GENOCIDE JOE, GENOCIDE JOE, DON'T TRY TO SILENCE MY DISSENT" you're producing no benefit for leftism in this country.

If you wanted to go the DNC and start yelling at them about support for Israel and tepid marijuana reform, then sure. That sounds fine to me, that would sound productive (because I think there you would encounter some discouragement of any "dissent" like anti Israel sentiment).

To drive progress we must sow discontent against the status quo, that much has always been clear.

Do you think that the Communists in 1932 who were fighting the SPD, instead of Hitler, accomplished progress by sowing discontent against the status quo? Certainly that's what they were doing, just my assessment of their success level is pretty limited, since they almost all were killed.

See this is a flawless bad-faith dig at the Democrats. I started typing up a big list of important stuff they've been doing, as counterexamples to the implication that they're only pretending to care about American women as some weird ploy to get votes, but then I just sound like some kind of overreacting after-school special.

With simple cynicism and dishonesty, this short comment actually does a pretty good job of making the Democrats trying to do something good which is only necessary in the first place because Hillary Clinton (for as much of a useless toad-lady as she was) didn't win the election, and being blocked by the Republicans, and turning all of that into a reason not to feel like electing Democrats.

Electing Democrats isn't the only answer; we need a lot better than them. But yes, electing Democrats would have prevented all these women that are suffering or dying or almost-dying right now because they need medical care (to say nothing of the ones that just need abortions), because there's a big difference between "not as good as we need" and "actively wants to kill Americans." Voting for the first one is not exclusive of working for better outcomes outside the voting booth. Refusing to vote is helping the second one.

I feel like I've already taken this bullshit too seriously by even typing up a longish comment in response, but this variety of bad faith bullshit is just getting too irritating and the outcomes in the real world are very real.

This is what happens when loyalty to the group starts overriding good outcomes and moral judgements of what's right and wrong.

Everyone knows it's the wrong answer, but to speak on behalf of something that's been defined as an enemy viewpoint is to yourself become an enemy. And since health care for women is now an enemy position, here we are.

Once you're on the train, it's very hard to get off. Even when everyone knows it's gone too far, even when real killing starts, most of the people who defined themselves in that manner won't say a word against it. Because of course what would happen to them, if they did?

So, I still don't think that what I am saying is what you think I am saying.

I wasn't saying that those three bullet points were the things that would indicate a shill user. The only reason I brought them up was to speak to you directly about how I saw your user -- they were all things that applied to you, as I saw it, in some way. But like I say, I don't really try to get involved in saying "I think this particular user is fake" unless it's pretty egregious. Just expressing leftist agitation isn't it. Like I was recommending slrpnk to somebody recently, sort of like yeah they hate voting sometimes, IDK, but whatever, they are good people.

One of a much smaller set of behaviors that'll imply to me that someone is fake is a glaring incongruity -- like beliefs or ways of speaking that very rarely go together. A good example is ozma talking about CNN as a trusted liberal news, sort of "our news" since all of us are leftists together... presumably if you are this far-left lemmy.ml person, you will see how ridiculous that is. Does it mean on its own he's a shill? Not completely, no. But it's super weird. That kind of thing is why I am suspicious of him, somewhat less suspicious of you even though you post stuff that to me seems wildly counterproductive to leftist progress in this country, and not at all suspicious of slrpnk. Does that way of looking at it make sense?

it will create just enough discomfort to spur action

So your intent in posting memes against voting for Biden is to spur the reader to get involved in leftist action? What would they start doing, to improve the state of the country? I'm not trying to be dickish by asking that, I'm genuinely asking.

That's why every criticism of Biden here is always couched in "but i'm voting for him anyway"; without signaling 'I am not seeking to cause chaos' every critique is potentially suspect of being bad-faith. It's a cancer for actual activism and it's another one of the convenient logics that can dismiss uncomfortable confrontation as unworthy of engagement.

Yeah, 100%. This is one of the key reasons why I don't like the shills. The country needs a whole lot of help definitely including replacing the Democrats with something substantially better, and by distorting the whole conversation away from "how do we make some progress" and towards "is it a good idea or not to let Trump get elected and start imprisoning anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell and shooting anyone who tries to hold a protest", it's eliminating a lot of the potential for forward progress that something like Lemmy could otherwise provide.

I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn't agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That's kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.

The person specifically called me out by name and said that I’d accused them of something but been too cowardly to engage with them directly on it. I hadn’t, but since they brought it up, I looked into it a little and confirmed that yes, I feel comfortable accusing them directly, and did so, and explained why. Thus they have a chance to defend themselves directly if they feel like what I said was unfair. But I didn’t bring the ad hominem into it and never intended to until I was specifically invited to. Until then, I was, as I pointed out, engaging with them purely on the merits of what they were saying.

I was absolutely convinced before I read the article that the deputies had been the ones that fucked up the migrants

Of course the Texas takeover of immigration enforcement in Texas is still in early days, there’ll be plenty of time to injure or kill (more) migrants in the weeks and months to come

(small voice) hooray

This needs a content warning