GarbageShoot [he/him]

Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

Biden said of the bill, “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

Jeeesus, what a fucking scoundrel. Literally just a Republican at this point.

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.

frogse

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.

Man, I really thought things were going okay.

I feel like you’re misunderstanding my view here. What I’m trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we’ll be so busy fighting things at home that we won’t have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn’t a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected

This is ridiculous. You have a Democrat in charge right now! You see the nothing that protests are doing! Kamala is the current President’s VP and has come out swinging declaring such protests antisemitic and supportive of terrorism! You’ve let people talk you into a position that would only make sense speculatively, but we have the concrete reality right now and for the past nine months and it tells us that things don’t work like that!

Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide

It’s arguably a mistake on my part to respond to this at all, but I still will: Russia is not committing genocide and has no intention to do so. Ukrainian nationalists love to cry genocide, but it’s nonsense. It’s part of a cottage industry of hysterical headlines made to drum up support for the militarization of Europe and, in some cases, the direct arming of neo-nazis.

This is something that really disgusts me because of all of the brutality the US inflicts on the world, and the disproportionate reaction from white audiences to a white country getting invaded for the first time in a couple of decades.

Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I’m just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?

Some people might conclude that if you’ve talked yourself into supporting an open genocider on the basis that anyone else is “unrealistic”, the more appropriate action instead of hemming and hawing about who to vote for is to work to do whatever is necessary to smash the system, something that is not a question of voting. Just worth thinking about.

However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they’re going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.

This is just you imagining a path to victory in which the opponent is functionally helpless to stop you, like playing chess against yourself, despite that power historically and currently being in a position of monstrous dominance. You sidestepped my counter here while trying to use it as evidence. This is the whole game, this isn’t just some concession that those old farts are unhappy about giving, this is turning over and surrendering their belly for the people to tear into. Are you not familiar with what the US has done abroad to depose democratically elected leaders? Do you think that if a movement gained traction here that they somehow couldn’t ratfuck like Bernie, that they would so much as hesitate to pull the trigger?

They wouldn’t.

I will get to your other comment before too long, hopefully, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this is exactly what I meant when I said that your perspective was distorted by Sorkin-ism. In the ways that really matter, the political class are nothing like “petulant children” and nothing in DC would be solved by people just “hashing their problems out.” They are, as you say, corrupt, and they are both largely getting their money from the same sources, resulting in their goals being mostly the same, whatever their professed positions are.

Paraphrasing from a source you rightly don’t care about, people talk about “diverse interests”, but generally what do those “diverse interests” look like? Typically it’s not something indifferent like “I like spaghetti” vs “I like hamburgers”, typically it’s something more like “I own this copper refinery and want to dump industrial waste into this river” vs “we live downstream of that refinery and don’t want to be poisoned” and typically, assuming that action isn’t already illegal (and sometimes even when it is), the Republican position is siding with the factory owner and the Democrat position is pretending to side with the people but really doing nothing. If you think that’s an exaggeration, remember they promised that they fixed the pipes in Flint but plainly did not.

You’re getting hung up on kabuki theater, a good cop/bad cop routine, rather than looking at how the system demands the oppression of working people and the ruling class is united on that front.

Anyway, if you want to have conversations with communists, Hexbear is good for that (see the askchapo comm), you just need to signal that you’re being sincere and unassuming. Most of them are better at being nice than I am, though in all respects there is a variance in quality.

In 2016 we were all saying we’re sick of the same old shit so let’s just burn it all down and let Trump win, what’s the worst he can do?

That’s really not what happened, it wasn’t Bernie Bros who caused Trump to win, no matter what centrists try to tell you.

Moreover, you’re missing that I’m talking about a specific and highly actionable demand, not nihilism.

However if Trump is soundly beaten in this election, it might just make Conservatives realize that nobody is willing to put up with this extremist reality-tv style showmanship that they’ve been cultivating over the last eight years, and perhaps they will consider putting up a more rational candidate for the next election.

This is absurd, straight up. They’ll change rhetorical tact as needed, but you are completely misunderstanding what the Republican Party is even for if you think them losing two elections will get them to unify behind the three #NeverTrump Republicans who actually exist. You are genuinely mistaking Sorkin slop for reality. They aren’t good guys with different values, they aren’t robots trying to hone in on a center-right consensus, they are a trust of capitalists and their ghouls seeking to crush the power of working people and maximize the profit that can be extracted from them.

More to the point, rather like the fundraising attempts of the Dems, the Republicans still win even when they lose the Presidency, because the Dems are completely unwilling to fight Republicans when they even partially control congress. The Republicans have been doing great these four years. They don’t need to come to a realization, they know exactly what they are doing.

OK, I understand the goal of bargaining power, and maybe it might work, I’m just worried that this isn’t the election to try making a power move when the alternative could literally see harm coming to their families.

It’s never “the right time”. There’s always some excuse to put off actual progress. That’s how this shit works; that’s how it has always worked. That’s how Democrats talk someone who thinks of himself as progressively-minded into considering genocide to be a negotiable issue.

I am a white guy, but

I have something for you to read.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection

– some Bernie Bro, I think

Have you seen that a few states are working out the details to implement RCV? I live in Colorado, one of the places which are trying to evaluate it. Yes it’s going slow, but our government is actually taking it seriously with plans to try and have it in place by the 2028 election

There’s a saying in Germany, don’t celebrate a baby before it is born. If you haven’t seen the classic Democratic practice of slow-rolling something into oblivion, I guess now you can. Just make sure to remember it so you recognize it next time.

And hey, they said marijuana would never be accepted either, but look at us now.

No one who knows what they are talking about would say that about pot. It’s clearly more useful to the bourgeoisie as a balm, they can prosecute the war on drugs targeting other substances just fine.

This is another place where I’m sure you can think through it just by realizing there is something to think through: Is pot really the same as voting reform that would surely topple the two-party system? Do they really not have any sort of structural factors differentiating them?