Lol “youre the lib” is hilarious.

Like, I was making the connection because the simplistic thinking of “well, look how bad THE OTHER SIDE IS!” is classic lib/conservative dichotomy type thinking. As if it were either one or the other instead of being an incredibly complicated situation wherein, yes, Israel is the aggressor and they are committing genocide and their government is a right wing nightmare and, yes, of course the oct. 7 attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum and were a response to the endless oppression and slaughter of the Palestinian people and the settler practices of Israel and Hamas is the most organized resistance against that and, yes, the American-backed government before Hamas was awful and Hamas rose up as a response to THAT injustice…and this is literally just covering a fraction of what’s happened in the past, like, 10-15 years.

But to ignore the practices of the right wing fundamentalist group strictly because it’s easier to sort out in your head when you have a “good guy” and a “bad guy,” to reason this all away with “the OTHER side is the REAL Hitlers!” is EXACTLY WHAT ALL YOU WESTERN E-COMMUNISTS CONSTANTLY COMPLAIN ABOUT LIBERALS DOING. Ignoring what’s inconvenient to your worldview to simplify your screeds from your toilets isn’t cool when liberals do it. It’s not cool when you guys do it either. Although it is much more hypocritical because you guys are actually self-aware.

Lol the fact that you think this is as simple as “bad guys v good guys” tells me everything I need to know.

Nuance really is dead and buried, huh? Israel can be committing genocide while Hamas…also abuses their power and hurts people? There can be more than one “the bad guys”, you know. I’m an anarchist. I know you communists loooove to write off human rights abuse if it fits your narrative, but I believe that things can be more complicated than that. Hamas may be fighting an equally right-wing authoritarian monster, but that does not suddenly make them good? Like, how is that so hard to understand? Yeah, they’re fighting a far more deadly and effective killing machine with religious fundamentalist ethics. But that does not absolve them.

I agree it would be very nice if we had “good guys v bad guys” but that’s…just not the way the world works.

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Wow. What a dick.

Great post. I give you my fake internet point up arrow.

I fuckin knew it! I could’ve sworn this was happening. I would switch to brave to watch something and would be able to no problem. Fuckin bastards.

Nah, man. I’m just an adult. I have my principles. And casting a single vote, I’m still sure what my principles are. And they don’t align with the Democratic Party.

But while there are two harmful options, one is significantly more harmful to populations of people whose very existence is apparently up for debate, friends of mine who I see struggle every day—also anarchist, but transgender (…who have also decided to give up a little of their pride in their stringent ideals in order to not be made illegal or to keep younger trans kids from suffering the way they did growing up in the 90s/early 2000s), opened my eyes to the urgency of the situation for them.

I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Obama didn’t get my vote either time. But I did vote for joe Biden. I didn’t love it. But I did it. It didn’t take too long, and I continued living my principles. I didn’t burst into flames.

I’ve voted third party most of my life. And I’ve wavered on this as I’ve gone through my life. I make a judgement call when I can. But I started reading anarchist literature young. Like I said, I came of age under late Clinton/bush II. So my radicalization happened early. And my proactivity in my beliefs has come and gone. But my principles have stayed the same. I dunno how old you are, but honestly, I’m assuming you’re kinda young based on the way you speak. I was cooking for FNB and burning American flags and spray painting banks and paint bombing Lockheed Martin longer than you seem to have been alive.

I think of my taking a few minutes to cast a ballot against a genuine fascist movement like harm reduction in drug addiction. I don’t support drug addiction, but I do want to help those at the mercy of the worst of it. Drug addiction is horrible. Our electoralism is horrible. I don’t want to support either. But there is a little I can do to reduce the harm to most vulnerable victims of both.

I’m secure enough in my beliefs and can still be a full-fledged anarchist doing my praxis and casting a vote. My beliefs aren’t so flimsy that I need to PROVE TO EVERYONE IM ABOVE IT. I’ve been there. I can still see the problems inherent in our system while casting a vote. I can still hate capitalism while working and spending money. It’s not the system we want. My beliefs are lived through my praxis and my sense of what I believe. Not by what I DONT do. Electoralism will still exist if you vote or not. Not participating in the vote doesn’t do shit to electoralism. You not voting won’t help the Palestinians. My voting won’t help them either, as we both agree. But there are people in my direct vicinity and in my life and in this country that I MIGHT have the off-chance of keeping from harm by sacrificing my own sense of “purity as an anarchist.” The electoral system doesn’t live nor die by my vote. To think that way is beyond self-centered.

Lol you really didn’t read what I said, huh?

I get the concept. I do. And I wrestle with the notion myself, as I’m an anarchist (you and I don’t agree on a few things, lemmygrad friend).

But I don’t subscribe to the notion that not voting as a principled abstainer is a righteous act…I don’t think. Because I do agree, of course. The democrats are capitalist, war-mongering shitheels. They aren’t “good” or just or righteous by any stretch of the imagination. They destroy the environment and will kill us if we challenge the status quo of lte stage consumer capitalism. I have no illusions about this.

But doing nothing in the face of a Republican Party that is hellbent on wiping trans people from the face of the earth, strapping us all to the whipping chair until they can establish a Christofascist nightmare in which we are all beaten into straight, white submission is…not a heroic act. Because, yeah, the democrats support Israel, they are neoliberal capitalist pigs. They boost police budgets whenever they can, they take obscene amounts of money from special interests and work for them, not for us. But the republicans do all the same shit PLUS hating trans and gay people and pass laws that make it so they can lock you away for protesting and they are clearly more “business friendly” because they can be open about it while the democrats have to do slightly less because their rhetoric and their base don’t approve like Republican voters do.

My point is, there are two terrible options. Yes, we are in agreement. And yes, electoralism is bullshit, incrementalism will get us nowhere. But hierarchy is bullshit. Capitalism is bullshit. These things will exist until some insanely devastating event upturns the way the world has run for a long time.

Not voting won’t change these realities. VOTING won’t change them. But all the people that are hurt by an emboldened xenophobe and vicious bigot WILL be hurt. Actual, measurable hurt. PLUS the Palestinian people you’re basing your position on will continue to be killed. Because the US supports Israel. Not the democrats or republicans, but the US.

Not voting against a party that is openly using REAL LIFE fascist methods and speech so you can maintain your perceived purity isn’t noble.

We can all hate capitalism. But we’re stuck with it right now. We can all hate electoralism. But we’re stuck with it right now. Capitalism kills way more people than the genocide currently happening in Palestine. But you’re way more involved with it than you would be in electoralism by casting one vote.

These things are truths right now. You’d do a lot more good (or at least contribute A LOT less hurt) by abstaining from capitalism than you would abstaining from electoralism. We can all be principled. But all-or-nothing-ism that is rampant on “the left” (read: in modern people with principles and humanity and half a brain) isn’t noble because it helps. It’s perceived as noble because you can say, “pfft. I didn’t _____.” You’re not helping anymore but yourself.

Engage in praxis. Fight for your beliefs. But when your abstinence will be weaponized by insanely powerful and horrible people, and leveraged against minority groups, your “purity” is nothing but self-aggrandizement.

Not voting against anti-trans Christian fascist bigots is a huge show of privilege.

Honestly, there are a few communities that rely on it—the more meme/picture-centric and the advice-centric ones—that I don’t want to completely block out. So I’ve been going and blocking the communities that flood my feed with minutes-old Reddit posts that don’t even offer the text to read or a picture to look at. I will say as well, I don’t know what causes one to include text but not the other, but I do also enjoy reading some of those insane stories posted on some subreddit I never subscribed to like relationship advice or drugs stories or something. There’s some wild shit. I don’t need the conversation in the comments to enjoy the batshit story

I’m sure if there’s one thing they’ve really gotten the hang of, it’s optimizing advertising profits. They explicitly said they’re killing third party apps because they want to sell user data. (In so many words). I can’t imagine they hadn’t thought of what makes them money. I imagine, actually, it’s what 95% OF their focus has gone toward recently.

That’s why the term “praxis” exists. So you’re not just grasping for the stars, but working on improving life for people around you every single day. It makes reaching for the stars much easier when you have a base to stand on. Not to mention it will truly help people as you live and embody your principles AND it keeps your from burning out on not reaching the stars in your lifetime.

Are you guys only rarely seeing Reddit sources on lemmy? With these shitty lemmit bots inundating this site with literally just links to Reddit without even any preview, I’m seeing almost exclusively Reddit links. It’s honestly make me rethink using lemmy recently.

Lol that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But I can tell you who thought of it, easily. The people optimizing the ad revenue. UX isn’t their focus, but boosting profits is.

Fuck coleslaw.

Raw cabbage or nothing. Hget your mayo off my cabbage.

Maybe I should’ve said that you CAN use them as a way to avoid touching two slices when pulling your own. You pick it up, place it in the middle of the slice next to yours, and pull so you don’t touch the crust of the next persons slice. Probably a creative use for something that was originally intended to keep boxes from saggjng

It’s meant to be picked up, the feet placed on the next slice, and you pull your slice with your hand. It’s not like it stays in the middle.

I worked in pizza places for 10+ years and we never used them, so maybe their original intention was avoiding pizza box sag, I suppose I wouldn’t know. I guess we can just say using them to not touch the next slice as you pull your own is a more creative adaptive use

I literally just learned last night that the little table is to hold the slice next to yours as you pull a piece, that way you’re not touching the next person’s slice with your grubby ass hands.

I absolutely love this. I’m not even an artist, but I’m giddy over this.

You need proof a modern state—and one that is competing with the likes of the brutally capitalist US in the global market—(not to mention one that has a government enabling one person to rule indefinitely, one that is violently enforcing its will on territories it wants to (re-)exert control over, one that is well-known for restricting media and speech)—has other goals than “making sure our people are happy and satisfied?” How delusional are you?

Why do I need to?

Lol wow. I guess more delusional than I was expecting. You know China has its own leftists that very much disagree with you…right? Like, you’re a western e-communist that you’re swallowing the party line so hard you’d be considered right-wing by the actual Chinese leftists. Like, they criticize the state for not being communist…while you’re over here idolizing them because you think you need to in order to “belong” as a communist. Ironic.

You can only view them as some fetishized version of what you don’t have. Like I said, you all never grew out of that stage we all went through when we first got radicalized (or at least I went through, at like 13 years old), where the complexity of the thinking is no more than, “i hate my government, they’re wrong…so anything that ALSO doesn’t like my government MUST be right!” Like, that Venn diagram has SOME overlap, but not 100%. And it’s so obvious when someone can’t differentiate. And that’s what I see in so many “communists” I talk to here.

They’re proving to be a force of good in the world, and whatever “wrongdoing” you believe China is doing is because the US government wants you to believe it. Now why you’d want to believe what the world’s biggest lying police state would say about anything, is beyond me

…how can you be so naive? You really can’t see past the binary of “pro-US/pro-china” that you can’t conceive of me, an anarchist who doesn’t think that

(let me make sure you hear this, this time):

EITHER FUCKING STATE IS IN THE RIGHT.

How can you discount the accounts of those who were IN Hong Kong, reporting exactly what was happening when the brutal Chinese state was…brutalizing them? Because you love a brutal state THAT much that you’re going to claim it’s wEsTErN PrOpaGaNDa? Defending china by calling the US a police state is some rich, rich irony.

BOTH HAVE BRUTAL POLICE FORCES THAT ENFORCE THE STATE’S VERSION OF THE STATUS QUO. We both obviously agree that is true in the US…but you’re blind to that being a fact of the Chinese state as well because you CLEARLY have a massive blind spot in order to more neatly arrange/understand your own beliefs.

But I’m wasting my time explaining this to you, I’m sure. Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason.