Disclaimer since based on my last comment i know the accusation is coming: i voted for claudia already. I think socialists should vote for Claudia if shes available.
I just also think voting is not the ultimate expression of politics and doesnt mean that much. The “its an endorsement” thing is true, but one extra endorsement does not equal one extra dead Palestinian. Thats just magical thinking. (Also, ive tried telling people the endorsement thing because its what changed my mind about lesser evilism, it doesnt work.)
And the idea that every Kamala voter is horrific evil when many are scared, propagandized, gaslit marginalized people doing what they think they need to do to not die is misguided. You guys claim to be the ultimate propaganda understanders but dont seem to understand its power. Are people still responsible for their actions? Sure. Does a vote of all things matter as an action all that much? Lmao fuck no. Its basically pointless.
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, “not forgiving”, or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Yea, because we got shit to lose
People dont go out and start shooting unless they feel like theyve got nothing to lose
That’s why
has been refining the art of taking things away slowly.Theyre very good at it
I’m not even sure this is true. I would give up all my shit in an instant if I thought it had a 0.001% chance of changing things. I think many people feel similarly.
I can never give up my wife
Well sure. But at no point in history did nobody ever have significant others. If you’re including that in your assessment then only humans who’ve lived their whole life in solitary confinement have nothing to lose.
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I dont think ur a coward i think ur based
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I disagree completely. Liberals are white supremacists and have always been waging war on the whole world. They are weaselly and smug liars. They invented ads. They live off of the stolen work of whole enslaved countries. They are humanity’s enemies.
Lmao, imagine voting ever. I gave Bernie $27 dollars and a temporary stay of execution in 2020, and I’ll take both back in this world or in hell.
Vibes do not matter. Actions matter. If your decisions “are not coming from a place of evil” but the result of those decisions is “substantially more evil every single time”, then your decisions are not sufficiently repudiating evil. Correct action comes from correct thought. If the action keeps being “kill more kids”, then eventually you have to admit the thought “killing kids is okay, actually”.
they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice
they’re making the conscious decision that murdering Palestinians is okay if it benefits them personally
they aren’t though, they think there is no way to not endorse it, they have been housebroken, they are pitiable but they are not Nazis
Most of the Germans during WWII and the Holocaust also were not nazis. The nazi party and the SS were only a small fraction of the total population. That didn’t stop the Germans from actively participating in the Holocaust or helping invade/bomb other countries. Hell, neither WWII nor the Holocaust would have been possible without all of Germany being complicit.
The number of people arrested, deported, and killed wasn’t possible with the SS alone. They relied on local police being informed of where people were hiding by neighbors wanting to eliminate Jews, Roma, homosexuals, etc. If the SS went door to door searching every house, there’s no way they could have captured as many people as they did. Those people were handed over to them by ordinary Germans not part of the nazi party.
So no, I don’t buy that excuse. Whitey is gonna whitey and if he is willing to throw Palestinians under the bus, he sure as shit will snitch when the time comes to eliminate the marginalized here at home.
very true, it is ultimately a concession to imperialism on the part of the labor aristocracy. unfortunately there is a statistically high chance you have participated in exactly the same thing, though you could also just be giga-based since your birth or not an Amerikkkan and in either way i envy you
yeeting the second half of this comment because it sucks
I think a younger, more reactionary me would have deserved a yeeting for being reactionary. There was no excuse for those views when there were people the same age who had the opposite views. While I realize that now, it doesn’t absolve my participation.
It’s also materially irrelevant because I can’t change the past, especially past versions of other people. I can only change the conditions of what’s going on right now. Maybe some libs are possible to convert with enough time and understanding. Unfortunately, Palestinians don’t have that time. It’s the same as what was going on in Germany. Maybe there were Germans who could have been reasoned with. It doesn’t matter because the war was necessary to end the Holocaust, the invasion of the USSR, and the occupation of neutral countries.
Oh also I don’t think we need to waste our time converting possible leftists from people still deep in delusional faith with electoralism, I was just condemning the “kill all Kamala voters” type rhetoric but I think I just took it too literally and not as the venting it was
it doesn’t need to absolve your participation for your possibility to stop doing stuff like voting for genocidal lib politicians to be acknowledged. the fact you are posting here is a sign that current clueless babyleftists don’t deserve to be compared to full on Nazis, though of course they are participating in a collective wrong. Like, :im-vegan: and i would be 100% justified if i went on borderline murderous rants at the people around me for being complicit with murder of living things constantly, and in fact many do, but i have a hard time comparing them to Nazi supporters regardless, because Nazi supporters had a huge amount of social context to understand why their decision is wrong, but veganism is still considered “extreme” and/or erased from public consciousness. In other words, people bad but definitely not full-on ghouls in and of themselves.
i’m not going to start killing my family
Good! Nobody’s gonna kill their family for voting for this genocide and nobody is suggesting it.
i already yeeted that shitty argument sorry
I’m glad you did that but it’s definitely telling that everybody who feels the need to tell us we’re wrong for our position has to include imagined declarations that nobody has declared
it’s the imaginary hexbear you’re disagreeing with, not the actual hexbear users
It was an allegory but a bad one, not an actual take I thought I saw
Yeah sorry I don’t buy this shit either.
You’re basically saying “if you hate your genocidal society then why do you participate in it?”
.Libs are just under the incorrect belief that by voting for the lesser evil they are “improving things somewhat”
. Doubly so where in many (though definitely not all) cases, it’s a factual error, not a values one. And I really struggle to blame individuals for that.Newsflash: The minerals in your electronics were partially or entirely mined by child slavery, why are you willing to throw them under the bus??? Turns out participating in society is required, and so you just act within it in a way you think is best to improve things.
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I’m very over the childish tendency to condemn colloquialisms as a lib/redditor thing. I’m using words to communicate a point. You understood that point. So they did their job.
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Exactly
Nobody is immune to propaganda, yet the effect that propaganda has is overstated here IMHO. Read Masses, Elites, and Rebels. If a cis white lib is saying they’re voting L3Harris out of fear, they’ve really just been granted moral license to not care and are using that moral license to justify doing the same thing they would be doing if no pressure was applied to them at all.
I think yelling at libs about voting is effective because the vast majority of them are not joining orgs, they’re not communists that are just doing this one thing wrong, etc. They’re libs! And they perceive voting as the singular most important political action (especially since the George Floyd protests have been memory holed). If we can radicalize liberals’ understanding of voting, we can radicalize their entire politics. I know that because when I was a liberal myself, the first piece of theory I read was Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy. After I read that, I radicalized very quickly, because my whole understanding of politics was based on voting for the right candidate and it was quickly shattered. So I believe that electoralism represents an attack surface for the left to exploit, since it has become the singular focus of the rank and file liberal politic.
All that being said, at some point it probably is worth shutting up about voting and just focusing on getting people to learn some useful skill, get organized, and agitate as many other people as they can to do the same. It would be really, really stupid if, for example, this whole site alienated a ton of its own already radicalized users over voting. It would be even worse if the same happened at unions and the DSA. It ain’t that deep.
You have to meet the people where they are, and right now that’s the polling place.
when people show you they don’t care about genocide, believe them
The US presidential election is a sham election even by the standards of bourgeois elections, so voting doesn’t matter in the end. But just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it reflects well on someone who casts their ballot for the current genocider. It’s like if someone upvotes a reactionary comment or post on Hexbear. The impact is practically nil, but they still would need to be reeducated and banned if they refused to self-crit. A major moment in the history of this website is transphobes getting banned for upvoting transphobic content. Imagine if they tried pulling some “uh aktually, this is a niche website. There’s no material impact for my upvote. It doesn’t meaningfully combat transphobia” excuse.
I don’t think people are trying to argue we should, like, just live with their terrible choices, just that they aren’t like consciously Hitlerites.
Liberals will betray leftists per usual when the time comes, so at a basic level, I don’t see the point of caring about liberals outside of being prepared enough to anticipate and make moves against the inevitable betrayal. As far as the US is concerned, more than half of the populace do not vote at all and it’s higher for marginalized communities. This is fertile soil for radicalization. They on some intuitive level are politically conscious enough to recognize the pony show for what it really is, and they are just begging for someone, anyone to show them the light. Why waste time and energy on some Harris-voting freak when the politically disenfranchised are just standing right there?
In the same way a fascist doesnt support self id for trans people, I dont believe in self id for fascists, sorry
Correct. If I vote non Harris I fear trump will be elected which would be a faster and stronger genocide. I’m not voting because I’m okay with genocide. I’m voting to try to mitigate as much damage as I can in my power without creating an exceptionally higher amount of risk by voting how I actually want too.
you should vote psl. if actual worker’s parties become bolstered by such a high profile election maybe the hitlerites in office will hesitate to do evil shit at risk of radicalizing everyone to socialism faster
Lmfao. You live in a funny reality friend. Gaslight someone else with that stuff.
Unlimited “faster and stronger genocide” on liberals
You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize.
I don’t hate humanity, I hate people who want to officially cosign a modern Holocaust.
Legitimate question, would you feel this way if someone told you they hated German Nazis who lived in and supported Germany during and in the lead up to WW2?
Because the moral calculus is identical.
We’re talking about people who support the modern equivalent of Hitler.
moral calculus
There’s your problem. Marxists are not moralists. Westerners are all already complicit and voting is meaningless. What matters is doing whatever is practical to actually support Palestine.
Being kind to tryptamine was not going to help any Palestinians.
I don’t think condemning people for being bad but not treating them as intentionally evil = being nice. You can still call someone a convienient rube spreading rhetoric to justify genocide and if they don’t pause from that I think going fully off at them is entirely justified
Sorry is “intentionally evil” something we care about or not? Seems like intention and good vs evil are valid or invalid modes of thought depending on what’s currently most useful for the “kid gloves for modern Nazis” crowd in here.
I’m going to restate my top level comment: you should be using the same standard for these people as pro Nazi Germans during the Third Reich.
People like tryptamine are fully aware that Harris is complicit in the modern Holocaust, know that they’re cosigning her actions and find a way to justify that to themselves.
On Hexbear of all places, I’m not going to let that stand without telling them to die.
yeah so going fully off at them is entirely justified
Mea culpa: I misread your comment as saying it wasn’t justified.
Sorry for the unwarranted tone, I get heated easily regarding this topic.
Totally valid, sorry for continuing the conversation probably longer than it needed to be
I’m of two minds about this and while I agree with you mostly I do take a bit of an issue here
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, “not forgiving”, or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
I don’t think anyone is serious about wanting to kill all libs, I can’t speak for everyone but when it’s coming from me it’s clearly hyperbole because I’m just yapping
I think libs should be treated as individuals, there’s a nice old boomer lady who feels genuinely scared of another Trump term who I’m completely kind and civil to because she’s out with us every week protesting the genocide, I can see that she genuinely cares and we don’t try to vote shame each other
Now on the other hand that old boomer dude I’ve never seen before who showed up at our protest last week to campaign for Holocaust Harris and vote shame us got none of that kindness or civility from me because he didn’t fucking deserve it, frankly I regret not being a bigger dick to him
Online it’s the same way, if they’re trying to scold us I’m going to tell them how I feel and I’m going to tell them that there’s blood on their hands
You are right that it doesn’t matter
I feel like a lot of these callout posts that are definitely directed at specific people would be solved with the understanding that everyone on here understands the difference between Hexbear and real life and that rhetorical hyperbole exists as a means for commiseration and venting. Does it occasionally get a little extreme on here? Sure. Should you be concerned that we’re all baying for blood in the streets? Nah.
I do think- and hear me out here, because I think people are predisposed to think of those sort of take as inherently justifying weird shit because people love to read into what ND people say. But it is definitely a result of us ND people reading others online very literally. It is difficult for us to tell the difference between a post that is ironic or unironic, hyperbole or literal, sober or joking, especially if we are familiar with the degree to which reality exceeds parody. I genuinely believe the hatred of this kind of post is rooted primarily in a kind of weird synthesis of something weird and cringe (ableism and an expectation of everyone acting the same) with something usually good (a desire to ensure a complete lack of reactionaries in our spaces). We (the ND) are interpreting a comment or general Vibe incorrectly because of our extremely different communication styles, and when it comes time for the majority/advantaged group (the NT) to clarify what they meant they instead interpret our questions as the prods or statements they would have intended if they said the same thing.
We definitely need a Dictatorship of the Neurodivergent on this site, even if we already have one it’s not enough. Yeah, if you read things literally it gets a little harder to detect a bad faith chud trying to wreck the site, but there are still really obvious tells. A change to a more explicitly communicative general conversation policy would be a huge improvement. I wish tone tags were built into every comment. ( someone going “god I want to kill Kopmala voters /pissed off” is way easier to relate to than our (some ND people’s) default assumption of “god I want to kill Kopmala voters /genuine /sober”)
Yes, this is not an excuse for any sort of problematic behavior. But the assumption that we are engaging with it in the first place with posts like this is a heavily neurotypical one. And I do take issue to @autismdragon’s reference to grass touching because that exact phrasing is usually used to dismiss us, though I do not think they considered this when they wrote the post.
When the NT urge to read nonexistent context into neurodivergent conversation crosses with our very real and reasonable experiences with reactionaries abusing said context to smuggle in their reactionary sentiments without saying anything explicit, it becomes very, very ugly, and I think it usually ends up with people both assuming neurodivergent people intend to spread reactionary rhetoric and becoming unreasonably angry at them, while also having neurodivergent people accidentally spread it because neurotypical people can share invisible context with each other even through the medium of someone specifically not trying to add any. The only real way to fix this is to embrace more and more explicit communication (and to embrace theory that makes the smuggled, implicit reactionary sentiments explicit through the revealing of it’s internal mechanisms)
I’m happy to take suggestions on ways to improve my communication style for ND folks. I’ve been marinating in the hexbear house style to the point where maybe it’d be beneficial to take a step back and reflect a little.
That said, it doesn’t appear that OPs issue here is with people sounding like reactionaries, it’s more against the performative misanthropy of comments like “Kamala voters get the pit.” I’m inclined to read that charitably as venting and not as a literal call to murder millions of people and respect the fact that the people engaging in that rhetoric online might be perfectly normal in real life. I think this election in particular has ratcheted up the pressure on all of us to stay sane against a deluge of propaganda, some of which we deliberately seek out and expose ourselves to by getting into dust ups with other instances, so I can’t say it’s entirely healthy.
I just wonder if these sorts of drive by posts where the op doesn’t really interact are actually helpful and change minds or if they’re just ways of getting approval and self-soothing after an interaction on here goes sideways, and I’m not sure that’s happening along an ND/NT divide.
That said, it doesn’t appear that OPs issue here is with people sounding like reactionaries, it’s more against the performative misanthropy of comments like “Kamala voters get the pit.” I’m inclined to read that charitably as venting and not as a literal call to murder millions of people and respect the fact that the people engaging in that rhetoric online might be perfectly normal in real life
This is what I meant, there’s a tendency for me and others to read said comments more literally despite it not being intended as such
voting for Kamala Harris is not the same thing as being a Hitlerite even though people doing it are completely wrong and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. You have seen the arrogance and myopic viewpoint of liberals. They do not think anything besides suffering is possible. This is not a mental state of Hitlerism but a state of supreme nihilism. It, of course, ends in materially the same thing, but intention is important when considering the “abstract moral value” of people, which is what this post is about.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
Also this is true. A ton of people here have endorsed genocide and are now deciding this is the genocide that they can decide lets them be a Good Person while everyone else is a Bad Person. Which of course is almost correct, that is how it works when it comes to genocides, endorsing them generally is a bad-person thing. But if you’re one of the people who literally did that exact same thing and are now “pulling the ladder up” because you’re already radicalized, then you have to realize how short sighted and selfish that is. If you are willing to give yourself a second chance despite a possible full past commitment to lesser evilism, then it is completely absurd to condemn every Kamala voter as unable to change.
Of course, this does not apply to those who are genuinely spreading Democrat rhetoric, that is a staunch rhetorical decision and while I’m sure they could technically become radicalized to socialism later in their life I do not believe anyone is obligated to tolerate them. I am merely defending the still embryonic baby-leftists that likely don’t know what’s going on and are just trying to support as many people as possible with the flawed understanding of reality they’ve been given
Calling it now
I will stay out of it, except for this comment.
I think I get what you’re trying to say, and I don’t entirely agree. As you’ve said it though I think I disagree a lot instead of just a little. I think presenting it as “1 vote =/= 1 dead palestinian” is flawed and a bit ghoulish and does you no favours. Likewise I think presenting yourself as a grass-toucher as opposed to those that disagree with you as being not-grass-touchers likewise will do nothing but inflame something that could otherwise give you a good and productive discussion, which I think is what you aim to do. As someone who is proud of being able to talk to liberals, I am a bit bemused that this is how you would phrase yourself when in discussion with comrades. Surely you yourself can see how provocative you are being?
I think that while voting normally does not significy a lot about morals due to people being surrounded by capitalist propaganda, this vote does, due to the fact it requires the voter to somehow rationalize accepting genocide (yes I know the rationalisation is “trump is worse”, but I’ve got a lot of hangups with that.)
I think that the primary contradiction of Hexbear is grass touching vs non-grass-touching and the openly inflammatory stance and ivory tower browbeating attitude towards anyone who is perceived to land on the opposite side of that dialectic is Very Good
I think that the primary contradiction of Hexbear is grass touching vs non-grass-touching
There’s a blurry line of performative grass touching that makes that contradiction hard to read sometimes, which is “the person I disagree with and don’t like must touch grass which will banish their bad opinions,” which is technically if temporarily true because if that magic phrase worked, the bad opinion haver becomes absent for a time.
/srs That’s exactly my point, if you’re on this site you’re already not touching grass lol. The fact that a huge number of our struggle sessions are based on that contradiction is ridiculous because being on this site already proves you’re way more online than you seem to think you are.
Oh, I see now.
Yeah, whenever “touch grass” is said as a thought terminating cliche it’s almost always from another power user that just wants to stand alone on top of posting hill.
A certain mod on chapo gave me a temp ban with “touch grass” before deleting not only my posts in the thread, but unrelated posts I made that day because I lost my patience with them wanting to shoot people over property.
Much easier to stand on the hill instead of doing the self-crit about why there was a need to kill strangers or how that rhetoric results in kids getting shot because they rang the wrong doorbell.
HUH
Okay this is my last comment in this thread, I swear. It almost doesn’t count, it’s just an addendum to my own comment really
I agree. It’s kinda comical how we can objectively mock the “I depicted myself as the chad and you as the soyjack” tendencies of other online forums, but then immediately revert to “I have depicted myself as the grass toucher and you as the online weirdo” arguments. It’s the worst when people start listing their leftist credentials (at least one of our mods is heavily active in organising lots of direct action stuff, so it’s not like being online has lots of correlations to being able or unable to do other stuff.)
There’s been quite a few discussions related to this tendency. Early chapo had a group of users who were miffed at the crass tendencies of the website, because it ruined what they saw as fertile grounds for organizing more serious things. It was from this group the “we need to distance ourselves from chapotraphouse” idea came from, as far as I am aware anyway.
Personally I don’t really see the website as anything super serious. The biggest potential it has is as agitprop and I think it would be cool if it could grow in size and influence, but I don’t think that has a lot of relation to wether or not we have a comm called chapotraphouse… This got away from me, I forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. I hope this was somewhat coherent.
yes I know the rationalisation is “trump is worse”, but I’ve got a lot of hangups with that
it’s a completely false political policy but an extraordinarily effective mental excuse. I don’t inherently distrust people who fall for it because we’ve been taught to think in trolley problem morality for ages
but yes grass touching is a very silly and non serious metric for being an authority on any subject
As someone heavily involved in
's presidential campaign, I can say that OP’s position is much closer to the official campaign than people disagreeing. By that I mean we are not particularly interested in how people vote, but in using the campaign to reach people and engage them in politics outside the electoral. Our campaign is a vehicle to big swathes of desperate and disconnected people who think of politics in purely electoral terms - whether that’s that we have to vote for the lesser of two evils or that the failure of voting to fix societal issues means there is no path forward.We know that when we go out and canvass, we’re going to interact almost entirely with people who are not ideologically committed leftists. The phase of organizing in the US demands that our work be focused on finding and bringing in people who are not aware of the necessity or existence of a vanguard working class party and convince them that their vote is only an extremely small part of their potential political engagement and the general path to fixing this rotten country.
Therefore, we always have to approach people empathetically, understanding their position so that we can move them towards revolutionary socialist politics. That requires us not to denounce Kamala voters as Hitlerites in training.
This ignores that the average USAmerican will let their country murder millions of foreigners if it meant their grocery prices went down by 10 cents
Kamala openly said that at the CNN town hall. paraphrasing but it was basically “murdering kids is bad, but what about murdering kids and your grocery bill got 8% smaller”. she might have even directly mentioned the price of eggs? my memory is blurred by a red mist
I think it’s worse in-person than online, even. Most of the pro-zionist libs and reactionaries I’ve met IRL have even worse takes than libs online. Just look at how many of them supported the Iraq War and Vietnam or how they ignored Obama drone striking weddings, hospitals, and schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even with the benefit of hindsight, they’d vote Obama for a third term if they could.
Americans turn into the most rabid of fascists when it comes to foreign policy.
