#discourse and politics

[keitrinkomfloukru]

[velvetvexations]

get his ass Lil Tay

[a-method-in-it]

You know that Chris Fleming line that goes "Call yourself a community organizer even though you're not on speaking terms with your roommates"?

I honestly think every leftist who talks about the "revolution" like Christians talk about the rapture needs to spend a year trying to organize their workplace. Anyone who sincerely talks about building a movement so vast and all-encompassing that it overwhelms all existing power structures needs the dose of humility that comes with realizing they can't even build a movement to get people paid better at a badly run AMC Theaters where everyone already hates the manager.

[lordnot]

PSA:

As it becomes increasingly clear that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic candidate for President, we will no doubt be deluged with a new type of psyop known as information. Examples of information may include:

Her policy positions

Quotations she said and the context in which she said them

The impact of her decisions on other people's lives

Stay vigilant! Remember that if the information has not been properly vetted by the Harris campaign, it is not Official Propaganda and is not to be trusted!

[alexs-life-is-a-bit]

some of you need to wake up and realize, the government does not want to make life difficult for us. they want us GONE. "these laws aren't fair and are leaving out ____ group" they don't care. they dont care about our discomfort, they dont care about accidentally harming other groups. they want to make things so bad that people stop transitioning. they want to make it so difficult for us that we slowly lessen, and lessen, until there's so few of us that they can completely wipe us out. DO NOT GIVE IN. PLANT YOUR FEET DEEPER. we need more trans people now than ever. do not divide yourself from the community, please please please keep pushing. don't give up. that is exactly what they want. stop pitting aginst your own community. please. we need to work together.

[xiranjayzhao]

I do not believe that anyone who takes "the US has always been a bully, especially to the global south, and if you are only now starting to be ashamed of it then you need to read more into its history" as a personal attack is actually "fighting for things to be better" like they claim, because you need to have an awareness of reality to fight effectively.

If I saw someone say "Canada is a genocidal settler-colonial state and always has been" you're not gonna see me go "NOOOOOO THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE HERE WHO ARE ALSO OPPRESSED AND TRYING TO FIGHT"

I would just agree because it's true. It's neither a personal indictment nor a demand that I leave when I didn't choose to be here. It's just a demand of awareness.

[opashoo]

I'm absolutely losing my mind seeing "We need to not treat men and masculinity as inherently evil and worthy of hatred, and not fall back into biological and gender essentialism because that hurts everyone, including trans women" being misinterpreted as "Women need to stop oppressing men", "I think trans women are actually men" or "You specifically who have trauma around men need to get over it because men are the real victims". It's so willfully disingenuous. It makes me sick how willing people are to read in bad faith, especially how willing other trans women are to suddenly start harassing and dogpiling another trans woman.

I am a trans woman too, I understand what it's like to feel unsafe, but it helps no one this cynical attitude that crops up every time someone suggests being kind to men in our lives. "You could save a man you know from falling down the alt-right pipeline" is not the same as "It's your fault that men murder you". "There are people who could be on our side if we don't meet them with immediate hostility" is not the same as "You need to shut up and stop criticizing power structures for the sake of your oppressors' feelings" (I promise there are a lot of people who can be taught about their complicity in oppression without immediately shutting down but you need to work with them). This kind of attitude isn't somehow more informed or correct. It's just lashing out to avoid considering one's own agency.

Making a better, safer world for ourselves requires all kinds of work, but it's always work. It's hard to try to reach out to people who could very realistically harm us, it's work that not all of us can afford to or are able to do and that's fine because we're all just trying to survive. But some of you would rather condescend, tear each other down, and make more enemies before even considering it a possibility.

[thejdog2000]

What's one "boomer take" you actually agree with (either political or non-political)?

[fozmeadows]

Something I'm working on lately is trying to find healthy approach when it comes to engaging with opposing viewpoints re: discourse and politics. Because yes, there are trolls and bad actors, and it's seldom worth wasting your energy on them; but particularly online, you can't always immediately distinguish these people from, say, a teenager grappling inexpertly with difficult topics, or a boomer working with outdated language and assumptions, or someone who's been given bad information - and these are all people that it can be worthwhile attempting to reach, even if you don't always succeed. I don't want to burn myself out, but I don't want disconnect, either, and so I've been thinking: what approach best allows me to remain optimistic while still drawing boundaries?

Here's my current solution: to treat potentially difficult conversations with strangers like a rewilding project. A sort of social conservationism, where the idea is to untangle what you can in passing, leave behind a few potential seeds, and then move on: a project of impact over intent. Nobody expects conservation efforts to succeed in a day, and it would be foolish to fixate so heavily on trying to plant a single tree in arid soil that you've got no energy left for more achievable goals. Inevitably, you'll encounter areas that can't be recovered - or at least, not by you - in which case, any time you spend making sure of their unviability is just due diligence, and only becomes a waste if you commit yourself to trying to salvage the unsalvageable. But by the same token, you don't want to over-engage with a healthy area, either. You want to see what's needed, give it a push in that direction if it's within your capabilities, and then keep going.

And maybe this is a strange way to think of things, but I'm finding it helpful. The fantasy of completely flipping someone's perspective if you can only find the exact right thing to say is a powerful one, but it's not a realistic expectation to carry around for 99.9% of interactions, and as such, there's a need - for me, at least - to detach the success of the exchange from the visibility of the outcome. I can't see into someone else's head, and in all probability, I'll never speak to that particular stranger again: therefore, my concept of catharsis needs to change. So instead of thinking, Did I change their mind? and considering anything less than a yes a failure, it's better to ask, Did I do my best to give them something to think about?, because realistically, this is all I can actually do. I can't control how a stranger receives what I say, but I can make an effort to be clear, calm and comprehensible, and that ought to be worth something.

[neurodivergent-mermaid]

The point isnt

"Us autistic people can be good tax paying working capitalism contributors!!!"

Its

"So what if some autistic people cant contribute to capitalism. So fucking what. They are still humans worth of love and care and support."

Sorry to break it to you but your not an amazing inclusive leftist for erasing people who aren't palatable.

"Here!! Here are the small amount of *minority* who fit your standards!! Here look we arent all like those bad *minority* people!! Infact they dont even exist!!!"

[velvetvexations]

I'm hardly the first person to say something like this but it's incredibly fucked up that health insurance is an industry that sells itself as an essential service but makes money by trying as hard as they possibly can to not provide that service.

[irenespring]

Today I would like to shout out that one random Twitter person who made up that JD Vance bragged about fucking a couch.

Imagine making a random shitpost and less than two months later your joke is being used by a major party nominee for Vice President on live television at his introduction rally, earning him thunderous applause.

That poster must be having quite the experience.

[la7ma-mafrooma]

I don't trust a country that funds an apartheid illegitimate state, had people creating a petition in 2020 to officially declare the KKK as a terrorist organization, and considered Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" until 2008, to tell me who's a terrorist and who's not. I don't trust a country that's built on colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and slavery to tell me who's a terrorist and who's not. I don't trust a country that has bombed, still bombs, and SUPPORTS the bombing of innocent civilians to tell me who's a terrorist and who's not. The United States of America is a fascist, imperialist, and terrorist country and it has always been. May we see its downfall alongside Israel's.

Your "civilization" is a sham.

[luna-drinker]

"Not caring about politics is a privilege!" said the middle class brat who thinks doom scrolling 24/7 is activism.

[roomwithavoid]

btw the whole point of human rights is that they are not revokable and that you don’t need to earn them. some of y’all will shout slogans about “human rights” and then fantasize about brutally torturing people who have done a crime you deem worthy of “revoking their humanity” which means you don’t actually care about human rights. you just want the “bad actions” to be directed at the “right people.” which is a fundamentally authoritarian and dangerous opinion

[xiranjayzhao]

This is why I'm side-eyeing people from the US who are only NOW acting like their world is being shattered lmao the racism and superiority came out real quick

(I am NOT talking about you if you already lost faith in US institutions way before. I was also not asking anyone to leave or do anything impossible. Literally just asked them to look more into the US' imperialist history)

Resources:

- Blowback (podcast, season 1 is about the Iraq War, season 2 is about US aggression against Cuba, season 3 is about the Korean War, season 4 is about Afghanistan, and season 5 is about Cambodia)

- The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

- The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

- Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky

- Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum