I don’t understand why people think in these terms, “If you approve of violence being done by your side, you must also approve of violence done against your side.” I’m not taking a principled stand in favor of violence for violence’s sake. I support that which hurts the enemy and oppose that which hurts friendlies.

Stealing from the rich? Good. Stealing from the poor? Bad. Killing exploiters? Good. Killing the exploited? Bad. There’s no contradiction here because my stance is based on self-interest and the interest of my class, not on any sort of categorical moral claim about some particular form of action.

This is woefully ignorant of reality. People are not immune to propaganda. It’s noble that you think most people are rational and politically informed, but that’s very clearly not the case. Rhetoric has been extensively studied and developed for literally millennia, there’s a reason.

Of course. Which is why effective propaganda and rhetoric is generally more sophisticated than just “our side good.”

80 million people voted for that.

More like 158 million.

No one has suggested that. Shifting a few degrees to the right isn’t supposed to win over Trump voters, it’s supposed to win over moderate conservatives that don’t care for Trump.

So… Trump voters.

What happened to caring about The Truth over all?

What happened to pragmatism over truth?

I don’t consider it true that everyone who votes for Trump is a fascist. There are plenty of reluctant Trump voters who are primarily motivated by negative partisanship, which is to say, voting against the Democrats.

When one side says their candidate is the Messiah, and the other side says their own candidate is deeply flawed, where does that push someone on the fence?

Probably the one that admits to their candidate’s flaws. The side claiming that their side is the Messiah can only reach people who are willing to believe that narrative. It tends to be very alienating to the average voter.

What’s baffling to me is that there seem to be a lot of people on the democratic side who simultaneously believe all kinds of contradictory things. Trump voters are all blindly devoted to their cult leader, but if we just shift a few more degrees to the right, that will win them over, somehow. Or, the key to winning elections is by winning over moderate swing voters who don’t feel attached to either party, and the way to do that is to demand blind devotion to our candidate while screaming that the other side is Hitler and anyone who even considers them is a fascist. It’s absurdity. And yet, no matter how many times these strategies fail, people refuse to learn from them.

I happen to come from a conservative family, and that made it immediately obvious that even the best attempts by someone like Biden or Harris to win over the right were doomed to fail, and the Dick Cheney strategy was absolutely not even close to “the best attempt.” The reason is that Biden and Harris look and sound like typical, mainstream democrats, who their entire political identity is built on opposing. Of course, my parents are always going to vote Republican, but the one person on the Democratic side I’ve ever heard them say they respect is Bernie Sanders. DNC strategists and their loyalists cannot comprehend this.

So many people adhere to this overly simplistic ideological model as if it’s just a truism - that the things people support are more or less innate characteristics randomly developing from birth and the combination of those things makes everyone fall someone on a one dimensional spectrum from left to right, and everyone votes according to who’s closest to them ideologically. And so the only way to win is to assume the far left votes will fall in line behind you while you move right to appeal to the centrist swing voters. But that whole model is bullshit, and it has been proven to be bullshit time and time again.

A large part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s able to present himself as an outsider. Moving right and shaking hands with Cheney, trying to be like, “See, the whole political establishment hates Trump,” merely reinforces Trump’s credibility as an outsider while also tying Harris to the disastrous policies including the War on Terror. The failure of the Bush administration is a part of why conservatives turned to Trump in the first place! It’s insanity.

If you wanna win by peeling off Trump voters, the best way to do that is by targeting people with libertarian values and running on isolationism and staying out of foreign entanglements. But that would require actually doing that, or at the very least, it would require not painting everyone who disagrees with your interventionist policies with the same brush of being a “Russian bot.” Alternatively, you can say, “screw Trump voters, we’ll win by mobilizing the base,” but that would require adopting popular leftist policies that would hurt their donors’ profits.

So, being unwilling to actually play the game, all that’s left is to put forward the same platform of interventionism and neoliberalism that has simply outlived it’s moment and does not have enough adherents to win.

I happen to believe in a little something called “The Truth.” I don’t believe that everything I say should have to serve an immediate strategic purpose. In fact, I don’t think it’s at all sensible to even set a strategic purpose until you have first clearly identified and laid out the truth. Even if the truth is inconvenient or counterproductive, I’m not really interested in a political project that’s based on ignorance or deception.

If the truth isn’t enough to get people to back your political project, then perhaps your political project isn’t worth backing. Regardless, it’s likely the truth will come out eventually, at which point you will lose credibility to the opposition. And if the left doesn’t speak out for fear of hurting the democrats’ chances, then the only opposition will be from the right.

Furthermore, people having correct political ideas and a clear understanding of the world is more important than any election, which is of secondary concern. A person’s political actions (or lack thereof) do not end at the ballot box, and when a person has correct ideas they are more likely to participate in productive actions and avoid harmful ones. Collective action, boycotts, protests, etc have more capacity to effect change than a political system designed by slaveowners explicitly to subvert the popular will.

Are you trolling?

Why did he constantly talk about how the attacks were politically motivated? What is the basis for claiming that he was motivated by religion?

Worst performance since the Republicans took California but hey who knows, could’ve been even worse somehow if they did anything differently. Clearly the right play is to learn absolutely nothing from this. Even the really obvious stuff like the fact that virtually everyone in the country hates Dick Cheney’s guts with extremely good reason.

Also is it still hindsight if a bunch of people were screaming that it was a terrible move before it blew up in her face? Because that kinda seems more like foresight.

You might be interested in GNS theory. TTRPGS try to do three things at once, be a Game, tell a Narrative, and Simulate a world. Different games will prioritize different aspects, some people want a fair challenge where they build a character according to the rules laid out to face a challenge, other people want everything to serve the story, even if it means fudging mechanics or breaking with realism, and then some people just want the simulation to be as realistic as possible.

Like many things with TTRPGs, it’s table dependent and emphasizing any of those elements over the others is totally valid as long as everyone’s having fun.

The modlog shows you being banned from three communities: thefarside@sh.itjust.works, libertyhub@blahaj.zone, and comics@hexbear.net. You had exactly one comment removed from lemmy.ml, in which you said, “I love how all you idiots on lemmygrad, hexbear and .ml constantly show how stupid you all are.”

You know these things are public, right?

Comments removed recently from TheOubliette for “misinformation,” which just means saying anything the .world mods personally disagree with

The “finding out” should be that you lost while supporting genocide. Shouldn’t have done that, huh? Not very strategic or “adult in the room”, was it?

Did you miss all of the people supporting a lesser evil Harris genocide? Many are in this thread right now trying to preemptively pass blame for everything Trump does onto those who opposed the genocide and refused to vote for its committers. This is in no way a pro-Palestinian space, either. This thread has many examples of “the pro Palestinian protesters were a Russian plot!” and, “hope you enjoy Palestinians dying, non-voters!” sentiments.

Supporting evidence:

I think Kamala Harris would be an objectively great president (1000 upvotes)

Kamala Harris is like Princess Leia and blaming her for Gaza is analogous to blaming Leia for Alderaan (1100 upvotes)

Kamala Harris is a “former prosecutor with a spotless record” (1200 upvotes)

These are the real beliefs of the supposedly “reluctant” Harris supporters who say they’re only supporting her because she’s a “lesser evil.” It’s the classic motte-and-bailey tactic, defending a much weaker form of their beliefs when under criticism than what they actually believe.

On what basis have you concluded that? Is it not possible that the intent of the camps is to give people education so that they can become more productive members of society and thereby be less prone towards violent extremism? You’re just asserting their purpose with nothing to back it up.

So they were able to continue to live their culture without being individually forced to do anything?

Well, that depends on your interpretation. If you were a Shintoist who did consider the emperor’s divinity to be a central tenant, then no, from that perspective, your culture has been eradicated and the current form is a deviation. You’re playing fast and loose here with your standards, in any religion, there are various sects which consider themselves to be the true, correct interpretation, and certain others to be false. You yourself thought Shintoists would have to ignore the emperor’s renunciation to continue practicing their beliefs. There were Japanese people who saw it that way. And I’m not sure about this but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t go around postwar Japan proclaiming the imperialist interpretation of Shinto with the implication of returning to the imperialistic ways, in the same way you couldn’t go around waving swastikas in postwar Germany.

The better analogy would be to allow the chinese government to force one person to say “I am not divine”. Let’s say they were able to revive the prophet and make him say these words.

Well, that’s interesting, because surely the intent in that case would be to get people to stop practicing Islam. I thought intent was the crucial defining aspect that made mass incarceration not genocide when the US does it but be genocide when China does it.

These standards seem completely incoherent to me. It seems like you’re just adopting whatever stance allows you to thread the needle to include the things you want to include and exclude the things you want to exclude.

(Btw, small correction here, but I don’t think Muslims consider Mohammad to be personally divine.)

one needs to recognize this isn’t done to eradicate them.

Ah, but we know that the incarceration of Uighurs is done to eradicate them, because, uhh… how exactly?

But as long as there aren’t any explicit actions/sanctions against you doing your thing there isn’t a problem there.

Are there explicit actions/sanctions against Uighurs practicing Islam, or other aspects of their culture?

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. They didn’t have the option? They didn’t do it?

I’m saying that modern practitioners of Shinto don’t consider the emperor divine.

And if the divinity of the emperor wasn’t the only thing keeping up shinto why does it matter that much then, that you liken it to a genocide?

What an interesting perspective. So what you’re saying is, if the Chinese government were to recognize Islam as one of its major, protected religions, but restrict certain radical teachings and versions of it, then it wouldn’t be genocide.

Good question! Do you consider the disproportionate mass incarceration of African Americans a genocide?

You may call me crazy but this doesnt sound like it all traces back to just one guy

That’s because you didn’t click the links on the article to see where the claims come from. That article cites Adrian Zenz, they just wized up enough to leave his name buried in the links. But you’re right that not every claim traces back to him, to be fair, we also have, uh, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the UK parliament, and some random Australian think tank.

If what happenend in Eastern Ukrain was genocide, then what is happening to the Uygurs is definitely also genocide. But if what is happening to the Uygurs can’t be genocide, then what has been happening in Ukraine also can’t be genocide.

What the hell are you talking about? Ukraine was launching artillery shells at civilian targers in Eastern Ukraine. How is that nonviolent?

People changing their culture on their own volition is obviously different from people being forced to by those in power.

Is it? Genocide doesn’t necessarily have to be conducted by the state. If a a roving militia or gang of mercenaries went around killing a certain kind of people en masse, then it could still be considered genocide. So if we’re allowing for this idea of a bloodless genocide, then I’m not sure it’s obvious how non-state actors taking nonviolent actions that cause the decline of a culture don’t meet your definition.

The main argument for genocide though is, that a whole population is forced to erase their culture.

“Forced,” but not through killing.

There’s often a disconnect between first generation immigrants and their kids, who often end up adopting the culture they live in over their home culture through various social pressures. The fact that the US has road signs only in English forces people to learn English, doesn’t it? Are those road signs genocide? If public schools fail to make accommodations in terms of language, if they teach history from a different perspective than what their parents grew up with, is that genocide?

It’s absurd. What a coincidence that the first “nonviolent genocide” in history happens to come from the US’s chief geopolitical rival. It’s a dilution of the word for political reasons that attempts to put much less bad things on the same level as the mass extermination of a people. The primary reason that genocide is wrong is the violence accociated with it.

The population of japan could have chosen to ignore the obviously forced statement and continued to believe in their faith. And it seems like they did if shinto is still a thing

No, they did not. The emperor’s divinity was one aspect of Shinto, and a significant one, but Shinto was never like a monotheistic tradition.