mozz Admin

mozz Admin , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Strong communities are good for a ton of different reasons, resisting fascism (or maximizing relative safety even if fascism comes) being a big one

TV killed American communities, and they haven't really recovered. Everyone just sits in their house or goes in their car.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Wtf, who is upvoting this, this is alarming

I strongly suspect that most of the people on the left are also carrying all the signs on the right

And that the person writing the cartoon is planning move on to targeting the next-least-acceptable sign from the pile on the right, as soon as the one on the left is dealt with. This thing of slicing off segments of dissenting opinion to shut them down one at a time, in separation from their natural cohort of supporting allies, by driving wedges in between them, is fairly normal "advanced fascism from people who know how to get it done on the ground" tactics.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Yeah. I guess I should have paid more attention to the title -- applying it to a "single issue voter" (or, non-voter, I guess) who really is throwing all the stuff on the right in the garbage, in the (incorrect) belief that they're helping the Palestinians, when in reality they're just threatening to make things worse for literally everybody, makes sense.

I just don't think that's most of the people in the tents or carrying the signs. If they had constructed the cartoon to attack all the people on Lemmy who don't want to vote because Biden personally killed all those Gazans and loves that the war is happening, or whatever they are claiming is happening, then that makes sense. But attacking the protestors themselves seems wrong.

mozz OP Admin , 5 days ago

I sorta had that same reaction, yeah. His Super Mario video was endlessly fascinating and then from time to time I would go to watch one of the others and they didn't seem all that different or exciting. Then yesterday I happened on this one, and for whatever reason, it absolutely hooked me.

mozz OP Admin , 5 days ago

I feel like it's like sports; if you do the game then it's interesting, but if you're just observing it as an observer, then it's sort of pointless.

I have observed live speedruns which are absolutely compelling though, too.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Yeah dude

"is why we're supporting the union drive our employees are putting together" or "is why we're donating some overstock clothes and blankets to the homeless" would have been better and more resonant with the moment, or hell, just like giving a discount because the customers and the stockholders are all created equal, or a little pamphlet about registering to vote, or more or less anything other than "we promise to redouble efforts to make our employees subservient in a satisfying fashion for you, their rightful masters."

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

1. An "officer came running up to her vehicle yelling for her to stop. ... Rogers 'panicked and drove the wrong way' down a bus-only lane." Assuming that's accurate, then if the police tell you to stop, and you drive your vehicle away, they're probably going to get physical with you once they catch up to you. That's their job. Their only alternative to responding with physical force at that point is to just shrug shoulders and say "O well we tried" and let someone drive around "panicked" in unexpected places in an environment where little school children are walking around.
2. I do not understand why it's difficult to find just the long, unedited cut of the bodycam footage of what happened. Every single video I was able to find is this weirdly intercut and looped version which focuses on the one part that everyone agrees happened, where you can't really see the context, and then it's overlaid over someone's interpretation of what happened, which is a whole bunch of irritating bullshit.
3. With #2 in mind as a caveat, I think that reading between the lines, what happened is that they stopped her car by blocking it with their cars, pulled her out, put her on the ground to handcuff her, she started screaming about ants, and then after 13 seconds they pulled her up. Then she started struggling, and they put her back on the ground and held her there in the ant pile for a long time while they hogtied her, and that's where all the carpet of ant bites in the photo came from.
4. I am far from an ACAB person, but I do not understand what goes on in US police training that if someone's actively struggling with you, you need to start hurting them until they calm down. I've seen this reaction over and over in police videos, and I think I have literally never once seen it be successful at the supposed goal. It's just not how people operate. I get it that you need to use force if someone's using force against the police to try to avoid getting arrested. That part actually makes sense to me. But the part where someone's resisting getting arrested, and the cops start hurting them and then usually seem for-real surprised that now they're struggling more, is genuinely confusing to me how they can't figure it out.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

I don't need to; I'm already a connoisseur of Youtube videos with titles like "When entitled suspects attack" or whatever. My observation is that the wrist lock usually converts an angry and struggling person yelling "grahgabgbabrbrae" into an angry and struggling person yelling "grahbcdsbfsdhfbYOURE BREAKING MY ARMsdfkjsdflsdf"

Like I say, this might make me some kind of asshole in Lemmy-world but I am usually not on team suspect. I think if you drive away from the police, or start struggling when they try to put handcuffs on you, the police getting physical with you isn't automatically a sign that they're terrible people and ACAB. That is literally their job at that point, and you're definitely still going to get arrested, just with everyone's day including yours getting worse as a result, and more charges now maybe a felony. I feel like the whole ACAB mentality has blown up the few times a year that one cop somewhere in the country does something really fucked up into this idea that 100% of cops are terrible people and any situation that goes wrong in any way where they're involved is 100% their fault; I don't think that's true. But definitely I do feel like a cop approaching someone who's not on board with what's going on by punishing them and expecting them to get more on board with it as a result is weird.

(One guy had a series called "Verbal Judo" which I liked quite a lot)

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

she has to have ignored or dismissed a LOT of red flags to get to where she was

Every news she watched told her a certain picture of how the world was.

Every person she talked to swears to her that the world is a certain way (and, if she starts questioning, they get real suspicious of her and maybe might ostracize her from their social circle).

It would be weird if she had arrived at the truth on her own before this point. And usually, it actually takes a lot more than just reading over the primary sources and realizing that they don't say what the news and all her friends said they say, before someone realizes the truth.

She didn't ignore any red flags, because the red flags exist in reality. You're well acquainted with some information about reality that she's not privy to, and so in your mind it was easy to spot. For her, her world picture is carefully managed and curated, and the instant that she saw some information that it wasn't the way she'd been told, she realized the truth, told everyone (alienating more or less 100% of her former allies), and started working to try to put it right.

Don't hedge your support for her, would be my way of looking at it. She wants to stop the Nazis. Okay, sounds great. I wouldn't kick Eisenhower out of the wagon train because he's a Republican, while the shooting against the ones who want to kill you and me and also her, is still going on.

mozz OP Admin , 6 days ago

Raw milk is not inherently dangerous

Unless there's some sort of deadly disease commonly involved in it (which, in the American food supply right now, is what's up.)

I mean bullets are not inherently dangerous either, but if the environment you're going into involves them moving at high speeds sometimes, you probably want to take some precautions about it.

mozz OP Admin , 5 days ago

That’s just lies made up by Big Copper

mozz OP Admin , 5 days ago

No, Big Chopper speaks only the truth

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

You can disagree, I just find it condescending that you seem to imply you see things others aren't.

Okay, so it's not punching left or silencing dissent if I disagree? Just want to get that clarified. You can call me condescending, that's fine; I probably am.

As for Ukraine, what specifically are you asking? Do you think opposing US imperialism must mean I support Russia, or something? My "feeling" is that war is bad and unjustifiable. Violence is purely justified against oppressors. I believe in Nation's right to self-determination.

Should the US send weapons to them? Or is that more imperialism? I am just curious; you brought up imperialism, so I'm curious what that means.

I want Socialism, and eventually, Communism. Worker ownership of the Means of Production. Democracy of, by, and for the Proletariat. Do you have any specific questions? We could be here all day otherwise and I am not sure there would be a point.

I'm just curious about what your viewpoint is. Not sure why that's a problem when arguing back and forth with hostility wasn't, but you can stop any time, if you don't like it.

What's a country which has implemented the model you'd like to see in the US? Or would this be the US doing it for the first time that it's been implemented on a big scale in the way you'd like to see it implemented?

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

You're clearly fishing for a "gotcha!" Because you can't actually argue any longer, lol.

I'm not into the idea of just "yes it is" "no it isn't" 'yes it is" "no it isn't." It's a waste of time. I feel like I understand your viewpoint on Biden at this point, and I've pretty much said what I had to say on my side. We don't have to keep going back and forth until someone "wins." If you want to call that me not being able to actually argue any longer, then sure.

I feel like we've arrived at the crux of me understanding the deeper seated issue, though, in that you just feel that any candidate who's okay with capitalism is going to be the enemy, and we have to overthrow the capitalist system completely in order to make real progress. So anything short of that that Biden does is going to make him the enemy to you.

I don't agree with that viewpoint either, but I don't really understand the details of what you think on the deeper viewpoint side. So me asking where what you want has been implemented is, one, yes starting to tee up reasons why I might not think it's realistic or why I might not agree. But, also, I'm genuinely just curious about the details of what you believe. Like if you said China is the model, or Cuba is the model, or it hasn't really been implemented in the way you'd like to see it but X, Y, and Z are how it would be different this time in the US, then those are very different things which could all go under the heading of "Communist."

mozz Admin , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

lets just confine it to the rail strike

Let's not. I'm pretty sure that my argument was that if you don't confine it to the rail strike, Biden's overall record on labor is excellent, when you include the rail strike and then all the other union things he did.

Can I do this too? Let's just confine it to the day he forgave six billion dollars of student loan debt. On that one day, his record was excellent. Therefore he's great. See? Logic doesn't work that way.

the active campaign to control media sources includes the tiktok ban. no matter your opinion on the application itself, you can't deny that the point of the ban is to remove it from the american media landscape.

"Includes" the TikTok ban.

What else does it include? Any other media sources he's actively campaigned to control? Or does removing the one that's overt Chinese spyware mean that he hates independent "media" in the US, and just forgot about Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, and all the other sources where people can get anti-US news freely? (Or Fox News or Newsmax, which actually present an affirmative threat to his presidency and in an indirect way to his actual personal safety, and show some fairly legitimate reasons why someone could argue for shutting them down?)

In the same way he forgot to crush all those other unions when he was being super anti-union in that one very specific way that one time?

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

This is just my uneducated viewpoint on it:

I don't think capitalism is as tied directly to imperialism as you're saying here. The USSR was plenty imperial, and they were (nominally at least) Communist. There are also plenty of capitalist countries in the world that don't have empires.

I think imperialism is mainly a function of power, and how the human beings who tend to gravitate to power and wield it, tend to operate. That can happen with or without capitalism or a US-style governmental system. I actually think, for all the terrible evils of US capitalism, that the US governmental system does a better than average job of reining it in. I think if it were any other country on earth that had the type of money and military power the US does right now, they'd be doing much much worse things than the (already pretty bad) things the US government and corporate system is doing with them.

Again, that's not to say I disagree with you on reining in capitalism or American empire. On that part we're fully on the same page, believe it or not. But I think the best way to do that is actually to preserve the US electoral and governmental system and overall position in the world (maybe with some major reforms e.g. on lobbying, media ownership, and the electoral system). I think simply tearing down the American empire is probably going to be a gateway to something much, much worse, because the whole problem all along wasn't an "America problem," it was just a general money and power problem that's worldwide (or universal, as a function of how people and systems of power operate).

I actually think that if your primary goal is undoing American empire, you should be advocating for Trump, because him fucking things up to the point that the US loses its imperial position is a way more realistic way that might happen than anything that's realistic as an "on purpose" outcome within American politics (electoral or otherwise).

But I also think that the new reality (both inside and outside the US) if that happened would be much, much worse than Biden or Hillary Clinton or Bush 2 or any of these already very bad outcomes we've been seeing so far.

Again, just my take on it, based on what you said.

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

harm reduction does not need to infringe on critique of the current executive branch.

Yeah. I've been criticizing Biden for abetting a genocide quite a bit; I think you can find some comment where I compared the Biden State Department to the Nazis.

That said, total bullshit criticism like "union buster" I tend to be against. You can find other links in this comment section where I talk about it and link to some explanation of his historic support for labor and specifically how it related to his breaking the rail strike and the events after, but here's an article which talks about it more broadly.

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

so he basically coopted the movement

Absolutely false.

Unions in the US have the same leaders they always did. Now, though, they have an NLRB who will fight legal battles on their behalf. Here's a general overview.

How on earth is that a bad thing? You're saying the NLRB was "coopted" by the federal government? I'm having trouble even understanding what you're saying happened, here.

i have all the reason to be concerned given your long history messing with our democracies in the region

Yeah, this part makes sense to me (and in particular as a reason to be suspicious of any US politician, Biden included). That said, given Trump's unusual-even-compared-with-the-American-standard support for overt dictators the world over, including Bolsonaro, you should definitely want Trump not to win power again, right?

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

I guess I just don't see a huge difference in level-of-evil between imperialism and expansionism. I get that they're not the same thing but I think most of what I said could be applied to one or the other or to both and the point remains pretty much the same.

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

i think the administrations response to a labor action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is the best thing to examine because it shows how the administration responds to labor power that opposes its aims and threatens it.

I disagree. I think the administration's response to a union action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is probably going to be colored somewhat by their reaction to the infrastructure of the entire nation being threatened. It's probably the least reasonable situation to take, and then extrapolate out to form the conclusion "and that's why he just hates unions."

Especially since, and I don't know why this keeps being not notable to you, his administration kept working with the railroads after, until the workers got the sick days that were the whole thing they had decided to have the strike over.

the tiktok ban is the best example of media policy against that which is actively controlled by the united states government and power elite. For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals. if you want something a little bit more recent, look up stovepipeing, the intelligence apparatus' method for creating media buy in for the iraq war.

Yes, I have read Manufacturing Consent, and I was around for the Iraq War and the general media enthusiasm for it; I had arguments with family members about it because they were believing what they read in the papers. Not that it's relevant, but as far as I can tell stovepiping was something totally different related to that war.

And, none of that is recent or in any way related to what Biden's doing about US media right now.

I'm gonna take this as an indication that you have no other examples of media Biden wants to ban, even ones that are a lot more explicitly hostile to him than TikTok is, and just want to get condescending to maintain a posture of being the one who's explaining to the one who doesn't understand what's really going on. Good luck with that! I don't think it's going well, but you can keep trying.

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

I know many non-US people, especially from the global south, who take the attitude: Hey the US government is full of enemies to us, don't try to tell me anything good about any one of them, please and thanks. For them to take that viewpoint honestly makes perfect sense to me.

I know absolutely 0 of them who go on message boards and get real involved in talking with Americans about how they should view American politics and who they should support in American elections or who they shouldn't, and how to view it, and what those people did in domestic US politics decisions and why that should impact who I support in the election.

Just one of those little mysteries one encounters sometimes

mozz Admin , 7 days ago

The difference is clear if you look at cause and effect, rather than the immediate moral consequences.

Why wouldn't the immediate moral consequences be the main thing to look at? Like I say, I see the difference. I don't see that one or the other is, like, harmless, or not a bad thing.

Trump is not a rare example of an exceptionally fascist person, rather, the material conditions within the US have pointed to allowing a fascist candidate to take power.

Absolutely agree. We need to reform the explicitly normal-person-hostile policies that in ways that are honestly too numerous to even list out have created the space where Trump can flourish.

Are you familiar with Dialectical and Historical Materialist analysis?

Not even slightly.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

i never said biden hates unions

Okay, sure. You said "labor demonstrations have been crushed just a few short years ago." That's a huge stretch, since multiple labor demonstrations have been materially assisted by Biden's revamped NLRB, and the one that was "crushed" was more complex than what you're implying.

Here's a story about some of the details of how the attendance policy specifically was the most proximate cause of the strike. Probably Wikipedia's article is the clearest overview -- in brief, negotiations broke down with workers getting wage increase but only 1 day of paid leave a year, as opposed to the 15 that they wanted. The law that broke the strike limited them to 1 day per year, which was kind of a "fuck you" to the unions.

Then, after that, the NLRB kept negotiations going with the railroads. E.g. as of March, they had 3-7 days per year. IDK, that's not as good as I thought it was, so maybe there's still an argument to be made that the workers got screwed.

Also, there are a ton of issues e.g. related to safety and wages. It's not just sick days. But, the sick days were the immediate proximate disagreement that led to the strike.

I choose to not meticulously source and check stuff because it both makes people i'm responding to get hostile and feel like theyre being attacked or accused of being ignorant

I am the exact opposite. I think it's important to have reasons for what you're saying and demonstrate that there's a reason and link to more information about it. I'm sometimes kinda condescending about it I guess but I think it's important to refer to what the reality is, instead of just taking turns talking at each other about our different opinions.

that last part is one of the reasons i don't like to quote

i've been trying to keep things civil and not resort to insulting you either directly or indirectly through implication. please do the same.

So this is just something about me: If someone starts saying things like "For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals" I get real offended, because I take that as that exact kind of accusing of being ignorant that you were talking about before. I think it's more about me, so maybe I shouldn't have reacted badly -- but yeah, if we were talking face to face and you said something like that to me I would get irritated by it. That's more why I got hostile with you. Like bro don't tell me what to read or imply that I might be scared off by it. I've read it, yes. If we're talking we can talk, and maybe I might be abrasive about some things and if so I apologize, but also don't try to take this you-maybe-haven't-heard-of-Noam-Chomsky tone with me. And in particular, don't try to change the subject from "hey here's my coherent argument for why banning TikTok is motivated by something other than censorship" by starting to imply that maybe I'm just clueless about the idea of US government interfering with media in general, and you need to help me by recommending some sources on it that I might not have heard of.

I never said there were more media sources that the administration wants to ban.

So it's just Tiktok? Is it relevant to you that there are other much more anti-administration sources that they aren't banning?

who was the politician who admitted that the tiktok ban was at least partially motivated by how much anti genocide sentiment was on it?

When did this happen?

mozz Admin , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I'm just interested in reality, is all.

If someone shows up and says "HITLER HAD THREE EYES" I'm like, no, he didn't, he had two. If someone shows up and says Biden hates labor, I say, no he doesn't, and then I give some explanation why. If they then say "HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT HITLER/BIDEN WHEN HE DID A GENOCIDE," I can point them to some comments where I also said that genocide is bad, but at the end of the day Hitler still had two eyes.

This system where any "support" for Biden by talking about good facts about Biden, when he's also yes assisted the US's longstanding policy of helping the Israelis kill brown people, is a Republican-like thing. If someone says a good thing about a Democrat they say "HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT THEM WHEN THEY'RE A MARXIST / CHILD MOLESTER / WHATEVER." I don't operate that way. Telling the truth is not a forbidden act, even if it crosses up the lines you've chosen for who the allies and enemies are.

If that means I am "singing praises" then sure.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

whether this works still remains to be seen

Labor has been winning in a big way since Biden came in, including both many strikes and many legal battles. Legal battles means forcing union elections at the UAW, or fighting court battles whether the strikes are legal (which for some fuckin reason is a thing in the US) for example. It doesn't remain to be seen whether it'll work; it already has been happening.

i dont think the more open fascim republicans plan have will change anything for us until the international correlation of power changes

You do understand that giving an opinion on the US election, but following it up with saying but that's only the US, so even if millions suffer or die there it doesn't really impact me here in Brazil... that isn't gonna convince me as a US voter to obey your way of looking at the election here?

This is one reason, but by far not the only reason, that it's weird that I'm running into so many people on Lemmy who have strong opinions on the US election (and always in the direction of not voting for Biden) who follow it up with, oh by the way I'm not even from the US, I just have super strong opinions about the election there.

strong unions are something that would 100% definetly push back but with bidens move to deflate the most important one at the time

I feel like you probably haven't been reading my links about what Biden has been doing with unions and labor, and just know that one example that everyone knows and likes bringing up.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

Yeah, all makes sense.

So what I'm getting at, is not like disagreeing with any of that. I'm just saying that, for example, it's relevant that the USSR starved millions of people in the territories it expanded into when their agricultural policies failed. So if we're going to say "We have to fight capitalism!" (which, yes, we do, or at least limit its bad effects) by saying "We need to install communism!", it's a relevant question to ask, okay what are the details, how do you plan to prevent that even-worse-than-capitalism outcome from happening again (which, I'm not saying that's every communist system, just that it's a relevant example to bring up as why "this isn't capitalism" isn't a sufficient or safe reason to switch to any particular other-than-capitalism system as the new answer).

Surely that makes sense? Or no?

mozz Admin , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

It's hard to say who is a genuine leftist and who is a please-don't-vote-for-Biden-so-Trump-can-win shill, but if we take e.g. @brain_in_a_box at face value, I think it's safe to say that they don't care:

• About any given good thing Biden might have done domestically (forget about that, how dare you run around supporting this genocide man)
• If Biden personally isn't doing the genocide (forget about that, how dare you run around supporting this genocide man)
• If Trump will probably do much worse genocides both in the middle east and in the United States (forget about that etc you get the idea)

It's like the Republican-type thing, where only one answer is allowed. If Biden did a good thing, then no he didn't, because Netanyahu is killing Gazans and anything Biden is doing to try to prevent that didn't happen and it's all Biden's fault and he's a bad man and I'm going to start to shout if you try to tell me anything about how even if that's all true then Trump is ten times worse and those are the only two options in this election.

I mean, I kind of get it. Biden is materially aiding in a genocide and it's easy at that point in the conversation to shut down anything further and say, okay I've heard enough. I think the right answer though is to figure out how to put pressure on Biden from the left to at least undo some of the harm he's been abetting up to this point, figure out how to install better candidates in the future who will undo American's war-crime-adjacent foreign policy in the future, while also voting for Biden in the election because he doesn't want 10 genocides like Trump does. However much bullshit is the resistance Biden has been giving Netanyahu up until this point, it's definitely better than the full-throated support and assistance Trump would give him.

(Edit: Fixed @ link)

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

I said: "Also, there are a ton of issues e.g. related to safety and wages. It's not just sick days." and then linked to some sources for why the sick days were the main flashpoint where things broke down.

Then you said: "there was definitely more than sick days to it." basically re-reexplained back to me what I had just got done saying, just changing the sourced statements into unsourced disagreements with those statements, based on your off the dome beliefs on it maybe.

I said: "just forgot about Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, and all the other sources where people can get anti-US news freely? (Or Fox News or Newsmax, which actually present an affirmative threat to his presidency and in an indirect way to his actual personal safety, and show some fairly legitimate reasons why someone could argue for shutting them down?)" (note: I edited it shortly after posting to add Fox News and Newsmax when I realized they should be included)

Then you said: "what are the anti administration media that isn't getting banned?"

It feels like you're not really listening, and just kind of have a set of points you want to make, and if I ask questions or make citations to disagree with it, you just rewind to the start and push play on the set of points you want to make.

Also:

to get liberals to realize that it's okay not to vote for biden

Not really, dude. I mean in a technical sense, you can do whatever you want to do, but if your house is burning down and someone's saying hey it's okay if we don't put out the fire, because I heard some bad things about the firefighters and anyway the back stairs weren't up to code, that person is objectively wrong. Put out the fucking fire. Trump is the fire.

because i genuinely believe that no one under 50 can look back at their adult life and say "yeah, this is good, actually, i'm happy with this, it should be biden, not literally any other candidate. the democrats are really my ally and i should lend them my support". i mean, there's the butigeegs (I can't spell his name) of the world, but you know, like real people. anyway i'm not trying to convert people to anarchism or communism but just to meet people where they're at with the message that "things are bad and they're not gonna get better from one or the other ruling class party. reject their tickets and choose something else. organize in your communities and try to build resilliency"

I would support you in doing all of those things. If it ever sounded like I was against the idea of improving the Democrats or replacing them with something better, or against organizing in your community, or anything like that, I'm not. But in this election, it's Trump vs Biden, and all of those things will get 10 times harder to do if Trump wins and shuts down community organizing and unions and protest movements and starts throwing anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan in political prison or if they're in congress killing them.

I'm not saying any disagreement with any of what you said up there; a good bit of my support for voting for Biden is based on the alternative being the end of the fuckin world. But sure, improving the system outside voting for Biden is also 100% necessary, yes. On that we definitely agree.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

Oh, no doubt. Biden's not nearly enough.

Example: Biden made a massive improvement to the US's greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which is predicted to be a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. Is that enough? Uh... if it had been by the year 2000, maybe. We're still facing a guaranteed global catastrophe. We need to keep pushing for more change, right now, and anyone who's satisfied with what Biden did so far is living in a dream world.

Where I have a problem with it is when someone extrapolates that out to "and that's why there's no reason to support Biden in his contest vs Trump, when Trump wants to undo even that much, and when Biden's climate action was the first big-scale thing any US politician has ever done to make the problem into an actual priority."

If anything I'm saying sounds like "and so Biden is good enough," it is not. What I am saying is that affirmatively choosing the Biden solution in this election while also pushing for big improvements in any one of 10-20 additional ways to achieve actual progress sounds like the way to go.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

Oh, and since I missed it: So Biden didn't say anything about how many anti genocide sentiment was on Tiktok, actually it was Blinken, oh wait, he didn't say that at all, he said "You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion—the impact of images—dominates." I would 100% agree with that. That's of the problems in my experience with talking with people who get their picture of the world from TikTok. There are other anti-establishment news sources which lend themselves a lot better to depth of understanding in addition to, yes, seeing the imagery and emotion which for something like Gaza is an important part to include.

Then, Romney said, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts." Which is at least vaguely adjacent to what you said, but also is (1) just someone who's not in the executive branch who's just kind of guessing (2) not at all the same as "how much anti genocide sentiment was on it".

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

just turns these disaffected leftists away.

"Biden took the first big step towards addressing climate change of any US politician ever, and was able to achieve significant success even within our horribly broken political system. While I fully support extra-electoral change (it is 100% needed), I would say that that's a relevant fact to the question of whether we should spend time shitting on him and only him, as part of our quest to produce positive change in the system."

"Well now you have turned me away."

Yeah, I'm comfortable letting that person go.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

I do employ the tactic of cutting the fat and staying on topic. We both have lots of comments and I’ve seen and read many of yours. Often you will ask a bunch of questions or bring up a bunch of points and the only way to keep someone who has a style like that on topic is to go back to five paragraphs and restate the topic. I’m not criticizing or making fun of the way you write, just explaining why I tend to bring it back to the points I’m trying to make.

Honestly, I don't even know why I'm in this conversation anymore. I'm not trying to be discouraging to you by saying this, but it seems like I keep saying things or asking questions and what comes back is not productive. Sorry.

I understand your viewpoint, I think. You don't have to go back and "bring it back" to the points you're trying to make. I am asking specific questions because to me that's a relevant way to engage in the debate -- you can sort of poke holes in the other person's viewpoint, or else learn more about it and so there are parts that will make sense or parts that don't make sense.

I'll make it simple, and just ask some questions. You can assume that I already understand your main viewpoint, and you don't need to restate it or "stay on topic," and just answer the questions. I'm not trying to be overwhelming or anything or pin you down or "debatebro" or whatever, but to me this is part of the dialogue. If you want to engage, cool, I'm curious to know what you think about these things. If not, then cheers. To me it's super dispiriting for someone to say e.g. Biden is censoring all the non establishment media but also refuse to identify what other media Biden is censoring, just sort of vaguely say all of it that's anti establishment. Maybe that is reasonable in your debate-world but in my world it is a weird and evasive way for you to behave.

important to examine it due to the circumstances illustrating how the administration deals with labor power

Do you think it's important to examine how the administration dealt with the UAW election or regulations on strikes / bargaining and union election guidelines in general? Or the writer's strike or the Starbucks or Amazon unionization drives?

it shows explicitly what will happen when you take effective strike action in Bidens America.

Same question

The examples you gave of media in opposition to the administration that are unbanned are either small, shrinking, controllable or represent the opposition platform under the two party system.

What are establishment unfriendly media that are being banned? Besides Tiktok? I keep asking this question. You said, more or less, all of them. That's not an answer. Which ones? What's all of them?

What do you think Romney meant by that?

(Answering this one, as it's surely a fair question to ask me)

I think he meant that the coverage on TikTok is slanted, as a way of amplifying Blinken's point that the entire format makes it basically impossible for TikTok to function as an informative type of news, and he brought up coverage of the Palestinians as an example.

I do agree with what Blinken said (basically, that is also my view on TikTok, in addition to the problem that it's controlled by the Chinese government). I don't agree with Romney's viewpoint -- I think it's fine if any social media wants to weight its coverage however the people who operate it and the people who have accounts there want to do it, and in particular I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with emphasizing the suffering of the Gazans in a way that's probably offensive to the people who are sending the IDF the weapons they're using to inflict that suffering.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

Does that answer your question?

Not completely, no. The more fundamental question I am trying to ask is this: It sounds like you're saying Biden is bad because we need to convert to communism and he's capitalist and so you can't support him regardless. Right? Or no?

And so I'm saying, if you're saying capitalism is so bad we need to replace it, then what are you wanting to replace it with, that any leader who doesn't want to replace it with is unworthy of any support? I realize that's a very very broad question which may not even have a single specific-at-the-outset answer, but I tried to narrow it down by asking, like what country would be the model? Or would we be doing something that was never done before?

It sounds like maybe the answer was the second one, right? Or no? I'm just trying to understand what it is that you're saying, in concrete terms, at this point. Like would we still have congress, or the electoral college? Would we be able to own private property? Would the economy be centrally managed by the government as in USSR and China? That kind of thing.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

I'm not trying to engineer any particular results. Notwithstanding the people who accuse me of running around supporting Biden just because I like Biden, I'm honestly just trying to talk about how I see the world and share my viewpoint and see what other people think in return. It's part of why I am comfortable saying yes, Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza is monstrous, and his little bullshit opposition to it is not nearly enough to excuse the majority of what he's doing, which is supporting it. Overall, I'm just trying to say how I see it. I'm not trying to, like, convince people to see it my way or support who I've decided I want them to support.

I mean yes I sort of hope that people will read my comments and decide to vote for Biden and help not end the world like if Trump gets elected. But also, I think more people will be convinced by simple facts and good reasoning, than will be convinced by something that happens to align with how they want the information to be presented and is triangulated to what's in their head currently and trying to push it around into the way I want it to be. That's a dangerous path to go down. Like what about lying, if that was more effective? Or what about setting up a little bot to post my propaganda, what if that was more effective? I just don't want to do it. Here's what I think, here are sources, do what you like with that and if you get super offended instead, then I feel blameless with that outcome because I tried to be straight about how I think because I think it makes sense.

mozz Admin , 6 days ago

Yeah. There are people who are just straight-up evil and trying to hurt people on purpose (Trump is one), but it's actually very rare, I think, even in political leaders. Mostly I think the destructive stuff in the world comes from people who have a weird reality built up in their head where what they're doing makes sense.

I see this even in internet arguments. It's very common that two people will both be saying things that makes sense, but because they both have this caricature built up of the other person and the other viewpoint in their head, they can't even understand each other and keep talking at cross purposes.

Person A says "How DARE you say that genocide is okay, genocide is NEVER okay"

Then person B says "How DARE you say Biden and Trump are the same, Trump is obviously way worse and we need to vote for Biden"

"How DARE you vote for genocide"

"How DARE you refuse to vote against Trump's genocide"

And so on. I mean, neither one is really wrong, and yet they're all angry at each other and each seem genuinely convinced that the person they're talking to carries cartoonishly wrong views like "genocide is okay as long as it comes from my political allies," and then they get all bent out of shape arguing against those imaginary views that almost no one really actually holds. And they can't even listen to the other person for long enough to understand what they're saying, because I can't possibly sit here and listen to a pro-genocide person, when I am ANTI genocide, and I just need to fight against this pro genocide person right now.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

I don’t think it’s a good idea to withhold pretty straightforward relevant information until my imagined picture of the person reading it reaches a point where they’re ready for it.

Honestly, I have no idea what the average Lemmy reader is or isn’t ready for or accepting of. Why do you assume that all or even most of the people reading my message aren’t at a point where this pretty bland information would be useful to them?

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Ha, fair enough. So let me rephrase: I am not "reaching out to disaffected leftists." I'm just saying how I see it and why. If someone's triggered by seeing a comment saying some good things Biden has done and starts literally shaking and crying and decides I am wrong about everything, then it is a shame but I don't think it needs to be my responsibility to prevent that. I think that person needs to become capable over time of seeing things they disagree with without freaking out about it. It'll be good for them.

Maybe that is a majority of Lemmy, IDK (and certainly lemmy.ml seems like it's like that), so that a "kid gloves" gradual transition to the truth approach would be better, but in my experience people generally like the "here are facts and citations" stuff well enough, and saying I should stay away from it until this one category of people decides it would be acceptable to them, seems like it might do more harm than good to the messaging overall. And anyway, it's honestly just not what I want to do -- like I say I'm not here to "reach out" with my message. I just like talking about this stuff.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

1. Congress and the Electoral College would likely be replaced by worker councils, with democratic representatives.
2. Private Property would eventually be removed, personal property would remain.
3. Some level of central planning would almost certainly be employed.

Got it. Do you have examples of places this approach has been employed and worked well during the 150 years or so of socialism/communism being around?

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

I was setting out to talk about the election, nothing about capitalism. You brought capitalism into it, I think. I actually think capitalism constrained by a very strong democratic government is the best system (historically) in terms of good quality of life and free environment for people inside and outside the country, that I'm aware of, but I don't really know.

I don't think it's fair to ask me to read a bunch of leftist theory before I have an opinion either on the election or on economics. I have my opinion on it and maybe it comes across as lecturing sometimes, but genuinely I'm just saying what I think.

I think I've been asking a bunch of questions, in general, trying to understand. No?

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

I mean I think you probably see what I'm getting at -- I'm suspicious of how this will work out in practice. In particular, I'm suspicious of the idea of shutting down private property, or centrally managing the economy; it sounds like a solution for the ills of capitalism but I'm aware of a couple of big examples where the way it's been implemented has turned into a living nightmare, and not produced the economic happiness it was supposed to produce.

Surely it's fair to ask how it's worked out in practice? You know, the metric being good standard of living, happy people, press freedom, basic necessities being met, that kind of thing. I'm not saying you have to copy another country exactly but surely it's relevant to look at examples. No?

Not saying you have to copy another country but also, like, if we were going to replace all the cars in a country with some other mode of transportation, it's fair to ask, okay where do they use that and how does it work? If it works well then cool, that's an indication of good things, and if not then maybe some lessons we can learn about how to implement it better here. Doesn't that seem fair?

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Care to share the examples

Sure, USSR and China are the big countries which converted to communism, and then in both cases millions of people starved. You said famines were common even in the feudal system in Russia, I think, but that's not fully accurate -- I mean, they happened, but not with anything like the same frequency, under the same technological-efficiency backdrop, or for simple reasons of management (there was generally some external reason like a drought). And the USSR had trouble providing basic necessities to its people for all its existence, even worse than the failures the US has to provide basic necessities. And they both have much more barbaric prison systems even than the US's fairly barbaric prison system.

China's different because at this point it's working "well" economically, but at the cost of personal individual freedom and working conditions -- I mean, the exploitation that the US is doing of global work force (which is very real) is often happening to workers inside China, so you can't really say that enacting China's system here would be a solution to the problems of the US. All it would do is import the exploitation of Chinese workers to happen to American workers too (i.e. much worse than their already pretty significant level of exploitation.)

(I realize all that is huge oversimplification, and those might not be the models you would choose, which I why I keep asking over and over again for details of the model you would choose.)

Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met" hasn't been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context

Agreed. I think the closest that's been achieved was probably the New Deal-era American economy (such as it was available to white people) up until around the 1960s. Basically, a strong organized working class backed by unions, exerting control over a democratic government to push back against the control that capital wants to exert over the levers of power.

Basically what I would think is the next step would be to extend that to all races, get back to unions as a unit of political power instead of political parties and a whole specialized class of lobbyists and consultants that work in Washington providing change "from above," reform some of the worst evils of money in politics and barbaric foreign policy, and see where that gets us. Because even that is far far away from where it should be. But that to me seems like a more sensible step than trying to make a more centralized economic structure, and assuming that the issues of who winds up in charge of the central planning will take care of themselves.

(Not that I'm saying that that last is what you're advocating -- just talking about my sort of stereotype view of what "getting rid of capitalism" as a solution might look like.)

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

I wrote about Biden, and you started debating me. Is it fair for me to ask you to read a few thousand words about what Biden's done, if you wish to debate me about his record? I can find some extensive summary and send it to you. That's way less than you're asking me to read before I debate you about communism.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

You're making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots

Like I said, oversimplifying, yes.

Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia

The PRC killed somewhere from 15 to 55 million people in a multi-year famine, around 1960. It's widely regarded, says Wikipedia, as one of the greatest man-made disasters in all of human history. What KMT famine are you talking about? I searched "KMT famine" and found nothing.

The Russian famines I think I already addressed. You're free to pretend I didn't, and simply claim that the USSR didn't cause a massive man-made famine unlike anything that happened under the Tsars, that has a specific name and still is talked about to the present day in the affected areas almost a hundred years later.

That's why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR

I mean, technically true.

• In Russia it ramped up from about 30 to about 70.
• In China it ramped up from about 30 to about 80.
• In the US it ramped up from about 40 to about 80.

I'm open to the idea that things would never have happened the same way in China or Russia without the revolutions. On the other hand, I'm also open to the idea that it would have happened in exactly the same way, because of the advances in medicine and public health that ramped it up over pretty much the same time period in the US, even without a centrally managed economy that killed millions of people and enacted a barbaric system without many of the daily freedoms that I consider essential to a decent life, which even the US manages to provide in some reduced form.

Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that's like comparing an adult to a child.

Not true. Outside a handful of notable cities, the US in 1900 was a lawless and unelectrified wilderness with a life expectancy of 46, that none of the mighty established European empires took all that seriously. In the late 1800s, labor began battling for control of the US in a big way, and around 1930 a pro-labor government got powerful enough to tackle some big reforms, and all of a sudden, some things changed between 1900 and 1950 that catapulted the US onto the world stage in a way where it became the dominant power and has remained there into the present day. And, for white people at least, the conditions inside the country transformed into a sort of paradise life.

(The war was a big part of the US becoming a world power, of course, but the course of the US's/China's/USSR's contrasting economic developments leading up to the war are kind of hard to ignore as a factor.)

Also, the USSR crumbled and collapsed from its dominant position on the world stage into now being a backwards little land of tinpot gangsters and alcoholic misery that can't even effectively invade its direct neighbor which it outnumbers by at least 10 to 1. Surely that's relevant? If you're saying (and I'm not saying you are, just saying if) that you want to replicate parts of the Soviet model in the US?

Either way, with respect to what you're saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism.

Agreed. I think this natural tendency always exists within capitalism, and we're living in the dystopian results right now. I think we're just disagreeing about what counterbalancing factors need to be introduced to more effectively combat the cancer.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Ah, got it, fair point. My point still stands; surely by the same logic, you shouldn't be criticizing Biden unless you're willing to spend enough time learning about the facts of his record to get a comprehensive factual view of what you're talking about?

I mean, I don't think it should work that way. I'm just pointing out that your logic seems like it would imply that it should work that way.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

To skip to the end, I will turn your question back on you: what do you want, and why?

I think I said it -- basically, return to the conditions of the New Deal and shortly after, just as applied to all people instead of only white people. I think it requires a lot of the same things that led to the New Deal -- strong labor unions directly exercising political power, a lot less power in the hands of political parties and professional politicians, but still keeping intact the main structures of US government on the government side.

In the short run, key steps would be big reforms to the things that are causing corruption in the US: Lobbying and campaign finance, broken and archaic voting systems, poor education and media that lead voting to be more or less a media-driven popularity contest that can be exploited by the wealthy to sideline any real progress.

I think a lot of the economic problems are intertwined with political problems. I don't think either of the two can be solved in isolation, and in particular I think that trying to solve economic problems by centralizing government so the government can "fix" the economic system to be more fair, is likely to be counterproductive, as turns out to be more difficult to prevent assholes from seizing control of it than it might at first appear.

That's the short answer, at least.

mozz Admin , 5 days ago

Absolutely I disagree with that. Here's why:

If we ran the numbers, and discovered that the demographics have shifted and now most users on Lemmy tend to be liberals, would that mean that you need to read up and research on liberal thinking before it makes sense for you to talk? And, getting back to the earlier point, that you needed to phrase your arguments in terms that would be acceptable to liberals, so that you could appeal to them?

Bro just let people talk. They can be in majority or minority, and you might or might not agree, but variety of political opinion in a forum is a good thing. This whole lemmy.ml thing where it's like "hey I'm a leftist and therefore privileged in this forum, and you need to make you're acceptable to my philosophy before I even want to listen to you, because I've pretty much decided what the right answers are, and yours is definitely wrong unless it lines up with mine" is just a bunch of crap. In my opinion.