You have just spent too much time talking to the chronically online individuals or whatever the term is.|

I have, and I know it, and those are who I am speaking to the most because that’s who are here in sites like this in the most numbers. I am here trying to rally people, even if it’s out of spite and anger and offense, to stay involved.

The last presidential election we had has had some of the highest voter participation and youth participation in history, and they still voted for Trump, so the problem isn’t exterior, it’s coming from inside the house, and as long as we’re lamenting and feeling like shit about it, we’re falling into their trap.

Except talking to people I don’t agree with is exactly what I do. I am doing it to you now! Think about that!

It’s literally ALL i wanted out of this.

I tried. If anyone gets what I’m saying, power to them and the kernel of hope rides in their hands. Otherwise I’m done. Peace.

So wait for a charismatic and perfect savior. We see what happens every time someone of this stature reaches the actual federal election stage.

I’m talking about what people can do here and now, which is built coalitions and not have purity tests about who is in it, just focus on single-issues like the right has done successfully over and over and over.

For some reason whenever someone says “compromise” every lefty immediately pictures “submitting on trans rights and abortion” or something.

I’m saying as individuals, you and me, scared lemmy browsers who don’t think they have power: build social connections, make more friends, build activism groups, start in local communities and keep it fixated on solving ONE populist problem that we can get a much wider array of people behind, like childcare or school lunches or yes healthcare and unions, social security or other public safety nets and the whole long laundry list of items we want, but instead of overwhelming a population, local or national, with a huge list of inclusivity and ideals, we attack one thing at a time. I have watched the right do this over and over and each time they fucking WIN.

Again, your notions of an ideal candidate you would vote for are spot-on, I would vote for that person in a heartbeat, most would, but that person doesn’t exist and they won’t exist until they can ride on the momentum of grass-roots movements to tackle populist issues. The democrat party is not our ally here, not without a mandate under it and if we’re more clever about building those mandates and then tying them together when it’s time, we might have success.

But I’m getting really pessimistic here. Voter turnout is not the problem. Everyone, everywhere, is avoiding mixing. The atomization of our world is the problem. We had the highest voter turnouts and youth involvement in the last several elections than we’ve ever had, and they voted Trump. That’s my whole point, that’s the key we have to fight against, how someone like a brazen fascist and idiot can sway so many people, and it starts with re-mixing our values and perspectives and this may take some kind of “compromise” that may make a lot of isolated lefties really uncomfortable, like having conversations with people you don’t like, like accepting people who hate you into your protest so you can both tackle a problem you both hate. If we can cross that boundary we can start mixing together again and pulling people out of this programming that corporate media does. Isolationism is killing our whole world and all our hope for the future.

We are facing a huge problem that nobody seems to be able to identify, which is not voter turnout. The sad, horrible truth is the last couple election cycles we had record turnout and more young people involved than ever before… AND THEY VOTED FOR TRUMP. It’s going to happen all across the world as more and more people have access to their little algorithmic ideology bubbles.

So what’s the problem? Atomization of groups. Everyone is isolated and not exposed to each other’s perspectives and it’s making a vacuum that corporations are easily leveraging to get their right-wing puppets installed so they can make line go up. This atomization is literally turning people delusional, and if we don’t push back on it we are going to lose not just the USA but all democracy and organization.

We fight it with activity and community and socialization. If it takes screaming at people to get off their asses, I will do that and I will do it in ways that piss people off if it gets attention.

You berate neurodivergent and queer people specifically

Exactly the kind of bad-faith, seething, atomized perspective I want to fight by forcing people like YOU to listen to people like ME who will say things to piss you off and make you reconsider what someone else is saying. We need to do that not on Lemmy but out in bars, in family gatherings, in social media, in public lectures, in town council meetings and so on. Withdrawing now will kill you all. I am being dead serious. This avoidance of conflict except with people who want the same outcome as you is ruining our entire world.

If you have a way to make it work without compromise let me know, I’m all ears. Expert Mode: something that doesn’t involve waiting for some charismatic and perfect savior figure to somehow come out of the sky and start successfully advocating for socialism. Nobody is coming.

Because what we’re doing now isn’t working.

Absolutely true, and what’s really wild is most of the left is broadly prideful of being intellectual, and so desperate to have intellectual fights that they tear each other down and find ways to nitpick their own allies into destruction. Just because they need to fight someone they can win on their own terms.

The enemy army is OVER THERE, it’s JUST RIGHT THERE! I want to shake everyone and aim all this effort to call out “problematic tones” and “cultural insensitivity” into actual action before we’re all just pawns in a techno-feudalism state, disposable as robots slowly replace even the workers, the last playing piece we had as people.

Lefty former martial-art teacher and gun owner here. I fully agree and have to argue about it a lot. This generation of lefties is completely dulled by short-attention-span self-medication and escapism and pseudo-socialization through discord and other online chats substituted for real socialization.

Whenever you talk about the need for actual organizing, forming groups, taking action, suddenly everyone has nine-hundred very special “conditions” that prevent them from doing anything. We may have co-opted the term “snowflake” from the right but it was targeted accurately at the start. Everyone thinks “someone is coming” or that there’s going to be a revolution “any day now” as if there’s some underground left-wing movement planning things and they’re just not invited. Motherfuckers you all ARE the left-wing in this country, ya’ll think the fucking democrats are gonna save you?

The left also gave up on the american flag, easily isolating itself in the public eye as an anti-american group. I hate that. I don’t get it. Yes, America has been awful and continues to be so, but if you don’t claim ownership of the goddamn land you live on, someone else is going to take it… and guess what’s happening.

This is just what it’s like to get old and grumpy. Youth is wasted on the young. I did my time organizing, I did volunteer work and phone banking for my local community and leaders, I tried. I really, really tried. I even narrowly, accidentally avoided assassination a while back but details would dox me. And I get lectured here about the ten thousand reasons why they can’t do hard things, why they have been relegated to retreating to back-water websites nobody visits having imaginary fights with imaginary nazis. Part of me is so done with humanity I feel like a lot of these kids deserve the consequence of being self-absorbed and undisciplined. But I guess I still have some lingering hope that someone will read something that makes them get off the couch.

This site, and honestly modern leftism in general, is utterly weak and in a sorry state. Lotta tender kids hiding in their discord groups talking hard about punching nazis, overthrowing the government, revolutions, etc. But if even half of them went out and organized and voted as regularly as the conservative orc army we wouldn’t need to be boarded up behind cultural firewalls.

Ya’ll desperately wish there were right-wingers and nazis on this site. The isolationism of the internet has left the entire population having arguments in the shower and imagining how thoroughly they owned their imaginary opponents.

Protip: you can ACTUALLY go outside and punch ACTUAL nazis at protests and demonstrations in towns near you! themoreyouknow.gif

Before it was coopted by the right to mean “child predator” or “deadly threat to everything holy” it was just a style of burlesque show, a whole niche cultural thing that never bothered anyone, open to anyone who wanted to take part.

They had problems with the fact that most performers are males or assigned male at birth, and the whole thing is basically parody of gender norms and style, but embraced rather than hated, and it was just a generally fun time. (Never mind that it’s kinda what stage performance has been like across the globe for hundreds or even thousands of years when it comes to gender-bending performances.)

Speaking as a CIS straight male, I have been to a couple shows and don’t really get it, it’s not my thing, but everyone is having fun and they’re being welcoming and happy and sharing a thing together, and it’s far more harmless than a million other silly things people do for fun as social groups.

Yah I love how places like Lemmy are packed to overflowing with “radical leftists” who scream murder at liberals and moderates and how broadly appealing progressive policies aren’t going far enough to address [issue X].

Guys, we’re getting literally murdered out there, figuratively and literally. If there was ever a time to start building larger coalitions, it’s now. No, you’re not getting everything you want. No, we’re not having a revolution, we don’t have the military. Yes, you will have to compromise. And if you hate that word because you think it means walking alongside someone you despise…

Tough shit.

Pick an issue, gather allies, overwhelm it, then repeat for the NEXT issue and realize nobody is coming, you may not see a better world in your lifetime, your immediate sense of resignation at this fact is manufactured. Get your shit together. Your personal problems are clouding your thinking.

They’re winning because they don’t recoil in horror at the idea of working towards mid-way goals or making deals they find distasteful, that’s how they pushed the overton window off the fucking map.

But yeah, lets continue to fuss over if our flags represent enough people and if [popular content creator] said the word “retard” once, while our administration builds camps and readies for war for funsies.

edit: just because I’m ready to soak up hate on this, you all also need to make real friends. You don’t build movements in discord, not ones that have impact at least. You are medicating your loneliness while the world burns outside. Get out and push through the discomfort of your introversion, your ADHD, your ASD, your sexual identity insecurity, your looks or your accent or WHATEVER it is that you think is keeping you from being social and building community. We lost because we’re isolated. Online groups don’t count. Don’t reply to me, go outside.

When we started letting tech-bros on social media hype up AI like it would be the savior for all humanity and in just a few short years we’ll all be sailing on our AI-powered yachts with AI-powered martinis and sacks of AI-powered cash from our AI-powered stock trades.

Then when they started getting snippy and biting back and saying how it “democratizes art” and it lets us spend more time working so the AI can do our art and writing, we didn’t laugh and then drive them into the FUCKING SEA, instead we all politely respected their opinions and now we have at least a decade of useless, incremental “advances” to products we don’t want.

You can love AI all you want, but the moment you go to bat for the corporate slop being pushed on us, you’re one of them.

Okay, now do it every weekend until something changes

Americans on both sides of the political theater have long since given over agency to fantasy ideas about “someone coming” or someone is going to “do something” or that “nothing ever happens.” It’s why we have Trump and why nobody has done anything about him.

We are far, far from uncomfortable enough to sacrifice our weekends every week to go stand in the sun. We are the wealthiest nation, and thus the most comfortable in our routines.

I appreciate the attempt, I think you can rework it to make your point, but just for the sake of keeping our minds working I will extend the conversation out to address the higher-level premise of what you’re trying to communicate.

If your clever comeback sounds exactly as smooth coming out of the enemy’s mouth, it’s not a very good comeback.

I fully agree with this point, but it’s also not how we argue with/interact with our current ideological opponents. We’re stuck in a loop on the left where we think crafted arguments and intellectual superiority will have any impact at all on anyone. If the right broadly cared at ALL about ideological consistency we wouldn’t be in this weird situation to begin with. Our big, missing hole in our analysis here is that the left us largely about headspace arguments and logic and consistency, and the right only acts like they do because they see us arguing this way and try to use the same way we argue to score points.

Conservatives generally don’t care about hypocrisy. Like, at all. They live in a world of feelings and how they feel now, and whatever story has been supplied to them about why they feel this way at this moment, so it almost doesn’t matter if our arguments are bad. If we want to change hearts and minds, we need to back waaaay the fuck up and start attacking how people feel. Like on a very personal level, because they only exist in their present moment and present feelings. This is why they get so worked up about petty, superficial insults like “you’re weird.” It’s far less satisfying because they always have bravado and hold frame, but it DOES effect them.

We like to craft expert arguments to impress other leftists, but if it had any kind of real-world impact, we’d all be swimming in socialism and equality.

“Political motivation” is just the term we use to describe something that happened that we haven’t codified into law yet because it hasn’t become the widespread, social norm.

I’m arguing that your example isn’t communicating your thesis very well, and I don’t think I’m alone in that feeling, but I’m doing the courtesy of letting you know that it’s not connecting and why.

Your counter-example doesn’t make sense.

In the picture in this post, the person who read the “down with fascism” message expressed disappointment with the person’s message, thus revealing that they are associating fascism with their own political leaning.

In your example, the left-winger just mentions a name of someone else they don’t like in response, which isn’t even connected to the topic.

You’re missing the point that certain political ideologies have very strong connections with each other. Except one side is arguably connected to many much worse terms.

You can say “down with authoritarian marxists!” and you might get a few tankies to pipe up and say “wow I can’t believe you are attacking the glorious people’s blah blah blah” to which you can say “aha called out your politics!” but nobody really takes tankies seriously anyway nor are they a threat to modern nation-building the same way they were a century or two ago.

isn’t every assassination politically motivated?

We can go further and describe everything we do and every way in which we interact with others as “politically motivated” because politics is literally just dealing with someone else. If there were two people left on earth, there would be politics. If there was only one person left, there would finally be no politics.

And that’s my platform when I run: no more politics 2028! lets gooooo!

We are a species of cognitive dissonance. I want to know how many of the people reading this story and feeling revolted or horrified were eating meat at the time.

Also not a vegan per-say, but I have reduced my meat intake and try to buy local to avoid giving money to the nightmare hellscapes like Tyson and Perdue the like. That’s about the best I can manage in my current lifestyle.

Everyone needs to reconcile and work out this dilemma. It’s amazing how many people are dishonest with themselves and others about their reasons for feeling the way they do about eating meat, killing animals, etc. It’s okay to say “I love animals but not enough to quit eating meat” and accept it in yourself. It’s not a worse moral failing than a hundred other contradictory ideas we all hold in our heads every day. It’s okay to say “I find this story distasteful because killing animals should be done behind closed doors to respect others.” That’s also a fine opinion to have.

I don’t get why people have to do backflips to rationalize shit. We are irrational species.