Disclaimer since based on my last comment i know the accusation is coming: i voted for claudia already. I think socialists should vote for Claudia if shes available.
I just also think voting is not the ultimate expression of politics and doesnt mean that much. The “its an endorsement” thing is true, but one extra endorsement does not equal one extra dead Palestinian. Thats just magical thinking. (Also, ive tried telling people the endorsement thing because its what changed my mind about lesser evilism, it doesnt work.)
And the idea that every Kamala voter is horrific evil when many are scared, propagandized, gaslit marginalized people doing what they think they need to do to not die is misguided. You guys claim to be the ultimate propaganda understanders but dont seem to understand its power. Are people still responsible for their actions? Sure. Does a vote of all things matter as an action all that much? Lmao fuck no. Its basically pointless.
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, “not forgiving”, or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
I thought this was already pretty clear. The “lesser-evil” mindset is strong and so is the propaganda supporting it. I’m not going to get mad over someone voting Kamala as long as they aren’t a shit head about it.
But agitating is raising awareness and so continuing to pressure is good imo, even if some get a little overly zealous about it
I’ve seen a shocking amount of comparisons between Kopmala voters and voters for the Nazi party which tbf might be more apt than I think? Was there some sort of genuine 101% Hitler the Nazi party used as an implicitl threat? Not just scaremongering about minorities being that threat, but an actual 101% Hitler party that was the only majorly supported running opposition to literal Hitler?
Well,it was the KPD, obviously
Except that unlike Trump, they actually were a positive force
The important point of similarity between Holocaust Harris and Adolf Hitler is actually that they both committed genocide.
The important point of similarity between their supporters, is that they are both groups of people who knew that the person they were supporting was committing genocide.
Hitler didn’t get elected, he got appointed by a liberal due to pressure from business leaders. Harris has already talked about wanting to put Republicans into high level appointments so she’s more like Hindenburg in that way. Of course, once again, the way she’s like Hitler is that they both perpetrated Holocausts.
I’d also like to clarify that I’m not comparing Harris voters to people who voted for the Nazi party prior to the Holocaust, when the Nazis weren’t in power, during the Weimar Republic. I’m comparing them to Germans who supported the Nazi regime while it fed millions of people into death camps. That’s who they are.
You might be able to make an argument for libs who aren’t particularly online and only watch mainstream news, but if someone is coming onto hexbear to try to proselytize, they’re online enough that they’re aware of the kind of evidence that has come out. They know what they’re supporting.
I’m not the defending the terminally online libs in any capacity lol
they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice
they’re making the conscious decision that murdering Palestinians is okay if it benefits them personally
they aren’t though, they think there is no way to not endorse it, they have been housebroken, they are pitiable but they are not Nazis
Most of the Germans during WWII and the Holocaust also were not nazis. The nazi party and the SS were only a small fraction of the total population. That didn’t stop the Germans from actively participating in the Holocaust or helping invade/bomb other countries. Hell, neither WWII nor the Holocaust would have been possible without all of Germany being complicit.
The number of people arrested, deported, and killed wasn’t possible with the SS alone. They relied on local police being informed of where people were hiding by neighbors wanting to eliminate Jews, Roma, homosexuals, etc. If the SS went door to door searching every house, there’s no way they could have captured as many people as they did. Those people were handed over to them by ordinary Germans not part of the nazi party.
So no, I don’t buy that excuse. Whitey is gonna whitey and if he is willing to throw Palestinians under the bus, he sure as shit will snitch when the time comes to eliminate the marginalized here at home.
very true, it is ultimately a concession to imperialism on the part of the labor aristocracy. unfortunately there is a statistically high chance you have participated in exactly the same thing, though you could also just be giga-based since your birth or not an Amerikkkan and in either way i envy you
yeeting the second half of this comment because it sucks
I think a younger, more reactionary me would have deserved a yeeting for being reactionary. There was no excuse for those views when there were people the same age who had the opposite views. While I realize that now, it doesn’t absolve my participation.
It’s also materially irrelevant because I can’t change the past, especially past versions of other people. I can only change the conditions of what’s going on right now. Maybe some libs are possible to convert with enough time and understanding. Unfortunately, Palestinians don’t have that time. It’s the same as what was going on in Germany. Maybe there were Germans who could have been reasoned with. It doesn’t matter because the war was necessary to end the Holocaust, the invasion of the USSR, and the occupation of neutral countries.
Oh also I don’t think we need to waste our time converting possible leftists from people still deep in delusional faith with electoralism, I was just condemning the “kill all Kamala voters” type rhetoric but I think I just took it too literally and not as the venting it was
it doesn’t need to absolve your participation for your possibility to stop doing stuff like voting for genocidal lib politicians to be acknowledged. the fact you are posting here is a sign that current clueless babyleftists don’t deserve to be compared to full on Nazis, though of course they are participating in a collective wrong. Like, :im-vegan: and i would be 100% justified if i went on borderline murderous rants at the people around me for being complicit with murder of living things constantly, and in fact many do, but i have a hard time comparing them to Nazi supporters regardless, because Nazi supporters had a huge amount of social context to understand why their decision is wrong, but veganism is still considered “extreme” and/or erased from public consciousness. In other words, people bad but definitely not full-on ghouls in and of themselves.
i’m not going to start killing my family
Good! Nobody’s gonna kill their family for voting for this genocide and nobody is suggesting it.
i already yeeted that shitty argument sorry
I’m glad you did that but it’s definitely telling that everybody who feels the need to tell us we’re wrong for our position has to include imagined declarations that nobody has declared
it’s the imaginary hexbear you’re disagreeing with, not the actual hexbear users
It was an allegory but a bad one, not an actual take I thought I saw
Yeah sorry I don’t buy this shit either.
You’re basically saying “if you hate your genocidal society then why do you participate in it?”
.Libs are just under the incorrect belief that by voting for the lesser evil they are “improving things somewhat”
. Doubly so where in many (though definitely not all) cases, it’s a factual error, not a values one. And I really struggle to blame individuals for that.Newsflash: The minerals in your electronics were partially or entirely mined by child slavery, why are you willing to throw them under the bus??? Turns out participating in society is required, and so you just act within it in a way you think is best to improve things.
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I’m very over the childish tendency to condemn colloquialisms as a lib/redditor thing. I’m using words to communicate a point. You understood that point. So they did their job.
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Exactly
Nobody is immune to propaganda, yet the effect that propaganda has is overstated here IMHO. Read Masses, Elites, and Rebels. If a cis white lib is saying they’re voting L3Harris out of fear, they’ve really just been granted moral license to not care and are using that moral license to justify doing the same thing they would be doing if no pressure was applied to them at all.
I think yelling at libs about voting is effective because the vast majority of them are not joining orgs, they’re not communists that are just doing this one thing wrong, etc. They’re libs! And they perceive voting as the singular most important political action (especially since the George Floyd protests have been memory holed). If we can radicalize liberals’ understanding of voting, we can radicalize their entire politics. I know that because when I was a liberal myself, the first piece of theory I read was Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy. After I read that, I radicalized very quickly, because my whole understanding of politics was based on voting for the right candidate and it was quickly shattered. So I believe that electoralism represents an attack surface for the left to exploit, since it has become the singular focus of the rank and file liberal politic.
All that being said, at some point it probably is worth shutting up about voting and just focusing on getting people to learn some useful skill, get organized, and agitate as many other people as they can to do the same. It would be really, really stupid if, for example, this whole site alienated a ton of its own already radicalized users over voting. It would be even worse if the same happened at unions and the DSA. It ain’t that deep.
You have to meet the people where they are, and right now that’s the polling place.
Lmao, imagine voting ever. I gave Bernie $27 dollars and a temporary stay of execution in 2020, and I’ll take both back in this world or in hell.
Vibes do not matter. Actions matter. If your decisions “are not coming from a place of evil” but the result of those decisions is “substantially more evil every single time”, then your decisions are not sufficiently repudiating evil. Correct action comes from correct thought. If the action keeps being “kill more kids”, then eventually you have to admit the thought “killing kids is okay, actually”.
I disagree completely. Liberals are white supremacists and have always been waging war on the whole world. They are weaselly and smug liars. They invented ads. They live off of the stolen work of whole enslaved countries. They are humanity’s enemies.
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Yea, because we got shit to lose
People dont go out and start shooting unless they feel like theyve got nothing to lose
I’m not even sure this is true. I would give up all my shit in an instant if I thought it had a 0.001% chance of changing things. I think many people feel similarly.
I can never give up my wife
Well sure. But at no point in history did nobody ever have significant others. If you’re including that in your assessment then only humans who’ve lived their whole life in solitary confinement have nothing to lose.
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I dont think ur a coward i think ur based
That’s why
has been refining the art of taking things away slowly.Theyre very good at it
they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice
except when they are, ie, when they’re white and benefit from the white supremacy that undergirds the whole Election Spectacle, whether they’re willing/able to acknowledge that or not
otherwise good post
Death to America
I feel like a lot of these callout posts that are definitely directed at specific people would be solved with the understanding that everyone on here understands the difference between Hexbear and real life and that rhetorical hyperbole exists as a means for commiseration and venting. Does it occasionally get a little extreme on here? Sure. Should you be concerned that we’re all baying for blood in the streets? Nah.
I do think- and hear me out here, because I think people are predisposed to think of those sort of take as inherently justifying weird shit because people love to read into what ND people say. But it is definitely a result of us ND people reading others online very literally. It is difficult for us to tell the difference between a post that is ironic or unironic, hyperbole or literal, sober or joking, especially if we are familiar with the degree to which reality exceeds parody. I genuinely believe the hatred of this kind of post is rooted primarily in a kind of weird synthesis of something weird and cringe (ableism and an expectation of everyone acting the same) with something usually good (a desire to ensure a complete lack of reactionaries in our spaces). We (the ND) are interpreting a comment or general Vibe incorrectly because of our extremely different communication styles, and when it comes time for the majority/advantaged group (the NT) to clarify what they meant they instead interpret our questions as the prods or statements they would have intended if they said the same thing.
We definitely need a Dictatorship of the Neurodivergent on this site, even if we already have one it’s not enough. Yeah, if you read things literally it gets a little harder to detect a bad faith chud trying to wreck the site, but there are still really obvious tells. A change to a more explicitly communicative general conversation policy would be a huge improvement. I wish tone tags were built into every comment. ( someone going “god I want to kill Kopmala voters /pissed off” is way easier to relate to than our (some ND people’s) default assumption of “god I want to kill Kopmala voters /genuine /sober”)
Yes, this is not an excuse for any sort of problematic behavior. But the assumption that we are engaging with it in the first place with posts like this is a heavily neurotypical one. And I do take issue to @autismdragon’s reference to grass touching because that exact phrasing is usually used to dismiss us, though I do not think they considered this when they wrote the post.
When the NT urge to read nonexistent context into neurodivergent conversation crosses with our very real and reasonable experiences with reactionaries abusing said context to smuggle in their reactionary sentiments without saying anything explicit, it becomes very, very ugly, and I think it usually ends up with people both assuming neurodivergent people intend to spread reactionary rhetoric and becoming unreasonably angry at them, while also having neurodivergent people accidentally spread it because neurotypical people can share invisible context with each other even through the medium of someone specifically not trying to add any. The only real way to fix this is to embrace more and more explicit communication (and to embrace theory that makes the smuggled, implicit reactionary sentiments explicit through the revealing of it’s internal mechanisms)
I’m happy to take suggestions on ways to improve my communication style for ND folks. I’ve been marinating in the hexbear house style to the point where maybe it’d be beneficial to take a step back and reflect a little.
That said, it doesn’t appear that OPs issue here is with people sounding like reactionaries, it’s more against the performative misanthropy of comments like “Kamala voters get the pit.” I’m inclined to read that charitably as venting and not as a literal call to murder millions of people and respect the fact that the people engaging in that rhetoric online might be perfectly normal in real life. I think this election in particular has ratcheted up the pressure on all of us to stay sane against a deluge of propaganda, some of which we deliberately seek out and expose ourselves to by getting into dust ups with other instances, so I can’t say it’s entirely healthy.
I just wonder if these sorts of drive by posts where the op doesn’t really interact are actually helpful and change minds or if they’re just ways of getting approval and self-soothing after an interaction on here goes sideways, and I’m not sure that’s happening along an ND/NT divide.
That said, it doesn’t appear that OPs issue here is with people sounding like reactionaries, it’s more against the performative misanthropy of comments like “Kamala voters get the pit.” I’m inclined to read that charitably as venting and not as a literal call to murder millions of people and respect the fact that the people engaging in that rhetoric online might be perfectly normal in real life
This is what I meant, there’s a tendency for me and others to read said comments more literally despite it not being intended as such
This ignores that the average USAmerican will let their country murder millions of foreigners if it meant their grocery prices went down by 10 cents
I think it’s worse in-person than online, even. Most of the pro-zionist libs and reactionaries I’ve met IRL have even worse takes than libs online. Just look at how many of them supported the Iraq War and Vietnam or how they ignored Obama drone striking weddings, hospitals, and schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even with the benefit of hindsight, they’d vote Obama for a third term if they could.
Americans turn into the most rabid of fascists when it comes to foreign policy.
Kamala openly said that at the CNN town hall. paraphrasing but it was basically “murdering kids is bad, but what about murdering kids and your grocery bill got 8% smaller”. she might have even directly mentioned the price of eggs? my memory is blurred by a red mist
Calling it now
I will stay out of it, except for this comment.
I think I get what you’re trying to say, and I don’t entirely agree. As you’ve said it though I think I disagree a lot instead of just a little. I think presenting it as “1 vote =/= 1 dead palestinian” is flawed and a bit ghoulish and does you no favours. Likewise I think presenting yourself as a grass-toucher as opposed to those that disagree with you as being not-grass-touchers likewise will do nothing but inflame something that could otherwise give you a good and productive discussion, which I think is what you aim to do. As someone who is proud of being able to talk to liberals, I am a bit bemused that this is how you would phrase yourself when in discussion with comrades. Surely you yourself can see how provocative you are being?
I think that while voting normally does not significy a lot about morals due to people being surrounded by capitalist propaganda, this vote does, due to the fact it requires the voter to somehow rationalize accepting genocide (yes I know the rationalisation is “trump is worse”, but I’ve got a lot of hangups with that.)
yes I know the rationalisation is “trump is worse”, but I’ve got a lot of hangups with that
it’s a completely false political policy but an extraordinarily effective mental excuse. I don’t inherently distrust people who fall for it because we’ve been taught to think in trolley problem morality for ages
but yes grass touching is a very silly and non serious metric for being an authority on any subject
I think that the primary contradiction of Hexbear is grass touching vs non-grass-touching and the openly inflammatory stance and ivory tower browbeating attitude towards anyone who is perceived to land on the opposite side of that dialectic is Very Good
Okay this is my last comment in this thread, I swear. It almost doesn’t count, it’s just an addendum to my own comment really
I agree. It’s kinda comical how we can objectively mock the “I depicted myself as the chad and you as the soyjack” tendencies of other online forums, but then immediately revert to “I have depicted myself as the grass toucher and you as the online weirdo” arguments. It’s the worst when people start listing their leftist credentials (at least one of our mods is heavily active in organising lots of direct action stuff, so it’s not like being online has lots of correlations to being able or unable to do other stuff.)
There’s been quite a few discussions related to this tendency. Early chapo had a group of users who were miffed at the crass tendencies of the website, because it ruined what they saw as fertile grounds for organizing more serious things. It was from this group the “we need to distance ourselves from chapotraphouse” idea came from, as far as I am aware anyway.
Personally I don’t really see the website as anything super serious. The biggest potential it has is as agitprop and I think it would be cool if it could grow in size and influence, but I don’t think that has a lot of relation to wether or not we have a comm called chapotraphouse… This got away from me, I forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. I hope this was somewhat coherent.I think that the primary contradiction of Hexbear is grass touching vs non-grass-touching
There’s a blurry line of performative grass touching that makes that contradiction hard to read sometimes, which is “the person I disagree with and don’t like must touch grass which will banish their bad opinions,” which is technically if temporarily true because if that magic phrase worked, the bad opinion haver becomes absent for a time.
/srs That’s exactly my point, if you’re on this site you’re already not touching grass lol. The fact that a huge number of our struggle sessions are based on that contradiction is ridiculous because being on this site already proves you’re way more online than you seem to think you are.
Oh, I see now.
Yeah, whenever “touch grass” is said as a thought terminating cliche it’s almost always from another power user that just wants to stand alone on top of posting hill.
A certain mod on chapo gave me a temp ban with “touch grass” before deleting not only my posts in the thread, but unrelated posts I made that day because I lost my patience with them wanting to shoot people over property.
Much easier to stand on the hill instead of doing the self-crit about why there was a need to kill strangers or how that rhetoric results in kids getting shot because they rang the wrong doorbell.
HUH
My problem is you really can’t effectively campaign for Kamala and acknowledge the genocide. You’ll see many liberals try to thread this needle but then their campaign slogan is “vote for the lesser genocide” which really self defeating. Eventually they’ll get sucked into genocide apologia or even denialism out of convienice. When that happens, fuck em. For the ones that keep trying to thread the needle, I’ll keep asking them why they are so invested in electoralism.
Might need to start shifting from using the term “voting” to “electoralism” instead.
Maybe some of these libs will learn the difference.
I ran into someone recently who was all smug about voting, asking me, “Did you vote?” Yet, he was completely unaware of the local ballot items. This is due to the stupid national campaigns that emphasize just showing up to vote without understanding the stakes at the local level. No local organizations were strong enough to educate him on the harmful propositions, showing just how unorganized the left is. We’ve all seen good local efforts get crushed by capitalism, and even sensible ballot votes get overturned by state legislatures or vetoed. I recognize that there’s no winning through pure electoralism alone and that non-swing state presidential votes do not matter. If you’ve got time, maybe it’s still worth voting on down ballot stuff and following advice from your best local leftist org.
As someone heavily involved in
's presidential campaign, I can say that OP’s position is much closer to the official campaign than people disagreeing. By that I mean we are not particularly interested in how people vote, but in using the campaign to reach people and engage them in politics outside the electoral. Our campaign is a vehicle to big swathes of desperate and disconnected people who think of politics in purely electoral terms - whether that’s that we have to vote for the lesser of two evils or that the failure of voting to fix societal issues means there is no path forward.We know that when we go out and canvass, we’re going to interact almost entirely with people who are not ideologically committed leftists. The phase of organizing in the US demands that our work be focused on finding and bringing in people who are not aware of the necessity or existence of a vanguard working class party and convince them that their vote is only an extremely small part of their potential political engagement and the general path to fixing this rotten country.
Therefore, we always have to approach people empathetically, understanding their position so that we can move them towards revolutionary socialist politics. That requires us not to denounce Kamala voters as Hitlerites in training.
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