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.
“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
That’s why
has been refining the art of taking things away slowly.Theyre very good at it
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
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
when people show you they don’t care about genocide, believe them
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.
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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.
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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.)
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
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.
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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.
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The US presidential election is a sham election even by the standards of bourgeois elections, so voting doesn’t matter in the end. But just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it reflects well on someone who casts their ballot for the current genocider. It’s like if someone upvotes a reactionary comment or post on Hexbear. The impact is practically nil, but they still would need to be reeducated and banned if they refused to self-crit. A major moment in the history of this website is transphobes getting banned for upvoting transphobic content. Imagine if they tried pulling some “uh aktually, this is a niche website. There’s no material impact for my upvote. It doesn’t meaningfully combat transphobia” excuse.
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Liberals will betray leftists per usual when the time comes, so at a basic level, I don’t see the point of caring about liberals outside of being prepared enough to anticipate and make moves against the inevitable betrayal. As far as the US is concerned, more than half of the populace do not vote at all and it’s higher for marginalized communities. This is fertile soil for radicalization. They on some intuitive level are politically conscious enough to recognize the pony show for what it really is, and they are just begging for someone, anyone to show them the light. Why waste time and energy on some Harris-voting freak when the politically disenfranchised are just standing right there?
In the same way a fascist doesnt support self id for trans people, I dont believe in self id for fascists, sorry
Correct. If I vote non Harris I fear trump will be elected which would be a faster and stronger genocide. I’m not voting because I’m okay with genocide. I’m voting to try to mitigate as much damage as I can in my power without creating an exceptionally higher amount of risk by voting how I actually want too.
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Lmfao. You live in a funny reality friend. Gaslight someone else with that stuff.
Unlimited “faster and stronger genocide” on liberals
You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize.
I don’t hate humanity, I hate people who want to officially cosign a modern Holocaust.
Legitimate question, would you feel this way if someone told you they hated German Nazis who lived in and supported Germany during and in the lead up to WW2?
Because the moral calculus is identical.
We’re talking about people who support the modern equivalent of Hitler.
moral calculus
There’s your problem. Marxists are not moralists. Westerners are all already complicit and voting is meaningless. What matters is doing whatever is practical to actually support Palestine.
Being kind to tryptamine was not going to help any Palestinians.
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Sorry is “intentionally evil” something we care about or not? Seems like intention and good vs evil are valid or invalid modes of thought depending on what’s currently most useful for the “kid gloves for modern Nazis” crowd in here.
I’m going to restate my top level comment: you should be using the same standard for these people as pro Nazi Germans during the Third Reich.
People like tryptamine are fully aware that Harris is complicit in the modern Holocaust, know that they’re cosigning her actions and find a way to justify that to themselves.
On Hexbear of all places, I’m not going to let that stand without telling them to die.
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Mea culpa: I misread your comment as saying it wasn’t justified.
Sorry for the unwarranted tone, I get heated easily regarding this topic.
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I’m of two minds about this and while I agree with you mostly I do take a bit of an issue here
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.
I don’t think anyone is serious about wanting to kill all libs, I can’t speak for everyone but when it’s coming from me it’s clearly hyperbole because I’m just yapping
I think libs should be treated as individuals, there’s a nice old boomer lady who feels genuinely scared of another Trump term who I’m completely kind and civil to because she’s out with us every week protesting the genocide, I can see that she genuinely cares and we don’t try to vote shame each other
Now on the other hand that old boomer dude I’ve never seen before who showed up at our protest last week to campaign for Holocaust Harris and vote shame us got none of that kindness or civility from me because he didn’t fucking deserve it, frankly I regret not being a bigger dick to him
Online it’s the same way, if they’re trying to scold us I’m going to tell them how I feel and I’m going to tell them that there’s blood on their hands
You are right that it doesn’t matter
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
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
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.
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
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Are you serious?
I don’t mind people voting for liberal candidates if they’re otherwise struggling, lost, and/or confused and need to feel like they’re doing something, for lack of understanding of the nature of organizing collective action. If it’s a little peace of mind, okay, they deserve it.
What offends me about electoralism are the people who speak of the act of voting in moral terms.
