online leftist
Important things happen offline, online is more or less a distraction.
I don’t know if that’s really true anymore. Or, maybe more accurately, I think we’re in between when that was true in the pre-social media age and when it’ll be true again after the social web breathes its last. There are just too many ways that megacorps, bad actors, and foreign agents can manipulate offline activity with online action.
Some of those things are manipulating small groups into large-scale action (see: Qanon), but misinformation and meme warfare also have a measurable effect on election, direct action, etc. Not to mention that local organization is best done online, and that has a very real effect.
Now, is offline action more important than online action? Absolutely, and if you’re saying that being an “online leftist” (as an identity) is a distraction, I think I agree with you. But online action is more than just a distraction, and to ignore it is probably counterproductive.
Trump is literally a 4chan meme gone too far, homie.
still had to happen offline yes?
Yes, but they are inextricably influencing each other. Both are subsets of reality.
Simpsons did it first
How? You banned most of the guns, and most of you are anti gun to begin with. Shit, I’d be banned on Reddit just for typing that out. I’m not advocating violence, I just don’t see any other way to actually affect change at this point.
Do you think we’ll actually get fair elections going forward? The last one might not have been, there’s a lawsuit and everything. I sure don’t think we will.
I agree with the sentiment of the post but I don’t see WTF else we can collectively do about it.
I will admit that the No Kings protests across the nation gave me a little hope, at least.
“Banned most of the guns” 😂
Jesus mate, ever wonder why you get banned for saying something as demonstrably false as this?
I fucking wish we banned any of the guns, why do you people just blatantly make shit up as if nobody would notice?
The easiest and simplest thing you can do is volunteer at your local food shelter. If you truly want to act. Feed people.
That isn’t doing something within the concept of changing stuff tho
How about stop doing the easy things?
Or we could just continue to argue and virtue signal on the internet, kinda like what you are doing now. It’s zero percent helpful. Go be too cool somewhere else.
Need more rope, preferably hemp.
You can do easy stuff and hard stuff at the same time! It’s cool!
I spent a bunch of time in such spaces before the election and was shocked how much time and energy was squandered with virtue signaling and purity testing. There was literally no room for anything else in some of them.
There’s nothing wrong with encouraging others to be better versions of themselves. The problem is many people aren’t capable of doing so without being toxic AF.
the other problem with leftist spaces online is a general intolerance to trolls
What is the value of tolerating trolls?
preventing them from joining the opposition
Yeah, good point. I agree that calling-in is better than calling-out, when it seems viable. There’s always the trade-off with how much energy you have available though.
Or rather the “I don’t agree with you therefore you’re a troll”
The ONLY time I’ve been muted by anyone was on the Fediverse 😅 (Still can’t wrap my head around how petty the argument was…)
And it’s even worse when that person is an instance admin or community mod of a pretty big place
And sometimes those people will even destroy active progress because it doesn’t meet their definition of perfect.
Online leftists will destroy something because it’s not 100% of what they want, disregarding the 50-60% that would be what they want.
learned helplessness!
Or malicious purity testing.
This one is fun because it could be both about tankies and actual leftists depending on what you believe in.
Oh it’s definitely leftists in general
Nah.
Because you’re the one in the meme you just don’t realize it
Because I don’t call tankies leftist?
Go away troll bait bot.
But doing nothing wrong is the greatest right you can do, no?
Perfect is the enemy of progress
Doing nothing wrong is doing nothing, period.
Immorality is not a requirement of success.
Guess we know where you sit on the Trolley Problem spectrum :P
I would say largest problem with leftist spaces is a little more challenging to identify; it’s that leftists are broadly intellectuals or at least identify as intellectual because of effort they put into honoring nuance. And the primary opponent of leftists are conservatives, and they are proudly not intellectual and view people who use the lens of intellectualism and nuance as weak or elitist.
Because it’s incredibly difficult to have any kind of meaningful intellectual debate with your opponents, we have all retreated to our safe-spaces and online bubbles, our discord groups and algorithm-driven feeds. We don’t even walk in the same environments or view the same media anymore,
So in order for people on the left to feel any kind of satisfaction and feel like their mental strength actually has a use, they find someone else who is ostensibly on the left and attack something that person said or did which they feel does not represent their own leftist values.
Our eternal, infernal infighting problem is because we have an army of head-warriors who have no heads to butt against. Even if there were people on the right willing to have intellectual debates, they’re not even in the same talking-space anymore. The only place you can go to have debates are contentious battleground where nobody is even arguing in good faith and just screaming their talking points for audience upvotes. So leftists, being humans, take the easy path and turn on each other to feel like they’re making any progress or are involved at all in making things better.
On the right it’s much easier to feel like you’re part of the movement or doing something for your group, all you have to do is buy a gun or stockpile trumpcoins and canned food or harass someone or get drunk and scream about minorities. It’s mindless and pointless but it feels like action. And sadly, more and more people are being turned away by this kind of mental effort and emotional labor of “doing the right thing” so they’re getting sucked in by the mindless orcs who have more fun and have easier victory conditions.
it’s that leftists are broadly intellectuals
I used to think this. Then everyone came out about how Kamala didn’t get them excited, aka appeal to their emotions. When I pointed this out and that they weren’t thinking logically and instead relying on emotions they frankly agreed, saying something something not a robot. And there were proud of it.
Is being an intellectual mutually exclusive with having emotions? Because as far as I know all people have emotions…
If you let your emotions dictate your thoughts and actions, I have bad news for you.
Bro, you do it too, you just don’t admit it to yourself.
Yeah that’s what I thought, you’re exhibit A.
🤷
Modern psychology and neuroscience agrees with me. Eg. https://neurosciencenews.com/emotion-reason-decision-making-25803/
Or have a read of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow if you want something a bit deeper.
The human brain is packed full of inescapable cognitive biases, many of which relate to emotions. They occur just as much for you as for me, and ignoring them or denying them just makes the problem worse.
emotions, as demonstrated in his wine tasting study
Lololololololol. Whatever you’re trying to say it’s based on wine tasting. Lolololololol.
My last message to you is: go ahead and cry during old yeller. When it comes to politics, think.
I agree, even the notion that the left is more “intellectual” is surface-level only, you can just as easily be someone who thinks but uses those thoughts to validate feelings over shared reality. We do a very bad job broadly of understanding or recognizing our own cognitive biases and dissonances, and the left is just as stupid as the right about a great many things. This isn’t to take the position of the enlightened centrist, but instead the need to remind people that this isn’t WWE, and we’re not actually choosing sides, we’re trying to uphold values and principles that others happen to share. We want good outcomes for everyone, not specific outcomes for specific people.
Even if we solved all our issues tomorrow and removed the republican leadership from politics entirely, we would still have to share a country with them the next day, and how rapidly would we become the thing we hate as we work to punish them or ignore them until they reach a breaking point? We are doomed to repeat history over and over because we cannot separate ourselves from our survival instincts and feelings, and we have fantastic brains that will spin narratives to justify our feelings about anything, from the most mundane decisions about lunch, to genocide.
it’s that leftists are broadly intellectuals or at least identify as intellectual because of effort they put into honoring nuance
Nah. It’s just that they believe they are better and have huge confirmation bias. You’re not with them? You’re an enemy and should be banned because you’re a troll.
Can’t we just fucking have a place where everyone is free to speak? Circlejerks are cringe
That’s not a “nah” that’s an addition, people make their social identities and then challenge those who aren’t part of that social identity. This is why any ingroup is a circlejerk without management.
I wouldn’t call that challenging but rather censorship and exclusion/discrimination
Special shoutouts to lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, hexbear and blahaj
I had an interaction once where I thought I used double quotes around a word to imply something obvious related to the posted article. A random person got mad at me and claimed I knew nothing about solidarity.
I felt insulted, they didn’t know my life experiences up to that point. I chose to ignore my feelings and pressed them to teach my why I was so wrong. They eventually disappeared from replies because they had nothing behind that image of righteousness. Rare win but I’ll take it.
If someone put themselves in harms way to punch an authoritarian follower in the face in my defence and also uses slurs I could find offensive to myself, that’s not my enemy. That’s someone awesome who could use a little more education. Later. When the current situation isn’t so wild.
Words are just words. That’s not as effective as punching a fascist in face.
We are really lacking in fascist faces punched these days, no one can have a civil conversation without them screeching and throwing shit
Reminded me of an old meme I saw in like 2009.
CW homophobic slur
Also a content warning for a couple slurs, but the point from Patton Oswalt a while back is roughly the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c
obviously a trap set by bougie liberals to try and get me to vote for a Democrat.
but i’m too smart for them
The only thing more important than “do nothing wrong” is to loudly correct those who are doing “almost right” and “in the right direction.”
I think it’s a tossup between “loudly correct” and “vilify as a disappointing libshit.”
I have referenced this post so many times but was never able to find it so thanks
