this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
436 points (89.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35702 readers
2534 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

And I'm being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don't understand it. Can someone please "steelman" that argument for me?

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 22 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

Steelman:

The US is currently a fascist, imperialist state. It has brutalized the global south, indigenous people, and POCs generally since its founding and will continue to do so unless the status quo is disrupted and changed significantly.

The Democratic party supports the same militaristic policies and the same neoliberal economic system that the Republicans do. The primary difference between the parties are various social issues that may make life somewhat better or worse for US citizens, but will never address the core problems of fascism, imperialism, and capitalism. Both parties support and protect the status quo. This status quo only benefits the bourgeois class and rich white people and harms literally hundreds of millions of others around the world.

The Democratic party is the only one of the two major parties that the Left has any degree of leverage over since the Democrats want the Left to vote for them. So, organizing to essentially boycott the Democratic party is a powerful method of protest that could effect real policy change. It is possibly the only effective method of protest left since the US police & surveilance state is cracking down on protests and the Left has no chance protesting violently against the most powerful military the world has ever seen.

The only way to make that threat matter to the Democratic party is to follow through if the demands aren't met, even - or especially - if it means a second Trump term.

The liberal establishment has ignored and abandoned the working class for decades while dangling the carrot of milktoast social democratic reforms that rarely come to pass, but they blame the same people they abandoned for not energetically voting for them. They say it is a moral imperative to vote for them, but they are incapable of bettering the lives of working class people.

Strawman:

It would hurt my feelings too much to vote for COPmala Harm-us. Plus, Trump would let Putin annex Ukraine. Also, I'd risk touching grass if I went outside to participate in bourgeois electoralism. Gross.

Reality:

You can, and should, do more than one thing. Voting for Kamala is effectively playing defense against outright, full-throated fascism a la Mussolini even if you'd still consider the US fascist - it is clearly worse under Republicans. So vote, play defense, AND organize to raise class consciousness, provide mutual aid, protest when possible, and contribute to socialist causes. Letting Trump win would be a bad move. But, ultimately it is not the Left's fault that he won. He won the popular vole and the electoral college vote by a large margin - larger than all third party socialist/socialist-adjacent candidates' votes combined.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 14 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Late but here’s my model of the situation. Sort of a WIP and very new but a /gen effortpost, so I welcome thoughts:

It’s individualism versus collectivism. The collectivist understands intimately the function of working together for the protection and future of the group. There is no doubt in her mind about the practical nature of her actions because she can see them play out in her community. The individualist, by contrast, operates solo; everything for him is about your vote, your candidate. This leads to a divide between the individualist and the material outcomes of his actions. This gap—this absence of practicality, we might call it—leaves a vacuum where symbolism can enter. This becomes a problem not when symbolism is simply encountered by the individualist, but when the symbol becomes the act, when the vote becomes a kind of personal expression, and any thought for collective consequences falls by the wayside.

“Ordinarily,” if we imagine such a thing exists, these two identities intermix and act in a complex and altogether non-problematic way; I don’t wish to imply that individualism is simply “bad” while collective action is “good.” For example, concepts of individualism are fundamental to advancing human rights to consent and bodily autonomy.

However, the setting and background of your question is the USA, a country with deep, deep historical ties to white supremacist, capitalist, colonialist, even fascist values, all of which hold the individual as intrinsic over the collective. The result is that hyperindividualism is catastrophically rooted in the heart of U.S. society—even in progressive and leftist spaces!

So, when you see a pro-Palestinian proclaim abstention or that they voted third party, you are witnessing the complex outcome of genuine compassion intermingled with the values instilled by white supremacy and individualism. And so you hear the phrase, “I just can’t in good conscience vote for XYZ.” To degrees varying between people, the vote loses its material value and becomes nothing more than a symbolic moral statement.

This doesn’t mean the leftist non-voter is a white supremacist, of course! Rather, it’s that they have been deeply affected by the presence of those values in their cultural context and have not yet had the opportunity or experience with group frameworks to question their assumptions and reassert the significant importance of collectivism.

So, in conclusion, the unnuanced TLDR is “because America is a racist capitalist hellhole.” The good news I conclude from this, though, is that collectivism can be learned and promoted. Cultural values are definitely not static, and perhaps with education, support, and time, mindsets among leftists can be shifted to better support the whole of the community.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 17 hours ago

when you are laser focused on a single thing, anything else just slides past you. making life changing decisions with limited information is a uniquely american trait

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

It's not Gaza. It's that the Dems are a party of the riches. They don't represent the poorer anymore. When you have this political shift, you open the doors of the far right.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 22 hours ago (6 children)

Because if it wasn't Gaza, it would have been another excuse to not lift a lazy goddamned finger and still delude themselves into feeling "morally superior"while sitting on their fat mediocre asses at home.

Before Harris, they also leaned heavily on the "Sleepy Joe" bullshit and "two old white men up for election, who cares". Once the old "Sleepy Joe" element was removed from the equation, they had to find a way to keep their goddamned stubbornly lazy and ignorant narrative intact.

Now that the election is over, most of these "concerned and outraged" deadweight assholes will never think about Gaza and the plight of its' people again. And they will keep on feeling smug about themselves.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

I'm not American, and I don't agree with these people either, but I don't think that calling them lazy and ignorant makes any sense. In the fucked up democracy of the US it's clear that the only way to get what you want for the coming 4 years is to vote for the least bad candidate. At the same time I can definitely understand that if you view both candidates was horrible, though one way more horrible than the other, you would feel conflicted about voting for either of them.

Let's do a thought experiment. Assuming both candidates are still roughly equally "popular". If both candidates wanted to start a genocide, but one would want to kill only 50% of the amount of innocents that the other would kill, how would you vote? Would you vote for the one who is overall the less bad option, which will in turn make you give your vote for something horrible. Or would you abstain and signal that the democracy as it currently stands has lost your confidence entirely, even if it means that on the short term the consequences might be way worse?

Not voting actually costs the democrats something, and should (if they want to win next time) force them to think how to better represent you next time.

It's fucked up that your democracy came to this. It has become an annoying game theory dilemma instead of voting for the candidate that you actually believe in. Our system here in the Netherlands is certainly also not perfect, since we have too many parties and too long coalition negotiations, but at least I feel like it represents people way better. Anyone can start a party and capture seat if they represent a large enough niche.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I know one of those people. they are now angry the left lost... 🙄

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

I said the same thing about people like you before the election, and I'll repeat it again. The laser focus on single issue voters was and will always be mostly an excuse to blame someone else.

To look at it another way, if this one issue actually decided the election, why didn't Harris change her strategy two months ago? ... Maybe it's because this wasn't the determining issue. Or it was, and her staff was incompetent. Take your pick.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›