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.”
No improving the current system allowed!
This is what I’ve been saying. The gatekeeping is unreal. How the fuck are we supposed to grow as a movement if we can’t accept those who maybe did and/or said some questionable shit in the past? If someone is trying to make positive changes and is demonstrating it with their actions and/or words than we should accept them. I guarantee the vast majority of you here have said or did something that goes against your current beliefs.
Gatekeeping, purity testing, virtue signaling, and no self accountability. These are the four reasons why every leftist space outside of the center left is a complete and utter joke. These traits are cultural in left wing spaces, and they are very common. They are so common that they’ll never be going away and they are the root reasons why the left will NEVER accomplish anything substantial during my lifetime.
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.
An alarming number of leftists are not revolutionaries but dictators without power.
some people are all ‘the system is broken’ and other people are like ‘the system is working exactly as intended’ and im just screaming ‘DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT VOTE IN THE LAST ELECTION?’
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.
I don’t usually participate in communities of my interest, like vegan, communist, anarchist, etc. because I know I don’t agree a 100% and that there will always be people that think are better than others or that have a lot more time to spend on activism than me. But all my friends know I never back down when discussing important topics with anyone, I always tell them that I will take the time to discuss with people they don’t like, like weird conservatives and other uncomfortable groups (which have a big presence where I study).
I usually can recognize when someone is close to being more left-leaning than what they think they are, and I take the time to talk to them about it, which a lot of leftist communities don’t (at least from what I’ve seen). Yes, there are trolls, but usually when talking in person, they aren’t that stupid.
Sometimes it feels like people are worse to people that almost agree with them than they are to people who are completely at odds with them.
Great now we get to argue what nothing and something is…
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.
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
We are really lacking in fascist faces punched these days, no one can have a civil conversation without them screeching and throwing shit
Every time I see the idiots calling for abolishment of the police, I never see anything remotely approaching a viable replacement for what they should be doing.
We’re not solving murder, rape, burglaries, drunk driving, general assaults, etc overnight. And we’re certainly not within a five year plan of solving those things either.
So yeah, hardline abolishment fanatics can shove off. Come back with actual solutions, even if they arent perfect, thanks.
To be fair cops arent solving those problems either. also theres plenty of essays around the nuances of this subject for you to explore and analyze if you look it up… not that we’re all depending on you and your validation anyway
These aren’t solvable problems, they will always exist. But while they can’t be solved they can be mitigated. Saying murders happen therefore the concept of having police is wrong is ignoring the fact that there can be more or less murders. Less murders is good even if not perfect.
I think this “do nothing wrong” tendency has something to do with intragroup power dynamics. I’ve often seen it used as a cudgel to knock down others within a group and stop mild dissent even though everyone is on the same team. Usually the most prolific wielder of the “do nothing wrong” cudgel rises to a position of some authority in the group, after which the group fragments because the person is insufferable but unassailable due to their moral superiority.
So…You are saying that mods are, in actual fact , not based ?
HERESY
Very good take.
I complained to a partner once about something they’d done that seemed vaguely unethical (by my understanding of their ethics). After they apologised, I was still upset, and they said “maybe I’m a little bit shit, just like everyone else.”
That really stuck with me. People (including myself) are often OK with accepting imperfections in other people in some spaces, but not in others. It’s pretty weird… Life is messy, even the bits that seems straightforward. And no one has a perfect understanding of any situation…
I haved discussions with others here where its people are just not happy with baby steps and want full change right away. Problem is we need to make more friends not enemies with each other.
I’ve started to make a habit on the internet to make amends and give grace to people who get upset in the comments as fast as possible. Textual online spaces are seemingly quite prone to disagreement, so it’s a huge help just to mindfully counteract that tendency.
Dude your username is amazing.
I worry people find it distracting, but it definitely captures the imagination
Well easy for you my brave little Hitachi wand! Who can stay angry at you!
It helps if you’re fun.
Ball big. Need lots of hands. Take long time move. Come. Help. Roll big ball with us.
Also, we don’t actually know which way we need to roll it. Some people have strong ideas, other understand the vague direction but there’s lots of invisible obstacles strewn across the landscape, and whenever we hit one there are a hundred different people with a thousand different explanations about what the fuck just happened.
It bothers me that I see genocide trivialize so often, like implying it’s a full step that needs to wait. The problem is that they would rather take the steps that help Israel commit heinous acts then start with small steps that benefit their constituents.
Stopping the sale of weapons to a apartheid state committing genocide and condemning them is now seen as too much? I can’t expect anything good to come from them if that’s the kind of slack we insist on giving.
They had the same foreign policy every administration since Israel became a country did but some people chose now to get upset about it.
The world is a worse place now because Harris didn’t win.
Biden second term would have be heaven compared to this.
It’s almost like if blatant genocide changes the equation. Honestly, Israel should have lost our support a long time ago. It’s easy to see how deep corruption and most likely black mail had a big role to play.
Yes, the world would be a better place with Harris at the helm. It’s a shame she tried her hardest to lose. FYI, I voted for her but I’m also mature enough to realize that she basically gave all her voters the finger and that’s why she lost.
Keep blaming the evil voters who couldn’t stomach genocide and we will get the exact same play next election. You are enabling, not helping. It’s their job to get votes and care about our opinion ffs.
Single issue voters always make the world a worse place.
I find it crazier that the dems decided to make genocide a voting issue in the first place. Weaponized incompetence, I swear. They could have told Israel to pound sand, but they chose a foreign state over us. They screwed you too man, have a spine.
Yes, but it’s not the ONLY thing going on. Would you let the rest of the world burn to stop genocide in the middle east? I’m guessing not.
So if there is a massive problem that we can’t directly take action to fix, you try to attack the source of the problem or other adjacent problems.
This idea that the Dems need to be fully against it or I’ll never vote for them is naive. If the alternative is WW3 with 10x the deaths or continued genocide I don’t like either but I’m not going to sit on the sidelines while WW3 starts and complain about the dems stance as the reason I didn’t try to prevent it. Maintaining a moral high ground at the expense of people isn’t ok. Yes they could have done a million things better or different, but they didn’t. We had a choice to make with the options we had. Some people rejected reality and ushered in this shit storm so they could keep their concussion clean, it’s selfish. They’d rather have peace of mind than actually prevent suffering, because they had a chance to and didn’t.
There are other people, other children suffering because of Trump that would not have been if Harris won. That’s just fact. Preventing him from getting in office or not, the events in the middle east remain the same, but those other lives impacted could have been prevented. We need to open up our world view and have it grounded in reality.
So if there is a massive problem that we can’t directly take action to fix, you try to attack the source of the problem or other adjacent problems.
I think that is the crux of the issue. I don’t see condemning Israel and stopping the sale of weapons as some massive wall. The dems failed to take action and I’m taking action right now by holding them accountable for it.
The fact is they didn’t even try to solve the issue. Israel themselves admitted to it. I consider it their fault Trump won and even more people have to suffer. I see the constant scapegoating post-election as serving nothing except enabling them.
They need to be told their platform, built on foreign genocide and apathy, is literally atrocious. We need to demand change, not give them an easy way out.
Nah, people who didn’t vote for Harris screwed the world.
Glad to hear you’re not one of them.
but the democrats have to appeal to their zionist money-givers too! it’s difficult for them to strike a balance between the money-givers and the people who are supposed to vote for them.
and the people who should vote for them aren’t directly hit personally by the israel genocide, so why would they care too much about that?
