This does not mean that attacking/defaming people is ok, just that “I don’t like this” or “this is insensitive” should never be brought up against the existence of a work of fiction.
Should any critiques be levelled at fictional works, then? If a work has a character that’s an insensitive racial stereotype, am I allowed to criticize the character, not for being an offensive stereotype, but for being one-dimensional and poorly written? If so, why, exactly?
Exact same discourse as 2016, actually, just replace, “tankies” with “Bernie bros.” Except the left did largely fall in line and still got blamed for it constantly.
We are still trapped in 2016 and doomed to have this eternal debate over whether to punch up at politicians or down at voters, whether campaigns have a responsibility to represent the wishes of their constituents or whether the constituents have a responsibility to drop all red lines and moral convictions and fall in line behind the lesser evil.
“We can’t allow you to transition because you’re not old enough to make a decision that could cause irreparable damage that you might regret later, but have you considered killing yourself?” is the insane nightmare scenario that we’re headed to.
From the UK (recommendations for a proposed law), “Doctors can bring up AS [assisted suicide] before the patient has mentioned it, including under 18.” They sure as hell can’t do that for HRT. Call me crazy, but if you’re old enough for a doctor to suggest suicide, you’re old enough to trans your gender.
People will say they hate eugenics but then just argue for the same concept under a different term. Anyone who agrees with this should read Eugenics and Other Evils by G.K. Chesterton, where he criticizes and refutes the idea of giving the state authority of who can have kids when.
I’m saying I observed a lack of anti-Trump sentiment in the run up to the election RELATIVE to the anti-Harris rhetoric. That is all. Lack of “anti” sentiment DOES NOT EQUAL “pro” sentiment.
You’re correct. I’ve posited a couple theories trying to make sense of the imbalance of critiques and that is one of them.
This is such an arbitrary distinction that it’s not worth acknowledging. Your accusation is that we showed preferential treatment towards Trump, that we were pro-Trump relative to Kamala, that we preferred Trump over Kamala. That is what I mean when I say, “Pro-Trump.”
That’s a perfectly reasonable viewpoint. What I don’t understand, then, is that MLs opposition to Biden and Harris were also understood, yet it was reiterated again and again.
Because while it was understood, there were a lot of people who did not agree.
The general argument happening all over the place was whether Kamala was significantly better than Trump to the point of being worth voting for. Those who said she was focused on how bad Trump was in order to convince people of their thesis, those who said she wasn’t focused more on how bad Kamala was in order to prove their thesis. Naturally. Is that really so hard to understand?
If my position is that candidates X and Y are both unacceptable, and a bunch of people are trying to convince me to vote for candidate X, then naturally they’re going to focus on criticizing candidate Y to show how much worse they are, and I’m going to focus on criticizing candidate X to show why I don’t like either of them. That in no way implies that I support candidate Y, and if a bunch of people tried to convince me to support candidate Y, I’d change the focus of my criticism to that candidate instead.
Being able to remember exactly which approximately 7 month old post it was and dredge up the exact comment is a tall order.
I hadn’t heard about it. Is anyone talking about it on here? Was there a big post I missed?
That is indeed bad, but I’m still just a little bit more concerned with my own country giving them a bunch of weapons than with a small country half the world away where I have no input on what they do not cleaning up our mess. Would you like me to write him a strongly worded letter or something?
This does not mean ml is pro-Trump. I am not claiming and never claimed ml is pro-Trump. I’m not saying that I saw pro-Trump content. It was just this weird black hole of direct criticism surrounding him. Now, this was all in the lead up to the US election, so I’m happy to see that perhaps this has changed (based on your links).
It just seemed, at least during the election, the point was more to destabilize than to actually further leftist ideals.
I don’t have a lot of patience for this style of communication. If you have something to say, say it. You’re just accusing us of shit while dancing around it and acting all “Who, me? Why, I would never suggest such a thing,” while plainly suggesting it. The accusation that you’re trying to get people to believe is that .ml gave preferential treatment to Trump with the intent of helping him to win and cause instability. So stop trying to split hairs and pretend that you’re not accusing us of being pro-Trump and say it to my face.
You tried to generalize it back to puppy murder. Those two things are not equivalent. Let’s ditch the analogy.
The analogy is valid, so no, let’s not.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying it’s good enough to criticize the bad actions the US is taking without having to denounce each and every bad actor and I mostly agree.
No, this isn’t what I’m saying. Please read what I said again.
What I’m saying is that our opposition to Trump is already understood so there’s not really a lot of reason to just reiterate it over and over, with everyone agreeing with each other. That’s not how discourse works. Uncontroversial, mutually understood points are boring and unnecessary to repeat.
We do, of course, denounce Trump. You know, when it comes up. The same way, if you ask me if grass is green, I’ll tell you yes, but I’m not just going to walk up to you and go, “Hello, grass is green.” I assume that since that analogy doesn’t help your conclusion, it’s a “false equivalence” and you’ll say we should “just ditch it.”
I saw people trying to get commentors to say one bad thing about Trump and they just wouldn’t do it.
Did you now? I’d love to see a link to that. My standard is, “If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.”
constant right moves the DNC will be the less radical right party.
I don’t believe it works that way, if it did, Kamala and Clinton would’ve both won. The DNC is already the less radical right party.
The problem is that voters are more complex than a fixed point on a left/right axis that votes for whoever’s closer to them. For instance, when Democrats pivoted to the right on immigration and tried to pass themselves off as border hawks, what happened was that they threw away a moral argument that they had previously used to criticize the Republicans. People didn’t say, “Oh, now that the Democrats have come around on immigration, I’ll vote for them,” they said, “You were calling them racist over this not long ago, but now you’re adopting the same stance? So the Republicans were right and your criticism was opportunistic and full of shit. Why should I trust your criticism of them on other points?” They actually tried to criticize the Republicans from the right on the issue, citing the fact that the Republicans didn’t go along with Biden’s anti-immigration bill and saying, “We’re the ones who actually want to secure the border, they’re all talk.” Nobody really bought it, and ofc if you were pro-immigration you were expected to still vote Democrat since it’s taken for granted that they’re the “lesser evil.” Meanwhile, this led to a collapse in support among Hispanics, many of whom were willing to support the Democratic party on the basis that Trump’s anti-immigration stance was racist, but when the Democrats shifted right on that issue, many didn’t see a significant difference on that front and voted Republican because they were more aligned on other, cultural issues.
3 stock market crashes with gop presidents in 20 years, measles out breaks, and I suspect stronger hurricanes etc, they cant keep it up.
I don’t have that much faith in the average voter. The democrats will have an advantage in the next presidential election (although they could fuck it up), but after that, like 7 years from now, people won’t remember or care - just like they didn’t care enough about Trump’s first term to not elect him again.
I mean, that’s the way it works with a two party system where they both suck. People see the Republicans sucking and turn to the Democrats because they’re the only other option. Then they see the Democrats sucking and turn to the Republicans because they’re the only other option. You can’t just rely on the other side being bad because if they’re not in charge, people will forget how bad they are. You have to go all the way back to Reagan and H.W. to find a time with two consecutive presidents of the same party - and recently, people haven’t even been going for incumbents, it’s been switching back and forth every four years.
My perspective on what rights are and how they work sometimes has people looking at me like I’m literally the devil. But it’s really not that crazy.
First off, rights aren’t absolute and have to be balanced against each other. Spend an hour or two following along with mundane SCOTUS cases and you’ll see all kinds of examples where two reasonable principles come in conflict with each other and it’s not immediately apparent which one should take precedence. I would actually argue that, if you want to treat principles as absolutes, you only get one, because any two concievable principles can (at least theoretically) come into conflict with each other. You can’t serve two masters.
Moreover, what rights actually are are a theory about maintaining order and keeping people satisfied and content. The theory goes that people were reasonably content in a “state of nature” and that if they become discontent in civilization, it must be because they’re lacking something that they would have naturally had. As a general rule, it works well enough - but viewing it this way means that you’re viewing rights as a means to an end, rather than an end of itself, which is a very important distinction. What that means is that if you’re in a situation where you have to choose between upholding rights and the end goal that rights are meant to achieve, then it makes sense to prioritize that end.
Again, something that makes people look at me like a demon (or call me a “tankie”), but like, there was a point in the Civil War where Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in response to the genuine, existential threat posed by the Confederacy, and it was probably necessary for him to do so, or at the very least he had good reason to think it was.
The well of discourse on this subject has been poisoned by politicians leveraging imaginary threats for self-interested purposes, and the fact that we in the first world are so used to basic security that we take it for granted. Certainly, there’s plenty of people who say, “The ends justify the means,” but who aren’t really following that principle, they just want to do illegal things for other reasons, like torture being motivated by cruelty, hatred, or revenge but justified on the pretense of extracting information to save lives.
However, just because people use imaginary/exaggerated threats like that, that’s no reason to think real existential threats don’t exist for anyone ever. And when you’re facing a legitimate existential threat, all bets are off, you should give it 100% and do whatever it takes to survive and win. If you’re not prepared to do that, you should give up the fight and walk away. Otherwise, how can you ask others to lay down their lives while you’re pulling your punches, just to feel good about yourself? A guilty conscience is a small price to pay.
Somehow, we’ve got all these people with martyr complexes who have got everything mixed up, that your job as a moral agent is about serving these abstract moral principles as an end to itself, rather than your job being to do the things that lead to the best outcomes and the principles being guidelines that generally, but not always, help you find that course of action. It at least makes sense if you believe following those principles will get you into heaven, but many people still act as though that was their chief concern even without believing in such an afterlife.
Honestly I don’t understand the logic of that approach at all. What makes you think the GOP will eventually become nonviable? I feel like people making this argument in the past relied on the assumption that young people and minorities would always be consistent democratic voters, but that hasn’t held up, because they blew it. If you recognize them as being shit, then what gives you the confidence in them to think that they’ll achieve total political dominance?
If that plan doesnt sit well with you please vote third party. Its a drop in bucket but oceans are made of drops.
I do, and I appreciate you respecting this choice.
You attacked the idea that ml is pro-Trump (which I never claimed).
I never saw one that was explicitly anti-Trump. I assumed because he is very pro-Putin.
Right. So you said that the reason that you didn’t see anti-Trump content on .ml is because he’s pro-Putin, but how could I possibly interpret that as you claiming that .ml was pro-Trump?
then said I missed the point of the analogy (with a terrible false-equivalence).
It’s not a “false-equivalence.” You can’t just drop “false-equivalence” and dismiss any comparison you don’t like, you have to actually explain why it isn’t equivalent.
People don’t say things that don’t need to be said, and things don’t really need to be said if everyone reading them already agrees with the thing. I don’t go around randomly saying things like, “wood comes from trees,” or, “the sun is hot,” or, “puppy murder is bad.” That doesn’t imply that I think wood doesn’t come from trees or that I think the sun is cold or that murdering puppies is good, and if anyone came around saying any of those things, I would very firmly correct them on it.
What you’re trying to claim is that us not circlejerking about Trump being bad - something that’s already widely agreed upon in our spaces - means that we’re pro-Trump. Oh, excuse me, your claim isn’t that we’re pro-Trump, it’s that we give preferential treatment to Trump because he’s pro-Putin, important distinction 🙄. The same logic could be used to argue that we - or .world, or any other instance or community - is pro-puppy murder because there aren’t enough posts denouncing it (even though if anyone who was actually pro-puppy murder came around they’d be banned immediately).
P.S. I haven’t been on ml in a few months. If there are any anti-Trump posts, I would love to read them. I could be way off base here.
Like bruh try won’t learn but let’s get rid of Satan/Hitler first. And ill be first to turn on them.
The democrats have literally funded far-right republican candidates because they know you’re operating on this logic. Trump himself was part of this “pied piper” strategy.
Should any critiques be levelled at fictional works, then? If a work has a character that’s an insensitive racial stereotype, am I allowed to criticize the character, not for being an offensive stereotype, but for being one-dimensional and poorly written? If so, why, exactly?