I understand why you’re frustrated, but you’ve got to realize that the presence of resources that can break you out of bad thinking doesn’t mean it’s easy to break out of bad thinking, nor does it absolve those who duped you into the bad thinking in the first place. Cults work for a reason.

Just as an example, consider how hard it is to:

• Find time to learn when you’re struggling to work enough to afford rent
• Find a way to learn that works for you if you’re disabled
• Consider your thinking to be in need of challenge when everyone you listen to tells you otherwise, and you trust them
• Listen to opposing viewpoints when you have thorough hatred for the people telling you them

This is just a smattering of ways a path out of broken thinking can be more fraught than it looks. There are plenty more, so even in cases where these specific ones don’t apply, that doesn’t mean the person in question is intentionally ignorant or malicious.

If you’re angry, be angry. I don’t judge that whatsoever. I only ask that you be angry at the people deliberately trying to make everything worse, rather than the those who they’re tricking. Get mad at the influencers, not the audience.

Very good post. I appreciate the time, effort and insight that went into this as well as and especially the fact that it is advocating for understanding others and seeing why they do what they do without accusations. Thank you for the write-up!

I had more I wanted to say on this topic when I first read it, but at the time I also had more energy. Had I not had other obligations, I would’ve written out my more detailed thoughts then. As it is, however, I’ll have to settle for the (relative) shortform, as I find this thread exhausting from the outset and the sheer quantity of incredibly angry back-and-forth here has only made it worse.

To suffice the ideas of mine that I still remember, then:

• I have a feeling that while you may not consider me specifically to be a “cuckoo,” that this post was still partially aimed at people like myself, since I’ve spent a fair chunk of time arguing to the immense faults of the Democrat Party, some of which was in discussion with you.
• If the above is true, I feel dehumanized and find this topic incredibly depressing.
• Regardless of the above, I find jumping to assumptions of bad faith on the part of those with whom you disagree on this topic understandable, but needlessly conspiratorial.

But to end my comment, I’d like to point out an area on which you and I can find common ground: Your point of “Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism” suggests you feel that the people arguing against voting / the Democrat Party are doing a poor job of offering alternative solutions. On this, I agree. Solutions for that scenario are hard to come by and often complicated, and where people do have things to suggest a portion of them are very flawed; voting Green, not voting, and the occasional implicit suggestion for violence, etc. All of those have huge problems that I know I don’t need to explain to you.

For that, all I can say is that I agree that leftists can do better and should. I’ve seen the good suggestions before. Things like mutual aid, education, organizing, joining events — all of these are very useful things that are significantly more important than one vote in a broken electoral system. Unfortunately, as you’ve noticed, frustrated and angry people tend to be bad at mentioning these things.

I only ask that you consider that these people are frustrated, angry, and restless, rather than actively fake.

the only real “leftist infighting” I’ve ever really come across.

gestures wildly at the thread we’re in

I don’t think it’s just tankies doing it!

I think it’s a very common belief amongst forums like these to look to logical fallacies to root out dishonest behavior, in the hopes that it’ll provide a nice and easy way to deduce when someone’s a grifter. That you can tell if someone’s a liar – or for that matter, real – by applying them sufficiently.

The problem is, humans are fallible. They fuck up. Innocently. Constantly. It’s normal to make fallacious arguments, and doing so should not cause you to be automatically marked off as a robot, troll or spy. Some examples for your given fallacies:

• Oversimplification can also occur if someone is tired and does not want to go into rigorous academic detail for their argument. Alternatively, they may simply not know the detail to begin with.
• Genetic fallacy can occur due to simple human anger; if someone feels that their interlocutor has made bad-faith arguments frequently before, they’re inclined to ignore what that individual has to say outright, likely without even reading it. (This one has happened in this thread, several times)
• Strawmen happen all the time and extremely easily, because people will inevitably end up making assumptions about the position of others based on previous discussions they’ve had. If you spend enough time arguing a point and getting response X, you’re going to start assuming that the person you’re talking to about that is implying X, even if they haven’t said it and never intended to.
• Ignoring refutation happens plenty simply when people get defensive. Admitting you’re wrong is hard, and it’s much preferable to instead change the topic or find some other way of pretending you were never disproven of anything. This is inherently a logical leap, and that’s why it leads to often dumber positions.
• With regard to ad nauseam: If someone finds a particular point very convincing and easy to understand for themselves, they may find it confusing as to why you don’t agree on it. This can lead to them repeatedly trying to explain it more thoroughly and in different words under the assumption that the way they said it was why you didn’t get it. I’ve done this a lot in my past.

With those examples out of the way, I just want to emphasize the fact that you should never pretend the presence of logical fallacies is a guarantee of bad faith, much less use it to dehumanize others. If we let ourselves do that, we’ll all tear each other apart under the mistaken assumption that we’re rooting out an evil that has no promise of even being present at all. To err is human.

I agree. My problem now is that people like Tlaib were who I looked to for how things could change, and yet here they are enabling worse instead of fighting for better. I can’t square that circle, and it means I’m losing one of the last bastions of hope I had for a better world.

I agree with your second paragraph, and find your third to be understandable (though I would contend that propaganda has been a problem for a long time now and wasn’t made meaningfully worse by tech, just different). Where I lose you completely though is this comment’s first statement.

Neither of your other points stated here back up a lack of empathy. In fact, they counter it, as you’ve provided two far better things to get mad at. I hope you haven’t abandoned empathy because it didn’t change minds, because empathy isn’t supposed to be contingent on getting people to agree with you.

I’m aware. My point was that this wasn’t a majority even besides that. Not sure why you seem to be phrasing this as a counterpoint, though, given that it reinforces my comment?

I said most of what I wanted to say in this comment, but I’d like to take an extra moment here to point out that you are currently making excuses for fascists.

Putting it bluntly, I don’t give a flying fuck how many people voted for Trump – which wasn’t the majority, by the way, since not everyone votes – there is no amount of votes that makes “doing fascism” okay. Trump is not a force of nature. He does not get absolved of blame. This rests on his shoulders more than anyone.

I’m so sick and tired of this gleeful throw-people-under-the-bus attitude that effectively dehumanizes people because they “voted wrong,” as if there aren’t millions of people among Trump’s voterbase who were effectively tricked by an entire network of con-men and grifters. As if there isn’t a giant oil-baron-funded media machine working tirelessly to convince people of a smorgasbord of lies.

I find it disgusting how easily you and others with similar takes will cheer on the suffering of your fellows. And let the Republican Party off scot-free in the process. Because apparently blaming a bunch of people who – let’s be real – by-and-large don’t pay attention to politics is apparently more important than blaming the people who’re deliberately engineering mass suffering. Not to mention how you’re currently partaking in schadenfreude over a problem that’s affecting many people you ostensibly agree with and care about! Everybody in America has to deal with the consequences of this bill!

Nobody in the U.S. voted for censorship or for fascism, save an extraordinarily scant few terrible, terrible people. If you decide that vast swathes of people “deserve this” all because of that few, I don’t think you ever actually wanted to help anyone so much as you wanted an excuse not to have to care.

The thing is, AOC herself spoke out against this bill according to this article. And I really, really want her to explain this one, as much as I do not expect that she will.

I don’t know how in the world I’m expected to have any faith whatsoever in our governance at any level when even our ostensibly most progressive voices aren’t willing to block blatant garbage like this.

Update: Welp, late today this passed the House overwhelmingly, 409-2. The only two nay vote were from Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison.

Hey yeah can anyone fucking explain to me why AOC and Rashida Tlaib voted yes on this dogshit?

She was not an option for vice president.

So that’s the set of options you were talking about, okay then. That was not clear.

In all honesty though, my response was somewhat motivated by the articles’ defense of Shapiro, which felt less than honest considering how poor he is on the grand scale of things regarding the ongoing genocide. Given your response to ranandtoldthat below though I suspect we don’t really disagree much on the Atlantic’s not-so-great reporting on the topic, though.

attacking the least genocide friendly of the options

What options? Who does that set include? Because if we’re talking all Democrats, then I think people like Rashida Tlaib are significantly better than Shapiro. His two wins are “supports a two-state solution” and “strong disdain for Netanyahu.” but beyond that, it’s pretty bad. Personally, I don’t find much faith in his good statements either, since his actual actions are counterproductive to either of those two views.

I made this post three minutes ago???

Many of the comments here provide salient criticism you’ve chosen to ignore. I don’t know why you’re even here anymore if you’re just going to fight everybody and plug your ears when they call you out.

Accusing people of bad faith without reason just because they disagree with you is one of the most disingenuous things you can do.

My opinion of your posts here was already low. This has not helped.

Several months back, we had a user who would post articles about China almost every day, to several places across Lemmy. They did this for months straight, and eventually some other users showed up for a bit just like them. It took a lot of pushback for them to leave.

It was frustrating as hell, because suddenly I 1) couldn’t avoid hearing about China when I went on Beehaw, and 2) started to reflexively ignore any articles about China because I couldn’t trust them anymore. They were almost exclusively negative, they’d get posted ridiculously often, and occasionally they’d just be outright racist in the tried-and-true “we considered this acceptable/ignorable until it happened in China” sense. You don’t listen to people who post like that. Months after they left, I finally started to be able to actually take headlines about China seriously again, and it was nice!

And now here’s you, starting up almost the exact same posting pattern those users had. I don’t know if there’s a Lemmy instance somewhere that just has a bunch of folks like you and you keep wandering over here, or if you’re one of those users back with new account. I barely care which it is. I just really don’t want this shit back.

Please go find a hobby.

A statement issued by the Chinese Film Administration (CFA) on Thursday, which we’ve translated using Google,

I’m sorry, what? Is machine translation considered valid journalism now? I’m not saying the translation was outright wrong, but Christ this is sloppy.

definitely isn’t permission for the administration to deport anyone they want with no due process.

I suspect this administration will do it anyways.