You’re talking to people that want to continue rationalizing their tacit, frequently racist support for genocide, and their easiest out has always been to say, “but Trump is worse”. They have never done the introspection required to look at their own personal role as a political being beyond what they’re told to do by the Democratic Party and their donors: slacktivist vote shaming, always presuming the high ground for themselves (even while tolerating genocide!), and doing as little as possible on the ground outside of minor exercises in false catharsis like a cop-escorted, permitted march or an ignored letter writing campaign.
When challenged on this by people on the left that do read and do self-reflect, these are the folks that responded in bad faith, even when the context is genocide, because they have made politics into an extension of their egos rather than a project to which to subordinate yourself and devote real work to.
Whining about .ml is their way of pretending to be vindicated every time Trump does something bad, as they cannot actually argue against what the people in .ml say, they must rely on inventions and emotional implications.
In short, many on .ml vocally opposed supporting genociding Democrats. None that I’m aware of expected Trump to be better. At best, a roll of the dice.
Edit:
Sorry, folks. I failed to consider that this is the home instance of the people being target by this comment.
Just to be clear, I’m not a big .ml fan, I’m just an anarchist who’s never seen this particular gripe of mine worded so nicely.
Yes, precisely. With a handful of rare exceptions I strongly dislike the Democrats. I voted third party for over ten years, and only stopped once the Republicans became so dangerous to make it an urgent matter to try to keep them out of power. I definitely support voting reforms which will make it more realistic to get third parties into power. Really, I think the answer is to get rid of political parties as the unit of political organization, and replace them with politically active unions as used to be the case back when this country wasn’t so fucked. I frequently post stories which accuse the Biden administration of war crimes in their support for Israel.
Often when I have this conversation, someone tells me some variety of “No you don’t. You’re clearly a liberal. I already know everything about you, and you ❤️ Democrats, and you’re lying about it to try to trick me. So I can safely ignore everything you say. Who knows, Trump actually might be better.”
I really am not, and he isn’t, and I think OOP’s type of viewpoint on people like me and what we had to say before and after the election is childish and insulting.
Thanks for sharing; I get your perspective now. I don’t think this comment was about people like you, though. People enjoy boiling things down into a single statement, and it can be hard not to take offense when you’re swept up in an over generalization. I assume you don’t identify with what varyk is saying elsewhere in the comments here? Because that’s the kind of person I think OOP is talking about.
I looked up OOP. It turns out I’ve talked with them a few times before.
I’m just going to present this, without comment. I think it speaks for itself and the frustration I’ve experienced specifically with OOP, talking to them about this kind of thing:
https://ponder.cat/post/484521/715793
Edit: To answer the specific question, I agree with varyk up until “how old are you, eight?” I don’t think anyone who didn’t vote for Harris necessarily needs to feel bad, and I don’t think it’s productive to start slinging insults around. However people look at it, and whatever they choose to do, I think we can talk about it and it’s already going to be difficult to come to understanding without getting angry and making it more difficult. I do get the frustration though. And the part before that, I’m completely in agreement with.
You’re in complete agreement that that’s not happening?
How am I left with anything but to assume that means you don’t believe Biden was actively supporting genocide?
What?
The thing that “is not happening” is people on Lemmy who support genocide or deny that it’s happening in Gaza. That is vanishingly rare on Lemmy, although there are a scattered handful of Zionist accounts around.
Those outliers aside, everyone on Lemmy is against the genocide in Palestine. What happens is that people say “Yes but Trump is going to do turbo-genocide” and other people say “AHA! I KNEW you were in favor of
BidenHarris committing genocide!” which isn’t at all what the first person said. I would defy you to find anyone from the past week who ever tried to say that what’s happening in Gaza is anything other than complete erasure of the Palestinians with full American support, without needing to insert “tacitly” or “sounds like you are trying to say” or some other type of alchemy by which “not wanting Trump to kill even faster” becomes “being okay with Biden assisting with the killing so far.”Um… So you are the kind of person OOP was talking about?
So I said:
And then, having explicitly acknowledged the genocide, and Harris’s agreement and approval for it, and the devastating betrayal it would be for someone to have American weapons killing their family and then for the administration that’s doing it to turn around and ask for their vote, I got a long lecture about how the US and Biden actually are enabling genocide, and it is a genocide, and similar virtue-signaling things.
This is precisely the kind of thing I was talking about. I’m saying, Biden’s administration was already committing war crimes, but Trump is so much worse that it will be enabling a disaster not to vote to try to keep him out of power. And OOP responded:
Maybe I triggered them by editing the quote. I was trying to agree with it, but they literally said that the genocide was “carried out” by the Biden administration, which is factually wrong but was a common thing for people to blur the lines of at the time, so I edited it to the actual facts, which is “supplying weapons” in addition to the background of aid, agreement, and approval. The IDF are the ones actually carrying it out. And he seized on that edit to paint me as someone who needed to receive a lecture about how genocide actually is happening, and is bad, and we’re helping make it happen, as if I needed to hear any of that. The picking out of what I am “sounds like trying to say” so they can disagree with it, is very much precisely what I am picking out as a hostile and bad-faith way to enter into this entire process, in my original comment here.
I was also pretty disgusted by the way they took a pretty impassioned letter, from Palestinians, begging the Americans not to let Trump come to power, and used some variety of slimy accusations (“it is the same all over” “You will recognize the type”) to make it sound like obviously a pack of self-serving lies. I looked up a bit of information about the listed names, and I asked if they had specific knowledge about any of these specific people that would justify throwing their impassioned plea in the garbage and replacing it with their own stuff, and they did not.
Basically it sounded like they had no interest in what I was saying, but just wanted to create as much of a disagreement as possible so they could be in as superior a position to lecture me about how genocide was happening and Biden was enabling it. While explicitly rejecting what some actual Palestinians had to say about it. After a short time of trying to explain myself, I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere.
They gotta huff only the purest of farts