Hexbears, heres your problem. You yourselves are liberals about voting.
Disclaimer since based on my last comment i know the accusation is coming: i voted for claudia already. I think socialists should vote for Claudia if shes available.
I just also think voting is not the ultimate expression of politics and doesnt mean that much. The "its an endorsement" thing is true, but one extra endorsement does not equal one extra dead Palestinian. Thats just magical thinking. (Also, ive tried telling people the endorsement thing because its what changed my mind about lesser evilism, it doesnt work.)
And the idea that every Kamala voter is horrific evil when many are scared, propagandized, gaslit marginalized people doing what they think they need to do to not die is misguided. You guys claim to be the ultimate propaganda understanders but dont seem to understand its power. Are people still responsible for their actions? Sure. Does a vote of all things matter as an action all that much? Lmao fuck no. Its basically pointless.
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, "not forgiving", or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
As someone heavily involved in 's presidential campaign, I can say that OP's position is much closer to the official campaign than people disagreeing. By that I mean we are not particularly interested in how people vote, but in using the campaign to reach people and engage them in politics outside the electoral. Our campaign is a vehicle to big swathes of desperate and disconnected people who think of politics in purely electoral terms - whether that's that we have to vote for the lesser of two evils or that the failure of voting to fix societal issues means there is no path forward.
We know that when we go out and canvass, we're going to interact almost entirely with people who are not ideologically committed leftists. The phase of organizing in the US demands that our work be focused on finding and bringing in people who are not aware of the necessity or existence of a vanguard working class party and convince them that their vote is only an extremely small part of their potential political engagement and the general path to fixing this rotten country.
Therefore, we always have to approach people empathetically, understanding their position so that we can move them towards revolutionary socialist politics. That requires us not to denounce Kamala voters as Hitlerites in training.
My problem is you really can't effectively campaign for Kamala and acknowledge the genocide. You'll see many liberals try to thread this needle but then their campaign slogan is "vote for the lesser genocide" which really self defeating. Eventually they'll get sucked into genocide apologia or even denialism out of convienice. When that happens, fuck em. For the ones that keep trying to thread the needle, I'll keep asking them why they are so invested in electoralism.
"they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice "
I understand that it's really quite easy to suggest that Nazis were an essential evil and even the US is magically suddenly a good guy with good motives having fought them - but for the same reasons it's absurd to argue "Nazis were just following their material interests", this argument is both a moot point, and fascist apologia.
Fascists aren't monsters. They're people. That's what makes them so dangerous.
Literally made an account again just because you pissed me off.
If you passively accept genocide, you have no rights. Of any kind. Because you deny them all to others for your own.
When I was maybe 14 or 15 that stupid damn TV movie about United 53 or whatever came out and the short version of the events that night is I got blacklisted, from the entire town, barred from employment and kicked out of the "accelerated" school courses and got my ass beat because I dared to say maybe, just maybe, Muslims are human. Because I took away their soft comfortable fantasy, because fascism is never passive.
You're not being a humanist. You're doing apologia for fascism.
The US presidential election is a sham election even by the standards of bourgeois elections, so voting doesn't matter in the end. But just because it's meaningless doesn't mean it reflects well on someone who casts their ballot for the current genocider. It's like if someone upvotes a reactionary comment or post on Hexbear. The impact is practically nil, but they still would need to be reeducated and banned if they refused to self-crit. A major moment in the history of this website is transphobes getting banned for upvoting transphobic content. Imagine if they tried pulling some "uh aktually, this is a niche website. There's no material impact for my upvote. It doesn't meaningfully combat transphobia" excuse.
Liberals will betray leftists per usual when the time comes, so at a basic level, I don't see the point of caring about liberals outside of being prepared enough to anticipate and make moves against the inevitable betrayal. As far as the US is concerned, more than half of the populace do not vote at all and it's higher for marginalized communities. This is fertile soil for radicalization. They on some intuitive level are politically conscious enough to recognize the pony show for what it really is, and they are just begging for someone, anyone to show them the light. Why waste time and energy on some Harris-voting freak when the politically disenfranchised are just standing right there?
Correct. If I vote non Harris I fear trump will be elected which would be a faster and stronger genocide. I’m not voting because I’m okay with genocide. I’m voting to try to mitigate as much damage as I can in my power without creating an exceptionally higher amount of risk by voting how I actually want too.
I'm of two minds about this and while I agree with you mostly I do take a bit of an issue here
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, "not forgiving", or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
I don't think anyone is serious about wanting to kill all libs, I can't speak for everyone but when it's coming from me it's clearly hyperbole because I'm just yapping
I think libs should be treated as individuals, there's a nice old boomer lady who feels genuinely scared of another Trump term who I'm completely kind and civil to because she's out with us every week protesting the genocide, I can see that she genuinely cares and we don't try to vote shame each other
Now on the other hand that old boomer dude I've never seen before who showed up at our protest last week to campaign for Holocaust Harris and vote shame us got none of that kindness or civility from me because he didn't fucking deserve it, frankly I regret not being a bigger dick to him
Online it's the same way, if they're trying to scold us I'm going to tell them how I feel and I'm going to tell them that there's blood on their hands
voting for Kamala Harris is not the same thing as being a Hitlerite even though people doing it are completely wrong and I'm tired of pretending it's not. You have seen the arrogance and myopic viewpoint of liberals. They do not think anything besides suffering is possible. This is not a mental state of Hitlerism but a state of supreme nihilism. It, of course, ends in materially the same thing, but intention is important when considering the "abstract moral value" of people, which is what this post is about.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
Also this is true. A ton of people here have endorsed genocide and are now deciding this is the genocide that they can decide lets them be a Good Person while everyone else is a Bad Person. Which of course is almost correct, that is how it works when it comes to genocides, endorsing them generally is a bad-person thing. But if you're one of the people who literally did that exact same thing and are now "pulling the ladder up" because you're already radicalized, then you have to realize how short sighted and selfish that is. If you are willing to give yourself a second chance despite a possible full past commitment to lesser evilism, then it is completely absurd to condemn every Kamala voter as unable to change.
Of course, this does not apply to those who are genuinely spreading Democrat rhetoric, that is a staunch rhetorical decision and while I'm sure they could technically become radicalized to socialism later in their life I do not believe anyone is obligated to tolerate them. I am merely defending the still embryonic baby-leftists that likely don't know what's going on and are just trying to support as many people as possible with the flawed understanding of reality they've been given
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
I'm not even sure this is true. I would give up all my shit in an instant if I thought it had a 0.001% chance of changing things. I think many people feel similarly.
I'm just a coward, I'm not willing to die for my beliefs cause dying is scary and maybe, maybe, if I keep my head down I can . . . nothing really. I make less than 10k a year, I don't have a toilet or shower, I have a minifridge and induction hob and live mostly off rice and lentils and peanut butter, my 'house' got to 115 for weeks this summer cause metal roof and shit insulation and come winter it will stay ambient +15. I keep going because I'm too afraid to do anything else. I only leave the house for groceries and work. Sometimes I hope something good might happen.
I do have two dogs, four cats, and a long distance boyfriend who is the first personal connection I've had other than my mother since I was in HS. So there's that, that's nice.
You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize.
I don't hate humanity, I hate people who want to officially cosign a modern Holocaust.
Legitimate question, would you feel this way if someone told you they hated German Nazis who lived in and supported Germany during and in the lead up to WW2?
Because the moral calculus is identical.
We're talking about people who support the modern equivalent of Hitler.
There’s your problem. Marxists are not moralists. Westerners are all already complicit and voting is meaningless. What matters is doing whatever is practical to actually support Palestine.
Nobody is immune to propaganda, yet the effect that propaganda has is overstated here IMHO. Read Masses, Elites, and Rebels. If a cis white lib is saying they're voting L3Harris out of fear, they've really just been granted moral license to not care and are using that moral license to justify doing the same thing they would be doing if no pressure was applied to them at all.
I think yelling at libs about voting is effective because the vast majority of them are not joining orgs, they're not communists that are just doing this one thing wrong, etc. They're libs! And they perceive voting as the singular most important political action (especially since the George Floyd protests have been memory holed). If we can radicalize liberals' understanding of voting, we can radicalize their entire politics. I know that because when I was a liberal myself, the first piece of theory I read was Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy. After I read that, I radicalized very quickly, because my whole understanding of politics was based on voting for the right candidate and it was quickly shattered. So I believe that electoralism represents an attack surface for the left to exploit, since it has become the singular focus of the rank and file liberal politic.
All that being said, at some point it probably is worth shutting up about voting and just focusing on getting people to learn some useful skill, get organized, and agitate as many other people as they can to do the same. It would be really, really stupid if, for example, this whole site alienated a ton of its own already radicalized users over voting. It would be even worse if the same happened at unions and the DSA. It ain't that deep.
Most of the Germans during WWII and the Holocaust also were not nazis. The nazi party and the SS were only a small fraction of the total population. That didn't stop the Germans from actively participating in the Holocaust or helping invade/bomb other countries. Hell, neither WWII nor the Holocaust would have been possible without all of Germany being complicit.
The number of people arrested, deported, and killed wasn't possible with the SS alone. They relied on local police being informed of where people were hiding by neighbors wanting to eliminate Jews, Roma, homosexuals, etc. If the SS went door to door searching every house, there's no way they could have captured as many people as they did. Those people were handed over to them by ordinary Germans not part of the nazi party.
So no, I don't buy that excuse. Whitey is gonna whitey and if he is willing to throw Palestinians under the bus, he sure as shit will snitch when the time comes to eliminate the marginalized here at home.
I thought this was already pretty clear. The “lesser-evil” mindset is strong and so is the propaganda supporting it. I’m not going to get mad over someone voting Kamala as long as they aren’t a shit head about it.
But agitating is raising awareness and so continuing to pressure is good imo, even if some get a little overly zealous about it
I've seen a shocking amount of comparisons between Kopmala voters and voters for the Nazi party which tbf might be more apt than I think? Was there some sort of genuine 101% Hitler the Nazi party used as an implicitl threat? Not just scaremongering about minorities being that threat, but an actual 101% Hitler party that was the only majorly supported running opposition to literal Hitler?
The important point of similarity between Holocaust Harris and Adolf Hitler is actually that they both committed genocide.
The important point of similarity between their supporters, is that they are both groups of people who knew that the person they were supporting was committing genocide.
Hitler didn't get elected, he got appointed by a liberal due to pressure from business leaders. Harris has already talked about wanting to put Republicans into high level appointments so she's more like Hindenburg in that way. Of course, once again, the way she's like Hitler is that they both perpetrated Holocausts.
I'd also like to clarify that I'm not comparing Harris voters to people who voted for the Nazi party prior to the Holocaust, when the Nazis weren't in power, during the Weimar Republic. I'm comparing them to Germans who supported the Nazi regime while it fed millions of people into death camps. That's who they are.
You might be able to make an argument for libs who aren't particularly online and only watch mainstream news, but if someone is coming onto hexbear to try to proselytize, they're online enough that they're aware of the kind of evidence that has come out. They know what they're supporting.
I feel like a lot of these callout posts that are definitely directed at specific people would be solved with the understanding that everyone on here understands the difference between Hexbear and real life and that rhetorical hyperbole exists as a means for commiseration and venting. Does it occasionally get a little extreme on here? Sure. Should you be concerned that we're all baying for blood in the streets? Nah.
I do think- and hear me out here, because I think people are predisposed to think of those sort of take as inherently justifying weird shit because people love to read into what ND people say. But it is definitely a result of us ND people reading others online very literally. It is difficult for us to tell the difference between a post that is ironic or unironic, hyperbole or literal, sober or joking, especially if we are familiar with the degree to which reality exceeds parody. I genuinely believe the hatred of this kind of post is rooted primarily in a kind of weird synthesis of something weird and cringe (ableism and an expectation of everyone acting the same) with something usually good (a desire to ensure a complete lack of reactionaries in our spaces). We (the ND) are interpreting a comment or general Vibe incorrectly because of our extremely different communication styles, and when it comes time for the majority/advantaged group (the NT) to clarify what they meant they instead interpret our questions as the prods or statements they would have intended if they said the same thing.
We definitely need a Dictatorship of the Neurodivergent on this site, even if we already have one it's not enough. Yeah, if you read things literally it gets a little harder to detect a bad faith chud trying to wreck the site, but there are still really obvious tells. A change to a more explicitly communicative general conversation policy would be a huge improvement. I wish tone tags were built into every comment. ( someone going "god I want to kill Kopmala voters /pissed off" is way easier to relate to than our (some ND people's) default assumption of "god I want to kill Kopmala voters /genuine /sober")
Yes, this is not an excuse for any sort of problematic behavior. But the assumption that we are engaging with it in the first place with posts like this is a heavily neurotypical one. And I do take issue to @autismdragon's reference to grass touching because that exact phrasing is usually used to dismiss us, though I do not think they considered this when they wrote the post.
When the NT urge to read nonexistent context into neurodivergent conversation crosses with our very real and reasonable experiences with reactionaries abusing said context to smuggle in their reactionary sentiments without saying anything explicit, it becomes very, very ugly, and I think it usually ends up with people both assuming neurodivergent people intend to spread reactionary rhetoric and becoming unreasonably angry at them, while also having neurodivergent people accidentally spread it because neurotypical people can share invisible context with each other even through the medium of someone specifically not trying to add any. The only real way to fix this is to embrace more and more explicit communication (and to embrace theory that makes the smuggled, implicit reactionary sentiments explicit through the revealing of it's internal mechanisms)
I don't care if anyone votes or not, it won't change anything, but a protest vote is better than no vote, in my opinion. Voting for a leftist is a chance to voice your dissent and not remain silent. If Harris loses Michigan because several thousand vote for third party leftists, then our message has been sent.
Agreed. No one has to vote, but refusing to vote has never been an effective strategy for dissent. Ideally, vote PSL. But honestly I don't give a fuck of you hand it to your toddler with a crayon and have them pick. It's the organizing that really counts
I think I get what you're trying to say, and I don't entirely agree. As you've said it though I think I disagree a lot instead of just a little. I think presenting it as "1 vote =/= 1 dead palestinian" is flawed and a bit ghoulish and does you no favours. Likewise I think presenting yourself as a grass-toucher as opposed to those that disagree with you as being not-grass-touchers likewise will do nothing but inflame something that could otherwise give you a good and productive discussion, which I think is what you aim to do. As someone who is proud of being able to talk to liberals, I am a bit bemused that this is how you would phrase yourself when in discussion with comrades. Surely you yourself can see how provocative you are being?
I think that while voting normally does not significy a lot about morals due to people being surrounded by capitalist propaganda, this vote does, due to the fact it requires the voter to somehow rationalize accepting genocide (yes I know the rationalisation is "trump is worse", but I've got a lot of hangups with that.)
I think that the primary contradiction of Hexbear is grass touching vs non-grass-touching and the openly inflammatory stance and ivory tower browbeating attitude towards anyone who is perceived to land on the opposite side of that dialectic is Very Good
I think that the primary contradiction of Hexbear is grass touching vs non-grass-touching
There's a blurry line of performative grass touching that makes that contradiction hard to read sometimes, which is "the person I disagree with and don't like must touch grass which will banish their bad opinions," which is technically if temporarily true because if that magic phrase worked, the bad opinion haver becomes absent for a time.
Okay this is my last comment in this thread, I swear. It almost doesn't count, it's just an addendum to my own comment really
I agree. It's kinda comical how we can objectively mock the "I depicted myself as the chad and you as the soyjack" tendencies of other online forums, but then immediately revert to "I have depicted myself as the grass toucher and you as the online weirdo" arguments. It's the worst when people start listing their leftist credentials (at least one of our mods is heavily active in organising lots of direct action stuff, so it's not like being online has lots of correlations to being able or unable to do other stuff.)
There's been quite a few discussions related to this tendency. Early chapo had a group of users who were miffed at the crass tendencies of the website, because it ruined what they saw as fertile grounds for organizing more serious things. It was from this group the "we need to distance ourselves from chapotraphouse" idea came from, as far as I am aware anyway.
Personally I don't really see the website as anything super serious. The biggest potential it has is as agitprop and I think it would be cool if it could grow in size and influence, but I don't think that has a lot of relation to wether or not we have a comm called chapotraphouse... This got away from me, I forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. I hope this was somewhat coherent.
yes I know the rationalisation is "trump is worse", but I've got a lot of hangups with that
it's a completely false political policy but an extraordinarily effective mental excuse. I don't inherently distrust people who fall for it because we've been taught to think in trolley problem morality for ages
but yes grass touching is a very silly and non serious metric for being an authority on any subject
I don't mind people voting for liberal candidates if they're otherwise struggling, lost, and/or confused and need to feel like they're doing something, for lack of understanding of the nature of organizing collective action. If it's a little peace of mind, okay, they deserve it.
What offends me about electoralism are the people who speak of the act of voting in moral terms.
they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice
except when they are, ie, when they're white and benefit from the white supremacy that undergirds the whole Election Spectacle, whether they're willing/able to acknowledge that or not
I think it's worse in-person than online, even. Most of the pro-zionist libs and reactionaries I've met IRL have even worse takes than libs online. Just look at how many of them supported the Iraq War and Vietnam or how they ignored Obama drone striking weddings, hospitals, and schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even with the benefit of hindsight, they'd vote Obama for a third term if they could.
Americans turn into the most rabid of fascists when it comes to foreign policy.
Kamala openly said that at the CNN town hall. paraphrasing but it was basically "murdering kids is bad, but what about murdering kids and your grocery bill got 8% smaller". she might have even directly mentioned the price of eggs? my memory is blurred by a red mist
I ran into someone recently who was all smug about voting, asking me, “Did you vote?” Yet, he was completely unaware of the local ballot items. This is due to the stupid national campaigns that emphasize just showing up to vote without understanding the stakes at the local level. No local organizations were strong enough to educate him on the harmful propositions, showing just how unorganized the left is. We’ve all seen good local efforts get crushed by capitalism, and even sensible ballot votes get overturned by state legislatures or vetoed. I recognize that there’s no winning through pure electoralism alone and that non-swing state presidential votes do not matter. If you’ve got time, maybe it’s still worth voting on down ballot stuff and following advice from your best local leftist org.
this is a disingenuous reading of what @autismdragon is saying. That is because Democrats are also horrible on domestic policy, so there is no inconsistency in forgiving a clueless Democrat voter.
Edit: Tbf they are slightly minority extremely slightly less bad at domestic policies than Reps but have the exact same foreign policies so I kind of see your point, but I think it's more of a "folding to fascism's posturing" kind of evil than a "fascism is good and believe in it 100%" kind of evil