cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10508286
(Stats that show boosting ICE funding is a bipartisan policy)
To all you libs on lemmy: “If it don’t apply, let it fly” as they say. If you think this post isn’t about you, it isn’t about you. If this post is about you, maybe consider why that’s an issue.
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At this point Lemmy must be 75% troll accounts then.
Starting to believe it honestly
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the libs dont want to hear they may have been abused by their party.
Yeah make an enemy of your allies. That’s a great strategy
Are liberals allies to leftists, if liberalism supports the capitalist system? Leftists are aligned on overthrowing the present system, while liberals are opposed to that and seek to tweak it.
is who’s under attack here liberals, or protestors who didn’t realize how bad things were? i find the number of people who still don’t see the problem frustrating, but we’ll never get them to see the problem if the first thing we do when they start seeing the problem is call them fucking idiots.
i’ve seen way more success changing minds to leftism handing out soup to protests and saying “we’re glad you’re here” than i have when people hit the streets and they’re immediately told to get back inside.
no one can undo the propaganda machine of the right but the left. we do not at present have the numbers to have the People Power to do the very most effective actions like large scale general strikes or even open rebellion with the hope of not being obliterated by the B-1 bombers that the air force has repositioned to loiter over our own air spaces. so we have to take the attitude of the mother goose teaching her goslings how the world works and violently attacking the threats to those goslings, not the goslings themselves for not knowing.
and so we’re clear: i get the frustration. i feel it, too. but killing your inner pro-cop lib means realizing that there ever was an inner pro-cop lib in the first place because it was specifically nurtured by a media environment that can only really be escaped in a Mennonite community.
so go ahead and critique the people who aren’t out doing anything. they’re awful. but attacking people who woke up later than you isn’t helpful and is in fact harmful
I’m not attacking people that aren’t yet radicalized enough, or have been newly radicalized but haven’t yet organized and/or read theory. It’s important to attack liberalism itself, so that the radicalized liberals are freed from the shackles of that ideology. I’m more than aware of my liberal past, and I have to kill the liberal in my head every day.
It’s extremely common for people to combine their pre-existing biases from growing up and being educated in, working in, and living within the confines of bourgeois cultural hegemony with newly radicalized left-wing politics. Without going back and confronting our pre-existing stances, we actually end up warping our new radicalized beliefs to conform to our deeply instilled beliefs about existing socialism. This is how people that genuinely believe themselves to be socialists perpetuate liberal lines of logic and historical narratives.
Instead, we combat this through long periods of self-criticism and confrontation. We have to take our new knowledge, such as that of dialectical and historical materialism, and intentionally confront our pre-existing beliefs that came from liberalism. We all have this process to go through, and it’s never “complete,” either. It took me a long time to actually come around to supporting existing socialism, even after I began reading theory, because my frame of analysis was ultimately still liberal, and therefore my interpretations of theory were forced to fit in neatly with my existing world view, rather than uprooting the weeds and planting new seeds.
This process of dialectical growth and inward reflection is difficult and lengthy, which is why those that are in support of socialism tend to be far more knowledgable, well-read, and aren’t typically strangers to real political organizing. It takes tremendous energy to not only learn new information, but re-analyze existing conclusions that had faulty logic.
A handy analogy is looking at it through a computer program. If you have version 1 of a program spit out a bunch of outputs, and then fix a critical bug for version 2, you can’t just only rely on the new outputs, you have to confront the old outputs made with bad code and go through the new process. This is where people get tripped up ideologically.
We aren’t at all immune to this, though, we aren’t special people for having overcome it, and we aren’t ever fully free of liberalism. We have to fight it daily.
part of where i’m coming from is that i mostly or even wholly agree with this message, however my understanding of effective propaganda tells me that the context of a message matters almost as much as the message itself. i appreciate and respect your desire to kill not just your inner liberal, put to also help others kill theirs, but what i see in this meme, and what the threadstarter saw as well, is an attack on a self organized resistance movement with a lot of potential to grow new leftists, kill inner liberals, and create an overall movement towards existing socialism.
my critique of your first comment was that i think it actually undermines your stated aims in your second comment because it creates the impression that the protestors should not be supported because it should be assumed the protestors are liberals.
is an attack on a self organized resistance movement with a lot of potential to grow new leftists, kill inner liberals, and create an overall movement towards existing socialism.
My goal is to connect that promising movement to the existing movement already organizing, to fold them into our shared movement. I appreciate your critique, but sometimes it is important for liberals to be exposed to genuine leftist theory and organizing work, otherwise they usually end up going back to brunch. I don’t condemn the protestors, but instead those that protest and then let that be the end of their political journey.
Is anybody an ally of you if they have other goals that are not yours???
So deep. Much thought. Philosopher. Wow.
Truly, you also participate in society, you fucking donut.
When the primary task is overthrowing the present system of late-stage imperialism, yes! I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but I consider anarchists and anti-imperialists of all stripes to be great allies. The problem with liberalism is that the underlying goals entrench imperialism and capitalism, not weaken it.
But that’s the thing. That isn’t the primary task. That’s your primary task. Some people just need to get out of their struggle before they can help others. And if you think that will create more enemies than allies to you, then… I think you are grossly misinformed or you are lying about what you actually want.
Like, you might as well say we shouldn’t have freed the slaves unless we destroyed the institutions that created slavery. Incremental progress is still good, even if it’s not preferred, and people’s lives benefit from it.
We can fight for benefits, but as long as we remain trapped by bourgeois ideology like liberalism, rather than proletarian ideology like dialectical materialism, then we will be hopelessly trapped by their cultural hegemony. The reason liberalism is propogated is because it rationalizes and justifies the present capitalist system, and we cannot actually move on to a better world as long as we hold to its ways of thinking except by accident. When we take a more serious approach, and actually analyze society as it truly exists, we find that overthrowing the present state of things is necessary and unavoidable.
Abolition of slavery was absolutely a good thing, but we have to know why it happend. It was mostly due to the north’s desire for more proletarians for industrial labor, it was a war between agricultural slavery and industrial wage labor. In the present moment, the largest contradiction is between imperialist countries and the imperialized, as well as domestically the issue of settler-colonialism. If we don’t actually take steps to combat these, we will be left wondering why conditions keep deteriorating despite putting more liberals in office.
Ah… I think I see your problem now. You think nothing can happen unless the bourgeois will it. I, frankly, don’t agree with that. I think you think the world is a lot more chess-like when it’s really a lot more like poker with mostly idiots. That does explain why MLs want to go authoritarian to fix the problems, though.
Anyway, the reason why you’re a fucking biscuit is you don’t seem to be expressing ideas to convert liberals to your cause. You have written them off as unfixable, and, well, that sort of gives you fewer allies. How silly.
Ah… I think I see your problem now. You think nothing can happen unless the bourgeois will it.
No, not at all. My point is that liberalism itself supports the system of capitalism, and as such we need to shed it in order to make progress, as it’s essentially how the bourgeoisie legitimizes itself.
I think you think the world is a lot more chess-like when it’s really a lot more like poker with mostly idiots.
The world isn’t chess nor is it poker. Classes generally act rationally, in their own interest, and proliferate class ideology to protect their interests. Ruling class ideology is meant to perpetuate that ruling class, which is why proletarian ideology needs to replace bourgeois ideology.
That does explain why MLs want to go authoritarian to fix the problems, though.
I don’t know what you mean by this. Marxists do agree with using states run by the working classes as a transitional phase to communism, but that doesn’t mean “going authoritarian,” but changing the class with authority from bourgeois to proletarian.
Anyway, the reason why you’re a fucking biscuit is you don’t seem to be expressing ideas to convert liberals to your cause. You have written them off as unfixable, and, well, that sort of gives you fewer allies. How silly.
I don’t, though. I was a liberal once. I write off liberalism itself. As I explained elsewhere in this thread:
I’m not attacking people that aren’t yet radicalized enough, or have been newly radicalized but haven’t yet organized and/or read theory. It’s important to attack liberalism itself, so that the radicalized liberals are freed from the shackles of that ideology. I’m more than aware of my liberal past, and I have to kill the liberal in my head every day.
It’s extremely common for people to combine their pre-existing biases from growing up and being educated in, working in, and living within the confines of bourgeois cultural hegemony with newly radicalized left-wing politics. Without going back and confronting our pre-existing stances, we actually end up warping our new radicalized beliefs to conform to our deeply instilled beliefs about existing socialism. This is how people that genuinely believe themselves to be socialists perpetuate liberal lines of logic and historical narratives.
Instead, we combat this through long periods of self-criticism and confrontation. We have to take our new knowledge, such as that of dialectical and historical materialism, and intentionally confront our pre-existing beliefs that came from liberalism. We all have this process to go through, and it’s never “complete,” either. It took me a long time to actually come around to supporting existing socialism, even after I began reading theory, because my frame of analysis was ultimately still liberal, and therefore my interpretations of theory were forced to fit in neatly with my existing world view, rather than uprooting the weeds and planting new seeds.
This process of dialectical growth and inward reflection is difficult and lengthy, which is why those that are in support of socialism tend to be far more knowledgable, well-read, and aren’t typically strangers to real political organizing. It takes tremendous energy to not only learn new information, but re-analyze existing conclusions that had faulty logic.
A handy analogy is looking at it through a computer program. If you have version 1 of a program spit out a bunch of outputs, and then fix a critical bug for version 2, you can’t just only rely on the new outputs, you have to confront the old outputs made with bad code and go through the new process. This is where people get tripped up ideologically.
We aren’t at all immune to this, though, we aren’t special people for having overcome it, and we aren’t ever fully free of liberalism. We have to fight it daily.
This is the point I’m actually making. Radicalized liberals are comrades that have not yet become so, because they haven’t yet shed their liberalism and as such ultimately go back to supporting the very system that oppresses them.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend etc
My point is that liberalism traps liberals into not actually fighting their real enemy, the capitalist class. Liberals exist as potential comrades, but without overcoming their liberalism they will end up supporting their own oppression.
Maybe I’m just mostly in lefty circles, but who the fuck wasn’t mad until Renee Goode and Alex Pretti? I’ve been seeing constant rage against ice for a couple of years now atleast.
white middle class people, and then other middle class people. Do you not know anyone in their 40s or older with a family?
Completely agree, but I think with Goode and Pretti it gave our team a good hand to play. Like, “hey, all you All Lives Matter people. Where ya at?” and with Pretti specifically, it’s like “Hey, all you 2A folk. Where the fuck ya at?”
I’ve been outraged and outspoken since the beginning, but these two incidents are really heavy hitting cards to play in order to expose hypocritical fascists. Not that it actually matters because these people are brainwashed mental gymists. But I like to think it at least puts cracks in their foundation. It’s caused some amount of infighting, so that’s a step in the right direction.
No, you’re right, plenty were mad before too. There seems to be a new push lately on trying to make this a race issue to divide the left. I’ve seen a major uptick in this framing lately.
If someone favors ICE because it’s a “race issue” they were never on our side to begin with.
You’re right about that! But that’s not what I meant.
What I mean is there’s a seemingly organized effort to create infighting between those against ICE by attempting to create issues and sow discord. It distracts from the real conversation at hand. It’s a common technique to fracture unity on an issue.
Who cares why people are protesting, as long as they are it’s good?
Yeah. As I’ve seen someone else put it, “we’re glad you’re here” is far better than “what took you so long”
Until they go back to brunch after electing Gavin Newsom.
if somehow we make it all the way to a free and fair 2028 primary and gavin newsome is the nominee i will be a form of pissed you’ve never witnessed before. that dude is such a fuckin’ unhelpful phonie. out here acting like Abigail Spanberger won Virginia because Virginians wanted neoliberalism. NO! Virginians already hated her when they voted for her, they only voted for her because the options offered were: ICE stays the same, or ICE gets way more violent. USW, UAW, and UMWA all refused to endorse her. Abigail Spanberger won despite not being liked, not because she was liked. but the DNC has refused to learn their lessons and eat their veggies for 18 years now. they took every losing lesson from Obama and jettisoned every winning lesson. ultimately, it comes down to that they are part of the conservative grift machine, but their grift is more subtle. the republican grift is to froth up anger and then demand money to go act on that anger. the democrat grift is to make money off losing.
it makes me so mad how many democrats are looking at 2025 election results and going “see! we don’t have to be more progressive. we just have to not be donald trump” and it’s like… goddammit, that’s been loser behavior since 2008 when the tea party tranformed the republican party.
so anyway.
in summation.
fuck the liberal excellence brunch crowd. we won’t get out of this thinking the crisis is over unless we get true systemic change, not just small trinkets
I never get the “we were doing it first” toxicity. Why should it matter why the newcomers were ignorant if they want to join the cause? Why create new enemies just to protect your “pure” reasons? That kind of separationism is exactly what keeps the ones you should focus on in power, and they want it that way. A divided resistance will fail.
I’ve been the first to be against “we’ve been first toxicity”, get in line!
I agree with your point, however it’s also frustrating how obvious it was that all the post-9/11 powers we gave the government would be abused.
The PATRIOT Act was a fucking power grab, and obviously was in place in case a crisis came into play. No way something that couldn’t be read in that short a time before approval was written that fast.
In case McZipper Unflies his tight walking two 16’s in a double deck knot-real via some stupid gayMe trick with some cubs over a century old.
Then be like, "Told you so. They made that shit up a dick a half ago and if you think I’m the one then check me in another deck and a half*
Tell Lima I saw the first one too but not with my ice. Just all this natural AC signing it the first time we did it again.
Math, Time, Logic, Lumbly and Love do well advise to swap it for Meth, Magic and Möbius Strip Doors to…
…Drumroll Mofos…
…Eat the Rich…Like a Cruise Pitt.
Because the majority of “leftists” are exclusively online and their entire lives revolve around internet points derived from having the best and purest ideologies
Where do you think the majority of “rightists”, “libertarians”, and “liberals” are spending their time nowadays? The mall? Everybody is terminally online, apparently including you.
Well, they sit in the “right house”
True but my political existence actually isn’t and I do stuff irl
Too many people just preach dramatic purity online and nothing else
yeah. for a lot of the attitudes i see on lemmy about how politics should work i’m like… where are you? i’m out in these streets and i don’t see you. a lot of what people are calling for don’t work until we have mass support and to have mass support we need people outside.
And as such, too, their idea of what leftism outside their zones becomes distorted by the propaganda mechanisms that benefit primarily their enemies
Its the cop-in-your-brain, which is of course all of the propaganda of the fascists. This is exactly what they want, and their choice rhetoric has worked its way into the leftist spaces to an extent
Exactly
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I always held that the creation of the entire DHS was a slight overreaction to like 20 guys armed with box cutters…
It really was muddled through while Iraq was being drummed up, too. I remember working a protest in 2003 and there being this talk about DHS implementing fascism. At the time I felt the impending war was more important topic, not quite realizing how interconnected it all was.
It’s good that you recognize how interconnected everything is. That’s an important piece of the puzzle. These days it’s that all the oligarchs are pedophiles, engaged in kidnapping immigrant children, and creating crises to justify those kidnappings. Everything is at the same time a distraction from everything else intended to keep you from uniting on what specifically should be protested, and also a genuine component of the overall mechanism by which we’re all tortured
Life of Brian Lumbly.
i don’t understand the reference, even after looking into him
Whats that story about?
9/11
At least we took care of that rogue kingdom 17 of the highjackers came from who planned and funded the whole thing.
Tbf I was in grade school in 2003 so it’s a bit much to expect me to have been on the “abolish the DHS” train for that long 😆
At the same time, for a lot of us that age it was a fundamental step into understanding “Oh. So our adults are fucking idiots” because we had so many allegedly smart people telling us “well. The PATRIOT Act can’t be that bad and these are changing times. We need to be able to protect ourselves.”
It wasn’t until I went to college that I got good at expressing how specifically something that happened when I was in elementary school was a fundamental affront to my autonomy as a human being, and why that was a threat to everyone everywhere all the time. But it was still a seed that grew within me that we are fundamentally not seen by our government as contributors but as resources
“an entire year of people being ILLEGALLY deported or disappeared” true, state violence against anyone is only okay when it’s done legally, with due process and for the good of the national people’s
The definition of pearl clutching
Like I’ve said before, expecting empathy was just silly, these people and their ancestors have been empire-building forever and, if they express any moral values, don’t think of them as anything but decorative disinfo cause what they really believe in is “might makes right”… There’s always one here and there, the thinking dissidents with moral frameworks like miss Greta, Francesca Albanese and John Brown but not a plurality. Selfish fear? Now that we can trust, lol.
these people and their ancestors
So if I’m the wrong skin color and have past relatives who didn’t do anything that made a change, I can’t participate in doing something now? If we could find a movement that had all the morality of the progressives while having the right’s trait to let anyone join who agrees with the cause, we might have something that works. It seems to be a leftist thing to gatekeep anyone who tries to help.
It’s the culture that wasn’t reformed, not the skin colour, friend. It’s the background attitude, the baseline amorality, the tolerance of violence as long as it doesn’t directly affect me, etc. The fact you went straight into skin colour shows your misunderstanding. And no, of course you can, and I’m glad you are, but all of this wouldn’t have gotten this bad if the American white folks had had sympathy for those that have been abused since the days of the colonies, and it might just take some white on white violence (another tragedy, ofc) to make people care and that’s just the reality of things. You might not like it but the facts are pretty clear.
I mentioned color because of your phrasing, which would lead to that conclusion. It’s pretty obvious. And it’s not like I even disagree with the points you make, it’s just how you made them. Don’t blame the reader/listener when you use euphemisms you didn’t intend to imply. Say what you mean.
Your previous statement was also a bit on the side of poisoning the well, so no matter what anyone says now, they’ve already been invalidated as being part of change. Attacking people who may be breaking from ignorance or finally pushed too far as part of the problem is dividing any potential resistance, and that’s exactly what the powers that be want us to do: fight amongst ourselves.
American history is dark. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned more and more of things that were simply not talked about, or worse, covered up. That doesn’t mean most Americans are guilty of these crimes, or can’t try to improve things. But it won’t get better if there’s so much infighting because of the past that most of us weren’t even part of. “Sins of the father” is such a crock of shit.
You say Well. I would but they mostly disappear like I’m some Stranger to expel ain’t real thru fear. Cuz that ain’t real even if you’re delirious enough to just end up knot being the same. Oh but that returing Martian baby did it. Fly Burger Mic.
Fa epalm
I mean, when was the last time Prickard sang with tab in his hand??
You misunderstood. It’s not “sins of the father” or “white people are evil because it’s in their DNA”, it’s “the current generation who either fervently supported racially divided violence/tolerated it to a great degree until it was their turn to suffer it were raised by the previous ones who did the same”, so why are we surprised that, besides the few lefties with a heart, white America for the most part had continued disregarding things like police brutality up until the victim shared their skin colour? Now, why haven’t white Americans gone through a complete ideological change after all the sins the country has accumulated? Idk. But what I do know is that it’s that attitude, that intellectual laziness and amoral selfcenteredness that’s at the core of white American ideology (whatever that is besides “might makes right”) that stopped them from being more active through the years, and now it seems like it’s too late. It’s just a very visible thing and I’m not attacking anyone, especially not people who are just opening their eyes. I’m happy every time anyone stops being a racist, amoral POS who condones evil as long as it doesn’t touch them, of course!
I really think class warfare is far stronger than any racial divide. And that’s exactly why there isn’t much momentum from any group, white, black, whatever. They’ve pinned us down for so long ensuring that any individual efforts can be punished. Now… how do you get a unified effort so they can’t lock individuals down? That is the question to be answered. General strike? Not if it’s some lame Friday and then back to normal. It’s got to be a shutdown that’s felt by the ones who are the problem, and it has to be outlasted long enough to matter. Can that be done by people living paycheck to paycheck, or by those already missing many weeks of food stamps? The rich hope not.
So sure, there’s the inequality of black vs. white. But it’s far deeper and planned than that, and this kind of arguing is what they want instead of a shared effort.
The racial divide is an aspect of class warfare though. Specifically in the US, so much of White America was willing to throw away/undermine the welfare and public services that they barely had for a generation just because black and brown people would get access to it too. It’s wrong to just skip over that and demand solidarity.
Personally, I think we can embrace people who are late to the game, while also holding space for people who are frustrated that it seems to take a tragedy to activate some members of the populace
Al whide beeble ebil.
