Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 4 days agoWhat makes you think that that is the only way to protest? And what makes you think we aren’t already doing that to our maximum ability? You are making a lot of assumptions about Americans (assuming you are Canadian from your choice of server). We all have careers to maintain, families and friends to support, homes to clean, debts to repay, meals to cook, laundry to fold, mental illnesses to manage, etc etc. We can’t just drop all that to go follow around ICE cars 24/7 and rotate in and out of jail, life doesn’t work like that. I’m not going to sit here and pretend i am doing the most that I can do, but there’s a reason I haven’t been maximally-engaged. Fighting fascism is exhausting, but so is daily life. The billionaires have successfully arranged our daily lives to ensure that simply existing in this hellhole is already exhausting without even adding in regular protesting.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Your grandparents stormed the beaches at Normandy and you’re whining and making excuses about why you’re letting your country slide into fascism.
Is this what you’re going to tell your grandkids when they ask why you didn’t stop it?
“Home of the brave”. Maybe long ago.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 4 days ago
More assumptions about me and mine. The history is not so simple. My grandparents stormed beaches because that was what the president told them to do, and because the country itself was literally under attack by an outside enemy. It wasn’t a noble personal sacrifice in the same way - soldiers risked their lives and went through hell, but they also did so with a guarantee that they would get something in return if we won the war. I’m not going to get paid to protest, and I will be demonized by my employer and the federal government. And I don’t know my great grandparents’ exact views on racial politics, but I would estimate those same soldiers took no issue with the whites-only bathrooms they used on a daily basis before and after the war.
It’s very easy to tell people to do more when you have no similar obligation to act.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Your country is literally under attack by an inside enemy
You’ll get your democracy.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 4 days ago
What are you doing to fight fascism in your country?
LukeZaz@beehaw.org 4 days ago
Oh, so what you actually want is for us to dash our bodies upon the stones and get shot to death by cops, is it? What a completely reasonable ask! One that I’m sure you won’t be doing yourself, of course. That’s our job.
I’m not your footsoldier. I’m not throwing myself into a fire just because you’re unsatisfied with the action being taken. I have a life to live, and I’m barely managing that as it is. Your criticism is less than worthless.
Your advice wouldn’t fix America. It’d just get us all killed.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Please work on your reading comprehension. Nowhere did I even imply that’s what you should be doing.
I was contrasting the level of bravery and energy between them and you. They stormed Normandy to save foreign nations and yet you’re making excuses to not even get off the couch to save your own.
LukeZaz@beehaw.org 2 days ago
You bring up people fighting a war as a comparison, you invite the idea that you expect others to do the same, bullets and all. If you didn’t want to make that implication, you shouldn’t have made that comparison. This is on you.
This goes double when the suggestions you’ve offered are so vague and unhelpful as “Organize. Disrupt. Disobey.” Do you have any concrete ideas for how that’ll work? Because right now, you’re just yelling at people in an entirely different country to you to do a bunch of Stuff™ all while you hypocritically whine online yourself about what we are doing.
Again, if you want to be frustrated, do it differently. As it stands, you’re just fighting your own allies because the work they’re doing isn’t what you specifically want to occur. You’re going to have deal with the fact that sometimes activism isn’t flashy, and sometimes it isn’t easy to spot. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, and it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Besides, even if you were right, shame doesn’t tend to be a useful tool for growing action; it just makes you more enemies and encourages spite and doomerism. So save the crit for the Democrat politicians, aye?
Doublenut@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
They were paid to do that