And yet he’s not doing that?
I know he’s not, you and others in the comments of this and countless other threads do it without having to be asked or directed to because that’s the benefit of being a populist. They make themselves synonymous with the cause and their base will treat a critique of their leader’s actions/character as an attack on the cause and themselves.
Do you realize how destructive and needlessly defensive you are?
Destructive to what? What have I destroyed? Piker is a celebrity, he’s not running for office, his boots on the ground contributions to the cause are few, far between, and highly publicized. He’s not a leader, he’s not a political party, he’s not even a philosopher, just a podcaster. He’s free to discuss his opinions on leftism, his fans are free to listen and adopt them, but he is not the voice of the left nor is he taking steps to become a stakeholder in the power struggle of what’s left of our democracy. This isn’t a tear down of a milquetoast Democrat when their MAGA opponent is going to be 1000x worse if they win.
THE COUNTRY IS LITERALLY DYING.
The country is dead. We’re just waiting to figure out how decayed it actually is come next election cycle, the one they’ve gerrymandered into guaranteed wins, are threatening to post up voter intimidation squads, and who knows how corrupted our machines and mail-in ballot system is. Even if MAGA loses majority in Congress, what do you actually expect to happen? They still have the courts, he’s embedding himself in a bunker. Congress can vote to impeach him all that want, he’s positioned to ignored that should he choose and ICE, the cops, and his zealots are going to make damn sure nobody forces him out.
Real leftist action isn’t listening to live streams or propping up populists on the notion it’ll create some counter-MAGA that will save our dying nation. It’s building coalitions in your community that are planning for when the last vestige of democracy is swept away and full-blown fascist tyranny replaces it. It’s mutual aid, food/medicine/hygiene/baby supply stock-piling, seed saving, identifying who has what skills (nurses, mechanics, child care) that can be relied upon when social order begins to breakdown. It’s making sure you’ve identified the most vulnerable in your community that will be targeted first and learning how to protect and defend them when ICE shows up.
Democrats, populists, and Piker aren’t the people running ICE and MAGAts out of their communities, that is achieved by the people who live there, sometimes at the expense of their own lives. Talk is cheap, even people with good opinions still have shortcomings, but no politician, podcaster, or populist is going to save us, we save ourselves.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I know you’re going to stop being a destructive asshole. I’m just going to tag you right now and call you out in the future every single time I see you do it. You’re just as morally corrupt as that which you criticize.
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 11 hours ago
Indeed. That’s what I wanted you to realize! That’s what the danger of populism, cults of personality, and idols are. We all have our moral deficiencies, what we think is important, our blind spots, our egos, and our failures.
Yes! Tag people and call them out. Demand your allies hold themselves accountable for their beliefs. That’s how society functions, when we govern ourselves through coalition and consensus rather than putting our movement in the hands of one slick individual whose shortcomings we overlook because winning is more important.
There’s a time and place to accept that your enemy has picked a path which the only response is to accept their terms, adopt their methods, and meet them with them with proportionate force.
The Nazis didn’t get stopped with political debates, populism, democracy, or appeals to morality. Not everybody who helped stop their hate was a pillar of morality. We’re not yet at the point we agree that the fight against MAGA warrants such a response, and while I personally think that’s delusional and a naive hope that democracy is still functioning, you can see throughout history the chaos, power grabs, and mad scrambles to claim power that occur when tyrants and their regimes fall. Planning to replace one team’s populist with your team’s is just reactionary escalation of the my team/your team game Democrats and Republicans played for decades, the root of what undermined our democracy until MAGA came along and cut the string of the pendulum.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Idk what leg you think you’re pulling but that’s not it. Go back to your cave.
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
Neither because I don’t know which leg you’re standing on. You bounce back and forth between accusations and judgements with emotionally driven but contradictory replies.
At one point you clap back that my morality is a hindrance, later I’m as morally bankrupt as is the thing I criticize, which is the thing you support. Which is it? My morals or lack thereof?
I’m tempted to believe that you didn’t mean to damn what I’m criticizing while you were damning me, but maybe you did, maybe it slipped out, or maybe it’s just a poor choice of words. Morality isn’t a universal constant, it’s shaped by people because it’s a human invention. White Christian nationalism is built on the idea of morality as a God-given baseline, by their values those who exercise their free will and reject that are morally bankrupt. People are free to adopt whatever morals they want and hold themselves to it, but that doesn’t allow them to take actions that negatively affect how others choose to live or hinder their self-actualization.
But didn’t you also accuse me of sounding like a sociopath? Believing you “know” what a person is going to do is a mistake. You can develop a reasonable belief about what another person will probably do in given situation based off their past actions and what they tell you about their beliefs. But all humans can lie, all can deceive, all can panic, pure altruism is rare. Most will default to protecting themselves and their tribe in a worst case scenario; that’s trap of populism. It creates tribes but if the demagogue begins to crack, abuse their power, declines morally, or fails to deliver on promises, the tribe would rather sail into annihilation than risk replacing their captain because to do so would admit they’ve been played, compromised their own integrity, and might result in a captain that alters course.
Allyship is not friendship. I stated clearly in an earlier response that there’s plenty of leftists I recognize as allies in the fight that is in front of us, but it doesn’t mean I am your friend, believe you’re mine, nor that the process of deconstructing and building a new America is going to be some peachy keen utopian world healing event. Libertarians are a great example of this. They have been perfectly content to support Trumpism when they thought it would be treading on everyone else but themselves despite being warned “it doesn’t care enough about you as an individual to ensure your life isn’t destroyed as a byproduct”. Now they are beginning to trickle to the left’s doorstep looking for allies. Trusting them is situational. I’d trust one in a firefight against the Feds, but I wouldn’t trust one to be my ally long-term unless I saw some real personal growth along the way. They’ll go right back to “I got mine, fuck you” as soon as the threat to themselves is lifted and abandon the cause to hoard what they can. The French Resistance and Italian Partisans were coalitions of leftists and libertarians united to fight fascism. They managed to work together on common ground and a few pillars of shared morality, but they weren’t “friends” and didn’t all agree on the course forward once the Third Reich was consigned to history. You take what you can get when you can get it but it doesn’t mean you have to like it.
We self-govern through consensus built upon arguments, debates, and demands for personal accountability, not through suppressing our values and morals to adopt ideology. Leaders serve at the will of the people, not because they make the best speeches or promises, and while we should all demand a high standard of personal accountability out of each other, people who offer themselves as leaders should subject themselves to an even greater degree of self-awareness.
Pull your head out of your ass. A decade of cheap comebacks telling MAGAts to “go back to wherever” didn’t do shit because people don’t live in isolation. We all live in society, we all participate in it. Wishing your opponents would be quite and disappear is a zero effort attitude and the longer you keep telling strangers on the internet to “go away”, the longer they have to spend recognizing you aren’t actually going to do anything to stop them while they build movements with real people and action. The Proud Boys became the J6ers became ICE while leftists built live stream followings. If you want to silence someone’s rhetoric and their ability to act on their beliefs, telling them to “go away” doesn’t make them go away. You have to draw the line of “it ends here” and accept the confrontation.