Objection

@Objection@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I the only one who does this?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let the outside world break it’s own head!”

  “He’s right. As the good book says, if you spit in the air, it lands in your face.”

  “Nonsense! You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.”

  “…He’s right.”

  “He’s right, and he’s right, they can’t both be right.”

  “You know, you are also right.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this what every election is like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah pretty much. 2016 was crazier than this one for sure. This one didn’t have a competitive primary on either side, and it was predicted as a toss-up whereas in 2016 every poll and media outlet was saying it was impossible for Trump to win, and there was no precedent to predict what would happen when he was in office. This is like, after people have had eight years to come to terms with Trump being a thing in whatever form that looks like. The general trend though is that things are getting crazier, and that trend is likely to continue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is it that "protecting basic democracy and the rule of law, and not crowning a criminal dictator" wasn't even on the chart?!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If that’s why Kamala lost, then explain why Tammy Baldwin is winning Wisconsin and Elissa Slotkin is winning in Michigan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course, it has nothing to do with corporate money or higher prices for consumers, it’s purely the people not participating in the system of abuse who are the problem. Very logical and definitely not just a defense mechanism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oops, you forgot to answer my question again.

  Cut the crap. It’s plain as day what’s happening here - you want to discredit the people who are actually doing things in order to make yourself feel better about not doing anything. It’s just a defense mechanism, and the person you’re really trying to fool us yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Whomst amongus could’ve predicted that you couldn’t answer?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, which candidate that supports those things you mentioned were you going to vote for but now aren’t? Love to hear even a single name.

  Of course, you can’t do that, because that’s not a realistic path in the short term. Let’s say you were going to run for office on that platform. First, the major corporations that have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are are going to dump money into the opposition. Second, people will oppose it because it would increase the price of meat - they’ll say you’re an elitist who wants to make it so that only the rich can have access to it, and emphasize the effect it’ll have on grocery bills. They’ll also talk about the environmental impact your regulations would cause, since it would take more land to treat animals humanely. And they will also call you a hypocrite for refusing to give up meat while calling the production process unethical, to the point of being deserving of jail time.

  So explain to me how exactly you would’ve overcome those obstacles, if only us mean insidious vegans weren’t so preoccupied with asking you to give up your treats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thoughts and prayers? No. Fines. Potentially jailtime. Potentially forcing them to sell farms and factories.

  And how do you intend to implement those things? Thoughts and prayers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sources that I’d prefer to regulate in terms of animal rights, but every time that comes up, you people divert the conversation to “if you’re not gonna be vegan you’re evil either way so it doesn’t matter” and everyone tunes out.

  Pack it up, vegans. This person was going to wish upon a star to regulate animal agriculture, which would’ve done it, but we just had to go and advocate for making material changes on a level we have control over, and that forced them to be explicitly fine with abuse. If only we had your thoughts and prayers, what a horrible miscalculation on our part.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is American politics really as seemingly satirical of itself as it is portrayed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely it’s a clownshow.

  If you ask me, the whole point of it is to get everyone to sort themselves into one of two horrific camps, where they’ll feel like any criticism of the people in power is an attack on them for voting for them - or, if they don’t vote, then they generally disengage from politics entirely. It’s probably the most effective system of propaganda ever designed, because you don’t even need to tell people that horrible people are on their side, they’ll happily convince themselves of it all on their own. It’s basically a race to the bottom where one side being dogshit allows the other side to be dogshit because there’s no alternative, and of course every politician wants to be as dogshit as they can get away with because that’s how you win favor with the corporate donors, who have no practical limit on how much money they can spend to influence the outcome.

  There’s also this level of spectacle in our elections that’s above and beyond anywhere else in the world, we treat it like a reality show, and our debates are complete jokes where nothing substantive is ever discussed. We have absurdly long election cycles and entire industries around milking them for entertainment. It’s unlikely that we will ever even begin moving in the right direction in the foreseeable future, because the brainworms run so deep.

  The worst part is when the spectacle becomes so eye-catching that people from other countries get drawn into it and start thinking in terms of our politics and what we define as normal or reasonable. Americans rarely learn from non-American perspectives and we have corporate influence constantly pushing in the direction of maximizing short term profits over all other priorities, and so our country is unable to understand or adapt to the changing conditions of the modern world, which is why we are in decline.

  Look at us only as a cautionary tale of what not to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are peole hating on .world?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  totalitarian control

  Lmao y’all are wild. Why are you on a platform where people you don’t like have, “totalitarian control” over the structure? Is it, perhaps, because they used this “totalitarian control” to create a structure that was decentralized and allowed communities to form that operated on different rules and different views? Doesn’t sound very totalitarian if you ask me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are peole hating on .world?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  for the same reason I now understand better why some women would prefer the bear.

  Now, please downvote me, you know you want to… just this once, I want you to know what it’s like to do something with the recipient’s consent.

  Lmao wtf are you talking about? Am I violating someone’s consent by holding beliefs they disagree with? Completely unhinged.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are peole hating on .world?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My biggest problem with .world is that people will just make up whatever they want about the out-group and everyone just believes it without question and with no interest in examining the evidence. It’s a toxic element of the site’s culture that encourages circle-jerking and the automatic dismissal of opposing viewpoints while making intelligent and informed discussion impossible.

  The moderation is also pretty heavy-handed with censorship and things get removed for “misinformation” pretty frequently just because the mods disagree with it. You don’t have to go very far back in the modlog right now to find removed posts from Cowbee and Alcoholicorn, despite both backing up their arguments with published books from respectable authors. It’s best to avoid engaging with the mods at all, I got banned from World News because a mod couldn’t defend their position so they just banned me. There’s a pretty clear bias towards NATO and the US.

  But like I said my main issue is the first point, and I’ll stop judging .worlders when I start to see people actually ask for evidence when someone says, “I saw a bunch of tankies eating kittens” instead of just blindly accepting it as fact because it’s about an out-group.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are peole hating on .world?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have ‘communists’ arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin. Although that is more rare, it does happen.

  If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

  The culture where these sorts of blatant lies are accepted without question is my biggest problem with .world. You can have whatever actual beliefs you want, but lying like this is really despicable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Absolutely nothing happened June 1989⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea that China was socialist under Mao but became capitalist under Deng is a common Maoist take and something that distinguishes them from Marxist-Leninists, it’s kind of right there in the name.

  Sometimes when people call China capitalist, I half-jokingly ask if they’re a Maoist, or if they think the best policy is closer to Mao than what they’re currently doing. Of course, usually, the answer (when I get an answer at all) is no: they opposed what China was doing when it was more state-controlled and they opposed what China was doing when it did reforms and opened up to private investment, if they make moves to hold billionaires accountable to the law or to move more of the economy to the public sector, they’re bad, and if they did the opposite, that would also be bad, but if they stayed steady, that too would be bad.

  Maoists and Capitalists are both at least coherent in what they think China should do, in opposite extremes: either undo the reforms and revert to how it was or liberalize further into a fully capitalist state. Marxist-Leninists tend to have more nuanced takes about adapting to changing conditions, in line with what they’ve done. But then you have this other category that’s super prevalent on Lemmy that wants to criticize China’s every move without ever offering any kind of coherent idea of what they actually want them to do, economically. I don’t even know what to call that position because it’s utterly incoherent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Absolutely nothing happened June 1989⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea of Tiananmen Square being one of the top ten most important historical events in that time period is wild to me. Just in terms of death toll, the highest estimate mentionedon Wikipedia of 10,000 comes from a US ambassador citing an anonymous “friend,” and is many times higher than any other estimate - a more realistic estimate is closer to 1,000. Let’s compare that to the lowest estimates from the list of genocides page:

  • Gaza: 38,000 (ongoing)
  • Darfur: 98,000 (ongoing)
  • Congo (Effacer le tableau): 60,000 (2003)
  • Congo (Massacre of Hutis): 200,000 (1997)
  • Rwanda: 491,000 (1994)
  • Bosnia: 31,000 (1995)
  • Somalia (Isaaq): 50,000 (1989)
  • Iraq (Kurds): 50,000 (1989)
  • Cambodia: 1,386,000 (1979)
  • Indonesia (East Timor): 85,000 (1999)
  • Uganda: 100,000 (1978)

  The same year that Tiananmen Square happened, two separate genocides were ongoing that, even by the most ridiculously generous comparisons possible, each killed at least 5 times as many people. Searching “Isaaq” on both .world or .ml gives exactly one hit which is a comment listing off a bunch of genocides, like I’m doing now. Entire cities were leveled and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee the country, but nobody ever talks about it (myself included, until today).

  In addition to that list, if we’re talking about events in general, then we should also look at the list of wars (again, lowest estimates):

  • Persian Gulf War: 29,000 (1991)
  • War in Abkhazia: 25,000 (1993)
  • First Congo War: 235,000 (1997)
  • Kosovo War: 16,000 (1999)
  • Eritrian-Ethopian War: 53,000 (2000)
  • Second Chechen War: 20,000 (2000)

  * These numbers only refer to the initial invasion, not to occupations, which killed hundreds of thousands.

  There’s ongoing conflicts in Myanmar, in North Africa, in Mexico, and in Sudan, and more, each of which has left more dead than Tiananmen this year and the year’s not even over yet.

  So it doesn’t seem especially significant in terms of raw numbers, but you could argue that it’s more significant because of the effect it had on Chinese politics, as the controversy led to the resignation of the head of state, Deng Xiaoping. Except that I never ever see anything like that discussed. Either way, it didn’t change the broad direction of the reforms.

  I could give my own reasons as to why it’s given such a high position of importance, but I’m genuinely curious to hear your own explanation of why Tiananmen would warrant a spot on a top ten list of important events, compared to any of the other events I’ve listed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Trump Made of Teflon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m gonna have to admit to stealing that line from Dimension 20

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Trump Made of Teflon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Because he’s rich and powerful and laws are just threats made by the ruling class, which he’s a part of. The law is primarily a tool of class warfare and as such is only enforced consistently and in full force against the working class. Very occasionally, one rich person pisses off enough other rich people to be subject to it, but you have to be extremely bad at the game for that to happen. The more rich people are subjected to the law, the easier it is to be subjected to the law yourself if you’re rich, so generally you’re better off looking the other way while they do illegal shit so that you can get away with your own illegal shit. Plus they have the resources to fight you, so it means picking a costly battle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i need an rv, and lab equipment, and a helper⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can see how an RV, lab equipment, and a helper might help, but you don’t actually need any of those to do OF.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨He must be stopped!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  out of context

  Everything’s always “out of context” with him, isn’t it? Because that’s his whole deal. He does controversial stuff to make people mad while hiding behind plausible deniability.

  Whether it’s saying the n word on stream, or saying what he did about CP, or whatever other antics he’s gotten up to, it’s the same playbook of controversy-bait. Stir up shit, get people mad, get hate clicks, get clicks from people who hate the people who got mad, get clicks from people who don’t want to get left out of the loop about what’s going on, etc.

  I only partially dislike him for the times he’s taken the controversy-bait too far and done something legitimately shitty. Mostly I dislike him because he’s controversy bait, and whether or not he plays the game well enough to make sure nothing sticks doesn’t really matter. It’s still just stirring the pot for attention.

  The best thing to do with people like that is just to pay them no mind. It’s not like I’m missing some unique insight or valuable perspective. I wish I could to that with politicians like Trump who employ similar outrage bait tactics, but he is unfortunately relevant to world affairs.

  Anyway, it is my longstanding policy to downvote any comment or post about Vaush, positive or negative, since I don’t think he’s worth paying attention to and doing so just drags down the level of discourse, so, true to my policy, I will now be downvoting my own comment since I talked about him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨He must be stopped!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You should’ve listened to your hesitancy, the less you know of him the better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the phrase is, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

  The economy had been trending upwards under Obama, and it peaked under Trump. If you’re a Keynesian, you might gripe that Trump increased spending when the economy was doing well rather then saving for a rainy day. Then, the rainiest of all rainy days hit with the pandemic, which shot spending through the roof. That caused rapid inflation that became most noticeable after Biden came in. Most Americans either don’t pay enough attention or attribute cause and effect to more or less random factors, so the experience is, Trump economy good, Biden economy bad.

  Second, skepticism of the government is a facet of American culture, fed into from the national mythos regarding the Revolutionary War, by anticommunist propaganda about how the government doing stuff makes things worse, and also from experience with getting disillusioned from politicians not delivering on promises and the government generally not acting in people’s best interests. Kamala comes across more as representing the political establishment, and her messaging doesn’t tap into that dissatisfaction or contrarian nature.

  Third, people feel like they’re getting fucked, and Trump offers a clear, simple narrative of who is fucking them. And the narrative scapegoats people at the bottom of the social structure, who are least able to push back against said narratives, and who already have negative stereotypes about them. If you’re not going to do that, then you either have to tell people they’re not getting fucked, or you have to blame the people who are actually doing the fucking, who are at the top of the social structure, who are most able to push back against your narrative. Imo, in order to employ the latter strategy most successfully, you need a sense of solidarity, a sense that everyone is included in your movement and you won’t allow anyone to be scapegoated or sacrifice anyone for your own advancement -and it’s kind of hard to do that with the whole genocide thing going on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A crackpot who is connected to the CIA and a known source of misinformation and fake news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, for starters, I don’t blindly believe anything people say about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Now they say that. They also lied and said that they weren’t asked any clarifying questions, when the linked comment proves that they very clearly were. They’re just trying to backtrack their unreasonable claims after the fact to make the response they got seem more disproportionate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Especially anything tankie related.

  Y’all will believe literally anything with zero evidence of it means making people you don’t like look bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.

  Anytime a person claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link to it, they are lying or misrepresenting what happened literally 100% of the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  genocidewatch.com/…/chinese-genocide-of-uyghurs-i…

  According to Adrian Zenz,

  thediplomat.com/…/erasing-memories-concealing-evi…

  provided to UHRP by scholar Adrian Zenz

  Whoopsie! That’s already two. It was easy to find those because they were already pointed out to you (along with several other of your sources) in the thread that you’re complaining about.

  Here’s a tip - when you post a source on this subject, press “Ctrl+F” then type “Zenz,” and if anything comes up, don’t post it. Obviously, I can’t expect anyone to actually read their sources before posting them, but is 6 keystrokes really too much to ask?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a rule that anytime anyone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they are lying or mischaracterizing it literally 100% of the time, and that rule has proven itself yet again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I found the thread and you had several people read your links and go through them in detail. Most of what they’re claiming is traced back to crackpot Adrian Zenz.

  As I said, if you go there and say wrong things and then can’t back them up, they’re going to be rude to you. Citing Adrian Zenz is one form of not being able to back up your claims.