driving them out of their homes and into shrinking, increasingly crowded prison cities with horrendous living conditions is ethnic cleansing. But they also have killed many thousands of Palestinians, not counting the 11,000 since Oct 7.

well yeah, fuck the CEO and upper management. This was my response to /u/SCB telling you there’s no wealth to redistribute. I tagged you so you would also see it.

If your only justification here is

The first thing I mentioned was ethnic cleansing, which tends to radicalize people after a few decades of it.

But also, Israel has Palestine inside a literal fucking fence. They control the fucking water supply. Yes, they are responsible for Palestine

Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat?

Because they were instrumental in creating that terrorist threat in the first place, not only by perpetrating ethnic cleansing but by directly funding Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterbalance against the secular PLO.

Instead of the CEO and other upper management, try stock buybacks and dividends, which enrich the actual owners. GM spent $21 billion on stock buybacks in the past 12 years, and around $18 billion in stock dividends. That averages to over $3 billion a year, which is over twice the worker raise from the strike — and a lot of that raise is going toward correcting the 19.3% pay cut they took after 2008.

@halykthered@lemmy.ml

transphobia and an adult abusing his position of power to hurt a kid, two berserk buttons in one headline

vote for who you’d rather negotiate with

I’m not saying don’t vote, but is it reasonable to expect that we can negotiate for much of anything?

“If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

. . .

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting.

The entire conclusion of the study I linked is that this is not happening.

There’s nothing wrong with voting, I vote every two years, but it’s dangerous to convince yourself that voting is enough. You need to also organize. You need to strike. You need to unionize your workplaces. If you really want to push the government into conceding real improvements in our lives, you need to apply direct pressure on a large scale. And when the crackdown comes, you need to collectively organize to help each other. Bail people out of jail. Help people pay rent when they’re fired for trying to unionize. Doing this on a large scale is how you get actual fucking change, and it will never happen if people lie to themselves that voting alone is sufficient.

The point is, you’re not going to hear a thoughtful explanation of what those people actually think or why on an instance where any such explanation gets you immediately banned and your comments removed.

You’re trying to dismiss the criticism by ingroup-outgrouping me. I’m not straight, I’m fucking pan, and numerically speaking I doubt most of the thousands of queer people on here know who you are or the intent of your username.

I’ve said my piece here and in our 1:1 conversation, and the more we talk the more you’ll probably dig your heels in. You got feedback from one person and a few upvoters. Take it or leave it.

The economically motivated NATO intervention in Libya was justified with false claims of a genocide. This was the conclusion reached by the British parliament report. Now Libya is a war-torn failed state with open-air slave markets. That intervention was less than a decade after “Iraq has WMDs,” a lie that has killed over a million people. When we have all witnessed these events in our lifetimes, I think we should be a little skeptical when enemy states are vilified. I don’t know if public backlash could have prevented the intervention in Libya, but I hope we’ll at least try to prevent the next one.

Both situations are bad, but I don’t think oligarchs hinder each other that much. They compete, but in their overall control of society they are fairly unanimous, because they all share the same basic material interest to pay us as little as possible for as much work as possible and to destroy any trace of meaningful working class political power that might challenge them.

what democracy?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[…]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.

In China it’s also illegal for gay couples to marry and adopt

Most American states only legalized same-sex marriage and adoption in the 2010s. Like America, China has socially conservative older generations and socially progressive younger generations. The country and its people are not monolithic, they’re not some alien land where people are fundamentally different from here. Support for marriage equality is widespread and rising in China, they appear to be on the same track as America.

stop pretending like you care about LGBTQ rights

Stop making paranoid assumptions about people. How is anyone supposed to communicate when that is the dynamic?

God-tier title

the person you were talking to never said crypto was good

/u/Omega_Haxors you seem cool when I see you around, and I understand getting heated or defensive during an argument and saying some regrettable stuff, but it is kinda frustrating to see you misrepresent what happened a year after the fact, in a thread like this of all places, when hexbear users are already widely demonized and misrepresented.

this sounds weird to me because to my knowledge hexbear hates crypto, I feel like I’m missing context

Not all attraction to enbies or fat people is objectifying, but some of it definitely is, and your reddit “pm me your tits”-style username comes across that way. And no one scrolling lemmy is going to hear your explanation of who you are and what you mean, they’re just going to see the comment and username right in front of them.

It’s been done before. There’s a documentary about it called The Act of Killing, and a book called The Jakarta Method.