dRLY [none/use name]
TL;DR first because I got rant-y
Hexbear and Lemmygrad formed to be leftist first and individual interests second. So your take is spot-on. I also think that they get mad that Hexbear doesn’t have the option to downvote. So they don’t get the satisfaction of the power trip and makes them even more pissed off. lol
The funny thing about people thinking we are assholes is that between here, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml I have found this instance to be the most chill. I find myself more concerned about getting attacked on lemmy.ml for even trying to say something that is not in-line with the western media narrative. I am a bit worried about getting jumped on for misunderstanding or having a bad take on lemmygrad. However I have begun to be better at thinking about how I say/ask things when replying to posts. Which I think is overall a good thing and have better accepted that even if I may disagree with folks, that it is better to learn more about those things over all.
For all the shit that I am learning and seeing that gets said about here and lemmygrad. Those folks on lemmy.ml and the other instances are just beyond quick to just outright refuse to take a moment to consider that they are not questioning shit at all. Just super binary “good or evil.” Even if they agree that their “side” has historically both lied and done super fucked up shit. It is still unwavering “still much better than insert whatever shit they think anti-capitalism has done to so many people.” They completely misunderstand that us “tankies” are just dumb motherfuckers brainwashed into thinking that AES nations never did anything wrong. It also doesn’t help that even “progressive” liberals are so firmly conserned about being super slightly left of dead centre. To go around talking shit about how the hammer and sickle should be treated the same as the Nazi swastika. Still believing that the US is the reason we won the war. Nor do they realize how the Cold War was completely kicked off by the western allies renegging on promises made to the USSR for helping recoup. That the massive build-up of nukes was due to our own war hawks lying about the supposed rapid build-up of anything from the Soviets. Cuba and USSR are always the “war mongers” for putting nukes on Cuba, but the US’s shit in Europe/Turkiey.
Them admitting this just seems to be the same tactics that are meant to be “scary” and create false demand for more money. With it being an election year and all, it means the corpo parties will both trip over each other to provide blank checks. Like always.
Which is kind of changing as more millennials and gen-z are getting more okay with not just simply hating basically all forms of anti-capitalism. Even taking time to get some random information while on their phones/social media from folks that are pro-leftist. I now find it easier to point to Lenin without dealing with all the “he was evil and killed people” lines. Stalin and Mao are still hard given that they seem to be more directly brought up in media/classes as being at Hitler levels. While they both went with some bad options (some of which was based on being given those options by advisers with bad understanding of a topic at the time), they did see how important it was to get caught up to western industrial nations quick as fuck.
It is hard to get to real critiques of which things didn’t work or were correct but maybe could have been done better based on what we know now. Because lots of people don’t want to hear anything as it (to them) is like Holocaust denial based on the very very black and white way they are treated in history classes and media. Though even both of them are getting a bit more critical support by those millennials and gen-z folks that go deeper. Also helps that more formerly classified documents from the US intelligence agencies from those times are finally getting old enough to declassify and release them.
Even Cuba is becoming less of a automatic trigger for being seen as some “purely evil nation”. Though it being so close geographically to the US means the hawks will keep trying to find ways to paint them as such. The anti-communist people that fled are the real thing allowing the US to keep up the blockade and sanctions that are literally only in place to torture the people of Cuba into overthrowing their government. Those anti-communist Cubans here are enough of a bloc to be able to scare most candidates for state and federal elections from saying anything positive. We saw how Bernie saying a simple truth about how literacy under communism went way up was treated like he said we should just let Cuba take over the US or something. His point was that education should matter more here beyond the very bad policies that claim to push education but actually make it about numbers and not about real learning.
I feel like that realization had more to do with the part where it just kept going even after the whole overthrowing Saddam bit by a lot. Especially after all the reasons given for going in were one by one shown to be wrong from the jump. Even with all that, I think the libs were more embarrassed about how much money was used in “nation building” while the US economy tanked. And not so much for the reasons that we constantly hear from them about “cost of human lives” or whatever pretend moral shit. I think most of them would still resort to adding something to the effect of “well even if we were lied to, it was still worth getting rid of Saddam” after front loading how they were lied to.
So this time the big “gotcha” bit of smugness will still be about how “evil Russia has always been”. So it will be still considered America helping “protect freedom” is the “correct” and “moral” choice (even with the price tag that would never be treated as “sooo important” for helping poor US citizens at home). Hell, they still like to call the FSB the KGB. So real “lessons” will not matter outside the same talk but no actions shit they do every single time. They did all kinds of talking nice words for BLM protests (not the org), but their actions were to paint anyone that wasn’t “correctly protesting” as bad and over-funded the pigs more. And the cycle continues.
I like that the article spends so much text talking about the importance of suicide prevention and mental health stuff. But otherwise is just acting like it isn’t beyond weird for there to be that many on the same day. If these pigs weren’t about to leak something or had stumbled onto something they weren’t meant to. Then I still think it could be some kind of attempt to get both some level of sympathy from the public AND more importantly get extra funding. The money would be marked for “mental health” stuff, but would actually be used for other shit of course.
Aside from the parts already said. For all the talk that dems have said about how RvW was on the line for basically all of my adult life. They never did anything to set it as anything other than a ruling. Which if said ruling was anything other than a win for its time but always possible to be overturned. Then it shows how little they really care about protecting reproductive rights, and just cared about being able to use it as a trump card to scare a few more people to show up to vote. And therefore it was always more useful to them to keep it that way. Want to have an easy way to make sure third parties never get a chance? Make sure that the people that are truly scared of RvW being lost are riled up to harass and attack/vote shame anyone that says they are voting for anything other than team blue. There are even quotes from Obama (and maybe Hillary but she obviously didn’t try to fight hard while working under him) where they even outright say that protecting RvW by making it law wasn’t a priority.
Always putting our Military Industrial Complex (and more importantly) their weird obsession with being anything other than hard centrist and not upsetting the conservatives. Never ending talk of “bipartisanship” by letting Republicans dictate what does and doesn’t fly. It is always just put back on the voters as being their job to “vote harder” or other bs that puts blame on everyone but them. For all the shit that they say in campaigns and some snarky interviews “dunking on” the right. Much like how protesting in the US is just about some one day marches and speeches where everyone high-fives and posts for clout before just going home. And when people that really give a fuck stick around for longer or anything more than that. They are then told that they are not “protesting correctly” and those same libs side with the right and begin supporting more funding for pigs.
Always riding on the next election as being too soon to push for anything that isn’t safely supported by at least 90% of the voters (of both parties). They could give zero fucks about gay marriage until it was safe to support it. More of that “oh I completely agree with you 100%, but it just isn’t the right time” and “we need to just wait to wait for you to have those rights until America is ready for it”. They are all the perfect example of what MLK Jr was talking about with his speech about white moderates being the real oppressors. It is easy for them to go slow on all of this because it doesn’t materially or directly impact them. Just like the same liberals that vote for them and claim to support X cause just as long as it isn’t in their backyard or otherwise inconvenience them.
The lame-ass libs in the comments checks out, but I also looked at the article and it gets bizarre. Feel free to correct me if I am misunderstanding. But the fascists might have been showing up to support the event that was “gatecrashed”. As the person giving the speech and the event itself seem to have been anti-trans anyway. But the TERFs get completely glossed-over and the lawmakers are pissed about the hateful fascists only. “These laws are part of our unwavering commitment to challenge antisemitism and hatred whenever it occurs.” Just an amazing level of contradictions being shown by liberals/conservative-liberals.
I wasn’t aware that he had been acquitted. How did that happen? Were the victims talked into settlements due to legal/court costs?