archomrade

Libs just so badly want to be left alone

If you put up any guards at all against data tracking, they get pretty bad pretty quick. They get skewed toward the one or two datapoints that you didn't shore up, so they think "huh, this user must really like phone games because they played doodlejump in 2016 and still has it installed on their phone". Or at least I think. My wife gets ads that are far more on-the-nose than I do, but she doesn't lock down her tracking data at all.

But I don't even like them trying to match me to ads, I don't want to incentivize their data collection practices.

Liberals delude themselves as being different simply because they "support" liberation politics but they are simply helpless against the system that forces them to support fascist policies

Complain more on the same internet invented mostly by the country you hate?

Lmao checkmate, tankie

My current biggest concern is climate crisis

You can obsessed with that issue all you want...

I feel like – tell me if I’m wrong – you’re interpreting all this that I am saying like I “support” Kamala Harris, and you’re trying to get me not to.

No, and I find this reduction to be a huge part of the problem with most of the political discourse on Lemmy. There's this intense urge to reduce or interpret discourse into 'support' or 'don't support', usually electorally and usually as a strict binary. To most Americans, the most interaction they have with politics is voting, sometimes even just for the general. IDGAF if anyone 'supports' Kamala/Joe/Dems, whatever that means. I view who people end up voting for as almost incidental to the broader direct action that I think is the true driver of political change.

That's not to suggest you're making a reference to that binary - you're clearly speaking more broadly. But even the way you're interpreting direct action through its "actual" electoral result is frustrating. Because the people protesting (even the people on lemmy who seem (to you) dead-set against democrats) contain multitudes, and most of them will end up voting for an option that's not perfectly aligned to their principles in the end (because there are none who are). That's not the point of direct action. You (or maybe not you specifically, but liberals generally) complain that people repeatedly casting criticism without proposing an electoral solution are just fanning the flames of division, but what they're doing is creating a kind of "positive tension" within the electorate that the democrats will eventually need to address if it's allowed to grow. Democrats can't do x or y policy change because "it just isn't popular", but it isn't popular because people aren't being confronted with the results of the policy that needs changing. Protesting is a part of that, but so is posting on social media about it. Those are doing the same thing.

But what I specifically take issue with is your objection to protests that have real and legitimate standing, simply on some theoretical calculation where policy doesn't change but the damage to voter enthusiasm remains, and the "fault" **implicit ** in that judgement. I realize you've made explicit statements of affirmation toward Palestinian protests generally, but you've still defended this abstracted way of assessing advisable/in-advisable protests independent from the 'righteousness' of the cause itself. From your perspective, it seems that even a protest that is completely justified in its cause can be viewed negatively (and liable to accusation, labels and insults) if your personal judgment has determined it will only cause damage and not result in policy change. It's a form of dismissal that comes from an intense sense of paternalism that rhetorically allows you to identify yourself with the cause but avoids the uncomfortable work of reflecting on your own complicity. Even if you object to that complicity on grounds that you do direct action yourself, blah blah blah - you're also vocally defending a system that enables that type of subjugation you're fighting against. (I can already hear you objecting to this framing on the grounds that you want the system to change, and I'll just say it now that i'm not talking in abstraction. I'm saying you're defending the electoral system by insisting we must conduct ourselves in a way so we can preserve your desired electoral outcome)

You keep bringing it back to shit that doesn’t matter. I don’t care whose fault it is. I don’t care what you think is opaque or ambiguously defined, or what frameworks you feel like are too complicated to want to spend the mental effort on, so you use simple ones instead. I care about dying people, and how we change it; what’s going to work, and what isn’t.

Funny. I don't care about whose fault 'it' is, either! I don't care if you've judged a form of protest as ineffectual or not, even. I care about dying people, and the real ways in which our system of power enables and supports the killing of those people. I think the point of direct action is to tie the policy outcomes of the system to the people acting on that system's behalf in order to pressure them, and tempering that direct action around preserving a desired electoral result is antithetical to that rhetorical goal. You cannot pressure political agents into change if you're undercutting the protest by implicitly assigning electoral responsibility to that protest. I know 'you don't care' about fault, but you're still drawing a causality between the protest and the electoral outcome, when the explicit goal of that protest is to draw causality between the electoral outcome and the policy.

If you show me a strategy “hey here’s how we can get better than the Democrats in power” I will start supporting it instantly. It feels like – again, tell me if I’m wrong – you think that what you’re advocating is that, and I’m refusing to support it and so I must love Democrats or something.

No, that is not what i'm advocating. It sure would be great if we had a better system, but placing our political goals behind that fantastic revolutionary goal first is just a way of deferring our problems to a different time, a better season. We have the system we have, and trying to change that system (even simply influence the outcome of that system) without damaging it is like trying to box with both hands tied behind your back. Democrats won't do their job better until they're made to swim in their own shit, without trying to white-wash it or rhetorically dance around their own complicity in them. Protest helps to reflect the impact of those policies back on the office, and a side effect of that is damaging their electoral chances.

I think judging a form of protest based on its hypothetical electoral impact isn't just pointless, it neuters and subverts it. It isn't 'abuser logic' to assign responsibility for electoral losses on the policies being protested - if anything it's holding the 'abuser' responsible for the harm they themselves are committing. By flipping the responsibility of that loss on protestors it rhetorically excuses democrats for their shit policy.

I hope that makes sense.

Do these streams typically use public domain IP? I imagine some publishers wouldn't much like their work being read 'for free'

We all remember that ad from the early 2000's that was like, "Imagine a world without oil: all of these things made of plastic wouldn't exist!" and a large part of the country was like "OMG could you imagine?!"

Lol we're completely fucked. I thought the worst studies were about finding plastic in testicles but this is way worse

I mean I can have sex without testicles, but I hardly think i would be able to enjoy it much without a brain.

I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.

If the ads were untargeted I'd feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.

A lot of protests right now are serving a double purpose – one, they’re bringing awareness to the issue with the American people (and it’s working), and two, they’re threatening the Democrats electorally and forcing them to change their calculus of what types of Israel policy they should do if they don’t want to lose the election from the other side (and that’s working, too). Both of those are good things. I keep saying that, and you keep, consistently, insisting for some reason that I must have a problem with them. I guess because it makes the point that you’re trying to say easier if I am just against all protestors. As I keep saying, I am not.

Yea, that's the point. But you continuously allude to some "other" type of pro-palestinian protestor, who is putting the pressure squarely on those most directly responsive to their protest, as "useful idiot", or "bad actor", or alluding to them having abuser logic for placing agency on the people currently providing Israel military aid and not, weirdly, on themselves. You even use a double-standard when discussing online behavior: in one instance, the correct way to Do Activism^tm^ is to convince the american public to sway public opinion, and then in the next you hand-wave away activity that is directed at swaying public opinion because 'you doubt the DNC reads your comments on Lemmy'.

That, OR, you're trying to distinguish between types of pro-palestinian protestors using some weird, "that's not gonna help" classification system that's opaque and/or ambiguously defined, so that at any given moment someone saying "democrats haven't done enough" can be cast aside as "other" or "bad actor". It is almost as if you are defending a naieve enthusiasm from water being thrown on it, simply because you value that enthusiasm even while there is a veritable gulf between what is needed from democrats on Israel and what they are doing. No, you may not return to your brunch, look at the shit that still needs cleaning up. Protestors are there to remind libs (who, as you pointed out, are safe from harm themselves no matter what the democratic policy is on Israel) that the work is not yet done. This includes people on Lemmy who are serving you reminders that things continue to be shit, despite what little democrats have actually done.

And it's not even like the Democrats can't, also, campaign for that change being worked toward. You're pretending as if the desired policy must grow from grass-roots before democrats can take action, but the democrats already know what the right thing to do is, it is just politically inconvenient to have to do it right now. A huge part of the problem is that the Democrats actively use the bully pulpit to deflect blame and run cover for Israel - when they should be using it to make the case to the american public why things need to change.

Literally anything to disembody the problem away from your personal electoral goals, while also claiming to support the issue being raised. It is the quintessential 'white moderate' take that MLK discusses in Letter from Birmingham, but you're so blinded by self-confidence that you couldn't possibly see it.

I describe people who are falling for deliberate propaganda which is being deployed to turn them unconditionally against the Democrats, producing only a vague level of improvement to the Democrats’ behavior but a stronger result of making it more likely that Trump will win, as “useful idiots,” yes.

Jesus christ. Do you consider US culpability in the Palestinian Genocide a part of this 'deliberate propaganda'? At what point does someone protesting against democratic involvement and complacency in Israeli war crimes become someone who is protesting against democrats generally? Is there any grey area that you're willing to acknowledge between these two categorical binaries you've proposed? Can there be a legitimate protest against the democrats, that hurts their odds at winning, but doesn't directly result in a change of policy? If the democrats and the protestors both refuse to bend to the other, is it categorically the protestors' fault if and when trump wins? Even if it isn't apparent that they've lost explicitly because of those protestors? Is it also the fault of the protestors if the democrats adopt a pro-palestinian policy in response to the protestors, AND THEN lose? What i'm gathering from you is that it is ALWAYS the protestors fault for the loss, no matter what the democrats do in response.

Fuck off with your electoral reductionism. The democrats are not helpless here, and they could absolutely be fighting to save palestinian lives and it is 100% their own fault if voters decide they can't support them over it. They are welcome to weigh the electoral calculus to predict how voters might react to their policies but it is completely their own fault if they've chosen the wrong ones.

“I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Based on your varied responses: sometimes.

It seems to depend a great deal on what you think the likely outcome of that protest is, and if your imagined calculus puts the protest on the wrong side of some imaginary line, suddenly those protestors are 'useful idiots' at best or 'bad-actors' at worst.