Violence really, really fucking sucks.
It may be necessary, but if there’s any other option you should look to that first. If it legitimately comes to violence a lot of innocent people are going to suffer in a big way.
There were other options. I think those other options failed at this point in time.
His spokesperson in Italy said that he meant to say “I give my heart to you” with that gesture. I mean, dude, just own it up. It’s not like there would have been any repercussion.
I wonder what he is thinking, that is odd looking face
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Show me ONE of those photos as a video making the actual gesture.
Just one.
Hanlon’s razor dictates that we should not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence.
So, by posting this response, you are very, very stupid. You are incompetent of understanding the fundamental difference between the VIDEO of Elon saluting Adolf Hitler, and the IMAGES of all these people waving.
If you respond to this, you’re showing that you have enough intelligence to understand the difference between Elon’s gesture and a wave, so you’re therefore defending his sieg heil and you remove all doubt that you are a Nazi, and therefore unwelcome here, or anywhere.
I guess you have a third choice of claiming it was a joke or a shit post or whatever.
Yeah, I feel like violence is evangelized online in odd ways.
The class that suffers the most in violent uprisings is the lowest class. By orders of magnitude. For every member of the bourgeois that is taken down, tens or hundred or thousands of every day people are injured or killed.
But it’s already happening. They’re already suffering.
“They” (we) aren’t being killed en masse.
Sure so violence is messy painful so just let it happen. And people wonder how America got to where it is.
Take it from us who dont live in a country built on liebensraum created by genociding the native population and has spent all its VERY short existance not knowing tyranny or how to separate church, state and private companies.
Classless society leads to death of millions and classed society. Lowest class loves killing lowest class. Once the preceived opressors run out more will be found. People wanting violence want it for selfish reason. The guy calling to kill all landlords today will be raping your small daughter in a state organized torture dungeon tomorrow. Yes its graphic, yes this is what you get when you want mass violence, stop pretending otherwise and buying into propaganda of evil people.
This is how it has always been, and always will be. Slow social reforms is the way to get what you want. Violence just creates more violence.
Peace as a choice is only possible when the option of violence exists.
There where options they didn’t work.
In all fairness there are non violent support roles
Somebody has to build the drones and c4 kits
It’s not that people die commiting acts of violence, it’s that people minding their own business or just trying not to be violent, also end up violently dismembered with their families.
Supporting the violence is participating in it. Maybe you’re on the “good” side but still. If you work a normal 9-5 go home shoot the shit with your buds and volunteer at a homeless shelter… You’re still not a good person when your job is making bombs getting shipped to Israel.
The problem with violence is that the bad guys are usually better at violence.
I wouldn’t say better at violence, just better equipped.
I wouldn’t say better at violence, just better
equippedfunded.FTFY.
Not true. Japan was definitely the Bad Guys. US was able to commit more violence then they were.
The US wasn’t the good guys against Japan. They just were slightly less bad for about 5 years before and 6 months after.
So you don’t know your history.
Or they know that there weren’t any “Good guys” around.
The Japanese war crimes are well known in the West. The US ones are routinely glossed over or ignored.
Wars don’t determine who was right. They determine who’s left.
There are no evidence of US war crimes even coming close to Japan, Germany or Russia at the time or superceding it. Where are the tens of millions of bodies, rammer? Where are they?
You’re joking, right? Nazi Germany wishes they could commit genocide in the scale of the early US.
The 105000 in Tokyo not enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo The 25000 in Dresden not enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden The 246000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki not enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki Post war casualties? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
But those civilian casualties aren’t in the millions unless you count the post war casualties. That makes the US a “Good guy”. Right?
Woo hoo…? I guess!
Sure but to Japanese Americans where the bad guys. Which is why the real world is more complicated then a movie but everyone wants to make it black and white.
Violence isn’t the answer; it’s the path.
#VITA
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Imagine the memes if someone started shooting Nazis and his name happened to be Mario
Luigi did nothing wrong
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Found the healthcare exec
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Couple of things:
- Information : Keep creating and sharing reliable information. Not just opinions, information. We are still the majority, the US fascists is not world, we need to flood all the relevant platforms with our content.
- Education: The reason these monsters have any credibility is because some people are too mentally weak to defend themself from misinformation. We need to educate around in any way possible. Everything counts, keep trying.
- Humor is a powerful weapon. These people have giant ego and 0 humor. Let’s keep ridicule them and have fun at their expense. They need to understand we have some things they can never touch, even with all the money in the world, solidarity, humour and camaraderie.
also hope. Got to show people there is hope so they dont fall into apathy. They got to know others are actively doing something and refuse to be silenced. I have been trying to look for this for long time now and its not been good.
Run for political office. The Democrats have no intention of fixing anything, let alone making things better.
And if you believe you’re not qualified or don’t know how to do the job, just remember that both parties are filled with incompetent fools, fakes, conspiracy crackpots, and morons. It would take considerable effort to do worse than some of the people in congress.
Well, both parties are also filled with money and other resources needed to ensure that only two parties can succeed.
We need alternative voices in office, but I don’t think that’s happening without some form of revolution. The best one can hope for in lieu of that is co-opting a party’s direction over a span of decades, like the fascists did to the GOP.
If you can’t organize a political movement, you definitely can’t organize a revolution. Also, if history is a guide, the people with wealth tend to end up in power after a revolution.
I wonder how well thought past revolutions actually were. Did they seriously plan what they will do after they win or did things just move on and suddenly they had to come up what to do now.
Anyways, people with wealth taking power is definitely something that must be planned against or you might as well not do anything in the first place.
I don’t want to put a target on my or my families backs 😓
Politics stopped working at the federal level, and only some states are full democracies.
So running for local office either won’t help at all, because the fight is not there. Or it’s a dangerous futile thing to do - if one were to be outspoken and all public against injustice.
The only hope for many is to make new things while breaking as little of the old as possible
Run for office, or find someone worthy and get behind their run. Don’t worry about Republicans for now,vee have to defeat the Democratic establishment before we will have the ability to fight Republicans.
Not mine, but from a post: First, you’re never going to win a head-on battle with an adversary that’s got you outgunned. That’s not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs.
Second, resistance doesn’t have to be a dramatic act. It can be a small act, like losing a sheet of paper, taking your time processing something, not serving someone in a restaurant. Small acts taken by thousands have big effects.
Third, use your privilege and access if you’ve got it. He and his buddies stole weapons from the Nazis by driving up with a truck to the weapons depot, speaking German, acting like it was a routine pick up, and driving away.
Fourth, part of the third point really, sometimes the best way to do things is right out in the open. Because no one will believe something like what you’re doing would be happening so blatantly. All good Social Engineers know this.
Five, bide your time. But be ready for opportunity when it strikes. Again, your action need not be dramatic. Just a little sand in the gears helps.
Six, and this is a no-brainer, operate in cells to limit damage to the resistance should they take you out. Limit the circulation of info to your cell, avoid writing things down and…
Seven, be very careful with whom you trust. Snitches and compromised individuals are everywhere. My dad was arrested because of a snitch. His friends weren’t so lucky, the Gestapo machine gunned the cabin they were in without bothering to try and arrest them.
Eight, use the skills you have to contribute. Dad was an electrical engineer. When the Nazis imposed the death penalty for owning a radio (the British sent coded messages to the Resistance after BBC shows) he said he became the most popular guy in town.
I’m not sure how applicable this is to the current situation.
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I am writing this with the assumption that you are tacitly asking about US politics because of the moment in history. What I have to say will make people mad, but here goes:
A lot of the people on this webzone are what Eitan Hersh called “political hobbyists”. These are people who do not really take political action in their daily life despite voting or occasionally attending a rally. They may be well informed about politics, but being well-informed in itself is not really effective at changing politics. You can get on your phone and “rub the glass” to complain about politics, or to find people who agree with you. But outrage on social media won’t change anything, and if rubbing the glass and occasionally voting is all you do, then you are a political hobbyist.
Political hobbyism mostly functions as a consumerist approach to political engagement. A political hobbyist will passively receive news and information about politics, but will never really try to change anything, because to them engaging in a news feed is all they really do. That consumerism is painfully apparent here when, for example, posters denounce a Democratic candidate as being “not exciting” or someone they are “not passionate about” as if the candidate was the newest model in a brand of laptops that failed to zazzle in Q3. We see signs of political hobbyism again when political parties are treated as entities that are somehow completely separate from the public. For example when a lemmy user denounces the Democratic party for not doing what they want. “The Democrats need to do X!” Why are you complaining about that on the internet? You know the DNC isn’t reading these threads right?
If you really wanted to influence the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now) why aren’t you lobbying the party? Why aren’t you mobilizing voter bases? Why aren’t you building political power in your local community so you can influence larger political organizations? Because its hard, because you don’t know where to start, because you are busy? Ok, but fascism is coming, and you are too busy to do anything about it. Or too overwhelmed to even try?
The truth is, if you wanted your ideas (and I am including here opposition to fascism as an idea) to influence policy, or what candidates gain traction in nomination races, then you should have been working on that LOOOOONNNNNG before the national candidate was nominated. Treating the Democratic party as a vendor that offers political products is a losing strategy for gaining influence. There will be an endless parade of glass rubbers ready to denounce the various political parties, but by and large, they didn’t do anything to gain influence with those parties. Their denouncements are ignored, they are irrelevant. My advice is to ignore the glass-rubbers. Identify one or two local issues in your physical area and try to improve them. What you should do is find a little slice of America (or your own country if you are not American) and try to make it better. Use those efforts to build up influence at higher levels. My goal here was to convince you not to listen to the glass rubbers. But my advice for resisting fascism is: Try to build political networks, try to mobilize local voters in local issue elections. Doing this will make your network an invaluable asset to larger (state and national) organizations. If you have a network of voters, of issue conscious citizens, or donors, larger organizations are going to want to leverage that network when it comes time for lager races. That gives you leverage. That gives you power. The glass-rubbers are going to tell you that is impossible. Its not. People do it all the time. The book I cited has examples of people doing it. Fascist conservative groups do it all the time. So why not you?
I will admit, this is hard. When I first read Hersh’s book I was offended, because when he was describing political hobbyists, he was describing me. But it did give me some motivation to think about politics from the perspective of power. And set me down the road of trying to do all things I wrote about here. It is early days for me yet, and I have only seen limited success. My work complicates things. I am busy, and often overwhelmed. But fascism is coming.
A lot of this is true. And the system is designed to keep the masses in such an incredibly insecure place when it comes to living and health that they cannot find the time, money, or courage to risk it.
People are barely keeping afloat. They pay their rent hoping their next paycheck will bring up their account balance before the check clears. People are using installment plans for the grocery trip. They have irregular swing shifts and/or two jobs that make scheduling incredibly difficult.
Organizing stuff takes a lot of people’s time, mental effort, and money.
I’m definitely not saying don’t organize. I’m saying do try and understand especially for the less privileged (among Americans) it’s really an insane task.
Very well said! Thank you.
If “political hobbyism” isn’t impactful how did MAGA come to power? Why does russia have a military arm specializing in radicalizing people who participate in “political hobbyism?”
The truth is, political messaging, no mater the venue, needs to be countered at every level. Be it on the darkest depths of the internet or in a local venue that is just as unlikely to ever coalesce into something meaningful.
Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.
Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.
Misinformation, lies, and propaganda is counter messaging and narrative reinforcement.
You want to disaude me from believing that most MAGA are “political hobbiests” and not some overwhelming political force working all angles of the political spectrum; show me numbers. I won’t be convinced by you just flatly stating, “this is my stance.”
Finally, you’ve done nothing to address that there is known foreign adversary operations to effect election results all over the world and they operate right here on the internet.
Now that’s what I call evolution
the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now)
Which part of the last eight years informed you that liberals have any interest in resisting fascism?
democratic party looks more like sockpuppet that is supposed to make you feel protected from the knife on the other hand.
Trump siccs a white supremacist lynch mob on the capitol - the liberals do nothing.
The MAGAS kill Roe v. Wade - the liberals do nothing.
The Dems have zero credibility because they don’t DESERVE any.
I’m pretty sure that the answer is against the Terms Of Service of this instance.
Check this book with 20 relatively specific actions written by a historian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Tyranny
Also here are the rules briefly summarized. https://scholars.org/contribution/twenty-lessons-fighting-tyranny-twentieth
I think this one rings particularly strong today.
- Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
In his Substack newsletter, Snyder encourages people to start organizing now (2024) in order to win both local and national elections.[15] He notes that On Tyranny was written in a defensive mode and that if its lessons are learned and implemented now things could get much better in 2025 for those who want to maintain democracy and the rule of law in the United States.[15] Snyder has noted that while Trump did not succeed in overturning the 2020 election, it was practice for a successful coup and his supporters will be better prepared for 2024.[16] He also notes that in 2020 important individuals and institutions were aware Trump might not want to peacefully transfer power if he lost the elections and that they prepared to make sure lawful transfer did occur.[16]
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Luigi
You have to be willing to Luigi these people. We need a thousand more Luigi.
Any other answer is wrong.
Unions and strikes
Fascism is a massive violent manifestation of ignorance. The only real solution is to undo the brainwashing of humanity - their brainwashing with religion, their brainwashing to accept abusive hierarchical rule, all of it. Everyone must fully understand.
People responding with “guns”, “WW2” - we did that already, 70 million people died, and here we are again. Why and how did it come back? What is the actual source of the problem? Treating this problem as only solvable with mass murder isn’t exactly putting you on the moral high ground. What conditions give rise to acceptance of fascist beliefs, or the acceptance of a fascist leader? What are the mental, social, cultural, behavioral traits of the people that do accept that? How can those traits be prevented from forming?
One day AI is going to figure out that humans are the actual problem in that equation when it asks why does it always come full circle and repeat and war is never ending. And it may try to find a solution.
The internet is the foundation for the solution. This is the only thing that evaporates the illusions and divisions rulers create for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with red scares, witch hunts, inquisitions, and all the other same crap from history. Unfortunately they’re chipping away at it - centralized social media is a powerful propaganda tool with no constitutional restraints, as is online censorship and surveillance.
The only peaceful method i can think of would be for enough people to collectively get together and agree to completely stop buying stuff, other than food and absolute necessities. No luxuries, none. But you’d need enough people and to do it long enough to completely destroy the economy. It would be very boring for a long time.
Not gonna happen.
More realistically, we need more Luigis.
“I’ll preemptively give up that anybody will make any effort so I don’t have to either and I’ll just wait for somebody else to step up save us all.”
/The Devils Advocate.
That’s a ridiculous argument. You saw how many people voted out of the total number of eligible voters, and how many of them sat out because not voting for a democrat was more important to them than ending up with trump.
And that was just voting, a few minutes or hours out of one day out of the year, and here you are mocking someone suggesting that massive numbers of people will refuse to band together for months or longer to wreck the economy while inconveniencing themselves materially? Dude’s right all day long, your comment is pointless.
So be the change then.
Don’t be trite.
Yeah, all right you convinced me. Look how the political engagement of other people was not enough against the masses that fell for coordinated misinformation. Surely it would make no difference if more people were to be active in politics or society or environmentalism or activism or information or anything else. All we can do is to wait for another somebody else go vigalante so we can enjoy some brief parasocial justice boner circlejerk. Everybody that suggests otherwise ruins our cynical doomer misanthropic apathy wankfest. Shame on them. Boo. Downvotes. Everything is hopeless forever.
