• pillow [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    in all my years on this site and leftist subreddits and discords and irl meetups, through all of the disagreements and struggle sessions we have I think unironically the one single issue that most determines which users I feel affinity with is the divide of:

    • people on the verge of tears from powerlessness and anger crying out for some desperate revenge against oppressors

    vs

    • ppl who don’t get the sentiment and can only kind of uncomfortably note that we should be better than that
    • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.

      Spare me your melodrama, children and babies are not your fucking oppressors. If you seriously want to tell me that calling for babies to be beheaded and every Israeli being burned alive is “desperate revenge against oppressors”, then I guess Netanyahu really is doing self defense right now.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.

        I see that divide too. Too many self-described leftists don’t really care about society improving somewhat as much as they want to be knee-jerk contrarians against the status quo and also think violence is fun instead of sometimes necessary.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        If you genuinely want the world to be better, you have to pick a side. You can’t just rest in your armchair in your ivory tower and condemn the material reality on the ground on all sides.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            Not an idealistic side you made up in your head, a side that actually materially exists in the real world.

            Israel and its goals or Hamas and its goals.

            Pick one.

            • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              9 months ago

              Hamas does not have a policy of completely exterminating of all Israelis. You are, despite nominally supporting Hamas, implicitly promoting anti-Hamas Zionist lies.

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                As far as I’m concerned, unless we in the crackerverse take up arms against our settler governments we are complicit. I include all of the settler-colonial project in this, so I’m guilty too because I’m posting instead of dedicating my life to opposing this evil project in all its forms.

                Am I supposed to not be held accountable just because I merely create wealth for my ruling class and pay into the imperial death machine?

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    9 months ago

                    From the Hamas Political Document

                    “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”

                    Now, what does this mean? One interpretation could be that they only struggle against Zionist jingoists.

                    The taking of hostages tells us something deeper. Were they all IDF reservists and veterans? I doubt it.

                    So, what is a Zionist? I posit that it’s all of us who live and serve in the imperial core. Every single one of us that feeds into this death machine and our ruling class. So I’m a communist, what the fuck does that matter? I haven’t done anything. I’m paying off loans for my trailer, I’m selling my labor for wages, I’m consuming the same treats as everyone else, and I pay my taxes. Am I not a Zionist, simply because of that?

            • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              9 months ago

              Are you actually on the side of Palestinians? You seem more like a bog standard online leftist that has done the bare minimum of recognizing a genocide for what it is and has taken that to mean they can just say whatever edgy nonsense pops into their head and pretend that’s anticolonialism. “Oh, you can’t criticize me for saying shit that Zionists pretend are the actual stakes of the conflict because I have right opinions.”

              You are not special here. You are not more outraged than anyone else. You are valuing the clout of appearing more “extreme” to a handful of internet leftists over the damage of giving Zionists screenshots of Palestine supporters actually wanting to commit genocide. If you’re worried about what side people are on, first worry whether you’re even helping the one you pretend to care about.

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                Clout? I’m anonymous.

                Posting isn’t politics. We can’t help anyone here. If I was worth anything I wouldn’t be wasting my time arguing on an underwater basket weaving forum, I’d be doing something that actually matters. We’re complicit. If I were killed for it, I’d understand.

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    9 months ago

                    You’re the one that wants to smugly denounce both sides as bad while upholding your imaginary side of the conflict as the solution. There are only two material sides in this conflict: Hamas and Israel. That’s it. If you don’t support the only material force fighting for Gaza:

    • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      falling into genocidal antisemitic tropes in response to the israeli state being ghouls is not hopeless desperation. these are not palestinians posting after having their homes bombed and their loved ones lynched. this site is still mostly westerners living in much more comfort, lots of white westerners with no real connection to the conflict. most people here have no fucking excuse to be posting like that, other than putting on the costumes of the actually oppressed to vicariously play out their outrage.

      it is adventurist nonsense. no, you actually can manage your anger enough to not call for murdering babies, if you lack the discipline to not even help but at least not produce propaganda for zionist liberals - and they do in fact watch this place for shit takes like this - then you are worse than useless.

      if you’re mad, at least focus on presenting the IDF as monsters instead of presenting their victims’ perspective as wanting to kill babies. you can recognize that the actual victims are not going to respond well to being genocided without stepping in to say awful shit on their behalf.

        • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Specifically singling out babies to me read as a bioessentialist take as babies are not actors with any political agency, and the language of specifically genocide as opposed to, like, hoping the IDF steps on their own landmines has an antisemetic connotation, but I missed the bit about the Nakba. I am much more suspicious of some white person having this extreme a take having some other motivation for talking about genocide than I am someone that was actually directly harmed by Israel.

          • LeninWeave [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            Specifically singling out babies to me read as a bioessentialist take

            While you’re correct that it would normally make sense to read it that way, the only reason anyone is talking about babies at all is that the IOF invented a story about “40 beheaded babies” and then immediately said they would not investigate it or provide any evidence. Given that context, I don’t think it necessarily makes sense to interpret it as bioessentialist, but rather as an angry (incorrect) reaction to all of the “Hamas are evil baby killers” propaganda.

            To clarify, this is not meant to justify the removed comment which was deranged regardless. Just because the evil settler genocide army is making things up about killing babies, that doesn’t suddenly mean that killing babies is good. jesus-christ

            • pillow [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              9 months ago

              the only reason anyone is talking about babies at all is that the IOF invented a story

              yeah this is closer to the mark for me, I get a bit skeptical when ppl start dredging up the romanovs, or all the french children dessalines killed, or whatever fantastical (or even fictional…) potential outcome, as a cautionary tale of what could happen if revolutionaries were to get carried away… like, it’s just incredibly unrelatable to be this ridden with anxiety about potential excesses when more restraint is honestly the last thing we need rn. on the dessalines thing e.g., black jacobins is pretty critical of that whole debacle bc of the geopolitical consequences for haiti but iirc james pretty explicitly rolled his eyes at the white people shuddering in horror at atrocities, it’s just such a weird thing to be concerned about

          • bioessentialist

            off topic but im kinda sure that this has primarily with gender, but I get what your aiming at. Its a mistake to attribute children agency they dont and will not have until they are at least 16-18 (even then its circumstantial and a touchy subject)

            I really don’t get why people with a communist would bring such inherently false analysis into discourse. Being Jewish has absolutely nothing to do with this. Its a critique of Fascist Nationalism and Settlerismwhich can be done by any member of any race. And again, Children are just unable to be a part of such exploitation because they have no agency whatsoever. Children are inherently innocent.

            Communists know the real enemies, why bring in people and groups that have nothing to do with it.

            And yeah, it really should be a rule that one should be suspicious of anything white people (especially imperial core ones) do. Again because of the system they surround themselves in and their material interests are entirely aligned with reactionary thoughts and actions.

      • pillow [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        what, the original commenter said their family lost everything in the nakba, and they were the one unhingeposting not me

        if you take away the wildly inappropriate conflation of israelis and jews, your argument seems basically the same as that of people grimacing at “death to america” and trying to sanitize it as only referring to america as a political formation or something bc it’s so important apparently to observe proper optics to win the sympathy of libs. idc what libs think about anything and I’m not expecting posts on hex bear dot net to have any bearing at all on world events. but im drawn to ppl who lowkey feel xi-plz stuff literally sometimes bc that electric sense of helpless outrage resonates with me a lot, and even when I don’t agree with someone like the removed poster there’s a sense of safety in knowing for sure where they stand

        • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          While I stand by the statement that calling for babies to be killed as an act of genocide has an extremely antisemetic connotation and I would normally assume someone saying that is doing some antisemetic entryism, I did miss that the bit about the Nakba which better explains their post as coming from actual harm rather than just grandstanding.

          However, shit like “death to America” is its own problem, as there isn’t actually any relevant desire to ethnically cleanse white people and so it can be understood as either a joke or indeed just about the nation state, as obviously even if you did actually mean to genocide white people for whatever reason there are a lot of people who are not white here or who are literally indigenous, so an unironic “nuke the US” take would be nonsense even before getting to the fact that whiteness is a social construct that can be destroyed without literally killing all white people. And then there’s the common criticism of leftists using the imagery of people.in the Middle East as violent terrorists to larp as such, along with using terms like inshallah while wishing for violence.