I thought about it and realized that you missed the point of what I’m saying.

I’m arguing that the only way you can view them (both biden and FDR) as someone who did more good than harm is if you abstract the harms and goods from the perspective of someone who is not being harmed while being a person who is benefited.

FDR sentenced a single ethnicity to prison for the crime of being japanese. This destroyed generational wealth, and ruined the upward mobility of a generation. It’s easier to say “he did more good than harm” if you are both the one being harmed.

Biden is not just allowing genocide, but funding it, and attacking those who prevent it from continuing. If you are isolated from the suffering he is causing, it’s super easy to say he is doing more good than harm.

Sure, there are parallels that can be drawn, but that’s not what I’m arguing against. To say I’m proving this point would be true, but completely dishonest since it blatantly ignores the argument I made against that point you madr in the edit.

I have no idea what you mean by that

It’s been a rough week at work, and being in an environment where we are all on call and numerous people are subbing for others who are having life get in the way, a lot of people are working late and taking weekend shifts that they would have otherwise had off.

One of my college friends works with me, and I know his responses to these questions pretty well, and boy howdy have I seen him go through all of these responses in order as things got worse and worse while the director pops in and out of call to check on us and get updates on the situation.

Considering we would have had the weekend off and both of us stayed very late, things are going pretty OK, all things considered. Can’t complain too much if I’m still truckin’

That comes from an incredible point of privilege.

If you were one of the people who were thrown in an internment camp, you probably wouldn’t remember all the good. You would only remember years of your life, wasted, having been thrown in prison camps due to the circumstances of your birth. Fuck, if you were the child or grandchild of a survivor of it, you would remember the stories of your grandparents thrown in a camp, discarded from society by a xenophobic government who clearly sees them as a second class citizen. You might remember hearing about them selling their homes for a fraction of their worth in order to get anything from them at all. When they were finally free, they were homeless too.

If you were a Palestinian American, you probably are stressed out of your mind, waiting on the uncommon phone call from your family, hoping for a confirmation that they are alive, and hoping you don’t hear that your cousin was gunned down by a gun drone when looking for food, or your aunts, uncles, and their children were blown up at a refugee camp, or executed in a hospital.

You might not have heard anything for six months, and you feel like absolute shit, having gone to protests, and even direct actions to try and put a stop to it only to be ignored, called antisemites, or otherwise degraded by a government and press lying through their teeth to justify a “war” wholeheartedly supported by the president. You might be looking at your paystub, seeing almost a hundred bucks, maybe more, being taken by the government to fund the extermination of your family.

To say “FDR did some bad things, just like Biden. But we still remember all the good that came from him, of which there was arguably more” is not a pragmatic calculation. It is valuing the good done to you, as a person who wasn’t systemically attacked by the government during that time, over the suffering of a marginalized group who felt the force of a white supremacist government coming down on them. Being a social democrat doesn’t excuse anything bad FDR did, and it certainly doesn’t make up for any of the bad things either.

Everyone loves to say ACAB, but people often forget about the cop in their head

You are mostly there. One of the most important notes is that the project is settler colonial, and it is also helpful to point out that zionism is older than Israel, and it has been around for over 100 years.

+1 on that Shaun vid, it’s great

I’m an anarchist, and seeing someone say “to be liberal means you’re against tyrants” is pretty humorous. It’s a self-aggrandizing tale that doesn’t reflect reality.

Liberals do not oppose tyranny. Liberals opposition to tyrants is done by keeping the offices clean, and the seats of power warm, be it in the oval office, judge’s bench, or chairs in the chambers. Liberals vote for the lesser tyrant as an anti-tyranny measure. They oppose tyranny by increasing funding for the police, and giving bombs to fascists the world over while continuing to fund the biggest military budget in the world while giving the district of defense a thumbs-up to defend American interests by invading countries and slaughtering millions.

The so called United States is a liberal democracy. It always has been. And yet this structure is the cause of some of the most violent tyranny the entire world over. Even if you consider the fact that there have been some terrible presidents who might have been the cause for some of the most tyrannical acts of the state, the very act of saying “all men are created free and equal” is tyrannic when said by a slave owner trying to create a government that considers life to be property. And that was said before there were even presidents.

Under a liberal democracy, even with a liberal leader of it, being minoritized is a sentence to feel the tyranny of the state. It doesn’t matter if you are a holding a minority political stance and using the liberal-approved mechanisms to oppose the state. It doesn’t matter if you are a minority based on religion, sexuality, gender identity, race, or ethnicity trying to peacefully oppose the extermination of their group, or the systematic oppression of it. You will feel the force of a police officer’s boot on your back and knee on your neck, tools of the liberal democracy being used to “keep the peace” or maintain “law and order”.

Liberals will uphold the fundamental tyrannies of capitalism. Liberals will uphold the fundamental tyrannies of property ownership.

To be a liberal doesn’t mean you are against tyrants. It means you are the lesser one.

Its moreso that “anti-authoritarianism is stupid because steam doesn’t care, and the machines of the factory I own must be operated during these hours because thats when the despotic steam engines are running”

Its a really silly argument, but I’m also taking the worst bits out of the essay because that point is stupid and funny.

To be more fair, Engels is trying to critique libertarian socialists and anarchists and he is doing a bad job about it because the language used by him, and the language used by anarchists did not line up. Engels expanded authority to be broad and impossible to escape, where the anarchists and other anti-authoritarians were talking about a specific type of authority, hierarchic authority.

His argument for most of the essay is essentially “collective activity means cooperation, and in order to cooperate you must, at some point submit to the will of the others.”

That argument is stupid because it lacks any nuance on authority. The authority of a police officer, able to violently impose their will on someone with a badge and a gun is different than the authority of a group of friends coming to an agreement on where to get lunch even when one doesn’t want to get food at that restaurant, which is different to the authority of a slave-master demanding that his slaves must work the loom in a particular fashion to maximize productivity.

Lemmy is a bit further left than center. And most liberals tend to fall around the center to center right.

Most people on the left don’t like liberals because in their desire to be “the adult in the room” by dismissing anything more radical than the status quo, they get in the way of people trying to bring forth important change. As an activist, it’s not very fun to see someone take a milquetoast centrist position and call you radical while continuing to uphold the status quo that we are peotesting against while claiming to despise the status quo. These liberals, though often well meaning, end up being the great stumbling block to freedom MLK was talking about.

From the perspective of the left, if you see someone who is making it harder to make necessary change (ex: ending the war on gaza, stopping police violence/police abolition, being a cop, etc) is a pretty nasty sight.

Is lib a slur? No, but it’s certainly an insult, and it’s aimed at people who aren’t used to being called out for their political positions by someone who isn’t conservative.

Also, as an anarchist, I find it fun to lib bash every once in a while :3

I don’t like the logic that “you cant say this because it is a similarly structured statement to something someone bad said”

Also “i aint reading all of that; free palestine” is a lot better since it isn’t like you are gonna convince any zionists to change sides with logic, since they don’t care about logic or truth. They care about the narrative and the stories they have.

As someone who routinely gets drunk and argues with zionists, I’ve noticed that most people nowadays are entrenched with their position on the genocide. And like arguments I’ve had with fascists in the past, you aren’t gonna be able to actually argue with them because they have 100 propaganda points drip fed from both American liberal and conservative media, and Israeli press, ready to pull out at once.

When you get dog piled, or someone cites 30 propaganda news pieces, you shouldn’t engage, its a waste of time. “I aint reading that; free palestine” is probably the best thing to say

“Zionists” = Jews, an entire people.

Unfortunately, zionism is not equivalent to a group of people. Zionism, at least in this context, is a geopolitical position, not an ethnic or religious group.

To consider an entire population of people one-dimensional and hold a political position is harmful. I literally said this exact thing in an earlier comment.

Zionism, at least in this context…

To elaborate on this point, I’ll describe it in this context, and then describe it being used as an antisemitic dog whistle, so we should be on the same page.

In this context, zionism is a political ideology based around settler colonialism, and it led to the founding of Israel, among many, many other consequences.

The meme points out a really annoying tendency that I, as a queer person, and many others have seen when supporting palestine where pro-israel people will go “lol why do you support hamas, they will literally torture you and kill you for being LGBT” even though it is pro-palestine, not pro-hamas.

In the antisemitic dogwhistle context, it is simply used as a stand-in for “the jews”. If you think this is the context people on the left are using, you lack all forms of critical reasoning.

Based on what you said, this meme would indeed be racist if you view it from the antisemitic dogwhistle context. But it isn’t coming from there. To try and conflate the two is just trying to conflate opposition to a geopolitical position with racism.

It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)

So, are you gonna tell me what’s racist, or what?

I live near another military contractor, and I saw them in pride this year. I’d say this is real.

It’s pretty disgusting ngl

I don’t see anything racist about it, but I’ll take it down if it is racist.

I don’t see anything racist about the meme, but I’ll take it down if it is.

That’s making more sense to me, but my view of reverse engineering is 100% tainted by my work in SRE and hacking.

I work in the same way, but I’ve kinda forgot about using a calculator since the last few math classes I took forbid using calculators

You think an entire people are one dimensional religious fundamentalists, based on an article of clothing worn by an entire people, even their queers?

Jesus fucking christ, you are being racist as hell

My first pride experience involved wearing a Kuffiyeh and shouting at my local military contractor’s HR department and the one visibly LGBTQ person as they strolled down the street appalled that people didn’t want them there.

No pride in genocide,