I ain't young, but this is my first election where I am a real lefty, and... Has it always been this bad?
The liberal seething is just disgusting right now. You can't be on any place of the internet that has any discussion about politics whatsoever.
If you suggest that the Democrats should be better, then you get called out for trying to make Trump president
If you respond that now is the time to actually put pressure on candidates because they're running for office and in any fucking reasonable place, this is where they would make campaign promises and you can demand stuff out of them, then they say that you're being a fascist.
The liberal propaganda is just mind numbing.
Even the traditionally leftist places on Reddit (a place I visit very infrequently, so small changes add up over time when I visit and see the crazies have come out of the woodworks) are getting inundated with a bunch of "but the GOP is worse", and "we have to compromise" and blah blah blah. Even in some commie spaces.
Like I understand not being a doomer, and trying to actually make things better in the meantime while we build forces for the revolution, but holy shit, it's like Anyone to the right of Marxist Leninists have immediately caved to pressure.
Nothing breaks a liberal's brain more than valid criticism from the left. They think of themselves as progressive darlings or the adults in the room and have adapted to a life where politics is mostly about being in a camp better than a camp to their right. Their usual way of coping is to try and slot left criticism into a right camp because they are politically illiterate and only know how to do that one thing. The political class knows this and teaches it
Anyone to the right of Marxist Leninists have immediately caved to pressure.
Story as old as time
Of course not, but principled Marxist groups exist. Principled squishy soft-left groups in the west, not so much
true.. baking through ignorance is often painful, which is why we often fight it
The always has been comments here kind of ring true. Back when I was a SocDem and then DemSoc, I barely noticed how bad the rhetoric was because I was also on the "we need to get
SandersClinton to win to beat Fascism!" bandwagon. But after I went further down the leftist pipeline, I started to notice that what all that rhetoric really was was just keeping the status quo but hoping for a few concessions like better education and healthcare. Basically we've moved a lot further left and they haven't.Another thing is that I noticed, from last election, and I know it was there since the dawn of social media, was how much harder the Democrat and Capitalist apologia propaganda is during the election seasons. This last month has been so fucking annoying. As soon as Tim Walz was pegged as the VP pick, reddit became a fucking hotbed of posting about how good he was as MN governor, and how full the Harris/Walz campaign rallies are, or how Walz is "just a normal guy" compared to Vance or whatever. Don't get me wrong, Vance is a fucking creepy dweeb.
I'm rambling. Basically we've moved further left and this is mostly just the facade of western politics crumbling.
reddit became a fucking hotbed of posting about how good he was as MN governor, and how full the Harris/Walz campaign rallies are
I am convinced that shit is hella astroturfed. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of Democrat fanatics out there, but i highly suspect that they also have huge bot farms that get activated at times like this. It was the same with the whole NAFO psyop when the Ukraine conflict kicked off, yes there were some mentally unstable individuals and genuine fascists in that, but a ton of it we later found out was co-ordinated and botted almost to Zionist hasbara levels. The intelligence agencies are deep in this sort of stuff.
Point is, the image that you get of the political mood in society if you just look at online social media is deliberately and heavily manipulated.
At this point it's painfully obvious that it's a lot of bots seeding the comments and then libs regurgitating all the same talking points. Reddit has basically become this sort of entity where you just need a few bots to get the ball rolling and then everyone falls into line. Which is hilariously on display when you see everyone calling every other subreddit an echo chamber, or when you see how common certain phrases show up on reddit. "unhinged", "mental gymnastics", and other rhetoric that tried to dehumanize the other party/group/individual basically in any exchange. I recently noticed this since Hexbear and Lemmygrad has it's own lingo of sorts and it doesn't fall in line with reddit's lol.
Point is, the image that you get of the political mood in society if you just look at online social media is deliberately and heavily manipulated.
I still need to read Manufacturing Consent, but this became glaringly obvious to me after reading Inventing Reality. I think this is what sets ours Lemmy instances apart from other social media in a lot of ways. It cracked me up earlier today on a reddit post about how it turns out China is basically taking over in the technological innovation department since the US is too busy feeding the war machine, and it was just comment after comment saying how China stole everything and don't care about patent laws(lol...). It was just like 400 of the same fucking comment man, and like one guy saying he moved to China last year and it's a lot nicer than the States. This post coming the same week as the US churning out 25 new laws aimed against China and shoving something like $30 billion into the anti-China propaganda machine. Not suspicious...
I started noticing it more via twitter after the October 7th thing happened and all the zionists coming out of the woodwork there, who would use the same general talking points, be accounts who were inorganic in their origins, posting history, username, etc.
And I agree, it seems heavily a part of reddit as well; it's just harder to spot at a glance on reddit because the accounts are more anonymized, as is the voting. But the tonality of it (for lack of a better word) is distinctly there. Although it's certainly believable, like you say, that there are fanatics out there, the numbers don't make sense. Many regular people are plain busy and do not have the time to be posting foaming at the mouth imperialism on the internet, even if they wanted to; and if they did, they would articulate it in varied ways based on their levels of ignorance regarding imperialism and conflict and so on, not this stuff where suddenly everybody has more or less the same talking point.
where suddenly everybody has more or less the same talking point
That could also just be an indication that the liberal imperialist media is very efficient at relentlessly drilling the phrases and talking points that their PR people came up with into the heads of their followers through constant repetition.
A great example of this is how the European media when referring to the Ukraine conflict constantly and in unison repeats phrases such as "Putin's war", "unprovoked", "full-scale invasion", etc. They have been doing this day in and day out for over two years now. For a good chunk of the population, at least those who are not yet highly skeptical of the mainstream media, eventually this propaganda works.
Yeah if you think its bad now just imagine what it was like in the early 2000s. American bloodthirst was at an all time high and universal healthcare was considered communism by 90% of Americans.
Oh boy, yeah, I was in high school around that time. Not super conscious about things, but man, I can imagine that the internet of the day was certainly on fire.
It's bad and it's only going to get worse. The weaker the center gets the more unhinged liberals will become and the more we will see them compromise with and adopt the positions of the far right rather than give ground to the left.
like macron did with forming the conservative government even though the leftists got the most votes.
Yup. Welcome aboard comrade. Try not to let it break your sanity.
I'm not an American, or living in the US, but I've been following US politics since 2006. In online spaces it's always been this bad.
I live in the US and have been following politics since before 9/11. In online spaces it's become worse, especially after 2014.
Fair enough. My main experience has been with Reddit (and Youtube early on), as well as a few forums here and there. Consistently, if I ever brought up any of the third candidates, even as a question, I'd be attacked as a shill for the other side trying to waste votes. I'll admit that now, because media has become deranged as well, people are a lot more willing to act fervently and lash out. But I've been seeing the basic behaviour since forever ago.
And back when I first started getting involved in online discussions, you still had the whole "patriotism" parade going on as well. I've been called "Unamerican" multiple times (people just assuming I was American in the first place), I've been chastised and banned for "not respecting the troops", I've been reprimanded for calling out the stance of candidates on the wars in the Middle East. And especially during election season, if I were to mention that I'm a communist, the American conservatives would almost always conflate me with a liberal, and the American liberals would almost always conflate me with a conservative.
Be lucky you weren’t politically active for the Gore candidacy. Liberals act like he would have governed further left than he was ever going to.
For most things the majority of the world is on our side. And for the rest is partly why MLs aren't tailists.
I've heard good things about the APL(American party of labour) and there are some comrades from CPUSA around here, seek out one or the other, or if you find any Marxist organization around you and join the struggle, being a Marxist in isolation is somewhat contradictory and very saddening as well, seek an organization (assuming you have the time and energy for it) and work together
CPUSA is exactly what OP is complaining about, they endorsed Biden before he dropped out lol.
If you want a principled non-reformist party in the USA you'll have to look farther than CPUSA because they are Democrats in red
Maybe APL could be better at any rate I believe organizations at least in the west retroceded rapidly since the fall of the Berlin wall, the loss of the USSR, for a bunch of reasons contributed (directly and indirectly) the structure of Marxists organizations to un-radicalize. The best example in recent memory of Marxist organization on the US is in my opinion the black panthers, particularly in Fred Hampton's time. We should go into that direction, do collective action towards empoverished populations. Work with them for them, take Marxism out of the college grounds and into the back allays where nobody else looks to. Of course that isn't easy, and especially doing it right and respectfully, but it's the only way, without going towards the masses it's just spinning wheels in vain, it goes not very far, refining the theory is helpful but we got to the point that it's all many organizations do and often in the wrong direction. So I don't know how to move things to the right direction but hopefully I kinda painted a picture of where said direction is, now the hard part is to get there.
Yeah, the long story short about that is I have made some strides and joined FRSO and have talked to some people, and even was organizing until life caught up recently (medical, work). The group is very small, very limited where I am and I'm outside the city nowadays, so it's a lot harder for me to do in-person events.
Im planning getting re-involved, but that's gonna take awhile unfortunately.
US politics has been a shitshow since as long as I can remember or have ever read about. Other countries have their own weirdness with politics, too.
To avoid feeling too negative, I try to keep a few things in mind. First, shit was way fucked up in the past, too. So don't panic, because you're not the first person in this position. Second, many people love to polarize things. Us vs. them. My way or the highway. You're either with us or against us... And it's hard for the pro-polarization folk to realize that their perspective is a shallow one, that they're getting played because of it. They really don't wanna have to learn more, to use their brains. Careful thinking is so irritating... And you and I can't fix that. We just have to live with it, work around it.
I'm gonna keep in mind what you and others have said that this is nothing new and I don't have to panic. At least I know this wave will pass like every other.
It sucks though. I feel unironically red-pilled. Just a different perspective on things and it's weird.
I used to have such strong positive feelings for Democrats and such strong negative feelings for Republicans and I remember literally feeling back in the day that I could not imagine feeling any differently. Now I hate them both (for sifferent reasons) and that's just a weird feeling.
