cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6197747
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Flippanarchy
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Feeling horror for the genocide isn't mutually exclusive to attempting to drown out the sound of their suffering and your and your party's complicity (which is what the liberals in the meme are doing, in case you're unfamiliar). Acknowledging that the genocide is happening and incredibly sad 😔 isn't very meaningful when you're actively trying not to talk about it.
If youve complained about democrats being criticized for enabling Israel over the last year, then you're in this picture.
Here's me trying to drown out the sound of their suffering:
Here's me complaining about Democrats being criticized for enabling Israel:
That was 8 months ago. I have nothing to add to it. It's mostly come true now, and if you actively pushed in any way for people not to keep Trump out of power, you helped make it happen. Even if you don't believe there is any difference between "sending weapons" and "sending even more weapons plus turning vague diplomatic complaining into excited diplomatic approval plus putting Americans on the ground to help make it happen," you still helped usher in the situation where Palestinian protest leaders in the US are getting deported instead of being out there protesting. Good job.
I'm aware that you're trying hard to reframe me saying "Trump is worse" as if it meant I was making excuses for Biden, or that I'm saying it for any reason other than concern for the Palestinians and all the other people Trump is current fucking up. I am not. Biden was very very bad on this issue, and Trump is worse. That's what's up. You can insult me or mischaracterize that any number of types of ways, but that's what's up. Tell me I'm wrong.
This is precisely what I'm talking about in my comment. You're taking a point of view that you might or might not agree with, either of which is fine, and deciding to pretend that it is a horrifying caricature (that I'm so in love with Joe Biden of all the fucking people in the world that I am willing to overlook or downplay a genocide just to have a chance to distract people from talking about a bad thing he did). Because it's easier than grappling with what's really going on, you simply pretend that there's a whole class of people out there running around who are just constantly stupid and wrong, and you comfortably assure one another that's the explanation for why they sometimes come along and expose you to a critical viewpoint that isn't what you want to hear.
Go on, continue with it, if you want.
Id also point out that many of us have been screaming about this genocide for far longer than 8 months, but were yelled down by liberals for bringing it up while democrats were trying to campaign. I'm not going to trudge through your history for evidence that you cared about it before trump was president elect, but it's a little telling to me that 8 months ago is when you made that bold declaration.
You were not yelled down. The majority consensus on Lemmy was that Kamala Harris was responsible for the genocide, I got banned from a couple of places for trying to say any different.
You're confusing "someone popped up and disagreed with me" for "I was yelled down." I don't think you'll ever find me going into some comments section about Palestine and saying, "Ssh! Don't talk about this before the election!" Definitely you won't find me banning anyone for it. What you'll find is me pushing back hard on people saying "Don't vote for Democrats, they did genocide!" That there was plenty of, because I don't think that strategy makes any sense, and because I care about the Palestinian people, I was pushing back on it hoping that the genocide that's currently taken a massive acceleration would not do that.
If I thought the DNC consultants who make up their awful strategy read Lemmy, I probably honestly would have approached it very very differently than I did. However I do not. I do not think posting on Lemmy influences Democratic politicians. I do think it influences voters (in some pretty tiny way), and so my main input to it is going to be centered around "how can voters behave in a way which will minimize genocide." Surely that makes sense?
https://lemmy.world/search?q=palestine&type=Comments&listingType=All&creatorId=13369510&page=1&sort=Old
https://lemmy.world/search?q=gaza&type=Comments&listingType=All&creatorId=13369510&page=1&sort=Old
https://lemmy.world/search?q=genocide&type=Comments&listingType=All&creatorId=13369510&page=1&sort=Old
When were you screaming about it in a way that didn't also lead to "don't vote for Democrats"? Most of what I see here looks pretty electoral. That's an honest question, I am genuinely asking.
Go and check the political memes comm from early to mid 2024. Check the mod logs of the politics comm from the same time period. There were several struggle sessions about specific users, complaining that 'all they do is post about Gaza' and being super paranoid that they were intentionally trying to throw the election. Several were accused of being paid operatives.
Whoomp, there it is.
Go take it up with MLK.
You'd have to go look at my previous accounts. I rotate accounts regularly and keep them as separated as possible.
Which users?
Which part of this were you disagreeing with?
Or do you think me saying these two true things is a gotcha about something else? Tell me.
I'm pointing to the statement that places you in the same category as the 'white moderate' that MLK castigates in LfB. I don't even need to find you a list of users I was referencing, because the evidence for your liberal perspective is right there in the next quote.
You're in the picture, buddy.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about. "I want to influence voters" -> "You're a liberal" -> "You don't meaningfully oppose genocide, and I know that because that's liberals"
Logical fallacy speedrun IOW
No, it isn't "i want to influence voters", it's the fact that the way you talk about democrats (and when) is dependent on how doing so will impact their odds of losing to fascists, even when the topic of conversation is about how democrats are themselves collaborating with fascists.
I don't care if that makes you a liberal by whatever definition you want to use for yourself - I care that you ignore your convictions and turn a blind eye to atrocity when it's politically inconvenient, and I care that democrats do, too.
Whatever word you want to use for that is fine with me.
https://lemmy.world/search?q=biden&type=Comments&listingType=All&creatorId=9155326&page=1&sort=Old
All from before the election. Usually it's connected to some kind of "and Trump is still worse" reminder, but your whole picture that I was "turning a blind eye" is simply because you're confused within this whole mental model where I am a liberal, and you're convinced that you already know what all liberals did and you don't need to learn anything about specifically what I did and said.
Actually, all of my actual engagement with people in congress on the issue was from before the election, too, because I thought there was a nonzero (even if infinitesimal) chance that it might do something. Everything has to start somewhere.
Edit: Actually, this whole thing is worth reading: https://lemmy.world/post/21463451 I posted an interview with the uncommitted co-founder, before the election, and then the top comment was someone saying "uncommitted" did more harm than good, and I somewhat disagreed with him saying I supported their right to do it. That was the context for some of the protest-supportive comments I posted above.
Like I say, I do understand why you have this view of what I believe and are repeatedly doubling down on it so, so hard in the face of me telling you different. The reason I am taking some decent amount of time to talk with you about it is because I think it is worthwhile to help you break out of this type of thinking.
That's great - good job. Like I said before, I have no interest in going through your history to examine your bonafides.
What I was commenting on was this:
Good enough if that simply means discouraging apathy and disengagement. But what I hear in this is, 'i cater my contributions to this conversation in such a way to encourage people to vote democrat in a conversation about their complicity in genocide', and I see that as incredibly unprincipled. More than that - protesting isn't like some private conversation with the strategists at the DNC. The point of protesting is to bring the issue out in the open in order to shift public opinion - that's what actually pressures a politician to the negotiation table. Whinging about people harping on how the democrats were handling the situation isn't subterfuge if the thing being criticized is legitimate.
But I'll gladly admit that your history doesn't seem as bad as some others here, and that does provide some comfort. But like I said - I was never really interested in categorizing you, it was you who first asked me, and you who read something into this meme to be personally aggrieved by. It's immaterial to me if you're a liberal.
Democrats being told that they're becoming less popular because of how they handle criticism isn't subterfuge - as far as I can tell that's just reporting on reality like it was sundays weather forecast.
Well, that's a super condescending way to phrase "Hey, you're right, all those things I was insisting to you over and over again were what you believed, they seem not to be accurate, and I apologize for having to go over and over it and not really acknowledging that I was wrong about it until you provided extensive evidence which I eventually accepted after rejecting the first few iterations of." I wasn't providing "bonafides," I was just repeatedly trying to illustrate how you were wrong in what you were repeatedly telling me about myself and my motivations. If you didn't use this strawman to represent anyone who doesn't agree with you as believing all these stupid and evil things, I wouldn't have had to do that, but you do and so here we are.
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that you got there in the end. In the future though I would really recommend against using your preconception of what "some others here" believe and applying it to random people you're talking to. I can pretty much guarantee you that those "others" also do not believe that genocide is basically okay as long as it's being done by Democrats. You and the people you talk to on Lemmy just all agreed with each other to each other that they do. And when you talk outside that bubble, the people outside it just don't have the patience to yell at you repeatedly and demonstrate it at enough length what they actually support and believe that you finally have to halfway backhandedly accept it.
I take it back lol, you're still doing it. You did halfway get there but only halfway.
I'm telling the truth here about what I believe and what I do, and why. If I thought something else, I would do something else (instead of catering my conversation a different way). I'm being straight with people about what I believe, and why it leads to voting and looking at the world the way I do. Of course I might be right or wrong, but that's why I'm saying something when I say it, almost all the time.
Now if it was this scenario where the DNC could hear me here saying that I was planning to vote for them anyway to keep Trump out of power, that would bother me a lot, because that actually would produce this impact you're talking about which could increase the genocide in the world. That would be fucking horrifying. That would probably make me not be straight about what I believe where they could hear me (or, even better, look for an organized coalition of people to be a part of so that I could threaten them with withheld votes in a way that they would interpret and understand as pressure to be better on Palestine.) That's part of the reason I contacted my congresspeople about funding for Israel and have gone to Palestine protests -- to effectively communicate, with whatever little limited voice I have, what it is that I and a lot of other people are horrified by about it. A big part of my horror at refusing to vote for Democrats "because of Gaza" is that I think the Democratic campaign machine is far too incompetent to accurately figure out that signal, and move to the left as a result. I think they're at least as likely to move to the right to try to fix the "losing elections" problem. Fixing that sounds great, but I'm disgusted in general with this big Lemmy contingent who seem to be a lot more vocal about not voting than they are about any other strategy for fixing US support for genocide. That's a shit strategy, straight up.
I wasn't aggrieved by it, I just thought it contained a logical fallacy that was worth calling out. Talking with you has abundantly demonstrated that yes, there are people here (one at least) who are suffering from that logical fallacy.
Yes, which is why I'm in favor of that. IDK, I feel like you sort of halfway absorbed and halfway failed to absorb what I was telling you about my own viewpoint on protest and effective advocacy for change, and you're still kind of stuck in this strawman model of "the enemy" who doesn't believe in protest and so you have to lecture me, or doesn't believe in criticizing Democrats and so you have to lecture me.
Honestly, like I say, a lot of people will not have this kind of patience to try to talk with you until you're able to grasp this stuff. You'll just yell at them that they're okay with genocide and being aware that they absolutely are not, they'll decide you are off your rocker and not want to interact with you. That may be your goal, you may be happier just in the echo-chamber where everyone agrees what monsters all these genocide happy "liberals" are and unable to ever really have a political conversation with anyone outside that realm, in which case mission accomplished I guess.
I've repeatedly said I didn't care if you, specifically, were a liberal. When you asked me several times, I acquiesced with "probably", but nothing you were saying was 'proving' your position relative to liberalism - if anything it was making more suspicous. I never went through your history because it's immaterial to me if you, specifically, are the type of liberal I'm being critical of. Mostly I was just glad you weren't as bad as others who routinely complain about people castigating liberals, but you're still incredibly disingenuous with your own accusations. Take whatever you want from that as a concession.
When people all get together and say, "what the democrats are doing is absolutely horrible, but it's incredibly important to vote for them anyway", and then accuse anyone not explicitly declaring their intention to vote for them of being dishonest about their intentions, of course it's going to reinforce that behavior. And why would I assume you think otherwise? Why would you take issue with people sharing reporting that you think is 'misrepresentative' if it isn't because that reporting might shift public opinion in a meaningful way? It's not out of principle that you tone police those political news comms - if anything it's because you believe the best way to minimize genocide is to elect democrats over republicans, and that means protecting public opinion against popular resentment.
Yes, i'm interpreting your behavior. Yes I know you insist that's not what you're doing or why you're doing it. But you've given me no reason to believe otherwise other than a few quotes affirming that the genocide is a problem, and a bunch of examples of justifying your electoral position by comparing democrats to how bad the republicans are in comparison. Honestly, though - and I feel like i've said this a few times already - i don't give a shit if i'm describing you. I never set out to prove that you're a liberal. If you really think that what i'm describing as liberalism in practice, then fine.
Those people aren't being vocal about not voting, they're describing why electoral politics are a huge part of the problem, and that voting can't fix it. Yes, democrats are the harm reduction option. Yes, trump is a fascist. No, voting does not even begin to fix the problem with our liberal democracy, and insisting everyone make their intention to vote a prerequisite for being considered an honest broker online is the problem i'm talking about. That it remains the central issue in your diatribes serves only to reinforce my opinion of you.
Because you continue to carve out exceptions to what you claim to believe, like this:
If that's not a hyperbolic comment about people expressing their distaste for the inadequacy of democratic policy and governance, I don't know what else to call it.
I'm not sure where you've gotten that assessment, I haven't told you that you're OK with genocide. I can see how you might have gotten there, though.
It's fine, you seem committed to your misinterpretation and your attachment to your label. You can have it.