I’m not claiming the US is being punished: that was a metaphor.

My point was critiquing folks who are gleefully reveling in the suffering of folks in the USA because of the actions of despots. It’s easy to do when it’s the USA, but when applying the same reasoning to other regions, it’s more obviously shitty behavior. I have empathy for Persians suffering under the Iranian regime. I have empathy for folks living in El Salvador dealing with an autocrat abusing power. I have empathy for the kids growing up in Mississippi. I even have some amount of empathy for the redneck down the street who is too fucking stupid to understand that their Republican “leaders” are taking advantage of them. Just like despots around the world. Plenty of innocent enough folks still live in terrible regimes, and IMHO we shouldn’t be happy about those folks suffering because a majority of their neighbors are assholes. We should…you know…help those minorities? Not just paint them with a broad brush and bask in their suffering?

TLDR I can have contempt and empathy at the same time, and I’m not going to cheer for the suffering of decent folks who just happen to have been born into a shitty regime, or who’ve had one foisted on them.

This kind of emotional response is why there’s an active genocide in Gaza right now. Hamas killed some folks, they technically represent the population, so…COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. People yearning for suffering because some portion of a heterogeneous population is terrible. Go back to the 1930s and say “kill all Nazis” and I’m on board. If you say kill all Germans, though…it’s a lack of nuance that at the very least borders on genocidal.

Plenty of us in the USA have suffered and fought our entire lives. We are a nation with an actively oppressed underclass. Even for those with the chance to leave (as I have in the past), we have friends and family here who don’t have the means to leave even if they would. Many people are also brainwashed. I know people who had almost no fucking chance growing up. Living in a dilapidated trailer, Fox News blaring on TV, no good education, etc. Yes, people can get out of that, but when your parents are terrible shitheels, and you’re surrounded by terrible shitheels, there’s a big discussion to be had about how much of a chance someone has to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…and I don’t just mean that in terms of improving their economic conditions, but literally the way they think. We need to teach class consciousness worldwide, not consider a large percentage of a population just collateral damage. I don’t think it’s moral to just consider a quarter of a population to be thrown to the wolves, or even another quarter that’s apathetic because of the systems they have no control over brainwashing them into compliance.

I especially like that it’s a recurring bit

There’s plenty of people beyond saving, that’s for sure: but I think people aren’t so immutable. I think people are being made more monstrous by the capitalist system we live in, and the people at the top who exemplify avarice as a path to success. I’m not going to be buddies with ex maga unless they’re really going the extra mile to make up for the damage they’ve done, but I hope at least some can be decent humans.

Yeah, and it also feels “forever ago” when you’re that age. Literally half their lives. So I could understand them thinking it’s “old news”, but when you’re an old and crusty 40 year old, you know that a 60 someone saying heinous shit means that person is deeply twisted.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Does he think the Democrats just “hate all things fossil” so much that there’s some kind of integer overflow and it flips negative, and oil businesses do just fine entirely by accident?

It’s truly astounding how well right wing propaganda gets folks to believe things that are so completely at odds with his own lived experience. None of us are immune to propaganda, I know, but that whole statement is just…fascinating

Oh that’s her, I was just trying to be insulting haha

Oh I’m totally agreed! It’s all capitalist, jingoist garbage, same as it ever was.

Yeah, I was just on a flight and saw a dude across the aisle that was mainlining all the worst people on twitter. Space laser lady, the racist cat, the nazi automaker…this dude was just liking everything and replying frantically. He was flipping through everything and replying so quickly that I felt pity as much a loathing. It was absolutely pathetic. Dude’s brain is melted.

That was the NFL being political though, this is them being patriotic…is what my troglodyte relatives will say.

To add to this, there’s a great section in Man Without a Country by Vonnegut where he talks about his approach to humor, and he mentions the time he was in Dresden during WW2 as a prisoner of war, while it was being bombed.

True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.

While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.

A bigger part of the section here: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/kurt-vonnegut-1/excerpt-from-a-man-without-a-country

No, my entire point is that they are the ones that showed up: hence why we have a more authoritarian president than perhaps ever before. Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, the raw numbers of votes dropped for the Democrats, not the Republicans. This whole discussion has been about bleeding support from (some) of the Left.

And yes, this is because Harris and the rest of the DNC shit the bed. That they went too hard toward the right is certainly a factor: and again, to be clear,I’m not saying it’s a good idea to move right. What I’m trying to get across is that abstaining is often indistinguishable from wanting a more right-leaning candidate, because then that’s the candidate that wins.

If it was up to me, see my volcano comment. If we want revolutionary change in the USA, I know which party I’d rather fight in the streets against.

I’m sorry that you’ve misunderstood my point so deeply. Let me more explicit. The Cheneys should have been thrown into a volcano. Harris did a shit job. We all need to organize to get milquetoast liberals/moderates and fascists alike out of office.

Unfortunately, over decades they’ve learned who are reliable voting blocks. Not participating communicates that one sees both options as functionally the same. So if anything, it encourages then to move to the right, which is a reliable voting block.

I’m not at all gleeful about voting for them, and desperately want other options. I’m doing what I can to build parallel structures, engage in mutual aid, and in my day job I’m fighting climate change as an environmental research scientist. Unfortunately, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and the tracks of the trolley don’t change overnight.

Well yeah, that’s exactly the idea. Choose the best of bad options, and try to improve things so that the next time there’s better options.

Not choosing either usually leads to the worse option, which makes it harder to improve things.

There are no easy options.

Yeah, a lot of evangelical churches make it abundantly clear that as long as you love Jesus, you can be a giant piece of shit otherwise and still get into heaven.

As a kid I appreciated that line of thinking because I thought it allowed us to strive for better, accept that we’re all flawed, but still understand we’re all worthy of love.

Instead, as I was a teenager watching these same folks froth at the mouth and cheer for blood in Afghanistan and Iraq, I realized it was a way to reconcile any damn horrible thing they wanted to do. A cloak for depravity and hate.

Something that’s stuck with me for a long time is this quote within a quote about Susan Sontag:

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

https://inthesetimes.com/article/susan-sontag-and-arthur-miller

You don’t even really have to headcanon it! The Voyager episode 11:59 touched on this, with Janeway’s ancestor being very different in reality than what spotty records had led her family to believe for generations.

Not Lemmy specific. There was US legislation related to the word being deemed offensive fifteen years ago (given the slow nature of Congress, it wasn’t a new sentiment then, either): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa’s_Law

Fair enough that plenty of insulting words could be cast as abelist: but my guess is that a word like “idiot” is old enough that most folks called that in a medical context aren’t around any more. Maybe I’m wrong though: plenty of folks do push against saying things like “crazy” in an insulting manner.

It’s only “demonic” if voting is the only action you take to flight fascism. The reason to vote for the lesser evil, IMHO, is that the less evil option tends to be easier to fight.