Most places had some type of shelter in place orders for a period of time that was difficult for people to handle. I never thought your comment was anti-vax.

Here’s the thing, it was a global pandemic, any decision a government made was only going to mitigate disaster, not prevent it entirely. Either a lot of people died or a lot of people had a really difficult time. I tend to think preventing deaths comes first. If your argument is NZ wasn’t flawless in their handling of the pandemic response, sure, no one was. But they did a better job than almost any other country. Zero countries had a satisfied populous after the pandemic. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You’ll learn from it and hopefully do even better next time.

Here’s some perspective, in the US we had more people die in the pandemic than any other single event in American history. More than WWII, more than the Spanish flu, more than the civil war, etc. The damage to our psyche from all that death, far exceeds 4 months in lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Over 1 million dead here, be grateful your country at least sought to keep you alive.

I don’t disagree with a single word you said. But having perspective and leaving time to be human is not burying your head in the sand.

The last things I tried to say was that taking action is one thing you can do to mitigate your sense of helplessness. People who help others or try to make the world a better place often end up in a better mental space. It has the added benefit of working against all of the bad shit that is happening. Pick something, anything you care about, and try to make a difference. Even if you only make a tiny difference, if a thousand other people go out there and make the same tiny difference, suddenly you’ve moved the needle. In my experience, despair is nearly always coupled with paralyzed inaction.

While on one hand I completely agree. On the other hand most generations in human history saw difficult times. One thing we have now is easy access to extra layers of constant despair by always being able to see any bad thing that is happening every minute of every day, on the news, on social media, from our politicians, etc. Then it even creeps into discussions with friends. The general dispare has crept into the discussion and taken over. But at the end of the day, most people have food, shelter, water, family, friends, and some level of healthcare (all be it problematic in the US).

For those of us lucky enough to not be destitute, or a current or future target of a repressive regime, it is important to remember to take some time to actually enjoy life instead of always feeling helpless about a profoundly imperfect world. Depression caused by the status of the world can also be avoided by taking action. Those that help, rarely let the status of the world get them down. Because, they know they did their part to move it in the right direction.

a lot of harm to society

You mean one of the lowest per capita death rates of any country with transparent reporting? Explain to me how saving tens of thousands of lives in New Zealand was bad without sounding like a dickhead…

Sadly as I get older I game less hours, so most of my games on this list are older. LoL, wow, Dota 2, modern warfare 2 (2009), Wingspan(online boardgame), PubG battlegrounds, counter strike 2, terraria. I haven’t played fps, wow, or dota for years, but they still dominate this list. It’s funny because if I made a list of my favorite games, it would include almost none of these, except terraria.

I said I was a gun owner because it directly contradicted your moronic binary thinking were people can only fit in one of 2 boxes.

instead they could open the NICS to people who sell guns for free

Okay go ahead…

And how do gun safety courses ban private sales?

Common criminals are not the only gun deaths. For crimes of passion, requiring a short term barrier to ownership usually leaves time for that passion to subside. For suicide, requiring a short term barrier is often insurmountable for someone that is depressed. But most importantly, for gun safety, a lot of dip shits with guns have zero idea what they are doing and are a danger to everyone even if they don’t intend to be. The same people that will argue up and down that mandatory gun safety is too far, will also argue that gun safety courses make guns safer and we should allow all guns because good people with guns train themselves and take it seriously. It’s usually just the mandatory part that bothers them.

I agree with the entire second half of your comment, from “pay teachers” to “end qualified immunity”. They aren’t mutually exclusive though.

I think simple minded people can only differentiate pro or anti when most issues are nuanced. Stop being simple minded. I’ve owned a gun for most of my life, I also think some of the gun laws need to change. That doesn’t make me anti gun, it just means I understand some regulation could save lives.

Things like universal background checks, and mandatory gun safety courses (resulting in a gun license), could both reduce gun violence while still allowing most citizens to own guns. That doesn’t make me anti gun, it just means I think we can do things to reduce violence by gun.

I think they meant it doesn’t solve any problems because they never were the problem.

No, perpendicular. We were on a path out of the way. I’m not sure why it came our direction, but I remember more than one pulley and the tree was propped against a building sort of in our direction.

I was watching some amature tree removal people rig a pulley system to a tree that partially fell over from about 50 yards away with a few other people. They hooked it up to a pickup truck and drove forward at full power. The pulley snapped and landed behind me on an incline a fraction of a second later. I felt the wind from it go over my head and sort of visually noticed it go by in the same way someone would notice a cannonball go clear across a field in an instant. It was most certainly going fast enough and weighed enough to completely demolish my skull and everything inside. Very surreal, we opted to leave them to their work after that.

Sorry you’re getting down votes. I think you’re giving your honest perspective and that doesn’t deserve the dismissiveness. I do think you undersell how much Trump specifically had to do with misinformation though. I do really believe the culture around Trump really follows his lead, so when he was selling misinformation, you saw his followers parroting his misinformation which I do think was likely responsible for a lot of death.

We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn’t happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.

Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn’t account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It’s amazing that this fact alone didn’t end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.

The Commonwealth still owns land in Australia (and 14 other countries ) and still heads the government all be it with limited powers. Literally, they are still colonizers. Fuck em.

Nothing could be more egocentric than believing every opinion different from your own can just be reduced to egocentrism. Maybe it’s time for a healthy dose of self awareness…

I think you’ve misread me. It’s not like I’m oblivious to the danger we all face, that’s exactly why the inaction of the left makes me irritated. I also admittedly led with a softer touch in regards to organizing in my last comment because I had no idea if going overboard would just shutdown the conversation. While I live a fairly heteronormative life, I’m queer, so is my wife, and so are a large chunk of the people I surround myself with. I brought up zoning and infrastructure because I have a lot of knowledge when it comes to those topics so my effort isn’t wasted. Densifying is an environmental imperative. The spread out nature of our infrastructure is the single greatest threat to human survival because the vast majority of our fossil fuels goes to supporting it.

There is a reason I said I’m not a fortuneteller, we really don’t know how far Trump and Co will take it, and we will all have to be open to pivoting depending on what he does. The single greatest thing people can do is get involved in literally anything. Because once people understand how to navigate activism and politics, it becomes that much easier to pivot when things get bad. Many people on the left have to still take the first step, literally just getting off the couch and used to organizing. I’ve been encouraging that on lemmy and reddit specifically because people need to start somewhere. It’s been my experience that the people most angry on here, the people that refused to vote, etc, are also the people that never get involved in real activism past protests. I really just want people to engage, now, while there is still time…

I’m not a fortuneteller, depending on the route things take I’ll join whatever group(s) are fighting to save democracy and go from there. But aside from that I’ll focus on organizing for small wins, multi use zoning, local transit, shared use trails, etc. Things that improve the lives around you lead to positive impacts politically. I’m most interested in just moving forward in the ways that I can. No one needs to take a large bite, just getting involved leads to positive impacts. People who get involved also don’t tend to feel so helpless when they see how possible it is to get bills passed and good projects funded, that usually leads to a positive outcome. If things go to shit anyway, at least I’ll have done something and tried.

There are all sorts of things that could have been done, but I’m not sure whether it would have moved the needle enough. You can’t just show up in the bottom of the 9th and say. “I’ve rarely hit for your team, but if you don’t do what I say I won’t hit a home run for you.” That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to communicate, all be it grumpily.

The left needs to integrate themselves into the party and into activism permanently. Yes we will be working with people with whom we profoundly disagree on some issues. But we will also agree on many things, and that will create progress. That progress will leave room for negotiation and firm resolution. When you’re already sitting at the table and already part of the team, then you have the power to make change. Especially because the left is large enough and passionate enough to completely overrun the party like the Trumpists did with the right. Instead the left repeatedly does the one thing that will always result in nothing, they refuse to participate.

Its not really about just voting. Though when 10 million people stay home just because they don’t like the top of the ticket, it’s definitely silly. Those down ballot races are filled with progressives and further left candidates that the left could actually be supporting.

They see abstention and protest as action. Protesting and refusing to participate is cathartic, but it has little to no impact on policy. We need to actually get organized and flex our power… Even if it is somewhat adjacent to the party, if millions of far left Americans truly organize and show they can work as a team, the Dems will be forced to bend towards us. The Dems consistently work with organized people. People that are organized are massive blocks of power with the ability to truly mobilize, It’s why the Dems have often been so integrated into labor unions.

I also think the issue with Israel includes hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign pressure against anyone who “falls out of line” from Christian and Jewish political action groups that support Israel. There needs to be far more organizing on the left to counteract that, we’ve done maybe 15% of what needs to be done if we really want to tip that scale. I have no faith in the left to really do that work. So people won’t do the work, and won’t vote… But won’t see how they are a part of the problem.

I agree, voting is the bare minimum, if people are so frustrated, it should drive them to action. Democracy is an imperfect system, but it only truly works if people are actively engaged with it. If we don’t start taking it seriously, we certainly won’t have it much longer, if not Trump someone after him will strip it from us.

At the end of the day, I don’t really care as much about the rift in the Dem party, as much as I care about the inaction on the left. If the left truly engaged with the process, in whatever way they choose, the path will open up for at least some reconciliation in both directions. The real problem is the inaction on the left, imo. The fatalism and despair that leads to lethargy. We need true activism beyond just protesting, such as citizen lobbying, getting involved in local community, joining affinity groups that have legislative goals, etc. All of that stuff forces the party to take notice, and it works. I’ve been involved in many things in my life that resulted in passed left wing legislation, it starts with people choosing to try to make a difference.

I’ve given thousands of hours of my life to politics and activism throughout my life, and intend to continue to. I don’t have to justify any of it to your brain rot.

Complete revisionist history. Before Trump got the nomination the first time, the Republicans did everything they could to prop up any other candidate but him. They worked far harder to stop Trump than the Dems ever did to stop Bernie. When Bernie ran his first time he won a majority of the early caucuses, a system that heavily favors party insiders. Aside from a handful of people at the top, Bernie was well loved in the party, but he failed to get votes.

Democrats would rather lose than work with their left.

The might be the biggest lie I’ve heard in years. The Dems have been willing to work with the left for my entire lifetime. It’s the lefts “my way or the highway” mentality towards politics that makes it impossible. Parties have to be able to garner over 50% support to win elections and win issues. The right wing has had an everything and the kitchen sink mentality towards politics for years, they will appease the far right and the moderate right and both show up. When the left tries to do the same the far left goes “you’re only doing 80% of what I wanted, that’s evil, you have to do everything I wanted because my viewpoint is the only correct one!”.

Yes, I do plan to do the work, because I’m not a lazy braindead idiot. The country is not lost yet, we still have to fight. And if it does fall, we still fight. That’s what people who aren’t caught up in their moral purity do, they look at the situation and make the best decision available to them. The reason you whine so much is because it’s so much easier than actually putting in effort. The world has always been a difficult place filled with selfish people, the only thing preventing disaster is good people taking action, be one of the good ones and do something, anything, to improve the world.