I went to engineering school in the US. Twice.

No. Lol.

I think it’s this, at 4:33

I don’t know if you can. May you post?

Yes. Imagine we meet at a train station or something and I say. “Hey, you look like a racist piece of shit, but we’re starting a campaign to end world hunger, would like to hear more about it?”.

Yeah but we’re not at a train station. Particularly, we are communicating through text, where you can skim the entire body of the text. Maybe the upcoming text justifies why the author sees me as a racist piece of shit. Maybe I have a blind spot! Or, maybe the author is just a jackass. But now I want to find out.

But like also I think you’re missing the forest for the trees? The point was not to say “you’re a liberal and you should feel bad about it”, it was to critique the point you started with. Namely, the “forest” is that the far right is not morally or materially equivalent to the far right, and to claim otherwise ignores history and the current reality. And I only used the “fellow liberal” framing because liberalism is the default ideology in the Western world, and because it is usually liberals who make points like this. Strike out any usages of the word “liberal” if you really can’t look past this point.

And we’re on Lemmy. I’m pretty sure " liberal" is a generally acknowledged insult here.

I mean we’re on Lemmy.world so I don’t know about that 😆. Lot of liberals around here.

People stop hearing the things that you actually want to say because the name calling bears more weight.

Yeah those people are never going to listen anyways. Really, namecalling bears more weight than the entirety of an argument, than the reality of the situation? If not namecalling, they’ll make up something, or just admit they never cared.

And while I think that “liberal” should be an insult in 2025, it unfortunately is not.

Did you actually stop reading at the word “liberal”? Because the actual argument I made was, with only a little bit of sass, that even from a liberal perspective, based on the values that liberals claim to uphold, the far right should be evaluated to be much worse than the far left. And then I remarked that this is not how liberals think because most liberals are two-faced (even if unintentionally so!).

And while there’s a small chance you’re not a liberal…well, you’re walking like a liberal, quacking like a liberal, posting and commenting like a liberal… and we’re on .world, so there’s gonna be lots of liberals here anyways.

You won’t be able to log in, post, comment, etc., with this account. Basically, the website lemm.ee is going to be gone forever. Lemm.ee is how you do stuff in the Fediverse. The rest of the Fediverse will still be up, and the instances you interacted with will have copies of your posts and comments, but your account will otherwise be dead.

So you probably do want to change instances.

Based, keep up the good work 👍

Ah yes fellow liberal, this is our classic dilemma: do I support people who want to destroy the planet, create an ethnostate, take away all my personal liberties, and kill me and all my friends and family and colleagues, or do I support people who are more zealous than I am about changing society in the direction of the values I loudly claim to hold? /s

(It’s not actually a dilemma because liberals always pick the far right.)

I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB

Well…ACAB is not just an assessment of all officers’ individual characters [1]. It’s an assessment of their role in society. Even a polite, protocol abiding, perfectly gentle cop is, on their best day, a member of the enforcement arm of the State, i.e. they are part of the organization that imposes the will of the capitalist class on the rest of the community every single day. Anything else that individual cops or individual police departments do is subordinate to the designated goal of enforcing the will of the capitalist class. In almost all cases where police departments attempt to do things beyond their primary function

I.e., literally all cops are the enemies of the community by design, regardless of the internal character of an individual officer or department. ACAB communicates this sentiment as well as you can do in 4 letters, i.e. something that can be graffitied in a pinch.

[1] To be clear, like 99.99% of all cops are still shitty people, even if the “cop” portion of their life is assumed to be separable and then ignored. And like you, I really don’t like black and white thinking, so the leftover 0.01% does not represent any cop I have ever personally met or read about; I’m only leaving open the theoretical possibility that there exists a person who would otherwise be a good person if they were not a cop. This observation is almost a corollary of the main point of ACAB, and then plug in the statistics about officers beating their partners and history of police brutality, violating their own protocols, enforcing heinous laws, etc…

Trump disrespected those troops by being there.

Yeah he gave them exactly what they deserved 🖕

We were part of an ‘anarchist’ group once but we left because two people became the defacto ‘leaders’ and kept telling us that we couldn’t do things without ever explaining what they meant beyond just saying that we couldn’t (in a more specific way but we don’t want to let on should they ever find this).

That fucking sucks. Respect for putting yourself out there into the real world. ❤️

I agree, but Andrew makes a very careful distinction between leaders (in the sense discussed in the video) and bosses, and correctly identifies that there are still risks of hierarchies developing out of anarchistic leaders. One of the YouTube comments makes a point that a better word for Andrew’s concept of “leader” in his video would be “guide”. For talking about this concept in English, I agree with that commenter, but otherwise I also agree with Andrew’s take.

Hell yeah, welcome back!

You’re back? I thought slrpnk.net was gonna be down for a month. Glad to see you here in any case.

A ringing endorsement for more protests

Even still, there is no good version of America as a piece of culture or ideal worth living up to. In all its forms, America is a vessel for white supremacy and settler colonialism. Even when distinguishing between the current US government and any other moment in American history, the reality is that at no point has America ever been a good project for the people it lords over.

As Americans, we need to make a clean break from the “America” brand at all levels if we ever want the rest of the world to trust us ever again. “Liberal” patriotism is still patriotism and needs to be smashed.

I honestly don’t know. I haven’t had to change instances for a while.

Now there’s a big ceremonial cry-in for an instance

Tbh I thought it was low-hanging fruit and I wondered why no one was picking it.