So I’m in the military, and my unit is particularly pleasant to be at, enough that if there are other military people on here, they might get upset by what I’m about to say.
We have peer group meetings with the Commanding Officer of the base, meaning each paygrade meets with the CO without the people above or below them to hear, and discuss issues. As you can imagine, those in the lower paygrades tend to be significantly younger, and when it got to my paygrade, we were all, almost without exception, millenials.
To give a background, in the military we get 30 days of leave per year (basically vacation), unlimited sick days, maternity and paternity leave (I believe it’s at 2 months for Paternity, which is pretty generous by US standards). Additionally, at my unit, we get a four day weekend for every federal holiday, have various “morale days” through the year for fishing derbies, group hikes, etc, and a 6.5 hour work day (cue all military going WTF?!).
At the lower paygrade peer group, a few of them were apparently asking for “more control” over their time off, and being able to take ask for days off with no notice because the weather was going to be good (for hunting, for example). When the CO brought the stuff they were saying up to us, the older, supervisor, millenials, we were facepalming and talking about the fucking Zoomers. But then something amazing happened:
The CO said he could see their point, and maybe we take some of those four day weekends and instead give a few “Liberty Bucks” at the beginning of the year to each person, that can be turned in to get a particular day in the immediate future off (like getting the next day off to go hunting). That actually worked really well for us, because it made those long weekends easier to schedule, and spread out the days people would be out.
And I realized we Millenials were just so happy to have what we had, we couldn’t fathom asking for something better… but they could, they did, and got it.
Fucking Zoomers indeed. Keep pushing, y’all.
The audacity of Zoomers will save the future.
My personal theory on why old people become miserable conservative pricks is that we’re born into this world knowing absolutely nothing, and spend every moment of our lives trying to figure out what in the fuck is going on. Over time, you start to figure some of it out. Then, when you’ve finally started to get a hold of some shit, and finally start to get into a rhythm of what you’re supposed to do, the next generations come in and start changing shit.
People aren’t against things being better. But they are against not knowing what the fuck they’re supposed to do in life. The problem is the overlap. Changing something for the better means people that spent their whole life doing it one way are now in a state of chaos and uncertainty, which is followed by fear.
So you slowly become conservative, and resist all change.
As MellowWheat said, people don’t become conservative as they get older. That’s a myth. People just stop accepting new ideas and stop thinking they can be wrong. They stop changing basically. They get what they wanted, but once they do they don’t want more so they end up just wanting to keep things the way they got them.
Also, even this I don’t think is fully true. The boomers and the next generation or two mostly became conservative when they got older, but I don’t know if this is necessarily the rule. They were just raised to be selfish. I’ve seen it with my parents. They just tend to think about themselves and their family first, and things happened to work out because the economy grew with them so almost everyone had enough, but that’s not the case anymore. We need more cooperation if we’re going to survive.
People stop changing around their 20s typically. But the world around them doesn’t stop. This happens to almost everybody.
guess that means i’ll effectively become more of a radical anarchist as i grow older? because i’m 24 and have yet to show any conservative tendencies
At 24, the world hasn’t yet had the time to change that much. I started seeing these effects at perhaps 35. Individuals are different, of course and not everything applies in the exact same way to everyone.
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I don’t think it’s the zoomies that are particularly different, it’s just kids being kids
May we all be so fortunate as to have a hand in creating a world in which we are executed as reactionaries
Amen 🙏🏻
How does being “executed as reactionaries” help anyone? Once you’ve gained social power you shouldn’t need to execute anyone for their beliefs, and you need that social power to execute in the first place.
I was just making a Proudhon reference
Honestly if the zoomers get to a point where they’re actively organizing and getting shit done, I’m happy. It’s more than millennials were ever able to do
Not so sure… used to think the kids are alright, but have been seeing some disturbing trends from the tankies, who are just fascists that like red flags and yellow stars.
They know things aren’t fair and know there’s problems but are prone to the same fascist tricks the MAGAs fell for.
Hopefully they can pass beyond of this phase, things can go the wrong direction when people organize with violent intentions.
I’m not too worried. Tankies are prominent here, on the fediverse, but despite the mewling of cretins like GenZedong, are not particularly powerful in the latest gen.
Says the guy encouraging fucking political executions.
To quote Jesus Nasarethian from his famous speech on the cross, “it’s a fucking meme, chill down man”
It’s a fucking tankie, fuck him.
Then why do you constantly bring them up, even in the most banal conversations?
I’ve noticed a lot of them are “puritan pilled.” For example, growing up, if there were sex scenes in a movie you would say “yeah, that makes sense. People like to fuck and fucking is a big part of relationships. Showing people being intimate isn’t really a big deal.” But now, I’ve heard younger people complain about sex scenes in movies. Like, as if it should be reserved exclusively for pornography. Which is a very…reactionary cultural take. It’s sort of ghettoizing intimacy, and it’s very similar to the perspective of prurient Baby Boomers in the 1990s or 00s who wanted every movie that showed a penis to be rated NC-17. I wonder if the Zoomers won’t wind up having a lot more in common with their Baby Boomer grandparents than they realize.
I’m of two minds on this. Yeah sure showing people fucking is no problem. But I am also annoyed that in 90s movies always had to be a romantic subplot tacked on. Tombstone would be a perfect movie if it weren’t for the tacked on romantic subplot. Story about revenge, and dudes putting their lives in danger to help a friend, all great stuff. But pause that for 10 minutes so we can put in some romance bullshit because it’s a 90s movie. It’s also the biggest historical inaccuracy of the movie as strange as that sounds.
it’s very similar to the perspective of prurient Baby Boomers in the 1990s or 00s who wanted every movie that showed a penis to be rated NC-17
Well the sensible approach would simply be to make NC-17 more mainstream. In fact that’s why they changed it from being called X-rated to NC-17. They tried putting out a popular NC-17 movie, but this is how we got the movie Showgirls and they stopped trying to do that. That’s just typical Hollywood bullshit where they have a good idea and fail at the execution and then abandon the good idea.
I don’t see a problem with having nudity being given an NC-17, it’s just more information. It’s just that NC-17 is considered a death sentence for a movie’s popularity because of its association with Showgirls. Which is just weird.
I wonder if the Zoomers won’t wind up having a lot more in common with their Baby Boomer grandparents than they realize.
I think it’s just that there are always going to be prudish people. Just in the past the prudes gravitated towards religious groups. But since religion has gotten so mixed up with some detestable politics, the prudes have to find some other groups to push their “ewww boobies, that’s not right!” feelings onto. Ideology isn’t really all that different from religion when you think about it, so that’s where the prudes go now.
I’ve seen a lot of tankie zoomers, but the generation on the whole seems pretty woke to the difference between socialism and authoritarianism
Seeing a lot of “from the river to the sea” from zoomers who don’t realize it’s at best a blood and soil kind of thing that an authoritarian regime is promoting, and at worst a call for ethnic cleansing.
Zoomers aren’t magical unicorns that are immune to manipulation from fascists when they’re facing economic hardship. We know that social media has a tendency to push people in that direction.
They are ripe to be manipulated into an antisemitic fascist movement that simply puts “socialist” in the name of their party. Sound familiar?
We don’t know this will happen, but lets just say that it’s possible that zoomers organizing under the direction of social media narratives could have some very bad results.
I haven’t seen one damn socialist complaining about the Jews. You know that ethnic/religious groups and governments are different things, yeah? It’s not antisemitic to hate the government of Israel if you hate them because they’re doing war crimes. What the fuck is fascist about wanting a government to stop doing a genocide?
They are right that a lot of Zoomers use ‘from the river to the sea’ without knowing the context of the phrase.
I don’t think it’s a symptom of anything deeper, but I do think it’s a matter of concern.
Sounds like you don’t know the context of the phrase if you think it’s genocidal. It’s a call for Palestinian freedom in their own homeland. Of course, when Israel uses it, it does tend to mean genocide or ethnic cleansing, but when Palestinians say it, it just means being able to live free in the place they always have, whether it’s a connected two state or one state.
Not so sure… used to think the kids are alright, but have been seeing some disturbing trends from the liberals, who are just conservatives that like rainbow flags and capitalism.
They know things aren’t fair and know there’s problems but are prone to the same fascist tricks the MAGAs fell for.
Hopefully they can pass beyond of this phase, things can go the wrong direction when people organize with violent intentions.
FTFY 🧐
Every generation has gone through a protesting and getting shit done phase. And before you say it:yeah boomers went through a phase too. Only they were doing things like literally killing themselves/setting themselves on fire to stop wars and regimes. Those protests are where the beatles songs came from. You can only imagine what kind of life they were protesting cuz each generation has created a step up from where the last generation got to. The generation before theirs was fighting for women to be seen as humans and not just property. Many steps for getting to this point had to be taken just so the fight doesn’t have to be about that. But about something else to improve.
It’s like painting a picture and cleaning up the mistakes. Each generation is like a pass cleaning a part of the picture and then you see the next thing to fix.
Bravo for the current generation but Just bestowing the crown for the current generation is just looking at improvement in relativity. It is not absolute.
And you’re still going to find you have meglomanic neo nazis running around somehow existing as an idea in each generation. That goes just to show you each generation isn’t a hive mind.
We tried 🤷
Not hard enough
Ah yes, let’s all start a generation war. How appropriate. This helps all the young people! Oh, wait… Does it?
Yay murdering people over ideology, this has never been a bad thing!
Murdering people for harming others, more grey.
So you guys aren’t even upvoting this like “bro it’s obviously a joke” you’re upvoting like “yeah no I think we should just murder people who do bad things sometimes, maybe even pretty often.”
I think the disconnect here is coming from the vague “bad things” and “dragging people from their homes.”
To me dragging people from their homes conjures up images of Krystalnacht, when the nazis dragged people from their homes for ideologically disagreeing. Ideologically disagreeing isn’t “bad things” enough for me to justify murder, thus why I think the nazis did the “bad things,” to which the response wasn’t dragging nazis from their homes, it was all out war against uniformed combatants and the violence was justified. We did however drag many Japanese Americans from their homes during that same war and put them in camps, which I also think was a bad thing.
So what “bad things” justify political violence? To me, basically genocides/pogroms and that’s it. To others it may (and does) mean “wrong opinions” but imo Ideological “first strikes” just make you the “bad guy.”
Also, in Germany as well it wasn’t just against uniformed combatants.
Don’t want to be the uhm actually guy, but Kristallnacht is the term used in Nazi propaganda. Reichsprogromnacht or the Novemberprogrome / november progroms is the preferred word.
My mistake, TIL. It’s the word they used in school when they taught about it so it’s all I knew.
This guy clearly wants the monarchy back.
You think people defeated the Nazis with just words?
Maybe authoritarians dragging you from your home to execute you is a little different from WW2. I do see some similarities tho, the Nazis would drag you from your home for not being far right enough.
I think maybe, just maybe, mayyyyybe, a political movement mass murdering the folks they consider ideologically impure might be bad.
Idk tho, I drink a lotta vodka and whiskey, so my utter contempt, disgust, and loathing for murderous ideologues might be a mere ghost. Perhaps I’ll wake up sober tomorrow and decide slaughtering people because they don’t kiss my preferably-colored boot sloppily enough is actually really based, who knows
You know which brand of “leftists” like pull this kind of shit right? Yep, red fash, fucking Tankies. I’d be fucking worried if zoomers are actually acting like this.
If they’re red fash I’ll be worried, but if they’re just going Reign of Terror or Paris Commune or Anarchist Catalonia, I’ll accept my execution with good grace.
“ I don’t mind being executed as long as the government that ends my life is weak, ineffective, predisposed to being taken over by a dictator, and will surely fail within 2 years of its inception.”
I dont think I could make a more L take if I tried.
Yes, Revolutionary France very ineffective, First Coalition won that war, right? Or the Royalists in the Vendee?
Which Revolutionary France? The one conquered by Napoleon, or the one conquered by Napoleon III. Just because a revolution kills a bunch of people and then gets conquered by a dictator does not classify it as a success.
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They replaced the king with an emperor, and if it wasn’t for the efforts of other kings it would have stayed that way. In all reality France would have gone the English route with the monarchy as a figurehead, or have been conquered by the Nazis.
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The reign of terror french were pretty proto-red-fash tbch, people don’t exactly consider very often WHY it was where the fiercest resistance to this lang d’oil region centered uprising was concentrated in regions like the basque country, bretton country, and the lang d’oc regions. It wasn’t that they yearned for royalist ideals to be reinstated, it was because Robespierre and his even crazier backers were so paranoid by the end that something like movements for language rights were treated as exactly as traitorous as plotting to restore the bourbons to the throne with a counter purge to boot.
Something the modern revolution idealizing french seem to have made fully into one of their “the quiet part” policies with how they implement their version of laïcité.
It wasn’t that they yearned for royalist ideals to be reinstated,
It literally was, though. The language conflict you’re describing didn’t hit full swing until the Third Republic. The revolt in the Vendee was largely a reactionary movement by peasantry who were miffed at the idea of the bourgeois taking the place of the traditional aristocracy and clergy. The Vendee itself spoke lang d’oil and is, in fact, one of the original regions of lang d’oil.
Bullshit it didn’t hit full swing until the third republic the third republic was just when it also picked up the dynamic of the religious and language rights of immigrant communities because of all the colonialism the third republic was doing in Africa and the ME
Immigrant communities btw who were the actual resistance backbone in WWII, and who go unrecognized because the french right were collaborators who wanted their stories stamped out to preserve french nationalist narratives, and the french left were the backstabbing stalinists who sold them out to the Nazis before liberation came so that they’d get to take credit for all the heavy lifting post war and wanted to cover up their own complicity.
Never trust a “leftist” who thinks state sponsored murder is a good idea. They have no interest in anything except to be the executioner, and to feel nice and self righteous when they pull the trigger.
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I mean they literally did exactly that until Stalin ordered them to start fighting after Barbarossa, after which point they began coopting the resistance movement already started by immigrants, jews, and other social rejects who stalinists also cast out for being rootless cosmopolitans or subversive agents of bourgeois decadence.
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Okay, Tankie.
Accusing me of being a tankie? That’s a first.
That’s a lie.
Is it? I can’t remember ever being called a tankie before in my life. I’m pretty ardently anti-Stalinist and anti-ML. Usually people accuse me of being a milquetoast socdem.
Yes, alone itt you were called tanki more than once
That post was made before I was called tankie elsewhere in the thread.
“Authoritarianism is cool when “the people” are doing it”
Uh, if that’s what you think all of those movements were, then sure.
It’s not that in either case the entire movement was especially authoritarian in their time periods and settings, it’s just that you’re willing to let people literally infringe on your right to live if it vaguely is in service of “the people.” If the world was against me, maybe I’m just an asshole, but I still have to fight for what I believe to be my best interest. Do I have any reason to do anything else?
it’s just that you’re willing to let people literally infringe on your right to live if it vaguely is in service of “the people.”
Yeah, that’s normal for people with actual beliefs. Surely you have a few you’d die for?
If the world was against me, maybe I’m just an asshole, but I still have to fight for what I believe to be my best interest. Do I have any reason to do anything else?
Yes. Absolutely. Unless your opinion is that only selfishness is legitimate.
My opinion is that only selfishness is legitimate. Again, give me a reason why not to. I care about my friends and family because I’m alive and get to experience the connection. I care about living in a safe society, and hopefully one that will treat people less fortunate, as I feel I have been given a shitty hand in many regards. This is all self interest. That all goes away when I die.
Edit: Also miss me with this “would die for my principles” shit. You’re literally defending dying for something you don’t agree with.
My opinion is that only selfishness is legitimate.
Then we have nothing to talk about.
Man tankie is this place’s favorite meaningless insult. Y’all use it where it doesn’t even make fuckin’ sense.
Tankies we’re the type to drag “intellectuals” out to cane them, simply for holding a position at a university.
Tankies we’re the type in Cambodia to literally kill those wearing glasses.
Is a “tankie” about to get elected President of the United States?
No? Even if trump wins he’s an authoritarian in the making but isn’t a tankie. Go read about the definition
So, the “tankies” are worse than Trump?
Two things can occur independently.
Maybe address the imminent threat, instead of tilting at windmills.
Referring to people who’d execute “counterrevolutionaries”?
Mao rehabilitated the last Qing emperor, there’s literally no excuse to be ordering state sanctioned murder against anyone else.
I’m not debating the morality of it but in your previous example it was used improperly, as it often is on Lemmy. That was my only point.
Not my example, but it’s still literally objectively correct, the only kind of leftist who yearns to send the opposition to the wall is a tankie.
Anyone who doesn’t have their head up their ass realized trusting the state with the precedent of being able to kill people for any reason at all is the biggest idiot’s bargain save maybe for signing a contract with Donald Trump expecting him to actually pay for something.
Tankie refers to Stalinism, you’re watering down the term to be against any form of violent revolution, which would put EZLN in tankie territory by your own terms despite their being Libertarian Socialists.
I get what you’re trying to do, but I think I’m in agreement, you’re using tankie where it doesn’t belong.
Bruh, if the EZLN is for murder under the color of rooting out counterrevolutionaries then yes they too are tankies, it’s not about the stated ideology, it’s about the authoritarianism they get up to regardless.
Lenin proclaimed an ideology that called for basically syndicalism, still used the cheka to kill all the syndicalists for being counter revolutionary.
It wouldn’t have mattered who was running moscow, what mattered was their supporters demanding they send the tanks in to kill the “counterrevolutionaries” in Hungary.
They fight and kill people who attack them, they are revolutionaries, but violent ones.
I understand what you’re saying, but you’re conflating violence with Authoritarianism, and therefore violence with both tankies and authoritarianism. It’s not really accurate and goes beyond the scope of stalinism.
Authoritarian social revolution is absolutely tankie shit, they’re proud of it.
Just wait until you hear the word “liberal” being used as a slur. It’s quite a bizarre sight to behold when it’s coming from somebody who’s not a redneck.
liberal:conservative
republican-lite:republican-right
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Then why are there tons of people defending it?
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Yup. Pay attention, Gen-z. This is what propaganda looks like. If you’re too busy fighting for “left” or “right”, then you’re already gone.
The left is correct, though.
In social politics, sure. Their financial politics tend to leave a lot to be desired, though.
And I’m not saying that leftist theory precludes being knowledgeable about economics. I’m just saying that that’s what practically happens, currently.
No, left is objectively correct. Just not violently murderous
Because you’re conserving the status quo?
Cool does that mean they’re gonna vote this time
Will they have a candidate who seems worth voting for? The answer to both questions is “probably not”.
Old man vs literally Hitler who’s also old. But both are equally bad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /s
no one said they are equal
People say that constantly especially on lemmy
i’ve never seen that, so you’ll forgive me if i don’t believe you
…and that’s why Democrats lose so damn much. Reading comprehension bro.
'old man’s called Genocide Joe. Ok bud
Better than the other guy who will genocide Palestine harder and also genocide LGBT people here
Yeah. It’s the voters fault. Not the candidate. Not the DNC. Not the duopoly. Not the electoral college.
I’ve said this in another thread, but American youths just don’t vote, unlike older folks. This is not a recent phenomenon, this goes all the way back if you look at voter turnout records stretching back from the 1960s.
Young Americans from across generations love to complain but don’t do anything. In other countries, the youths are more energised and proactive. You’d notice their politicians are much younger, manifesting the youthful proactivity. American politicians are older on average, because older folks vote more, and voters prefer someone who is their peers whether they realise it or not.
I’m saying this in this thread, politics isn’t just voting. Liberals think that voting is the only way to effect change, when it is the least effective, if not performative. Organize, create parties, movements, struggle, strike, protest.
If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
Why not organise AND vote? It’s not like there hasn’t been other third parties elected before, especially at the local level.
I’m saying this in this thread, politics isn’t just voting.
Yes.
If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
No.
I’m saying this in this thread, politics isn’t just voting.
Yes.
Flotsam
If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
No.
Jetsam
Zoomers vote at higher rates than any previous generation at the same age
If young people actually voted we would have Congress members that understand technology and are interested in fair voting systems. Instead geriatric and withered insider traders or desiccated obstructionist ghouls.
An estimated entire 1/3 of people eligible did not vote in 2020. Do you understand how much of Congress groups could have with those votes?
Meanwhile the insurrectionists vote religiously and they have managed to jam up Congress from doing anything at all. If sane, normal people don’t vote the building fills up with clowns.
I’m gonna vote so hard they might give me 2 stickers.
Are you a strawman building machine, by chance?
Fallacy fallacy. Votes don’t grow on trees. You can’t catch a vote in a forest. It’s an idea. A social contract. It can be taken away, or limited.
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“Fantasy”
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Not at all. Voting is defensive. Activism is offensive. We vote for the least worst candidate put forth by a major party in national level elections that stands a chance to win. All we need that person to do is stay out of the way. Then we vote for super progressive loval candidates (school boards, city council, etc).
Council communism? Les Go!
There were the reason Biden won in 2020
It’s a joke, you losers
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You’ll be first against the wall
is this meme condoning violence or condoning conflating young leftists with violence?
either way this is fucking rancid.
people are being dragged out of their homes to be executed as we speak and none of them by “yesterday’s avant garde.” white supremacy has always been the west’s norm. slavery and economic inequality has always been the norm. violence against those who cannot resist is not edgy or new—it is literally the status quo.
A Biden-supporting, Soviet-hating, Ukraine-backing, US-positive Market-socialist tankie.
Huh. I must be a new breed.
lmao, nice edit. Pretty far from your original stance of “I’m sure this guy is a tankie, I checked his post history!”
I haven’t bothered to check your post history, but assuming that the adjectives you listed are indeed true, I would not consider you a tankie.
yeah no problem i edited my comment because i don’t care about you that much. :)
just came here to voice that it’s bile to joke about dragging people from their homes, and i believe my edit reflects that.
It’s an old joke, about how today’s avant-garde or radical is tomorrow’s establishment. To quote Pterry, 'We Shall Overcome is a song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz., the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing We Shall Overcome at.
shame on you for using pratchett to justify violent authoritarian bile. disgusting.
K
This should be the top comment. Gold.
What the fuck?
Yeah let’s all be extremist terrorists, what could possibly go wrong? Let’s kill those that think even slightly different from us because history has show that to be w great idea, no?
Idiot
Edit: wow, there are a lot more fascists here than I thought, look at all those down votes.
Yeah, let’s do absolutely nothing, and keep things the same.
There’s a pretty large delta between doing nothing and murdering people.
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
-Mao Zedong
So, you don’t want a revolution, and keep things the same.
I want a system designed by people who know how to design systems. I want those systems to be greed-proof and have clearly laid out goals. I want economic systems to be circular with caps on the highest and lowest while still rewarding those who excel.
I want corporate and income controls. I want environmental policy that fucks over economic policy instead of the opposite. I want to heavily discourage corporate manipulation of human systems (such as addiction).
I want news to be publicly funded and with honesty legally mandated. I want more and better political parties. I want a legal system that doesn’t need a degree and endless buckets of money to tell you if you’re committing a crime or not. I want a legal system that applies to rich and poor in equal measure and with proportional punishments.
Yeah, I want a revolution. The problem is that everyone who also wants a revolution has a very different idea of the outcome of that revolution and I don’t want someone to get in their idiot head that murdering everyone else who deviates from their revolution is a good idea. Because it isn’t unless you want the revolution to be won by 10 hyper-opinionated assholes.
Yeah, reading through the history of the revolutionary period in China through the 60s and 70s shows how just murdering people to be the one in charge isn’t enough. You end up with murderers and psychopaths in charge at the end. The ones who were the best at fucking people over.
That said. I’m pretty sure we could do with a handful of the current psychopaths that are charge falling out some windows.
Amazing! I heard they all have their own ponies and people get free iPhones on their birthday
This might help.
With what? I know what a revolution is and how they can function.
I was speaking about the outcomes. Just because you get that many people together to agree that something must be done, doesn’t mean they agree with what will happen after you’ve won the revolution.
What policies will be put into place if any? What about when two groups who were formerly together in the revolution completely disagree on what to do with the systems they are building? Do they just all kill each other then?
Sorry. I think I responded to the wrong comment. What you are talking about is Prefigurative Politics. You want the means to justify the end. The problem with revolutions is that it is a coalition against an established power with different ideas of what comes after. I wish I had an answer for you, but I’m just beginning to explore this aspect. Vincent Bevins has a recent book that get into why protests fail and explores the lack of prefiguration in planning. I haven’t read it though. I heard of it from a recent Upstream podcast. Hope it helps.
“Guys Mao Zedong said violence is cool, so we can just start murking people for any reason”
‘Guys, JFK said the same thing.’
‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’
Doesn’t matter who said that violence is sometimes necessary that still isn’t a valid response to “maybe let’s not just kill people on an ideological basis”
execpt the nazis, right? we kill the fascists, right?
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why fascism cannot be stopped.
That is very much acceptable, killing other people is not.
Has there ever been a political revolution that overthrew the government without violence?
Is every terror attack for political reasons justified then?
“I want to change something and I cant get it democratically so because a revolution requires violence, I have the right to kill everybody” - Is that how you think it works?
Is every terror attack for political reasons justified then?
YES
Who defines what terror is? What is politics? If the policies that govern a society aren’t working for a group, and they are given no other recourse, what are they to do? What justifies anything? Can you justify dropping a nuclear bomb on an unaware city to “end the war?” You can, but it erodes your moral authority to other groups.
“right to kill everybody?”
Not everybody. Violence should only be used if it is necessary to achieve goals. There is a reason Nelson Mandela refused to renounce violent struggle.
So you support right wing violence against abortionists because they want to make a change? Neat.
If you lived in a fascists society that was systematically killing gay and trans people, and you opposed this action, would it be justified for you to form a group and fight them?
If the answer is yes, congratulations, you are a terrorist to the state.
The question of whether a terror attack is justified becomes a moral question. The bigger issue is violence and politics. Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
So a democracy has no value to you? Not everyone can be perfectly happy with the state of society at any point in time. What makes you feel like you are entitled to achieve your goals against the majority’s will?
If the policies that govern a society aren’t working for a group, […] what are they to do?
- Either you accept the constitution, in which case you could protest, say your opinion publicly or just accept what the majority wants, OR
- You don’t accept the constitution, in which case you can leave the country/society.
You’re conflating a lot of empty signifiers with “democracy.” So, I’ll focus on the specifics of political activism.
If you, and the political group you ideologically agree with lived in Nazi Germany, but were a minority, would it be morally justified to fight against the government with terrorism if you are unable to leave?
Every political group thinks they are justified in their actions. One group’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
Pfff, learning from history? I don’t see that happening too much these days.
Didn’t think lemmy would peak so early in the day for me. This is top shelf shit
As always, but boomers did it first.
That group sounds based as hell
There were many other socialist boomer groups active in the 60’s and 70’s. They were vocal, organized, but too small in numbers to enact real lasting change. It wasn’t these groups that sold out the future. Some fled, some went underground, others are still intellectually active.
So, remember that a significant portion of boomers were just as based as any millennial or zoomer when others bring up the “generation wars.”
Capitalism corrupts every generation, even this one.
Those boomers actually did enact a lot of change, just not nearly as much as they thought they would. The America of the 50’s was fascist as fuck. The US just used to invade any country they wanted to. The US was an apartheid state. As hard as it is to believe, it’s better now. That’s why Trumpists want to go back to the 50’s. Those boomers did a lot, they just didn’t go far enough.
Liberalism adapted. The income gap reached the lowest point in US history in the 70’s. The US government gave in to a bunch of their demands, like getting out of Vietnam. At the same time Nixon, who won the election by coup, created the drug war to target his political opposition.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice a pattern in US politics. They split the moderates from the radicals (for example, by small concessions) and then arrest or kill the most radical elements. Nixon started it and it ramped up significantly under Reagan. It’s continued to where we are today, with the right pushing hard and liberals defining their whole platform as “at least we’re not the right.”
So the lesson is not that they didn’t do anything, it’s that you have to go all the fucking way or you’ll lose more ground than you gained. The lesson is that if you don’t protect your generation’s most radically leftist elements, your generation will ultimately be seen as reactionary. A lot of those boomers are still with us, and still radical.
“I dream of a society in which I would be guillotined as a conservative.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)
Anyone not getting the reference:
“I dream of a society in which I would be guillotined as a conservative.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
guys the joke is that the leftists start to act on similar ways that right winged folk did
Yet again, rightwingers prove they’re illiterate
Yeah no one is clearly seeing this. You go far enough to either side and both are using violence and force to get what they want.
Unfortunately, systemic change always takes violence, or at least the threat of violence. Every case where peaceful protest ever worked there was always a parallel violent movement. Any non-violent movement that gets anywhere close to real victory can also count on violence from the other side.
the truly only way of no-violence is to just simply have no enemies
'Course, it is more effective the more directed the violence or threat thereof is. Just killing anyone who disagrees with you will only serve to make you enemies, target it at specific people that are a problem and you’re more likely to gain supporters, as it’s easier to justify than the wide-net method.
That is to say nothing about whether political violence itself is moral or not, I’m generally on the side of “until it’s for anarchism forever, it’s kinda amoral. I’d rather convince the people through words like a human, and then use violence as an absolute last resort against those unwilling to relinquish their positions of power, or those who attempt to ‘fill the new power vacuum’ they don’t know has been filled by ‘the people.’”
It’s the only thing that works.
Ever.
You don’t think the liberal center uses violence? What do you think laws and the police and military are?
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Bait. Lots seems to be falling for it too.