Marcela (she/her)

“Leftist” in 2000s Italy meant either a) communist or socialist party outside the established Communist parties, also mostly excluded from parliamentary politics…or b) lifestyle progressive in the extended network of ‘a’, also understood as “lite center-left”. There is no way to quantify the “amount of Left” since these two meanings of the word are in opposite directions.

Understanding this in terms of US politics is a lost cause. This is the only correct response so far:

As for the US, it actually uses the term “liberal” correctly, the US just has thoroughly shut out the left to the point that liberal is the farthest “left” mainstream discourse is traditionally allowed to go.

Different culture, different meaning. But if I had to, I would say that “b” above is the one introduced by the American far-right into the political discourse.

Kimmel is back on air, and the American liberal establishment has heaved a collective sigh of relief. Not because liberals and their Democratic Party have learned from the incident and used it as an opportunity to galvanise meaningful opposition to Trump’s authoritarian surge, but precisely the opposite – because it allows them to go back to their blissful slumber, ignore reality, cling to cognitive dissonance, denial, ahistorical wishful thinking, and the complicity that is integral to white privilege within a white supremacist order.

In fact, liberals do not even substantially disagree with the core of Trump’s policies. After all, both right-wing and liberal elites are loyal servants of empire, the latter just give it a veneer of humanitarianism.

Both support policies that sustain the oppression of poor and marginalised people: the corporatisation of healthcare and education, labour exploitation, mass incarceration, militarised policing, censorship, corruption through corporate donations, and extractivism and militarism abroad. The liberals have put their spin on all these with talk about human rights, rule of law, and diversity.

Other than the semantics of “liberal” (substitute for Centrist or Democrat to taste), this is very well conceived. These are the same people who tone police and chastise the victims of being too angry, and will through as under the bus to appeal to “the middle of the tent”.

This piece is really a breath of fresh air. If Democrats were so precious about other topics as they are about their late night comedians, we would have not descended that far into fascism. And this is why they are actually complicit.

Somewhere I read that the concept of anti-christian bias can, and will, be used just like antisemitism is, as a broad moral justification for annihilating leftists. Didn’t hold much water when Trump signed his “antichristian bias” EO, but after the most recent events (Catholic church, Kirk, Mormon church), they are bound to dial up this angle. Also queer people: christian nationalists consider gay rights as a direct attack to their faith.

This is why your comment is the only one here that is worth responding to. The rest indulge themselves in a self-righteous and false sense of superiority. They make the same mistake with Trump, failing to see through the fuckery, and realize the consistent strategy of the christian nationalists backing him.

Obscure internet lore has it, that Watson mouthed “bar the one”, right after “here for ALL the witches”.

But this does not make a difference.

bringing a transition vibe to heterosexuality that 2nd wave gender essentialists don’t really like

I share your anti-militarist attitude, but I don’t think that this is good in any way. It is rather bad. The military is a well respected institution in society and the standards it enforces resonate to societal beliefs very deeply. For decades, a staple rhetorical attack against gay people was that “they don’t take them in the army for a reason”. And guess what, this belief floats around to this day. So this is a huge discrimination, and very stigmatizing, and it will be the bedrock of massive scapegoating of trans people in both the US and the UK. And it might not be this triumph of anti-militarism you seem to think it is. History shows that this can just be the prelude to a massive militarization of society at large.

Well, this is something that felt off indeed. But please explain. So http(s) is the world of http requests, but you can also have other services like ftp, ssh, bittorrent and what not. Is that what you mean? So the WWW is just the global interconnection of web pages strictly, over the Internet? Would this apply to any internet? /genuine

Is this …mansplaining?

An internet in theory is a network of other computer networks (not single computers). The Internet is the world wide web.

Transphobia is a deal breaker for a substantial portion of the lemmy userbase. Also, other open-source communities are fiercely pro-trans, like Debian. And Ubuntu recently chastised mods for pushing the idea that transness is inappropriate for bios, supposedly because it is seen as sex-related. In this interval you say “nothing new happened”, this probably means that the person is question is at least as transphobic as they were back then. If you consider transphobes only get more and more radicalized (Rowling, Chapelle, Mace, etc), it can only be expected to get worse, so that is why I said “at least”. If he ceased to be a transphobe I suppose he would be out telling everybody, perhaps add a changelog that pronouns are canonically supported in ML. In the meantime, genocidal anti-trans rhetoric and legislation has only gotten worse, rendering his previous standing on the issue, even if stable, relatively worse from an ethical viewpoint, and if trans people under the new circumstances are more suspicious and feel less safe in the instance, they are fully justified, taking all the above into consideration. Being “as antisemitic as before” for an individual between 1938 and 1942 does not mean the same amount of antisemitism. The amount of things done to us in the surrounding environment has severely worsened, so being on the same ideological position comes with condoning a lot more cruelty against us. Because this is a prejudice and the “amount” of prejudice does not really matter when not only genocidal rhetoric is heightened, but also because right-fucking-now there is all this talk about cracking down on trans online spaces as havens of extremism. If the rest of this comment has not persuaded you yet, then this last part should be an eye opener, because being a fediverse instance admin, in this toxic social climate of intense transphobia is reason right enough for any trans people in ML to pull a reddit-exodus on them. So, yes, keeping the issue afloat is perfectly justified in my view.

Remember when a lady shopkeeper was shot for having a Pride flag outside the shop? Or when Canadian intelligence services reported they expected a rise in hatred-fueled domestic terrorism against trans people?

With republicans, every accusation is projection. The last part speaks volumes, as it seems they are doing it on purpose. They now want to silence those speaking up about it.

There is a knee-jerk reaction surrounding the word propaganda. Etymology of the word is Latin for “what is to be disseminated” and it can be used with or without the malicious connotation. Also telling apart the distinction between wartime propaganda (psychological warfare) and political propaganda might help. The commonplace usage of the term is better illustrated by “manufacturing of consent”.

Laura Loomer:

“It’s time to designate the transgender movement as a terrorist movement,” she wrote in a social media post. “Trans people are a threat to society. We can’t allow them to continue killing people. They need to be socially ostracized and the president should make medical transitioning ILLEGAL in our country.”

In an interview with Newsmax, Jackson baselessly said that transgender women “have an underlying level of aggressiveness” and suggested they be forcibly committed to mental institutions.

“We have to treat these people,” he said. “We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can’t let them communicate with each other. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that’s spreading across this country.”

Todays news outlets if sent back to 1945: Underrated painter shot in the head by maniacal racist in Berlin. German outrage over frantic celebrations across Europe.

Radio is great. Local radio rarely has the kind of political talk I prefer. It’s either podcasts or web-radio for me in this direction. I still love to have the radio on anyhow.

Funny how being subtly irrespectful flies under the radar of the mods, yet you keep insulting after you called the mods on me. Noice. Now, on your original question. Does the article say that civil war in the US is outlandish because the standard of living is high, racial tensions are diminished, and there is not clear geographical division between sides? All three of these premises are wrong. It is ridiculous that I even have to spell this out for you, but the irony is lost by the fact that you felt the need to archive the article, which is so funny that I consider this discussion over. So, dress the world however you want, but civil war in the US is both probable and imminent.

Removed by mod

Uhm… all of the premises he lays down by the first two paragraphs are wrong, so I stopped reading.