PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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1 yr. ago

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Okay, so why would I want to adopt a governmental system that, if history is any judge, is going to get destroyed by some external military? Isn't that a flaw that is more severe than the electoral college?

I mean I do completely agree with you in terms of making life better and the problems of modern government. I was asking that specific thing because of genuine interest in talking substantively about it, and you're not wrong about the overall smug and hostile tone I'm taking. I do apologize. But, on the other hand, you came out with an incredibly smug tone ("How to explain to libs in crisis"), and other people in the comments have been incredibly directly insulting (as well as just generally incredibly unproductive in the conversation). Generally speaking, when someone's rude to me or about me, I'm not real polite to them in turn. IDK, maybe you are right and I should not be rude. If you're really trying to talk about this, instead of concocting insulting strawmen and talking about "libs," then sure let's talk. Why is a governmental system that's easy to crush a good one to adopt even if life is temporarily better before it gets crushed?

Yeah. Like I say, it is heartbreaking.

I am delighted that Palestine has gotten more attention, and I am very hopeful that somehow the situation can be stabilized and improved for a people that has suffered way too much.

It's fucking harrowing right now. The food is gone. The amount that can come in has been cut to 0, and the aid agencies that were operating inside the country have run out as of this week.

I think May might be the month that everyone dies. That's not an exaggeration. I hope I am wrong.

The best I can hope for, honestly, is that they didn't die in vain and the holocaust beginning for real, combined with the strength of the recent protest movements you talk about, is what finally motivates the international governmental community to act in a big way. None of this "divest." None of this "strongly worded statement." I don't know what it should look like instead, but it is heartbreaking that they want to just stand on the sidelines and watch it all happen. And, maybe with Trump and his dysfunction disabling the US's ability to defend Israel as they usually would, maybe there is a little window of opportunity to make a better life for the people in the West Bank and really hold Israel to account for once.

I am not hopeful, to be honest. But that is all I can see of hope, is that something better will come from it in the long run. Right now it is very, very grim.

I think socialists can and should focus the message on issues like healthcare for all, childcare for all, housing, etc., but in order to actually win and protect those gains, you need to have deep, direct democracy

Wow! We really do agree on a lot of things, this is amazing.

The Consitution (and I would argue representative democracy in general) doesn’t provide that. I won’t go into all of it here, but there are socialist currents like communalism, libertarian socialism

Great! Can you point me to some examples of where these things have been put into practice and not succumbed to the systemic forces I talked about which tend to send government askew? Since these are such better things and the constitution of the United States is such a pile of shit by contrast, I'm sure you have tons of examples.

Yeah. They're not all fakers, either, I've seen these people at actual protests too. The one time it's happened I thought about interacting with them but I decided it wouldn't go well and went and hung out with the pro-Palestine people who didn't feel the need to be injecting a whole bunch of leftist infighting (to the point that it eclipsed anything pro-Palestinian and the leftist infighting became the main thrust of the message).

Ding ding ding you broke the code lol.

I also like how, if you sort of unfocus your eyes and take a broad look over the comments, it's very obvious that the chief purpose is shitting on "liberals." There's very little interest in the topics about democracy and improvement of the government and people power that are the ostensible purpose for this whole thing. Basically, almost all of it boils down to:

• There are all these horrible people running around who believe the constitution is sacred and everything in it is great but they are wrong it's just a piece of paper and also it and they are going to make fascism
• And you are one of them, no don't tell me what you believe, I already told you what you believe, shut up listen to me
• YOU'RE A BIG PIECE OF SHIT ARAGRABRAGREWHDBEFJKHEBF

Absolutely! So, talking about the importance of "the constitution" is a common phrasing for principles that are under deadly attack right now, that you can use which will engage the support of a massive range of people including among them conservatives, liberals, leftists, military people, police, lawyers, judges, and so on. And, using it in that way will not in any way interfere with reforming the problems with it, or indicate to people that we need to go back to having slavery or other atrocities that were codified into it. It's a way to rally support for things that need support rallied for them right now. Letting protestors out of jail. Not sending anyone to concentration camps. Stopping ICE from busting in people's houses and terrorizing them. People can get mobilized to oppose that, even if our current constitutional system needs significant reform to be sustainable in any way.

Beyond the current crisis, what this country actually needs is a massive people movement to get the crooks and tyrants out of government. Trump didn’t invent any of those problems or even close to, but if him trying to have the government kill everybody who looks at him funny or gets in his way is what it takes to get that reform going, let’s fucking take advantage and accomplish some things, lord knows we need it.

The supreme court is 9 ppl appointed for life, so that’s antidemocratic.

Yeah, we should change that.

The Senate is 2 ppl per state regardless of population, that’s antidemocratic.

Yeah, we should change that.

Amendments need 3/4 of the States, not people, to go through, that’s antidemocratic.

That one I'm a lot less sure about but we can talk about it.

The federalist papers specifically discuss the desire to prevent the people (“the mob” they called us) from having much power.

Yeah, they also said we shouldn't have a bill of rights.

Also, the need to protect government against "the mob" and how it's not as simple as just "let's let people vote and whoever wins the popular vote gets to rule because that's democracy" should be absolutely starkly apparent after November of last year. Trying to build a government that works is not really a simple thing, and just like in engineering, saying that some tool is deeply flawed isn't always necessarily an argument for why things will get better if we just get rid of it (without exploring what the alternate option is going to be and how it'll play out).

But mostly we're in agreement. Glad we worked all that out! It turned out to be really simple, who knew.

Everyone knows that when the ship is having trouble and seems like it might be out of control, the first thing to do is destroy the wheel. After all, it wasn't working right, it was a big problem.

Almost as if they are being disingenuous, and the theory under which what they're doing makes perfect sense is more likely than the one at face value which makes 0 sense.

it was difficult to grasp what you meant in that paragraph

Maybe for you. It seemed perfectly coherent to the people that upvoted it. Slow down and read. It's good for you. I'm being completely serious about that, I was aiming to make a serious point that broadly is in complete agreement with the "a piece of paper won't do shit to protect you and even what's written on the paper is seriously flawed in important ways" people.

For someone who claims to agree with me you seem quite upset

Honestly not in the slightest. I'm sort of short on patience because of the number of people in this thread who seem to have their thinker miswired and their yeller turned up too high, but that's nothing to do with this conversation.

Oh. Got it. Well, get in touch with Hamid then, and let him defend the bullshit he was saying. I revised my message to indicate to you that he was strawmanning me, when you hopped in to defend him, not that you were. Glad we got that all worked out.

I am reacting to:

The accounts on this thread who immediately go to attacking leftists on lemmy and protecting this document are running on pure vibes and low education. No other modern democracy runs on anything like it for a reason. No other modern democracy is unable to rewrite their document as appropriate, the fact that the US is stuck with this and people like Phillip are why you’re going to descend into fascism while screaming to protect the past. You are the conservative.

I'm not attacking anyone on Lemmy, for example by saying they were running on pure vibes and low education. I disagreed with a post. Factual disagreements are totally different from attacks.

I'm not protecting the constitution, I said it was written by oligarchs and was pro-slavery among some other things.

Your whole thing is calling me out by name while pretending I said a whole bunch of ridiculous nonsense. You said:

the US is stuck with this and people like Phillip are why you’re going to descend into fascism while screaming to protect the past

While I said:

What this country actually needs is a massive people movement to get the crooks and tyrants out of government. Trump didn’t invent any of that or even close to, but if him trying to have the government kill everybody who looks at him funny or gets in his way is what it takes to get that going, let’s fucking take advantage and accomplish some things, lord knows we need it.

You're literally just making up bullshit to ascribe to me. Not sure why I was motivated to spend this long talking with you, but yes, you're making things up and claiming that I said them so you can go on extensive rants about how wrong I am.

maybe the discussion would be meaningful if you at least listened to the shorter, 1-part interview.

No thank you

1. Purchase muffins at Safeway
2. Overturn democracy

Did I do it right?

Here's a fun exercise: Look over posts on beehaw that do give opportunities for someone to come in and start yelling about how the Democrats are the worst thing in the world, or how protests are scary and complicated and we don't need to protest, or (in this case) that we don't need the constitution and it's super important to get into extended academic infighting right at this moment and take big shits on one of the big rallying points that could potentially get people together to resist Trump.

Notice how many comments there are, and how there seems to be this super-vocal contingent that is (1) saying something that doesn't make a whole ton of sense (2) yelling about it and belittling the other participants.

Then, look at the other posts. Mostly it's just quiet, normal comments.

Look back at the hot-button posts. All angry yelling and not making much sense.

Look back at the normal posts. Even on controversial topics, it's not just this cesspool of yelling.

Wonder why that all is. I have a theory.

Oh, sweet! I love listening to 4-part interviews before I can take part in a conversation. I'd be happy to do that, but first I'm going to need you to watch this documentary, I'm sure you understand.

Nothing but knee-jerk reactions here.

Not really dude. Hamid spent most of his message telling me what I was saying (and getting it 100% wrong) so he could disagree with the imaginary things you were pretending I was saying. I was reacting to the message and what was quoted, and the problems with it in some detail. How is that knee-jerk?

Edit: Revised "you" to "Hamid", I can't really tell these people apart and they keep taking over for each other in conversation

I don't even want to make a joke about let's talk in a month, I want to be able to point to the material difference in Gaza. It's too horrifying to make light of or want to connect in any way with internet debate points. But yes, there is absolutely a material difference. Things were already hell on earth, and now they've gotten even worse. Beyond the slaughter that was already happening. Simply because you don't see it doesn't in any way make it go away.

I think I'm done talking now, and it sounds like you were already, I think we can go our separate ways.

Ooh ahhh so moral, 😍 so principled.

Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.

Lol, a piece of paper will not protect you from jackboots.

Do you want to address anything about what I actually said? This is one of the core things I've been saying here.

You can search for "code-word" in my comment to find where I talk about it, if it's too long to read through and comprehend and you want to skip to the part where I indicate strong agreement with this.

Fun fact: gaza lacked clean food and water for almost a year now. Its old news and was allowed under Biden.

You really don't know?

There is 0 food coming in. The aid agencies inside have just run out. I'm not talking about "clean food." I'm talking about mass starvation.

People can't survive for a year with 0 food. That's what I am talking about. There was food coming in before, including with that pitiful effort to build a pier to get the US military directly involved in providing it. It was terrible, but whatever, it was something. Now it's 0.

Finally harris lost in no small part by demonstrating she’d throw any minority group under the bus and exactly how out of touch she was on working class economics.

No, Harris lost because masterpieces of propaganda convinced people that she would be worse for the working class and Trump would finally set things right. Her actual positions had literally nothing at all to do with it, and Gaza was a tiny sideshow to it that was only occasionally deployed to people on the left who it would influence.

They actually did opposite propaganda sometimes, depending on who was being targeted: To mainstream Americans, she was a friend to "terrorists" who was on Palestine's side, and that's why we can't vote for her, and to leftists, she was a friend to Israel who was responsible for 100% of Biden's Gaza policy, and that's why we can't vote for her.

And people bought it. Like you! Good job. And look at how we're fucked now.