OBJECTION!

Fair, and people in swing states get inundated with ads as it is. Mostly I'd say it's more useful for mobilization than persuasion, like if you get a text reminding you when voting day is maybe someone makes it when they wouldn't have otherwise.

Ideally, volunteers could mean quality over quantity, less automated spam asking for money and instead actual humans responding to concerns and answering questions. Even more ideally, that could be paired with voters' concerns being elevated and the party actually responding to them. The goal is to improve the quality of the campaign's voter outreach, in whatever form that outreach takes.

I'm not a fan of Biden myself but I still think it's worth discussing general electoral strategies.

The vast majority of Americans both already know how they feel about Trump and Biden and live in a solidly red or blue state. If you do want to focus on Biden, volunteer with phone banking or canvassing so that your efforts are directed to where they'll actually matter and be organized in line with their messaging. Personally, I'd say you're better off focusing on local races where you have more of an opportunity to come at it from a different angle and cut through people's fortified positions. And as another user said, focus on mobilization, it's easier to get someone who already agrees with you to register and make a plan than to convince someone to change their whole worldview.

There are also strategies outside of electoralism, such as protests and counter-protests. You can join an organization and form tactics and strategies to subvert the right's actions, and engage with direct action to build trust and community that could be important in the future. Form strategies while being realistic about your goals and capabilities and coordinate with others.

Are you talking about the time communists ran the only candidate who wasn't either Hitler or the guy who appointed Hitler chancellor and the social democrats voted for the Hitler supporter to stop the communists, whose victory directly led to Hitler's rise to power?

Yeah I'd say there's some similarities between that and today.

Lol moving right along from one false claim to the next.

At least 2 previously undecided voters now support Biden so I suppose this headline is technically correct, it's just completely meaningless and insignificant statistically.

I'm a tankie. What tankie is supposed to mean is someone who blindly supports anything anyone does so long as they claim to be communist and wave a red flag. There's maybe a handful of edgy teens who actually fit that description, but the way it's actually used is to punch left at anyone who supports anything a socialist country has ever done, or who is insufficiently patriotic/nationalistic and is willing to consider things from an internationalist perspective.

If you say for example that Cuba under Castro had a successful literacy program, then there are people who will accuse you of being a tankie just for that. Because it gets used this way, some people like myself chose to reclaim the insult and wear it proudly.

Generally, the actual term for most "tankies" would be Marxist-Leninist. But I actually prefer tankie because it's a more general, big tent label. It's used so broadly that even anarchists can be called tankies. It's basically like "woke" where it doesn't actually have any real meaning.

The idea that that's the origin of the term is a common misconception. The actual origin was about the USSR under Kruschev sending in the military in response to a rebellion in Hungary. Some British communists supported the move, while other communists opposed it and labeled the supporters as tankies.

But regardless of the origin, it's changed to where now it's liberals using it to criticize socialists in general.

These people have truly gone off the deep end. I don't even know what to say. How do you reason with that? I can barely even comprehend it.

I intend to vote for a third party.

I know that you think I'm throwing a childish fit. That's because, fundamentally, you don't consider Palestinians to be human beings, just as your kind didn't see Iraqis or Afghans as human when they were being slaughtered. To you, this is just some random pet issue I've taken up to feel good about myself. But it's not. I have nothing but hatred for Biden and people like him, and I have incredibly good reason for that. "Genocide" isn't just a word, it's not something to be casually brushed aside. It must be opposed, everything else be damned. If you genuinely attempted to see the world from their perspective, you would understand.

Someday the democrats will decide that us trans people are too much of a liability and throw us under the bus too, and you'll rationalize it by placing us in the exact same subhuman category you use whenever they murder a million people in the Middle East. Call me childish all you want, you're just telling on yourself about how seriously you take their deaths.

Well, if not voting for Trump counts as supporting him, then rest assured that Biden will have my "support."

I'm not lifting a finger to help either of them. If Trump wins, it'll be because the Democrats nominated that senile, genocidal corporate sycophant. It's their job to win elections, not mine. I've heard you people try to shift all blame away from your shitty party and onto the left a thousand times before. You're wasting your time. As I said, I don't give a shit. Fix the party, win without me, or lose. Your choice, I've made mine.

You know, I used to be a lot more extreme than I am now. When I was younger, I said I wouldn't vote for anyone unless they were going to reform the system to where I wouldn't have to vote for a lesser evil anymore, demanding that our rulers give up their power.

Now, all I'm asking is that they stop slaughtering people. They can rule over us in their sham democracy, if they would just stop killing all these people. They won't even do that. So again, my answer is "Hell no, fuck off." Biden is my enemy and I will oppose him just as I oppose Trump, regardless of what the odds are. Again, anyone with a spine and a conscience should be doing the same.

Mostly just I just wouldn't do more genocide tbh.

Nope. There is no reasoning with me on this, my position is absolute and set in stone. You want my vote, get a better candidate. No other option, period.

They will flinch first. And if they don't, then we'll go to hell together. You're wasting your time with me.

Oh, does Biden support ranked choice voting, then?

He doesn't. I'm not going to support asshole after asshole in the vain hope that maybe out of the kindness of their hearts they'll eventually give us freedom, which directly opposes their own interests. You're the one that needs to grow up if you believe that fairy tale.

If our "democracy" has decayed to the point where I'm not able to vote on whether or not we do a genocide, then it is not a democracy and I should not legitimize the sham through participation.

There is no circumstance under which I will support genocide. If that means I die, then I will die. If any of you had a backbone you'd do the same. And if enough people drew that line, they'd have no choice but to listen to us.

Tbh I'm fine with respectful disagreement.

"Nothing incoherent about it"

I'm literally right here interacting on that exact topic right now. I've seen plenty of discussions from the people mentioned about the topic and newsflash, they don't say that. Y'all just would much prefer to pass around rumors and dismissive charicatures rather than investigating what we actually believe.

Ironically, not even to stop a genocide.

Yes, that's correct.

You shouldn't be. The rich supporting fascists (and vice versa) is nothing new.

:::spoiler Excerpts from Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"—really a coup d'état—took place. . .

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end. . .

Here were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different temperaments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. In such diverse countries as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Spain, a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save big capital from the impositions of democracy. . .

Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital.

At the same time, taxes were increased for the general populace but lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance taxes on the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished altogether.

Skill issue.

Of course the opponent is always going to claim you're wrong, that doesn't mean you can't mount a competent response. If their tactics are so incredibly effective that there's no way to counter them, then steal those tactics and throw them right back at their face. Trump isn't even an unknown quantity, they've got teams of people working for 8 years to come up with an answer to his approach, if Biden still isn't up to the task then he needs to step aside and let someone else handle it.

Surely you'll have no trouble producing the receipts for what you said then, right? Since you didn't make it up, can you link to where you saw it?

Some of us don't like seeking out stressful news about the government coming after us just to answer a non sequitur from an asshole. Doesn't mean it's not out there.

Thank you. I have to vote according to my conscience and what I believe is right, but if someone else's conscience tells them differently, I can make my case but ultimately it is their decision to make. So many people on here expect everyone to think and see things the exact same way as them and can't even seem to imagine someone having different values or a different perspective, and that can be very frustrating.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

No, obviously, in the same way it would be ridiculous to claim that every single person who supports separatism is a secret agent for Russia. The claim in both cases is that the movement received foreign support, allowing it to convince more ordinary people to support it than they would have otherwise.

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR.

Russia is not the USSR. And most people experienced a decline in quality of life, across every objective metric, following its collapse.

It's also well known that many people in eastern Ukraine have ethnic, cultural, and family ties to Russia, so it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of them wanted to have more favorable relations with them. This goes back to when the Soviets transferred the territory to Ukraine in the first place.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Americans don't actually care about Ukrainians, most people barely knew they existed and couldn't find the country on the map. The only reason people started caring is because they started being relevant to state interests.

Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

No it won't. The Ukrainian people do not have the option to vote on whether or not to accept territorial concessions, because they don't have a democracy, and even what pretense of democracy they used to have has been suspended due to the war. The Ukrainian state may get to decide that, but that is not the same as the Ukrainian people. You don't seem to be separating the state's interests from the people's interests at all.

A chaser is someone who fetishizes and objectifies trans people.

Atlanta, Denver, somewhere in Virginia, Maryland, or DC, or possibly Ohio or Pennsylvania. There's places like Austin and some places in Florida that might have cool people, but the state government is trash.

I saw Greenville recommended, and this is anecdotal, but last time I was there visiting friends, we (visibly queer) got followed around by this crazy guy with a metal pipe making all kinds of death threats. I love my friends but that sealed the deal for me on not wanting to live there. There are some neat places there ngl, the sex themed desert restaurant was a fun place for a queerplatonic hangout, but in general it's not exactly going to be a refuge from Trump supporters.

"Libs" is short for "liberal," meaning a supporter of capitalism. Those on the American right who aren't fascists are generally liberals, though they often don't know what it means. When I criticize liberals, it's from a leftist/anti-capitalist perspective.

I watched the whole 20 minute video, just for you. I'm not interested in reading more from him as I was not impressed.

Welcome to philosophy. These ideas are not remotely new, they've been discussed for literally thousands of years. Obviously there's a difference between sensation and perception, and obviously it's possible for senses to be fooled, and obviously optical illusions exist. No one denies these things.

One thing that he is wrong about near the end is the rather arrogant idea that reason and logic are somehow magically immune to evolutionary pressures. The whole host of cognitive biases we experience as humans are grounded in the fact that we evolved in contexts where group cohesion was important to survival. He doesn't seem like a particularly knowledgeable cognitive scientist if he either isn't aware of the bandwagon effect (for instance), or if he can't see the obvious connection between that and the need to fit in with a tribal community.

But more to the point of his thesis, the reason it's trash is because it fails it's own test. It's indeed possible that, contrary to all evidence and observations, we're living in a simulation, or whatever gobbledyremoved he said about conscious beings creating reality - the problem is, so what? By definition, this theory is unfalsifiable, and it is not capable of helping us do anything at all.

There is a saying in science, "All models are wrong - but some are useful." Physicists are well aware that when we draw a diagram of an atom on a piece of paper, it differs from an actual atom in several crucial ways. It's very large, for instance, meaning that the drawing can absorb and emit photons without really changing. Our mental models of atoms are necessarily imperfect, the only perfect representation of an atom is the atom itself. However, we still use these imperfect drawings and mental models because they help us navigate reality and predict events. This person's theory does none of that.

It appears that he has conjured up an imaginary, unobservable world, that does not interact with us in any way, and he has, for some bizarre reason, chosen to dub that with the moniker of "reality," instead of the actual, you know, reality that we can sense and perceive, that is testable and verifiable, that is necessary to navigate in order to survive. Why he's chosen to call his fantasy reality and reality an illusion, I don't know.

Now look, this whole thing you've come up with seems like a fun little form of escapism, and I don't have a problem with that in itself. The problem I have is when you start trying to interject it into actual politics, when you actively try to divert energy away from engaging with reality, the thing that actually exists and can measurably improve or harm people's mental and physical states, and instead towards your fantasy. That's when it starts sounding more like a cult.

Your kind of thinking is responsible for countless New Age spiritualists telling people they don't need medicine, that they can just cure diseases, like AIDS, through the power of belief. You can indulge whatever fantasy you feel like, but when push comes to shove, medicine fucking works, the train will kill you if you step in front of it, etc. The speaker in your video at least acknowledged that, even if by doing so, he undermined everything else he said - at the end of the day, he has to submit to that which he labeled "illusory" and deny that which he labeled "real." And so should you. And that means that you have to engage with materialist and empirically backed theories of psychology, sociology, politics, economics, etc. Which means, get your nonsense ideology out of here.

The benefit Hoffman’s theory does us is that is reveals the universe is governed not by physical laws, but by cognitive laws, of which apparent physical laws are a contextually dependent subset.

This is not what he says at all, and if he has any credibility as a scientist and doesn't want to change careers to cult leader, he would completely disavow what you just said.

And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology.

This is complete nonsense.

That’s precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in.

No it absolutely is not.

Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality.

Yes, I figured this was about getting high and seeing pretty colors.

Why do you need the government for this? If you need more funds, why don't you just alter reality to manifest them into existence?

For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form.

Again, respecting a trans person's identity does not require a denial of reality or of our physical forms. If the physical form of a trans person wasn't objectively different from that of a cis person of the same gender, then we would not need any of the medications or treatments that we do - we wouldn't even have the terms "trans" and "cis." Please stop talking as if trans identities are somehow a denial of reality.

We are fighting an anti-science platform

If you respond to nothing else I say, then at least answer me this: why have you chosen to term something that is anti-science as "reality?" It makes absolutely no sense. Just say that science is real, that trans identities are real, and that transphobes are pushing a false and unreal narrative.

Try to pay attention to the language we've all agreed on.

I am not a soulist. In fact, I consider it to be an extremely dangerous ideology. If you're successful in undermining consensus reality, we're going to have dragons and vampires running around terrorizing people. The moment reality becomes mutable enough for someone to turn themselves into something with mind control powers, like a mind flayer, we're all fucked.

I am trans and neurodivergent, and I take offense at this statement:

Obviously, soulism is more attractive to any trans person than realism, because it offers faster and more complete transition than any realist ideology.

Trans identities are not a rejection of reality. I don't find your ideology appealing in the slightest. I believe in objective science, and the science is 100% on the side of trans people.

I didn’t choose to term anti-science beliefs as reality. Society did, and then I went along with it so as not to be incomprehensible to you. If by “reality”, we mean “An objectively extant world”, then there’s no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by reality we mean “The world society thinks is objectively extant”, then that thing is anti-science.

That which has the potential to smack you if you pretend it doesn't exist is objectively real. It is nonsense to say that that is not real or that anything else is more real than that. There is no "world society thinks is objectively extant." Society contains a lot of people who disagree on a lot of things. Scientists and supporters of trans rights are part of society.

Please don’t begrudge me for accepting your premise that consensus reality is reality.

Never said that. That's your position, isn't it? My position is that there is an objective reality that exists regardless of what people believe.

Cause the brain doesn’t work like that, you dipshit. Didn’t I say our perceptual reality is governed by cognitive laws? Cognitive laws don’t allow me to just do that. Weren’t you paying attention, or do you just have a kindergartener’s understanding of psychology?

Sorry, I suppose I've only been schooled in laws that, uh, actually exist and are observable and testable. I suppose I do have a kindergartener's understanding of these magical psychic laws you've made up, I know nothing about how they supposedly work, please excuse my ignorance.

I'm familiar with psychology. Nothing about psychology suggests that it's possible to collectively reshape the physical world through thought if enough people believe hard enough. I'd love to see some academic work that supports that claim.

I don't use it that way. There are plenty of people I disagree with who aren't libs. But in this case I was talking about a specific group of conspiracy theorists who are active on Lemmy who are, general speaking, libs.

Realism is anti-science.

Absolute nonsense.

but soulists say the outside body is a mental construct, and cannot be taken as fact in any sense.

Of course the body exists, in the same way that anything exists. It is an objective fact, and denying that doesn't help anyone.

So's this

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of people who I disagree with who don't baselessly accuse everyone they disagree with of being Russian bots. There happens to be a shit ton of overlap between liberals and people who subscribe to that particular conspiracy theory.

I called you a supporter of capitalism because you objected to criticism of supporters of capitalism. You can identify how you please, but if you quack, I'm gonna assume you're a duck. Doesn't mean I accuse everyone of being ducks.

Oh, yeah, you know what, I've already made the decision to accept considerable risk to myself and the people I care about because of my absolute commitment to opposing genocide, but if you just bring up some other random issue, that's totally gonna change my mind. Wtf I love Biden now.

In any case the best thing to happen for the Ukrainian people is that they stop being drafted and forced into a meat grinder to reclaim territory for a state that doesn't care about them. But regardless, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to support a genocide to stop anything! I don't know how I can possibly make that position more clear to you.

Stop wasting your time with me and go waste your time trying to get your party to be less shit.

Got an example right here:

If trump wins anything that happens to you you deserve because you brought it on yourself.

Oh hey found another one