He / They

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I was commenting on a likely Democrat going to a convention 5 years into an airborne pandemic that targets whoever its spreaders deem “genetically weak” (via its immune system test) to kill or disable.

    I’m going to need a whole lot of context that’s not in this post. If you think this post is calling out a specific Democrat, you have not conveyed that at all.

    And Nazis denied that racism makes no sense. Denialism isn’t particularly what defines non-Nazis.

    “Nazis denied that racism makes no sense”. Wait, so you think that 1) racism makes no sense, and 2) Nazis denied it/ claim otherwise (i.e. they claim racism makes sense)? I think you’re severely mis-stating whatever you’re trying to convey. Racism is a very real thing, and it’s usually Republicans and Nazis who claim it makes no sense as a concept, and claim it’s just a label created to attack them for political purposes.

    “Being racist makes no sense” is a very different statement than “racism makes no sense”. I think you meant to say the former.

    Nazis denied that their beliefs were rooted in racism, because racism was (even in the 1930s) understood as a cognitive and cultural bias, not beliefs rooted in science or fact. They didn’t deny their own disdain for non-white people, they just denied that it was racism. Eugenics as a pseudo-scientific framework was developed in order to legitimize racist beliefs so that racists could openly tout those beliefs without them being labeled racist. Racists (Nazis included) didn’t want to have to deny their racism.

    Denialism is in fact contra-indicative to Nazism, who were very concerned with legitimizing their beliefs openly, so as not to have to hide/ deny them.


  • dumb and not what I said

    Hence the “like saying” part: it’s illustrative of the erasure of relationships that I’m talking about.

    “Nazis support eugenics, so if you support eugenics, you’re a Nazi” = dumb but something I’ve been told by what I presume is your type of person before

    Huh? I’m pretty sure I did literally the opposite of this when I said, “All Nazis are imperialist, but not all Imperialists are Nazis, for example.”

    “Nazis support using mass murder for eugenics, so if you support using mass murder for eugenics, you’re a Nazi” = a fair way to read what I said

    Sure, and do you think that Democrats support “using mass murder for eugenics”?

    I despise Israel, for example, but I can also critically examine how we got to the level of support for them that we did as a country, including Democrats. Everything from the anti-Communist/ pro-Capitalist Red Scare propaganda, Islamophobia, racism, and a whole lot of moneyed interests, contribute to the US’s cultural support for Israel.

    Eugenicists do not deny that moniker, it was literally created as a moniker by them for their pseudo-scientific framework to support genocide. Nazis very openly promoted that they were eugenicists. Israel on the other hand cloaks its eugenics in the language of/ mask of Securitization (which it learned/ inherited from America and Europe), which exists to give a veneer of deniability to it being a eugenicist State. Democrats who support Israel will deny that Israel is engaging in eugenics (another indicator that Democrats are in fact not Nazis).

    Mass-incarceration is another case where eugenics is very relevant when examining its evolution from/ replacement of slavery, but is not the goal of Democrats.

    If I’m incorrectly interpreting your meaning here, please tell me; I am not a Democrat, but I’m not going to label them “slow-moving Nazis” for rhetorical convenience/ expediency (nevermind that it’s counter-productive when trying to pull people away from identifying as Democrats).


  • It’s definitely worth it to help the slow-pace Nazis overthrow the fast-pace Nazis, even if it vaguely “stabilizes” Nazi control.

    This is a strange false-dichotomy. You shouldn’t be helping any Nazis.

    If this is a “neolib centrists are also Nazis” take, you need to recalibrate your baselines: there are tons of groups out there in between wherever you (and those of us here on Beehaw) are on the ‘Left’ spectrum, and Nazis. Democrats are shitty, feckless, Capitalist, and even imperialist, but you can literally be all those things and not be a Nazi (debating whether Settler-Colonialism is worse than Nazism is a topic for another discussion- it’s still different, and Democrats aren’t pro-SetCol ideologically anyways).

    You can’t invert or erase the hierarchical relationship between more general traits and systems with narrower group ideologies in order to make those traits or systems indicators of the group (like saying “Nazis eat food, so if you eat food, you’re a Nazi”). All Nazis are imperialist, but not all Imperialists are Nazis, for example.

    I think this sort of irks me a lot because people need to be anti-Capitalist/ anti-neoliberal/ anti-imperialist for their own sake, not just because they’ve conflated them as being “Nazi things”, and thus inherited their opposition from an anti-Nazi stance by default. People need to understand why these things are bad.






  • immoral people existing is not the problem here

    True. The profit motive is. People pushing harmful content are doing it because it makes them money, not because they’re twirling their moustaches as they relish their evil deeds. You remove the profit motive, you remove the motivation to harm people for profit.

    the difference is that there isn’t an algorithm that acts as a vector for harmful bullshit

    The algorithms boost engagement according to 1) what people engage with, and 2) what companies assess to be appealing. Facebook took the lead in having the social media platform own the engagement algorithms, but the companies and people pushing the content can and do also have their own algorithmic targeting. Just as Joe Camel existed before social media and still got to kids (and not just on TV), harmful actors will find and join discords. All that Facebook and Twitter did was handle the targeting for them, but it’s not like the targeting doesn’t exist without the platforms’ assistance.

    Said bad actors do not exist in anywhere near the same capacity. Imo the harm of public chat rooms falls under the “parents can handle this” umbrella. Public rooms are still an issue, but from experience being a tween/teen on those platforms, it’s not even close to being as bad.

    It wasn’t as bad on those… back when we were teens. It absolutely is now. If anything, you’ll usually find that a lot of the most harmful groups (red-pill/ manosphere, body-image- especially based around inducing EDs- influencers) actually operate their own discords that they steer/ capture kids into. They make contact elsewhere, then get them into a more insular space where they can be more extreme and forceful in pushing their products, out of public view.

    If it was the case that it was just individual actors on the platform causing the harm and not the structure of the platforms incentivizing said harm, then we would see more of this type of thing in real life as well.

    I’m not saying it’s all individuals, I’m saying the opposite; it’s companies. Just not social media companies. Social media companies are the convenient access vector for the companies actually selling and pushing the harmful products and corollary ideas that drive kids to them.

    I struggle to think of a more complete solution to the harm caused by social media to children than just banning them.

    Given that your immediate solution was to regulate kids instead of regulating companies, I don’t think you’re going to be interested in my solutions.






  • despite how harmful it is for society as a whole, and especially children

    If you don’t understand that the motivation is to target kids with ads and influencer content designed to push products, you’re not going to solve anything. Kids have to have spaces to communicate with each other in order to develop healthy socialization skills. Locking them in a proverbial box is not healthy, and guess what, we killed off 99% of third spaces that welcome kids.

    If social media is banned for under 16’s, then children would have to communicate with normal chat apps.

    I feel like you are envisioning “chat apps” to mean “text-only”, but chat apps have been multimedia/ multi-modal, and multi-user (i.e. not 1:1 messaging) for a long time now, and can be just as easily infiltrated by the same actors targeting kids on social media.

    at some point some systemic problems are better served by systemic solutions

    This is not a solution, this is a band-aid that doesn’t attack the root cause whatsoever.


  • I despise the disinterest I see in “normal” peoples’ reactions to this. Saying “that’s horrible”, then literally tuning out and checking their investments and raising rents on their tenants and clicking their tongues at anyone who brings “politics” up further. We created a nation of completely selfish and self-interested cowards, and handed them the title of “Centrist” to hide behind so they could tell themselves their cowardly inaction was not just justifiable, but in fact morally superior to taking a stance.

    I’m not a Christian, but I grew up in an on-again, off-again religious household. I never understood the emotion behind Revelation 3:16:

    But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!

    Feeling the disgust and rage I do at seeing the selfish indifference and willful ignorance of the “moderate” people in my life towards what is happening, I understand it now.


  • I think the Vietnamese and Iraqis and Afghanis and Native Americans might disagree with you. Red Scare and Manifest Destiny and Islamophobia were the convenient ideological covers used to pretend we were not just goons with guns and bombs in the past, but Europe (who is usually our partner in whitewashing our violent actions) don’t share our current government’s anti-hispanic hate in the same way they did those others, so we’re not finding the same ‘support.’

    We’ve been corrupt since our founding (morally, killing native americans to steal their land. Economically, being built on slavery despite it being considered repugnant even at that time. Politically, enshrining rights like voting or property ownership only for white men, etc etc.). People around the world have been discussing our evils from the beginning, but since we only really get exposed to either Ameri-centric and Euro-centric views, it’s easy to think this is new or different, behavior-wise.