I have a similar job, but I have been in the unfortunate position to be swamped with work for the past month or so.

I have had one task that needed babysitting in the past 3 weeks, and I was so busy that I was jumping between tasks at that point.

Fact checking will only work on people who care about facts, and those people aren’t the problem. Though stopping doing it won’t exactly help the situation either

Does fact checking even work anymore? At this point it almost feels like a waste of time, and maybe even counterproductive.

Like, it doesn’t matter how hard I fact check things anymore. It doesn’t matter how many statistics I can pull out, or how simple and factual my response is.

People want to be wrong. Their mind is made up and their desire to have that opinion is unflinching. Fact checks might not even reach them in their corners of the internet. Telling someone who is choosing to be wrong that they are wrong will not do anything.

I honestly don’t know what to do instead, this seems like it is going to need something that is basically cult deprogramming.

I mean, that is a definition of rights.

Rights that can be instantly taken away mean almost nothing. What good is my right to do something, such as be queer, when a bunch of cishet people can just say “alright, now you can’t exercise your right to be enby or trans or otherwise gender non-conforming, or be in a non-heteronormative relationship because a large enough portion of bigots decided you can’t.”

Those rights don’t mean shit unless they can’t be taken away. If they can, they are little more than privileges granted to us from cishet people because they felt bad for being oppressive.

If your rights can be determined by other people you do not have rights

Why should we have any trust in any part of the government? It’s not like they care about the bare minimum, like giving us a future that isn’t full of climate catastrophe

This is why I did a “walkthrough test” when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. I’m a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.

I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.

Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end

I’m glad things are going well for you, and I don’t mean this in any sarcastic way or anything.

Because my personal situation has been so good, should I assume that this is true for everyone in our country? Or should I be smart and recognize my personal experience is anecdotal and not representative of the whole economy? Should I blame the media too for reporting what’s actually happening?

I get my personal experience isn’t the average. I also get that, while a better representation, knowing the experiences that my friends and family are having isn’t the average.

My problem isn’t my experiences not matching the average. My issue is the metrics used by media are not a representation of average, and the pain of seeing these metrics show things are supposedly getting better where so many things around me are getting worse, at times in order to improve the metrics used by the media.

My issues are twofold:

I don’t think the metrics used by the media, ie the stock market, are wholly representative of whether or not things are going good for the average American. When things plummet, sure, I’d agree that’s a good metric, since companies will panic and then people will get screwed. But I don’t think markets doing well means things are doing well for the average American.

Sure, the line might be going up, that’s good for some people, but there are many reasons why that could be happening that have no impact, or even a negative impact on the average person. For example, a new technology could have been discovered that lets workers do double the work. A company that fires half their staff will now be making more profit, since they are paying less in wages, and therefore their stock values will rise. Half of their employees were sacrificed on the altar of the stock market for those gains. To use a more recent and frequent example of something that fucked me over: tech layoffs. Tech companies will often purge a lot of employees when doing things like preparing for an acquisition, or immediately following one. Sometimes, they will just thin out their staff following a completed project, or something similar. This often has a positive impact on stocks, but a dire impact on workers.

I also have an issue with the partisanship of the media and how the economy is presented to us differently based on who is in power and the bias of those, but that’s a whole new can of worms.

Yeah, I know. Unemployment is a fucked metric, especially if you have the misfortune to have student loans, a shit job, and live in an expensive area, you’re quite simply fucked.

I’m well aware that the us government sucks since I live under it.

But saying “that’s just how it works” is a thought terminating cliche.

I genuinely don’t get how “Trump would have been forced to do the same though” even works as an excuse.

Wouldn’t it be better off if biden risked his career to actually try and prevent the genocide from continuing? Wouldn’t it be better if he even took a small risk to try and actually prevent Netanyahu from crossing one of his many lines? Wouldn’t it be better if we learned from our mistakes in WWII and instead of appeasing the fascists, we did something about fascism? Netanyahu will not be pleased with only Gaza.

To paint it as a necessity, ie “trump would have been forced to do the same,” is genuinely disgusting. This removes all agency the person in power had when they made the decisions that led up to this, and it removes the agency they have to fix this. To say the “most powerful man in the world” was forced to aid and abet a genocide is such a bullshit argument and I really wish people would just realize that.

I think it’s the worst kind of pragmatism to consider it a necessity of geopolitics to just casually cleanse a people. That sort of thing is how you make the evils of this world palatable for people on the news.

Congratulations! You are employed, even if you are only working half the normal hours to get a luxurious starvation wage!

I hope you are proud to be a golden star on this country’s incredible employment statistics! Uncle Sam loves ya for it!

Well, you are absolutely right that it doesn’t make it better lol. It’s like that “Well, it could be worse” thing people say. The people doing very well during the depression were doing so at the expense of everyone else. I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing for a parasite to be engorged on its host.

I just hate how the media acts like everything is peachy and good as I see another mass layoff knowing my contract won’t be renewed. While I get that this is not at all representative, I did see a big industry fire so many people after record profits.

Where I live, I’ve been seeing a lot of people struggling to get groceries and shit while the market boomed, as supermarkets made record profits. I applied to many hundreds of jobs during a hiring shortage, and I have a few friends who applied to more.

I get these metrics aren’t supposed to represent me, but they do not represent the world around me either. If not that, then who is it supposed to represent?

And to be told that “Bidenomics is good for the economy” might be factual based on these metrics, but to see all those good lines go up and bad lines go down and see everyone around me struggle is super fucking dissonant, and to get that level of gaslighting is a bit insulting.

The economy is complete bullshit and isn’t a metric of the average either.

Wait there was full employment? That wasn’t my experience over the 10 months I was unemployed. It wasn’t my experience watching the mass layoffs in my field.

I feel like I have been gaslit by the news saying the economy is up and unemployment is down and all I can see around me is the contrary. The past year was infuriating

I run two APs, and a Unifi server running on a thin client linux server.

I have the U7, and the U6 extender that goes in a wall outlet

I have a few of their small poe powered ethernet switches, they’re great since I have a poe switch as a backbone I can put it near a group of devices in a room, like consoles, raspberry PIs, etc, and just not have to worry about much setup or powering yet another tiny device.

Highly recommend unifi devices

What makes it not an election issue?

Is it the fact that many people consider it the strongest motivation for not voting for biden?

Is it the fact that people are putting in a lot of time and effort to change the position of one of the candidates before the election?

Is it the fact that people protesting against this around election time makes you unhappy the reason you think it isn’t an election issue.

Shut the fuck up. Stop talking and stop spreading this braindead take that is begging to remain at the pro-genocide status quo. You don’t get to decide whether or not it is an election issue for everyone.

I’ve seen and been at protests against my congressmen, mayors, state houses, and governors. People have been doing these types of protests since October. Just because the current wave of protests is campus occupations.

Also, if you think this is solely a congressional issue, you fundamentally do not understand what the president can do in a situation like this.

100%

Let’s not forget that the Leviathan was the justification for the divine right of kings over democratic systems.

To explain away the man-made horrors of the world as being “human nature” is taking the easy route by avoiding questioning what causes the worst things to happen in the world and coming to a shitty catch-all conclusion.

It’s also super defeatist and can stop discussions on how to fix the crimes of those before us.

These are some pretty good questions, and ones that are not particularly uncommon. (I also promise this will be the last long post I make lmao, you are absolutely right about this being an empty room to speak in)

but why do these [anarchist/libertarian socialist] values not seem to take hold on a larger scale?

Depends on what you mean by a larger scale. There’s nothing at the scale of a large country like the US in the current day, or at the current population. but, as detailed in “The Dawn of Everything” by anthropologist David Graeber and David Wengrow, pre-colonial america has some very anarchistic organizational structures that were successful in their right.

There are also currently some anarchistic projects. While they’re technically not pure anarchism, the Zapatista and Rojava experiments are ongoing, and have some solid achievements (they consider themselves a different libertarian socialist branch that is very similar to anarchism, being neozapitismo and social ecology respectively). One interesting thing I’d love to point out is that these experiments are actually closer to socialism (and I’d arguably say are close to achieving it in both cases) compared to supposedly socialist/communist countries such as the USSR, the CCP, and Cuba. Here are two videos summarizing the two movements.

• Liberation in Action: The Zapatistas
• Liberation in Action: AANES/Rojava

It feels like that need for hierarchy is built into us as a species as it seems to be the default through much of history.

First and foremost, the necessity of hierarchy being built into us would only be true if there was no horizontal (non-hierarchical) society in the past, but there have been many, as mentioned in “The Dawn of Everything”.

I mean, it might feel like that considering we live in a world where we don’t really see any alternative to the status quo. There’s this concept of “Capitalist realism,” where it becomes increasingly difficult to consider a world where there is no capitalism. We are told we live in “The End of History”, where “There is no alternative”, as put by Fukuyama and Thatcher. The same can be said for hierarchy, as we live in a hierarchic world that is simply “the way things are” as a social construct. But what says we can’t tear it down? For many years there was the natural hierarchy of the divine monarch at the top and the peasant suffering under their boot. To the peasant, there was no alternative; the monarch had to be there. But in reality the monarch didn’t have to be there.

Anarchists do have an answer for this (Well, there’s quite a few, but I find this one simplest), which is the theory of practice. Essentially, many things are learned by people, including societal norms. Take a highly hierarchic culture like south korea, where the hierarchies enforced by their version of Confucianism is dominant. There is no organ in the human body that forces humans to be hierarchic in accordance to Confucianism from birth. Instead, people are taught that it is" the natural order", then practice said hierarchic order, making it reality. By the practice of said hierarchies, it becomes real. However, if you are raised in such a society, it would be difficult to see an alternative, unless you begin to practice a different hierarchic order.

On the other hand, what if we begin making a society that isn’t hierarchic? What if instead of instilling the values of obedience, we tell people obedience is not a virtue? What if we tell people that there is no natural reason to live under such a hierarchy, and that they could set themselves free? What if we instill values of self-governance, and let people practice self governance.

This is why anarchists often approach spreading anarchy in what might not seem an intuitive way. You might see an anarchist organizing a union, or creating a mutual aid group, or making a chapter of Food Not Bombs. If we consider the fact that practice influences the way you think, then it only makes sense that creating a non-hierarchic structure such as an anarchistic union, mutual aid group, etc. When non-anarchists participate in these structures, they begin to practice anarchism, and dreaming of a non-hierarchic world becomes much easier. Unfortunately it’s kinda hard to get people to participate in some of these structures under the increasingly individualist modes of capitalism, but it is still a viable path that will need to adapt to the changing times.

Wrapping my head around all the -isms has been a lot of work. You need to learn what they are in both historical and modern context, and that varies from person to person as it is, so it can be hard to get what everyone is always advocating even if they use the same words.

I’ve had a fun experience talking with someone at a protest, and we were agreeing with many things broadly speaking. He eventually was like “What type of communist are you”, and I just said “Oh, I’m an anarchist” and he, a trot, was disappointed. I’ve also had a discussion with a different random person who was on board with literally everything I said in a discussion, barring a few implementation details. He then decried the communists and anarchists for their radical ideas 🤦‍♂️.

As far as current and historic context, check out “Means and Ends” by Zoe Baker. I’ve not gotten to reading it yet but a wonderful lady at my local Anarchist bookfair told me it was not only a good starting place for historical context to the movement, but it is also wonderfully written. Also, you’ll be pleased to know that the differences between old and modern anarchism isn’t too drastic. It’s more refined than changed. There’s some splinters and splits, but even the biggest differences are smaller when compared to how other leftist thought has developed.

As far as -isms, I totally get that. -isms are often used as an insult, such as when trump tried to insult all the cool people, which tends to devalue the fact that in many cases there is a huge amount of philosophy behind the idea (not that it makes the philosophy or the ideology good) and conversely elevates more mainstream politics by turning alternatives into an ideological insult, even if their philosophy and ideologies are kinda trash.

So I’m not against most of the Lemmy Left in concept, I’d just rather see helpful post and comments like you and I are having than what feels like a leftist version of a FOX News comments section of everybody complaining, but not bringing anything useful to the party. We all need to vent and all, but it feels like that’s the bulk of what I see on here now

First, thanks :)

I think you are right, but probably in a way you weren’t thinking. When I watch FOX I always feel like I’m missing some context even though I am seeing a story beginning to end. I don’t see this on mainstream lemmy, but interestingly I do sometimes see it on Hexbear. I think that’s because I’m immersed in leftist culture, and there is a shared cultural understanding that I share with the left in general that the average conservative would share with FOX. I’m not a Marxist-Leninist, and sometimes I’ll see a take on hexbear that catches me off guard, since I lack the ML viewpoint and shared culture. And just like FOX, I don’t think that the average lemmy user will have the most nuanced and carefully examined takes (myself included, though I am getting better at discussing some topics after actually doing it more often) that makes their political discussion uneasy, but at least most of them lack the bigotry.

I dont really remember it being that way 9 months ago when I first hopped over here with everyone else

I remember occasionally seeing it. But not at this level. I think a lot of people are getting radicalized by the genocide and seeing the two genocide lovers on a ballot and are having a justifiably angry reaction. Also, election season is in full swing, so the internet will be infested with political discourse for a little while, and not the kind that is fun, pleasant, or interesting.

I was raised conservative until I got to know some people who acted much like you are here that helped me to gain a better perspective and to see the things that I valued weren’t being supported by those I thought I was supposed to trust

Me too. I was born in a deeply christian family, and I identified as a conservative libertarian after becoming politically active. IDK how I’d be doing right now if I was still conservative. Now, I’m queer, and while I still suffer the unfortunate position of having to be in the closet to prevent my family from exploding, having that feeling of shame and regret consume myself from the inside out would be 100x worse if my politics and religion made me objectively bad for it.

Thankfully I talked with some of my friends I had in a political science class I took in high school around the time Bernie started campaigning. At this time I was having some doubts about capitalism that I never shook off from seeing some good critiques of capitalism itself, and my libertarian ideology. I was pulled further left, and eventually surpassed them on my journey to becoming a socialist with a libertarian edge. I haven’t looked back.

Granted, I’ve only really reconsidered politics recently when evaluating the absolute shitshow that’s been american politics. While I was becoming increasingly anarchistic when studying theory, I can definitely say that I was radicalized by the ongoing genocide. The mechanisms that worked to justify the existence of an apartheid state, to justify the ongoing genocide, and to execute it are fueled by the state to further it’s positions, which doesn’t exactly give the it a good look. Once again, I went on this journey with a friend who was also becoming more radical.