I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.

But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?

Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.

Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?

Nah. Verbotten opinions.

I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.

The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’

But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.

Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.

When your highly nuanced and extremely educated political stance is obliterated by an extremely obvious fact that you forgot to consider because you got lost in the sauce of [current hot conversation topic] for [I’m a Leftist!™] identifying individuals.

Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.

You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!

Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.

For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.

And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?

Nooooo!

No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!

But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.

He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.

Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

Why latch on to Trump in particular?

Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

You know, standard fascist shit?

It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Its insane when you compare the things they hold dear and are most concerned about to themselves personally and the people they support.

They will tell you they are highly worried about secret sex trafficking and millions of missing children, but extremely often they and the people they support are sexually abusing children, or have a history of it.

Its the cognitive dissonance thats the insane part, the extreme hypocrisy.

Gaetz is almost certainly a person who knowingly paid an underage girl for sex. The person who facilitated it basically already plead guilty and may be cooperating with investigators, though the proceedings of this seem to be going quite slowly.

This is even more insane given that Gaetz is one of the most Q-Anony of the lunatic Republicans in Congress. Kind of their whole thing is largely based around saving children from being sex trafficked.

What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.

Bleck.

Well that would make you the actual only person I have ever met that has said any opinion I have about politics is too /optimistic/.

I have spent my entire life being called overly pessimistic about the political nature of America, and while I have been wrong about some things and learned /why/ and then learned more, you are again the only person who has ever said I am too optimistic and this is both baffling and in a weird way sort of validating.

For my full actual outlook for the future, I am basically educated guessing that while the financial elites of America have been so far successful in convincing a good number of non poor people that the economy is in a sort of low growth holding pattern, this will fall apart due to the now for several months ongoing military/piracy fun going on near Yemen.

No amount of financial fuckery and op eds will be able to mask the downturn which I estimated several months ago now would cause such significant logistical strain on basically the global capitalist machine in general that it would result in an actual negative GDP print for the US economy in either Q1 2 or 3 of this year. The UK has apparently already had that happen.

What this means is the economy will officially shit itself and basically barring Trump literally being incarcerated, he will win over Biden.

If Trump /is/ literally incarcerated, enough Republicans will lose their minds that they will basically attempt to secceed even harder and basically do something like another insurrection and/or mass wave of basically domestic terrorism to the point that it will be obvious that the US is balkanizing.

While I consider this Trump being incarcerated scenario overall less likely, if Trump wins he will basically end American democracy and his total inability to have any kind of policy that makes any kind of sense will basically lead to horror misery and further impovershment of the masses, while he basically just orders his goons to order their goons to direct the idiot violent followers of his to be brownshirts.

Either way, the climate has now basically indisputably passed the 1.5C threshold, is actually basically trending closer to the worst case scenario envisioned by the last IPCC that actually bothered to model such things, possibly even worse, which means we are guaranteed basically everything most people need to routinely purchase becoming more expensive, more failing infrastructure, more unchecked corporate greed, hundreds of millions of climate refugees in this decade alone, and we in America will basically either be having a civil war or being crushed under an authoritarian boot while this happens.

There.

Am I still too optimistic?

Welp, I was wrong!

Wait until his second term and you will probably agree with the lowest possible rank for Trump.

Or you can make the sort of detached cynical and dehumanizing raw numbers argument that without Trump doing basically everything he could to fuck up handling covid and spread insane misinformation, he is largely the most responsible of all people in America for covid deaths beyond basically the first wave, roughly 9 times more people than were killed/displaced/genocided than Jackson’s trail of tears.

I dont even want to attempt to get into some kind of moral argument about which of those things is worse, so there ya go, numbers based.

… Who are you referring to?

Possibly Nikki Haley, who basically would never stand a chance in the Republican Party of today or basically ever without going by a nickname as her first name because a huge amount of Republicans would never vote for her if they are too cognizant of the fact that she has a foreign sounding first name?

You cannot possibly mean DeSantis, can you?

Well uh definitely no likely Trump voters and likely about half of ‘independents’, so something like 60 ish percent of American voters?

You must either be European or otherwise blissfully ignorant of American society.

For me, Trump is ultimately the last president who could possibly have enacted and globally promoted actual climate science based reforms that at least might have stood a chance at preparing America and the world a way forward through what is going to be an extremely challenging next few decades.

Instead he was an incompetent idiot criminal mobster bully who crystalized nascent fascism, religious extremism and anti intellectualism into an unstoppable political force, and in the process broke basically the brains of all of America in one way or another, utterly destroyed our reputation to the rest of the world, and has left an utterly catastrophic political situation in his aftermath, that basically only FDR could possibly hope to do any better than mitigate.

Say what you will about exact placement of other Presidents but Trump very obviously deserves the bottom spot.

The fact that having this ‘opinion’ outloud in a bar in basically most of America would get me assaulted is further proof that this collosal evil doofus is essentially the best argument against American Exceptionalism I can think of, but I am again literally likely to be assaulted for having it.

Anyway, tl:dr, we’re doomed now, thanks Trump.

You… you can’t go to a corner and relieve yourself.

Thats a misdemeanor you will likely be arrested and jailed for.

This moron has just told people to do something that is illegal, in addition to being dehumanizing on its face.

How is people pissing and shitting outside /not/ tearing down society, isnt this exactly the kind of thing that is bemoaned as a sign of society collapsing when talking about the homeless or drug addicts?

I actually had a tankie tell me that Chinese is not actually a bunch of what us Americans would actually more properly call different languages altogether, when I told a story about a friend I knew from Hong Kong, speaking Cantonese and a little a English, had to actually go through me (Cantonese, English, capable of translating Cantonese to Vietnamese, but not Mandarin, because my phone waa bugging out), and a nearby Vietnamese shopkeep (Vietnamese, some Mandarin) to communicate to someone who only spoke Mandarin, and effectively nearly no English.

We did this comical routine of my friend typing Cantonese into my phone, translating it to Vietnamese, then to Mandarin via the shopkeep, then to the Mandarin speaking woman, then all the way back the other way, for about 20 minutes, to have a conversation that probably could otherwise have been had in 3 minutes.

There are in fact many regional /dialects/ of Chinese (beyond just Cantonese) that are actually so different that it is very common that one who can only speak one /dialect/ cannot actually communicate nearly at all with someone who knows only a different /dialect/.

I am putting /'s around dialect because actually a growing number of translators who know one or many of these /dialects/, as well as English, think it is more accurate to describe them as being different languages to those who speak English.

Anyway, yeah, had a tankie chew me out for pointing this out and call me a ‘gusano’, which is incredible because this is an insult popularized by Castro against counter revolutionaries.

I am an anarchist, and gusano is Spanish for maggot or worm.

It was truly a ludicrous exchange.

And at this point I am sure that when you say that you mean the status quo of Taiwan has always been a part of China.

You are wrong, but keep pushing that narrative!

You’re right, its a plurality. I misspoke.

Still doesn’t change any of the rest of what I said.

Hey at least I can admit and own up to a mistake!

Also worth noting, the TPP candidate, incumbent and now former President Ken Wen-je, is in favor of the status quo with China, in terms of their governmental influence/dominion, meaning continued independent governance when it comes to sovereignty, though this does mean significant economic partnership, in uh, economic terms.

So that’s actually roughly 65% of Taiwanese voting for a President that seem to not want Taiwan to become a part of China.

Which would be… a majority.

Damn near a super majority, as us filthy consumeristic and vapid Americans might say.

To actually attempt to venture into the Narrative Construction Zone, one might say that despite one major party in Taiwan with close positions and ties to the Chines Government itself, the momentum seems to be in favor of moving toward /less/ interference from/subservience to/ integration with China, especially where matters of sovereignty are concerned.

Cool, uh, anyway, in Taiwan the President is directly elected by popular vote.

So the majority of Taiwanese voted for a President who opposes greater integration/interference/subservience to, whatever you wanna say, with or to China.

In fact this would seemingly necessarily mean that the only way this could happen along with the DPP not also winning a majority in Parliament is that a good chunk of Taiwanese support the KMT and TPP for domestic affairs, but prefer a president, who has more power and relevance specifically to foreign affairs, that opposes integration/interference/subservience with/from/to China.

But please do go on about my narrative while you are either knowingly or unknowingly misrepresenting the most fundamental basics of the situation.

Funny, I just had a whole bunch of hexbear and ml lemmy tankies dogpile on me for, not even suggesting necessarily that Taiwan seems to desire that it be independent from China, but that if they did voice that opinion democratically, that such a thing should be respected, even if they are a flawed and imperfect capitalist society.

They all seemed to be very certain the Taiwanese people desire a kind of integration into China that would essentially make them either a puppet state or perhaps nominally democratic province.

I would just like to point out that being terminally online has almost nothing at all to do with being technically savvy.

Huge numbers of people who are terminally online are really only adept at using tech at a surface level, and often confuse this /skill/ for things like knowing how back end programming works, understanding what software development entails, etc.

Actually technically competent people go to great, astounding lengths to make decent software very easy to use for the average person. UI/UX, front end devs, back end devs, database management, and I would say testing paradigms for possible bugs, but the industry seems to have largely abandoned giving a shit about that.

Even here on lemmy I often find myself in discussions which turn into arguments which turn into me finally realizing that the person I am talking to has absolutely ludicrous ideas about tech, the tech industry or a specific software.

Such people say and truly believe in obviously nonsensical things, or approach topics from a standpoint that makes it obvious they are really just power users of a particular kind of software, and have developed into basically superficially convincing fanboys or fangirls for it.

They reveal that they only have knowledge from a bit of experimentation and mostly just following a whole bunch of uninformed discussion about some new tech buzz word, and lack understanding of the important basic concepts, or actually relevant dynamics at play, which they likely would /not/ believe if they had ever actually worked in the tech industry, or developed their own software, or contributed usefully to some open source project.

A whole key thing about the tech industry is that it is dominated by reverence for impressive sounding tech buzzwords that promise some new and revolutionary feature, when in reality such things are nearly always minor, iterative improvements on something that came before.

A high number of people are easily bamboozled by such things.

Basically… you are not immune to propaganda?

Then tech world has: You are not immune to marketing.

A great example is the current craze over ‘AI’ generated content.

OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, these kinds of things?

None of them are capable of the vast majority of the kinds of processes that describe intelligence, but people will argue vehemently that they do, because they are not tech savvy, do not know anything about how the underlying tech actually works or what its capable of, or even what the word intelligence means.

It can do cool and neat things, and its branded or marketed as AI, so it is!

But, its not.