But I appreciate the arrogant insistence that anyone who disagrees with you clearly just fails to understand the topic as deeply as you do.

See, you just can’t stop lying. Straw men to play the victim, over and over. You came here in ignorance, you admit to having no organizing experience on this topic and failing to keep up and you demonstrate this plainly, which is why I extracted this from you: you were not behaving in accordance with that reality.

Just be honest.

Realistically, we should be voting in primaries, too.

lmao holy shit you think this is insightful.

That’s the best way to influence the Democrat party, especially if Republicans are failing to provide an actual opponent.

Is that so? Have you ever run a primary campaign? Do you know elected socialists? What are their experiences? What can they accomplish? What is their relationship to the party?

If the biggest threat to a candidate isn’t from outside the party, it must come from within, and their biggest fear becomes losing the primary.

Wrong on both counts. Their biggest fear is losing position and status within the party apparatus and as you can see, this easily survives election losses. This is why they will lose elections instead of move left on key topics. A primary is only disruptive to some climbers. And when they do perceive that threat, which was always present even when Republicans win every other election (you still believe their lies about needing to move right implicitly), their response is to fight if with their entire apparatus. To punch left. So to the extent that losing a primary is feared, it does not translate into a left shift. That is not how the party works. The nominal moves left are individual politicians (alleging to be outsiders) winning those primaries instead. The party reacts to them, even moves right in response.

If we make it crystal clear that a push to the right is intolerable

Intolerable? Didn’t you promise to vote for them in the general regardless? Do words mean anything to you? Champ, you tolerate genocide.

suddenly, trying to court centrists and fleeing Republicans is suicide. Instead, every time we get pissed at Democrats, what do we do? We elect a Republican. What do the Democrats do in response? They see moving right as viable and do so.

Goddamn you just can’t stop repeating yourself

I try to get exposure to non-corporate news, I try to join protests when they’re close enough and I have the time, but just staying fed and housed takes up an absurd amount of my time. Despite that, I try when I can. And when I end up discussing it with a bunch of people who profess to care deeply and know what must be done, I don’t get genuine suggestions for how to help or anything like that.

You barge into an enti-genocide space promoting genocidaires and whine when you are criticized for bad faith behavior after receiving tons of responses trying to help you understand. You reply to those responses by digging in your heels and demanding sources and repeating your original false claims ad nauseum. The fact that you think you aren’t the problem here is itself the problem. No humility in the face of knowing your own political naivete, happy to make excuses and blame everyone else, while you still belabor falsified talking points and ignore what people write to you.

You would not be useful in a pro-Palestine organizing space. You haven’t learned to decenter yourself or accept criticism and would drag everyone around you down. Politics is not about you. To quote a great thinker, “get the fuck over yourself”. You will only be useful when you can subsume yourself to the cause, and that includes prioritizing learning about it and developing correct opinions on it. This isn’t a hobby or a media franchise to argue about on the internet, it’s not Superman vs. Batman, it is a world historical project to end unfathomable oppression.

I get verbally abused and accused of advocating for it

See, you still don’t understand why people have written you off. No responsibility taken. You fundamentally don’t understand how to speak or act and are still reacting purely defensively. This is why I have given up the pretense of respecting you: you were acting like this long before anyone was directly pointing it out. Basically everyone gave you leeway - at first.

I’m here with an open mind

You have demonstrated the exact opposite. You are intransigent, deflect from criticism of your ideas, and lead with condescension. You have a false self image.

and trying to engage in good faith

Clearly this is not the case. You seem to not even recognize evasive bad faith behavior even when it is laid out for you specifically and with examples. Your response, even then, is continued evasion. You have to take responsibility eventually or you’ll always have these experiences.

Responding to comments does not make good faith by the way.

taking the time to read and respond as best I can to almost every single one, I’ve probably responded to closing in on 20 comments with 20+ notifications remaining,

That’s not very many. This… demonstrates good faith? Personally, I think good faith is about responding germanely, taking feedback seriously, and not being dishonest in interactions.

and so far, only one or two have tried to actually engage and provide information.

This is a lie. I’ve seen at least six or seven and I’m not even trying to keep count. I’m one of them. You have a pattern of trying to ignore correction, including with specific examples, and trying to cling to the original falsehoods and repeat them as nauseum. Again, you need to spend time reading not replying one by one. It’s clear your focus is on rescuing your bad and harmful ideas comment-by-comment target rather than developing understanding.

The vast majority have only tried to make me feel like an idiot for disagreeing.

You should feel like an idiot for disagreeing, your ideas are bad and harmful, they aren’t your item, and you’re publicly doubling down on them over and over again. That’s a foolish thing to do. At no point were you forced to open your yapper and do any of that.

Now, if we focus just on the original sin of saying some bad and harmful ideas, you’ll see that the direct responses are correcting you. They explain how and why you are wrong. It is only after you double down and act like you need to be convinced (as if you knew anything in the first place) and did no research of your own and seemingly have no actual interest in the topic beyond “vote for genociders” that the disrespect piles on. And it’s not unique to this comment section, you also exhausted the patience of others discussing Ukrainian neo-Nazis where, again bathed in liberal talking points and the associated ignorance, your proceeded to engage in bad faith, treat your own baseless claims as the default truth and demand explanations and citations from others lest you withhold your agreement (oh no!).

I’ve learned a little about the situation as a result of it, but most of what I’ve learned is that Hexbear is full of bitter assholes who will pile on to verbally abuse me for disagreeing.

Yes it’s our fault that you promoted genociders and responded in bad faith to correction. If only we had responded with patient explanations first! Oh wait. We did and that didn’t work either.

Sounds like a you problem.

I never said things just happen later

Yes you did. You were extremely vague about what happens later, so I am describing this accurately. Despite me prompting you five or six times and explaining why you have nothing to actually do after promising to perma-vote for Democrats no matter if they do genocide, you still have nothing and refuse to address why you have nothing. You just deflect over and over again.

and I explicitly said to do it and then go do whatever you think is most effective.

It is amazing that you think this is a different plan from “and then things just happen”.

This is the type of thing I’m talking about when I complain of people putting words in my mouth. They avoid things I explicitly said to make it easier to belittle me and what I’m saying.

No, I accurately described what you’re saying: you have no plan for after voting for Dems no matter what. This vague hand waving lets you pretend otherwise, but we know very well that you don’t even care about the political project, you don’t actually think about how the changes would actually happen, and yet you pretend to be explaining how they do.

The point was never to stop doing what’s most effective. The point was to elect whoever of the available candidates will be most vulnerable to those effective things.

No, the point was “vote Blue no matter who” and then you don’t really have any actual thoughts. You think things will just happen after that. Somehow after giving away leverage you will gain leverage. But you don’t know how. You say they will be moved left, pressured, forced. But you don’t know how. That’s not your priority. You haven’t thought about it. And when I correctly point this out, you aren’t honest about it.

Everyone here is so sure they know the Right Way that I’m not even gonna try to say what that is

You don’t even know what it is, and there is still variety here so it’s not just one thing. See, you are still fibbing and trying to save face. Just acknowledge ignorance when you have it. People who do know things can easily clock a fibber. You aren’t actually saving face, you’re building a bad reputation.

but whatever you think it is, one of the two potential victors is more vulnerable to that than the other.

Your thinking is to devoid of mechanism that you believe Democrats are always more vulnerable to every single possible means of opposition than Republicabs. Literally. This is your impregnable belief system, it does not require evidence or coherence or logic.

I think Democrats would be easier to break overall compared to Republicans. I don’t think either will be easy to break, but that’s all the more reason to push the odds in our favor by influencing who we’re trying to break.

See how you pointlessly repeat your original claims and beliefs? Do you not even recognize the irony in repeating this in response to what you quoted? Do you not see the irony in hand waving about what actions are taken after voting for Blue No Matter Who? You’re just proving me right.

Or maybe I’m just not intimately familiar with every community on the internet.

And yet you have assumed we don’t know electoralism and repeatedly try to explain it despite it being quite obvious that we’ve heard this all before. I’ve told you repeatedly that we have. Yet you can’t stop yourself from trying to place yourself in the lecturing position, completely pointlessly talking about FPTP as if it addresses anything we’ve said (it doesn’t). You’re really just navel gazing, repeating your own understanding to shore up your own confidence, but it’s condescending and demeaning to the people directly in front of you.

Like I keep saying: shut the fuck up and read. You don’t know who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about. Until you realize this you cannot learn and be less harmful.

I saw a post, I made a response, turns out everyone here has a very particular set of views, which is becoming more and more apparent as I work through the dozens and dozens of responses I got.

This is seemingly your first experience with the left. This is how little you understand politics. So why are you still arguing?

I didn’t seek out Hexbear to start shit with a specific community

Your claims and behavior would be wrong and unacceptable regardless of context, though I’m sure you’d find plenty of agreement in genocide tolerant liberal spaces.

I can stumble across your posts if anyone in my instance subscribes to the community, and you may think it arrogant to point that out here on Lemmy, but I’d remind you you seem to have forgotten there are ways to find yourself commenting here without intimate familiarity with the community norms.

Why am I supposed to care about this? Community norms? When did I say anything about community norms? Your bad behavior is bad in any space.

Split comment again

Fine, I tried to speed things up a bit because I have a deluge of notifications over this, but let’s go back to it.

Poor baby.

Yeah, as you present it, it doesn’t sound like it makes any sense. In the greater context of the US political environment, though, I think it makes sense.

So yet again you are going to avoid critically analyzing your logic and just repeat your vague handwaving stories than deal with the contradiction. You can’t acknowledge the fundamental self-defeat aspect, you have to avoid discussing it. See, this is dishonest behavior.

What happens every time Democrats lose to Republicans? Democrats use it as an excuse to court centrists and move to the right.

They also say that when they win. Time to reach across the aisle and get things done, right? You need to expand your thinking to actually consider the alternative because your post hoc ergo propter hoc is cherry picked. The reality is that Democrats always want to favor their bourgeois machinery, their donor networks, their media access and relations, their think tank and NGO graft network, and the personal professional mobility built into that system (party climbers). And this applies a filter for who has power and what they do with it.

What happened in Nevada when DSA DemSoca electorally gained nominal control of the party? Do you know?

So if every loss pushes Democrats to the right, not the left, how exactly do you expect to push them left by costing them elections?

You’re again confusing me for someone who thinks electoralism and “pushing Democrats left” is viable. I am simply pointing out that your rhetoric is self-defeating and illogical and that if you did want to push Democrats left you wouldn’t subscribe to the theory of throwing away all leverage by promising to vote for them no matter what. You have clearly never tried to make anything happen electorally nor analyzed your inevitable policy failures.

I’ll remind you that your logic is to have literally no situation in which you don’t provide a Democrat support, at least so long as you don’t believe anything is worse than genocide. And somehow, through the magic of storytelling, this becomes a political strategy for you and “the left” because the demons that fight you every step of the way will become less focused on opposing you when their alleged right wing opposition needs less attention. Because again you cannot spell out what happens next and how.

In what way does that not make sense? What is the real conclusion? Where did ideas of electoral defeatism originate, and what purpose do they serve?

You still haven’t answered those questions by the way. And they don’t actually apply to me. Just be honest and stop deflecting.

Let’s look at this the other way around. Democrats lost, and it was very likely expressly because of Gaza.

It is marginally because of Democrats doing genocide. That tipped the scales to a degree that you can attribute the loss to it in a “if they had those voters they’d probably have won”. But Democrats lose for a much larger host of reasons that accumulate socially over time and breadth of political life. The pro-Palestine voting bloc is nascent, it’s barely organized, it’s not very disciplined, it’s full of fools who think they can “change the system from within” because they either do not understand it or stand to fund their nonprofits through proximity to the party. So it’s marginal.

It is, however, useful to understand that Democrats preferred to be genocidal than win the election. And that’s who you say to vote for no matter what. Then you get prickly when it’s pointed out that this makes you an advocate for genocidaires.

They wrote up an election autopsy on why they lost. They then released that report, admitted they were wrong, and pivoted to supporting Gaza, right? Right?

See you belabor this straw man re: withholding votes because you don’t know how to seek knowledge or understanding. You falsely presume I have your same misunderstandings of the party and electoralism. You’re projecting that into me and really just arguing with a less politically incompetent version of your own politics, not mine. But this doesn’t elevate your even less competent logic to be better than the alternative I’ve dangled in front of you.

Yeah, about that, didn’t happen. We just continued it while also starting shit in a bunch of other countries.

It’s almost as if there’s a strong political continuity regardless of whether it’s a D or R in power. Do you wonder why that is?

Or maybe it’s because things got worse when we elected Trump, with invasions of Iran, Venezuela, potentially Cuba, and giving Israel a chance to go at Lebanon.

You’re just deflecting again. No, that is not why you are opposed here, which is what you are supposedly responding to with this retort. You don’t even make sense. You just avoid. Go back and actually engage.

There’s not much to say here other than I disagree, but I’ll include it to avoid being accused to ignoring anything again.

There’s plenty you could say. You could, if you don’t understand how this could be the case, ask why I perceive that. You could explain your disagreement, though you’d probably have to ask questions first. But you’d rather avoid understanding.

Who do you mean when you say “actual advocates”, and what strategies are they recommending? This is too vague for me to really address, but it sounds potentially useful to know.

Those who organize for the liberation of Palestine from imperialist settler colonialism occupation and genocide. There are many organizations that do this. It’s not really vague, you are just unfamiliar with this topic. You confuse your ignorance for a communication problem.

Well hey, that leverage got used anyway, so let’s look at the results: tried to withhold the autopsy report,

See you don’t even read responses before replying so you belabor useless talking points I’ve already addressed. When will you start reading and stop talking so much? Organize yourself.

to pivot at all. But at least we got involved in Iran, Venezuela, potentially Cuba, and helped Israel get into Lebanon. Is that the success you hoped for? Because it kinda sounds like you won nothing and helped make things worse.

So the Democratic Party would rather lose the election than stop supporting genocide. What does that tell you about how well your strategy of actively throwing away leverage and then doing nothing will work? At no point has this made you think, “gee, these people are in power in the party and so opposed to this they’d rather lose the election. Maybe I need to think about what keeps them, nevertheless, in power in the party”?

Get the fuck over yourself.

Nothing in what I said is egotistical or self-promoting, it was simply critical of your empty proclamations of caring about brown people while advocating for their genociders. And clearly it struck a nerve.

I’m not okay with any of it.

You are an open advocate for the people genociding brown people. You’re proud of it. You think it’s smart and condescend towards others about it.

Thinking that things would be better under Democrats isn’t a glowing endorsement of them.

I already told you exactly what it is and “glowing endorsement” isn’t anywhere to be found. See how you have to invent criticisms that are easier to respond to than what was actually said? You aren’t coping with the reality.

Like I’ve already said here, Democrats move right when Republicans win elections. We should not just vote them in and hope all is well.

And yet, again, your only conception of left electoral power is to vote for Democrats and then everything else kind of just happens with hand-wavy “force” and “demands” with no mechanism. Your logic is to throw away leverage and only then will things happen, somehow. You’re very light on the details of the other steps because you haven’t thought about them. I know this. You know this. This is because you are parroting the logic of the genocidaires’ party, cynical logic to disenfranchise their voters and keep the money train a-rollin’, and they don’t want you to really think about how the rest of the steps would work so they don’t spell it out for you.

We should choose who we think is more susceptible to being pressured, and then heap as much pressure on them as possible through whatever means you think will be most effective.

“Force”. “Pressure”.

With what? You still can’t even think of what you’d actually do once you have promised to always vote for them.

Sure, totally that and not the fact that we knew things would get even worse under Trump, like with the multiple invasions and abduction I’ve already mentioned.

Yes that is part of the early genocide apologia. An immediate pivot to lesser evil rhetoric even in the face of your politicians doing genocide. I recognize your rhetoric because I’ve seen it scores of times for 2-3 years. There is nothing to doubt about this.

I could have phrased that better, so I’m sorry for the impression it gave. I did not mean defeatism on the topic of Palestine. I meant defeatism on the topic of elections.

I am actually pointing you towards less incompetent electoral strategy so you can eventually learn its many failure modes and why, and more proximally, stop saying ridiculous bullshit we’ve all heard a thousand times.

You’re right that I don’t get to do as much as I’d like on the topic. Unfortunately, life has put significant constraints on my opportunities to stay well informed and participate.

No investigation, no right to speak. Shut up and ask for opinions and advice because you don’t know anything, you just repeat cynical party propaganda.

PS poor sharecroppers informed themselves by candlelight after 14 hour days so cry me a fucking river for trying to excuse your proud genocide apologetic ignorant proclamations. You always have the option of shutting the fuck up.

Split comment again.

Democrats use it as an excuse to court centrists and move to the right. So if every loss pushes Democrats to the right, not the left, how exactly do you expect to push them left by costing them elections? In what way does that not make sense? What is the real conclusion? Where did ideas of electoral defeatism originate, and what purpose do they serve?

Can you demonstrate this with data or something? I know that DSA members have been getting elected all over the place since Democrats started losing to Trump with 90% of all DSA members being elected since 2019. I also know that taking money from AIPAC is increasingly seen as politically toxic and elected Democrats are condemning Israel’s genocide.