I know they’re going to say it is only jokes. Fuck that. I get y’all want to be edgelords, but this is the most dangerous thing that has happened this century. I would be surprised now if we make it to the end of the year without some people getting assassinated for real, and it will target overwhelmingly the leftest end of the spectrum.
Example, example, example. There are others.
Y’all are on the precipice of finding out firsthand the difference between “OMG I’m so oppressed, the police are racist and I’m struggling to pay my bills, civil war y’all” and “OMG I’m so oppressed, a gang of big violent fuckers with bats and boots and the support of the government just attacked my whole community, seriously hurt me, and burned part of my house down. They told us if they find us here tomorrow, they’ll kill us.”
I for one am here exclusively for the too soon jokes and have noticed a distinct lack of them.
You can try lecture me all you want but its probably going to go in one ear and hit someone else at the rally.
And people ask me why I distrust ‘Chaos’ at the fucking Democrats convention.
I don’t fucking trust the left. Good job fucking this up so far. The rest of us will need to work harder to keep Trump out of office now, and the far left is making things worse.
I don’t trust y’all to come up with a reasonable candidate aside from Biden or Harris.
At least Biden / Harris are being adults today.
How could the far left be fucking anything up in this country when the far left doesn’t hold any real power here? How about you say things that actually make sense.
I don’t fucking trust the left.
This is so reductive as to be completely meaningless.
The far left are already fucking this up. Look at these dumbass edge lords.
Idk about the people in this thread; the accounts and that whole blahaj genre of left is unfamiliar to me so I can’t say. But I will say that some of the other super “left” accounts that I have observed being super amped up about not voting for Biden being real important, and not really being all that convincing about other aspects of their left persona, have pivoted seamlessly into being super amped up about how this is a good thing and everyone on the left in the US needs to do a lot more of it.
I bet that a lot of the leftists are Russian trolls.
Remember we live in divided times. Keep an eye out for the reasonable people. We need to stick together.
It’s easier than ever to spread distrust right now. And we have to deal with a foreign adversary who will 100% try to turn this violent.
Russians played the Black Lives Matter vs Blue Lives Matter and tried to make both sides distrust. It’s not just our base instincts at play here, but also foreign interference from our enemies at play.
100%
And a lot of people work by emotion and groupthink and really want someone who’s super confident with their presentation, who can tell them how to look at it in some satisfying exciting way, and want to follow the presented thought patterns. It actually works really well.
Guys, those of you (what percentage Idk; for all I know it could be 100%, too) who are US left people - taking potshots of violence at a fascist movement is about like eliminating the wasp’s nest by going up and trying to destroy it with a ball point pen.
What are you bringing the “far left” up for? I don’t think you understand what you’re on about.
Good job fucking this up so far.
Who? What?
Edgelords who are serious (or even joking) about this tragedy.
Tomorrow at the RNC, watch it. Every right-winger will be using this as proof of political violence and blame the left.
And the left will be angered and make more edgelords jokes and we lose the election in a few months. Well, at the current path anyway. None of this shit helps.
With luck, cooler heads prevail and people remember why we have a calm President like Biden in charge right now.
But now DNC will have this shit hanging over it. Just a few shitty protesters will make everyone in the country hate Democrats.
Why are you associating all “edgelords” with “the left”?
You’re… blaming the DNC? For some randoms saying stupid shit on the internet…
This elected moron things Biden ordered it, is he being an edgelord and are you going to criticise him?
Go away and take your American politics with you. Cry somewhere else.
Pizza Cutters.
All edge, no point.
Haven’t heard that before, but I like it.
I don’t understand why you get so upset. Have you been living in your own bubble, being protected from these views and now you are surprised they exist?
Lemmy.world doesn’t allow these opinions to exist on their site but that doesn’t mean that they disappear from the actual world.
I don’t agree with their opinions but I’m also not at all surprised they exist.
Also i think if I was a trans person, I would be hateful against ordinary people, because of how I have been treated as a trans. Nothing strange about that either.
All of this is just common sense. Now I will have some breakfast. Have a good day.
I guess I was just mistaken about the nature of blahaj.
Also, it’s not really related to what you said, but I am a little bit curious to see if the really shocking nature of the pattern of the votes changes now that the Americans are going to be waking up.
Fascism is fascism: left, right, or center. Celebrating violence shows a weakness of character, and demonstrates that the violence wishers are really fascists happy to use violence to get their desired outcomes.
I made nearly the exact same point in /c/news last week and got similarly downvoted to hell.
Seriously reconsidering whether Lemmy has the type of people I want to be associated with. I’ve definitely been increasing my rate of bans as of late.
Yeah, I am only here to help Lemmy grow. I really have come to realize over this experiment that I’m not the right type of person for social media.
In the past year nearly 100 percent of my discussions with people I know have been productive.
On Lemmy it’s about 5%. I’ve tried blocking most of the political discussions, and memes and that helps. When I do find good conversation it’s rewarding, but the frequency is going down.
I mainly think that it’s because niche communities can’t grow sheltered on Lemmy, the tools aren’t there yet. Lemmy is so small and flat we end up having the same discussion over and over again. The main Lemmy zeitgeist is one I dont really agree with, and that might be the reason the conversations I value are so hard to have here.
Eh, it gives me some faith to still see the occasional individual making sense in the comment sections. I’ve blocked close to 800 people on Lemmy, and on average, I probably block 10 more each day. It feels like it’s not making much of a difference, but it must have some impact. If the number of users here were on par with Reddit, I’d just be wasting my time. However, considering Lemmy’s low user base and the fact that most comments are written by a small percentage of users, I still have faith that blocking those who are just making noise has to improve the signal.
For me, it serves two purposes: less content to browse, which means less time spent here, and the opportunity to engage in thoughtful conversations with the remaining sensible users, rather than partaking in a shouting match with everyone.
Well, I appreciate you being here. You’re a semi-rare voice of reason in a cacophony of nonsense.
I’m a Reddit refugee myself, and I came here expecting a similar crowd. They’re definitely here, and I’ve had many productive discussions, but I always end up having to swat away (read: block / ban) the 'chan-type crowd that just wants to stir the pot.
If I gave up on this, I dunno where I’d go since every other social is either not interesting to me at all or has enshittified beyond usability.
I guess outside is still an option LOL
Hackernews, matrix servers of friends would be my fallbacks… maintaining social groups in person really should be my main component.
Well, I appreciate you being here. You’re a semi-rare voice of reason in a cacophony of nonsense.
As are you! I appreciate you too.
Lemmy is effectively the left-wing equivalent of Gab or Truth Social. There’s a ton of extremists here, but they don’t see themselves as such because they believe their extremism is justified and that they’re on the right side of history. Ironically, that’s what all extremists think. Moments like this are the true test of one’s intellectual honesty. A rational, independent thinker should be able to condemn this kind of behavior even when it’s targeted towards their “enemies.”
The absolute hate for free speech I’ve encountered on Lemmy has also been perplexing, like it’s the whole point of a open federated platform. It’s the reason I blocked all the political communities, those discussions went nowhere with no ability to have a discussion deeper than sound bites repeated.
Fascism is specifically a right wing type of Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is Authoritarianism: Left, right, or center. Please, use the right words for this. Yes, I’m choosing to be a stickler because a lot of right wing nuts claim Nazis are left wing and use that to prevent self reflection. Words have power and meaning - That’s even the very point you are making, that words can do more than violence
Communism / Lennism / Marxism was the left-authoritarians.
Fascism was the right-wing authoritarians.
See WW2 for details.
They’re not against fascism. They’re against fascism from the opposing side. The level of hypocricy demonstrated in these comment sections is mind boggling.
100% agreed. It’s not violent authoritinarianism if we do it.
(Another commenter corrected my use of fascism, I think they’re correct, but this lacks the impact of fascism for violent oppression of political opponents)
weakness of character is being a little pussy bitch instead of standing up to evil.
ok! your being evil. please be a better human being
incorrect
Wishing for people’s assassination is definitionally lawless and by extension morally evil.
lawful good bitch says what?
Ad hominem attack while tacitly admitting your unlawful evil, bold strategy.
Please be a better human, you don’t always have to be evil.
stfu pussy
I think I am deeply troubled by some of the comments I’m reading. I absolutely agree that Trumps ascent to presidency is a huge threat to democracy, and it’s important to do everything we can to stop it.
But in my opinion it is extremely inappropriate to wish someone dead, even someone as harmful to American Democracy as Trump. No person deserves to die for things they’ve done - this is the main reason why the UN urges its members to outlaw the death penalty. And when I read comments that people would want the killer to just do one job, or that he shouldn’t have missed, this doesn’t work with my ideal of respect for the human life.
I am really sad about these comments.
Must be nice being morally superior to everyone else and lucky to be that privileged.
Absolutely.
The death of a political candidate robs All of us of our Democratic ability to vote and voice our political opinions.
Democratic ability
Who won the popular vote in 2016?
Reforming the electoral college is a great place to start, I agree there’s a lot in the United States system that needs to be changed. Especially the voting system not just The electoral college, but first pass the post voting in general
However, the implication of your statement, is assassinations are fine if they achieve your political goals. My response is that is the absolute antithesis of democracy, you’re removing people’s ability to affect their outcomes by killing the people they might vote for.
Who won the popular vote in 2016?
The point still stands You’re implying that a government decided by assassinations as preferable to a government run by the electoral college.
I’m saying assassinations are the greater evil, and further from any practical form of democracy humans know about
Who won the popular vote in 2016?
https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2016
Reforming the system is acceptable, using assassinations to get the outcomes you want is destroying the system entirely, and not replacing it with a better system, replacing it with worse levels of authoritarian violence.
If you simply want to win, and you have no principles about how you get there, you have no business in governance. I’d rather be led by somebody who is wrong but guided by principles then somebody with no principles.
When you sexually molest a child, you deserve to die. There are definitely things people can do that they deserve to die for.
Joseph Fritzl should have been given the death penalty for what he did.
I can understand not wanting death penalty due to fear of it being misused. But if you think there’s nothing anyone could do to deserve it, then I think you lack imagination of what horrible things people are capable of doing
This is not about the death penalty for trump, he deserves that day in court. What is wrong is some asshole shooting an assault rifle into a crowd to kill the wretch, at least in my view. Like the US doesn’t have enough shootings every week…
I am really sad about these comments.
If it makes you feel any better, they are completely wrong.
For me it’s not even about the death penalty aspect (although that also, yes). It’s the extrajudicial killing aspect and what it will do to our already fractured democracy.
Thanks - I appreciate the support. And yes, I absolutely agree.
Y’all are on the precipice of finding out firsthand the difference between “OMG I’m so oppressed
Sounds like the perspective of a privileged person who’s life hasn’t been in danger for years because of this person. Why is it bad to celebrate the misfortune of a person who has caused massive harm and is promising to eradicate your kind?
Because you’re not seeing the big picture. Zoom out and see how the right is going to weaponize this.
Plus, the whole advocating for political violence is NOT a sign of a healthy society NOR a sign of a society heading in the right direction.
Stop pretending like our society has been healthy for any amount of time in the past 8 years
What you’re seeing is gallows humor.
I’m trans. Trump is going to win. The shooter (who was a registered Republican, by the way) has guaranteed that. I’m fucked. My whole community is fucked. We all know that. And the only way many of us aren’t sobbing uncontrollably is by dark humor like this.
I’m not saying it was a smart thing for the shooter to do, or that I’m celebrating this event or what it could’ve been, I’m just saying that it’s perfectly normal and understandable for an oppressed peoples to not have sympathy for the misfortune of their oppressor.
Plus, the whole advocating for political violence is NOT a sign of a healthy society
Yes, we are not a healthy society
The thing I think you might be missing here is that: regardless of any external factors, the right is going to weaponize this. This is not a healthy society, and based on available data it is not heading in the right direction, and people coping with memes on the internet is not going to change any of that. With the level of rhetoric coming out of the right (and some, but a non-zero amount from the left/center), and with the escalation of violence in this year alone, getting to the point where people are going to be taking shots at public officials (or candidates, in this case) was an inevitability. The only outstanding question was who, when, where, and by whom. And of course, when the next one’s coming.
There’s no amount of ‘high road’ that will change this. All we have is that the victims this time weren’t a bunch of innocent kids, they were fascists at a fascist rally, and, for tonight at least, I’m not going to pretend I’m upset about that.
If you are celebrating this because it’s a step in the right direction as far as your life being in danger from Trump and his followers, you have a lack of grasp of reality that implies pretty strongly a position of privilege and safety. Most people I know who have a lot of unsafety in their lives show a lot of common sense and caution when it comes to threats to their safety; they don’t have this luxury of bravado, or not thinking about consequences.
Yes, Trump is incredibly dangerous. For that reason I would rather fight him with methods that work, and not methods that make things exponentially worse. If that makes me privileged, then call me Privilege McPrivilegeson.
Trump is incredibly dangerous. For that reason I would rather fight him with methods that work,
Because non-violence has been so effective at stopping fascism historically?
Read “How Democracies Die” for a pretty good breakdown. The question isn’t really violence versus non violence, but escalating the breakdown of democratic norms versus trying to maintain them.
I don’t care how oppressed you think you are right now; this has the potential to make it much, much, much worse.
I get what you’re saying. But labeling an assasination attempt as misfortune is a little disingenuous don’t you think?
I don’t think that political violence shouldn’t be celebrated or even slightly accepted. It’s not the solution. If you don’t mind people celebrating the assasination attempt of Trump.
You also don’t have to mind people celebrating a potential attempt on Biden, or any other politician. And I don’t think you actually want to do that.
I don’t like him either. But when you start shooting/assasinating politicians you don’t agree with you end up like Mexico or Russia.
I see you have chosen the lawful stupid alignment. Good for you.
Would you like to expand on your reply? Not sure what you are trying to say.
You want political assasinations to be an accepted part of day to day business?
So your argument is nobody should make jokes because you’re afraid of his followers rioting…
What’s your opinion on jokes on Islam and the prophet Mohammed? Because we occasionally have similar discussions. Like back then, when people were afraid of terrorist attacks because of the Mohammed caricatures and people already got stabbed, flags burned etc…
Of course we could outlaw offending people who are easily offended. Currently that isn’t the case and people are allowed to use dark humour to cope with things.
Back then, with the caricature situation, we concluded we have to defend democracy and our values… Even at the cost of someone blowing up a subway station and a few hundred people. But there was the same big argument, and some people didn’t agree.
I’m not saying nobody should make edgelord jokes in general. I’m saying that no one should be speaking approvingly, whether joking or not, about something that is such a mind-bogglingly terrifying development.
If someone went into a mosque and shot up the place, but missed a bunch of kids, and someone posted a meme suggesting they needed to do better because their score was way down in C tier, I would be appalled for the same reasons I am appalled by this.
But isn’t that besides your initial question? I think we can all agree that shooting people is wrong in 99.9% of cases and should be condemned. I suppose even the majority of edgelords will agree if you ask them for their true opinion and they’d share that.
But as I understand that wasn’t your question? Your question was if it’s okay to crack jokes about bad things. Or if you can anticipate a joke will lead to negative consequences?! That’s why I’m drawing that parallel…
And it’s a different question. Commiting a crime and talking about it (in whatever form) are two seperate things and need to be discussed seperately.
… The thing they’ve been shouting in my face that they want to do, for years? They’re gonna still want to do it?
They’re gonna weaponize this? As opposed to every other fucking thing in existence that they weaponize?
I’m not even one of the people saying the things you take issue with, but wake the fuck up lol.
And where are you when we’re the ones actually getting killed and murdered? Fuck off with that shit, @[email protected].
You haven’t been murdered yet. Now, you might be, and people are making jokes about the situation.
My concern about you maybe getting murdered because of what gets inflamed by this is exactly what I think it’s wrong, and that the people who are happy about it are terrifyingly mistaken.
The last time a president was assassinated it was Kennedy in 1963. Reagan was shot as well. Two different people tried to assassinate Ford.
It’s actually a wonder that nobody has taken a shot at Trump up til now. It is only jokes. It adds levity to the situation. The fact that someone was able to get this close to a former president with the protection of the secret service with a weapon of any kind, let alone fire multiple shots is absurd.
The idea that it will lead to open war in the streets? I don’t think so.
There were always going to be isolated incidences of violence in regards to this election. Given the way the insurrection has been handled (what I would consider to be one of the most dangerous things to happen to American Democracy in the last century), this is just the kind of thing to fire up his base but it doesn’t endear fence sitters to him. They’re fence sitters for a reason. And it certainly isn’t the type of thing to prevent democratic voters from voting.
So your worry here is what? The same danger he has always posed as a Demagogue before this shooting is the one he poses as of now in the present. If you’re worried about people using this to incite more violence, that was going to happen regardless of whether he got shot at.
People cope with current events that have the potential to impact their lives in different ways. Blind panic and condemnation of people who would otherwise be your allies is a choice though.
The idea that it will lead to open war in the streets? I don’t think so.
Well, glad we cleared that up. I would recommend to watch the news for historians who study this type of thing; I would expect that you will see some who predict exactly that. Or, well, more of it, since there’s already a little bit of it.
I mean the proof is in the pudding. We’ll see what happens.
So your worry here is what?
That his followers will be inspired to acts of violence they otherwise wouldn’t have been
Blind panic and condemnation of people who would otherwise be your allies is a choice though.
I’ll “condemn” people who I disagree with, and explain why I disagree with them. I plan to continue to do so. If that is wrong in your world, then it makes some kind of sense why you think assassination is right.
If you like assassinations, and aren’t panicked about further erosion of democracy, you already won’t be a potential ally of mine for two big reasons. The issue wasn’t created when I spoke up about those reasons.
There are a handful of instances here that reliably attract extremists. lemmygrad, hexbear, lemmy.ml, infosec.pub and blahaj to name a few. I don’t think I’ve ever blocked as many people as I have today. Even disabled my content filters to see those threads so I could do some housekeeping.
The last thing we need is democratic systems being worked around or losing more faith. Unfortunately we have an ultra left that want to burn it all down and an ultra right that want to locked it all up and what feels like to small of a center that just wants a niced balanced democracy with free enterprise but also socials safety nets and sensible regulation and a fair tax system and decent public infrastructure and such.
You might enjoy this Jon Stewart podcast about the two-party system in the United States. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_EofYXRBnM
The US flavor of democracy is not the only flavor, and as we are seeing it is not very representative. There’s room for improvement
Tldr: systemic issues in the voting system and the representation system encourage party factionalism and extremism
oh im well aware. It unfortunately is a self perpetuating thing that has only gotten further dug in with citizens united and deregulation. It would be incredible to have ranked choice.
Idk when the one that’s trying to murder you and your whole family and friends because there different gets shot. It’s celebrating the little things they barley have to end the Nazis
