purpleworm [none/use name]

What they said was incredibly dumb, but a lot of this is just you masturbating and it doesn’t really help this person improve or really communicate anything helpful to anyone. Perhaps most importantly, there’s no reason to think them incapable of independent thought. The problem is that they are too comfortable not exercising it.

I need to wonder if this is a child

Your tone and the implication Yog was doing the cropping when this is just a 5th-hand jpeg. The assertion itself was true.

I think this is meant as a political cartoon, but I’m sure Yog would love to discuss with you if you want to talk about real photographs being misused to similar effect (along with stories that don’t even have fake photos attached), e.g. with Tienanmen Square or Xinjiang, if you ask him to. I must admit that I don’t have the patience for having that discussion with hostile strangers, but Yog is a power poster.

You can probably volunteer to phone bank or something.

You have an excellent opportunity now to show them a blatant manifestation of this. I was just talking with people earlier today about how the Dem idea is that even if the Dem machine went and supported a progressive platform, it would not be electable, but here we have the Dems and corporate media blatantly working against a progressive platform that has so far beaten them anyway. Surely if the Dems want progress, Mamdani has demonstrated how popular it is in New York, right?

his Holocaust revisionist knowledge

There’s a lot in there, Senator, some of which may be inaccurate . . . I can’t fact check everything in real time

I think Lehrer did okay here (unlike the genuine monster Gillibrand and her cynical faux-progressivism), I just thought that response was funny.

tbf I’d say that of a design that seems to be too Old Glory-core.

I mean, Yeezies exist

A tattoo of a full-sized poster from the Cultural Revolution down the front of their torso

I think just the barest little counter-messaging could still be helpful if that’s your concern. You don’t need to wear a hat with “marg bar amerikkka” printed on four sides, but a little rainbow wristband or something will get a message across to most people without drawing a huge amount of attention unless you’re in a really chuddy place.

Personally I think most people probably profile me as like a channer or a drug dealer, but well, I think that most people aren’t going to make very grave assumptions about you and if you aren’t a chud, it’ll probably become obvious if you just behave in a manner that shows even an interest in being empathetic to them. You come across as gentle enough – partly for asking this question at all – so I think most people aren’t going to stubbornly hold on to an image of you as a rightist, and those that do (because of trauma or something, I’d expect) aren’t going to be persuaded by you wearing an earring.

Sure, if you’ve got a friend in Gaza who said it, I believe them. It just seemed like something invented by zios to mess with a western audience online, but if Gazans believe it (and they would be the people who know in this case) then I think it’s most likely true.

The version of the story where it’s just a smuggling mechanism and not itself a poisoning attempt also seems way more plausible. It’d be strange if Israel wasn’t trying to promote dangerous drugs, honestly.

Both parties are led by a Cash My-Check, turns out.

They could be targetting aid workers/bakers/etc. more so than the people eating the bread, though I think the story is fake and just as likely to be some reactionary trying to discredit reporting on Israeli war crimes by spreading false rumors. [edit: see reply]

I think this story is fake, but hypothetically there’s still the effect it would have on bakers. It’s not necessarily meant mainly to hurt the person who eats the bread.

Edit: https://hexbear.net/comment/6283279 Looks like it’s in bags inside the flower bags, so this is drug trafficking rather than poisoning.

This place is obviously something of an echo-chamber, but it’s so rich coming from a redditor for whom their entire lives are going to be capitalist echo-chambers whereas the people on hexbear just have their little lemmy thing and otherwise exist in the same sorts of dogmatically capitalist spaces the redditor does (for the most part).

I call them left-liberals, and depending on the specifics you can call them socdems

You said you were done, I didn’t say I was. If you’re done, don’t respond.

the laws to punish “war crimes” do not apply to israel, the US, or their allies. israel’s existence is a war crime. what israel has been doing for 80 years is a war crime. october 6th was a war crime. october 5th was a war crime.

This is all true and also completely irrelevant to the point of contention, not to mention that Israel probably did more war crimes on October 7th than Hamas, as I alluded to before. That fact is also irrelevant on any level but trying to communicate with each other diplomatically, though at this point I am just saying it for the sake of completeness.

i will not condemn the actions of people living in those conditions under western settler colonialism with the frame work those very nations dont apply to themselves. . . . they can not commit a “war crime” as defined by western powers who are themselves committing war crimes and worse with impunity while crying “war crimes”

You’re just pointing to hypocrisy as though the guilt of Israel, the US, and the rest of the western edifice overwrites the rest of reality. It does not.

hamas is not at war with “israel”, they’re defending themselves from violent invaders who view them as subhuman and treat them as such.

Here’s the issue, people characterizing the overall Israel/Gaza situation as a “war” are doing genocide apologia because Israel is targeting civilians with no military value to exterminate the Palestinian population, and these are being counted like war deaths or collateral damage when they obviously are not. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a war going on between Hamas and Israel, one where Hamas is defending and Israel is invading. An invasion is still a war if the invading force meets with military resistance. There are just other things going on beside the war, i.e. the bulk of the actual genocide/ethnic cleansing campaign.

The Soviets were also facing extermination, and probably over 10 million people were killed in genocide (ignoring combat deaths and similar, despite the Nazis being at fault for those as well) as part of Generalplan Ost. The Great Patriotic War was an invasion of the Soviet Union and it was, in fact, a war, and I don’t think that most of Hamas would deny to you that there is a war happening because that’s what happens when two militaries are trying to kill each other, regardless of the moral asymmetry of their positions or whatever else you want to throw in.

The Soviets also committed war crimes. This got exaggerated to make them brutal asiatic hordes in the eyes of white society, first by the Nazis and then in crypto-fascist western historiography. There are many misrepresentations, such as the idea that high command had anything but the utmost hostility toward sexual violence that occurred during the occupations (incidentally we have no first-hand account, forensic evidence, or pictures or video indicating that any sexual violence occurred during the day of October 7th, aside from one claim that Israeli courts themselves rejected, but that’s tangential). The Soviets also, though they committed war crimes, did so at an incomparably lower rate than the Nazis, and probably at a lower – or at worst only comparable – rate to the western Allies. There are many Germans who fully got away with what they did, but Red Army soldiers generally did not unless it was something benign like summarily executing a Nazi officer (or Katyn, I guess, but I don’t think either of us want to get into that).

None of this changes that parts of the Red Army and the general Soviet apparatus did do war crimes, something they themselves partially acknowledge, just as Hamas during negotiations acknowledged the problem of members committing war crimes on October 7th and offering to submit them to court if Israel could conceive of any action toward Gaza other than ceaseless slaughter (it could not).

It would be deeply unreasonable to suggest any sort of blanket condemnation of the Soviets in WWII, just like it would be deeply unreasonable to suggest any sort of blanket condemnation of Hamas in their long war of liberation against Israel. I support both and view their opponents as monstrosities that need to be wiped from the face of the Earth. That does not mean that defensive forces can do no wrong, as much as you are trying to make it so for Hamas with moralizing nonsense that you only double down on as you accuse me of being unfair in how I represent you.

If your goal is to convince someone of communism, books by “left” libs written against rightists that are selected partly on the basis that recommending a communist would be scary is hamstringing yourself. The scope of discussion, and especially of positive alternatives, will be very limited and it’s also just kind of dishonest in this context. If the pitch was “I’m a communist but I think this lib academic has useful things to say about some given subject” I would not be objecting because I think that’s true of basically every subject.

Israel is Hamas