I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren’t really true - and that’s why trying to “fix” these things won’t work - because it misses the real problem.

Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying “men are rapists”, or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.

I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the “masculine party”, and in driving the narratives I’ve mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they’re best at driving those narratives.

Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon’s control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.

And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.

Or vote against the one party (starts with an R) that continues to make the duopoly happen by banning RCV, and for the party (starts with a D) that’s far more likely to implement RCV.

The most politically incorrect truth is this: People are not good or bad, individual people do a variety of good and bad things. Mister Rogers told his gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman. Hitler banned animal cruelty. We don’t like to talk about these things, but it’s a true principle and a useful one to live by.

Colorado’s Division of Motor Vehicles also tried to explicitly ban them last year, though it later pulled its proposed rule. Some kei vehicle owners, however, say the state is still trying to keep them off the road by refusing to allow them into the emissions testing process.

As usual it’s confusion from news when reporting on public policy. So are they proposing that there be exceptions to emissions rules for these vehicles or not? Because that will make a huge amount of difference in how much I or pretty much anyone else should support this.

deleted by creator

In addition to what everyone else says, I’ve done well with rubbing aloe on after. I’m not usually a natural goop guy but my ex bought it for me and I found it actually works pretty well.

I agree but the goal should be not to win a debate, but use their debate platform to slip some woke mind virus into their drink. I always liked to ask very simple questions that they thought they knew the answer to already and make them defend their inevitably irrational answers. For example I used to ask what race is Mariah Carey, because it’s a question everyone seems to have a different strong opinion on that can’t withstand much questioning. The goal being to make them realize on their own that race is a social construct. Whether that ever worked with anyone I don’t know.

Up to you? I used to hang out on a WN part of reddit back when that was allowed and debate people but that’s not a thing anymore. The problem is you have utterly no idea if you’re getting through to anyone. I do feel like people had to back off their angry racial ideas and adopt a softer “racial zoo” argument that made it seem like all they wanted was to preserve racial diversity rather than eliminate any particular race. I mean at times I wonder if they were looking in the mirror going “is that really why I have this swastika tattoo?” but I have no idea.

I do think the far right cannot survive much scrutiny of its ideas because they are very irrational, but to be honest the left has done a terrible job pointing this out. I know many people even on the moderate right feel like there’s a grain of truth to racism that they’ll admit in private with other white people, but then once you confront racism and question common assumptions about race* all that falls apart. Many attack racism as a moral failing and that doesn’t work because it makes it sound like the truth is being suppressed for moral reasons.

*The most pernicious being the idea that a person can have a single race on a fundamental level that isn’t up for debate

The chicken came first. Chicken-ness begins at conception.

A house with a yard in a city with good subway access

Reddit had its advantages but when they forced everyone to have r/all as a default sub I feel like the content really started going downhill and all the subs started becoming the same. Then when the API thing happened I realized it wasn’t going to get better, they were determined to become Facebook.

Yes, lemmy.world

Miss Cleo was big in the 90s. And she wasn’t even the dumbest one. Americans have always believed in stupid bullshit. The CIA used to hire psychics too. Go back to the 1920s, and Americans pretty much took it for granted that fairies are real.

What’s changed recently is that the news media went from being a mostly curated place where completely lunacy was hard to find, to a right wing clown show led by con artists. When I was a kid news was for nerds only, now it’s more like the national sport where everyone has their team. And don’t underestimate the degree to which this was done deliberately - Elon buying Twitter was a pretty clear example of the billionaire mafia taking a platform that was sort of trying to be more attached to reality and making it a lot dumber and more right wing.

Because protests don’t do shit. There were mass protests over police brutality in 2020. Didn’t do shit and the right wing media reaction arguably helped kill off police reform legislation that was in progress before the protests.

The reason protests from the left don’t do shit is because the most popular media is controlled by Maga. The top social media network for news, the top podcast, and the top cable TV news are all outright maga propaganda. A narrative can arise without them, but they will determine what happens to it. So last time, the protests arose due to George Floyd, but the right wing media turned it into a narrative about lawless riots, using exaggeration and fake images.

See also Palestine protests.

Basically, the left is fucked in the US until something changes in the media so there’s no point in trying.

It’s completely unrealistic in the short term, more so in the long term. This would require arresting millions of people - there simply isn’t enough jail space. They would have to execute people on sight, and that’s also not realistic because low level soldiers would refuse (there’s a reason the nazis needed to build a system instead of just executing jews on sight). Obviously if this were attempted it would result in extremely violent resistence which would destroy any economic, political, or other incentives for such an action.

Instead we can see what happened in Russia for a more realistic example - there was a slow elimination of dissent. Even today there are some Russians who vocally oppose Putin and don’t get arrested so long as they stay small enough. And that’s in a place where the society never had a culture of freedom to begin with, so here it will probably be much harder and obviously MAGA is much dumber than the Russians too. But regardless that’s why it’s very important to be vocal now and oppose any silencing of dissent, like the removal of pro-Palestine activists here on green cards or even the pardoning of pro-Trump people, as this combined with harsh punishments for others is effectively silencing of speech. It may not affect you now, but if they keep at it for a decade or two it’ll get to you eventually.

There’s a million things you could do with that. The musk of kleptocracy? I dunno.

Or you could do a bunch of other Elon refences - Don’t buy from klepto-guy, gimme a Model FU, Elon owes a horse by now, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust

The holocaust, like all slave labor, inevitably was exploited by capitalism.

Because to me personally this kinda feels like America is still stuck in those slavery/segregation times

Yes. American culture is very much based on social hierarchies, and slavery created a very easy, color-coded social hierarchy. So it’s hard to get rid of because a lot of people are invested in it - whether they admit it or not.

Americans (except for the most liberal) tend to look at race as a biological reality and regard anyone saying race isn’t science as woke extremism. Generally when science conflicts with common/traditional sense in America, common sense wins. The only reason quantum physics isn’t banned from schools yet is because probably only about 10% of Americans know the first thing about quantum physics.

Americans also regard a wide variety of racial discrimination - such as in dating (including who you allow your kids to date), or where you live, or where you send your kids to school, as “not racist”. This is considered not racist because the goal isn’t to harm racial minorities, but rather you’re just doing it to protect your place in the social hierarchy. The race-based social hierarchy. And if this harms minorities, well it’s not like it’s your fault right?

And if you dare try to suggest that the above is racist, people will get very angry at you and do things like elect Trump.

So yeah, racism is still very prevalent in the US.

Because the status quo throughout history is an extremely small number of people getting the most benefits by far and everyone else getting screwed, and everyone seeing this as normal. People are used to it, while having everyone on relatively equal footing is new and therefore scary.

Well that’s what I mean by doing more harm than good. People notice, and then say “I hate whatever those people stand for”.