Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 day ago:
OK have a nice day. Obviously no point in talking to you.
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 day ago:
They’re obviously correlated, and the number of member is obviously the more important stat.
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 day ago:
I’m trying to explain our conditions to you but you’re just choosing to be stubborn and refusing to listen.
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 day ago:
Because you need coordination and organization. If you don’t reach a critical mass of participation then the handful of people involved will just be handled as if they were skipping work for any other reason. And if it only lasts a day it can simply be waited out.
Strikes require funds, funds require dues, dues require unions. You have to ensure that striking workers will have some form of security in order to reach a critical mass. People have families to feed. Striking without funds or organization could only work if everyone was really dedicated to the cause, and if that was the case, then what’s stopping them from forming a union and collecting dues in order to do it right?
You can’t lay down the sort of moral “line in the sand” that you need if participating means, “I didn’t show up to work, all of my coworkers did, and now I’m unemployed and will be on the streets if I can’t find a way to make rent soon.” These “General Strike Now!” calls happen basically every other week, with no coordination or thought of strategy.
Strikes involve inherent individual risk for a collective benefit. It’s a collective action problem, which can only be overcome by an organized structure mitigating the risks and inspiring confidence in the outcome. A “wildcat general strike” isn’t really a thing.
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 day ago:
Where on earth did you hear that?
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 1 day ago:
If only. You’re overestimating the level of solidarity and political development of American workers and underestimating the effectiveness of strike-breaking tactics. If every location did it, they can’t shut them all down, but if only one other location does it, they can, and the threat of that makes it all the more difficult to organize.
You have to understand the history of how unions were dismantled.
Stage 1 was the New Deal era, when the government was cooperative and played nice - just so long as you kick out any Reds. And what’s a “Red?” A “Red” is someone who has a broader political consciousness, who sees common cause with workers of other industries, who will support striking in solidarity or cooperating with a general strike. But, so long as the union is just about narrowly advancing the interests of their specific members, that’s fine. Better than fine, actually. You can get some real carrots to go this route, not just sticks.
Stage 2 was the Reagan era. At this point, because the unions have no solidarity with each other, because they kicked out all the “Reds,” they are now more or less powerless to act as a collective group, as a conscious political entity. Furthermore, there’s now divisions between workers. The unions are more about protecting the senior employees than about helping everyone, and people see it. Now that they’ve kicked out the “Reds,” the government starts labelling them all as “Reds,” or they deploy all sorts of other propaganda about how they’re corrupt or lazy or whatever. Union protections get rolled back (along with social programs), the carrots start to disappear, now it’s just sticks, and the organization to resist doesn’t exist anymore.
Stage 3 is where we’re at now. Unions have been almost entirely dissolved. People have all sorts of brainworms about them, and when workers start to organize they get fired, the company makes everyone attend meetings with anti-union propaganda, protections are more or less non-existent. The handful that do exist are narrowly self-interested. People are not only divided but atomized. Unions have become lost, broken, and scattered to the wind.
So it’s not that simple. It is not an easy task to undo all the effort that the rich and powerful have done to keep us from organizing.
- Comment on YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday. 2 days ago:
That’s not a strike, that’s just called being unemployed.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Lol what a load of bullshit. I remember when COVID was beginning, and lots of scientists were talking about how we needed lockdowns, and for a while, before it became a culture war issue, that was a perfectly acceptable stance.
Then the right decided to go full on, “It’s my right to get sick and spread illness to my neighbors, and any attempts to stop that are literally 1984.” So we got completely half-assed “lockdowns” that were little more than polite suggestions, and of course the right treated it as the worst thing to ever happen. The exact same mentality as when right wingers deliberately waste water out of spite during a water shortage because the government had the audacity to politely ask them to maybe consider conserving it.
While we in the West were being sacrificed so that the line would go up, while our grocery stores were packed with everyone panic-buying toilet paper, Vietnam’s government for example was delivering free groceries straight to people’s houses to encourage them to stay indoors.
Socialist countries generally listened to the science and took steps to keep people safe while capitalist countries did nothing and lied to us, sacrificing our lives and health for profits.
- Comment on Are you people all bots? 1 week ago:
I believe in Live Internet Theory. The vast majority of people I interact with are real humans, bots are often easily identifiable, and even then there’s usually a person behind the bot.
- Comment on It's just obvious 1 week ago:
I may be the dumbest man in Athens, but I still know a thing or two.
- Comment on Tankie 1 week ago:
What’s silly about it? Tankie is when you support using tanks, I don’t support using tanks in Ukraine so therefore I’m not a tankie. The people who want to send tanks to Ukraine are tankies.
Or we can recognize that that definition doesn’t reflect how it’s actually used. And the way it’s actually used is generally towards people who promote peaceful, diplomatic solutions over military ones.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
OK, next time someone calls me a tankie, I’ll just say, “Actually, I don’t support sending tanks to Ukraine” and I’m sure that’ll clear things up and convince them I’m not a tankie.
- Comment on Danish Forces Are Mandated to Fire Back if U.S. Attacks Greenland 2 weeks ago:
That as an argument falls apart pretty quickly when you remember they made a blitz attack for Kiev on the first day into areas not expressing a desire to separate.
That logic relies on a big assumption that I don’t agree with, that fighting has to be contained to the specific territory in dispute. If the United States invaded Greenland and Greenland attacked NYC, despite Greenland not having any claim on NYC, that wouldn’t really be a mark against Greenland. It’s a matter of military strategy that if you can destroy enemy capabilities or force them to defend multiple fronts or knock them out entirely, you’ll probably try.
I said the USA did not start this war, and you are saying it was started by local separatists. Which back to the Revolutionary war comparison that’s spot on again
I didn’t exactly say it was started by local separatists. I said that who started it depends on which political entities you consider legitimate. If the separatists are more legitimate than the central government, you could say that the central government started it. In the same way, if you consider the American revolutionaries more legitimate than the British, then you could argue that the British started that war by infringing the American right to self-governance and popular sovereignty.
To use another comparison: the Vietnam War is generally seen as an act of US aggression, but at the time, it was claimed to be a defensive war, protecting the Republic of Vietnam from foreign supplied rebels. The reason that interpretation fell out of favor is because the Republic of Vietnam is generally regarded as having been a Western puppet.
Now, I personally don’t know to what degree each side represents popular will or to what extent they are just proxies of foreign governments. But my point is that if you allow the other user’s claim that the Ukrainian government was set up through US meddling, that significantly muddles the question of who started what.
- Comment on Danish Forces Are Mandated to Fire Back if U.S. Attacks Greenland 2 weeks ago:
You fail to link “us meddling” to justification for a war. Or more accurately an invasion of a sovereign nation.
A bunch of armed men seized parliament and established a new government which banned opposition parties. Another bunch of armed men seized local government buildings and declared independence, after which they requested Russia send troops to come to their aid. Each side claims the other was foreign-backed while theirs was a legitimate expression of popular will.
Whether Russia invaded or responded to a request for aid depends on the legitimacy of the separatists and of the central government. When France sent troops to the British colonies in America, we don’t generally call that an invasion.
If the US meddled in overthrowing Ukraine’s previous government and picking out the new one (and there’s some evidence of that) then it calls into question whether the central government has more legitimacy than the separatists, and whether they really had the right to send tanks in to suppress the separatist rebellion.
- Comment on Huh? 2 weeks ago:
WHAT?
YEAH, I LOVE BEING HERE WITH THE PEOPLE I’M WITH TOO
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Don’t judge what a tankie or Nazi is by insults on the internet, hyperbole and bullshit rule.
Words are defined by common use. If the common use of the word “tankie” is to throw it at people who oppose war, then that’s what it means now. You can say it’s defined as being pro- war, but I’ve never seen it used that way.
Back in the day when word originated they loved the T-34 tank and Russia in WW2 and so on.
Well sure, WWII is basically the go-to example of a necessary and justified war. There was a time in my life when I labelled myself as a pacifist and the counter-example that everyone always brought up was WWII.
At that time, my position was that that was one exception from like 70 years ago and we shouldn’t make a rule from the exception considering how many unjustified wars have been fought since then. Now, my position is a little bit more flexible to account for that and a handful of other cases: now I say, “no war but class war,” and WWII was a class war.
However, my position hasn’t actually changed much in practice since those days. The vast majority of wars and violence are systemic and fought for bourgeois interests, so I still oppose them. Only very rarely does violence happen in the opposite direction, for example if we compare the death tolls of Luigi Mangione to Brian Thompson.
And what do you think the “tank” in “tankie” comes from?
It comes from accusing people who oppose war of supporting the other side’s tanks, as I just explained to you in my previous comment.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Name one piece of misinformation I posted. You’re just lobbing baseless insults again.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Not my fault this is the only level of discourse y’all are capable of.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Yes I do.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
You’re thinking of social democrats.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Non sequitur.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Case in point: Anyone who wants to stay out of conflicts automatically supports Russia. My actual reasons and motivations are totally irrelevant. Thank you for proving my point.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
You’re thinking of liberals.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Not everyone the term was or has been applied to supported them. But regardless, they still used whatever influence they had to push for fewer tanks.
If I’m an American and I’m out protesting the Vietnam War, and I say that we should end the war and stop building tanks, and that the Vietnamese communists were justified in rising up against the colonizers, does that make me pro-war? Does it make me pro-tank? Is the “peaceful” stance the one that says the Vietnamese were not justified so the US should stay in the war? That’s nonsense.
But that’s the exact same logic you’re applying here and everywhere else. If someone supported peace and deescalation with the USSR during the Cold War, then they’d be accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning how they handled the Hungarian uprising. If someone opposes the war in Ukraine, they’re accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning Russia. If someone opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning 9/11 and Al Qaida. And so the peace advocates are always depicted as being violent, and it works the exact same way every single time. War is Peace.
At this point, I accept that it’s always going to happen that way and that I’ll always be “the bad guy” for opposing war. I used to be a “terrorist sympathizer,” now I’m a “tankie” in another ten or twenty years, I’m sure I’ll be some other horrible thing. Who cares.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Actually, I do. That’s completely consistent with my point.
The people who coined the term wanted to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with the USSR. They were particularly concerned that tensions might deescalate due to the change of leadership from Stalin to Khrushchev and the explicit foreign policy approach of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. Those in the West who supported deescalation and refused to take a hard line in support of the Cold War were labelled as “tankies” for their insufficient hawkishness.
The Western leftists and peace advocates the term was created to condemn obviously had no control over the policies over the USSR. To the extent that they could influence the policies of their home countries, they pushed for deescalation, for building fewer tanks. It was the “anti-tankies” who wanted more tanks, as they always do.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Yes, that’s why “tankies” are generally opposed to building and deploying tanks, moreso than just about any ideology short of pacifism. Certainly moreso than liberals are.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
But tankies oppose nearly all wars.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
The word “isolationist” doesn’t exist in the vocabularies of most people around here. It doesn’t really matter why I disagree with US military interventions, the fact that I do means that I will inevitably be labelled tankie or a Russian bot. So you might as well ignore it, or love the word instead, cause you ain’t done nothing if you ain’t be called a Red.
Besides, I’m not wholly an isolationist. I have no problem with trade or foreign aid, so long as it isn’t military aid. More accurately, I’m a dove. But “dove” doesn’t exactly work as an insult. Some liberals even like to imagine that they’re doves, unbelievably.
But again, liberals don’t recognize that perspectives like “doves” or “isolationists” exist. You either follow the narrative of the media and politicians, or you get thrown into this big lump of Bad People™ with zero distinctions regarding why you disagree with them.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Exactly.
There’s only one war worth fighting and that’s the class war. Everything else is just throwing lives away for nothing.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Really? Because I’m always calling for staying out of conflicts and dramatically reducing the military budget and people are constantly calling me a tankie because of those stances.
See, if you don’t want war, it means you support the other side, and however bad “our” side is, the other side is always worse and more aggressive (the media says so, after all) and that means that anyone who’s pro-peace is actually pro-war.
So it was when I said we shouldn’t invade Iraq and Afghanistan, it meant that I was “a terrorist sympathizer” and “pro-Al Qaida,” and when I say we should stay out of Palestine, people say I’m “pro-Hamas” and when I say we should stay out of Ukraine people say I’m “pro-Russia” and a “tankie.” Consistently advocating against the use of tanks is essentially the defining characteristic of a “tankie.”
