Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on So um, america just started another war in the middle east. We're going to need a shit ton more memes to americans from the nightmare they are enduring. Thanks in advance... 16 hours ago:
Whitaker followed up, asking, “If Iran is building a nuclear weapon, would you take military action?”
“I’m not going to talk about hypotheticals at this moment,” said the vice president.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
I think what they’re looking for in terms of methodology is what objective criteria they use to determine if a protest is violent or nonviolent, as well as what constitutes success or failure. These are not trivial questions, and there’s lots of debate surrounding virtually any given movement, so to make objective determinations about a large number of such movements raises the question of how they’re resolving all these questions and debates. Some might argue that such questions are inherently political and up to interpretation.
As another user in this thread pointed out, it may be a case of confusing correlation with causation: if a movement is popular, it may be more likely to succeed and more likely to be considered nonviolent, as compared to a less popular movement employing the exact same tactics.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
The lack of distinction between strikes shutting down entire industries vs walking around for a bit with a witty sign is one of the many reasons the study is kind of silly.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
Yes, but it’s complicated. I’ll use Iran’s long tradition of nonviolence as a case study.
In the late 1800’s when the shah tried to sell out tobacco farmers to foreign exploitation, and virtually everyone in the country opposed it, resulting in a tobacco boycott. Virtually everyone in the country participated it, including members of the shah’s own harem, and religious leaders issued a fatwa condemning anyone who violated it. The shah was forced to cave to pressure and reversed the decision.
This boycott movement helped for organization that would set the stage for later (largely peaceful) protests that led to the shah signing a constitution and establishing a democratic parliament. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards, and his son was much less cooperative, and called on foreign assistance to shell parliament, and successfully restored himself to power.
During WWI, Iran was invaded by the Ottoman, British, and Russian Empires, and the country suffered greatly from disease, famine, and the Armenian genocide, leading to over 2 million civilian deaths during the period. The Qajar dynasty collapsed, as did the Ottoman and Russian Empires, allowing Britain to dominate the power vacuum. They supported the new Pahlavi dynasty into power, there was a parliament, but the shah generally appointed whoever the British told him to.
At this point, oil had been discovered in Iran, and the Iranians were stuck with an awful, exploitative deal that the previous dynasty had signed, as part of their general policy of selling out every part of the country to foreign colonizers so the shah could have a bigger harem. This deal was substantially worse than the general deal the US offered (which was generally 50/50 between the country that owned the oil and the country that built the infrastructure to extract it). But the terms didn’t actually matter because the British violated them all the time, vastly underreporting how much oil they were extracting so that they paid virtually nothing, and the Iranians had zero oversight of their records. Britain relied on this oil to be one of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet, while the Iranians remained some of the poorest people in the world.
For the next several decades, the Iranian people repeatedly asked Britain very nicely if they would possibly consider not stealing all their oil. And for those decades, the British completely stonewalled them, refused to consider any sorts of concessions whatsoever. Even with their own, hand-picked prime ministers, they still stonewalled them.
Finally, in the 1950’s, and a peaceful democratic movement successfully pressured the shah to appoint a popular leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as prime minister - the shah finally became more afraid of popular discontent than he was of the British. Mosaddegh, after making attempts to negotiate, made a decision with overwhelming popular support, to nationalize the oil industry. This, however, led the British to impose a blockade, crippling the country’s economy.
Mosaddegh was an idealist, and he believed the Americans would see his cause as just, connect it to their own revolution, and back him up against the British. At this point, most Iranians had neutral or positive views of the US, seeing them as well intentioned, if naive, not understanding how long the Iranians had been struggling against British colonialism. All of these perceptions were proven completely wrong, because, rather than backing them up, Eisenhower agreed to use the CIA to overthrow Mossadegh to protect BP’s profits and to ensure British cooperation with NATO and the Korean War. This was the first of the CIA’s coups of democratic governments.
A stark example of this betrayal is that, the day before the coup, a US ambassador called Mossadegh and fed him a false story about how his supporters had been calling the embassy with death threats, and he was afraid he’d have to shut it down. Mossadegh - who had refused to crack down on (CIA funded) protests, or censor the (CIA controlled) press, or seek aid from the Soviets, or otherwise do anything to disrupt the infiltration out of concern for principles and respecting dissent -then issued as public statement calling for his supporters to cool it and stay off the streets. When his residence was attacked, no one was on the streets to come to his aid. He lived out the rest of his life under house arrest, while the shah used his absolute power to hunt down and exterminated the Iranian left - until he finally crossed the US and was himself overthrown by the current government.
When the stakes were low (from a geopolitical perspective), like, some poor tobacco farmers trying to maintain their (still quite poor) lifestyle, nonviolence worked. When the stakes were higher, like, changing the whole structure of the government, nonviolence worked better than one might expect, but generally encountered violent resistance and counter-revolution and fell apart. When the stakes were very high, like, trying to get a world-spanning empire to stop stealing the resource it needed to dominate the world, nonviolence was not very effective at all.
Being in Iran’s position, it really wouldn’t matter what they did to try to appease Westerners, so long as they assert control over their natural resources - so they don’t really bother. The goal of nonviolence is to be “in the right” but Iran’s history proves that you can be 100% “in the right” and still lose because foreigners don’t know/care about what’s being done to you, or are propagandized to side with the oppressor.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to protests in the US, but it can. If you’re a nonthreatening old white lady and your goals are not too disruptive to the empire, then sure, do nonviolence. But if you’re someone who the news could villainize, who people will assume the worst of just because of your race or religion, then they’re probably going to characterize you as violent whether you are or not. And if your goals are something that would disrupt the ruling class’s hold on power, then understand that the only reason they aren’t gunning you down is that they aren’t afraid of you - the real dangerous part about nonviolence is that it can be effective, and if power is threatened it will respond with force.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
You’re absolutely valid and not overreacting. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you might not have many other options - but if you can look into other modes of transportation you should.
Driving is dangerous, and not everyone is cut out for it. The great thing about public transit is that it’s much safer and less stressful, it doesn’t demand focus and attention - and that benefits drivers too, because it means fewer bad drivers will feel like they have to drive and it reduces traffic in general.
It all comes down to what the alternative is. If your alternative to driving is relying on others to drive you places, it’ll reduce your independence or be expensive (if you use rideshares). But if the alternative is biking or taking a train, then by all means go for it. There’s lots of reasons cars suck, danger, stress, insurance, gas, traffic, pollution, lots of reasons to look into other options.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 1 week ago:
Interesting how the paper picks East Timor/Indonesia as a case study but makes no mention of the massacres of the nonviolent PKI and suspected communists, which the US was ambivalent, if not supportive about.
Any serious study of resistance movements around the world will paint a very different picture, one in which nonviolence is frequently met with slaughter, and people turn to violence specifically because nonviolence failed.
The fact of the matter is that people living in the imperial core cannot be well versed in the history of every country in the world (to the extent that we can even exert influence in the first place), and this allows the media to either ignore things like the massacres in Indonesia, or spin them in such a way to justify the preferred side through biased framing. The thing the paper cites as a major determining factor of success or failure is defections from security forces, but what if those security forces come from thousands of miles away?
Trying to assert a universal principle on a tactical level regarding such broad categories is kind of silly in the first place. It’s too broad. You have to assess what you’re trying to accomplish and formulate a strategy to get there based on the particular situation you find yourself in.
From “The Jakarta Method:”
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:
“Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 1 week ago:
The wordplay is clever. Somebody’s big mad that people are blaming the British for something they did
Might want to examine why people making fun of a blatantly evil empire offends you.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 1 week ago:
Do you not understand that it’s a joke?
Obviously we all know the paper is talking about the microorganism, but since the real cause of the famine wasn’t the microorganism but the British, it’s funny to act like the paper is insulting the British rather than talking about the microorganism.
That’s the only way I can interpret your comment in any coherent way, that the joke just went completely over your head.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 1 week ago:
The British were responsible for those deaths while the Chinese were not.
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 1 week ago:
I does not. Where?
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 1 week ago:
Tbf, the article should probably mention the fact that machine learning programs designed to play chess blow everything else out of the water.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 week ago:
Thank you, brainfart on my part.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 2 weeks ago:
tl;dr Because that’s communism.
Let’s look at the history of labor movements in the US.
At first, yeah, you started with a pretty broad cross section of society (the Knights of Labor, for example), as well as some more radical elements. Then you had the Haymarket Affair, where people were protesting for an 8-hour work day, and the cops started killing protesters, and someone (possibly a provocateur) threw a bomb at the cops. The press went wild with it and it kicked off a red scare where many labor organizations kicked out and distanced themselves from Anarchists and Marxists.
Fast forward to the Great Depression, and you’ve got a new wave of radicalization because people are seeing the failures of capitalism, and that led to the New Deal. There was another red scare as the US and USSR became rivals, and that served as “the stick,” while the New Deal policies served as “the carrot.” The labor movement once again distanced itself from the more radical elements on the promise of a cooperative government. All the communists, who were more concerned with a broad movement of solidarity, got kicked out of groups like the AFL-CIO, and the unions were considered acceptable because they were (at least to a degree) narrowly self-interested.
These unions flourished in the 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, during this post-New Deal, Great Society era. They weren’t necessarily the most inclusive, but they worked well for their members. However, in the 70’s an economic phenomenon emerged that was termed, “Shrinkflation” - a period of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. The Keynesian economic model (which had had a broad consensus up until that point) said that you deal with unemployment by having the government spend more money, and then when unemployment drops, you reduce spending to avoid inflation. It didn’t have a clear answer for what to do when both were high at once, that wasn’t really supposed to happen.
The Carter administration made the decision to focus on inflation instead of unemployment, which screwed over the labor unions. But this was a broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington elites, and when Carter was replaced by Reagan, he did the same and pushed it further. Under this new paradigm of “supply side economics,” people’s identities as consumers was emphasized over their identity as workers. Even having purged radical elements and having become relatively toothless, unions were vilified and blamed for making goods expensive, and they didn’t really have the power to do much about it.
Question of economics were increasingly moved outside of the realm of public accountability and influence, being left to “experts” and both parties having broad agreement about things, but we still had to vote over something, and so we had the emergence of the culture war. Around the 90’s you had some rather boring presidents and debates, because it was the height of “the end of history,” where there was this idea that all the big questions and conflicts had been resolved and it was just a question of little tweaks here and there.
However, in the 2000’s, as it became clear that conditions were declining and the wealth gap was growing, there has been a new wave of radicalization, on both the right and the left, which started to really manifest in 2016. But it is very much in its infancy, without a lot of experience or strength. It’s been over 40 years since we had strong unions, and even longer since we had unions that believed in broad solidarity. Now, we’re fighting against entrenched anti-union and anti-worker policies, practices, and beliefs. And progress is being made, but it’s a long, uphill battle, and a lot of it is young people figuring things out from scratch.
- Comment on Happy anniversary of the day absolutely nothing happened at nowhere square! 2 weeks ago:
Funny how extreme poverty starts racing down as soon as China adopted capitalist market reforms.
I wonder if there was any opposition to those reforms, like, maybe some kind of big protest right as they were being introduced 🤔
- Comment on Happy anniversary of the day absolutely nothing happened at nowhere square! 2 weeks ago:
When Kent State happened, surveys showed an overwhelming majority of Americans blamed the students for getting shot more than they blamed the guard for shooting them. There were all sorts of fake news stories going around on TV about how the protests were filled with outside agitators doing things like putting LSD in the water supply. It was only once the opportunity for a reaction was safely past that they said, “Oopsie, we made a mistake.” There have been many other cases where the government and media lied until it determined it was safe enough to tell the truth, including the justifications for several major wars.
- Comment on "And my dick fucks your wife more than you do. What's your point?" 2 weeks ago:
“Oh, well this gun costs less than your watch, and yet: hand it over.”
- Comment on Four NYPD officers converged on one woman on a bike because she smiled at them, then detained her because she wasn't carrying ID. 2 weeks ago:
Okay, so smiling is bad. What the fuck is the solution to not look suspicious to cops at this point?
There’s an episode from the Twilight Zone reboot (S1E3, “Replay”) that plays with this idea in an interesting way. A black mother and son are at a diner with a police officer, and things happen and her son gets shot. But then she discovers that she has this magic camcorder that can rewind time, so she goes back to the diner and tries again, doing things differently. And this time he gets shot for a different reason. So she goes back, again and again, trying different approaches.
It really captures the feeling of insecurity, of being damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And it’s sort of a metaphor for the different scenarios playing out in one’s head, of trying to think of how each action might be misinterpreted or go wrong.
- Comment on The joy of quitting a shit job with an asshole boss 2 weeks ago:
This also happened to me once too. I was working at Amazon as a picker, and they unveiled a new tool that lets you put in electronically if you’re planning to leave. One morning, I put in that I was planning to leave in a month. Before lunch that same day, I was suddenly fired.
- Comment on Remember, kids! Unregulated capitalism is not your friend! 3 weeks ago:
This quote is from a later period, but it reminded me of it:
When he was a serf, they said to him, “Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else’s field.” But now he is a tramp they say to him, “You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else’s field: but I will not give you a field.” They say, “You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed.” If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn’t. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.
The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, “Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it.”
(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)
- Comment on 100% people who drink water die 4 weeks ago:
I heard that some people drink so much of that crap that literally more than 50% of their body is made up of water. I don’t even know how it’s possible to still be alive at that point, I mean, JFC it’s like you’re not even a solid at that point, you’re just gonna dissolve into a puddle. Like, get help.
- Comment on Speak American 4 weeks ago:
there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use
Well yeah, but these days, you say you’re English, you’ll get arrested and thrown in jail
- Comment on the young always think they have all the right answers but THIS eventually happens 4 weeks ago:
My father once yelled at me because he tried to to tell me a story about a friar in the 1600’s who had the power of flight and I assumed it was a joke. It was not a joke.
- Comment on Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments. 5 weeks ago:
Elad Barashi, who has worked in the Israeli entertainment industry for several years, sparked outrage after posting on X: “Good morning, let there be a Shoa (Holocaust) in Gaza.”
In another post, he wrote, “I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers… or train cars… and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza.”
- Comment on Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments. 5 weeks ago:
They have demonstrated that they are not “leftists” by defending the cruelties of Israel. There is no “infighting” here.
- Comment on Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments. 5 weeks ago:
“Bans all criticism of Israel” is not the title. The title is that they are banning criticism of Israel, which is true. It’s also true that if someone bans oranges, then they are “banning fruits,” it would only be untrue if they said, “banning all fruits.”
The title does leave it ambiguous in a way that people might think it extends to all criticism, but that’s not actually what it says.
- Comment on Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments. 5 weeks ago:
The best way to prevent another Holocaust is to make it illegal for anyone to ever warn that anything happening is similar to the Holocaust or to the Nazis and should be stopped before it goes further. Brilliant. Genius.
- Comment on Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments. 5 weeks ago:
Equal rights for all, but with Jewish people being more equal than everyone else.
- Comment on We gonna fight 5 weeks ago:
The right has their fair share of infighting. They may all want heirarchy, but they disagree on who should be on top. They can all agree on scapegoating an outgroup, but disagree on which people fall into that outgroup. Like, the ultimate endgame of fascism is for the last fascist to kill the second to last fascist for not being white enough.
They appear to be united because most of us don’t go into their spaces and lurk, because, I mean, ew. If a Trump supporter came to Lemmy, they’d find people quite united against them, and if one of us went on Truth Social, we’d find them quite united against us, but that doesn’t mean they actually get along internally.
- Comment on We gonna fight 5 weeks ago:
I have seen people waxing poetic about Imperial Japan
What? Who? Where? That’s an absolutely wild take.
- Comment on Are We All Becoming More Hostile Online? 1 month ago:
More personal attacks, because it’s all you’ve got. Funny how I’m the one criticizing civility fetishism but I’ve been considerably more civil this conversation than you have. Maybe you should try practicing what you preach.
Also funny that you think you understand Marx, who famously called for, “Ruthless criticism of everything that exists” as if he’d be clutching pearls over me calling out Jonathan Haidt.
What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).
