Let's stop arguing and do something.

The only thing more important than "do nothing wrong" is to loudly correct those who are doing "almost right" and "in the right direction."

I think it's a tossup between "loudly correct" and "vilify as a disappointing libshit."

I had an interaction once where I thought I used double quotes around a word to imply something obvious related to the posted article. A random person got mad at me and claimed I knew nothing about solidarity.

I felt insulted, they didn't know my life experiences up to that point. I chose to ignore my feelings and pressed them to teach my why I was so wrong. They eventually disappeared from replies because they had nothing behind that image of righteousness. Rare win but I'll take it.

If someone put themselves in harms way to punch an authoritarian follower in the face in my defence and also uses slurs I could find offensive to myself, that's not my enemy. That's someone awesome who could use a little more education. Later. When the current situation isn't so wild.

Words are just words. That's not as effective as punching a fascist in face.

Reminded me of an old meme I saw in like 2009.
- Also a content warning for a couple slurs, but the point from Patton Oswalt a while back is roughly the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c
We are really lacking in fascist faces punched these days, no one can have a civil conversation without them screeching and throwing shit

I haved discussions with others here where its people are just not happy with baby steps and want full change right away. Problem is we need to make more friends not enemies with each other.

I've started to make a habit on the internet to make amends and give grace to people who get upset in the comments as fast as possible. Textual online spaces are seemingly quite prone to disagreement, so it's a huge help just to mindfully counteract that tendency.
- Well easy for you my brave little Hitachi wand! Who can stay angry at you!
- Dude your username is amazing.
Ball big. Need lots of hands. Take long time move. Come. Help. Roll big ball with us.
- Also, we don't actually know which way we need to roll it. Some people have strong ideas, other understand the vague direction but there's lots of invisible obstacles strewn across the landscape, and whenever we hit one there are a hundred different people with a thousand different explanations about what the fuck just happened.
It bothers me that I see genocide trivialize so often, like implying it's a full step that needs to wait. The problem is that they would rather take the steps that help Israel commit heinous acts then start with small steps that benefit their constituents.
Stopping the sale of weapons to a apartheid state committing genocide and condemning them is now seen as too much? I can't expect anything good to come from them if that's the kind of slack we insist on giving.
- They had the same foreign policy every administration since Israel became a country did but some people chose now to get upset about it.
  The world is a worse place now because Harris didn't win.
  Biden second term would have be heaven compared to this.

I spent a bunch of time in such spaces before the election and was shocked how much time and energy was squandered with virtue signaling and purity testing. There was literally no room for anything else in some of them.

And sometimes those people will even destroy active progress because it doesn't meet their definition of perfect.

Online leftists will destroy something because it's not 100% of what they want, disregarding the 50-60% that would be what they want.
- learned helplessness!

I think this "do nothing wrong" tendency has something to do with intragroup power dynamics. I've often seen it used as a cudgel to knock down others within a group and stop mild dissent even though everyone is on the same team. Usually the most prolific wielder of the "do nothing wrong" cudgel rises to a position of some authority in the group, after which the group fragments because the person is insufferable but unassailable due to their moral superiority.

So...You are saying that mods are, in actual fact , not based ?
HERESY

Very good take.

I complained to a partner once about something they'd done that seemed vaguely unethical (by my understanding of their ethics). After they apologised, I was still upset, and they said "maybe I'm a little bit shit, just like everyone else."

That really stuck with me. People (including myself) are often OK with accepting imperfections in other people in some spaces, but not in others. It's pretty weird.. Life is messy, even the bits that seems straightforward. And no one has a perfect understanding of any situation..

obviously a trap set by bougie liberals to try and get me to vote for a Democrat.

but i'm too smart for them

Great now we get to argue what nothing and something is…

The problem is they keep dissagreeing on details and forget, they'll never agree on everything.

This one is fun because it could be both about tankies and actual leftists depending on what you believe in.

Oh it's definitely leftists in general
- Nah.

I don't usually participate in communities of my interest, like vegan, communist, anarchist, etc. because I know I don't agree a 100% and that there will always be people that think are better than others or that have a lot more time to spend on activism than me. But all my friends know I never back down when discussing important topics with anyone, I always tell them that I will take the time to discuss with people they don't like, like weird conservatives and other uncomfortable groups (which have a big presence where I study).

I usually can recognize when someone is close to being more left-leaning than what they think they are, and I take the time to talk to them about it, which a lot of leftist communities don't (at least from what I've seen). Yes, there are trolls, but usually when talking in person, they aren't that stupid.

Sometimes it feels like people are worse to people that almost agree with them than they are to people who are completely at odds with them.

No improving the current system allowed!

online leftist

Important things happen offline, online is more or less a distraction.

I don't know if that's really true anymore. Or, maybe more accurately, I think we're in between when that was true in the pre-social media age and when it'll be true again after the social web breathes its last. There are just too many ways that megacorps, bad actors, and foreign agents can manipulate offline activity with online action.
Some of those things are manipulating small groups into large-scale action (see: Qanon), but misinformation and meme warfare also have a measurable effect on election, direct action, etc. Not to mention that local organization is best done online, and that has a very real effect.
Now, is offline action more important than online action? Absolutely, and if you're saying that being an "online leftist" (as an identity) is a distraction, I think I agree with you. But online action is more than just a distraction, and to ignore it is probably counterproductive.
Trump is literally a 4chan meme gone too far, homie.
- Simpsons did it first
- still had to happen offline yes?

That's not only a problem of online leftists spaces. The left has always been pretty busy with discussing what page of the capital is more beautiful written...

There's nothing wrong with encouraging others to be better versions of themselves. The problem is many people aren't capable of doing so without being toxic AF.

Gatekeeping, purity testing, virtue signaling, and no self accountability. These are the four reasons why every leftist space outside of the center left is a complete and utter joke. These traits are cultural in left wing spaces, and they are very common. They are so common that they'll never be going away and they are the root reasons why the left will NEVER accomplish anything substantial during my lifetime.

Yes let's start a 3rd party

wave of downvotes and idiots screaming about RCV even though that's not a disqualifier

But you’ll continue to support democrats in higher offices until your third party has support in lower offices and a functioning party structure, right?
- No!!! The lesser of two evils is still evil so I'd rather vote for a weak 3rd party candidate to help secure the win for the more evil candidate

I have referenced this post so many times but was never able to find it so thanks

some people are all 'the system is broken' and other people are like 'the system is working exactly as intended' and im just screaming 'DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT VOTE IN THE LAST ELECTION?'

I would say largest problem with leftist spaces is a little more challenging to identify; it's that leftists are broadly intellectuals or at least identify as intellectual because of effort they put into honoring nuance. And the primary opponent of leftists are conservatives, and they are proudly not intellectual and view people who use the lens of intellectualism and nuance as weak or elitist.

Because it's incredibly difficult to have any kind of meaningful intellectual debate with your opponents, we have all retreated to our safe-spaces and online bubbles, our discord groups and algorithm-driven feeds. We don't even walk in the same environments or view the same media anymore,

So in order for people on the left to feel any kind of satisfaction and feel like their mental strength actually has a use, they find someone else who is ostensibly on the left and attack something that person said or did which they feel does not represent their own leftist values.

Our eternal, infernal infighting problem is because we have an army of head-warriors who have no heads to butt against. Even if there were people on the right willing to have intellectual debates, they're not even in the same talking-space anymore. The only place you can go to have debates are contentious battleground where nobody is even arguing in good faith and just screaming their talking points for audience upvotes. So leftists, being humans, take the easy path and turn on each other to feel like they're making any progress or are involved at all in making things better.

On the right it's much easier to feel like you're part of the movement or doing something for your group, all you have to do is buy a gun or stockpile trumpcoins and canned food or harass someone or get drunk and scream about minorities. It's mindless and pointless but it feels like action. And sadly, more and more people are being turned away by this kind of mental effort and emotional labor of "doing the right thing" so they're getting sucked in by the mindless orcs who have more fun and have easier victory conditions.

it's that leftists are broadly intellectuals
I used to think this. Then everyone came out about how Kamala didn't get them excited, aka appeal to their emotions. When I pointed this out and that they weren't thinking logically and instead relying on emotions they frankly agreed, saying something something not a robot. And there were proud of it.
- Is being an intellectual mutually exclusive with having emotions? Because as far as I know all people have emotions..
- I agree, even the notion that the left is more "intellectual" is surface-level only, you can just as easily be someone who thinks but uses those thoughts to validate feelings over shared reality. We do a very bad job broadly of understanding or recognizing our own cognitive biases and dissonances, and the left is just as stupid as the right about a great many things. This isn't to take the position of the enlightened centrist, but instead the need to remind people that this isn't WWE, and we're not actually choosing sides, we're trying to uphold values and principles that others happen to share. We want good outcomes for everyone, not specific outcomes for specific people.
  Even if we solved all our issues tomorrow and removed the republican leadership from politics entirely, we would still have to share a country with them the next day, and how rapidly would we become the thing we hate as we work to punish them or ignore them until they reach a breaking point? We are doomed to repeat history over and over because we cannot separate ourselves from our survival instincts and feelings, and we have fantastic brains that will spin narratives to justify our feelings about anything, from the most mundane decisions about lunch, to genocide.
it’s that leftists are broadly intellectuals or at least identify as intellectual because of effort they put into honoring nuance
Nah. It's just that they believe they are better and have huge confirmation bias. You're not with them? You're an enemy and should be banned because you're a troll.
Can't we just fucking have a place where everyone is free to speak? Circlejerks are cringe
- Special shoutouts to lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, hexbear and blahaj
- That's not a "nah" that's an addition, people make their social identities and then challenge those who aren't part of that social identity. This is why any ingroup is a circlejerk without management.

An alarming number of leftists are not revolutionaries but dictators without power.

This is what I've been saying. The gatekeeping is unreal. How the fuck are we supposed to grow as a movement if we can't accept those who maybe did and/or said some questionable shit in the past? If someone is trying to make positive changes and is demonstrating it with their actions and/or words than we should accept them. I guarantee the vast majority of you here have said or did something that goes against your current beliefs.

I believe it's actually the opposite. So many extremists or "I don’t agree with you therefore you’re a troll" bullshit.

You get censored and banned for pretty much anything. Lemmy is no exception and pretty obviously like that.

You get censored and banned for pretty much anything. Lemmy is no exception and pretty obviously like that.
Seeing as I have not been banned for anything I have to disagree.
- It depends on the instance and mods I think. I got a temp ban from an instance just citing "bad faith" for asking if there was a source article and getting flamed for "standing in the way of the movement". I accept that the Libre/FOSS space trends towards more niche user bases, and Lemmy is infinitely better than any other alternatives, but sometimes it feels a bit to close to Emo Phillips "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912".
- It really depends on the community and the mods awake at the time.
  One of my accounts got a week ban from a larger community for being "accusatory". Because I said someone sounded like they were spreading misinformation.
- Depends on the things you say, where…
  If you’re generally leftist, you should mostly be fine.
  Otherwise you get banned for trolling (because ofc they’re right so you’re trolling) or transphobia, because if you don’t agree with everything a trans person says, you’re transphobic. Also, the world belongs to them.
  Talk about lesser known subjects by the public or make a mistake yourself? Thats it, you’re banned for misinformation and trolling. Or being a nazi or racist or whatever. The words don’t have a meaning anymore
  Also the random ban reasons like "Rule 3" which refers to the most open and subjective rules like "Be civil" or "Dont be a dick" or similar
I've said some vile, fucked up shit while I'm having a bipolar depressive episode, but I have yet to get modded for a single thing.
You can basically say whatever the fuck you want, like 4chan. But unlike 4chan, Lemmy hasn't yet devolved into a cesspool of hate and bigotry. Probably only 'cause the average troll is too stupid to figure out how federation works.
- Weird then. From experience this tends to dissapear quickly. Maybe it wasn't so bad or no one saw and reported it
I would even go as far as to argue Lemmy is a prime example of this.
- And that why federation is good, but it gets annoying having to switch instances or communities
Just like my recent post on r/politics got censored?
- I don’t know, I’m not on reddit. And by definition if it’s removed I can’t see it.
- Well, I didn't see it

Not to ironically quibble, the sentiment is there, but I think "more important to do nothing correctly than something incorrectly" is closer to the mark

and then people didnt vote in the 2024 election

Well put.

Every time I see the idiots calling for abolishment of the police, I never see anything remotely approaching a viable replacement for what they should be doing.

We're not solving murder, rape, burglaries, drunk driving, general assaults, etc overnight. And we're certainly not within a five year plan of solving those things either.

So yeah, hardline abolishment fanatics can shove off. Come back with actual solutions, even if they arent perfect, thanks.

To be fair cops arent solving those problems either. also theres plenty of essays around the nuances of this subject for you to explore and analyze if you look it up.. not that we're all depending on you and your validation anyway
- These aren't solvable problems, they will always exist. But while they can't be solved they can be mitigated. Saying murders happen therefore the concept of having police is wrong is ignoring the fact that there can be more or less murders. Less murders is good even if not perfect.

the other problem with leftist spaces online is a general intolerance to trolls

Or rather the "I don't agree with you therefore you're a troll"
- The ONLY time I’ve been muted by anyone was on the Fediverse 😅 (Still can’t wrap my head around how petty the argument was…)
What is the value of tolerating trolls?
- preventing them from joining the opposition

The left purity spirals and eats their own. There is also an unhealthy obsession with victimhood. If these two things were solved the left would be more successful. It would also cease to be "the left" in any modern sense of the word.

The easiest and simplest thing you can do is volunteer at your local food shelter. If you truly want to act. Feed people.

That isn't doing something within the concept of changing stuff tho
How about stop doing the easy things?
- You can do easy stuff and hard stuff at the same time! It's cool!
- Or we could just continue to argue and virtue signal on the internet, kinda like what you are doing now. It's zero percent helpful. Go be too cool somewhere else.
- Need more rope, preferably hemp.

Leftist thought is predicted on dialectical materialism. That means that when someone presents you with material facts which conflict with your ideology, you plug your ears and call them a liberal.

Can we stop attacking each other? They are working the "divide and conquer" from every angle, can we not create yet another division within a group of people that agree with each other?

Democrats and liberals are doing the dividing themselves every time they attack people further left of them for daring to actually have principles.
So no, you can’t stop.
- And this wild characterization of everyone in a group helps nothing. People seem so hungry for more enemies.
can we stop attacking each other?
I challenge you to a duel.
can we not create division?
Oh so you think we should work with just anyone?
agree with each other
How dare you suggest i agree with those people! You understand nithing
- Lol you seem equal parts confused and angry

I wonder if the protest-non-voters support this message.

“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents*, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money. Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

--Matthew 25:14-30

A talent was a monetary unit worth about twenty years' wages for a laborer

The point of that chapter is that you should use the talent that God has given you to improve your talent.
It's not that you should pay back your employer double his investment.
- Alternate take: Billionaires are entitled and get grumpy when they get back exactly what they gave.
  Imagine if the servant had invested the talent and failed to produce a profit. How angry would the billionaire have been? The servant took no risk, and protected the billionaire’s money. And instead of being happy that their money was protected, they got angry that the servant didn’t go out of their way to make the billionaire more.
Okay this is really good but I don't see how it links with this thread, kindly explain sir
- If you have opportunity to do good you have a moral obligation to seize it. Fear of getting it wrong is not an excuse to do nothing.

I think you mean Collectivists in general

Go away troll bait bot.

But doing nothing wrong is the greatest right you can do, no?

Doing nothing wrong is doing nothing, period.
- Guess we know where you sit on the Trolley Problem spectrum :P
- Immorality is not a requirement of success.
Perfect is the enemy of progress

That's Right with a hard R. No thanks

How? You banned most of the guns, and most of you are anti gun to begin with. Shit, I’d be banned on Reddit just for typing that out. I’m not advocating violence, I just don’t see any other way to actually affect change at this point.

Do you think we’ll actually get fair elections going forward? The last one might not have been, there’s a lawsuit and everything. I sure don’t think we will.

I agree with the sentiment of the post but I don’t see WTF else we can collectively do about it.

I will admit that the No Kings protests across the nation gave me a little hope, at least.

"Banned most of the guns" 😂
Jesus mate, ever wonder why you get banned for saying something as demonstrably false as this?
I fucking wish we banned any of the guns, why do you people just blatantly make shit up as if nobody would notice?