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.
“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.
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?
Yes, but they are inextricably influencing each other. Both are subsets of reality.
The problem is they keep dissagreeing on details and forget, they’ll never agree on everything.
I wonder if the protest-non-voters support this message.
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…
If you let your emotions dictate your thoughts and actions, I have bad news for you.
Bro, you do it too, you just don’t admit it to yourself.
Yeah that’s what I thought, you’re exhibit A.
🤷
Modern psychology and neuroscience agrees with me. Eg. https://neurosciencenews.com/emotion-reason-decision-making-25803/
Or have a read of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow if you want something a bit deeper.
The human brain is packed full of inescapable cognitive biases, many of which relate to emotions. They occur just as much for you as for me, and ignoring them or denying them just makes the problem worse.
emotions, as demonstrated in his wine tasting study
Lololololololol. Whatever you’re trying to say it’s based on wine tasting. Lolololololol.
My last message to you is: go ahead and cry during old yeller. When it comes to politics, think.
I don’t do it to a point of being a complicit in electing Hitler 2.0. Which shouldn’t be abhigh bar. But here we are!
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
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.
I wouldn’t call that challenging but rather censorship and exclusion/discrimination
Special shoutouts to lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, hexbear and blahaj
It’s funny how you just mentioned my entire list of blocked instances 😂
Case in point I guess.
Do you believe feddit.org is better in that regard? Did you experience edge cases and stuff?
No, feddit.org has its fair share of weirdos. But it’s fast and ich_iel is by far the best Community in all of Lemmy
I was mainly talking about moderation. Weirdos are annoying but can be ignored
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.
So like the mod of /c/LibJerk?
Who invited you here, liberal?
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…
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.
Perfectly summarized.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Because you’re the one in the meme you just don’t realize it
Because I don’t call tankies leftist?
