Fellas, is it woke for YouTube to funnel viewers towards pro-fascist videos?

Personally, I’ve yet to see a single American successfully use guns to protect any other constitutional right from government infringement.

The Battle of Athens is probably the most uniquely clear-cut example of what you’re asking for, unless we count the American Revolutionary War itself.

Other successful examples mostly involve activists using non-violent protest to push for change, while using firearms to protect themselves from violent reactionaries that would otherwise murder them. Notably, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. For a modern example, there’s various “John Brown Gun Clubs” and other community defense organizations providing security at LGBTQ events against fascist groups that seek to terrorize event-goers.

It’s also worth noting that resistance is often worthwhile even if it doesn’t result in unqualified victory. For example, the Black Panthers’ armed cop-watching activities saved a lot of Black folks from brutal beatings at the hands of the police, even if the organization was eventually crushed by the federal government.

I have seen lots of examples like Waco and Ruby Ridge, where the government should have tried harder to deescalate, but in the end, everyone died. The closest example I can think of where the government did backoff was the Bundy standoff and all those guys were “defending” was their ability to let their cattle graze illegally on federal land because they didn’t want to pay for access like everyone else.

It sounds like you might be in a bit of a filter-bubble. I don’t mean any offense by this, it’s a normal thing that tends to happen to people. If the news sources you read and the people you talk to don’t mention these things because it doesn’t mesh with their worldview, how would you hear about them?

Strong gun control requires a police state, and it’s advocates are okay with this. Some of them (mostly suburbanites and the like) just imagine that that police state will never be directed against them.

Others are capitalists that actively want to inflict a police state on the rest of us, for their own benefit. It’s a lot easier to break strikes and enforce “work discipline” when the working class is disarmed.

Food Courts Martial

Yeah, I laughed at that bit. Big “I am not a member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party” energy.

I love these memes that turn into threads full of vim tips. You really can do anything within vim. You can even exit vim!: !killall vim

Huh, I’m going to have to try that at some point. It’s even got nim support.

Link for the lazy

Interesting. I was thinking more of gray area stuff than outright lying, like playing up the importance of facts that support one’s position and downplaying those that don’t.

I read somewhere a while back that it’s supposedly an evolutionary thing. In a social competition for resource allocation, confidently arguing your position regardless of its correctness is more beneficial than admitting you may be wrong.

It’s probably exacerbated by the internet, where the relative anonymity and psychological disconnection further reduces any benefits to admitting to an error.

Fair enough.

I’m a man.

Me too. As are most people that you’ll currently encounter on lemmy.

I don’t expect sympathy, and when I get it I suspect an ulterior motive on the part of the person offering it.

I meant more in the sense of “sympathy strike” rather than “sympathetic ear”. It’s useful to be able to collaborate with others on shared goals, both in pursuit of the anarchist cause and of one’s personal interests. An attitude of “only class matters, shut up about feminism or queer liberation or whatever” is detrimental to said collaboration.

I’ve never been particularly enthused about voting, but I don’t think Obama-era arguments against it have aged well. At least in the US, the rise of Trump and the MAGA fascists makes “both parties are the same” sentiments look silly and out of touch. I read your follow-up too. While there is some truth to it, I don’t think the argument is very solid. You seem to place a bit too much faith in liberal institutions as a bulwark against the fascists.

Overall, “voting isn’t very effective, so what else are you doing” is a much better approach on this topic than “voting is bad so you shouldn’t do it”.

Not just tankies. Try telling a social-justice type that the only identity you give a shit about is class identity. It’s hilarious.

I might be a social-justice type, then. Class reductionism is appealing in its simplicity, but I don’t think it’s very productive. Like, it’s fine to focus on a particular thing that you care about, but being unsympathetic to the things that others struggle with isn’t going to garner sympathy in return. I see the parallel that you’re pointing out, but I don’t think it’s the same.

That’s what bootleg fansubbed anime is for. :)

UwU

For me that’s more of a social activity, though.

And that’s fine for you. I just don’t have the patience to sit through a video or audio lecture. I can read faster than these people can talk, and it’s not like you can grep a video for keywords.

Oh yeah, I’m not trying to sell you on watching this one, just pointing out why some people do like video. The TL;DW is that leftists have never been unified, and never will be. We all have our differing goals and preferred means. Rather than trying to browbeat everyone into falling in line under a single unified ideology/party/platform/etc, we should just collaborate selectively on a per-project basis, and otherwise not worry about it.

Tankies are allergic to this notion, though.

Those on the right have their own splits and power struggles. Not everyone can be at the top of the hierarchy, after all. I think their advantage lies more in the fact that they have existing systems to rally around, whereas the left is trying to create something new.

I definitely appreciate the raw efficiency of text, and prefer it most of the time. Video has its place too, though. Sometimes it’s nice to just relax with something that has moving pictures to hold your attention.

While the Andrewism video doesn’t fit into this category, I’ve been getting more into watching videos for technical topics lately. I was trying to learn about how perceptual image hashing works the other day, and needed to understand the discrete cosine transform. The wikipedia article wasn’t going to cut it, but I managed to find this video on JPEG compression (which uses DCT), and it ended up being very helpful.

Sorry. From now on I’ll stick to only posting Tick Talk videos.

The quality of their arguments doesn’t really matter though, nor does it matter whether they’re able to convince a majority of people. What matters is that they can reach the few people that will find their overall presentation intriguing enough to merit further investigation, and then pull those people down the rabbit hole. It’s the same strategy that fascists use, just red-flavored instead of brown.

It also makes the space overall less appealing to your actual target audience, which is a cardinal sin of online community management.

Just like with fascists though, it’s better not to let them propagandize, even if you aren’t personally triggered by it.

You know, there’d be a whole lot less gish-galloping propaganda in the comments here if you were to defederate hexbear. Just sayin. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯