You are mostly there. One of the most important notes is that the project is settler colonial, and it is also helpful to point out that zionism is older than Israel, and it has been around for over 100 years.

+1 on that Shaun vid, it’s great

I’m an anarchist, and seeing someone say “to be liberal means you’re against tyrants” is pretty humorous. It’s a self-aggrandizing tale that doesn’t reflect reality.

Liberals do not oppose tyranny. Liberals opposition to tyrants is done by keeping the offices clean, and the seats of power warm, be it in the oval office, judge’s bench, or chairs in the chambers. Liberals vote for the lesser tyrant as an anti-tyranny measure. They oppose tyranny by increasing funding for the police, and giving bombs to fascists the world over while continuing to fund the biggest military budget in the world while giving the district of defense a thumbs-up to defend American interests by invading countries and slaughtering millions.

The so called United States is a liberal democracy. It always has been. And yet this structure is the cause of some of the most violent tyranny the entire world over. Even if you consider the fact that there have been some terrible presidents who might have been the cause for some of the most tyrannical acts of the state, the very act of saying “all men are created free and equal” is tyrannic when said by a slave owner trying to create a government that considers life to be property. And that was said before there were even presidents.

Under a liberal democracy, even with a liberal leader of it, being minoritized is a sentence to feel the tyranny of the state. It doesn’t matter if you are a holding a minority political stance and using the liberal-approved mechanisms to oppose the state. It doesn’t matter if you are a minority based on religion, sexuality, gender identity, race, or ethnicity trying to peacefully oppose the extermination of their group, or the systematic oppression of it. You will feel the force of a police officer’s boot on your back and knee on your neck, tools of the liberal democracy being used to “keep the peace” or maintain “law and order”.

Liberals will uphold the fundamental tyrannies of capitalism. Liberals will uphold the fundamental tyrannies of property ownership.

To be a liberal doesn’t mean you are against tyrants. It means you are the lesser one.

I disagree.

The idea that a government will serve a people forms the basis of it’s legitimacy, but as long as a government rules over people, it does not need to serve them. It doesn’t matter whether or not the power is derived from the divine right of kings in a monarchy, or the tyrrany of the majority in a democracy (or alternatively, the tyrrany of the largest minority), the relationship of the governed and the government is always a relationship of subjugation. If enough votes are cast, people will be subjugated. Novel ways will be found to abjectify a group, imprison them, and subjugate them without breaking laws.

Saying the government serves the people doesn’t change the oppressive nature of the structure, and to say that the democratic coat of paint prevents it from being used to oppress is just naive.

The reason I consider both to be soulless is because the organization itself, be it a branch of government or a bureaucratic office, has their support based on political capital. If it becomes inconvenient to support the queers, their support is gone. This is the same with businesses, with monetary capital being the deciding factor of support.

You are right that the means of interaction is different betweeen the two, but that goes down to the currency used to interact with them.

I can’t say I’ve experienced pride a decade ago, since I’ve been closeted for years and only recently had the epiphany that I can just show up as an undercover ally now that it’s more socially acceptable to have solidarity with the queers.

I can see where you are coming from. Before I realized I was queer, I was an ally and I thought about it a similar way, happy to see people support a group one of my friends belonged to that has suffered historically.

I think our difference of opinion is summed up by your last paragraph:

no, those rainbow ads don’t mean anything more than the green and red ones in December, or the red hearts in February. But the fact that corporations are openly showing support without fear of death threats, or “more importantly” losing money, means something to me.

I genuinely don’t care about symbolic actions. I worry that corporations will heel turn the moment it is no longer safe or profitable to pander to the queers. Having rainbows in june does feel nice, but I’ve come to notice that it merely distracts me from the pain of the closet.

I think it’s more important that pride comes from a stronger base than the whim of a corporation chasing profit. As long as we are profitable, we get support. The moment things change, we lose it all.

I also have a problem with the corporatization of pride. When I went to my local pride parade, I wouldn’t be allowed to march, since I wasn’t a member of an organization/corporation, since pride was no longer for the people, it was for the corporation.

Queer protestors interrupted the parade to try and stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and they were beaten by the cops. Pride used to be a protest, but now protest was no longer possible in pride.

When unaffiliated queers tried to march through the street, cops blocked them and were preparing to arrest people before that crowd took a different route. Had that group of people been an employee of the local military contractor, they would have been able to stroll down the road with them unopposed.

My expression of pride was reduced to standing on the sidelines and watching corporations parade down the street with rainbow banners, interrupted by real people in organizations. There was a sterility of the corporate floats compared to a random organization marching down the road.

For example, there was a group of furries marching down the streets in their fursuits and the pride flags that represent them. There were multiple groups of drag queens strutting down the street with a car following them blasting music. These displays had a completely different feel than seeing some airline company march down the street with their little carts throwing pride themed merch at us.

To me, the big thing I want is solidarity, and corporations are incapable of giving that. And solidarity is what is going to matter if things come crashing down around us.

The soulless structure of the government is not much different than the soulless structure of a corporation.

Also, there is no indication that this isn’t a private consulting firm, for example.

My issue with corporate pride is twofold.

I hate pinkwashing. Pretending to love the gays for a month of the year is shallow, and when you march down the streets waving rainbow corporate logos, all the wile making bombs to blow up people of color or while selling bombs to queerphobes half the world over is a wild double speak.

I also hate the fact that the pride companies show is often for political capital, and that the company is really just indifferent at best. If all LGBT restrictions were stripped away, the companies marching down the streets of new york wouldn’t risk itself to try and protect the employees at the bottom. It would move on, logos now unchanging.

The point you make about the higher-ups or the corporation itself vs the people who interface with employees is absolutely correct and I think that’s why I have no issues with this, alongside the fact that it is funny as fuck. That shirt seems to have come from someone at the company, not the company itself.

Its moreso that “anti-authoritarianism is stupid because steam doesn’t care, and the machines of the factory I own must be operated during these hours because thats when the despotic steam engines are running”

Its a really silly argument, but I’m also taking the worst bits out of the essay because that point is stupid and funny.

To be more fair, Engels is trying to critique libertarian socialists and anarchists and he is doing a bad job about it because the language used by him, and the language used by anarchists did not line up. Engels expanded authority to be broad and impossible to escape, where the anarchists and other anti-authoritarians were talking about a specific type of authority, hierarchic authority.

His argument for most of the essay is essentially “collective activity means cooperation, and in order to cooperate you must, at some point submit to the will of the others.”

That argument is stupid because it lacks any nuance on authority. The authority of a police officer, able to violently impose their will on someone with a badge and a gun is different than the authority of a group of friends coming to an agreement on where to get lunch even when one doesn’t want to get food at that restaurant, which is different to the authority of a slave-master demanding that his slaves must work the loom in a particular fashion to maximize productivity.

No matter how much I hate corporate pride, I cannot find a fiber of my being that hates this

Lemmy is a bit further left than center. And most liberals tend to fall around the center to center right.

Most people on the left don’t like liberals because in their desire to be “the adult in the room” by dismissing anything more radical than the status quo, they get in the way of people trying to bring forth important change. As an activist, it’s not very fun to see someone take a milquetoast centrist position and call you radical while continuing to uphold the status quo that we are peotesting against while claiming to despise the status quo. These liberals, though often well meaning, end up being the great stumbling block to freedom MLK was talking about.

From the perspective of the left, if you see someone who is making it harder to make necessary change (ex: ending the war on gaza, stopping police violence/police abolition, being a cop, etc) is a pretty nasty sight.

Is lib a slur? No, but it’s certainly an insult, and it’s aimed at people who aren’t used to being called out for their political positions by someone who isn’t conservative.

Also, as an anarchist, I find it fun to lib bash every once in a while :3

I’m sorry, you are being silly and rejecting reality.

Zionism literally is a political movement, founded by jewish people, with a desire to make their own state. Zionism isn’t new, and it is well over 100 years old. Check out this wikipedia article for a rundown.

To say that it is only a dogwhistle is just a rejection of reality. But it is also a convenient rejection of reality because it lets you vilify political opponents.

I don’t like the logic that “you cant say this because it is a similarly structured statement to something someone bad said”

Also “i aint reading all of that; free palestine” is a lot better since it isn’t like you are gonna convince any zionists to change sides with logic, since they don’t care about logic or truth. They care about the narrative and the stories they have.

As someone who routinely gets drunk and argues with zionists, I’ve noticed that most people nowadays are entrenched with their position on the genocide. And like arguments I’ve had with fascists in the past, you aren’t gonna be able to actually argue with them because they have 100 propaganda points drip fed from both American liberal and conservative media, and Israeli press, ready to pull out at once.

When you get dog piled, or someone cites 30 propaganda news pieces, you shouldn’t engage, its a waste of time. “I aint reading that; free palestine” is probably the best thing to say

“Zionists” = Jews, an entire people.

Unfortunately, zionism is not equivalent to a group of people. Zionism, at least in this context, is a geopolitical position, not an ethnic or religious group.

To consider an entire population of people one-dimensional and hold a political position is harmful. I literally said this exact thing in an earlier comment.

Zionism, at least in this context…

To elaborate on this point, I’ll describe it in this context, and then describe it being used as an antisemitic dog whistle, so we should be on the same page.

In this context, zionism is a political ideology based around settler colonialism, and it led to the founding of Israel, among many, many other consequences.

The meme points out a really annoying tendency that I, as a queer person, and many others have seen when supporting palestine where pro-israel people will go “lol why do you support hamas, they will literally torture you and kill you for being LGBT” even though it is pro-palestine, not pro-hamas.

In the antisemitic dogwhistle context, it is simply used as a stand-in for “the jews”. If you think this is the context people on the left are using, you lack all forms of critical reasoning.

Based on what you said, this meme would indeed be racist if you view it from the antisemitic dogwhistle context. But it isn’t coming from there. To try and conflate the two is just trying to conflate opposition to a geopolitical position with racism.

It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)

So, are you gonna tell me what’s racist, or what?

I live near another military contractor, and I saw them in pride this year. I’d say this is real.

It’s pretty disgusting ngl

I don’t see anything racist about it, but I’ll take it down if it is racist.

I don’t see anything racist about the meme, but I’ll take it down if it is.

That’s making more sense to me, but my view of reverse engineering is 100% tainted by my work in SRE and hacking.

I work in the same way, but I’ve kinda forgot about using a calculator since the last few math classes I took forbid using calculators

You think an entire people are one dimensional religious fundamentalists, based on an article of clothing worn by an entire people, even their queers?

Jesus fucking christ, you are being racist as hell