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millie @beehaw.org

Brood Parasitism in Leftist Politics

I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.

  • Claiming to be leftists
  • Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
  • Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
  • Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
  • Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
  • Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
  • Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we're missing ideological parasites in our midst.

This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it's extremely effective.

Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn't take advantage of it?

By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we're giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.

We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it's why they're targeting us here.

Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.

205 comments

  • None of this shit matters anymore jfc. There won't be real elections in 2026. Stop drinking Democrat collaborator diarrhea and start preparing for mass street level resistance. In case it somehow isn't glaringly obvious, when the mass protest encampments shut down cities the Democrats will be the ones telling people to go home and vote instead. And when Trump nationalizes the national guard and sends them in to break up the encampments at rifle point the Democrats will wring their hands and put out a milquetoast statement about how they support peaceful protest but that disruption can't be tolerated. Were none of you alive yet in 2020? Did none of you get guns pointed at you by national guard sent in by Democratic governors?

    The Democrats are sitting in congress making word-shaped noises that gesture at displeasure with the ongoing fascist coup. A Republican Nazi could walk around congress putting them down with a cattle gun and the remaining ones would smile tightly and put out a statement about how "this is a serious violation of democratic norms" and then vote in favor of the next Trump nominee. These people are collaborators. They will do nothing to stop the fascist coup because they don't want to.

  • It's like making banana bread. Everybody has their own recipe, but it's still banana bread. The Trump administration is the continuation of the Biden administration. And America is an imperialist empire that rapes and pillages the world. We are also heading to a precipice, where we will be fooled into fighting another world war, war because of course blame it on the Muslims. Fascist are the useful idiots of empire, and sometimes fascists don't realize their fascist. Neo-liberalism is a right-wing ideology, and that's what we've been dealing with when it comes to the Democrats. Because they all take money from foreign powers, and they do not work on our behalf. They also use the intelligence department to divide this nation. since education has been under fire for so long, that most of the people in America don't understand World War II or the world that they live in today. Russia defeated the Nazis, America came in to take the credit as they were also funding the Nazis, similar to what is happening in Ukraine today. But what is different is that communism is dead and what we have now is global capitalism. With our own capitalist class that fights amongst themselves for their interest while at the same time understanding their place in the hierarchy and keeping us all down and stupid. China is a capitalist country. Russia is a capitalist country. Liberals or the Democratic Party will try to rebrand themselves in order to keep voter engagement because that's all it is. It's a suggestion. It's a temperature. But what I've seen is that voter turnout keeps getting smaller and smaller because people are starting to catch on .....things will just get worse, I can guarantee. But you'll just turn a blind eye, because you're playing Tribalist Games. Red Team vs the Blue Team. It's all the same, it's still the same game. You should Google the imperialist Boomerang. What goes around comes around. What they do overseas will come back to you and me. I would think with the Snowden and Julian Assange leaks that would have woken up a lot of America, but America is.. That.They're literate, or they lack reading comprehension and the ability to pay attention. As somebody who is liberal arts educated, I really do think that America is one of the most servile nations in the world. Because we've been fat and happy, eating the spoils, well relative crumbs, but spoils of our imperialist wars. Unfortunately, I live in this country and I am struggling. I really want out. I do not identify with this culture and everyone around me seems crazy. And they lack the patience to listen. All I ask for you to do is listen. I plant seeds. Eventually, if you get enough of those, you have a garden of reality. We really do lack critical thinking skills. And then the sofist, Uno card, is something that just drives me mad. Either way, if I live or die, justice will be served, and Yankee gets what they deserve. Justice is coming, either by the nations of the world sick of your shit, or by your own hands. I mean, haven't you figured it out yet? The whole good cop versus bad cop thing. You are the most gullible nation in the world. America is similar to North Korea. America is like North Korea with Disneyland. You're in a theme park that you can't afford and you can't get out. It's a small world after all.

  • I had more I wanted to say on this topic when I first read it, but at the time I also had more energy. Had I not had other obligations, I would've written out my more detailed thoughts then. As it is, however, I'll have to settle for the (relative) shortform, as I find this thread exhausting from the outset and the sheer quantity of incredibly angry back-and-forth here has only made it worse.

    To suffice the ideas of mine that I still remember, then:

    • I have a feeling that while you may not consider me specifically to be a "cuckoo," that this post was still partially aimed at people like myself, since I've spent a fair chunk of time arguing to the immense faults of the Democrat Party, some of which was in discussion with you.
    • If the above is true, I feel dehumanized and find this topic incredibly depressing.
    • Regardless of the above, I find jumping to assumptions of bad faith on the part of those with whom you disagree on this topic understandable, but needlessly conspiratorial.

    But to end my comment, I'd like to point out an area on which you and I can find common ground: Your point of "Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism" suggests you feel that the people arguing against voting / the Democrat Party are doing a poor job of offering alternative solutions. On this, I agree. Solutions for that scenario are hard to come by and often complicated, and where people do have things to suggest a portion of them are very flawed; voting Green, not voting, and the occasional implicit suggestion for violence, etc. All of those have huge problems that I know I don't need to explain to you.

    For that, all I can say is that I agree that leftists can do better and should. I've seen the good suggestions before. Things like mutual aid, education, organizing, joining events — all of these are very useful things that are significantly more important than one vote in a broken electoral system. Unfortunately, as you've noticed, frustrated and angry people tend to be bad at mentioning these things.

    I only ask that you consider that these people are frustrated, angry, and restless, rather than actively fake.

    • If you read down to my comments down below, you'll find some examples of people doing specific fuck-ups that strongly indicate that they are non-American fake accounts, and not someone who is frustrated, angry, or restless.

      I do think that a lot of people on far-left-Lemmy are in fact genuine accounts who also do the things OP is saying, and that maybe calling them fake accounts isn't productive. I actually think fake accounts on Lemmy is also a huge problem, but the tells that I consider are a little different than the ones OP talks about.

      For that, all I can say is that I agree that leftists can do better and should. I’ve seen the good suggestions before. Things like mutual aid, education, organizing, joining events — all of these are very useful things that are significantly more important than one vote in a broken electoral system.

      Yes. Whether or not someone is fake, talking about those things constantly would be a much better (and also less suspicious) thing to talk about, as opposed to incessantly talking specifically about how important it is not to vote and not so much about those other things.

      A lot of the accounts I'm talking about are still talking about how important it is not to vote for Democrats, and haven't bothered to say more or less anything about joining the protests that are going on right now. Actually, I've seen a little scattering of the current generation of fake commenters who are talking about how dangerous the protests are, how some might be "false flags," how we need to be careful or they're going to sit this upcoming one out. Things like that.

  • From Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerrin

    From Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

    • In re the first excerpt:

      This, to me, sounds totally backwards.

      The KPD had tried to overthrow the government through violent force with guns, and the establishment government including the SPD had violently fought back. A generation later, the KPD was still so incensed that the SPD had not gone along with getting shot and overthrown that they refused to get things together with the social-democrat + center-party coalition, ran their own spoiler candidate, fought the SPD in the streets, and basically treated the "not left enough" party as the main enemy all the way up until they all went into the camps. Whereas the SPD was still giving speeches against Hitler and trying to muster resistance to him in government even when parliament was half-empty because of all the disappeared opposition.

      I have no idea how the groups you're talking about here map onto the groups I am talking about. But, to me, the problem of splintered opposition to Hitler was 100% a far-left-created problem, which would be an incredibly apt comparison as regards the most recent US election if the election had happened on Lemmy or if the US as a whole had any kind of far-left representation that went above low single digits.

      In re the second excerpt:

      Yes, it is mathematically certain that in any FPTP election system, things will coalesce into two parties which are both a few inches to one side or another from the center. That is a good argument to me for not doing FPTP. I don't think you can blame the left-er of the parties if they don't want to wander away from the center and start losing elections.

      If we're going to apply that to the US, I think the "center" in the US being so far to the right that it's off the edge of the table is a whole separate problem, largely corporate-media-created, but I think asking the center-right party we call "Democrats" to start losing elections from now on so that everyone on the left can feel better about the Democratic party positions is probably not the answer to that.

      (Actually, there is one caveat: They could have just not fucked over Bernie and let him win the election which he 100% would have. That would have been nice. If you want to try to help talk them into doing something like that in the future, that would be grand, but I think (a) hoping for a candidate as good as Bernie to come along every election is a tough ask (b) some campaign finance reform will need to go along with it and maybe putting some people in prison for accepting bribes just to send the point home. If we're still trying to operate within normal politics. All of this is a little academic now since Trump is aiming to run the elections going forward.)

      • I have no idea how the groups you’re talking about here map onto the groups I am talking about. But, to me, the problem of splintered opposition to Hitler was 100% a far-left-created problem, which would be an incredibly apt comparison as regards the most recent US election if the election had happened on Lemmy or if the US as a whole had any kind of far-left representation that went above low single digits.

        Sure, but this assumes that the KPD and NSDAP weren't both reacting to a popular sentiment that the SPD wasn't. I think a good analogy for this is to consider fight or flight in mammal behavior as two extremes of a political spectrum, and an absence of stimulus response representative of 'status quo' centrism. A nervous system that is inadequately responding to threatening stimuli risks being eaten/killed by the threat, but a NS that's too sensitive is prone to overreaction.

        There are a lot of ways to flesh out that analogy, but I think the popularity of the NSDAP and the momentum of the KPD (as small as you'd like to see it as) is a missed hormone signal by the SPD that some kind of movement was needed to address the underlying current of populism. Assuming that the KPD ought to have joined the SPD against the Nazis simply because they were the smaller party (without addressing their concerns) completely disregards the political context of the moment.

        I think a similar critique of Democrats applies to 2024 (and to an extent 2016 and 2020, with con-founders). Liberals insist that the democrats lost because of 3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause, but I think there's more evidence that the Democrats failed themselves by not reacting to the clear signs of distress that both the far-right and far-left populists were signaling. I think dems miscalculated because they assumed they could meet more voters in the middle like they always had, but didn't realize that all those people aren't there anymore. Instead of meeting people in the middle, they were yelling at people on the ends to meet them in the middle, like over-administering an SSRI to someone reacting appropriately to a life-and-death situation.

        Any response to fascism is going to need a mixed response to address it - you can't simply plant yourself in the middle and cross your fingers people will meet you there. Even as a way just to buy time, by not offering any solutions to the issues that created the popular fascist sentiment you'll end up loosing those voters who can very clearly see them while they grow hopeless/disillusioned that democracy can solve the problems at all.

        We can wring our hands all day about far-left and far-right movements being too extreme and demanding perfection all we want, but the truth is that there were simply not enough people in the middle for democrats to overcome the populist motion on the right, and choosing to steer to the middle (and throw a tantrum when people didn't follow) is a clear cut miscalculation on their part. Especially when it seems pretty clear that most democrats agree on the basic grievances of the left-of-center part of the party.

  • Voluntarily disenfranchising yourself is complying in advance.

    A broken tool still has its uses. A bent screwdriver can still be a prybar. A rusty sword can still kill, so don't ask people to drop it before have something better. It is possible to explore and acknowledge the failures and limitations of a system -- and to reduce overreliance on it -- without abdicating all influence over it.

    The Democratic Party is a disappointment. They follow popular (polled) opinion rather than sticking to principles, and that makes them vulnerable to Overton shifts. As public opinion towards trans people has been poisoned by the Jugendverderber libel, Democrats have largely thrown trans people under the bus instead of fighting back. Likewise, Democrats stick closely to corporate interests because money is power. These issues may never be fixable.

    The solution to this is not to capitulate and discard what political influence we still hold.

    The first half of the solution is to primary the hell out of Democrats. A left-wing caucus within the party could easily tilt things in our favor, just like the Freedom Caucus tilted the RNC in the opposite direction once before. Bernie Sanders (link) and David Hogg (link) are now spearheading multiple campaigns to do exactly that. Even if you have no faith in your ability to change the norms of the party, just think how much impact your resistance could have if you held an office, even a low one, even for just a week. Do you have any idea how much trouble a county clerk can make?

    The second half of the solution is to build solidarity-based power structures outside government to reduce overreliance on a broken system. Economic desperation, social isolation, and cultural "other"-ing make people easy to exploit and oppress regardless of the type of government, so attack those problems directly. Unions, mutual aid networks, churches, you know the drill. Put in the legwork to find them in your area or your profession.

    Embrace nuance. Embrace diversity -- even political diversity. Political beliefs are not sacred, but the lives under those political systems are. Don't try to reduce the vast complexity of politics to 120 characters. Don't treat the ongoing wellbeing of human beings flippantly. If you think the problem is the existence of a state, then say so, but make your case for why making the state worse makes conditions for its subjects better. If you think voting third-party will teach the Democrats a lesson and drag them leftwards, then make your case and acknowledge the risks of what happens if you're wrong.

    Don't just ridicule every positive effort you see. Doomer trolls (or cuckoos, if we're going with that) are pithy, but reductive, and their criticism is never constructive.

    • This all day.

      I think one if the big things that people miss is that while it may be the most prominent fights in the headlines, there are countless little fights going on all the time and they have a huge impact. They don't make national news or sometimes even local news, but they still matter. It's easy to dismiss them, but they still move the overton window and they still have a substantial impact on the day to day lives of people across the country. Every union steward in some small retail chain standing up to management makes an impact. Every judge who stands up for the rights of marginalized people makes an impact. Every city councilor who votes to fund programs for people in need. Every volunteer who shows up day after day to soup kitchens and food banks. Everybody who stops to give a few bucks to a person on the street. Everyone who sees someone struggling and takes the time to try to lift them up. Every advocate who spends their time helping people who are trying to find a way out of horrible situations.

      The less visible stuff is much more wide-spread and makes a huge difference, maybe even more of a difference in many cases, than the big visible stuff.

      It honestly drives me up a wall when people who seem like they never go out and connect with the real world around them spend so much time ranting about how everyone's screwed and nobody's doing anything about it. All they have to do is look outside or step outside themselves and lend someone, anyone a hand.

      • All they have to do is look outside or step outside themselves and lend someone, anyone a hand.

        Touch grass, if you will.

        I remember years ago watching a video -- I desperately wish I could remember the channel -- where the author shared his experience with depression and the early days of 4chan anime forums. He found it easier to browse forums about anime than to go out and actually watch them. Then the negativity piled in. That anime you like? "It's shit." Any hint of optimism or passion was an opportunity to get a rise out of someone or smugly ridicule them. The only unassailable belief was to doubt everything. The only winning move was not to care.

        I've been thinking about that video a lot recently.

        Online activism has led to a handful of noteworthy victories. But the ease of online activism has also made people (myself included) rely too much on it, and get disillusioned by it, as if we've forgotten that online activism is pointless unless it leads to real-world resistance.

        I don't believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it's a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don't think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they're just people who've given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.

  • Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates

    Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party

    These two things drive me fucking crazy, and you are absolutely spot on with all of this. Obviously, the Democrats aren't perfect. But the argument that X makes them complicit in Y issue is a null point when the alternative is unbridled, unchecked fascism.

    WHATEVER POINT YOU WERE TRYING TO MAKE, IT WILL NOT BE SOLVED BY ELECTING FASCISTS. It doesn't matter if it's corruption, wars, homophobia, trade, the economy, taxes, it could even be people shitting in litter boxes.

    Whatever it is, having the entire country taken down to the studs is not going to help your issue, in fact, it's probably going to make your problem significantly worse. The economy? Look up the tariff war that caused the great depression. Homophobia? Read up on the lavender scare and how it tanked our astronomy and weapons research, notably ICBM research. Wars? Need I say anything more? We've had insane wars due to Republican war hawks for decades. Whoever you were trying to protect, they are 100% B O N E D now. And now we are sending innocent people off to literal concentration camps, so don't give me any of that "the Dems don't respect human rights" crap. It's beyond the pale now and all this was warned of in advance by those morons who published P2025 before the election. And yet, people still fell for it. It's absolutely infuriating that we are gonna have to dig the country (and the economy) out of a massive pit once again, if it's even possible at this point. We will be extremely lucky to prize it back out of the hands of dictators before they run it into the ground like they did with Venezuela.

  • Hey, have you used Tumblr? I ask, because I don't think that this is always people trying to infiltrate a political discussion to paralyze effective leftist organizing. I do think it totally is sometimes- but sometimes it's because of how people structure their values and philosophy of engagement with the world, politics and moral actions.

    I have become very familiar with how, on Tumblr, the dominant cultural paradigm has a strong tendency to several of those traits purely because of a combination of ways that the internet, and that website, is structured; and, the ambient cultural values of the US informing how they structured their beliefs about morality and politics.

    People who are part of this paradigm tend to have a strongly dentological bent, and are obsessed with if an action is good or bad in and of itself; and, especially critically- if there is any part of it that represents any moral compromise, no matter how small. They do not want to ever have to compromise their principles, and frame those principles as actions and behaviors and not ends. They are very focused on maintaining a sense of moral purity and superiority, which naturally leads to inaction due to the inherent compromises present in political action and general life.

    Paired with this is a deep desire to prove one's virtue, which is done by performing it- frequently by finding an acceptable target for harassment or abuse, then heaping unpleasant behavior on them in order to show that bad people are bad and they, a good person, is good. It's very simplistic and results in people who are constantly vigilant of if anything they do can be construed as wrong, because then it becomes a vector for harassment and attack, and who are constantly trying to discern if someone else is currently vulnerable to the same.

    This mixes with a general lack of critical thinking skill, reading comprehension and fact-checking that so defines our modern septic pit of an internet; and, you have a cycle of inaction and abuse that accomplishes very little. It's very frustrating, and a major contributing factor to me not using Tumblr anymore. I got really burnt out on people who would use, for example, you not reblogging a post supporting a specific political point as proof that you were maliciously against the political point, even if you openly advocated for it, or it was about a marginalized group you were a part of.

    I feel like you are identifying a pattern that is very real and important, but I think your conclusions about why it happens may be too narrow. I think there's a multiplicity of groups of different political and philosophical tendencies that are contributing to this atmosphere. I also feel like sometimes people need a place to vent about how incredibly infuriating US politicians and politics are- I try to keep that to my friends and personal writing, nowadays, but there was a point when I was incredibly bitter about how the Democrats continued to neglect and ignore people in need due to political exigencies. Sure, I get it, and sure, I support them whenever I get a chance to, but damn if it's not frustrating.

    I increasingly feel like there needs to be more sectioning of discussions on platforms to allow constructive discussion and vent-posting to be clearly separated and have that be aggressively enforced.

  • Happy International Worker's Day. Every single leader of emancipatory movements in the history of labor rights would disagree with you, having fought and been very vocal against the different flavors of oppression in order to get the liberal concessions that you seem to cherish today. Hopefully if you participate, you might find some leftists celebrating in the crowd. Please don't get too angry at them for not defending genociders, I'm sure a lot of them ended up voting for Kamala anyway, but at least they got the confirmation that even opposing genocide is too great a hurdle for them.

    I'm tired but I guess I'll still address some of the traits you identified:

    Claiming to be leftists

    I'm a leftist

    Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left

    Okay that doesn't sound like leftist behavior, you're totally right. I just hope you don't mean that "power possessed by the left" is the democratic party, but sure, that broadly sounds like liberals or feds.

    Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates

    There's a point to which you can push liberal concessions for damage control or for actually gaining some more concessions. I think criticizing voting is healthy since it's still playing the capitalist's game and a liberal "democracy" with almost no wiggle room anymore, but considering how little effort it takes to vote I'll always advocate to both play their game and also assume that nothing will come out of it without actual pressure.

    I've mostly seen people advocate for withholding their vote in the favor of some concession (please don't do genocide), I've never seen someone say "don't vote and also don't do anything else", but I'm sure they exist, you find all kinds of confused people online.

    Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party

    Is genocide disqualifying for a political party or not? I'm asking you, specifically, if you think that a party that commits (funds, arms, protects, justifies, excuses, does constant propaganda for) a genocide in the face of their own atrocities, while actively silencing the voices within their own ranks that speak out, is worth defending? Again, I think the idea was to hopefully change the democratic party to the radical position of "anti genocide". That failure is on them, not the people who threatened not to vote for them.

    Not highlighting that issue is frankly criminal.

    Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”

    Yeah that's leftism, that's always been leftism, but again I hope to god you don't mean that "leftist political power" here represents the democratic party, so I'm gonna assume you mean more broadly what they call "purity politics" and constant division in the left. I think it's fair to criticize people to the right of you, I'm to the right of anarchists and I welcome their criticism, even when I don't agree with it. If I spent my time shitting on them I think they would be completely legitimate in calling me out for someone with ulterior motives, or a reactionary shithead.

    Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system

    I want you to examine your own sentence just for a second. To disempower an attempt at legitimate engagement with the political system. Opposing genocide isn't used as a moral cudgel against whatever 10 steps removed version of power this is (and I'm not criticizing the way you put it, quite the opposite), it's used AGAINST GENOCIDE.

    People are out in the streets and criticizing liberal complicity because we talk about GENOCIDE not some vague questionable US foreign policy.

    Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

    So that's the democratic party, right? That's why I'm confused because leftists are out in the street, even the most liberal ones with their "fight oligarchy" campaign, while the democrats are still out defending genocide, doing filibusters without a cause, and generally trailing so far behind the average population that it's mind numbing. So I don't know what you mean when you say "leftists", because you seem to refer to two groups at the same time.

    Anyway, voting goes both way, you can't pretend to vote in a vacuum for the lesser evil without recognizing that you empower them and their genocidal endeavors.

    And I'll be a little more incisive: If you criticize a leftist of not caring about minorities (which I've seen a lot and is deeply ironic considering who did and didn't vote for the dems) you open yourself to be criticized for having proudly voted and called on everyone else to vote for a party that does genocide, and having attacked the ones that tried to actually make a difference in shifting their position or using that moment to show what their true colors are.

    • and generally trailing so far behind the average population

      I put it to you that this is a gerontocracy problem. It's easy to fall behind where the general public is at when Congress is a grotesque take on Weekend at Bernie's (no, not that Bernie, and yes, I'm aware of the irony).

      • I think that can often be a problem in political structures, but I don't think this is the main issue. It might explain how their messaging is so terrible, but the republicans have clearly managed just fine and the average is almost exactly the same in both.

        I think it's primarily that they see support for Israel as an absolute necessity because it would (1) be another massive loss of support and political funding, and (2) a very difficult pill to swallow. Admitting to having supported a horrible genocide in full conscience and trying to convince that they have now learned their way might still look like a steeper hill to climb than the time-tested tradition of genocide denial.

        It'd be great if it was the main issue though, I think you're right in that at least they would have better messaging, unfortunately I don't think the actual policies would be much different. In Europe for example fascist parties tend to be pretty young 🤷‍♂️

  • I'm not an american (but anti-electoral nonetheless), and I do get the critique and think it is perfectly valid if one views things through liberal framework - vote for the lesser evil, minimize suffering, not voting is letting the bad candidate on getting the upper hand, etc.

    However, this isn't an objective position but an ideological one, as it operates within lesser-evilism, coalitionism within capitalist institutions and having a definition of "the left" that generalizes them to essentially having to be "pro-democracy somewhat progressive liberals", and any deviation makes them into a troll or a right winger or something like that.

    What is important to realize is that most leftists aren't liberals - in fact, many leftists, particularly Marxists, view elections as:

    • A way to legitimize the class rule that leads into passivity among the working class who are being ruled over, essentially recognizing that this "tool that we are given" is just an illusion and leads to neutralization of worker power,
    • Enabling of 'capitalist-tribalism' in the form of "which capitalist manager do you support" which is seen in US through party loyalty and basically disarming the working class from realizing their own interests.

    Essentially, their goal isn't to just "vote for the lesser evil" or "achieve the maximum good through the means we're given" but to abolish the system entirely, and electorialism/voting is counter-productive in that regard due to legitimizing effect that it has that I mentioned previously. This does go against the "liberal left" and their goals, and being on the same political wing does not automatically mean there's an alliance or shared goals, nor does it mean that two positions aren't going to have antagonistic goals.

    Besides, why blame the left for the electoral failure who abstained from voting? Why not blame MAGA for voting in an enemy that goes against your interests (as in, people who have actually voted)?

    EDIT: Reading some of the comments over here, and what the fuck. Automatically labeling people as bots or trolls for daring to commit the crime of 'wrongthink' is definitely dehumanizing and the most toxic I've seen beehaw be. It's fine to disagree, it's fine to choose not to engage, but making a post calling a certain somewhat niche political position out, having people such as myself try and explain that this position is more complicated, then going full on "nah I'm right, you're wrong, everyone who disagrees is now blocked and also not human or Russian/Chinese agents" is genuinely loser behavior to put it bluntly, especially on a "Chat" community where discussion is expected.

    • I agree with the concept that electoral politics will not bring us the change we want but disagree with the notion that it isn't beneficial to vote for lesser evil.

      We exist in both paradigms. The worse evil does directly impact our lives, this isn't debatable especially with Trump, so it makes sense to vote for lesser evil. Leftists are correct the lesser evil voting does not change the status quo (ratchet theory) but I view it as incorrect for leftists to moralize the act of voting to the point that if you vote you are not a leftist

      It's a tool and revolution is easier when you aren't under threat of being sent to a concentration camp. These are issues of tactics not virtue

    • There just isn't that kind of leftist discourse in America. If there are communists here, I've never met one in real life, and I live in a very progressive region. Lemmy has been my first real exposure to anything further left of democratic socialism. I'm not sure why non-Americans are so continually surprised that we use "liberal" framework to discuss politics (that word means something completely different to us than it does to you). It would be great if the far right didn't keep moving us to the right, but that's the situation we live in. As capitalism fails, more people are waking up to the class struggle, but you can't just change a whole country's political paradigm overnight.

      • Honestly, this applies to EU too. There are still communists out there in real world (mostly found in university groups, labor unions or just some very niche book clubs), but way fewer than when compared to 20th century thanks to the efforts of red scare, the hellscape of "socialist" regimes, etc. There's also the fact that if you want to be a communist, you need to go way out of your way to seek the theory and groups and actually study rather than having the ideology imposed onto you (but exceptions apply, like how Marxism-Leninism and Maoism can definitely be cultish).

        Also, "liberal framework" in my comment was referring to viewing politics as choosing between good or bad, treating the system as being a fair, neutral arbiter, and it's how majority view electorialism since that's what is imposed onto us. Doesn't really have to do anything with progressives being referred to as liberals in the US, but just taking liberal democracy at its face value.

  • There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated claims being made in this thread, especially wrt what these supposed maga-bot/trolls all claim or do.

    If the post contained any actual examples of comments that OP believes are either bots or trolls, it might be possible to actually analyze whether their assumptions and claims have validity.

    As it stands, however, making broad insinuations about the ill intentions of anyone who disagrees with you is not very Nice, and is certainly not Assuming Good Faith.

    The mods here are very active, and very capable. We don't need people starting witch hunts here to "root out the fake Leftists", and based on OP and some others' reactions in this thread, that's clearly what's happening here.

    • If the post contained any actual examples of comments that OP believes are either bots or trolls, it might be possible to actually analyze whether their assumptions and claims have validity.

      We don’t need people starting witch hunts here to “root out the fake Leftists”

      These are contradictory statements.

      I won’t identify anyone who is claimed to be an example, specifically because of the valid concern raised in the second quote. I will say that the two examples that come most clearly to mind for the proof requested in the first quote are two people who are in that category of “talks CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, who also claimed to be American, who also made mistakes that no American would make. One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didn’t understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number. Another claimed that they employed a bunch of people and paid them all $250k per year (and, again, seemed not to understand that this was a wild thing to claim when people pointed it out ).

      Is that proof positive that those people are working for the Russians? No, not really. Is it “beyond a reasonable doubt” that they are working for someone? Yes, to me. Certainly in conjunction with all the other circumstantial evidence about the way they behave. You use the standard straw man of “anyone who disagrees with you” being put in this category, but that is not at all what’s happening here. I disagree with people on Lemmy constantly and I very rarely think that this is what’s going on. However when I run into a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving, I start to think that the person might be a paid propaganda account.

      But regardless of that, talking about the problem in general is surely okay. Your implicit threat to have the mods shut us all down is a waste of time. Talk to the mods (I am sure that some people have), tell them about the post, let them do what they’re doing to do. This is 100% an active and important problem on the Fediverse and talking about it is no kind of bad faith. I do actually, halfway, agree that singling out any particular user to accuse, could be a problem even if you’re extremely sure. But that’s not what this is.

    • I'm specifically talking about an exploitable vector that can be taken advantage by any number of people or organizations, so it's not really about particular users. There are examples, to be sure, but pointing them out or accusing them of working for anyone in particular would be counter-productive. Not only would it distract from the subject at hand, but they can literally make an infinite number of sock-puppets so it doesn't really matter unless you feel like playing an absolutely exhausting and fruitless game of whack-a-mole.

      I'm seeking to illustrate the behavioral pattern, the weakness that it exploits, and the damage it can do, which I expect to have much more efficacious results.

      • This is not talking about an attack vector in the abstract. You and Philip directly asserted that users in this post are part of this group, and even went on a little self-congratulatory rabbit-hole trek deciding that they're probably AI as well.

        There are examples, to be sure, but pointing them out or accusing them of working for anyone in particular would be counter-productive.

        You already did that, the second you asserted that some people here in this thread are part of this group. Hiding behind, "oh, I'll say they're here in this thread, which means their usernames are here to see and speculate upon, but I won't explicitly name them in my comment, so I can pretend that this is only abstract discussion" is just being evasive.

        I’m seeking to illustrate the behavioral pattern, the weakness that it exploits, and the damage it can do, which I expect to have much more efficacious results.

        You're using terms like "behavioral pattern" to lend your post an air of scientific truth, but this is literally nothing more than rank aspersion. The list of behavior you laid out is rife with strawman positions and imprecise, improvable propositions.

        How precisely do you define "Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left". "Most" is a vague, moving target. What qualifies as "dismantling... power possessed by the left"? That's an assertion of outcome, so are you asserting that you have some evidence tying posts here to a reduction in Leftist political power? Obviously not, but it's a useful claim to use for attacks since you're now working off a much worse impact than just political disagreement.

        You haven't shown any damage, but you certainly seem happy to use the mere claim of damage and "abstract discussion", to call for direct exclusion or expulsion of people from Left spaces.

        That's why this is a witch hunt, and not an appeal for moderation rule changes.

  • I 100% agree with this post. I do believe many of these attackers are sincere, but that it's time to recognize it doesn't matter and the end effect is the same as if they had acted in bad faith.

    They give permission to be cynical to the less informed who might otherwise feel guilt to support one candidate or the other. They create an argument that no one needs to pick a side, which a lot of people take comfort in because our politics are so divisive and polarizing that many don't want to wade into them if they can stay above the fray.

    The message in the 2024 election should have been "Biden has been great, if you think he was bad you don't realize what he's had to deal with caused by Trump and the pandemic and the not-entirely real Democratic majority in the Senate which includes two turn-coats. His only issue is he's old so let's go with Harris." That's all. But that kind of messaging was never possible because most of the left wanted to always frame things by starting with their laundry-list of all the things they didn't like about Biden to prove their independent thinker bona-fides, and then circle around and say "BUT here's the thing-" which is lousy messaging.

    Even today, when it's clear Biden fixed the economy and passed a ton of great legislation we can't frame the discussion as "Biden was great and now Trump has ruined the economy and defunded all these programs that were working" because people still want to start by crapping on the Democrats and sabotaging their own case. It's a great plan if the goal is to have the left perform weaker than they should have in all future debates and elections.

    EDIT: This is my first post on this platform, so when I say I see people on the left doing this I'm talking about other places I frequent like Reddit, Mastodon and BlueSky.

  • Watch out for the following five fallacies, and the cuckoo is easy to spot:

    • oversimplification: false dichotomy, ignoring relevant factors
    • genetic fallacy: instead of focusing on what is being said, the cuckoo always focuses on who says it
    • straw man: cuckoos are really eager to put words into your mouth, and try to force you to defend claims you never did in first place
    • ignore refutation: if you prove without a shadow of doubt that the cuckoo's claim is wrong, they'll ignore your refutation and still use it to back up even dumber claims
    • ad nauseam: same claim over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

    Then as you spot the cuckoo, the rest is easier - for example, IMO a sensible approach is to point out what the cuckoo is doing, to whoever might be reading your comment, while disengaging so you aren't giving the cuckoo further time to sing.

    • I think it's a very common belief amongst forums like these to look to logical fallacies to root out dishonest behavior, in the hopes that it'll provide a nice and easy way to deduce when someone's a grifter. That you can tell if someone's a liar – or for that matter, real – by applying them sufficiently.

      The problem is, humans are fallible. They fuck up. Innocently. Constantly. It's normal to make fallacious arguments, and doing so should not cause you to be automatically marked off as a robot, troll or spy. Some examples for your given fallacies:

      • Oversimplification can also occur if someone is tired and does not want to go into rigorous academic detail for their argument. Alternatively, they may simply not know the detail to begin with.
      • Genetic fallacy can occur due to simple human anger; if someone feels that their interlocutor has made bad-faith arguments frequently before, they're inclined to ignore what that individual has to say outright, likely without even reading it. (This one has happened in this thread, several times)
      • Strawmen happen all the time and extremely easily, because people will inevitably end up making assumptions about the position of others based on previous discussions they've had. If you spend enough time arguing a point and getting response X, you're going to start assuming that the person you're talking to about that is implying X, even if they haven't said it and never intended to.
      • Ignoring refutation happens plenty simply when people get defensive. Admitting you're wrong is hard, and it's much preferable to instead change the topic or find some other way of pretending you were never disproven of anything. This is inherently a logical leap, and that's why it leads to often dumber positions.
      • With regard to ad nauseam: If someone finds a particular point very convincing and easy to understand for themselves, they may find it confusing as to why you don't agree on it. This can lead to them repeatedly trying to explain it more thoroughly and in different words under the assumption that the way they said it was why you didn't get it. I've done this a lot in my past.

      With those examples out of the way, I just want to emphasize the fact that you should never pretend the presence of logical fallacies is a guarantee of bad faith, much less use it to dehumanize others. If we let ourselves do that, we'll all tear each other apart under the mistaken assumption that we're rooting out an evil that has no promise of even being present at all. To err is human.

      • Just to be clear:

        I am not proposing to categorically label anyone using those five fallacies a cuckoo. I said that it's easy to spot the cuckoo when you look for those fallacies. Because cuckoos rely on those fallacies to convey their "As A Leftist®, I say we should disempower ourselves!" discourse.

    • straw man: cuckoos are really eager to put words into your mouth, and try to force you to defend claims you never did in first place

      This one is a really key tell. The people who spend most of their message emphasizing what it is that their opponents believe, and only in passing deal with what they believe (which tends to be along the lines of "well they all want to kill Palestinian babies but I don't want that, so clearly you can see the difference"), and immediately start telling anyone who talks with them what they believe also... that's an important signal.

      I think it is so popular because it is substantially lower-effort than engaging with anything the person is actually saying, and also it works on anything. You don't have to be on the right side of the argument, you can just assign your opponent some awful crazy shit, and then get to work disagreeing with that.

      Edit: Just for some examples. Here are things people have told me today:

      your attitude that good people who would absolutely give you their last meal for days or literally stand in front of you to take a bullet that you may or not deserve are disposable lives

      (Literally no idea what this is about)

      I don’t think it’s unconscionable that the police are minimally held to that expectation

      (I, also, think that the police should be held to the expectation they're talking about, and said so repeatedly)

      you were unnecessarily bringing race into this discussion

      (I wasn't, I did bring BLM into a discussion about the police)

      Your saying things like “don’t refuse to give ID” or “Just talk with them. Tell them what you know, help them figure out the situation.” as a blanket suggestion

      (I said the exact opposite of that)

      I don’t mean to condescend to liberals – shouldn’t have used “libs” I guess – but I think of them, in the US, as primarily just trying to get the democrats back into power and then mostly disengage. The most outspoken of them tend to have much more energy to fight universal healthcare and other the social democratic reforms of a Bernie Sanders rather than actually take aim at the capitalist, state, and other hierarchies making our lives worse.

      (I wasn't explicitly included in this grouping, but this person was explicitly talking to and about me when they said this. Obviously none of this has anything to do with anything I think or want. This is a form of indirect strawman "You are group X and all group X people think Y and Z" that is particularly hopeless to ever have any kind of success in disagreeing with)

      So kindly fuck off with your genocidal apology nonsense

      (I pointed out with alarm that there is literally 0 food in Gaza currently and people are likely to start to starve on a mass scale this month)

      And so on

    • That's quickly becoming my approach. Point it out and then immediately block them and stop engaging. Once you block them, they can't keep following you around spamming the same noise.

    • Claiming to be leftists
    • Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
    • Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
    • Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
    • Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
    • Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

    Except for the one example you listed that I omitted here, you've just described, like, at least 1/3 of Lemmy, maybe more.

    The obvious ones I blocked long ago. There were some I didn't block, but a good chunk of those up and disappeared right after the election in November, so that was not suspicious at all.

    Frankly, I'm just about done with anything "political" on social media and am just going to start employing keyword filters. I'll just have to find some other void to shout into when I need an outlet lol.

    • Yep. It's a damn mess.

      I don't claim to know how to make them be honest about their motivations or, in the case of those few who are genuinely being taken in by this garbage, wake the hell up and realize what they're throwing away. But I know that having the idea out there in the open in a digestible way can at least help some people get a better view of what's going on. Maybe they'll follow suit and block some of the worst ones. Maybe they'll rely less on social media for their perspectives on the world and realize that Lemmy isn't the exception to its toxicity just because it's open source.

      We need to be more aware of them than we have been, though, because it's getting worse.

      • I just don't know a good way to deal with that, TBH. I wish I did.

        how to make them be honest about their motivations

        It's tough. If I get a funny feeling about an account and think they might be a concern troll (I think that's the term that applies here; if not, someone please correct me. I think "false ally" is a sub-class of that, but I'm shooting from the hip here),

        I'll typically look back through their history, try to put things in context, and get a feel from there. The ones I blocked were pretty much all one-trick ponies, so that was easy (though tedious as it took a while "vetting" each one).

        The problem there is, yes, you've identified that person. But everyone else needs to do the same legwork and come to the same conclusion. You can't just put up a sign that says "Troll" lol. Depending on the community/instance, you could report them, but that often puts mods in a sticky situation because they usually don't want to suppress anyone's viewpoint as long as it's not violating any rules.

        or, in the case of those few who are genuinely being taken in by this garbage

        That's even tougher. First, you have to figure out if they're the troll or the one who was trolled (troll-ee lol?) . And one, very rightfully, can't /shouldn't just start calling people trolls or shills. For one, they might be the troll-ee; going out of the gate with name-calling and accusations is definitely not the way to convince them to re-evaluate their views. For another, it just sets a bad tone and gives the impression that "everyone who disagrees with me is a troll".

        But sometimes they are. What do you do then?

        Wish I had an answer that didn't involve writing multiple theses on a number of topics as they try to sealion me into submission lol.

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