Asklemmy

I know it was a few days ago, but the full statement was “if you do all of the [door knocking, etc.], but no one does any of the voting, things will get worse”. This was an attempt to find common ground to build from.

And you didn't find it, because when I challenged you on the inverse, which was that if people did vote things would get better, you hid behind mathematical logic. The reality is that things will get worse whether people vote or not because things getting worse is a function of larger systemic issues than who specifically is in which office.

I’m noticing this is not a mutually shared goal.

The mutual ground I hope to find with you is human empathy, not agreement about electoralism. Through shared human empathy we can come to common ground about mass murders being bad. That's about where it stops though because our understandings of politics and history are fundamentally different, as we'll keep seeing...

you should consider that you are practicing preaching, not debating, not convincing.

Here you begin to stop talking about the significant arguments presented for the case I'm making about electoralism and its relationship to mass violence and instead focus on the form of my communication as a way of not engaging with the substance of what I'm saying.

Literally the same argument I’m making about your position [regarding why people vote vs why they don’t get what they want]. You’re speaking from your own POV. I believe your POV doesn’t align with the data. If you are able to produce data to the contrary, you are welcome.

I did. I established, with sources, that the foundational documents of the country were intentionally designed by their authors to prevent mass interests from overriding the interests of the wealthy elite. Are you saying that by voting we might be able to change the fact that the system was designed to prevent voting from changing the system in ways that went against elite interests? If so, you'll need to make a case for it instead of pretending a hypothesis is just a perspective.

The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.

Why is that a flaw, though?

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, against all evidence, that perhaps you actually thought that what I was saying is that the flaw is that the USA became the seat of the empire that birthed it. That was not the intention of the communication. You said "The USA is not uniquely flawed" and I established both that it was and why. The flaws are the bloodlust, the mass murder, the ecocide, the genocide, the violent dominance of the globe. Those are the flaws. And the manifestation of those flaws are unique in scale, in scope, in aggregate form, and in historical process. And the explanation for why they are unique is because the USA inhabits a unique place in a historical process that has a unique place in history.

If it had done this, and none of the rest of the stuff, and immediately gone full communist, you would say this same action makes it uniquely the best, no?

No, because going full communist while being a settler state and also inheriting the European empire would be just as violent and contradictory and just as foundationally genocidal. The USA is an occupying settler state that is continuously and actively displacing millions of people from their land. And the US government and its court decisions have supported this analysis. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing a majority opinion in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, cites the Doctrine of Discovery as the legal basis for the USA's claim to its physical presence, that is to say, the highest court in the land and a liberal judge appointed by a Democrat stated in no uncertain terms that the very foundation of the USA is the European process of genocidal settler colonialism backed by the Pope's decree that the savages of the world can be dispossessed of everything including their life and children in the service of spreading Christian civilization.

No. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult.

Is incongruent with

That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society.

It's not. And you know that. You said "starting from scratch is easy". That's an absurd claim. I said starting from scratch is hard, and also, it's the way people have chosen when all other options have failed them. These two things are both true.

Starting from scratch happens far more in history, at the cost of many lives. Gradually working toward and maintaining a system that protects the people very rarely happens. By definition, that indicates one is clearly easier to accomplish (by humans).

You didn't say easier. You said easy. If you want to say that flying in an airplane is easier than flapping your arms, go ahead. It doesn't make it more noble to stand there flapping your arms. Reforming white supremacist genocidal settler states by voting is hard to accomplish because it's quite literally impossible, in much the same way that it's impossible for customers to make more money than the house in a well-run casino. You can win individual games, but the house always wins. The government isn't some piece of stone that you can fashion given enough effort and focus and determination. It's a social system created by elites for the maintenance of elite power and, in so far as people are able to vote, voting is relegated to a set of outcomes that genuinely cannot change the core logic of the system.

Could you inform me on the state of Muslim minorities in China, and what is going on there, though?

Sure. China is fighting terrorism that is being developed by the West, with the US being the primary adversarial influence. The East Turkestan separatist movement has been a target of US intelligence for several decades. That entire region has been a hotbed of US terrorist training for decades, dating back to the early 80s. And it's not limited to Xinjiang, they have also trained and supported terrorists in Tibet as well (the Dalai Lama's brother has written about how much he regrets that their family worked with the CIA). No one has ever figured out how to deal with this form of asymmetric warfare from the US, frankly not even the US. There's tons of blowback from their support of the Mujaheddin that turned into Al-Qaeda which at various points has been the US's enemy but also has been something the US has been intimately involved with. Even ISIS, which the US claims to be fighting, has had active collaboration with the US as seen in Syria with a known ISIS terrorist taking office after the West toppled their government and the US admitting it'd been working with him for almost a decade, while he was literally beheading people.

But we don't only have to take China's word that they're fighting terrorism and the history of Western developed terrorism in the region. Many many people have been to audit what's going on in Xinjiang. The Arab League directly visited and observed deradicalization camps in Xinjiang and left expressing their approval of the program. Islam is still openly practiced in Xinjiang, their language is still used everywhere, their population is still growing year over year, and the last several years of anti-terrorism work has reduced terrorist attacks in the region and increased the standard of living, access to jobs and education and healthcare, and generally been one of the first successes in dealing with Western terrorist programs without going to war.

To me, it feels like you’re willingly ignoring reality

That's how I feel about you. I guess we found our common ground.

When I point that out to you, you reduce my position to a meme you’re more familiar with.

You haven't actually pointed it out to me. You said "The US is not uniquely flawed" and "If you take everything bad the US is doing, you'll see that it's always been that way and it's happening all over the world". To me, both of these sentiments sound like willingly ignoring reality. The US bombed a girls' school in Iran as part of their opening salvo. China hasn't dropped a bomb in conflict in 36 years. The US killed a million people in Iraq. China hasn't dropped a bomb in conflict in 36 years. The US is openly killing sailors in civilian vessels. China is using water canons to get people to leave an area of ocean it considers critical for national security. China hasn't fired munitions upon a boat (outside of warning shots) in 37 years. Russia has launched offensive operations against 3 countries since 1992. The US? 14. And that's not including attacking Venezuela and starving Cuba.

I reduce it to a meme because that's what it sounds like. It sounds like you're not engaging with reality but rather a shallow narrative that falls apart as soon as it comes into contact with actual reality.

Unless you can convince me you’re not here to waste both of our time, I think we’re done here.

The same goes for you. As far as I can tell, you are saying that my refusal to accept most of your premises is a me problem instead of the foundations for debate. You are saying that my attempt to explain WHY I don't accept your premises is actually just me preaching and refusing to find common ground. I am appealing to your sense of humanity and of justice by listing out all of the incredibly salient ways your premises clash with my understanding of history. The US is uniquely flawed. Reform has never ended fascism. Revolution has always been the result of the masses waking up to the way the elites control the system. And I've provided support for all of these positions. That you disagree with them is not me being difficult.