YOU are speaking!

Have you made any poignant commentary on the recent election in the U.S.? Do you have a good response to liberals who are upset with the results or process of the election? Have you written or seen something as a comment reply/post that you think has standalone value? Did you see a new take or analysis you hadn’t previously considered?

Whether it’s a long idea with lots of context, or a short and sweet one liner, we want those thoughts aggregated here. This post is intended to be a resource for comrades to draw from when having actual discussions outside of Hexbear both online or IRL regarding the election.

Consider this a mini-effortpost aggregator. This is not for shitposts, but humor is completely acceptable if it helps make the point.

  • Angel [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 hour ago

    Harris did not lose (primarily) due to her gender or race. I feel that people who are operating under this assumption need to examine the dialectic here a lot more closely. Kamala’s major L is not a testament to Trump being any degree of magnificent but rather a demonstration of how God awful she is. Liberals need to garner far more awareness. If your answer to the question, “Why did Kamala lose?” has anything to do with assuming that it’s mainly the fault of reactionary, sexist, and racist white men, you are cutting out a whole bunch of very important factors from this equation. Plenty of marginalized people feel utterly disappointed in the bourgeois, imperialist machine that is the Democratic Party of the United States.

    We’ve seen that they will truly do nothing to further our rights or even maintain them as they currently stand. They don’t care about economic equality, and the most we’ve gotten from them is lip service. Democrats and Republicans are two heads on a vicious and malevolent double-headed fire-breathing dragon. One of these heads breathes fire of its usual color, and this head will explicitly warn you that this fire is there to kill your ass. The other head, on the other hand, will breathe a mesmerizing, astonishingly flashy rainbow-colored fire instead. On top of that, this head will tell you that if you get touched by this fire, you’ll heal from all of the wounds that the other head’s fire has given you, but in actuality, it just exacerbates the damage.

    This double-headed dragon has wreaked havoc on marginalized communities, and these marginalized communities know, be they oppressed on the basis of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, religion, or anything else, that the rainbow fire actually has zero healing properties, so stop acting like they do not know because we do. In addition, stop pretending that you care about us because you liberals have constantly demonstrated to me, a poor neurodivergent transfem of color, that you do not care about my view on bourgeois electoralism. It’s clear that I am nothing but a pawn to you, and you seem to want to dispose of me the moment that me being your pawn stops working in your favor. If that were anything but the truth, you’d listen to me on how to be a better ally to the marginalized, but you never do. If your outlook is that you want to hurt marginalized people while pretending that you care about them, it’s no wonder that KKKamala HarriSS seems right up your alley.

    fanon “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    31 minutes ago

    I have none except that:

    1. This country is going to get worse and worse. Neither party offers any way out (because they are beholden to capital) and the unviability of a third party means people will constantly bounce between the two, blaming the current signs of decline om the incumbent party. Incumbent disadvantage will be a thing. In the end, Harris lost because she was a member of Biden’s administration and Biden himself only won because he wasn’t a member of Trump’s administration or a member of Trump’s party.

    2. The majority of people already recognize the sham election for what it is and opt out to not waste their time. Imagine wasting an entire workday standing in line with nothing to show for it in the end. And as the country further declines and third parties continue to be unviable, more people will check out. These people are fertile soil for radicalization. They are disillusioned with the status quo but don’t know exactly why and are just begging for somebody to show them the way forward.

    3. The people who still believe in the electoral process will be and ought to be treated like Jehovah’s Witnesses: a bunch of evangelizing and obnoxious freaks. Believing in the electoral process should be treated like believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 hours ago

    I’m Canadian and Trump hysteria is only gonna hurt the conservatives and helo the ndp, the lib party is dead in the water as far as public opinion goes. This is gonna make things easier for the NDP cause we can literally point to America and say ‘look where it got them, we have a viable third party’

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 hours ago

        Not so much, but also it was covid and the government was matching our paychecks to not work for the last year. Hard to lose during that. The NDP has more recently cut the political ties they had with the libs do to their overwhelming corporate ties publicly but more importantly they won’t be helping out a genocide if elected and that’s helped a lot lately. Tbh, it’s probably gonna be a tory win for the next one but NDP seems to be looking better than ever for a 2nd place and a shot at pm for the election after next. If they pull it together instead of the cons that’d be cool, but seems unlikely

  • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 hours ago

    I think we can use this to put the nail in the coffin of arguments about stalling or harm reduction. I think even people who find that convincing as a concept would have to concede that they’ve ridden that horse as far as it can carry them. It seems self evident that this is not a working strategy at this point.

    So if you’re talking to a progressive/lib ask them what their plan was once they stalled as long as they could. Because they have.

    • glans [it/its]@hexbear.net
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      2 hours ago

      trumpism has its roots in disaffected working class people

      is that true?

      nazism wouldn’t have taken the same hold in germany if their economy was [ ?wasn’t? ] destroyed post-WW1

      is that true? it’s certainly what we learned in school. but basically zero of what schools have to say about nazis is true.

      your dad seems unconvinced by the walls of text

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    -Can’t blame third parties, the margins are too big and they wouldn’t have mattered in a single state.
    -Can’t blame non-voters, voter turnout was relatively high.
    -Can’t blame the Electoral College, Trump won the popular vote by almost twice the difference that Hillary has in 2016.
    -Can’t blame it on people being ignorant of the ramifications, Trump had already been president for 4 years, he was the presumptive nominee all along, and throughout election season he actually polled higher than his favorability when he left office.
    -Can’t blame corruption or voting machines, the last week of polling had Trump ahead, and the exit polling lines up with the results.
    The only thing the Democrats have to blame is themselves, for running a bad campaign with an inferior candidate and striking out on a softball.

    A close friend of mine was remarking in the last few weeks how the Democrats had pivoted from the “weird” messaging, which seemed to be working, back to the “he’s dangerous and unstable and a threat to democracy” messaging, which they knew from experience did not have much of an effect. In fact, from exit polls, out of people who said “democracy in this country is threatened” or prioritized a candidate’s capacity to do the job, a clear majority supported Trump! This is yet another damning piece of evidence that suggests that Democrats were actively not doing what they could to win the election. Either they prioritized fundraising at the expense of outcome, or they actually threw it.

    Also, Allan Lichtman BTFO.

  • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    Make some slide decks

    You should organize your thoughts into slide decks that you can use to keep you organized and have evidence on hand to make your point, instead of having to scrounge up a screenshot from your downloads folder when you need it.

    Socialist education is complex in the imperial core. You kinda need to understand like 8-12 different concepts at once before it all clicks (and even then someone may not fully agree at that point, it just starts making sense). Slides will help you lay all that out, and that sort of structure will make it easy for someone to digest as well, since you’ll be able to specify what you will talk about when. Fewer tangents cause you can say “we are gonna talk about that coming up”, so you can stay focused.

    Your own arguments will sharpen up. There’s definitely some lazy shit that’s propagated on Hexbear/Twitter, and it’ll start to become obvious where you have weak points when you start to structure your thoughts into a slide deck.

    Get to the conversation

    Trying to get a couple of people to sit down and take a lecture from you is borderline cringy, however the point is that right now, liberals are ready to learn. It shouldn’t be hard to bring them to

    “we agree on a lot: Trump bad and Democrats offer nothing except losing to Republicans, We need to do more about it.”

    followed by

    “We’ve talked about socialism a bit in our conversation, but socialism is really a complex topic that it’s taken me years to get a grasp on, it would be cool if we could sit down sometime and I can share what I know. I want to get us on the same page so we can start working on some political decisions together.”.

    These real life discussions will make you razor sharp in a way that posting online can not. Keep it interesting, add a bit of humor, and make it look nice. You should be able to educate people that you want to work with using this resource you craft for yourself (it’s ideal to develop the slides yourself).

    People do not actually want to educate themselves, and if you aren’t doing it, CNN and the NYT are instead.

    • Des [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 hours ago

      is there a recommended app to do this? these days pulling out a deck of cards to read off of might look unhinged vs. just swiping left and talking freely

      • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 hour ago

        Thinking it would be a PowerPoint kinda thing, but doing for practice and never using it is in the same ballpark, and having it on the phone for reference is also a good idea.

        • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          51 minutes ago

          I wonder if there are good phone apps for that. Good thoughts, although it’s hard for me to imagine being able to convince people to sit through an actual presentation on “So you’re being burned by liberalism:”

    • glans [it/its]@hexbear.net
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      2 hours ago

      this is nice but there are a couple of logistical issues:

      • the point of social media and social platforms is to be in touch with other people. not just random other people but the specific people/groups you are friends with or interested in.
      • matrix is so goddamned complicated to use with encryption. I’ve honestly never gotten it up and working despite several concerted attempts. it is absolutely not a drop in replacement and suggesting it is only sets comrades up to fail and therefor feel powerless.
    • sudoer777
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      4 hours ago

      Some things I would caution here for clarification:

      Matrix is known to leak metadata and has weaker E2E encryption than other E2E encrypted platforms.

      Signal is better than most platforms for one-on-one messaging (can also be used for larger groups but doesn’t have channels) but it has shady requirements like requiring a phone number and requiring an Android or iOS device (doesn’t support less corporate OSes like Linux as primary device) and the desktop application message storage not being secure (largely a desktop OS problem since their security tends to be horrible, but Signal could add more protections and doesn’t), and other weird things like requiring proprietary libraries and not having fully FOSS builds and crypto stuff. It’s not anonymous meaning theoretically the Signal backend could link sender IP addresses to exact recipients which is just enough data to be useful to intelligence agencies if Signal happens to be compromised (which they have received government funding in the past and suspiciously stopped updating their backend repo for like a year not too long ago). Signal is fine for the average person, but I’ve seen political activist groups use it and act like they’re anonymous and I would be very careful in that situation. Otherwise if you know people that use Signal it’s still better than most platforms, I would recommend using the Molly client which is actually FOSS and has more security features than the official Signal client.

      Cwtch looks like the overall best alternative to Signal since it is decentralized, doesn’t require a phone number, has all of the main encryption features Signal has, and has an option for running a server to reduce battery life and increase message delivery reliability. Briar is similar and works over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi making it a decent option for protests (if you even bring a phone). SimpleX Chat looks better than Signal as well since it doesn’t require a phone number. Also XMPP which is decentralized and self-hosted but it requires a server setup. I haven’t really used either of these platforms though so I can’t attest to whether they actually work well.

      Lemmy and Mastodon are not private unless you are very careful in signing up for a public instance and not revealing your identity, assuming the instance you sign up for even allows that. However, they aren’t run by corporations with shady agendas which is the most important part.

  • MrPiss [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 hours ago

    Ultimately the fault lies in Harris and democratic leadership who were in charge of the campaign. Harris got like 10 million fewer votes than Biden and you can’t blame that on any one group. They made the conscious decisions that led them to have only a few million more votes than Hillary got almost a decade ago.

    If someone is hell bent on a certain race/ethnicity let them know it can’t purely be black or Latino voters fault if this is a majority white country. Are these people going to vote scold white people for sitting out or voting wrong? Democrats seem to lash out against their supposed allies more than the apathetic whites. They just write off the disengaged and target the apparently 20% of African American men that voted for Trump this time. Most of them still voted for Harris and if they went against voting for a black Democrat then she had to have a terrible campaign since that is one of the most loyal voting blocks in the United States.

    Also, important to remember that Hispanics/Latinos aren’t a coherent group within the United States. Some are fifth generation jet ski dealers that don’t know Spanish and some are recent citizens who work as day laborers and need their ballot to be in Spanish. There’s too much variety to tie them together like can be done with other groups.

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    There has been a silent protest voter class ignored by mainstream reporting, tabulations, and analysis that can be found hidden within ballot reader error rates. These voters are casting ballots with no presidential candidate, but potentially ballot questions and down ballot votes filled in. They are consciously abstaining from all candidates for president and represent a active but non participating voter. There must be a reason these people cast a vote for no one right? Because they’re not “selfishly voting 3rd party” after all, and not voting for their “unicorn” candidate. The only conclusion is that no one is winning these people over with their policies at the federal level, and know local races matter to them more.

  • RiotDoll [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    5 hours ago

    I’ve been trying to figure out how to innoculate/poison the rhetoric in use that gets people to go along with whatever liberal/conservative talking heads set as an agenda for discourse.

    Deconstructing rhetoric, analysis of media narratives - “media literacy” - more generally. I need a really fast way to read people into that frame such that they are immediately deonstructing narratives as soon as they feel empowered to do so.

    I basically want to utterly snuff out the average person’s credulity towards people who are seeking power or modelling behavior from a highly visible place.

    In order for things to get better, people have to have the tools they need to distrust power. That needs to be paramount, over anything else. Once you have people going “oh wow that’s kinda bullshit” rather than uncritically entering a receptive state and parroting what the guy on their screen told them to say and think, a lot of the work will just get done on its own

    We really need to be poisoning the rhetorical space as much as possible. I need something that devalues propaganda the same way capital is trying to use AI to devalue art. I need something that poisons the dataset.

  • real [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    Maybe this isnt the place to have this discussion, but I think it would be great to make these mega threads a regular thing. We have a lot of work to do, people to radicalize, etc.

    It begins now.

  • adultswim_antifa [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    Is there a way to force liberals to reckon with all the stuff they just stopped caring about the day Biden became president? Like the camps of migrants? A lot of them went full border wall with Biden. Now they’re probably going to start caring again.

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 hours ago

      I don’t think this would be a fruitful line of discussion. They don’t perceive themselves that way, so it just kind of bounces off and makes you unlikable (cause you’re calling them a shitty person to some extent, regardless of whether you’re correct or not).

      Focus on common ground, and you’ll be able to stand on that ground and clean up that sort of stuff later on.