this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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For all we know the people that are on the right have gone to other platforms. That doesnt stop you jerks from saying im on the right even though im not. For some reason both sides have adopted a "with us or against us" mentality and everyone is a nazi.
That’s exactly what a Nazi would say!
/s
People throw around the word too much, there are actual Nazis around and we need to reserve the term just for their special brand of evil. Otherwise the phrase gets so watered down as to essentially become meaningless.
Otherwise they are just rightwing dipshits.
The rightwing dipshits are now mostly nazis though, the moderate and neutral have been mostly boiled off.
I can only base this on my own government but I'd say about only a small fraction of the right wing party are full on Nazi's, the rest are just awful people but they're not evil. Although it is hard to tell because quite a lot in the greedy, which from a distance can't look the same.
I want to upvote you for your rational take on nazis but downvote you for calling so many people awful.
Watering down language is part of the right wing platform. I think they actually want to be seen as nazis so the term is less powerful. On the other side, they are calling everyone groomers to water down that language as well.
I’ve had people in this thread say that I advocate for genocide.
I don’t think the right are the ones watering down the language
Maybe you should do more research instead of advocating for then.
Sorry, this is the case on both sides. I'm a leftist, and I see it happen from my side all the time. Deflecting and claiming only Republicans do it is ignorant or blatant gaslighting.
I'm called a nazi sometimes from people in my own party. It 100% happens.
Hell, "gaslighting" itself is a good example of this phenomenon, and it's mostly on the left.
I'm all for saying both sides are bad, because they are, but I'm guessing you either did something to warrant being called a nazi or found a cringey liberal to argue with.
You know your political views are truly independent when both the left and right accuse you of siding with the enemy.
Independent.. you mean a dirty centrist?!?
The hate for anyone who weighs ideas no matter which team they're from is very transparent.
You are absolutely correct. Not all fascist are Nazis.
There was already a right wing exodus from Reddit. /r/RedditAlternatives was created during that exodus, which is why their pinned list of alternatives includes things like gab(racists) and ovar.it(terfs).
Don’t forget the classic, “You sure with insert political extremist group on an issue. At least my side doesn’t team up with them.”
Most commonly seen when talking about Nazis obviously. I’ve been criticized for supporting free speech on social media sites because obviously only Nazis would benefit from being able to voice their opinions without worrying about being deplatformed.
Exactly. Blame/credit (blame in this case) doesn't travel that way.
Take the following example: Alice and Bob both support view X. Bob also supports view Y. Y is evil. Then, Bob can be deemed responsible for supporting view Y. But X does not become evil because Bob is. And so Alice is completely fine.
The right has moved onto other platforms.
A lot of people on the right who would post online have been banned from most of the left leaning platforms and have found their own places to talk.
And the end result is that every site is an echo chamber.
The state of the internet in 2023 is more or less, “Do you want the left-wing circlejerk or the right-wing circlejerk?” And if you want a place where people are allowed to express their views even if it disagrees with the majority opinion of the site, that no longer exists.
I’m sure it must be great if you identify as left or right, but it sure as hell sucks shit if you don’t align completely with either side.
I agree so much.
I love discussing things with people who think differently than I do, that’s how we learn. We should be able to disagree in a civil way and exchange ideas and understand each other and eventually agree to disagree.
But we can’t.
Online it’s either one extreme or the other.
When is someone going to have the balls to create a place where people can argue and talk shit out? Or is that just too mature for the kids online these days who cannot handle a disagreement?
Maybe there should be online discussions that are age restricted. No teenagers, 30+ adults only. I wonder if that would be better or worse
Aren't you doing that right now?
I mean I always try, because I believe in it.
I think I’ve probably lost 40% of my total upvotes having this conversation though. On reddit when you go too deep into negative karma you need to make a new account because you can’t post in a lot of communities at that point
I think you're speaking with people willing to engage and you're not seeing it. Downvotes don't mean people aren't discussing, it means they don't agree or they think you're coming from a trolling place.
No no, I don’t mean anyone specifically in this conversation
I was more speaking in general.
The end result is that some sites have a lot of white nationalists and some sites have very little white nationalists.
Conservatives have nothing humane to bring to the table at this point, even if not proudly saddled with your average ethonostate enjoyers, the platform is nothing but a fight against progress during a time where crisis requires it.
Which site has the least strawmen?
I know I shouldn't go into comment sections of these kind of posts, but man is this depressing.
It really is. So many vapid little monsters. You get to witness the ignorance and hatred spewed from people who think they're moral beacons for the rest of us. It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing, like you said.
I always find it funny (albeit in a depressing way) when people on the left act like anything short of totally open borders is white supremacy.
Wanna talk about ethnostates? Check out the demographics and immigration policies for countries like Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Wanna talk about racism? Ask the average naturalized immigrant how they feel about illegal immigration.
Supporting more secured borders isn’t racist. The reality is that the American government should prioritize the interests of its own citizens before prioritizing the interests of people from other countries. It drives me up the walls to see how much support our government provides to refugees when meanwhile our own cities are struggling, most often in predominately black areas. Yes it’s a slight false dichotomy to act like we can’t support refugees while also improving our inner cities, but the reality is that we usually fail to do both as they’re often competing interests.
Is it really “supporting a white ethnostate” to say I’d rather have our country let in more immigrants with college degrees or at least a willingness to work over a bunch of people who have zero desire to integrate or even work.
“Progress” doesn’t mean trying to increase the population of our cities and diversity as much as possible even if it means bringing in millions of people who will rely on the government to survive, refuse to integrate into American society, and are the literal opposite of progressive. “Progress” means working to improve the lives of the people we have already living here, regardless of their ethnic background. And currently our immigration policy isn’t accomplishing that.
How many democrats with meaningful power are actually proponents of an "open border"?
The main times I see the term "open borders" is a bunch of republican sites making strawman arguments. Fact is the border isn't open and nobody serious really wants it open, but if it's implied enough then people believe it. The #2 hit on google is an official republican senate website attacking this "open border" policy.
https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/democrats-declare-mission-accomplished-on-the-open-border
Why this fixation on highlighting immigration in a facetious way to misrepresent the situation? Even the tone-deaf can hear that faint whistle.
There is also the fact that this isn't a platform as much as it's a framework that uses and open protocol. Right leaning people can setup Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, and so forth as easily as left wingers.
The biggest problem in general has been people treating Fediverse setups like traditional ones. Facebook, Twitter, Discord are all run by central companies.
Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, have the benifit of being usable as bases for people to setup individual communities for themselves and still have some networking.
I hate this. I hate that if you are not 100% aligned to a certain groups policies, you're pretty much the devil in disguise. A leftist Democrat that supports the 2A? You're a "hard core racist bigot conservative that needs to home someone you love die in a shooting to see how you like it!". Those people are insane. It's not how the majority thinks, but those that do are very outspoken and loud so they have way more visibility.
There are a lot of people (on both sides) that can see how extreme parts of their "side" are and are very self aware of those things. They'll call out their own side for going too far, being too weird, and saying unfactual things. Those are the people that you can have real conversations with. You won't agree, you won't change opinions, but the conversation is generally very informative and you're not getting pissed off at each other (or you do, but you still show each other a mutual respect).
I cannot stand those with the "with us or against us" mentality. They really need to GTFO. And they absolutely cannot say they are patriots and support America first and everything that goes along with that. Because our country was founded on different principals, people with different viewpoints, and we created ways to allow those various viewpoints to exist together. We WANT to have different viewpoints instead of just allowing one to flourish and grow to an extreme and heavy handed policy. If you support the "Us" part of that, we are ALL with us, even if our views are opposing and we refuse to even meet in the middle.
In other words, if they aren't with you they are against you?
As someone with similar views, I recently realised that I have the exact same tribalism and aggression, it's just targeted at people who have that mentality.