What makes a society good is being inclusive of everyone regardless of how they were born and working through cooperation to achieve goals and look out for each other. A society where people are intentionally neglected for another group’s economic gain is not a desirable society unless you’re a fascist. However, ideologies are not people and ideologies that promote an unequal society do not need to be tolerated, and people who pose a danger due to their actions to the people around them in a society that would otherwise be more fair do not need to be tolerated either.

Neither authoritarianism nor ignoring the rule of law are inherently bad. In reality, law isn’t words written on a piece of paper - it’s people with political motives that hold authority over law enforcement and the criminal justice system. The words themselves hold no authority, and they depend on the people to actually follow them, so the people can collectively choose to ignore them or change their meaning and now suddenly the law is different even though the words didn’t change one bit. The political motives the people who decide the law have generally favor a society that supports corruption and inequality, so there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking the law, especially if it makes everyone’s lives better.

Fascism is a specific type of authoritarianism that basically does the opposite to a society of what it should look like. Utilizing authority to make society better for basically everyone is not fascism. Utilizing authority to dehumanize a subset of people for the economic gain of a “superior race” is fascism.

The Democrats need to drop out and let an actually serious party take over

I’m not really sure. One of the most common complaints among the less extreme portions of the right is that the left is too intolerant and strict and not fun to be around. And being more welcoming of the person themselves, even while acknowledging to yourself that their beliefs are severely flawed (possibly due to factors such as propaganda, peer pressure, religious beliefs), might be a way to help capture that crowd and work to win them over.

At the same time, there needs to be a line drawn somewhere where the person is clearly being malicious and possibly dangerous and is a lost cause. Stuff like “your body my choice”, using slurs, praising suicides of marginalized people, etc isn’t worth tolerating. Also when it comes to group activities, allowing these sort of people and ideas makes minorities uncomfortable, so when they leave to someplace more comfortable now your group is just full of Nazis. I seen no problem with cutting these sort of people out.

My family is conservative and I’m still dependant on them for healthcare, so calling them out usually isn’t worth it although sometimes I still do.

There are also people I know (many of whom are relatives) who seem like normal people but then support Trump and all of his policies. I want to think they’re not horrible people and that they’re just brainwashed, but recently I’ve been seeing some of my friends jump on the alt-right bandwagon and posting extremely racist stuff to be “edgy”, even after leaving the far-right culture bubble they lived in. This is the sort of stuff that even when I was still a conservative I would never have thought it would be okay to promote, and I grew up in the same environment they did so it seems like they know perfectly well what they’re doing. After all of this I’m starting to think that maybe many of them are genuinely terrible people.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Recently I looked up what has been going on in various European countries, and it seems like with a lot of them there’s an extreme populist party with about 20% control, there’s a less extreme party that’s still queerphobic and anti-abortion but more willing to compromise with maybe about 15% control, and then there’s more liberal but economically conservative parties parties making it so the total of economically conservative parties including the above two is above 50%. These countries also have actual progressive and even some left-wing representation in government.

Contrast this with the US, which only has a populist party and a socially liberal but economically conservative party that a bunch of people are brainwashed to think is literally communism. There is very little progressive representation even though the country has a significant number of progressives, and people who want less government regulations are voting Republican regardless of their stances on social issues. Meanwhile polls say that opposition to LGBTQ rights and abortion is probably around 30% which is not much different than the European countries I looked at. So I think half the problem is that democracy in the US is basically dysfunctional.

However, 30% opposition to LGBTQ and abortion rights is still fucking bad, and I’m still trying to figure out whether it is the propaganda to blame or the people themselves. Additionally racism and xenophobia had been on the rise everywhere and has basically gained popular support at this point so democracy clearly isn’t going to solve this.

For the average Republican voter yes. Neo-Nazis and rulers are probably more intelligent though.

I have mine set to 18 hours

Well the election ended so there’s nothing to argue about right now

I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that’s basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I’m pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn’t give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that’s not exactly helpful either.

I’m a Gen Z male, from what I can tell it seems like older generations tend to rely more on cable or traditional news outlets while younger generations tend to get their news from social media platforms like Instagram. Cable news tends to be more corporate and “normal”/consistent, while Instagram tends to feed news from a larger variety of sources that tend to be more anti-corporate and radical, but those sources also tend to optimize for very short bursts to get the point across quickly so the user can quickly move on to the next piece of news, and there’s also quite a bit of low effort content and reposts and misinformation and that sort of stuff. So I think it’s social media that’s the main driving factor in causing Gen Z to be more radical - which in some ways is a good thing since they have more awareness of the events in Palestine (and radical leftism is based), but the platform can also put them into far-right fear-mongering bubbles and cause serious problems.

I’m also a Gen Z male, raised in an evangelical household at a Christian school that supported Christian nationalism, and was supposed to be a strong conservative Christian but ended up turning into an atheist socialist instead. It’s kind of funny to read that Gen Z is going radical right when for me it was the opposite.

Genocides? Concentration camps? Racial discrimination and dehumanization? Israel has all of these things and Biden is propping it up. If that isn’t fascism then what is?

Fascism was already in America the moment Biden gave Israel funding for the genocide and the Democrats threw all sorts of social issues under the bus. “Not fascism” in the current state of the country was not a choice, the only difference was how fast fascism would accelerate. The Democrats chose to make their platform boring in favor of donors and lose, and the fact that so many people support Trump shows that this country has much bigger problems than just that Trump was elected. This is a problem that needs much more than just voting to fix.

No, the blood is on liberals who allow the Democrats to support a genocide and get away with it without losing their votes to an anti-genocide candidate. Also on the Democrats for making their platform regressive and boring in favor of their donors so people lose interest in them and they lose.

So it’s the leftists fault for not voting hard enough between two pro-genocide candidates. What were we supposed to do to vote against the genocide, vote third party?

and move where? to another country electing fascists?

Firstly, I never told anybody to not vote for Kamala, what I have done is explain why people aren’t voting for her and why she’s a shitty candidate.

Secondly, what I described above are different situations. These are products of flawed systems, the products themselves are not inherently bad and are necessary for survival which is why they exist and why people use them. But because the systems are flawed, there is all sorts of fucked up stuff going on behind them. The products themselves have no power to fix the system, and most individuals don’t either without a coordinated effort, unless they are exceptionally powerful.

Kamala, on the other hand, would be one of those exceptionally powerful people that - by working with other politicians - can fix these systems, yet she chooses not to. And one of the reasons for that is because a large portion of her voter base doesn’t give a shit at all about the rights of anyone but themselves and their friends, shows no interest in improving them, and even dehumanizes people being oppressed by them, so she knows she can get away with keeping the oppressive systems in tact and the voter base will still support her.

In order to fix oppression, we need to focus not on the products of the systems but on the systems themselves. And how we fix the systems is by someone who is willing to fix them gaining power. Kamala and the Biden administration have demonstrated that they have no interest in fixing the systems, that is why leftists are trying to raise awareness of these problems and are putting pressure on the Democrats and the voter base to change their stances on these problems.

Do you pay taxes? You could choose to just go to jail instead. Do you use a device made with slave labor? You could choose to abstain from technology and not post on Lemmy. Do you work for a corporation? You could choose not to help them do shitty things and not get your basic needs met. If you said yes to any of these you are being hypocritical.

Do you live in a city with sane transit? (Also I put more effort into avoiding cars than basically everyone I know where I live, nobody else I know uses a bike.)