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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
Two hundred union workers, out of 5,700 who assemble dishwashers, refrigerators, washers, and dryers for GE Appliances-Haier at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, received notice this month that the Trump administration is revoking their work authorizations.
The immigrant workers from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela have received a mixed reaction to their imminent deportation—hostility from some co-workers and an outpouring of support from their union and the local labor movement. They’re part of the Communications Workers’ industrial division, IUE-CWA Local 83761.
Thank you for this. There has been far too much of people utterly ignoring the hard work that people have done against authoritarianism in the US and the actual impact it’s had. Lemmy seems to be inundated with people insisting that nothing anyone can do could possibly help and the no one has ever done anything meaningful to resist, and that’s just bullshit. It’s some terminally online doomerism and it’s the last thing we need.
Frankly, it’s complicity. It needs to be called out and opposed, and you’re doing good work by not mincing words here.
People who pull this shit day in and day out are as much a part of the problem as the MAGA idiots, both in their constant attempts to undermine any and all resistance and very likely in getting us into this situation in the first place.
We need to stop tiptoeing around them and throw their bullshit back in their faces. It’s fucking shameful, and they should be embarrassed to be such spineless bootlickers.
Your turn! Point out where what I said is bullshit.
I’m not
I’m saying that we have the benefit of hindsight now and can look back and see the results of actions taken and determine what tactics were and weren’t effective. If you don’t do that and instead only focus on how much “hard work” was put in instead of the results of the labor you’re going to be constantly wearing yourself out and accomplishing nothing.
I’m begging you to focus less on the “how many people showed up” and focus more on the “what did it accomplish” and update your tactics accordingly.
Am I wrong, or was your original comment saying that people were so intimidated by police brutality that they weren’t willing to show up?
And they aren’t, at least not in any way that matters.
The Hands Off protests are only permitted because they have no impact. They even schedule them on a Saturday so that nobody who works at the places being protested at will be inconvenienced.
THEY BURNED DOWN THE FUCKING POLICE STATION
Also many police cars. This is the weirdest conversation. Like I say, I really think you guys are just saying random stuff to try to wind me up.
What is the argument you are trying to make with repeating that?
Is your argument that was a massive blow to the material holdings of US law enforcement? There are 17,985 police agencies in the US, we’ll pretend they only have one station per agency (that’s a gross underestimate, the Minneapolis 3rd precinct should make that clear…) then 0.000056% of police precincts were burnt down during the protests. I would argue a number that small is negligible.
Is your argument that a burnt down precinct is a form of justice that was achieved? There were ~1200 police killings in 2020. If that is your argument, then only 0.083% of people murdered that year got justice, much less any from previous/subsequent years.
And I cheer them for it, but a momentary expression of righteous anger against the injustice of our ruling order does not constitute a successful movement for systemic change.
The people who own this country allow us to protest peacefully because they can easily channel all that energy into a political structure designed to diffuse it and any non-peaceful protests stand out so much they can easily be brought down by the intelligence services before they get any momentum. That political structure has been falling apart since Nixon and the violence they dish out to suppress protest has escalated to the point of sending college kids to torture camps without due process on nothing but an accusation of thought crime.
Suffice it to say, I’m too cynical to have much faith in the most domesticated culture on the planet. Americans will not turn out to cause problems in unignorable numbers until the government gives in, we’ll follow the course of that old poem until they come for us and there is noone left to speak up.
Yes. I’m also incensed that “let’s all not vote for Kamala Harris because we don’t want a cop as president” “let’s all not vote for Kamala Harris because we care about genocide in Gaza” has been replaced by “ho hum let’s not protest ICE, that sounds scary, they might do something to me” “ho hum I’ve moved on from Gaza, I care about other issues now” and so on.
I saw earlier today someone I saw who has moved on completely from hand-wringing about Kamala Harris about Gaza to hand-wringing about Eric Adams’s opponent, for perfectly sensible reasons I am sure. I thought about going back and seeing how many of these people who were super concerned about fascism in America and policing and the cop who spoke at the DNC and Gaza, are now trying to publicize the 50501 protests, but (a) I already have a pretty good idea of the answer (b) it’s a little mean spirited I guess and just more mud-slinging © what’s the point. But yes. This bullshit on a friendly social network should get people yelled at. In my opinion.
I’ve been saying this for months and I’ll keep saying it. These people aren’t genuine users. They’re a combination of bot-farm workers and useful idiots. There’s a reason their perspectives don’t reflect those of actual human beings that we meet and talk to out in the world. Because they’re literally just hired to demotivate us.
I trust the content I see on Beehaw and Lemmy in general less and less as the months go by, because it’s inundated with this shit to the point that it’s clearly being targeted to demotivate any resistance. It’s literally flooded with messaging designed to make us feel hopeless and helpless.
The messaging I’m seeing (and assuming that it is what you’re referencing) doesn’t seem to be arguing against “resistance” it’s arguing against “performative resistance”. If you don’t understand the difference between the two I can definitely see why that would come across as demotivating.
Personally that same messaging you are finding demotivating gives me lots of hope in the future as there seems to be an upswelling of desire to actually fix things and coming to terms with the scope and reality of the situation.
It’s bad. The work to fix the last 50+ years of buried/ignored problems is a monumental amount of work, but facing it head on means that we can start making progress instead of just leaving it to pile up further and to get worse.
Hoping this "bot-farm"s perspective helps a bit with the whole “hopeless and helpless” feeling.
Yeah. It’s infuriating to me.
It’s a hard thing, because there’s no way to tell for any particular individual user, and it’s not real productive to introduce random accusations that someone is secretly a troll farm or something into the conversation. That just makes it even more divisive, which I think is a big part of their original goal. But yes. It’s a whole bunch of crap that this stuff is tolerated and it’s just “Oh yeah frequently someone comes in and ruins the conversation we’re trying to have, for their own fucked-up reasons, and we just have to smile and tell them politely that we disagree while they’re pissing all over the table and everyone at it.” That can’t possibly be the solution.
I mean, honestly, they make it incredibly obvious. The idea that we somehow can’t tell is just a tactic they use. We can both smell it on them. Why pretend we can’t?
Usually I don’t think the users are literal LLMs. I used to have suspicion of it but I’ve never seen really any indication that they are other than real humans. In this case I’m actually a lot less sure.
Not only were they persistently confused by the context of the conversation including flipping back and forth between “the American people are too cowed to do anything” to “sure the American people are doing things and God bless their courage for it but it won’t succeed” while seeming unaware even when the discrepancy was pointed out… but one of them managed to pick up that I was really emphasizing that American policing is certainly not “fixed” and flipped it around to get all forceful about how silly I was for saying it was “fixed”.
And then when I pointed out the weirdness specifically as to how humans don’t really often make those mistakes… both of them suddenly just fell silent.
Idk man. It’s usually not productive to make that accusation. But both of these people are acting super weird. They’re also taking turns responding in a sort of weird and disjointed way.
When I say bot farms I don’t mean literal LLMs. I mean people hired or forced to work in a call-center type environment where their day is spent disseminating propaganda and sewing meaningless conflict. Often using multiple sockpuppets. Some are working for hostile governments, some are working for companies. They try to sway elections and influence public opinion to strengthen their allies and weaken their enemies. They’re all over the place.
Okay, I wanted to drop this because bucket seemed to be spinning out pretty hard after getting his world view repeatedly fact checked and proven repeatedly wrong, but I’m a big fan of treating others the way they want to treat others and this sort of conspiracy theory nonsense is 100% some “bullshit that needs to be thrown back in their faces”
So are you going to engage at all with the material of the conversation or are you just going to spread conspiracy theories because the worldview being expressed isn’t your own?
I actually really like engaging with the material of the conversation. Here’s what makes that hard:
You strawmanned what I was saying into comical evil and into the literal exact opposite of what I said. You also keep switching back and forth between “everyone is too scared to resist” and “yes they’re resisting but it’s not accomplishing anything” and then pretending to fail to comprehend the difference between those two things even when it’s directly called out. That’s why I suspected you of being an LLM, is that that surface believability of language but lack of any underlying model that the language is encoding is a hallmark of them.
At that point, whatever you are, it’s time to put the brakes on and call you out for it, instead of just pretending we’re both still playing the “good faith debate” game. That’s not “spinning out”, that’s calling out your horseshit for what it is. If you want to go back to the reasoned-engagement game, just back off from doing that and we can talk. I actually like talking and you made some points I do want to respond to. But, in the current format, it would be a waste of time.
We’re actually talking about this exact issue right at this moment, and how once your opponent starts breaking the rules it is a mug’s game to keep playing by the same conversational principles that they’re pooping all over.