1. They are not refugees, they should immigrate the normal (expensive) way like everyone else and not get a free ride on the American tax payer’s dollar. Especially when we have, what, 30,000 refugees from south of the border living in warehouses awaiting a chance to legally immigrate. 50,000? 100,000? Probably even more than that.

2. They’re escaping South Africa with fortunes made by exploiting the people of South Africa and will suffer no consequences in the US. They stand at least some chance of being punished in their own country (even more so if they’re running like this, seems like they can feel the noose tightening), and their money would stay in South Africa to help the country in such a case instead of disappearing into the offshore haven of the US.

3. They’re friends of people like Musk and Trump, and allowing them to more easily use their money to affect American policy will be worse not just for the US, but the world at large. Letting people with experience running an apartheid regime into the politics of a belligerent war hungry government who has already threatened numerous friendly countries over resources cannot end well.

Step 1: Ban “assault rifles” (no clear definition so specifics will vary greatly from place to place)

Step 2:??

Step 3: Mental health crisis, economic crisis, and various other underlying causes of gun violence are solved

Not to say that guns aren’t an issue. They are, but this is no different than arming the police with military surplus munitions and vehicles instead of decriminalizing drug use, improving social security programs and education, etc. It does nothing to actually address the issue - especially since these gun laws never actually target the guns most frequently used in gun violence/crime (pistols), and are never followed up by any step 2.

It’s security theater to look like they’re doing something to address the issue.

That’s incorrect. The Dems first ran the sitting President who vowed that he would not run a second time and waffled about for an extended period before saying he was running, and then waffled about some more before dropping out due to the extremely tepid voter opinion on his running and the Dems declaring that they weren’t going to hold a primary and appointed Kamala as the candidate.

She was already a contested candidate with very mixed opinions on her track record, plus general discontent with the party leadership, and that was before the Democrats gagged her and her running mate when they found the most effective political campaign move they could ever possibly use against Republicans when they called them “weird,” and then the Dems shot the campaign’s legs off when they started dragging around conservatives to speak at campaign rallies. In places where they had people like Cheney speak, the Dems dropped a full 3-5% in the polls afterwards compared to before the campaign speeches.

Kamala herself definitely played a part in it, as did sexism, but truthfully the Democrats, like with Hillary, looked a gift horse in the mouth and started sifting through the pile of horse shit behind it for “moderate conservatives.” I bet if they had run a candidate like AOC and, you know, actually appealed to their base instead of avoiding talking about the things that their voters cared about, things would’ve been rather different. But they’ll never willingly run an actual progressive, so we’ll never know.

Por qué no los dos?

Opt out on one account, use another as poison. If you’re gonna do this, I’d say move all your code to a new account and use the older account to poison - that way they can’t filter the bad out by account age.

Apparently turkeys eat ticks. We just need to keep the wild turkey population up and they’ll help cull the infestation.

I’ve heard it said that pickleball is for former tennis players. And I think there’s plenty of truth there. It’s a relatively low impact sport that requires similar skills.

It’s honestly a great sport for older people - less risk of injury compared to similar sports, doesn’t require a lot of expensive equipment (although there’re plenty of companies making a killing nowadays), and it helps build and maintain things like hand-eye coordination.

There are tons of towns near me that are replacing their tennis courts with pickleball courts. The sport just supports a wider range of people than tennis and you can get two pickleball courts out of one tennis court if I remember correctly.

It would be weird for the Marxist instance to have entire communities dedicated to saying how bad socialists are, that’s what Hexbear is for.

But, that’s also why memes.ml is here, right? When people aren’t making fun of liberals (rightly so) or calling all Americans Nazis or something, you gotta make fun of the wrong kinds of socialists for not seeing the truth. Otherwise, what kind of content would be left?

This is the sort of behavior that I’m talking about, but with the term “liberals” being thrown at any leftists whose flavor of socialism you personally disagree with. Like a bunch of Christian denominations all claiming that they speak the truth and all the others are heretics and liars.

It’s all too common in leftist spaces because we can’t get over the minor (and not so minor) differences in our theory/philosophy to stay focused on our shared opposition of fascism long enough to act on it, while fascists naturally cooperate because it’s easy to do when you don’t believe in anything other than hate and whatever you’re told to believe.

That’s part of the point. Anybody who steps too far outside the “cultural norm” (read: that one look Republican women all have) will be weeded out of public life as well.

I didn’t mean that as a literal quote but as sarcastic air quotes to evoke the exact imagery that you came up with. Although, I have actually seen a Hexbear or (what’s the other one, Beehaw?) user use that phrase. Of course, they also said that only capitalist pigs die in China, so it’s hard to tell if they were serious or if it was full commitment to the bit. That part of Lemmy is fairly indistinguishable from a leftist version of 4chan.

Like I said in another comment, ML has an issue common to many leftist communities in that old saying of “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” And that can manifest as behaving like more moderate leftists (not liberals - actual leftists) may as well be centrists or conservatives, or treating Europe as being just as bad as Trump’s regime. Purity tests and trolling rather than the mutual cooperation that Cowbee posted.

I guess? I don’t think I’ve ever really stayed in a memes community where that’s the case, though on Reddit I was largely in places like egg_irl and traaa, where everything was focused around a shared experience of a minority group.

Besides, it’s not just the memes community, the memes is just where it appears the most blatantly and loudly. As the person above me said, it’s an instance wide thing. ML is nowhere near as bad as Hexbear (or I have yet to see any targeted harassment campaigns against an instance for failing a purity vibe check come from ML, at least) but, as they say, “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” Leftist spaces tend to have a bit of an undercurrent of only being welcoming to the “right kind of leftist.” I used “decadent West” up there very purposefully. There’s a bit of a vibe to ML that’s less “uniting various leftist groups” and more “preaching The Good Word to those poor ignorants” proselytizing.

Every time I see Cowbee in a thread like this, it’s like I walked into a restaurant to see someone trying to explain to somebody else why their friend who just spat in their food is actually a cool dude doing great solidarity because the owners of the restaurant treat their employees poorly.

ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the “decadent West.” Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it’s a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.

Anti-vaxxer insurrectionists protesting COVID regulations and “personal freedom” by attempting to shut down the government? Yeah, we had that. It’s called Jan 6th. We’ve also had our own series of MAGA convoys over the years. We call them Y’All Qaeda. I don’t know why this is your golden idol of what protesting should be.

And you should give a shit that I’m a minority who has watched Canada be roughly 5 to 10 years behind the US in their own war on science and education since 2001. Trump may be the signpost that actually turns the Canadian slide into MAGA conservatism around, there was some evidence of them backtracking on those stances during his last term, but only time will tell.

Oh, so you can dish it out but can’t take it when someone else handwaves away your effort?

I’m a trans woman living in the US. I absolutely know what I’m talking about. I’ve been keeping up with politics since I was a pre-teen just so I could know what rights of mine were being stripped away in which states. I’m illegal in 41+ countries in the world and 20 states in my own country.

Keep thumping your chest about your little Sunday drive while people are chasing ICE agents out of their neighborhoods.

But good to know this man never led a “real protest.”

I’m a trans woman in the US, a group who the government had already been stealing official documents from since before Trump was even officially in office and who states have been banning from public life, creating lists of, and trying to deny medical care to for years. We’ve been saying for a decade that conservatives would love nothing more than to round us all up and put us in camps. Guess what conservatives have expressed their desire to do?

Come at me again and tell me I’m not doing anything about my government when you don’t know the first thing about me.

You sir, are a fucking moron and transphobic to boot. Go be racist somewhere else.

First rule of operational security: if you’re going to do something, don’t tell anyone that you’re going to do something. Especially on social media/someplace with easily traceable records.

How about you start blaming German Jews for letting Hitler start WW2 next?

You mean that one time a bunch of Canadians drove in a line?

Compared to that time a protest was staged across an area the size of Europe? From small towns with a few dozen people to capital cities? And then again? And again?

These were all literally a quick Google search away. And you know what? Almost all of them are from last year, from a couple of cities out of those national protests, because our media is captured and it’s very difficult to find photos of the people scaring off ICE attempting to snatch people in broad daylight or the masses of abandoned cars in Chicago - some of them still running - from all the ICE raids. Or the community watch groups that have sprouted up to track where ICE agents are in the city. I couldn’t find a single picture of the protests from Boston then where there were more protesters in the city than the total population of the city. Most of what I saw was pro-ICE propaganda from news outlets about immigrants in NYC “cheering for ICE after capture of violent gang members” and other nonsense.

TIL, I thought it was intentional from the start.

Short answer? It’s normally used against conservatives, but cliques and purity politics (both literal politics and not) do come into play on occasion.

Longer answer: Lemmy was originally founded by a bunch of Marxist-Leninists and socialists of similar stripes (that’s what the .ml stands for), and early adopters often made up some form of minority group/outcast - LGBTQ and the like. This has led to a very zero tolerance policy towards conservative “talking points” and the usual bag of tricks that they employ when attempting to colonize an area/group. Especially as Reddit has further enshitified, but even before then Redditors were generally thought of more in terms of r/the_Donald subscribers rather than as disparate groups from across the political spectrum.

There are of course the “joined Lemmy before it was cool” groups who resent the growing popularity of the platform - especially after the Reddit API exodus that brought you and me here - but I think they’re largely relegated to the parts of Lemmy that most of the instances defederated from. Some of those places are basically the leftist equivalent of 4chan, and would absolutely use it as an insult if you failed their political belief purity tests.

In short, basically everybody would use it for a Trumper, but a small few might use it on me if I were to say something like that I think that dbzer0’s support of genAI inherently makes the instance pro-corporatism so long as they’re the ones benefitting from stealing labor from workers, and an even smaller few would probably use it simply because I started using Lemmy during the Reddit API fiasco.

“The only people worried about privacy are those with something to hide.”