Something that i find prettyd disgusting these days is how certain people put their political ideologies / viewpoints over human lives, for example, celebrating the russian invasion of ukraine because it is “a blow against US / NATO imperialism” completely ignoring all the warcrimes, the deaths, and the suffering generated by that war, the same happening with the palestinian genocide because “Israel is the only working democracy on the middle east”, acting like their ideoligies are going to bring back to life all the dead people somehow
I’m trans. Tell me more. 🤷♀️
If authoritarians get their way, you’ll have to hide in my attic until we are liberated.
Maybe even write a book while you’re up there.
my attic
Isn’t that where you’ve been hiding your sex toys?
Amongst other things. Why you wanna come over and play swords in the dark.
No, I just thought you’d put them in with the rest of your sex slaves in the dungeon.
I don’t know why people are okay with trans people dying as well. Some people were absolutely sick when Brianna Ghey was brutally murdered.
You should ask your fellow Christians, trans folks are not so popular with the church if you haven’t noticed.
Here’s an example of putting ideology before people. I see on here regularly people who believe in the Christian god but are told that them looking at the doctrine of their holy books critically and trying to change the nature of their churches to be better is a useless endeavor and use the opportunity to snipe at people of faith.
During they holocaust while some Christian organizations were supportive of Nazis others assumed great personal risk and extracted hundreds of thousands of targeted people out of the country ro safety because of their faith. Their contributions were not small or easy and should not be ignored.
So often on here when trans issues come up people choose to use the occasion to put their personal religious trauma or prejudice before the needs of solidarity in the fight. They snipe at other trans allies for being “bad leftists” for believing in god. The trans community does not have the luxury of petty in-fighting, if choosing who our protectors will be. We cannot be choosing beggars for solidarity and help. Everything helps. There are trans people of faith who feel isolated in their need for community of other people of faith. There are churches that are key to changing people’s minds, there are people of faith who need support and encouragement to keep fighting in their corner because creating an enduring culture of acceptance inside a religion can also create long term security. The needs of our community are varied. We of the trans community are not weapons to be weilded to score hits against our own allies so you can feel good. When you do so you are putting yourself first in opposition to the goals and needs of trans people. You want to hate on people of faith there are lots of people who could use the distraction but wearing out people who are actually empathetic and who we need fresh for the fight is not doing us a service.
Allies of faith, keep doing what you are doing. I may not personally believe in your gods but you have my respect and thanks because I have friends who are alive because of you.
I see on here regularly people who believe in the Christian god but are told that them looking at the doctrine of their holy books critically and trying to change the nature of their churches to be better is a useless endeavor and use the opportunity to snipe at people of faith.
Everyone who tries to change the Christian doctrine to be more in tune with the actual spirit and teaching of Jesus, has my respect.
During they holocaust while some Christian organizations were supportive of Nazis others assumed great personal risk and extracted hundreds of thousands of targeted people out of the country ro safety because of their faith. Their contributions were not small or easy and should not be ignored.
And during the inquisition Christians tortured and burned people for basically fun of it. As any dogmatic believe system you can use Christianity to justify what ever you feel like.
So often on here when trans issues come up people choose to use the occasion to put their personal religious trauma or prejudice before the needs of solidarity in the fight. They snipe at other trans allies for being “bad leftists” for believing in god.
Sure, but the dude I’m talking to is a christian fundamentalist who believes that abortion is murder and on trans issues just stated that trans people should indeed not be killed (pretty sure the person does adhere to christian dogma of two genders, even so they dance around an answer), wich I would not classify as ally.
It is still something I see very often levied at members of this community who don’t deserve it. It is so very common for people who have a history of just mentioning their faith in the same breath as their support of trans people getting completely dog piled on by people who having sighted a believer to decide to try and debate their faith and hurl abuse.
More generally I wish people would realize what they are actually doing when they are doing that.
Possibly. I personally don’t have any problems with personal faith but a general dislike for organized religions. In this instance I replied because I’m discussion abortions with the same person in the same thread.
Sometimes people’s veiws on abortion are dearly held and we can ask only that they not inflict those beliefs on others.
This person, despite their stance on abortion, seems at least fairly progressive on their stance on trans people. Maybe not a gold star of support yes but was coming after them undermining them for the general state of the church in regards to gender minorities ultimately nessisary? This habit of individual members of a faith getting shoved on the back foot having to defend all of Christianity simultaneously for beliefs they don’t personally hold is a way to express your distaste of organized religion… But Scapegoating isn’t pleasant to be on the receiving end of.
Every Christian I have talked to about this subject is vehemently against killing transgender people. What does my belief in God have to do with my opinion on not killing trans people?
Christians are not really known for being champions for transgender folks. Catholics and Orthodox are official opposed to the existence of trans folks as a whole, since it does not work well with their binary view on gender.
Okay? That’s a them problem. I’m not a Roman Catholic nor an Orthodox. Still never seen an Orthodox or a Catholic person advocate for the killing of trans people though.
Still never seen an Orthodox or a Catholic person advocate for the killing of trans people though.
They just say you don’t exist, which at least does not help.
I’ve seen Atheists say that. Including Dawkins. Killing people and saying someone’s belief in their own gender is or isn’t valid are different things, though.
You don’t have to strictly be for killing them, you can just be against their existence, and someone else will take that to its logical conclusion.
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest”
I think it is true that Christians who are against violence against trans people should be far more vocal over it. But the general thing I hear isn’t really wanting to get rid of trans people, more of if they should be validated as their desired gender or not, or how children should be approached about the topic.
the existence of trans people is quite literally conditional on them being validated as their desired gender.
if you don’t validate them, then when they keep doing trans stuff (like transitioning), you will freak out and attempt to stop them. For example by sending them to conversion therapy. And it should be obvious to any basically humanist person why that’s a bad idea.
No, because there are no effective conversion therapies that work, and it can make the situation worse. It’s not a binary. You don’t have to choose between “oh yeah sure let’s change the signs on bathrooms! You can compete in women’s sports and be in women spaces, too! Oh and please go and tell these children all about your sex change!” and “send them all to conversion therapy at gunpoint”. I don’t know why you keep jumping to conclusions so quickly and freak out at me stating the fact that killing people is abhorrent. Because apparently I am not allowed to condemn the murder of a young girl because I, like 2.38 billion other people, think that Jesus of Nazareth from 2024 years ago made a convincing case for actually being God.
The people who boil complex geopolitical events down to “haha western imperialism is finally getting challenged, lol shitlib get owned” are immature teenagers arguing in bad faith or on things they don’t understand. That would be what we call a “tankie”.
The same goes for those blindly supporting Israel because “omg hamas is terrorist” or whatever the hell they even justify it with anymore. A lot of those may just be quiet racists or fascists happy to see a dictator like Netanyahu have his way with Western support- obviously never thinking for a second that they themselves have an equal chance of being on the receiving end of such treatment, not the delivering end.
Both of these situations are absolutely horrible. But neither can really be boiled down to simple ideology over human lives as much as the lower-quality people love to do so. People want things to fit how they think so that they can feel good about their thoughts. Many things get shaped in that lens and it gets worse every day. And, unfortunately, the only real solution is just not to interact. Their minds can never be changed once they set up their world view to be self supporting.
Your views mirror mine closely. Ukraine’s war is awful, but it never needed to happen if Putin wasn’t such a trigger-happy, imperialistic dictator. His war is purely for territorial and ideological expansion of control at the expense of human life. Same goes for Palestine, while the operation was framed as being anti-terrorism at first, Netanyahu has gotten completely unhinged and fallen out of line in some crazy drive to control all of Gaza and eliminate Israel’s competition. However, I support Ukraine and do not support Israel, despite these being philosophically contradictory in the terms of “preserving human life over ideologies” since Ukraine is still killing people. The context makes the conscience.
Ukraine is killing people to preserve their people’s lives, it’s not contradictory.
“Killing Russians in self defense is comparable to genociding Palestinians” is the take of a very, very sheltered individual.
The people who boil complex geopolitical events down to “haha western imperialism is finally getting challenged,
I mean that is what is factually happening right now. The US can no longer hold its diplomatic and military weight. The US and its allies are unable to prevent the Houthis from succesfull attacks in the Red Sea. On Israels genocide in Palestine the European countries are dividing. Putin is managing to divide the US internally and to have some European countries break away to his side. China doesn’t give a fuck about US sanctions anymore and there is elaborate systems to bypass sanctions. As a result both Russian energy exports are laundered before being sold to the EU and US and western components end up in russian military equipment.
Cheering on the current prospecting alternative is stupid, as it is just another imperialist system.
But it is urgently necessary to realise the changing reality and use the window to create a world order, that puts all imperialists to limits and embraces a rule based international order of equal countries with equal people. Especially the EU could take this opportunity to renounce the remnants of its imperial ways and the subtle and open supremacist believes.
The EU countries made the terrible mistake to consider Trump an anomaly and were all to eager to remain complacent on Bidens presidency. But Trump wasn’t just a pimple you wait to pass. He is the symptom of a deeper instability in the US.
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The difference between the two conflicts is that the govt of Russia was the unprovoked aggressor in Ukraine, whereas in Israel, the Gaza govt (Hamas) was the unprovoked aggressor.
Israel has gone too far and the war needs to end but the two conflicts are not identical in every way.
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Valuing human lives is itself an ideology/viewpoint. A great one obviously, and one I fervently agree with, but once you realize this it’s easier to understand how other people can put other viewpoints ahead of this one.
Sometimes, but it’s more complicated than that. It depends on the ideology. Sometimes ideologies clash in ways that can’t be reconciled without the loss of life. For example, I think it’s a good thing that the rest of the world collectively put our ideology above the lives of Nazis, and fought in ww2.
The allies didn’t fight the Nazis because they took issue with their ideology, but because they became a threat to their own powers. The reality is, that many people, including leaders of the time, weren’t interested in helping those being persecuted, in some cases they even inspired the persecution with their own.
The U.S. and the Holocaust (BBC, PBS) is well worth watching the whole way through, especially for how it mirrors our world today.
Yeah, I’m generalizing here, and that’s a very good point you bring up. I think whenever you have an ideology that claims to be the “one true x”, which in the case of Nazism was the belief in a racial hierarchy, if that ideology is expansionist, it will by necessity become an existential threat to other ideologies. You can say it became a threat to their power, but is that not also a threat to their ideology? Perhaps I’m using an overly broad conception of ideology here.
I’ll have to add that documentary to my watch list. Looks informative!
if that ideology is expansionist, it will by necessity become an existential threat to other ideologies.
This is it right here, and it’s why the world didn’t really care what a threat Putin was until he fully invaded Ukraine, or about the Uyghur genocide, or the treatment of North Koreans, or Gazans, or Kurds, and on and on - the people responsible for those are, quite deliberately, trying to keep their actions as much as they can within their own territory to avoid giving any other country reason to physically get involved (though they are deeply involved otherwise in the supports, financial and otherwise, that they provide, often to both sides of a conflict).
You can say it became a threat to their power, but is that not also a threat to their ideology? Perhaps I’m using an overly broad conception of ideology here.
No, you’re right here too, the “good guys” aren’t that good at all, and are only acting to defend their own interests - hoarding wealth and power, and maintaining the systems that enable them to do that at the expense of everyone else.
In actuality capitalistic imperialism specifically has and continues to claim more lives than probably all of the others combined (not only directly through war and invasion, but also through hunger poverty and preventable diseases which are a requirement and an inevitable result of artificial scarcity and commodification of what are basic human rights for profit), but history is written by the victors, and we are indoctrinated from birth in to false ideas of what humanity, freedom, and justice actually mean, in service of keeping us in line.
Yet FDR is still idolized, including on here.
Politics should put people first, I struggle to understand progression if it isn’t human focused.
Oh, it’s focused on humans! Just not in a way that benefits most humans ಠ_ಠ
Too true, its focused on the 1% of humans :3
I was at a skating rink this weekend. It was full of families bringing their kids so their kids could have fun. Even some kids birthday parties.
Oh, and the dad wearing an anti-Biden shirt. While hanging out and skating with his kid.
Priorities.
I mean, did wearing the shirt stop him from doing that?
I think you’re missing the point that it doesn’t really fit the environment he was in. It says a lot about how much free rent a politician seems to have in his head, when he’s likely never met said politician, likely has nothing directly to do with said politician, and was also displaying it in an area where I’m fairly sure the majority already agree with him (knowing this region).
It’s just a weird topic to flex in THAT specific environment.
Meh, I interpret it as someone buying a shirt, then just wearing it randomly whenever they grab it from their drawer
What a loser
Yea, and I extend that to all Politics. I don’t want to see anti-Trump shirts, I don’t really want to see pro Trump or pro Biden. Politicians aren’t sports teams. Save it for rallies, and what not. Just tired of seeing it.
Yeah agreed. It’s so weird to make politics or politicians part of your identity like this and extend it to totally hnrelated situstions by wearing a message. I already barely understand when people do it for sports as if they personally have any connection to the team.
People do it for the community. The right wing has done it because they’ve been more or less pushed out of normal culture because of how awful they’ve become. Same reason conspiracy theorists stick together. At least with sports there’s a winner and loser and it mostly can’t be disputed or ignored.
The don’t talk about politics and religion at dinner thing is very true. No one wants to leave their house and be miserable.
Really owned the libs xd
Being anti-Biden is literally giving priority to human lives. If palestinian lives matter, I mean.
Edit: if palestinian, afghan, yemeni, russian and ukrainian lives matter.
Yeah we gotta get Trump into office, he’ll be MUCH better prioritizing human lives
Didn’t say that. I think u americans are fucked up anyways.
Yeah, tankies are the worst
Yeah, I get you. Just remember though, they’re trying to take us back in history.
Some people just see humans, all humans, as just another random member of the animal kingdom. Just clumps of cells doing a thing. These people usually end of believing in power, and nothing else.
You know all those villainous chars from films, books, etc? Those attitudes are not limited to fiction. They’re inspired by our real life history, that’s what we grew up from. Some people want to go back.
Hello, i am a large clump of cells doing a thing. I don’t only believe in power though and your comment has left me confused.
It’s complicated.
I think it’s stupid when they say America is just fighting a proxy war. No, Ukraine is fighting for their independence. Like when France was fighting a proxy war against England back in the day, they weren’t considered the bad guys.
Every political position mostly tries to define in which ways violence is to be used. Realising this and knowing power is already established before you were even born. Seeing violence being used against your oppressor(s) is often times the only thing we feel we can still hope for.
Or from another perspective, is the war in Ukraine worth it for Ukraine or Russia, can you really say a war with so many deaths is preferable to being a russian subject, or an international embarrassment of the Russian state. Is the self determination of Palestinians really worth the terror and the war. We’re the PIRA justified in bombing London for their brother’s and sisters discrimination and deaths in Ireland. It’s ultimately all subjective, wether the violence of the system you fight against is bad enough you can bring yourself to fight.
Nothing brings back anyone but as long as there are people who want to, and do turn us into their machines, we have to rely on our interpretation of that being wrong, and fight them for it.
Is this “General”, or “General in the US”? I’m not saying it cannot be the latter, but if it is. I’m out. Best mentalt health choice I’ve done is reduce exposure to American “problems”.
It is meant to be General in a global/world sense, not strictly US. It simply happens that many of the people posting and commenting seem to be from the US, going off their posts and comments.
I’d encourage people from anywhere to post here if they’d like, as that would help mitigate the US-centric vibes.
I put human lives over political ideologies, and I’m pretty alone with that.
I’m a pacifist to the point that I’m opposed to the concept of “self defense” on a national level.
If someone tries to kill you, by all means defend yourself.
But this concept doesn’t translate to groups of millions of people, killing each other for years over who’s in charge.Interesting. What do you think Ukraine should do then if not fight back against the Russian invasion?
What India did against the British – sabotage all Russian-led businesses in Ukraine, and refuse to cooperate with the occupiers.
It would lead to a great deal of suffering for Ukrainians, but the alternative against which this would have to be measured is the current war – with close to one million dead, several million displaced, and no resolution in sight anywhere.Well Putin for sure would be happy if Ukraine would choose this path. He’s quite used to brutally squash dissidents. Russia also has absolutely no qualm to disperse a group throughout their country to destroy their cultural identity. They are already doing so with the Ukrainian children they’ve kidnapped.
So sorry, but your proposal seems to be really naiv and not taking into account how fucking brutal Putin’s Russia is to people stepping even slightly out of line.
your proposal seems to be really naiv and not taking into account how fucking brutal Putin’s Russia is
Pacifists are always confronted with this criticism. Every time:
“This war is different. This war is justified, cause this attacker is truly evil. We need to stop this evil guy by all means necessary, even if it completely destroys the country we’re trying to defend and kills an entire generation of its inhabitants.”I’m not naive, at all. I have no illusions about Russia. I just believe there is no option available that will save Ukraine, and war is always the worst option available. No matter how justified it was in the beginning, in the end all that’s left is war.
Two things can be true:
- War is the worst outcome
- Fighting evil is the right thing to do
We don’t get to live in a world where doing the right thing is always simple and easy, or even a good option.
There is no peaceful discussion with fascism, the only language it understands is violence.
I’ll shut up about it if a fascist movement has ever once been stopped by talk.
Sure wish we could put you in front of a long line of Ukrainian bereaved so you can tell them their family’s deaths weren’t the act of an evil man.
I wonder how many of them will spit in your face.
Putin ordered a false flag strike that killed russian grandmothers just to propel himself into office. He IS evil and your bullshit both sidesism deserves to be slapped out of your brain.
Your comment has nothing to do with what I wrote.
But yeah, I’d rather have Ukrainians spit in my face than go to war.
I’d rather be killed by Russians than go to war, for that matter.It seems you have been so privileged to grow up in a country where mortal violence is not a pressing threat.
There are people in the world that would gladly kill you for your shoes, or for fun, or even for sexual pleasure.
What do you do when one of those people target you or your family?
There is no reasoning with them, there is no reaction except to run or fight.
Pooty poot sent orcs to kill Ukrainian civilians, the elderly, women, children. There are tens of thousands of people who will never see their families again, would any amount of talking or self-sacrifice stop them if they were breaking into your family house?
You have every right to choose to be a pacifist, and I guess there is some degree of self-satisfaction to it, but pacifism will not stop an violent madman if he chooses to target you or someone you love.
What will stop Russia from doing the same to more countries?
The same thing that lead to the decolonization of almost all countries that were once occupied - it’s neither possible nor profitable to rule over a populace that hates you and doesn’t identify themselves as subjects to your rule in the long term.
And next up on the Disney Channel: The fall of the bad man because teh peepo don’t like him.
it’s neither possible nor profitable to rule over a populace that hates you and doesn’t identify themselves as subjects to your rule in the long term.
Slavery in the USA South disagrees with that. It was very possible and profitable. It would have continued but armed conflict ended that.
Ah, so we should just let them attack countries until the internal problems get too big and the empire falls from within? And those countries should just suck it up in the meantime?
Look, I have no good solution for this. No one has, the currently accepted solution is killing millions until the problem disappears behind the problems caused by the war.
I’m not telling anyone or any country what to do. I’m just saying, I won’t ever support or participate in any war, defensive or otherwise.Look, I have no good solution for this. No one has, the currently accepted solution is killing millions until the problem disappears behind the problems caused by the war.
No, the currently accepted solution is defending yourself against an invading force. Ukraine isn’t killing people to solve the problem, they are killing them to stop themselves from being killed.
And what if your solution doesn’t work? What if Russia just expands and the current regime stays in power? You’ll take away the sovereignty of possibly generations of people, and continually condemning more and more to the same fate, until maybe things collapse. And even then you have no guarantee that whatever comes after the collapse is, in any way, better.
There’s a quote on this topic that puts this into words better than I can:
You think you’re better than everyone else, but there you stand: the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs and your rigid pacifism crumbles into bloodstained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns.
So you admit your position doesn’t solve anything.
The issue is the popularity of tribalism. A lot of people see an attack on people they “identify” with as an attack on themselves.
Tell me you 19 years old, without telling me your 19 years old…
I’m old enough to have talked to people who experienced WW1, as an adult.
You can be 19 and still talk to people who experienced WW1…
If you’re 19 and had a meaningful conversation with people who experienced WW1 as an adult, those people would have to be at least 113 years old and still mentally fit.
In my case it was my grandma who hacked off the hand of a home intruder with a fire axe and threw it in a nearby river cause there was no police you could call in 1918.
This is a very grey topic for me. We can use the Russian invasion as an example since you brought it up. You can argue that more lives would have been saved had Ukraine just rolled over and surrendered immediately. But you can also argue their quality of life would be worse. But how do you compare that to resisting and fighting a war? How many lives would you trade for how big of an improvement in quality of life?
Btw I’m for Ukraine resisting, and I support them 100%. I’m just giving an example why it might not be always best to compare in human lives. Or at least, it’s really complicated.
People have this problem where they subscribe to Us versus Them thinking. They dehumanize certain groups of people and see them as something less than human, and therefore they don’t care if they are harmed. Militaries all over the globe do this to train their armies to kill without discrimination.
We see it in the USA all the time with the two party political system. I think if the extremist liberals and extremist conservatives had to share a room, it would turn into a blood bath before any common ground could be found. It’s disappointing and disturbing to me that people can’t seem to act in a civil manner. People get tunnel vision and lose sight of the fact that we all have to share this planet and we have to compromise on a lot of things. Seems like most people don’t want to compromise anymore, they want to destroy the opposing side instead and rule the world. That’s so delusional I can’t even…
