Try this argument again when a grade school bully has the power and privilege of a health care CEO who makes ~10 Million USD a year off of the suffering of millions.

Hey, let’s not discredit the amazing work that Brian Thompson accomplished as CEO! Before his joining UnitedHealthCare in 2022, their denial rate was 8%. Then, only one short year later, he managed to successfully drive that denial rate up to almost 28%! As the UnitedHealthCare conglomerate served some 122 million Americans that year, you can easily discern that Brian Thompson was directly responsible for ensuring that ~24 million Americans had their claims denied. Imagine how much less UHC would have made for their investors if they had to pay an addition 24 million American’s health care claims!

So before giving all the credit to the board members and share holders, let’s take a moment to understand exactly how hard Brian Thompson worked to ensure some ~24 million Americans went without doctor-approved medical support that they previously were entitled to.

All this data is publically available on Wikipedia, by the way.

What if I told you that, when I help others, I don’t do so expecting them to return the favor in the future? It’d be great if they did, I am sure some of them will, and many of them have, but that was never what it was about.

That this post was made in good faith. The way conversation between the left, the right, and the centrist voters is either dishonest, or shows a horrible misunderstanding of common opinion. If it is the latter, I am wrong about the good faith bit, hence the “I hope I am wrong,” though I am not happy about either outcome.

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies.

From Wikipedia.

The comment I am responding to never denied that there is an influx of tankies here. Instead you said I shouldn’t be surprised to find leftists here, inferring that leftists are tankies. Being authoritarian and manipulating information to manipulate people is not a leftist value.

You can disagree with me all you want. I’ll respect that. I would appreciate if you had better respect than to treat me like I am insane and my statements make no sense just because you disagree.

That is not my experience. I hope I am the one who is wrong.

Authoritarian manipulation is not a leftist value.

Don’t conflate my concern in speaking out against discourse like as “seething and coping.” My goal is to call out attempts to divide and other people for what it is.

And here I thought statements of lemmy.ml being overrun with tankies were exaggurated. Boy your deconstruction of my post sure showed me!

This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude, close-minded, genocide supporter, posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China, sometimes pro-Russia propaganda, and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.

Just making sure the context for this post is visible.

This is not how I have understood the criticisms being thrown around Lemmy lately, but I appreciate the perspective. Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first, but I can at least appreciate your point in the specific context of the current two-party system.

I wouldn’t know. I’m not an American, not a card-carrying liberal voter on my country.

What I do know is that this constant othering is how these problems were created in the first place. Spending time and energy building straw men on the Internet is creating enemies, not allies. If you are genuinely dedicated to spreading information and awareness, as your earlier post suggests, making assumptions and jumping down people’s throats is hurting your cause, not helping it.

We are currently in the process of creating a larger divide in left-minded individuals, and I am unbelievably sick of it. As the right rapidly unifys, we seem to be learning nothing.

Thank you.

Real sick of this argument right now. Just letting the right win because the left-most party is too willing to compromise isn’t a moral victory.

Everyone always talks like defeating Trump in the election is the end-all be-all of the disussion. Voting Democrat and preventing Trump from taking the white house should have been an obvious step. It is not the best outcome for the election, nor is it the end of the ongoing decay of late-stage capitalism into wealth-based fascism, but all this whataboutism and strawmanning Democrat voters as believing Kamala was going to single-handedly save democracy is disingenous. It was never “Plan A”. It was one minor, marginally better compromise in the collective of shit we should be doing.

What an insane take. If both sides are equal on one completely undefendable thing, then you vote based on other issues. One of the two parties are going to be in power at the end of this election cycle, regardless. Both are permitting genocide, and it’s a fucking problem, meanwhile only one of those parties are actively working to strip the people’s right to do something about that.

All this “both sides” bullshit feels disingenuous. If you were really concerned, you’d be focused on paths to solutions, rather than focusing strictly on trying to devalue Democratic votes. I certainly don’t see any path to stopping this genocide that starts with permitting a Trump presidency.

Fucking real, though. The cultural group responsible for checks notes “shaming people who have the wrong bubble color in texts”?, suddenly think they’re the one’s being unjustly preached to? The joke in this image is not the one OP thought they were making.

Second. The guillotine.

I hope this is a joke. North American economy has been in a downward spiral for the past 4 years.

It doesn’t matter. Convservativea cannot accept the notion of a “good weird” because it removes all justification from their beliefs. The whole conservative belief system is founded on the notion that there is an effective normal and that normal must be protected from those that would upset it.

They cannot say they’re the “good kind of weird”, because that means admitting that weird can be good. And if weird can be good, they have no ground to plant the roots of their beliefs in. They have to be normal, because if they’re weird, all the time they spent attacking others for being weird in the defence of what’s normal doesn’t make any sense. Calling themselves the good kind of weird is a complete 180 on what it means to be conservative and alienated a massive portion of their voting base who only vote conservative because they see people who are “just like them”, not weirdos who are willing to redefine sex and gender, or question historical narratives.

The “weird” angle of attack has been so effective because it deconstructs the very notion of what it means to be a conservative. Giving them an out through the “good kind of weird” doesn’t change that.

Imo, the neat thing about this current “weird” discourse is that only right-wingers could ever find it genuinely insulting. Any sensible, self-actualized human being who isn’t obsessing over the sex and genetalia of others is like “haha, yeah, I am kinda weird”.

But the right wing is built on the misconception that they are “normal” and everything else is a problem. They’re the only ones that could ever be bothered by being told they’re weird, because it deconstructs the very foundation of their beliefs. Without the core of “we are normal and everyone else is causing problems in our normal society” backing up their every decision to threaten others over the religon, sexuality or life choices of others, they instead have to face reality: it’s normal to be a little weird, and it’s normal for some of that weird stuff to take root and become normal. And to refuse it and obsess over it is, in its own way, kinda weird.