Stage 2:
Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?
I liked that about the comic.
Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it’s not true love. You’re not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it’s a “failed” relationship.
The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.
Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can’t stand each other anymore.
I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.
Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.
Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.
Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.
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But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”
Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.
Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)
Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go
Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don’t have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.
Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won’t roll, after all, liberal means “live and let live.”
As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I’m not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be “the left.”
Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.
Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.
I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.
Man, I remember when the “Tea Party” (what became the Freedom Caucus, then MAGA) was laughed out of the room by the vast majority of people, and Sarah Palin, who, it is rumored, can still see Russia from her house in Alaska, was not idolized but ridiculed to the point where movies like “Iron Sky” spoofed her with clueless villain characters. Good times.
Um, no? You can vote and push for change at the same time.
Imagine half of the people in the room wants shrimp pizza, which you happen to detest. Yet you’re exclusively dunking on and shouting at the mushroom group to keep it shut and stop suggesting mushrooms. Well?
You could do both. Keep the fascists out and actively pressure the Democratic Party to move left. These memes don’t do that though.
So, like,
I wonder what their idea of the outcome is.
Tankie: “I convinced 20 Democratic Party voters to stay at home (and did the same for 0 Republican Party voters). Wait until Democratic politicians see that more voters favored the far right party. Then they’re going to move left and fall on their knees and beg me to forgive them.”
(Cue scene: swastika-adorned tanks rolling past the window)
“Stupid liberals, unwilling to fight the fascists like us true leftists.” (Watches tanks and twiddles thumbs.) (Fetches keyboard.) “Let’s tell everyone online that it’s their own fault and they deserve this.” (Sudden sound of harsh knocking on front door.)
At best, their actions will “only” cause another grid-locked presidency where progressives can’t get their reforms to pass (which will then be used as the reason to abandon the likely last line of non-violent defense against fascists).
If you’re wondering about the downvotes:
I think @pacrist quoted tankie statements there to show how they’re aiding fascists (should have prefixed it with “things tankies say” or so).
A subgroup of people on the left who believe in communism and mostly hold pro-Russia and pro-China views, while often having a “doomer” mentality in regard to the US.
Unfortunately, that has them made very susceptible to Russian propaganda, to the point where they’re now doing the bidding of Russia and helping fascists rise to power.
The mechanisms are similar to MAGA. They’ve disconnected from classical media and their echo chambers censor posts that highlight positive developments in the US or posts critical of Russia/China. Once inside, their world view collides with the outside and it’s hard to get out again. Similarly to Russians and Republicans, they vilify liberals (“liberals are complicit in xy”, “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”, “Marx warned liberalism inevitably leads to fascism”, etc.).
On here, they’re largely the people dissuading US Democratic Party voters from turning out, via “both sides bad” and recently via claim-to-purity (I’m sure you’ve encountered one of those “genocide joe” posts, which are kinda awkward, since tankies commonly support/deny China’s genocide on the Uyghurs and Russia’s genocide on Ukrainians).
Theistic Satanists
These would be the (mostly imaginary) ones that conservative Christians are fearmongering about. They’d believe the actual devil exists and that by serving him, they could gain something.
Atheistic Satanists
The kind that is pulling this stunt to fight for religious freedom. Specifically, The Satanic Temple. Their “commandments” are secular compassion, empathy and justice.
Amusingly, the biblical Satan seemed to value many of those things. Freedom (“non serviam” / “I will not serve”), Reason (apple from tree of knowledge in paradise), and perhaps Self Reliance and Equality (in some variants of the creation myth, Adam has a divorced first wive named Lilith who gave him the middle finger when he pulled that alpha male malarkey)
Not seeing it, sorry.
Perhaps it’s just my subjective experience, but to me it looks pretty much other way around.
Visiting Lemmy from lemmy.world, liberal-bashing seems a bit like a folk sport for leftists in most threads that touch current world politics.
Well, meme, not just not voting, but actively using their energy to attack their allies and help fascism spread.
To my disappointment, all I see from the self-appointed “real left” are people stubbornly trying to get US members to stop voting for the Democratic Party. And dunking on liberals ten times before they say one bad thing about reactionaries.
There could be so much good tankies could do, but instead, they aid the fascists. They treat the ongoing genocide as a just a convenient issue to drive a wedge between progressives. When China was committing genocide on the Uyghurs, tankie spaces on Reddit were talking it down and passing around Chinese propaganda memes. The ongoing genocide by Russia in Ukraine seems fine, too, if not even largely met with approval.
I hope some of those pulled into this web and led astray will yet wake up and use their energies for something positive. For example, there are already states that have adopted ranked choice voting, which will let everyone vote, even for a fringe party, without risking a fascist takeover. It will show, black on white, how many progressives there are that would want politicians to move left. If it was to kick off, it is almost guaranteed to topple the current status quo.
Do you know what we get to see of this “actual left” around here?
Not organizers trying to set up a demonstration in Washington. Not people linking to websites explaining how to mail your governor or the white house with suggested text passages. Not activists recruiting stunt performers to make some artistic display that will get reported in the press. Not people trying to aid the resistance within Israel itself.
All we see is people trying to dissuade the non-fascists from voting.
Fascist Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine is completely masked out. In online spaces held by Marxist-Leninists, aka tankies, fascist Russia is even elevated to be the good guy, with mods deleting dissent. During China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, tankies posted Chinese propaganda memes trying to keep their communities supportive of China.
German anti-fascists had a name for such people. Collaborators.
These “don’t vote” posts always do the same shtick, too, attacking and blaming liberals (hint: Marx actually admired liberalism), while claiming some true, real, actual left is much better (how? are they all John Rambo? Do we have to wait until the shooting starts?). It just doesn’t look very organic, it looks like talking points constantly injected into tankie spaces by Russian propagandists.
I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”
Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!
I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).
This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:
Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.
Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).
For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)
And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):
TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).
They always release their “Creation Kit” which is apparently also what the Bethesda employees use to build the quests and NPCs in their games:
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The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven’t done any modding since the Skyrim days).