Israeli fascism is not a result of democracy…it’s a colonial project born from the pre-war mentality of Europe and the preceding centuries of monarchy and despotism. It is, fundementally, anti-democratic.

Israel and the US are indeed different. The US, regardless of its problems with its right-wing and the right’s support of Israel, is not an apartheid state and there is meaningful internal opposition to the far-right in the US (unlike Israel, or Russia, or China).

You’re trying to conflate democracy and capitalism, which really makes me question your motives.

We can only hope that literally being the ones to be involved in counting the votes and seeing the results for themselves first hand is enough to get them to accept reality.

A long shot, but if these people genuinely believe that there was election interference and they aren’t simply looking to knowingly commit fraud, there’s a chance they might acknowledge the facts in the end if the results really are just undeniable.

Edit: This American Life did an episode back before the 2020 election about an election administrator who basically made it his priority to make the process as transparent as possible so that election deniers could see under every stone and explore every nook of the process.

And I think it both speaks to the power of transparency as an antidote, but is also a bit sad how this guy bends over backwards to accommodate these people and is still treated with suspicion. Really interesting listen and highlights how fair elections really do rest on the shoulders of these lower level workers.

This is illustrative of why I have no faith in Israel to actually behave as a liberal democracy the way its allies pretend it is.

It’s not just that they temporarily have a far-right administration as part of some cycle between liberalism and conservativism, the population itself is overwhelmingly far right and supports apartheid. The only thing that upsets them about what’s happening in Gaza is that the Israeli government clearly doesn’t care about getting the hostages back. The wholesale slaughter of innocent people does not bother most Israelis in the least, many of them see it as a positive.

There is no internal opposition to the far right in Israel, and the country should be geopolitically categorized the same as we categorize Russia, China or any other hardcore authoritarian state. It’s not a democracy.

-Gets punched in the face-

“Mmm, strawberry daqueri!”

“Tont” sounds like a term you look up in Urban Dictionary

Not a great sign, if she’s going to go out of her way cozy up to him it’s back to Uncommitted for me. Certainly don’t want to, but I guess we’ll see if Dems snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with this.

This is why people don’t care about him getting up on stage and rattling off a bunch of progressive policies. This is a massive display of deep dishonesty, why on earth would anyone believe he would do anything he says when he can’t even face the truth about his role in the Gaza genocide?

This is up there with web developers not respecting the Back button.

Fuck you in particular, Microsoft website.

I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia

Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.

Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn’t a country I’d recommend taking tech from either.

Ireland is not comparable to China though, that’s an extreme reach. We’re not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we’re talking about uni-party state control.

I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.

Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled “cia misinformation” by the mods. It’s a throughly compromised instance.

Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.

Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.

Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.

Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it’s not really a question.

European countries aren’t totalitarian states. This isn’t a question of culture, it’s an issue regarding the one and only state power that’s making decisions.

This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country. Yes, there are long histories in China and are (vanishing) diverse cultures in China but that’s irrelevant when talking about the actions of the state, which is all encompassing and overrules culture and diversity every time.

It’s the state that owns and controls these companies, it’s the state that dictates their policy and usage, and since the state is fascist and actively seeking to undermine democracy across the global, it is wise to treat the products of that state as a threat.

Honestly once you sort of realize that you can’t be on the left and also support authoritarianism/fascism (regardless of the label or intent) the factionalism kind of isn’t as troublesome or confusing.

You end up with those who believe in supporting progress informed by rational, current understanding of reality and then you have those who cling to failed ideas the same way conservatives do.

The left can debate solutions and data reasonably without splitting into contradicting camps, people just need to always check and see if they’re actually oriented towards the defining principles of left wing politics; bolstering human rights and well being, strengthening democratic institutions and outcomes using the most current understanding of the world we have available to us right now.

The left, by definition, flexes and adapts to reality to achieve an outcome, conservativism is when people try to bend reality to fit their ideology.

Those “academics” are wrong.

We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].

And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:

"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]

The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.

That kind of makes me a bit more skeptical of Lemmy as a whole if I’m being honest. Not necessarily the instance owners, but the system as a whole.

Ah, you must be talking about Stonetoss the Nazi.

He’s a nazi.

He certainly did give a ton of handouts to corporations with nice sounding names, yeah.

And he offered the GOP every fascist policy they want on border with literally no strings attached. Twice. What a great totally-different-from-republicans guy.

Really knows how to reach across the aisle and be bi-partisan by…-checks notes-…giving the GOP everything they want with no conditions.

If that’s the take away from a Biden loss then totalitarianism really is inevitable in this country because it would indicate that the only party in a position to resist fascism, has refused to ever do so.

I suppose we’ll see, though you’d never catch me betting against neoliberal stupidity.

Imagine if the DNC and liberal media apparatus had supported his presidential campaign instead of doing everything they could to kneecap it.

Really was a massive mistake to push Clinton and the pied piper strategy.