I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we’ve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.

  • Claiming to be leftists
  • Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
  • Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
  • Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
  • Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”
  • Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
  • Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they’re accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It’s a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we’re missing ideological parasites in our midst.

This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it’s extremely effective.

Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?

By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we’re giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.

We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it’s why they’re targeting us here.

Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    This is and clearly never was just talking about the problem in the abstract.

    Sure it is. “There are people in these comments who are in the grouping I’m talking about” is quite similar to “there are people on Lemmy who are in the grouping I’m talking about.” In both cases, we’re talking about the problem without starting an unproductive and maybe-totally-wrong accusation against any single specific person.

    none of their comments in here are doing the behaviors OP describes

    Again, I don’t really want to single out any specific person, since there’s no way to be completely sure and there’s so much overlap between someone who is doing propaganda and simply someone who is arguing in bad faith. And what’s the point of starting the big argument that will surely ensue. I will say, though, that there is someone in these comments who I replied to who is exhibiting some of the behaviors OP described pretty much to a T.

    That doesn’t look to me like “a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving”, it looks like you’re absolutely just using this as a broad net to attack people who disagree with you.

    Look through my history. How many times (for whatever timeframe you have time and inclination for) have I disagreed with someone, and how many of those times have I chosen to “attack” them in this way?

    I actually agree with some of the people who I believe are these accounts, on some things. They tend to be stridently pro-Palestinian for example, which I think is a way to give themselves cover. Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can “attack” the viewpoint I agree with? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s an example of what I’m talking about with “ways of behaving” that are separate from the viewpoint, without needing to accuse any specific person to explain myself.

    I can’t make you agree with OP, and of course you are not required to. But you seem to be extremely persistent, here, in interpreting something OP is saying which has some widespread agreement as obviously that they are saying some other, different thing.