Not gonna cry for him, but not going to break out the crabs and officer-down bouquets either. This is what it looks like when a person who is sensitive and does have a sense of empathy (even if it’s buried too deep to have done any good) is fostered in a culture of fascism and mass sociopathy. He still made a series of evil decisions that he alone is responsible for, but it’s still sickening and sad that had he not been embedded within a society as thoroughly committed to fascism as the entity is, he might have become a decent human being.

I do wish that his latent understanding of the atrocities he was taking part in had steered him towards burning his fellow war criminals to death instead of himself, then facing those consequences though. He could have done a minor but real good and redeemed some small shred of his humanity if he had.

I think it’s the mobile-phone camera version of a double exposure. AI in the sense that it’s the camera software that automatically tries to stitch together a single image from a long exposure of something in motion, probably in low light conditions. Someone who knows more about it correct me if I’m wrong, of course. But I have some images of my (one) cat with two heads like this just from taking a pic of him at dusk with my phone using default camera settings. They weren’t so perfectly and humorously aligned as this one though!

So just to be clear, the graph is not real. It’s not just the flavor text that was added to make it a meme, the lines are just drawn in too. So much about this not believable, like that close to 0 percent of democrats thought it would be a good idea to bomb Iran a day before it was bombed? (Come on, it was much higher than that). And then they polled repeatedly over the next few hours and just over the course of that day it jumped to 25% but then dropped back down to zero after it happened. Yeah, nah.

The sentiment may be correct but to people in the comments taking this as valid information, please consider these kinds of things more carefully.

They’re not though! At all! This is about protecting themselves from reprisal, not shame.

I’m glad you said this. I’ve mentioned it before but I am definitely one of these people who will often search hexbear for past information. I have (diagnosed) memory issues and will often be able to hold onto vague memories of something happening but not the important details so I like to check back on things like old threads.

And just in general, I will wonder about things like what were people’s thoughts on a given issue here say 3 or 4 years ago? And then it turns out, who knows, these two threads with a couple hundred comments discussed it, but they’re just bare bones among all the “deleted by creator” placeholders. Or I’ll think “Hasn’t some recent struggle session already been had before, how did it turn out then?” But again, it will turn out only a fraction of the comments are visible and the OP is deleted making it impossible to find out. Or there’s a movie I want to watch or a game I want to play, what do my comrades here think of it? Damn, can’t tell, only every 4th comment about it is still there and those makes no sense without the context.

Or even just that i want to learn more on some leftism-related topic. Since I’ve already learned so much here over time, hexbear is still the source I think of when there’s a topic I want to understand better, one that if searched for, all the search engines will make impossible to find accurate information on, with any western means of finding out will be loaded with bullshit and propaganda. And thats where its really sad, because what could have been a great resource has been cleared from the site. For example, I wanted to know more about what leftists thoughts were on the Cultural Revolution, something i didn’t know much about beyond the usual propaganda we hear. I found a couple long detailed threads about it, even a struggle that was undoubtedly fascinating. I say detailed, presumably they were detailed anyway, it seemed like they probably were, from what I could tell from the maybe 1 in 5 comments that were still there. Everything else was “deleted by creator.” Of 200 hundred and something comment thread it was all unreadable really. Ironically there were comments thanking other users for the detailed list of resources they provided, resources I would have consulted if I could. But those resources were of course in a comment made by someone who had since wiped their account. Must have been a fascinating duscussion if i had been there to see it. Some of the deleted comments were made by users I remember and know had really deep and insightful things to say, now all wiped out. It’s always so disappointing.

I understand people’s desire to be careful and have good opsec and don’t hold it against them. But it really does degrade the site and make it so that instead of being the excellent source of leftist information that it could be, it becomes closer to a discord server where the only purpose is the immediate conversations happening in the moment. I can’t help but find that sad. Especially when I don’t think it really does much to improve a person’s opsec anyway. (If any fed or lea in general at any point wants this information on you, they can have it without issue regardless of whether you wiped your account. It might help you keep safer from the regular-people level of fash who might try to dox you or something, but for one, that’s probably not all that likely to happen for the vast majority of posters and even if it does, they can only use the stuff that is really personally about you which you shouldn’t be posting in the first place, but if you do, you can selectively delete just those personal comments rather than your entire account history.)

It’s mostly because of these ressons that for a while I did use archive.ph to save some threads I thought were interesting, or threads I thought had bits of valuable information but were likely to get lost. But the captcha shenanigans the archiver sites require now make it less worth the effort so I haven’t done that for a while. But anyone can go look at those and any other posts that people archived over the years, clearing your account isn’t going to make any difference with that. Especially now with federation, people can archive from different instances so your hexbear post may still be archived, but only on a lemmy.ml url and you wouldn’t know it if you only checked the archive for hexbear urls. That doesn’t make hexbear any more usable as a repository of information (as I would like it to be) but it does mean that deleting your history here may not have the opsec benefit you thought it would. In other words, wiping your account still hurts this site, but doesn’t really do what you hoped when you do it.

In addition to just how wrong this loser is about all of that obviously being around in the 90s too, what really gives away his privilege and almost certainly his bourgeois politics is the line “wealth was something to aspire to not scoff at.” He doesn’t like the fact that wealth disparity is something being discussed and criticized. “In the 90s the poors just looked up to us noble rich folk like they’re supposed to. Not like now where they’re getting all uppity about the well deserving billionaires and complaining about not being able to pay for food and basic shelter. In the good old days they just would have gotten another job and worked harder, so ungrateful!”

Might be neat if, in addition to the chant, dd2idf became a popular acronym kinda like acab.

Or not even a stupid ass one but just some innocent kid out playing around where they were told they’re not supposed to.

20-odd years ago I thought Amy Goodman was the pinnacle of leftism.

Amazing what actually reading Lenin will do to open a person’s eyes to the world.

Some that come to mind that might fit the request:

Shoplifters

Burning (edit: or maybe not since you said no downers. That narrows the field.)

District 9

Good Night and Good Luck (explicitly about red scare shit, but very normie-friendly + George Clooney)

Matewan (similar issues to above, not very subtle)

The Motorcycle Diaries (about Che of course but still just a beautiful film for anyone who isn’t already anticommunist)

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Though that one is very heavy/downer, maybe could still work for the later showing)

But I also want to mention that it’s always a good idea to talk to libs (or just people who aren’t leftists) about the film afterward and emphasize the stuff that was actually leftist. I dont mean blatantly explain to them the left messaging in the film, but just casually mention a left-leaning theme or even relate a scene to something political irl "weird how much <x movie event> reminds me of <y current/historical event>. Because the sad reality is that most “apolotical” people and definitely libs will take the exact opposite message from what was intended, often relating the bad guys to communists (Star Wars’ Empire was the Soviet Union!) or misinterpreting something satrirically critical as being an endorsement (Starship Troopers shows us how important it is to have a strong military!) etc. To be effective with your film choice, you also have to goad them in the correct direction (leftwards) or it will go over their head or have the exact opposite effect.

Here’s an old comment from @[email protected] that I spotted saying the same sort of thing and also includes more suggestions:

The problem with movies that are not explicitly leftist is that wormbrained viewers will misunderstand the message or side with the bad guy. You can’t radicalize somebody with consumption.

dr strangelove - satire of the cold war

they live - I am eating the trash all of the time

starship troopers - openly fascist america begins interplanetary imperialism and starts a war with a bug planet

network (1976) - news network controlled by evil corporation

full metal jacket - in case you ever wondered how films get access to film with military equipment or military bases, the USDoD provides equipment to movie studios in exchange for censoring and propagandizing the script. the USDoD has altered hundreds of films since the early 1900s. if you’ve seen a hollywood film with military equipment, the USDoD probably had their finger in it, including most of the capeshit. full metal jacket was not approved by the USDoD. Kubrick acquired the military equipment from military surplus stores and foreign militaries.

From a strict class analysis perspective, yes. As others have said, their social role is to serve as enforcers of capital, just like cops. They may not have the level of power and reach that cops have and are quite a bit more constrained from doing the serious and egregious things cops do, like murdering people of color with impunity - cops obviously do this, but with grocery store security, that isn’t a systemic issue like it is with cops. So the magnitude of their class treachery is not anywhere near the scale that it is at for cops. But scale aside, the role they play is still one of using force to defend capital and uphold the capitalist order. And that definitionally makes the people from the working class who fill that role class traitors.

There is another caveat though, another one that sets them apart from cops and provides some wiggle room that doesn’t exist for cops. A person can get the job of grocery store security guy, but not actually do the job. The ones who don’t actually do what they signed up for, and knowingly avoid doing what their job description would have them do, these are “the good ones.” I would contend that there are no good cops because any cop that does not fulfill their duty simply doesn’t last as a cop. With cops, as with fascist gangs (same picture I know), if you don’t demonstrate your loyalty to the system and your complete adherence to the blue code of silence, you are immediately ejected (or even killed). as a classic example - he reported other cops for excessive force, it was ruled that he was lying and he was kicked off the force. All that happened long before he… became famous. You don’t get to be a cop if you don’t do cop shit. Not the case with grocery store security, though.

The store security people who actually do their job and play the role they’re supposed to play are traitors, as established. But the ones who are there just to get a paycheck and who purposefully look the other way when someone at the self-checkout is bagging 5 items for every 1 they scan, these ones are fine. They’re not class traitors because they’re actually being a traitor with respect to the job/role of capital enforcer. It really is a double negative sort of thing. 1 minus -1 = 2. There is no grocery store security culture like there is cop culture that prevents this from happening sometimes. Some chud security guys might like to pretend there is, but in actual practice, it’s just not there. So grocery security people have a lot more room to just not do what they were hired to do and in that way, it is possible for someone to get that job and not be a traitor. Unlike cops.

I don’t think they would use a nuke yet either. I agree what you said is the most likely thing to happen at this stage. But the question I was addressing was what the entity meant or what they’re trying to project by saying “we will act alone” if you, Trump admin, don’t do what we want.

edit to add: When I read the “act alone” thing, to me that sounds like they’re saying “we’ll go all the way and use our nukes, so you’d better help us now before we do something that would hurt you as well.” It doesn’t mean that is what they would actually do, but it could be some telling posturing. Even then it’s an open question if saying they’ll “act alone” is really a threat aimed at a genuinely reluctant Trump admin or just something they’re projecting to give the US even more cover to make it look like the poor, calm, rational US is in a tough spot but just has no choice but to strike Iran directly.

Isn’t this a thinly veiled threat they would use a nuke? Not to give the fascists credit for an ounce of intelligence, but since it is so clear to everyone that they have already been “acting” without direct US involvement, to me it sounds like they’re saying they will act by using that one thing they never outright say they have but have been holding over everyone, even their allies, as a threat for decades. Aren’t they saying “we’ll do the ultimate escalation if you don’t escalate by joining us”?

In my experience they’ll usually have a retort for that with some bullshit about “authoritarianism” and how the Soviets were forcing the population to work focused only upon the will of the party. It doesn’t make sense of course, but it doesnt have to, it only has to fit with the narrative they already believe.

There was that post the other day with someone at the protests propping up a sign saying “If Kamala were president, we’d all be at brunch” or something like that. To me, it was very clearly a criticism of the liberals there who would not have cared if a dem were in office, the kind of thing one of us might put on a sign for these protests, but almost everyone commenting on that post was assuming the sign was meant to be taken at face value. The top comment said:

“this place is beyond hopeless. i don’t have the words to describe the despair that these lib “protests” are engendering in me”

That is the kind of doomerist, nihilistic, non-dialectical nonsense that I think OP is addressing here.

When I pointed out that even the olive cocktail cutouts made it obvious it was irony-protesting, I was berated for “giving a white american the benefit of the doubt.” Like wtf, what percentage of this very site is white american again? Some of them are capable of being comrades. It was weird to me how much people in that thread just wanted to think everyone at those protests are the equivalent of .world libs. One of the predominant sentiments on hexbear about the prostests are to be ridiculed and nothing more. That they are worse than ineffective, they are somehow only heling the bourgeoisie. And don’t get me wrong, I am well aware of the many completely valid criticisms of these protests and their inadequacy to effect real change. But the kind of attitude that jack is addressing in this OP is absolutely something that is prevalent here and needs to be addressed.

Apparently there’s a contingent of people here who are happier believing no one outside of their niche internet forums are capable of using irony to laugh at libs. Also especially no cracker can possibly be a leftist and make a sign that ridicules brunch libs (unless they’re one of the crackers on this site which is like 85% mayo). Its almost like a form of except inversed, refusing to see the potential coolness of others and denying that comrades do exist out there who do funny things things offline.

Well first of all, being sorta one myself I’d like to think that every once in a while they are deserving of it, some of them can earn it through past actions. But also, I’m not necessarily even doing that because we don’t know who made that sign, could just as easily be the person behind the camera as the person propping it up or someone else entirely.

Doesn’t matter though, the way I see it that sign speaks for itself whoever made it. I can’t look at it and think it’s doing anything other than pointing and laughing at the brunch libs. And saying that doesn’t feel like I’m being optimistic or generous either, I just don’t think an actual brunch lib would make that sign that way.

Exactly. The brunch thing is too well-known of a criticism for this not to be a self-aware sign. And the little cocktail 🍸 cutouts? Yeah, come on, there’s no way this person isn’t just making fun of the libs.

I gotta be honest, I think this is some irony-protesting. The person who made that sign is being critical of the lib protests and might even fit in on this here bear site.