Israel declares War - Destruction of Gaza / Growing conflict in Middle East

[getback]

Ya'll seem to forget there's corporations and figures in the shadows running #$%^ BEHIND the scenes that are connected to BOTH parties, red and blue, and makes no difference for them who won.

Pretty sure everyone knows this

 

[DLF]

The only alternative I can think of is Tiktok but it's less real-time updates and more opinions. Reddit is trash with pseudo intellectuals who are very opinionated.

sounds like the politics thread

 

[DLF]

The only alternative I can think of is Tiktok but it's less real-time updates and more opinions. Reddit is trash with pseudo intellectuals who are very opinionated.

for now, X>>

 

[Public Enemy]

I am even beginning to believe the Dems set it up for Trump to win, and the Dems started the genocide, knowing Trump was going to continue it.

 

[gry60]

We're responsible for nothing. Everything is a conspiracy.

 

[Methodical Management]

Are some of ya'll SERIOUSLY getting on DLF because of using X/Twitter since now Elon is in Trump's cabinet and comparing that to him criticizing the Dems and choosing not to vote for them?

What kind of moral absolutism and comparison is this?

You’re welcome to quote and address me directly if you’d like.

Unless you’re referring to someone else, I believe you’re missing my point.

Remember when you were urging people to stop shaming voters? It wasn’t that long ago:

In regards to voting, ya'll can vote for who you want and I do not know why there is this shaming voters which party to vote for as we do not live in a liberatory or fully and authentic democratic system

Despite looking up to you, DLF has decided to ignore this, as he’s done nothing but spit on those who - like him - have been forced to choose from imperfect options.

He implies that those who tried to block Trump are “hypocrites” without taking stock of his own choices.

That’s the point. In defending Twitter, he’s made the same “both sides” “lesser of two evils” arguments he’s used to try and pretend that helping to elect Donald Trump was somehow the only ethical choice.

Talk about moral absolutism.


DLF is hardly alone in being largely unaware of this conflict prior to 10/7/23. Tens of millions of people found themselves shocked and horrified by what happened that day, and ever since. So not only are they justly outraged by the mass murder of an extremely vulnerable and deliberately entrapped civilian population, but they are also catching up on decades of oppression. They want to learn more, they want to do more, but they’re also embarrassed about their prior obliviousness/ignorance - and so many of them look to social media for cues to try and get up to speed, fit in, and find community/purpose at a time when it would be all to easily to feel exasperatingly powerless.

And while social media has helped lift the fog in some instances, providing direct, on the ground information and citizen journalism akin to what helped disprove some official accounts and media narratives about police brutality incidents and protests in the United States, it has also provided grifters with the opportunity to exploit catastrophe for their own selfish ends. (Many of them White Nationalists and Russian shills.)

While he was trying to get up to speed, DLF was cautioned about people like Jackson Hinkle, but he would hear none of it. He wanted on the ground reporting and didn’t want to hear anything about the backgrounds of those who curated it for him. In recent months, he seems to have managed to identify a few grifters and misinformation spreaders, and is probably embarrassed to have promoted some of them, as he is embarrassed to have relied on CNN for most of last year.
I suspect that, in the future, he’ll come to feel similarly about some of his recent sophomoric behavior.

In its pursuit of engagement, algorithmic social media rewards outrage farming. (Twitter rewards it financially, through “revenue sharing.”) Sometimes people - especially those who are overcompensating to distract their wannabe peers from the fact that they’re privileged neophytes - mistake positions that generate the most outrage for those that are the most “pure” or “hardcore.”

We’ve all seen what happens when people cloister themselves away in self-reinforcing echo chambers. They often become internally hierarchical preening competitions with no tolerance for introspection and no real praxis aside from endless posturing.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of attempting to exist in an activist space alongside a coffee shop revolutionary in their smug Che Guevara t-shirt phase, who read Capital for an Econ class and made it their entire personality for two years before joining a private equity firm, then you understand the fatigue some of us are feeling with DLF’s recent antics.


If you don’t think “moral absolutism” and “purity politics” are helping anyone on the ground, then what is the value of spiking the football at a time when Trump and Netanyahu are hurtling towards a policy of annexation and claiming those who sacrificed in attempt to prevent the worst case scenario through electoral means were ackshyually supporting genocide?

For the record, does anyone here still think that Palestinian people deserve this - or only the people harassing our team from the outside after getting banned?

Who is helped by terminal “nothing matters” doomerism?
For what it’s worth, I don’t find “I told you so” posts to be particularly worthwhile, either. The focus should be on what we can do, not wallowing in nihilism.


I know this is not some distant abstraction for you, and I should hope you realize that many of those who chose to include, rather than abandon, political engagement are likewise motivated by a deep, personal connection. I expect that quite a few people who participate in this thread will experience - and have in some cases already experienced - some form of harm as a result of this election. That ought to be respected.

Everyone here lives with a degree of relative privilege. We are not “in the trenches, covered in blood,” but none of us can claim to have spotless hands, either, when contemplating what our tax and consumer dollars have contributed towards, or the many bodies treated as fertilizer for economies in which we participate.

Each of us has to make the best decisions we can - and not all of us have access to the same options.


Don’t make perfect the enemy of good. Don’t make good the enemy of better.

 

[Methodical Management]

I am putting an effort to search up effective alternatives now. Already disabled my meta accounts so X and Tiktok are the only ones I can depend on but they're two very different platforms and X is the one I see journalists using while Tiktok are more summaries by...well...Tiktokers.

If I do find a better alternative I will update it here and will gladly delete my X account.

Public Enemy and I had a discussion about this recently, as he wanted to know what more NikeTalk could do as a platform.

I’ve never had a personal Twitter account and we haven’t accessed NikeTalk’s Twitter account since Musk’s takeover. It basically only exists so that it can’t be seized by some basement-dweller for crypto spam. The platform we use has Twitter/FB share links by default, but we’ve tried to tear all those out. On mobile, OS-integrated sharing options are out of our control.

That leaves support for embedded content - and that’s not a step I currently favor. I generally prefer persuasion over coercion, and even if we were to try and sabotage our own software (which has a lot of downstream technical consequences) to impose this choice on others, users could still take and post screen shots of Twitter as they used to on the Huddler and Yuku platforms.

We know that any platform derives its true power from its users. Most people use Twitter because most people use Twitter. I don’t personally know anyone who feels like it has some inherent merit as a platform. It’s rotting, but most people won’t leave until another platform has already achieved critical mass.

If you’re waiting for some of your favorite personalities/accounts to leave, one think you can do - which Public Enemy is doing - is to reach out to them to make that suggestion.

There’s no practical reason why these accounts can’t post to a different platform. If the policy environment of something like BlueSky is somehow prohibitive, there are open source, self-hosted options like Mastodon out there. Smaller groups can set up group texts on Signal or a Revolt instance.

This is why NikeTalk exists: those of us on an early Internet message board for sneaker fans were fed up with the constant harassment by White supremacists, trolls, frauds, and porn-posting misogynists who sought to claim or poison our budding community. While many of us commiserated, Nelson C went out, found a platform that met our moderation needs, and set up a forum. That was almost 25 years ago.

You don’t have to outcompete trillion dollar corporations to set up pockets of resistance or sanctuary.



Everyone has different time/resources/skills at their disposal, so not all of us are equally empowered, but neither are we strictly powerless.

If you can no longer vote with your ballot, we can still vote with our wallets and our patronage.


I appreciate that you’ve been making the effort to explore your options, and if you’d like it to take a step further I’d be grateful if you’d to reach out to others and encourage them to do the same.

 

[DLF]

great listen on the amsterdam incident



i know. i know

google owns youtube.

i’m a terrible human.

 

[TURBO UNO]

I appreciate everyone posting vids on the subject in here. A lot of it isn’t talked about on the tv news channels..

 

[DLF]

two cheeks of the same ***

 

[DLF]

what we do without social media

in early 2000s. all we had was cnn to tell us things like WMD..

 

[degenerate423]

 

[Belgium]

Are some of ya'll SERIOUSLY getting on DLF because of using X/Twitter since now Elon is in Trump's cabinet and comparing that to him criticizing the Dems and choosing not to vote for them?

What kind of moral absolutism and comparison is this?

At least use of X/Twitter is to support accounts that are actually anti-genocide and bringing in and exposing the truth, even if it is owned by a psycho capitalist looney white nationalist now in Trump's cabinet. What if he may eventually choose to move to another platform eventually?

As a Palestinian, I use X/twitter too because of WORK, and also because it is mainly one of the platforms that has many pro-Palestinian accounts and news about Gaza that have built a following. There's also ENGAGEMENT, and discussions on X by reknown experts and influencers different than other platforms.

But, I have started to look into Telegram, but regardless for now I still have to use X/Twitter for work as they are on there.

Compared to awhole political party that has done nothing, but is brutally murdering, abetting and supporting a genocide in Palestine.

Are ya'll serious right now? As Dems and Liberals, ya'll really need to reflect on yourselves. Don't lecture ANY of us on ethics, because you don't have any moral righteousness to stand on by supporting The Empire by VOTING for them.

I’m not a big fan of the X/Twitter comparison but I do agree with the overall thesis about DLF

Hypothetically if Palestine was the sole issue someone considers for voting, I do not believe there is any scenario where voting third party or abstaining isn’t extremely ignorant.


A Demorat presidency is undisputably a lesser evil when it comes to Gaza. It doesn’t even require the most rigorous research to figure that out, and the Israeli government (especially Netanyahu) has made it abundantly clear they want Trump because he will be more favorable to Israel’s genocide and annexation goals.
With the above information, the most favorable path to help Gaza is as straightforward as 1+1.

Before I continue, I should note that I have a mostly nonexistent sense of emotional empathy and I’m aware my position on this is very harsh.
I do not feel anything from the horrific images/videos coming out of Gaza, just like I felt nothing when I immediately demanded to sign a Do Not Reanimate form for my dad as soon as I got the news he slipped into a coma. He was bound to die “imminently” anyway so signing the DNR form was an easy logical decision. The logic behind that decision was that killing him off asap would prevent potential additional pain/suffering if he were to wake up.

With that background in mind:
If some US elligible voter had family members killed in Gaza, I would view it as egregiously ignorant to not use your voting rights to try and elect a president and Congress that will undisputably be less bad than the alternative.
I would at least find abstaining or third party voting understandable for people with a direct interest in the conflict. I’d still strongly disagree but emotions tend to cloud proper judgement, and obviously it’s understandable that someone with a direct personal interest would feel very conflicted by having to vote for a candidate who funded genocide. Even despite the goal of helping to prevent the election of Netanyahu & co’s dream candidate.


I can’t say the same for armchair activists like DLF who, in his own words, mostly watched CNN occasionally before October 7th. To date he still hasn’t been able to formulate a single argument as to how helping to elect Netanyahu & co’s dream president is the best option to help Gaza.

I can understand and to some degree respect whatever election decision someone in the position of me love nutella made.

On the other hand, I have absolutely zero respect for an armchair activist like DLF who proudly did Netanyahu’s bidding and proceeds to morally grandstand while refusing to engage in any substantive discussion about the (absence) of logic behind his decision.
I’m sure my very harsh view on voting third party or abstaining is something many would disagree with (including Methodical Management for example) because I strip any emotional or personal attachments from the argument and reduce it to a simple matter of logic.

DLF previously admitted to not really being informed on general news, politics, … before October 7th.
Therefore it would be fair to assume we’re not talking about someone with some link to the conflict other than a general humanitarian concern (correct me if I’m wrong). In other words, he is not bound by the burdens people with more direct link to the conflict have.

He has all the information he needs at his disposal, yet ignores all of it, has routinely fabricated baseless “zionist” accusations and can’t or won’t even produce a single substantive argument to support why helping to elect the dream candidate of Israel’s genocidal government is better for the Palestinians.

And no, “I’d have to vote for a contributor to genocide” is not a proper defense.

Instead, DLF operates in a fantasyland where voting for the least unfavorable outcome for the Palestinians is too much to ask.
Plenty of brave Palestinian and Arab voters voted for a Democrat presidency and were able to endure the difficulty of voting for a contributor to genocide in order to try to prevent an even more unfavorable outcome for the Palestinians.

People with personal ties to the conflict were able to see the forest past the trees despite the burden of intense emotions’ capacity to cloud rational thinking, but apparently the same is too much to ask of some privileged American who, prior to October 7th, had little to no awareness of the many deaths and horrific treatment throughout decades of the Palestine/Israeli conflict.

To be clear, Trump would still have won even if you reallocate third party voters to the Dems but that should not give those voters a free pass.

If someone voted third party or abstained, fine. What’s done is done. However for someone to then morally grandstand from their position of privilege and refuse to accept the reality that the only benefactors to that decision are Trump and especially Netanyahu is well worthy of criticism and contempt in my view.

 

[Moheezy]

Public Enemy and I had a discussion about this recently, as he wanted to know what more NikeTalk could do as a platform.

I’ve never had a personal Twitter account and we haven’t accessed NikeTalk’s Twitter account since Musk’s takeover. It basically only exists so that it can’t be seized by some basement-dweller for crypto spam. The platform we use has Twitter/FB share links by default, but we’ve tried to tear all those out. On mobile, OS-integrated sharing options are out of our control.

That leaves support for embedded content - and that’s not a step I currently favor. I generally prefer persuasion over coercion, and even if we were to try and sabotage our own software (which has a lot of downstream technical consequences) to impose this choice on others, users could still take and post screen shots of Twitter as they used to on the Huddler and Yuku platforms.

We know that any platform derives its true power from its users. Most people use Twitter because most people use Twitter. I don’t personally know anyone who feels like it has some inherent merit as a platform. It’s rotting, but most people won’t leave until another platform has already achieved critical mass.

If you’re waiting for some of your favorite personalities/accounts to leave, one think you can do - which Public Enemy is doing - is to reach out to them to make that suggestion.

There’s no practical reason why these accounts can’t post to a different platform. If the policy environment of something like BlueSky is somehow prohibitive, there are open source, self-hosted options like Mastodon out there. Smaller groups can set up group texts on Signal or a Revolt instance.

This is why NikeTalk exists: those of us on an early Internet message board for sneaker fans were fed up with the constant harassment by White supremacists, trolls, frauds, and porn-posting misogynists who sought to claim or poison our budding community. While many of us commiserated, Nelson C went out, found a platform that met our moderation needs, and set up a forum. That was almost 25 years ago.

You don’t have to outcompete trillion dollar corporations to set up pockets of resistance or sanctuary.



Everyone has different time/resources/skills at their disposal, so not all of us are equally empowered, but neither are we strictly powerless.

If you can no longer vote with your ballot, we can still vote with our wallets and our patronage.


I appreciate that you’ve been making the effort to explore your options, and if you’d like it to take a step further I’d be grateful if you’d to reach out to others and encourage them to do the same.

There's a lot to decipher here so I am going to try to respond the best way possible:

• It's definitely good to understand what more you can do as a platform, but the first thing that came to my mind was why? What problems are you trying to solve trying to do more and what are you trying to achieve?
  • Are you looking for more growth in the platform and you have seen stagnation in recent years? Or are you noticing a shrinking userbase? Or are you trying to penetrate into a new market/ audience?
  • I personally have no issues with Niketalk and I actually like that its a pretty tight-knit community
  • I also hate that other platforms are meant to instil addictive habits to keep you engaged with the platform while NT doesn't do that as much.
  • I feel like other platforms trying to do more to compete with one another only ends up with all those platforms being the same (even youtube has shorts now).
  • If anything, Niketalk can double down on those niche communities that do have similarities with the current communities and introduce them. In a way, that gives a bit of "crowd control" instead of opening it up to the masses and end up being another Reddit becoming an echo chamber of psuedo intellectuals
  • I personally see Niketalk as more of a Slack/ Discord than a Twitter/ Instagram where it thrives on finding niche communities
• As far as Twitter as a platform, I 100% agree with you that is has 0 merit as a platform. in fact it has become trash since the Musk acquisition and has lost billions of dollars worth of value since then. It's just that's where the audience still is for people who need to reach out to the masses.
  • The Palestinian people as an example. No one ever saw their point of view and the Western media coverage has been nothing short of biases and dehumanizing. Twitter, Tiktok and instagram were the only platforms that could reach a world wide audience and only now perspectives are finally changing. Even with Twitter and Meta's attempts to suppress anti-Israeli content, it was still the most effective platform to reach out the a wider audience.
  • People facing oppression and genocide cannot go to niche sites to tell their stories, they need the mainstream platforms.
  • Where us as consumers of this content are all different and with all the noise out there and fake news, appreciate content that filters out all the noise and focus on what is really happening.
• In terms of what DLF 's decision with voting, I understand how tough it is to make a decision, it's one thing to talk about it on paper, it's another when you see your own family dying over there (I had my extended family completely erased from the face of the earth, an entire family gone after following the IDF 's direction to enter a safe zone).
  • Voting for the status quo is a really tough pill to swallow, but looking back, it should been the same strategy as BDS where efforts needed to be unified and strategic which I think it wasn't. And the reason it wasn't was because Kamala made it clear that the genocide will continue.
  • I don't know what I would have done if I were American tbh. But as a Canadian, I still face the issue of voting for three completely incompetent parties next year

All in all, I appreciate DLF posting this filtered content here as it allowed me to remove myself from instagram and to a lesser extent twitter while still being informed.

I know a black CEO who did not speak out at all after Tryvon Martins death and he said that he cannot speak out because he was never outspoken about these matters and didn't want to look like a hypocrite.

I personally thought that was a cowardly move and lost a ton of respect from him. I do think it's a dangerous mentality and even if you only started right now, continue to speak out because it does make a difference and I do wish the DLF continues to post content here even if it's from a platform owned by a lunatic. Hopefully we find other platforms that are just as effective, I've been asking around but no luck so far.