Well the election ended so there’s nothing to argue about right now

I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that’s basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I’m pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn’t give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that’s not exactly helpful either.

I’m a Gen Z male, from what I can tell it seems like older generations tend to rely more on cable or traditional news outlets while younger generations tend to get their news from social media platforms like Instagram. Cable news tends to be more corporate and “normal”/consistent, while Instagram tends to feed news from a larger variety of sources that tend to be more anti-corporate and radical, but those sources also tend to optimize for very short bursts to get the point across quickly so the user can quickly move on to the next piece of news, and there’s also quite a bit of low effort content and reposts and misinformation and that sort of stuff. So I think it’s social media that’s the main driving factor in causing Gen Z to be more radical - which in some ways is a good thing since they have more awareness of the events in Palestine (and radical leftism is based), but the platform can also put them into far-right fear-mongering bubbles and cause serious problems.

I’m also a Gen Z male, raised in an evangelical household at a Christian school that supported Christian nationalism, and was supposed to be a strong conservative Christian but ended up turning into an atheist socialist instead. It’s kind of funny to read that Gen Z is going radical right when for me it was the opposite.

Some things I would caution here for clarification:

Matrix is known to leak metadata and has weaker E2E encryption than other E2E encrypted platforms.

Signal is better than most platforms for one-on-one messaging (can also be used for larger groups but doesn’t have channels) but it has shady requirements like requiring a phone number and requiring an Android or iOS device (doesn’t support less corporate OSes like Linux as primary device) and the desktop application message storage not being secure (largely a desktop OS problem since their security tends to be horrible, but Signal could add more protections and doesn’t), and other weird things like requiring proprietary libraries and not having fully FOSS builds and crypto stuff. It’s not anonymous meaning theoretically the Signal backend could link sender IP addresses to exact recipients which is just enough data to be useful to intelligence agencies if Signal happens to be compromised (which they have received government funding in the past and suspiciously stopped updating their backend repo for like a year not too long ago). Signal is fine for the average person, but I’ve seen political activist groups use it and act like they’re anonymous and I would be very careful in that situation. Otherwise if you know people that use Signal it’s still better than most platforms, I would recommend using the Molly client which is actually FOSS and has more security features than the official Signal client.

Cwtch looks like the overall best alternative (edit: actually it’s not on F-Droid which is weird) to Signal since it is decentralized, doesn’t require a phone number, has all of the main encryption features Signal has, and has an option for running a server to reduce battery life and increase message delivery reliability. Briar is similar and works over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi making it a decent option for protests (if you even bring a phone). SimpleX Chat looks better than Signal as well since it doesn’t require a phone number. Also XMPP which is decentralized and self-hosted but it requires a server setup. I haven’t really used either of these platforms though so I can’t attest to whether they actually work well.

Lemmy and Mastodon are not private unless you are very careful in signing up for a public instance and not revealing your identity, assuming the instance you sign up for even allows that. However, they aren’t run by corporations with shady agendas which is the most important part.

Genocides? Concentration camps? Racial discrimination and dehumanization? Israel has all of these things and Biden is propping it up. If that isn’t fascism then what is?

Fascism was already in America the moment Biden gave Israel funding for the genocide and the Democrats threw all sorts of social issues under the bus. “Not fascism” in the current state of the country was not a choice, the only difference was how fast fascism would accelerate. The Democrats chose to make their platform boring in favor of donors and lose, and the fact that so many people support Trump shows that this country has much bigger problems than just that Trump was elected. This is a problem that needs much more than just voting to fix.

No, the blood is on liberals who allow the Democrats to support a genocide and get away with it without losing their votes to an anti-genocide candidate. Also on the Democrats for making their platform regressive and boring in favor of their donors so people lose interest in them and they lose.

So it’s the leftists fault for not voting hard enough between two pro-genocide candidates. What were we supposed to do to vote against the genocide, vote third party?

and move where? to another country electing fascists?

I’m really nervous about losing my already barely accessible healthcare since my medication is extremely expensive

Firstly, I never told anybody to not vote for Kamala, what I have done is explain why people aren’t voting for her and why she’s a shitty candidate.

Secondly, what I described above are different situations. These are products of flawed systems, the products themselves are not inherently bad and are necessary for survival which is why they exist and why people use them. But because the systems are flawed, there is all sorts of fucked up stuff going on behind them. The products themselves have no power to fix the system, and most individuals don’t either without a coordinated effort, unless they are exceptionally powerful.

Kamala, on the other hand, would be one of those exceptionally powerful people that - by working with other politicians - can fix these systems, yet she chooses not to. And one of the reasons for that is because a large portion of her voter base doesn’t give a shit at all about the rights of anyone but themselves and their friends, shows no interest in improving them, and even dehumanizes people being oppressed by them, so she knows she can get away with keeping the oppressive systems in tact and the voter base will still support her.

In order to fix oppression, we need to focus not on the products of the systems but on the systems themselves. And how we fix the systems is by someone who is willing to fix them gaining power. Kamala and the Biden administration have demonstrated that they have no interest in fixing the systems, that is why leftists are trying to raise awareness of these problems and are putting pressure on the Democrats and the voter base to change their stances on these problems.

Do you pay taxes? You could choose to just go to jail instead. Do you use a device made with slave labor? You could choose to abstain from technology and not post on Lemmy. Do you work for a corporation? You could choose not to help them do shitty things and not get your basic needs met. If you said yes to any of these you are being hypocritical.

Do you live in a city with sane transit? (Also I put more effort into avoiding cars than basically everyone I know where I live, nobody else I know uses a bike.)

I don’t own a car either but unless we improve public transit and city planning in the US there are situations where not using a car is simply impractical. My city is enormous and while my ebike works for shopping trips and getting to places <20mi away, I can just barely reach downtown and back with it before it dies. If it’s pouring rain, it’s not waterproof and it gets me soaked which is both uncomfortable and a health hazard. There are a lot of activities promoted by leftists in my area that I don’t go to because I would be spending 3 hours in transit to get there and back and I simply don’t have time for that (and Uber is too expensive). There are other places that take 3 hours one way to get to on public transit but 20 minutes by car. Where I live is not at all designed with sustainable transit in mind, and while I don’t own a car here I don’t blame people for wanting to use one. Not to mention I have almost been killed multiple times because the cycling infrastructure here is 45mph 6 line roads with no sidewalk or bike lane.

I use lemmyverse.net for finding communities

If supporting Kamala is your definition of a leftist echochamber you clearly haven’t browsed Lemmy much

Yes I’ve met lots of those people

Same here on Kagi and DDG except it wasn’t at the top

$20 = $140

-$20 -$20

0 = $120

/120 /120

$ = 0