Objection

Context

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen says he has met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who immigration officials say was deported by error, in El Salvador on Thursday.

The senator shared a photo with Abrego Garcia at what appears to be a restaurant.

"I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar," Sen. Van Hollen said. "Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return."

https://lemmy.ml/post/28111691/17749466

This is actually insane. Another user was criticizing the New Deal era and brought up a bunch of points, I commented refuting a bunch of their points but describing two of of them, Japanese Internment and the Red Scare, simply as "legitimate criticism."

@[email protected] responded "No they’re not. Those two things were caused by far greater international factors. Like, you know, the 2nd World War."

I cited a commission that found that internment was not caused by a legitimate threat posed by the Japanese but was rather caused by racism and hysteria, and that even Reagan agreed with that conclusion and signed a bill paying reparations to the victims.

Well then the mod responded that I was jumping to "inflammatory conclusions" and "personal attacks" because I assumed that when they said that criticism of internment is not legitimate it meant that they were defending internment. They continued to refuse to explain how else I was possibly supposed to interpret such a claim. I still have no idea. Apparently their stance is, "It's not legitimate to criticize the thing I oppose." If anyone can make sense of that, please enlighten me.

Since they refused to explain, I took a guess that maybe the misunderstanding was that they were interpreting "legitimate criticism" as "damning criticism," like that because a bad thing happened during that era, nothing good came of it at all. I made it clear that this was speculation and that any criticism of interpreting it that way only applied if that's what was happening.

The mod responded by permabanning me, removing all of my comments so they don't show in the modlog, and adding this:

Edit: the other commenter essentially proved that they were just baiting people into inflammatory discussion. They kept resorting to personal attacks and flip-flopped on their position solely to continue arguing. This behavior is not tolerated here. Please report such trolls in the future.

At literally no point did I "flip-flop" my position of "internment was bad, actually." Nor did I "bait" them, unless "criticizing internment is legitimate," is somehow "baiting" someone into saying "no it isn't." By far the most "inflammatory" thing that was said was when they said that criticism of internment was "not legitimate." The "personal attacks" I made were stating the fact that the position they had expressed was to the right of Reagan on the issue, and also making a quip about a .world mod defending the Red scare and Joseph McCarthy.

This seems to be a case of a clear case of PTB, the mod apparently misspoke but because they're a mod they can just ban people for calling them out instead of owning up to it.

Edit: My comments are still visible on kbin.earth (thank you @[email protected]) so I can provide screenshots:

:::spoiler screenshots

context

:::spoiler spoiler

Context:

This comes from a game called "Queen's Wish: The Conqueror," a retro indie RPG. In the game, you play as the third child of the queen of Haven, a large and powerful nation, but up until now you've lived an idle live with little power and few responsibilities. The queen decides to send you off to reestablish control of lost vassals in a remote continent which were abandoned following a major magical disaster.

There are three vassal states and each has two factions who you can choose to support into power, usually one side being more aristocratic and the other being poorer. You also have the choice of how much you actually follow through with your assignment, you can just run around doing your own thing regardless of what the queen wants. But you can navigate a route where you side with the poor while still negotiating agreements as expected of you and feel like it's a "good guy" route. Although the queen would rather you work with the aristocrats, she's satisfied as long as you get either side to win and cooperate, just so long as somebody's keeping the spice flowing, so to speak.

This conversation occurs with a sage/scholar working in one of your forts in that region, who refers to "The Theory of Inevitable Decay." It's missable, but it's a crucial line of dialogue that recontextualizes everything that you're doing. From the beginning, you see a lot of the mess that was left behind and the power vacuum from when the kingdom pulled out before, but then, it sorta seems like you're fixing things, getting rid of bandits and warlords and establishing order, traditional fantasy hero stuff, and with a kinder, gentler hand, even. But even if you as an individual have the best intentions, you're still kind of setting things up in a way that's dependent on a great power a long way away. Haven has its own stuff going on and it probably isn't going to be knowledgeable about the region, interested in it's long-term well-being, or accountable to the people who live there. Sooner or later, it'll get a ruler who doesn't give a shit about a given vassal, and the vassal will fall to ruin - or so the sage suggests.

Anyway sorry I posted this in the wrong comm, this is just an interesting bit of dialogue from a video game with absolutely no relevance to modern day politics 😇

https://youtu.be/VT6LFOIofRE

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Ursula Le Guin

Lots of things are impossible until they happen and become inevitable. The human mind has a tendency to place things in that box that don't really belong there. We can see it in people's personal lives, "Oh, I could never possibly stand up to my parents!" and then they do, and the chips fall where they may. "I could never leave everything behind and move to another country/city" but you take a leap of faith and you make it work. "Oh, I could never become a soldier," but then you find yourself in the trenches and you become one. Humans are far more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for.

But the things that need to happen are things that we have determined rationally. The bias that exists in our minds when there is such a conflict is to ignore reason and evidence and think that we have to follow our self-imposed restraints and limitations, and if that's not enough, well, too bad, maybe it'll still be fine somehow. It is easier to simply pretend a physical problem doesn't exist then it is to confront a psychological barrier - but the physical problem remains whether we acknowledge it or shove it aside.

It is abundantly clear that there is a mismatch between what the US political reality is capable of delivering on and what actually needs to happen, on an increasingly large number of issues. Wealth inequality increases every year, and there is no path to stopping it. Every year we get closer to ecological collapse, heading towards tipping points that will spiral out of control. And of course, the military-industrial complex gets larger and larger, now fueling a genocide with overwhelming bipartisan support.

All of these things need to change, but it is also impossible for them to change. So we have no choice but to do the impossible (see the invisible, row, row, fight the powah). It is impossible that we could convince the democrats to change, they are too attached to their corporate donors. Too bad, we'll get them change anyway. It is impossible that we could build a third party, it isn't viable in FPTP. Too bad, we will build it and make it viable anyway. It is impossible that we could resist the strength of the military and police. It is impossible to organize a general strike. Boycotts can never work. The king would never allow us to have a constitution. Too bad.

The limits of existing political systems have been overcome in the past even when they seemed impossible, and the desperate need for change means that the limits of this one will be too. Shit is headed towards the fan, and things will change, for better or worse. The longer we wait, the more shit will build up. Only by finding a breach in "impossibility" can we start to address any of these problems.

Where will that breach be found? Who knows? All we can do is search for cracks and hit them as hard as we can until we find a way to break the limitations. We can discuss where to focus our efforts and that's a valid and important discussion to have. But we cannot allow the functions of the existing system to limit our efforts to break out of it. You cannot be so concerned about damaging an already sinking ship that you won't rip off a plank to hold on to.

I don't really care who you vote for or don't vote for. Follow your conscience. What's important is that you have your head in the game. What matters is recognizing the the things that what needs to happen is a function of immutable natural laws while what can happen is a function of mortal laws and conventional wisdom. When there is a mismatch, to uphold the ideas of "what can happen" is to reject that "what needs to happen" is actually real, which is no different from thinking you can change the laws of physics by passing a bill in the senate. The "reason" of conventional wisdom must be kicked to the curb in favor of actual reason that says things need to change, and that it's necessary to go beyond the impossible to make it happen.

How would you answer this, and how would you expect Chinese netizens on Xiaohongshu to answer?

I will link to the thread in the comments because I want you to take a moment and think about it first.