Mostly on a state level with their relentless crackdown on Abortion, LGBTIQ+ rights and so on, on a nationwide level? Not so much and hopefully this stays so with Trump losing in November.
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Serious The Politics Thread
- Thread starter Oglemi
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Mostly on a state level with their relentless crackdown on Abortion, LGBTIQ+ rights and so on, on a nationwide level? Not so much and hopefully this stays so with Trump losing in November.
I heard some political commentators and people saying that the war in Gaza might hurt Biden's reelection. I find that kind of funny because do people really think Trump would handle it differently? I guess people may just not vote as a protest if that is the most important issue for them. But I think it would be crazy to think that Trump/republicans would handle it differently.
I do wish the US would stop sending financial aid to Israel and stop supporting them militarily. I think this issue in particular is drawn along generational lines more than anything. Boomers love Israel. Gen Z hates Israel. More than any other issue, you can predict someone's opinion on this one by knowing their age.
Even if you count Trump as a "renegade" Republican, which I think it is totally fair to view Trump and Trumpism as different than the Republicans of the Bush era, etc, then all three political parties are united on the Israel issue.
Also makes no sense to me... My dad who is a smart guy supports Israel absolutely. When you ask boomers why they do, they will talk about how Israel is our greatest ally, strategic importance in the middle east, etc.. But part of, if not almost entirely, why we have enemies in the middle east is because we have Israel as an ally. So it feels self-defeating to me. We need to support Israel because they are our strategic ally in the ME, and they help keep our enemies in check ..who are our enemies primarily because we are allied with Israel. Kind of mind boggling stuff.
The point is that your vote is your leverage that you can withhold (or threaten to withhold) to compel your political party to act differently. If people go "well Biden is the lesser evil", he has no incentive whatsoever to change his current policy or acknowledge the discontent in his base. But if Biden knows he might lose Michigan (and possibly the election) because of his stance in Gaza, then he might have an incentive to act differently.
I don't think it should surprise you that committing a genocide hurts a president's re-election chances. It would seem to me that it is a less-than-bare-minimum ethical responsibility to not vote for someone actively and enthusiastically facilitating a genocide. There are many Arabs and Muslims in the United States who take this quite seriously as well, which should not surprise anyone either.
I don't think the framing of this as a generational issue is correct. It's true that younger people are more supportive of Palestine and less supportive of Israel, but there are many many people of all ages who are of course against the United States facilitating a genocide.
As for whether Trump would handle it differently, here is the difference as I see it: I think a large number of democratic voters and 'progressive leaders' who are currently doing little to nothing about this genocide, would be in an uproar and out in the streets on a regular basis if it were Trump doing it instead. So yes, I think it is pretty likely that Trump does win in November. What we can be hopeful about is the possibility that this will motivate some people who are currently apathetic into actually taking action and joining movements that aim to create real change.
I guess I'm accustomed to people believing in a "pragmatic" approach which is that given that Trump and Biden are virtually identical on this issue, you would still vote for the lesser of two evils. I don't have any problems with a protest no-vote, I think its a good sign that people are willing to do that rather than simply clicking the box for whichever person
this is literally just the "I can't tell the difference" meme but redwashed and vague. If you can't tell the difference between a fascist paramilitarist party that actively flirts with neo-Nazis and a milquetoast liberal government that's historically moved on foreign policy at a crawl, you're very simply not the antifascist you think you are. There's no rational justification for this position and it's impossible to look at it any different from that of the "what about antifa!!!" concern trolls.
This really strikes me as a very American (derogatory) take on the situation. Under the Biden administration we've seen the greatest shift against giving Israel free reign in the region among any administration. Same goes for Canada under Trudeau. In my city, "pro-Palestine" student activism is mostly dominated by people who aren't from the Middle East, mostly white (except for one very large Black woman) self-identified communists. A few months ago, these individuals spent an hour crashing a Liberal Party event to lecture a room full of Muslims in the Middle East that they "support genocide." They didn't move anyone on the issue and clearly didn't try to (at one point telling the room "we don't care what you think"). Instead of getting people to talk about Palestine, they ended up shutting down discussion on the subject among attendees ON TOP OF having the people who showed up to actually advocate for Palestine (including myself, which I've been doing for a decade) heckle them for being such shitty activists. It's been months since and these people still don't have a website with more than 20 minutes of effort put in. They're pretending to advocate for genocide victims but can't be fucking bothered to put in any real effort to further any concrete goal for improving life in Gaza. Meanwhile, literally every Palestinian I know except one is VOLUNTEERING for the Liberals because they quite literally have family on the line during the next election.
There's no desire among American "progressives" to incentivise governments to pressure Israel among such people, because when they do, self-proclaimed "progressive" voters punish them instead, entirely because these largely uninvolved Westerners determined it's not enough. What you're saying strikes me as exactly the same as that position. Arab lives are reduced to props in American political discourses, always alternating between being treated as irredeemable terrorists when alive, and their corpses as sources of self-righteous outrage by the same people that demonize them. The American "left" is extremely bad for this, it's not too long ago that every White Progressive With A Podcast was using the same excuses Netanyahu uses to defend Assad. You know who was also bad for it? The people behind Redfish, the Russian media company where you pulled that Malcolm X video from, are EXACTLY the people who did that shit. Where were these people when Assad displaced 200,000 Palestinians? Nowhere to be found, because this it's never been about Palestinian lives.
So not only are we now escalating to accusing Joe Biden of committing a genocide, we're now actively "hoping" that a fascist victory will "motivate" people to "join movements." I'm not going to lie, I'm thoroughly disgusted by this take, which speaks again to my point about Westerners absolutely disregarding the interests of those they've appointed themselves as advocates for, in the self-absorbed pursuit of building a nonspecific "movement" that doesn't exist. If Joe Biden is committing a genocide because he's not doing enough on Gaza, what does that say about you backing a victory for the party whose leaders openly fantasize about glassing Gaza and completely eradicating the presense of Palestinians? If your preference is for Trump to win, you can stop pretending you care about Palestinians.
Quintessentially American-ass take. They literally killed a million people during COVID and tried initiating a paramilitary coup that saw half a dozen people die. They rolled back civil rights to the fucking McKinley era. Several minorities are now the target of violent campaigns aimed at intimidating them and muting civil society responses.
Sorry dude, but if Joe Biden isn't the fascist dictator ruling by fiat that we pretend to be against, he's actually just as bad as the actual fascists [/s]. American political discourse is so poisoned that if everything isn't magically solved in 4 years that there's genuinely a segment of the population that will just entirely abandon any principles or values they pretend to have, because the FEELING of power (specifically, of "punishing the establishment") matters more than any amount of Palestinian life.
Withholding a person's vote has never, ever convinced parties to take the withholders' position. Literally all it does is push parties to attract more reliable swing voters by taking more middling positions. Mark my words, a Biden loss will push the Democratic Party rightward.
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Your post is basically you wildly misrepresenting me, complaining about some very specific group that bothered you personally, and yelling at someone else for simply asking a question.
Not really sure how to address the parts that are directed at me. You claim that I say that it's impossible to tell the difference between the democrats and republicans--not something I said. You claim that I support Trump winning--not something I said. Is it reasonable for you to misrepresent me in this way, and should I feel obligated to respond?
Back in 2020 when many people, possibly including you, supported Biden and said he would be amazing and progressive and that it's absolutely imperative to vote for him, probably 0% of those people predicted that he would end up actively facilitating a genocide. That is something they only would have ever thought Trump capable of. And if Trump had won, and if he was instead the one committing a genocide, as we speak we would be seeing those people in this very thread, crowing about how "biden would have stopped this" and blaming people for not holding their noses and voting for him. Yet, here we are, and in our reality biden did win, and those same people who would have been crying on their hands and knees if trump had murdered palestinians are now defending it because it's biden who's doing it. So, the very benign little point I made there was: at least those people have been exposed. It's a sad thing, it's not exactly a win because there is no winning when your country is actively facilitating a genocide, but at least those people are exposed, will continue to be marginalized forever, and hopefully will never become relevant ever again.
Not really sure how to address the parts that are directed at me. You claim that I say that it's impossible to tell the difference between the democrats and republicans--not something I said. You claim that I support Trump winning--not something I said. Is it reasonable for you to misrepresent me in this way, and should I feel obligated to respond?
Back in 2020 when many people, possibly including you, supported Biden and said he would be amazing and progressive and that it's absolutely imperative to vote for him, probably 0% of those people predicted that he would end up actively facilitating a genocide. That is something they only would have ever thought Trump capable of. And if Trump had won, and if he was instead the one committing a genocide, as we speak we would be seeing those people in this very thread, crowing about how "biden would have stopped this" and blaming people for not holding their noses and voting for him. Yet, here we are, and in our reality biden did win, and those same people who would have been crying on their hands and knees if trump had murdered palestinians are now defending it because it's biden who's doing it. So, the very benign little point I made there was: at least those people have been exposed. It's a sad thing, it's not exactly a win because there is no winning when your country is actively facilitating a genocide, but at least those people are exposed, will continue to be marginalized forever, and hopefully will never become relevant ever again.
I don't get why people say "Democratic Party is UwU small bean, they don't have to do major big things at once, long-term legislation and compromise!" while at the same time believing that the least competent crime boss in America becoming President (again, he's already been it before) will allow him to Prestige into a God Emperor that kills Democracy and gets a 25+ killstreak and Nuke it all forever.
I cannot stress enough that it's grotesque that a media front for a fascist, blatantly white supremacist government's appeal to American liberals would post a video of the Fox Analogy and have that shared by some self-hating liberal to defend their own support for an even worse government for Palestinians. And rationalising that it's okay because they are the REAL self-appointed advocate for Palestinians.
You are literally the person Malcolm X is warning about lmao
There's no way to interpret "What we can be hopeful about is the possibility that this will motivate some people who are currently apathetic into actually taking action and joining movements that aim to create real change" as anything other than hope for a Trump victory. Pretending otherwise is wilfully obtuse, especially after telling everyone you hope the sitting government is "marginalized (sic) forever." You're telling us that some nonexistent movement matters more than preventing a government that will give Netanyahu absolutely unfettered reign in Gaza. It's an unserious position at best and at worst sounds like you're just unsatisfied that you don't get to toy with Palestinians' lives in your hands.
And yeah, i used a local example this time. Would you prefer I lay into Redfish? How about PSL? The DSA IC? God knows there's no shortage of those types in either.
You are literally the person Malcolm X is warning about lmao
He's not fucking facilitating a genocide, he's literally made an entire 180 on US foreign policy on Israel. Stop pretending to care about Palestinians when you can't even approach the issue honestly. It's one thing to say he's not doing enough and another entirely to act as if Joe Biden is personally ordering the IDF.
There's no way to interpret "What we can be hopeful about is the possibility that this will motivate some people who are currently apathetic into actually taking action and joining movements that aim to create real change" as anything other than hope for a Trump victory. Pretending otherwise is wilfully obtuse, especially after telling everyone you hope the sitting government is "marginalized (sic) forever." You're telling us that some nonexistent movement matters more than preventing a government that will give Netanyahu absolutely unfettered reign in Gaza. It's an unserious position at best and at worst sounds like you're just unsatisfied that you don't get to toy with Palestinians' lives in your hands.
And yeah, i used a local example this time. Would you prefer I lay into Redfish? How about PSL? The DSA IC? God knows there's no shortage of those types in either.
Because the Democratic Party isn't undertaking an attempt to shape the US into an autocracy. Y'all pretend that you're against fascism until it comes to demanding Democrats rule an American dictatorship. Aside from the fact that becoming head of state is literally the definition of a successful organised crime figure, this REEKS of that tired American exceptionalist belief that America is uniquely capable of restraining authoritarian leadership.
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Friend, joe biden is widely known by the moniker 'genocide joe' right now. That's not some fringe leftist thing, you can probably go to just about any pro-palestinian march and hear that. So maybe go to one of those, I don't know. Anyway, it is pretty well-known that he is facilitating a genocide and he will 100% go down in history for that.
For you, I guess? If someone else genuinely reads that part of my post and is confused, thinking it might mean i actually support trump and think he is great, please let me know, and I will be happy to clarify for you. I will not clarify for this guy because he is being rude and it feels like he might be intentionally misinterpreting me to try and make me look bad, rather than genuinely wanting clarification.
I feel like your messages here have the idea that establishment Liberals actually hate fascism, or is opposed to fascism in an actual effective sense.
It is not. We are a country that has funded fascists, will continue to, and have brutal policies and protection in favor of corporations rather than our citizens. The Democratic Party is not opposed to fascism, nor is it actually going to or aiming to stop fascism. The Democratic Party represents a "slow it down" party, while the ratchet effect still overall pulls us further closer to fascist tendencies. The reactionary establishment Democrats shoot down more progressive candidates in primaries with super-delegates to force their very unpopular candidate, and then fund campaigns like Trump's hoping that they will have to do nothing positive while going back on almost every progressive position that isn't just defended by doing nothing because the opposition is worse.
For instance, how Biden moves on issues like Immigrants.
You say that Biden is anti-genocide, but I'm sorry, doing nothing now (outside of lip service literally everyone knows will do nothing) while you were just funding it by billions for six months is actually supporting it, and it took an insane amount of pressure to make him back down only a little bit. For months he publicly funded for Israel's "defense", with the only appeal to the Left being "leaked messages" where Biden says "But Netanyahu sucks!"
Biden is not against the genocide and is historically one of the biggest supporters of Israel in the party, having been a major supporter of it from the start of us attempting to get a puppet state in the Middle East. It is one of many examples of our Liberals funding fascists in order to keep our global power.
I do not want an American authoritarian, what I want is Democracy to actually function. This is not democracy functioning. When super popular policies can only get progress in decades while unpopular policy gets done in months or a couple of years, there is something fishy- and that fishiness is that the Democratic Party doesn't really care, because they have accepted their role as one side of our imperialist-capitalist coin, and have no ambitions to do anything more.
I was reading that post as a new observer and thinking in my head, "holy shit what is this dude's problem? Is this how these people communicate?" And the first reply let's me know I'm not insane. I was so relieved.
People said this? From what I remember, the progressive consensus on Biden in 2020 was that he was a thoroughly uninspiring candidate who almost certainly wouldn't keep many of the promises that he was making. It was only Trump's catastrophic botching of COVID that motivated such a large wave of support for his opponent; rhetoric about "harm reduction" and "lesser evils" dominated the discourse that I saw. To this day, I wholeheartedly believe that Trump would have cruised to a second term with ease if he had come out in March with a statement about how masking and social distancing were the patriotic things to do.
Adjectivenoun yes, most people were like what you're saying, but there were also more enthusiastic people who would say stuff like "he would be the most progressive president ever" or something very close to that, which astounded me at the time. I will also say that some of the 'harm reduction' and 'we must vote in Biden so we can push him left' people really did not seem to do any pushing left once he actually came into office, and seemed to spend more time just defending him. Similar to the dwindling number of people who are willing to defend him right now.
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Hijacking this thread to force discussion on Cypriot corruption and the Anastasiades lawsuit against Makarios Drousiotis, currently one of the most important current cases in the EU on press freedom.
I haven't read the book yet (it's not translated) but one of the things I'm interested in is whether or not it'll touch on the law firms that facilitated a lot of this behaviour. One in particular was involved in a bribery scheme a couple years ago and is implicated in some of the activities Anastasiades was accused of aiding (namely harassing, luring, then stranding a Russian oligarch's ex-wife on the island).
https://www.occrp.org/ru/daily/18694-cyprus-ex-president-sues-corruption-probe-witness-author
I haven't read the book yet (it's not translated) but one of the things I'm interested in is whether or not it'll touch on the law firms that facilitated a lot of this behaviour. One in particular was involved in a bribery scheme a couple years ago and is implicated in some of the activities Anastasiades was accused of aiding (namely harassing, luring, then stranding a Russian oligarch's ex-wife on the island).
https://www.occrp.org/ru/daily/18694-cyprus-ex-president-sues-corruption-probe-witness-author
j going to address a couple things that other responses may not have covered
~ you didnt compare palestinians in gaza to german 'civilians' in general, you compared them specifically to germans who exploited the Nazi imperialist wars in eastern europe to steal land, and who were later expelled from that stolen land. this particularity both emphasizes how absurd the comparison is, as 2 million people living in an open air prison / concentration camp obviously cannot steal anyone's land, as well as explaining why we all "interpreted" the comparison to be victim-blaming palestinians in gaza for their own incarceration.
i think this is also a place to emphasize the limitations of the international law framework and derivative concepts such as "civilians." settlers who every single day steal more land in the west bank are "civilians" under international law but it is absurd to pretend as if they are not 100% intertwined with the military apparatus of the settler zionist State as neither can exist without the other.
~ many ppl alr responded to the comments abt the 2006 election but something that has not rly been said which is where i personally would start is that the "election" is purely performative to begin with bc gaza does not have any self governance whatsoever. ofc the PA in the west bank is little more than a mediator that enforces the violence of the occupation, but gaza since 2006 does not even have that. even before getting to the absurd claim that hamas can be compared to nazis, comparing the 2006 election to the election of adolf hitler is ridiculous j due to the fact that the latter was an actual government election, and the former was a theatrical performance orchestrated by the occupying power in order to (attempt to) promote the illusion that [its military occupation was not really an occupation or etc]. at most, one could maybe interpret the 2006 election as palestinians in gaza refusing to cooperate with the zionist state's farcical performance of "elections", and ofc it did have the effect of leading the occupying zionist state to admit that the elections were bullsh*t and the results would not be accepted.
the 2006 elections "argument" reflects a systematic issue within western humanism where material conditions are pushed aside in favor of focusing on symbolisms and performances. hamas did not acquire $ or weapons from a farcical "election" that was instantly nullified by the occupying power, the zionist state funneled such to them for its own reasons.
~ the discussion of a few of the many many war crimes committed by the "allies" in WWII entirely bases itself off of the mythology that the allies were "the good guys" and that the massacres of tens of millions of people, including but not limited to the atomic genocides of hiroshima and nagasaki, came from good intentions and part of some sort of strategic plan to protect the world from nazism.
in reality, the "allies" at every opportunity allowed or even encouraged the nazi regime to conquer eastern europe and commit mass atrocities as long as that didnt threaten the respective allies own interests. nazism was not popular only among germans in the 1930s, but across the euroamerikan world, and the nazi party received massive financial and other material support from the most powerful amerikkkan corporations including GM and Ford (and id imagine support from the wealthy in western europe as well but im not knowledgeable about that). it is well documented that the atomic genocides of hiroshima and nagasaki had nothing to do with any military strategy against japan, which was already in the process of conceding, but as a show of force directed at the USSR to try to influence power dynamics of post war negotiations, the beginnings of what is now known as the cold war. (obviously the US government has propogated a revisionist mythology about the atomic genocides that erases this history.)
the atomic genocides were in fact genocides, i dont know as much about the war crimes in dresden but they sound like genocides too from your description and even if for some technical reason they werent, they were obv horrific war crimes, and any sort of pretention that they "came from good intentions" or whatever is just part of the revisionist myth under which the history of WWII has been rewritten.
obv idw to shift the focus into a full on discussion of the history of wwii, but it seemed important to address since you invoke revisionist wwii history throughout your post. i dont think its rly a useful comparison to make tbc, the bombing of dresden was in the context of an inter-imperialist war, whereas the zionist state is a settler colony and holds 2 million people in gaza in an open air prison / concentration camp; but i think its important to address what u are saying here anyway bc it basically seems to be: taking historical war crimes / massacres, turning them into something else under the amerikkkan wwii mythology that it was "the good war" etc etc, and then questioning well is the genocide of palestinians in gaza really "worse" than the atomic genocides or other genocides or war crimes committed by the allies in wwii and if its not "worse" then under the revisionist history it cant be a genocide.
the racially-segregated amerikkkan army in wwii did not give two shits about protecting civilians etc, and neither does the occupation army of the zionist ethnostate.
~ you claim to distinguish between arguing for the necessity of the occupying zionist state and the necessity of its violence against palestinians (im not going to call it a war because its an occupation, war is generally used to refer to armed conflict between two States and there is no palestinian state.), but you cant have one without the other. the zionist state is an occupation state, it was founded on the nakba genocide in 1948 and has reproduced itself with continuous military occupation ever since. the theft of palestinian land required and continues to require state violence. the siege on gaza and maintaining of an open air prison / concentration camp, constitututes state violence. the apartheid system in the west bank constitutes state violence. the denial of the right of return to millions of palestinian refugees is state violence. there is no portion of "Israeli" society that doesnt rest on the foundation of past, present and future State violence against palestinians.
Hi, I research neo-Nazis and right wing paramilitarism. I also have a strong grasp of their history.
Bombing Dresden was not a war crime. At all. Whatsoever. Dresden was a densely populated industrial centre in a conflict that did not feature the same precision munitions utilised in war today, which Israel has access to. Unlike in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or Gaza), there was a considerable effort to avoid civilian casualties in Dresden. There is a reason why Krauts quite literally celebrate the Dresden bombings and Bomber Harris.
Bombing Dresden was not a war crime. At all. Whatsoever. Dresden was a densely populated industrial centre in a conflict that did not feature the same precision munitions utilised in war today, which Israel has access to. Unlike in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or Gaza), there was a considerable effort to avoid civilian casualties in Dresden. There is a reason why Krauts quite literally celebrate the Dresden bombings and Bomber Harris.
I might be mistaken, but I don't think the post above yours was referring to the Dresden bombing campaign but rather the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and I'd also put the fire-bombing of Tokyo here as well). Minimizing civilian casualties was not remotely a concern in either case.
Yeah i considered adding LeMay's actions jn Tokyo. It was mostly in response to the "war crimes in Dresden" part. I don't think that person was definitively saying they were, but it's necessary to get that comparison out of the way.
to be clear i did mention the dresden bombings in my reply but as i said i am not very knowledgeable about it.
arthur "bomber" harris was a white nationalist who fought in the rhodesian army and developed bombing and other imperial terrorist tactics used by the british air force against colonized populations in southwest asia including palestine.
(lemay was ofc a white nationalist as well)
thats the only portion of the above comments that i have a sufficient basis to reply to
arthur "bomber" harris was a white nationalist who fought in the rhodesian army and developed bombing and other imperial terrorist tactics used by the british air force against colonized populations in southwest asia including palestine.
(lemay was ofc a white nationalist as well)
thats the only portion of the above comments that i have a sufficient basis to reply to
You're right, Dresden wasn't a war crime, no, but your depiction of the events, particularly the "it's celebrated for a reason" part, still appears slightly callous. I would like to know which "considerable effort to avoid civilian casualties" was made in Dresden that at the time of the bombings was filled with refugees seeking as much safety as possible under the obviously heavily precarious circumstances in Germany and particularly its east at that time. Furthermore, while I acknowledge the importance of Dresden's infrastructure that was a valid target in a war the allies fortunately won, I would also like to know how one can cheer at the death of as many (20000 - 30000) civilians. I'm well aware that right wing extremists are using Dresden as a fallacious argument to suggest the military campaign against Germany wasn't justified and to deflect blame which is shown by the shameful protests taking place in Dresden to this very day. I clearly condemn such frivolous actions, but at the same time glorifying the bombings is something that doesn't sit right with me. Dresden might've been a necessary evil, but even a necessary evil doesn't deserve being "celebrated".
I proudly defend Joe Biden in 2024 for the simple fact that either Biden or Trump will be the next President in 2024. With Biden, I can confidently say he will not “be a dictator for a day.” If people think we can “just vote out” Trump in 4 years after he gets in there again they are fooling themselves.
I’ll take democracy for $800, Alex.
I as a Leftist will not be voting for a guy who hates me and would 100% choose Trump over an actual Leftist in power, while nuking babies and eventually dying for his VP who is somehow worse IIRC to eventually take over.
Harm reduction is not democracy, in fact it is exactly the opposite of democracy. A two-party system where popular ideas have no representatives and you're only voting on how fast bad shit comes to the country. It's bribing votes not with presenting different options for what people want, but having a bad option and a slightly less bad option.
The way Liberals say "It's democracy or no democracy" is inherently showing that democracy is dead. There is no real structural change possible within the system under this dichotomy, which is the essence of Democracy. And they play this card for basically the third election in a row and then get mad when people do not just accept the political reality that the Democratic Party has actively pushed for, because it means they don't have to do what people want.
I mean, it is literally just clear even from the sentence alone: The goal is create a political landscape where every 4 years we have to vote between the shit party and the no-democracy party, and because people have been conditioned to believe a vote + "civility" in politics = democracy is functioning, it might work.
Edit: This applies mostly to federal politics. Local/State politics are where things are actually more malleable, and the establishment within each party has less reach. Locally you can make an actual difference.
Please vote on local issues and participate there, but I will not stand for pretending that any voting above this in America is actual Democracy. Joe Biden is not saving Democracy.
Harm reduction is not democracy, in fact it is exactly the opposite of democracy. A two-party system where popular ideas have no representatives and you're only voting on how fast bad shit comes to the country. It's bribing votes not with presenting different options for what people want, but having a bad option and a slightly less bad option.
The way Liberals say "It's democracy or no democracy" is inherently showing that democracy is dead. There is no real structural change possible within the system under this dichotomy, which is the essence of Democracy. And they play this card for basically the third election in a row and then get mad when people do not just accept the political reality that the Democratic Party has actively pushed for, because it means they don't have to do what people want.
I mean, it is literally just clear even from the sentence alone: The goal is create a political landscape where every 4 years we have to vote between the shit party and the no-democracy party, and because people have been conditioned to believe a vote + "civility" in politics = democracy is functioning, it might work.
Edit: This applies mostly to federal politics. Local/State politics are where things are actually more malleable, and the establishment within each party has less reach. Locally you can make an actual difference.
Please vote on local issues and participate there, but I will not stand for pretending that any voting above this in America is actual Democracy. Joe Biden is not saving Democracy.
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I, as a leftist (more radical than most, even), am well aware that while America is by no means a democracy, it can (and in all likelihood will if Trump wins) be a whole lot worse. I don't think anyone is pretending Biden winning will "save democracy" or fix all of America's problems or anything, or even that a vote for Biden isn't just stomaching the better shit sandwich, but at the end of the day the alternative is objectively worse by every metric a leftist should care about. Harm reduction may not be democracy, but it is still a reduction in harm, and while we build alternative avenues to social change, it is imperative that we do what we can to stop things from getting worse.
If you genuinely think Trump won't be worse than Biden, I can promise you that you've got a nasty surprise coming and I'm going to be as smug as humanly possible about it. In many ways they are the same. I agree with faint; that when it comes to economics and foreign policy, the Democrats and Republicans walk hand-in-hand. But given no other viable alternative, if your only two options are the neoliberal warhawk who wants to fund drone strikes on Palestinian children but is okay with gay people and Mexicans and the neoliberal warhawk who wants to fund drone strikes on Palestinian children and also deny LGBTQ+ people human rights and machine gun Mexicans on the border, why the fuck would you ever let the latter win?
If you genuinely think Trump won't be worse than Biden, I can promise you that you've got a nasty surprise coming and I'm going to be as smug as humanly possible about it. In many ways they are the same. I agree with faint; that when it comes to economics and foreign policy, the Democrats and Republicans walk hand-in-hand. But given no other viable alternative, if your only two options are the neoliberal warhawk who wants to fund drone strikes on Palestinian children but is okay with gay people and Mexicans and the neoliberal warhawk who wants to fund drone strikes on Palestinian children and also deny LGBTQ+ people human rights and machine gun Mexicans on the border, why the fuck would you ever let the latter win?