Depends, are you a cop?
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- 3 yr. ago
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- 3 yr. ago
I think part of the problem is that liberals don’t actually think we live in an inherently just and fair world. But that they think that capitalism, corporatism, and “stability” at any cost (even if that stability is a downward slope to fascism/oligopoly and ecocide) can still be “just” and “fair.”
Look at—and I hate to use Bernie as the example, but it’s relevant—how Bernie’s kinda progressive policies were treated by the party. They refused to let him win. And then pseudo-“adopted” the outward appearance of those policies to win voters. If his policies aren’t harmful enough to refuse to endorse them…why would you not just let him be president? Why stop him and take facsimiles of his policies? Is it because they knew they would win them votes but they’d never in a million years enact those policies? What was scaring them about him winning with his (again, very moderate) policies?
This is just the most recent and telling example. And then…I mean, the genocide thing. Not supporting a genocide is a pretty goddamn easy ask. But they were probably bleeding voters because they just wouldn’t.
These are not big, crazy things to ask for. But stopping them and enacting helpful policies was unthinkable to them. Why is that. Because more than anything, they would protect the rotting corpse of capitalism and the global hegemony over anything that might help people. And that comes back to their fucking billionaire backers, I assume? They are the ones who stand to lose scraps of their money and power.
I mean, I have to assume that is the answer. But it can’t be denied, I don’t think.
It’s not about overthrowing the government. Local action to protect vulnerable peoples, mutual aid. The US Govt can’t be “overthrown.” But local enacting of harmful policies can be stopped.
That’s kinda the problem with the US. People can’t just all travel to the centrally located capital. Look at how the republicans have continually tried to “send it back to the states” where they can wash their hands of, say, outlawing abortion. Focus on your area, find mutual aid groups to support those being harmed by these laws. That is how you can effectively fight creeping fascism. They can put down one centrally located demonstration no problem. But they would have a much harder time fighting every town. (Psst This is also good advice in your own town. Spread out, and be more effective. Move around, don’t stay all together. Not when you’re acting, and not when you’re fleeing)
Exactly. On the fuckin head.
Just goes to show how deeply-run this “focus on courting the fascists” was in the campaign.
Who’s the ghost boy
Voting won’t save us. Not trying to throw a wrench in your plans to stay healthy and happy. But true mutual aid is what is most necessary now. Voting is what got us into this mess. Incrementalist politics will not save the climate, will not save us from fascism.
It’s the hard truth that the ownership class has brought to our lives. It’s the logical outcome of capitalism. This is sort of the endgame. We fight now. Relying on voting alone only enables more of the same. We’ve been trying to vote as long as the system has been around. And it’s led us here.
Evangelicals are now the inmates who have taken over the asylum.
I mean, not that I’m pro-this scenario, but I don’t think in this hypothetical there would be anyone who would take on Russia, china, and the US. More like “whatever you three are doing…I guess we’re doing too.”
One could make the argument that the leftists are right, and the people who keep supporting the democrats as they continually walk us down the path toward collapse are the ones that are slurping up propaganda about the system being able to save itself.
Look at the long list of anarchist and leftist thinkers. They’ve been ignored and shunted off to the side since the late 1800s. Arrested, killed, devastated by state propaganda. Assassinated, vilified.
All the while, democrats have been walking hand in hand with the republicans, defending the rotting corpse of capitalism as it drags us all under. We’ve had answers as to why so many are suffering. But those answers are a threat to the ownership class and the prevailing order. And I would argue that not upturning that order, instead opting to vote for the “lesser of two evils” no matter what, is 50% responsible for the situation we’re in.
You said it yourself. You want spineless, feckless, out of touch leaders so that we can avoid spiteful, hateful leaders. The spineless, feckless out of touch bunch was courting the spiteful hateful bunch. Because throughout history, liberals will reach for the fascists when the cry for true change to help the people become deafening. Look at France. Right now. The liberal, trying to hold onto power and the standing order, formed a coalition with the right wing, instead of the left wing that won the majority of the votes. Look at Harris, parading around the fuckin Cheney family when people were really just asking them to stop slaughtering children in Gaza and the West Bank.
Isn’t following that same path, regardless of the recorded history of a fascist outcome the more likely candidate for “slurping up propaganda?” Blaming the electorate for their entirely reasonable wants being ignored.
This is exactly how fascists have come to power. Through a desire to maintain the status quo and an uneasy alliance between liberals and the right wing. Defenders of the status quo thinking it’s better to go fascist than to challenge the prevailing order. Blaming the people who want real change when the people you were voting for lurched right is the definition of succumbing to a propaganda campaign.
You can’t say that it didn’t contribute at all. I don’t think anyone is. And if they are, they’re stupid. But trying to boil it down to just that answer is even more stupid.
Harris retained more male Biden voters than female.
Capitalism is eating people alive. And people are fuckin sick of it. The democrats are the one party that actually pretends to try to appear to be on the “right” side, but will throw the working class under their campaign bus the minute the big money donors pull on their strings. So the betrayal people feel from the dems is fuckin palpable.
That, I think, is the biggest contributor. We are told they are the ones that will actually do good, but then get in office and “stay the course,” so their voters turn on them. Then we get people like trump and bush in office, and people are disgusted, so we hold our noses and vote for the democrats. But they’re Lucy and we’re Charlie Brown, and the cycle starts all over again. Meanwhile, the Overton window keeps lurching to the right, capitalism scorches the earth and robs us blind, and we all get more desperate. People are angrier than ever, and feel even more betrayed because it’s increasingly clear to more and more people that we have no one in our corner.
But here come the democrats again, telling us we’re on the right path, that we just have to trust them and their incrementalism nonsense while they try to court some nonexistent right-leaning swing voter. They fucked up bad on that last point this go round. They turned their backs on us in a big way to parade the Cheneys around telling us they were going to put republicans in the White House even if the democrats win? What in the fuck were they thinking?
Yes you do. We all do.
She was progressive by saying she would saying she would have a Republican in her cabinet. So…”progress…?”
But you’re just not willing to understand what it was like for other people. Because, I completely understand your position. These things are both true. But…that’s exactly my point. The “correct” solution isn’t binary. The system may give you only binary choices, but the truth isn’t simply your vote for one or the other.
This is exactly what’s fucked up about it. For some, it was a vanity thing. “Well, I didn’t vote for it!” That type of thing. It’s not about the people, but about their own outward appearance of who they are based on their “correct” politics.
But seeing as how that is also true, it is also true that everything that’s already been happening, Palestinians slaughtered, starved, tortured, raped, just completely dehumanized. This has all been happening under a dem admin.
And what neither of us has touched on: The US is a massive, powerful machine running on money. I don’t think, even if we got the strongest pro-Palestinian voice available in office, that they would be able to slow this machine down. Which is the sad truth. We don’t get to vote for the true levers of power.
We should be uniting over that tragic, infuriating fact. Not fighting over “you’re responsible for this!” This type of shit is exactly how the democrat is the best choice we can make. And it makes very little material difference in the horrors we have to see and endure.
Can’t we agree on that?
Not to mention, Kamala kept a higher percentage of biden’s male voters than female.
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/XUI7E/
They lost anyone left of bush. They offered no vision for the future except “you guys good now? Because we’re doin’ more of this with a few republicans in the cabinet! Vote for me?”
Think of voting like signing your name to a candidate/party and what they’ve done/signaled they will do.
A lot of people can’t stomach a candidate who has been courting the neocons and softening their previous mildly progressive stances she took the last time dems had a primary and the progressives were showing up in numbers. Everyone got in line and the debates were all about M4A, erasing federally held student debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. Sanders single handedly dragged the party to the center (technically more “left” than they were) in 2016/2020 and the dems responded by po’mouthing like they cared about those issues, but then circled the wagons and kicked those voters to the curb.
The party has shown over and over again that they don’t give a shit about working class people, those of us that want real change. They want to maintain the status quo. Which is progressively more hostile capitalism.
Signing your name to that constant move rightward is unthinkable for some. And understandably so.
And that’s before we even discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza funded and armed by the US. While this administrations representatives in the UN and in any official capacity constantly run defense for the genocide. For literal war criminals.
Plenty of people could not fathom putting their name on that tragedy.
We all get that trump is much worse. But everyone else needs to understand how sickening that shitty choice was for anyone with a conscience about what’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on with their neighbors. Signing on for more of the same was completely unthinkable for some. That has to be understandable if we are ever going to change things.
We’ve been on the road we’re being forced down now as long as I’ve been alive. And the road just keeps going forward. The dems’ proposal is “maintain the course.” The republicans’ was “mash the gas.”
Some people couldn’t stomach going any further down this road. That’s not making a choice to mash the gas. Because the world is not binary.
So the choice may have been one or the other, and you see it as “you basically voted for trump” because people couldn’t bring themselves vote for Kamala. To sign their name to a genocide. You’re boiling everything down to the two party mentality, which is exactly what has let us continue down this same fucking road. None of us want to continue this way. Telling us all to hold our noses to vote for Kamala while the entire party gave everyone left of them the finger…is not on us.
You’re not wrong, we all hate the fascist party. But you have to understand that a lot of people couldn’t bring themselves to vote for someone who was going to keep the regular ol’ genocide going while courting fuckin neocons. They looked to their left, said “fuck those people,” and tried to court republicans. And you’re blaming the people to the left who’ve been repeatedly told to go fuck themselves?
Kamala actually retained more male Biden voters than female.
Exactly. I don’t fear becoming a minority at all. I’ve lived in countries where I was a minority as a white person. I…didn’t really register that fact. I knew one other white person that lived there.
These people are sick. It’s like the people who think everyone must be repressing their gay urges and that attractive gay people are dangerous because it makes repressing those feelings harder. Like…bro. You’re gay. That’s cool. None of us are going to treat you any differently. Only people who think it’s some curable disease will. People…like you.
You’re just racist, my dude. Those of us who aren’t…don’t care about becoming minorities. I think it would give us some fuckin character, honestly. White majority nations main characteristic is, like, genocide and colonialism. Nah, I’m good.
I’m not going deny that there were certainly sexist people that wouldn’t vote for a woman. But I don’t think I can agree it was the difference between winning and losing.
I think it’s much, much more likely that the progressive voting bloc that was able to start winning the primaries in 2020 and was railroaded by the party (twice) that’s been completely shunted off to the side in favor of some mythical swing Republican voter is very much the reason.
They think putting a woman of color up as the candidate would be enough to win that bloc. Which goes to show the root of the problem. It’s the rainbow capitalist issue. “If we slap a pride flag on the person of color we got as our new representative and change our single bathroom signs to say ‘all gender,’ we’ll be in the right! We’ll fool those hippies and socialist dirtbags yet!”
This has failed them. Over and over. The most thinking people of the entire country (biased opinion, I grant) aren’t easily appeased. Things were so bad in 2020 that bloc mostly held their noses to vote for Biden. And they figured running against trump was the only ammunition they needed to lock down that bloc and they could hold them no problem while also courting the neocons!
They are funding a genocide. Basically perpetrating it. They were going to have to bend over backwards to get anyone left of Biden to vote for them. And they unquestionably didn’t. They basically told us to go fuck ourselves. Again.
And they fucked themselves by doing so.
Yeah, the people I know and spoke to all just said “I didn’t even vote, I couldn’t stomach it.” And the people who didn’t vote because they were put off by the choices don’t really get reliably surveyed—if anything we might find out a small sample size’s opinions months down the road, but more leftist circles are so disillusioned from being asked to plug their ears, hold their nose and vote for neoliberalism with a heavy splash of neocon garnish thrown in that they don’t engage. We can’t keep ignoring that segment of people. Some of them went to vote third party, but when you’re talking about a 4% difference, a lot desperately needs to be said of anyone left of Bernie madoff being written off as “extreme left.”
Ah. A ghost boy born to Orange parents. Genetics are, like, magic