It’s pretty normal that main stream reporting looks critically at fringe groups. That can be frustrating, but it’s not an attack. Also consider that any time MSM publish anything that could outrage the political fringes, it is cherry picked and makes its run through the fringe communities.
To consider that as liberals attacking the left, I’d have to put on a tin foil hat and buy into the far-right conspiracy theory of “liberal bias in media” or even assume the main stream media and liberals are synonymous.
And if I was taking “MSM” literally, the most-watched news medium in the US happens to be Fox News, which essentially put the idea of blaming and vilifying liberals for all the ills in the world on the map.
This is posted from Lemmy.world’s political meme community, within the context of Lemmy.world, liberalism is the status quo. Within the context of broader Lemmy, leftism is the status quo, so bashing liberalism is more common on those threads.
(Shitting on leftists probably helps Democrats if it entices Centrists to vote for Democrats. Worst thing Leftists do to the cause is not vote, worst thing Centrists do is actively vote for Republicans)
Our Hexbear/.ml leftfashs have proven that the best friend of the authoritarian left is the authoritarian right, which makes their arguments invalid.
For them there is no space between far left and far right. Just like everything to the left of the nazis is “woke”, “communism” and “antifa”, everything to the right of them is “liberal”, “genocidal” and “fascist”.
Tankie is a pejorative term for someone who would support an authoritarian to bring socialism/communism. Literally to cheer the tanks that suppressed popular protests in the cold war.
No, there’s nothing but tankies to the left of the democratic party, just like there’s nothing but Nazis right of the democratic party. /s
(Ok, the last part has a kernel of truth in it)
For real though, there’s enough place left of the democratic party, but those will just not be on the ballot. And if Trump wins, there will be no more ballots (or trump will just get 131% of the vote, just like in Russia). But like I said leftauth, rightauth, they are the same picture, aren’t they?
If the democrats put as much work into getting people to vote for them as they do threatening the left, they’d get votes. Humans don’t actually respond very well to threats.
Oh, the threat of creating the worlds largest and most powerful dictatorship is something that should concern you. But it doesn’t. Like I said, Left authoritarians, right authoritarians, same same.
Oh yes all the people who don’t want to be coerced into voting by threats are authoritarians. That’s as logical as putting lipstick on your hogs when you send them to the slaughter house.
Lol, the projection goes hard in your answer. the only one in the US getting sent to the slaughterhouse are LGBT+, the homeless, political enemies of the right-wing and anyone who stands up against the forming dictatorship when Trump wins. i don’t want mass graves in gaza, but bringing them to the US instead can not be the answer.
Just that you know, i don’t think that such a regime will thank you for your service; i’m inclined to believe that your political goals will put you in the crosshairs too.
Project 2025 has a lot of shit in it but nowhere did I see anything about committing genocide. Making up shit like this when there’s one actually going on that we’re supporting is ridiculous. Especially your accusation of projection. Because there is literally a genocide occurring right now. People are dying because of our support for Israel right now. And you want to make one up.
But I’m the one projecting? Holy shit dude. All Biden has to do is cut Israel loose. Do the right thing. Earn the votes. Blaming the people who will not be bullied is not going to work. It didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now.
a convicted murderer and racist, pardoned by the governor. and the police in the US is already known for their extrajudicial killings. If project 2025 gets started, digging single graves will not be enough anymore.
I am a leftist. I think constantly shitting on Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists who believe Biden is a bad President with or without genocide is a terrible way to grow a coalition, and actively hurts Biden’s chances for reelection.
The left does not like the right, the problem is that a lot of liberals believe themselves to be left just because they are not far-right, and wonder why Leftists are still upset.
Yessssss, finally meme I agree with, and therefore am required to like. Our funy memes, their horrible propagandist image macros, our nuanced conversationalism, their lunatic screaming, etc.
I dunno guys I think I’m just like an exhausted contrarian maybe. Can I get like, can I get a lemmy where every post is just a link to an interesting blog post, or something? Do I have to construct that lemmy myself, only to watch it totally fail because nobody reads blog posts in the year of our lord 20XX?
Can’t believe how many times I’ve seen that sentiment on Lemmy alone.
Never, you have never seen that sentiment. You’ve just refused to actually listen to what any leftist has tried to tell you, and made up a strawman in your head.
Yes that must be it. Because there’s never been a time in history where that exact same thing happened. It’s not like leftist in a country allowed fascist to take over and then we’re surprised when they were murdered by said fascists. That’s never happened…
Correct, it’s never happened. What has happened before is liberals annihilating the left because they tried to stop the slide of liberalism into fascism, only to be shocked when they got annihilated by the fascists in turn.
The authoritarians are already in power. Student antiwar demonstrations are being crushed by the police, border detentions are up, labor demonstrations have been crushed just a few short years ago and there is an active campaign to control media sources.
He did also break the rail strike, and then his NLRB kept working the issue after people weren't paying attention, and got the rail workers the sick days they were asking for in the first place.
To me, it sounds like he wanted to avoid the disruption to the economy that the rail strike would have caused (which would have caused inflation which actually was sort of his fault, in contrast to the Covid and price-gouging inflation which is currently happening which people are blaming him for even though it isn't his fault).
You can say, I guess, that he broke the rail strike because he hates workers, and then wasn't paying attention when his NLRB got them the sick days after, and that he just didn't bother to break all of the other strikes that were happening coincidentally before during and after that, including historic ones like UAW and the writer's guild strike. Or maybe that he hates rail workers specifically but not the other kind. Or something. I don't know.
Or were there labor demonstrations other than the rail strike that were crushed that I missed?
there is an active campaign to control media sources
lets just confine it to the rail strike: biden broke the rail strike. then he gave a small subset of the strikers demands to them through executive action. the result is reduced labor power and benefits that can be taken away again anytime the executive decides it’s in its interest.
the active campaign to control media sources includes the tiktok ban. no matter your opinion on the application itself, you can’t deny that the point of the ban is to remove it from the american media landscape.
Let's not. I'm pretty sure that my argument was that if you don't confine it to the rail strike, Biden's overall record on labor is excellent, when you include the rail strike and then all the other union things he did.
Can I do this too? Let's just confine it to the day he forgave six billion dollars of student loan debt. On that one day, his record was excellent. Therefore he's great. See? Logic doesn't work that way.
the active campaign to control media sources includes the tiktok ban. no matter your opinion on the application itself, you can't deny that the point of the ban is to remove it from the american media landscape.
"Includes" the TikTok ban.
What else does it include? Any other media sources he's actively campaigned to control? Or does removing the one that's overt Chinese spyware mean that he hates independent "media" in the US, and just forgot about Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, and all the other sources where people can get anti-US news freely? (Or Fox News or Newsmax, which actually present an affirmative threat to his presidency and in an indirect way to his actual personal safety, and show some fairly legitimate reasons why someone could argue for shutting them down?)
In the same way he forgot to crush all those other unions when he was being super anti-union in that one very specific way that one time?
i think the administrations response to a labor action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is the best thing to examine because it shows how the administration responds to labor power that opposes its aims and threatens it.
we could examine a bunch of other stuff, but that would largely only show how the administration behaves on its own terms. while there’s an ocean of ink that could be spilled on that topic, i didn’t bring it up because it doesn’t matter for the purposes of answering the question of weather the administration is authoritarian.
if you wanna talk about that, youre welcome to, but i’m not gonna get embroiled in it. the administration was threatened by labor power and chose to suppress the strike then deliver a modicum of the demands through action it could control. the end result of that response is that the power of labor is reduced and labor and its supporters are compelled to align with the administration.
it’s a response that seems like a perfect solution politically if your alignment is already democrat, but if you would rather labor have real power to exercise on its own terms then it’s pretty clearly anti-worker.
the tiktok ban is the best example of media policy against that which is actively controlled by the united states government and power elite. For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals. if you want something a little bit more recent, look up stovepipeing, the intelligence apparatus’ method for creating media buy in for the iraq war.
i think the administrations response to a labor action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is the best thing to examine because it shows how the administration responds to labor power that opposes its aims and threatens it.
I disagree. I think the administration's response to a union action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is probably going to be colored somewhat by their reaction to the infrastructure of the entire nation being threatened. It's probably the least reasonable situation to take, and then extrapolate out to form the conclusion "and that's why he just hates unions."
Especially since, and I don't know why this keeps being not notable to you, his administration kept working with the railroads after, until the workers got the sick days that were the whole thing they had decided to have the strike over.
the tiktok ban is the best example of media policy against that which is actively controlled by the united states government and power elite. For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals. if you want something a little bit more recent, look up stovepipeing, the intelligence apparatus' method for creating media buy in for the iraq war.
Yes, I have read Manufacturing Consent, and I was around for the Iraq War and the general media enthusiasm for it; I had arguments with family members about it because they were believing what they read in the papers. Not that it's relevant, but as far as I can tell stovepiping was something totally different related to that war.
And, none of that is recent or in any way related to what Biden's doing about US media right now.
I'm gonna take this as an indication that you have no other examples of media Biden wants to ban, even ones that are a lot more explicitly hostile to him than TikTok is, and just want to get condescending to maintain a posture of being the one who's explaining to the one who doesn't understand what's really going on. Good luck with that! I don't think it's going well, but you can keep trying.
i never said biden hates unions. the things i said are written out in text and i haven’t made any edits to them. i don’t like doing inline quotations, but you use that style of response, so when you see me say that biden hates unions please quote it directly.
Sick days were not the whole thing the rail unions had decided to strike over. biden broke the strike rather than bargain with the union. that represents much more clearly the administrations stance towards real labor power than anything else. when faced with a true threat, it chose to break the strike and give a fraction of the demands directly through executive action.
i was around for iraq 2 as well. good looking out on stovepiping, i haven’t been looking up everything ive written so errors like that where i mix up the sending of unvetted intelligence information directly to decision makers with whatever the name for the unique combination of exerting soft and hard power on media outlets, badjacketing oppositional viewpoints and sending professionally trained media teams to express carefully crafted messages are inevitable.
I choose to not meticulously source and check stuff because it both makes people i’m responding to get hostile and feel like theyre being attacked or accused of being ignorant and because i feel it’s better to treat people in text formats like this one as if you were speaking to them.
that last part is one of the reasons i don’t like to quote. this is a conversation, we’re just talking. no ones going to win and you will in no uncertain terms ever convince me to vote for biden.
why and how do you think the governments relationship to media has changed since the response to 9/11?
I never said there were more media sources that the administration wants to ban. i said there was an active campaign to control media sources including the tiktok ban. who was the politician who admitted that the tiktok ban was at least partially motivated by how much anti genocide sentiment was on it? like i said, this is all off the dome, water cooler style.
i’ve been trying to keep things civil and not resort to insulting you either directly or indirectly through implication. please do the same.
Okay, sure. You said "labor demonstrations have been crushed just a few short years ago." That's a huge stretch, since multiple labor demonstrations have been materially assisted by Biden's revamped NLRB, and the one that was "crushed" was more complex than what you're implying.
Here's a story about some of the details of how the attendance policy specifically was the most proximate cause of the strike. Probably Wikipedia's article is the clearest overview -- in brief, negotiations broke down with workers getting wage increase but only 1 day of paid leave a year, as opposed to the 15 that they wanted. The law that broke the strike limited them to 1 day per year, which was kind of a "fuck you" to the unions.
Then, after that, the NLRB kept negotiations going with the railroads. E.g. as of March, they had 3-7 days per year. IDK, that's not as good as I thought it was, so maybe there's still an argument to be made that the workers got screwed.
Also, there are a ton of issues e.g. related to safety and wages. It's not just sick days. But, the sick days were the immediate proximate disagreement that led to the strike.
I choose to not meticulously source and check stuff because it both makes people i'm responding to get hostile and feel like theyre being attacked or accused of being ignorant
I am the exact opposite. I think it's important to have reasons for what you're saying and demonstrate that there's a reason and link to more information about it. I'm sometimes kinda condescending about it I guess but I think it's important to refer to what the reality is, instead of just taking turns talking at each other about our different opinions.
that last part is one of the reasons i don't like to quote
i've been trying to keep things civil and not resort to insulting you either directly or indirectly through implication. please do the same.
So this is just something about me: If someone starts saying things like "For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals" I get real offended, because I take that as that exact kind of accusing of being ignorant that you were talking about before. I think it's more about me, so maybe I shouldn't have reacted badly -- but yeah, if we were talking face to face and you said something like that to me I would get irritated by it. That's more why I got hostile with you. Like bro don't tell me what to read or imply that I might be scared off by it. I've read it, yes. If we're talking we can talk, and maybe I might be abrasive about some things and if so I apologize, but also don't try to take this you-maybe-haven't-heard-of-Noam-Chomsky tone with me. And in particular, don't try to change the subject from "hey here's my coherent argument for why banning TikTok is motivated by something other than censorship" by starting to imply that maybe I'm just clueless about the idea of US government interfering with media in general, and you need to help me by recommending some sources on it that I might not have heard of.
I never said there were more media sources that the administration wants to ban.
So it's just Tiktok? Is it relevant to you that there are other much more anti-administration sources that they aren't banning?
who was the politician who admitted that the tiktok ban was at least partially motivated by how much anti genocide sentiment was on it?
it’s not a stretch to say that labor demonstrations were crushed. multiple unions together composed the rail strike and their demonstrations were crushed by the administrations direct action.
if i were gonna encapsulate the demands of all the rail unions i’d basically say precision scheduled railroading was the cause of em, and it’s bad. there was definitely more than sick days to it.
it’s okay to meticulously source stuff and have a big wall of links ready to refute fake bullshit. that’s a certified tankie banger and i mean that with love and respect while soviet anthem - bass boosted trap remix (10 hours) plays.
just, you know, i gotta be on best behavior here at .world. and in this particular instance it’s not like the goal is to get people to read fucking history and critique of a black legend but instead to get liberals to realize that it’s okay not to vote for biden. because i genuinely believe that no one under 50 can look back at their adult life and say “yeah, this is good, actually, i’m happy with this, it should be biden, not literally any other candidate. the democrats are really my ally and i should lend them my support”. i mean, there’s the butigeegs (I can’t spell his name) of the world, but you know, like real people. anyway i’m not trying to convert people to anarchism or communism but just to meet people where they’re at with the message that “things are bad and they’re not gonna get better from one or the other ruling class party. reject their tickets and choose something else. organize in your communities and try to build resilliency”
I didn’t mean to take the tone that you hadn’t heard of chomsky, or to call you a lib, but instead to recommend something as a source and example that is generally respected and inoffensive. you’d be surprised how many people don’t know manufacturing consent or got taught it in the most tepid way possible, sometimes even with chomsky’s own walkbacks from the decades after 9/11.
i don’t know what sources you know and don’t know. i don’t know if you have a critique of manufacturing consent or what your perception of the governments’ relationship with mass media is. from manufacturing consent and the experience of the post 9/11 world its hard to imagine you having an understanding that doesn’t include broad implicit and explicit media consent for the power that underlies the two party state.
what are the anti administration media that isn’t getting banned? is any of it as outside the US political system (and i’m saying this with full awareness of how bytedance offered to route all US users through a datacenter in texas running oracle systems and what that implies in order to fend off trumps threat of a ban and how they then just started doing it in the hopes that it would be enough for the state department) and widespread as tiktok? I wouldn’t call fox or something like that in the same category as tiktok.
goddamnit you got me to look something up. just this once and for you, it was blinken and romney speaking for the mccain institute.
I said: "Also, there are a ton of issues e.g. related to safety and wages. It's not just sick days." and then linked to some sources for why the sick days were the main flashpoint where things broke down.
Then you said: "there was definitely more than sick days to it." basically re-reexplained back to me what I had just got done saying, just changing the sourced statements into unsourced disagreements with those statements, based on your off the dome beliefs on it maybe.
I said: "just forgot about Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, and all the other sources where people can get anti-US news freely? (Or Fox News or Newsmax, which actually present an affirmative threat to his presidency and in an indirect way to his actual personal safety, and show some fairly legitimate reasons why someone could argue for shutting them down?)" (note: I edited it shortly after posting to add Fox News and Newsmax when I realized they should be included)
Then you said: "what are the anti administration media that isn't getting banned?"
It feels like you're not really listening, and just kind of have a set of points you want to make, and if I ask questions or make citations to disagree with it, you just rewind to the start and push play on the set of points you want to make.
Also:
to get liberals to realize that it's okay not to vote for biden
Not really, dude. I mean in a technical sense, you can do whatever you want to do, but if your house is burning down and someone's saying hey it's okay if we don't put out the fire, because I heard some bad things about the firefighters and anyway the back stairs weren't up to code, that person is objectively wrong. Put out the fucking fire. Trump is the fire.
because i genuinely believe that no one under 50 can look back at their adult life and say "yeah, this is good, actually, i'm happy with this, it should be biden, not literally any other candidate. the democrats are really my ally and i should lend them my support". i mean, there's the butigeegs (I can't spell his name) of the world, but you know, like real people. anyway i'm not trying to convert people to anarchism or communism but just to meet people where they're at with the message that "things are bad and they're not gonna get better from one or the other ruling class party. reject their tickets and choose something else. organize in your communities and try to build resilliency"
I would support you in doing all of those things. If it ever sounded like I was against the idea of improving the Democrats or replacing them with something better, or against organizing in your community, or anything like that, I'm not. But in this election, it's Trump vs Biden, and all of those things will get 10 times harder to do if Trump wins and shuts down community organizing and unions and protest movements and starts throwing anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan in political prison or if they're in congress killing them.
I'm not saying any disagreement with any of what you said up there; a good bit of my support for voting for Biden is based on the alternative being the end of the fuckin world. But sure, improving the system outside voting for Biden is also 100% necessary, yes. On that we definitely agree.
Uhm…let me be clear: I said what I said about the sick days not being everything because the point I was making was that Biden broke the strike and it’s important to examine it due to the circumstances illustrating how the administration deals with labor power in opposition to its goals, not labor power in opposition to some other party the administration can align itself away from or trade some favor for.
I can’t help but view centering the demand the administration granted workers after denying them a strike as carrying water for it. Considering the myriad issues surrounding the strike action and stemming from precision scheduled railroading that are unresolved it’s hard to see the administrations actions as being in good faith or representing solidarity with workers in their demands to reform the railroad industry.
When workers stood up and there was only recognition or opposition, Biden pounded them down. That action is so much more important than all the little fiddly things the administration does on its own because of what I just said: it shows explicitly what will happen when you take effective strike action in Bidens America.
So naturally I restated what you said in my own words.
Like I said, I’m not digging up a wall of links. When I say something that agrees with what you say, we agree.
Now the thing about anti administration media kinda gets to something I’ll talk about at the end, but I didn’t ask something you already answered. I asked if there was any other example of something as far reaching and outside the American media power structure as TikTok in response to your question about all the examples of unbanned media sources.
A question you did not answer. I don’t believe there is such a media source, but I’m open to being wrong.
The examples you gave of media in opposition to the administration that are unbanned are either small, shrinking, controllable or represent the opposition platform under the two party system. Why would they be banned? When the New York Times prints Zionist propaganda unquestioned, why would it merit a ban?
I do employ the tactic of cutting the fat and staying on topic. We both have lots of comments and I’ve seen and read many of yours. Often you will ask a bunch of questions or bring up a bunch of points and the only way to keep someone who has a style like that on topic is to go back to five paragraphs and restate the topic. I’m not criticizing or making fun of the way you write, just explaining why I tend to bring it back to the points I’m trying to make.
So you brought up trump and made a metaphor to explain how voting for Biden is necessary (one that minimized a genocide!) so let’s talk about trump. Do you truly believe that he’s an existential threat to America? What do you think will happen if trump is declared the loser? Is there a red line Biden could cross that would make you abandon voting for him against trump and instead vote for the third party you actually believe in?
I said I would talk about your response to my question about media sources at the end and here we are. The part you quoted is a great example of a technique you deploy in this conversation with me and in many conversations with other people: cut out the nuance when you quote something and respond to that.
I’m not accusing you of speaking in bad faith and I’m saying this having already fielded your criticism of my own style of response. With that said I think it doesn’t really add to discussion and techniques like that are another reason I keep rewinding and pushing play, because often times people don’t actually answer the question that was asked, but instead answer a slightly different question.
I do employ the tactic of cutting the fat and staying on topic. We both have lots of comments and I’ve seen and read many of yours. Often you will ask a bunch of questions or bring up a bunch of points and the only way to keep someone who has a style like that on topic is to go back to five paragraphs and restate the topic. I’m not criticizing or making fun of the way you write, just explaining why I tend to bring it back to the points I’m trying to make.
Honestly, I don't even know why I'm in this conversation anymore. I'm not trying to be discouraging to you by saying this, but it seems like I keep saying things or asking questions and what comes back is not productive. Sorry.
I understand your viewpoint, I think. You don't have to go back and "bring it back" to the points you're trying to make. I am asking specific questions because to me that's a relevant way to engage in the debate -- you can sort of poke holes in the other person's viewpoint, or else learn more about it and so there are parts that will make sense or parts that don't make sense.
I'll make it simple, and just ask some questions. You can assume that I already understand your main viewpoint, and you don't need to restate it or "stay on topic," and just answer the questions. I'm not trying to be overwhelming or anything or pin you down or "debatebro" or whatever, but to me this is part of the dialogue. If you want to engage, cool, I'm curious to know what you think about these things. If not, then cheers. To me it's super dispiriting for someone to say e.g. Biden is censoring all the non establishment media but also refuse to identify what other media Biden is censoring, just sort of vaguely say all of it that's anti establishment. Maybe that is reasonable in your debate-world but in my world it is a weird and evasive way for you to behave.
important to examine it due to the circumstances illustrating how the administration deals with labor power
Do you think it's important to examine how the administration dealt with the UAW election or regulations on strikes / bargaining and union election guidelines in general? Or the writer's strike or the Starbucks or Amazon unionization drives?
it shows explicitly what will happen when you take effective strike action in Bidens America.
Same question
The examples you gave of media in opposition to the administration that are unbanned are either small, shrinking, controllable or represent the opposition platform under the two party system.
What are establishment unfriendly media that are being banned? Besides Tiktok? I keep asking this question. You said, more or less, all of them. That's not an answer. Which ones? What's all of them?
What do you think Romney meant by that?
(Answering this one, as it's surely a fair question to ask me)
I think he meant that the coverage on TikTok is slanted, as a way of amplifying Blinken's point that the entire format makes it basically impossible for TikTok to function as an informative type of news, and he brought up coverage of the Palestinians as an example.
I do agree with what Blinken said (basically, that is also my view on TikTok, in addition to the problem that it's controlled by the Chinese government). I don't agree with Romney's viewpoint -- I think it's fine if any social media wants to weight its coverage however the people who operate it and the people who have accounts there want to do it, and in particular I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with emphasizing the suffering of the Gazans in a way that's probably offensive to the people who are sending the IDF the weapons they're using to inflict that suffering.
I can’t assume you understand my viewpoint because you selectively quote my words to change their meaning, put words in my mouth and dodge questions i ask (just like youre accusing me of here!).
I never said that all the establishment unfriendly media was getting banned. I said that there’s an active campaign to control media that includes a tiktok ban. I asked you what establishment unfriendly media isn’t getting banned in order to look at those examples, their reach, their position and alignment relative to the american political system and their level of consent or hand in glove cooperation with the american political system.
the point of that is to illustrate how there is cooperation between the american political system and media, how there is control exerted by the political system on that media and when those two are not present, that media is not allowed when it cannot be minimized or silenced.
compared to how the regime responded to the rail strike, it’s unimportant how it responded to other labor actions that didn’t threaten it.
the rail strike was an action that opposed and threatened the biden administration. the other labor actions you bring up were not an imminent danger to the regime. at best that could be interpreted in the words of the reverend doctor as a desire for the absence of conflict over the presence of justice.
a more realistic outlook might be that the biden administration cynically viewed a powerful labor action as something to be crushed when it’s in opposition to that administration as opposed to representative of a core value or even a necessary constituency.
what is the greater measure of a mans values, how he responds to something when given time and resources and under no imminent pressure or how he responds when threatened? what is the greater measure of an organization made up of many men?
how can you possibly get mad at me for implying you haven’t read a book as milquetoast as manufacturing consent when you take blinken at face value and agree with him that tiktok is too emotional to be treated like other “informative” sources when those “informative” sources express IDF actions in the passive voice?
i’ll end by combining our two great tastes, restating myself, selectively quoting myself, and asking some questions:
you brought up trump and made a metaphor to explain how voting for Biden is necessary (one that minimized a genocide!) so let’s talk about trump. Do you truly believe that he’s an existential threat to America? What do you think will happen if trump is declared the loser? Is there a red line Biden could cross that would make you abandon voting for him against trump and instead vote for the third party you actually believe in?
Oh, and since I missed it: So Biden didn't say anything about how many anti genocide sentiment was on Tiktok, actually it was Blinken, oh wait, he didn't say that at all, he said "You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion—the impact of images—dominates." I would 100% agree with that. That's of the problems in my experience with talking with people who get their picture of the world from TikTok. There are other anti-establishment news sources which lend themselves a lot better to depth of understanding in addition to, yes, seeing the imagery and emotion which for something like Gaza is an important part to include.
Then, Romney said, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts." Which is at least vaguely adjacent to what you said, but also is (1) just someone who's not in the executive branch who's just kind of guessing (2) not at all the same as "how much anti genocide sentiment was on it".
because your vote has meaning and value as more than either a winner and loser of political races. vote tallies determine funding, media and event access and even if that was it (it’s not!) there’s some level of dual party fascism where it would be better to spend your meaningful vote helping some third party you really believe in get an edge next time (or this time) rather than just picking which version of evil you’d rather have.
Do you really think you’re going to get a third of America to not only rally behind a candidate that isn’t the two-party front runners, but also rally behind the same candidate?
I’m worried about people refusing to vote Biden because he sucks and then the outspoken, proud fascist winning and stripping rights from myself and my friends, giving Israel even more support, halting support to Ukraine, and attempting to dismantle the little democratic power we have.
No, I don’t think that. I mean, I think it’s possible, but the effects of a big third party campaign are wide ranging.
If you want an unarguable example of a third party campaign changing the dialogue on a fundamental level even in the face of a loss, look at perot.
Not only was his campaign considered not to be a spoiler, but it rendered nafta dead in the water, just waiting for someone to drag it in to shore. There’s a reason no politician since then made it a priority and no media, political or popular support materialized to protect it instead of replacing outright.
If you’re worried about fascist Biden losing to fascist trump, have you considered what trump being declared the loser looks like? At what point do you stop saying “I was not Palestinian so I said nothing”?
If you truly feel fear, real existential fear, about Biden losing: stop worrying about voting. It can’t protect you and you’re looking at January 6 electric boogaloo no matter what.
Take concrete steps to make yourself, your family and your community more resilient, maintain your health and wellbeing, and avoid life altering disruption from whatever is gonna happen no matter who is declared the winner.
The '96 election was not an existential threat at the level of the '24 election.
At the margins we have voting for Biden or voting third party will do nothing but prop up Trump’s dedicated voter base. This is your impact. You can hate Biden and still vote for him if it means keeping Trump out of office.
I don’t subscribe to your belief of widespread violent revolt if Trump loses.
I say this a lot and it’s to keep people from wasting their time, not as some attempt to shout people down: I will never vote for Joe Biden again. You cannot convince me.
Again, that’s not to shout anyone down or be aggressive, but to firmly seat us in the context of an actual Biden voter (you) or a hypothetical Biden voter (someone else).
Usually when people talk about Perot, they mean ‘92. That’s the one where he was in all the debates and the one that brought nafta into the public eye in a big way. It’s the one that was initially called a spoiler for the republicans but later research proved was a nearly even draw from prospective and past voters of both parties.
Perot 92 is my favorite example of a third party run in our lifetimes because it shows how that external pressure can deeply change the two parties and was in no way “throwing one’s vote away”.
No matter if you stay with genocide Joe or decide to walk away from omelas with me, I urge you to reconsider your view that there will be no uprising if trump is declared the loser. If you believe he’s an existential threat, believe that January 6 was an attack on democracy, see project 2025 as a real threat, and recognize that the same base that will vote for trump cannot accept or trust the electoral system, it’s hard to reach the conclusion that nothing is gonna happen.
I don’t think anything’s gonna happen myself, but that’s because I don’t see trump as an existential threat, don’t think January 6 was a big deal, see project 2025 as the rights response to Covid laying the power of the administrative state bare and their plan to control it and generally recognize that the only way trust in the electoral system will ever be restored is through a trump victory in 2024 and a peaceful transition of power to the winner of 2028.
If we’re considering foreign policy, a Trump victory means not only continued destruction in Gaza but potentially an additional genocide in Ukraine. Domestically he has demonstrated that he’s unwilling to accept a loss and will stoop to transporting fake elector ballots to overturn the election. That’s not to mention his platform which I see as abhorrent. I don’t consider putting this guy in the Oval Office to be an acceptable solution. Voting for Biden is the only effective defense against this. I have accepted that we are going to have a terrible genocide enabling president after this election. This is taking a mental toll on me for sure but at the end of the day it can always be worse. If we don’t agree on that premise then we won’t agree on much here.
Yeah, I guess if you’ve accepted a genocide being committed in your name we are pretty far apart.
This is not to chastise or shame, but to convey a personal experience: no amount of what we now call self-care will cover lending your support to stomach churning atrocity or standing idly by during its commission.
When the people doing it tell you to support them or you’re next the situation can’t be made any more clear.
Please don’t strawman me. I’m not a zionist, I’m not a proud liberal. My belief is that encouraging a Trump victory will result in MORE atrocities and should be avoided. I have accepted the truth that we will have a genocide-enabling president because, in terms of my participation in the 2024 election, that is out of my control. There are means of protest and expression outside of this election but, within the scope of the '24 presidential election and our casted votes, this is simply the reality that we have to work with. My phrasing of “accepting” is not in terms of complacency with my country’s actions but acceptance that within the scope of which box I check on Election Day, I will reluctantly have to vote for someone who supports a genocide because the alternative is to not participate.
the alternative is to give voice to your true beliefs and desires!
i guarantee there is a ticket that you would support. you may not believe in the party for socialism and liberation but there is definitely some group that actually represents your politics!
even if you don’t truly walk away from omelas, never to return, telling the democrat party that you won’t support a genocide isn’t not participating! it’s using your meaningful, powerful voice to tell them that you represent voters they could have if they just don’t run the perpetrator of a genocide!
stand up and let them know that you won’t tolerate their bullshit!
imagine even the most goofy outcome, biden steps down at the convention and they run kamala and someone else on a platform of peace. wouldn’t that be balm to your soul? wouldn’t you be proud that you stood up even on the vile and worthless internet for what’s right instead of a poison compromise?
there literally are not only two options. you can join me and vote la riva. i’m sure the greens are running someone if youre aligned that direction.
if you just feel petulant that day there’s a whole host of jokers that are always around and while their platforms might be as asinine as “give everyone a pony” (see what i did there?), at least youre not supporting a genocide.
you have options! your voice matters more in the weird harmony of people calling for the democrats to run anyone but biden than it does in the discordant cacophony of those browbeaten and bullied into pulling the lever for the architect of our broken nation who’s currently pissing away the cost of universal healthcare on weapons shipments to israel!
It feels easier to organize opposition if the people in the White House are just saying stupid shit about protesters instead of urging for sending in the National Guard so they can nuke Gaza without listening to the complaints.
That’s where I disagree- Voting third party or not voting at all enables fascists. Period. There is no ethical option in a single-vote system. There is only harm reduction.
Is that an extreme view? Yes. Is it wrong? Not when the Republican leader says he’ll be a dictator on day one. Our only option is to first make sure we don’t fall under a fascist dictator and THEN continue to fight. It’s not a problem that will be solved by voting, but voting HAS to be the first step.
How does voting third party (the only thing I’ve advocated with regard to voting)enable fascists?
I mean, we have the fascist sending 2000lb gbu jdams to aid a genocide and advocating crushing anti war opposition domestically or the fascist who everybody says will be worse. How does not picking a fascist aid the fascists? Should we strategically harm reduce by choosing regular Hitler over hypothetical 1000% ssj3 Hitler?
At what point does even our electoral action aim for what we want as opposed to what they want? Is there such a point?
Here is a good video that explains how mathematically, over time, if you give people only one vote, their options will become whittled down to two major parties who don’t represent anyone. It’s just what happens if you only have one vote per person. In these scenarios, third parties are destined to fail. That’s not hyperbole or exaggeration, it’s literally just how the math works. Ranked choice, or allowing multiple votes per person is one of the only ways to actually have representative representatives.
Should we strategically harm reduce by choosing regular Hitler over hypothetical 1000% ssj3 Hitler?
ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY.
With ‘regular Hitler’, you still have a vote, and you still have a CHANCE to change to government. If you vote for ‘1000$ ssj3 Hitler’, you’re not only guaranteeing that you won’t have another vote, no say in changing the government, but you’re ALSO signing the death warrants for queer people, immigrants, and people of other religions. Trump wants to KILL POLITICAL RIVALS. He’s trying to ban objective reporting. He’s praising Hannibal Lecter! Yes, it’s a fucking awful situation to be in, but we also don’t have an alternative.
At what point does even our electoral action aim for what we want as opposed to what they want?
Like I said before, voting is the FIRST STEP. We do need a major overhaul of the election process, but that starts with states like Maine going for Ranked Choice voting. You have to start local and build your way up, this isn’t a problem that will be solved overnight with a single vote. It will START with a single vote, and once we actually get people who represent us in government, we’ll see actual progress.
so, none of that stuff happened during the first trump presidency but itll happen this time so there’s no point in voting outside the two party fascist duopoly until some hypothetical new electoral system is put in place (how? by voting it in? which of the two parties will welcome this significant change that completely restructures their hold on power?).
that’s a wild outlook.
at what point does even our electoral action on the most individual, atomized level need to aim for what we actually want instead of some deeply flawed and amoral compromise with one of the parties of fascists?
surely there must be a red line that both parties could cross that would make you abandon the dire calculus of strategic harm reduction and instead use your meager but meaningful vote to bring about the future you want, right?
Nope! As I’ve said before, voting is not an ethical choice in a single-vote system. That’s because it’s not the solution. Its the first step.
The real work starts afterwards with local government and getting involved in your community. I already told you how Maine is changing the way voting works there, and everyone can focus on changing their own states laws to continue the work.
Neither of the parties is going to want it, which is why it won’t just be on a nationwide ballot. We have to do it ourselves.
I swear to god, it’s like strategic voting doesn’t exist at all.
If you live in a deep blue or red state who’s basically guaranteed not to flip, with maybe extra considerations to which states tally their votes along which lines, because, as we know, states that tally their votes earlier in the process have a much higher sway, so, the DNC winning more overwhelmingly in those states, and especially if those states are swing states, has much more of an effect overall, then a protest vote to a candidate you agree with, in those circumstances, is pretty good.
It potentially shows the democratic party what you actually want, contests their claim of a mainstream, deep blue state, potentially in mass, and can give more legitimacy to those parties or those positions. Even better would probably be voting for a candidate like bernie, or someone internal to the DNC, in that scenario, since that’s more likely to give them a lot more media attention in the future and realistically someone like that has the best chance of winning.
The same principles as all this apply to local elections, just at a much smaller scale, with less media attention, and potentially less information on both sides, since people generally don’t give a fuck about understanding local elections even if they’re the ones being fucking elected. Just send out money and a bunch of lawn ornament signs explaining nothing, and then expect, probably not wrongly, that everyone will just vote for whatever candidate is a part of the party that they generally agree with, even if nobody has any fucking idea what anyone really stands for. Better off even if there’s no hint of an alternative being campaigned or even on the ballot despite everyone just telling people to run for local spots as though that’s really a possibility for most.
Instead, instead of paying attention to why votes are shifting, and how they might appeal to that voter block, the mainstream DNC strategy seems to be to just like demand that leftists have to come over to the democratic party’s side and then just accept all of their orders basically unquestioningly. To just pester them to vote more, and to vote harder, and to vote for the mainline DNC candidate, without any real conversations about how they might actually use their vote or why they might actually want to vote for their desired candidate. And of course that’s the fucking messaging, because that’s the messaging that allows them to get away with as little concessions to the left and the general population’s popular sentiments as possible. Bonus points if you’re always voting for damage prevention, too, because the urgency gives people a morally justifiable reason to just engage in relentless bullying tactics, rather than actually have a nuanced conversation about the ups and downs of a candidate and how they should use their vote, under what circumstances.
You can’t blame people for smelling something fishy in all that, being unable to articulate why or think through for what circumstances they might want to vote in, and then just kind of feel burnt out and cynical about the whole prospect and not really want to vote. It’s not exactly a hard strategy to see through when we’ve been seeing it for the last… 25, 30, 40 years maybe? I dunno, don’t remember those elections before I was born, but they’ve been pulling this shit since bush got into office.
This is the biggest thing IMO, liberals would rather attack leftists than try to work with them. All this does, however, is convince leftists that they have nothing to gain from siding with liberals and instead trying to build outside pressure.
Liberals would rather defend genocide than join leftists in trying to force Biden’s hand and gain back leftist voters.
I say this as a Leftist likely voting for Biden: Leftists are going third party because Liberals have been blocking all leftward movement, thus alienating leftists from the electoral process. If you want leftist votes, work with leftists, instead of constantly punching left.
Liberals would rather attack leftists than attack fascists even. History has shown that liberals will side with the right against the left every time, and it’s happening once again.
Liberals would rather defend genocide than join leftists in trying to force Biden’s hand and gain back leftist voters.
What an asinine statement. There are those of us who understand that Israel is a sovereign fucking Democracy and it’s not our job to police them and literarily throw out everything any and everything else in this insane fight to stop Israel.
I want the war to stop. But I also live in the real world where conflicts exist and it’s not our job to fix everything and everyone. We’ve got plenty of shit to deal with here, and if you want to put any pressure on anything, put pressure on Israelis to handle their own government and foreign policy.
Equating people not thinking that the Israel conflict is our #1 concern that needs to trump absolutely everything else with supporting genocide is beyond idiotic and unkind.
There are those of us who understand that Israel is a sovereign fucking Democracy and it’s not our job to police them and literarily throw out everything any and everything else in this insane fight to stop Israel.
“They’re a sovereign nation! Poor helpless America can’t intervene in a sovereign nation! We have no choice but to keep sending them $10000000000s in weapons!”
speaking a liberal, i find it’s the leftists who refuse to work with me. and would rather tell me off that i’m anti-trans over not asking them their pronoun rather than find common ground.
also their delusion that minorities are leftist by default. blacks and latinos are moving towards conservatives, because they tend to be more socially conservative than whites.
I think that’s a bit of a strawman, no? I haven’t seen leftists call people transphobic for not asking for pronouns. Misgendering, certainly, but not asking? Haven’t seen that.
i dunno i’m sure those annoying types exist but they are not nearly as common as our fascist uncles insist they are. im around many leftists and havent met one who was as outwardly annoying as some people suggest most leftists are.
well if i’ve experienced that IRL, is it a strawman still? if i call someoen ‘they’ and them blow up at me, because they are a he or a she, am i an asshole?
because apparently leftists think i am. at least the people who did that to me very much self processed themselves as leftists and love to loudly brag about how cool and anarchist they are. as if their political beliefs are nothing more than an aesthetic choice…t
That sounds frankly absurd. It wouldn’t be a strawman, but an unfair assumption that a one-off anecdote is the norm for leftists. Then again, you very well could be transphobic and are leaving out details, who knows.
Someone having firm beliefs they are proud of does not make it an “aesthetic choice.”
Sounds like you need to do some self-reflection and introspection.
liberals would rather attack leftists than try to work with them.
That’s because liberals know (despite their pretensions otherwise) that leftists threaten their oh-so-precious status quo.
Liberals also know that, when push comes to shove, they are going to need the fascists to protect said oh-so-precious status quo for them - despite their pretensions otherwise.
Nothing liberals do or say is a mystery once you understand that.
American power only rewards those that don’t threaten it and punishes those that do.
The left is the last hope America has to reform anything in a positive direction, but sadly liberals would rather abide power than join the left and transform our collapsing system into a force of good.
Biden's corporate tax reforms swung Amazon's taxes from negative $1.2 billion per quarter to positive $1 billion when they took effect at the start of 2023, and they're currently paying $3 billion per quarter, a comfortable amount more than they've ever paid before. Here's this year's proposal of what he plans to do to build on top of that. Raising corporate taxes was most of how he funded stuff like the infrastructure bill.
I literally do not see anyone "punching left" outside of the mainstream media. No one on Lemmy is out here saying "these damn protestors if only they would shut up" or anything like that. I see a bunch of people punching Biden, and then other people saying hey, what you said is actually not accurate; for as criminal as his support for Israel is, he's actually the first pro-working-people president the US has had in many many years.
That's not "punching left," that's refuting the punching that is coming inwards towards the person who is right now the only available alternative to full throated, military-seize-the-voting-machines, shoot-the-protestors, fascism.
leftists don’t care about facts anymore than trump supporters do.
all they care about is pushing their boogeyman ideological agenda and shouting down anyone who talks facts or reality as ‘fake news’ or ‘capitalist agenda’ or whatever nonsense phrase they feel makes them morally superior.
It's hard to say who is a genuine leftist and who is a please-don't-vote-for-Biden-so-Trump-can-win shill, but if we take e.g. @brain_in_a_box at face value, I think it's safe to say that they don't care:
About any given good thing Biden might have done domestically (forget about that, how dare you run around supporting this genocide man)
If Biden personally isn't doing the genocide (forget about that, how dare you run around supporting this genocide man)
If Trump will probably do much worse genocides both in the middle east and in the United States (forget about that etc you get the idea)
It's like the Republican-type thing, where only one answer is allowed. If Biden did a good thing, then no he didn't, because Netanyahu is killing Gazans and anything Biden is doing to try to prevent that didn't happen and it's all Biden's fault and he's a bad man and I'm going to start to shout if you try to tell me anything about how even if that's all true then Trump is ten times worse and those are the only two options in this election.
I mean, I kind of get it. Biden is materially aiding in a genocide and it's easy at that point in the conversation to shut down anything further and say, okay I've heard enough. I think the right answer though is to figure out how to put pressure on Biden from the left to at least undo some of the harm he's been abetting up to this point, figure out how to install better candidates in the future who will undo American's war-crime-adjacent foreign policy in the future, while also voting for Biden in the election because he doesn't want 10 genocides like Trump does. However much bullshit is the resistance Biden has been giving Netanyahu up until this point, it's definitely better than the full-throated support and assistance Trump would give him.
Well, it’s important to consider trajectory. Biden doing small positive changes in a rapidly crumbling Capitalist empire is still negative overall. For many leftists, this minor amount of positive concessions in an ongoing train wreck isn’t enough and can’t be enough.
It’s impossible to look at individual policies in a vacuum, everything is related. We can accept minor concessions as fact while still believing them to be woefully insufficient.
Example: Biden made a massive improvement to the US's greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which is predicted to be a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. Is that enough? Uh... if it had been by the year 2000, maybe. We're still facing a guaranteed global catastrophe. We need to keep pushing for more change, right now, and anyone who's satisfied with what Biden did so far is living in a dream world.
Where I have a problem with it is when someone extrapolates that out to "and that's why there's no reason to support Biden in his contest vs Trump, when Trump wants to undo even that much, and when Biden's climate action was the first big-scale thing any US politician has ever done to make the problem into an actual priority."
If anything I'm saying sounds like "and so Biden is good enough," it is not. What I am saying is that affirmatively choosing the Biden solution in this election while also pushing for big improvements in any one of 10-20 additional ways to achieve actual progress sounds like the way to go.
I don’t disagree with your conclusion that Biden is not as bad as Trumo, I just disagree with your framing and methods for reaching out to disaffected Leftists.
The crux of my argument is that opening with minor, insufficient positive changes that come nowhere close to enough just turns these disaffected leftists away.
"Biden took the first big step towards addressing climate change of any US politician ever, and was able to achieve significant success even within our horribly broken political system. While I fully support extra-electoral change (it is 100% needed), I would say that that's a relevant fact to the question of whether we should spend time shitting on him and only him, as part of our quest to produce positive change in the system."
Votes are votes, if you’re going to intentionally use ineffective means of rhetoric when talking to potential voters, isn’t that just an admittance that you care more about your personal feelings than raw results?
I'm not trying to engineer any particular results. Notwithstanding the people who accuse me of running around supporting Biden just because I like Biden, I'm honestly just trying to talk about how I see the world and share my viewpoint and see what other people think in return. It's part of why I am comfortable saying yes, Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza is monstrous, and his little bullshit opposition to it is not nearly enough to excuse the majority of what he's doing, which is supporting it. Overall, I'm just trying to say how I see it. I'm not trying to, like, convince people to see it my way or support who I've decided I want them to support.
I mean yes I sort of hope that people will read my comments and decide to vote for Biden and help not end the world like if Trump gets elected. But also, I think more people will be convinced by simple facts and good reasoning, than will be convinced by something that happens to align with how they want the information to be presented and is triangulated to what's in their head currently and trying to push it around into the way I want it to be. That's a dangerous path to go down. Like what about lying, if that was more effective? Or what about setting up a little bot to post my propaganda, what if that was more effective? I just don't want to do it. Here's what I think, here are sources, do what you like with that and if you get super offended instead, then I feel blameless with that outcome because I tried to be straight about how I think because I think it makes sense.
I may just be more Materialist than Idealist, but I don’t think people can merely be convinced of the correct take based on evidence or sound logic, they must also be at a point materially that allows for ideas that challenge their predisposed narrative to penetrate.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to withhold pretty straightforward relevant information until my imagined picture of the person reading it reaches a point where they’re ready for it.
Honestly, I have no idea what the average Lemmy reader is or isn’t ready for or accepting of. Why do you assume that all or even most of the people reading my message aren’t at a point where this pretty bland information would be useful to them?
Ha, fair enough. So let me rephrase: I am not "reaching out to disaffected leftists." I'm just saying how I see it and why. If someone's triggered by seeing a comment saying some good things Biden has done and starts literally shaking and crying and decides I am wrong about everything, then it is a shame but I don't think it needs to be my responsibility to prevent that. I think that person needs to become capable over time of seeing things they disagree with without freaking out about it. It'll be good for them.
Maybe that is a majority of Lemmy, IDK (and certainly lemmy.ml seems like it's like that), so that a "kid gloves" gradual transition to the truth approach would be better, but in my experience people generally like the "here are facts and citations" stuff well enough, and saying I should stay away from it until this one category of people decides it would be acceptable to them, seems like it might do more harm than good to the messaging overall. And anyway, it's honestly just not what I want to do -- like I say I'm not here to "reach out" with my message. I just like talking about this stuff.
I think it’s more that you agree that Capitalism isn’t the way, but haven’t put forth the same amount of effort into reading leftist theory so it comes off as condescending yet unearned. Maybe open with questions, and try to understand first, before listing your own opinions?
I was setting out to talk about the election, nothing about capitalism. You brought capitalism into it, I think. I actually think capitalism constrained by a very strong democratic government is the best system (historically) in terms of good quality of life and free environment for people inside and outside the country, that I'm aware of, but I don't really know.
I don't think it's fair to ask me to read a bunch of leftist theory before I have an opinion either on the election or on economics. I have my opinion on it and maybe it comes across as lecturing sometimes, but genuinely I'm just saying what I think.
I think I've been asking a bunch of questions, in general, trying to understand. No?
You’d be wrong then. Capitalism “working well,” such as in the Nordics, depends on Imperialism and internal exploitation. Socialism would be far better both in and out.
It’s fair to ask that you read theory if you wish to debate it.
I wrote about Biden, and you started debating me. Is it fair for me to ask you to read a few thousand words about what Biden's done, if you wish to debate me about his record? I can find some extensive summary and send it to you. That's way less than you're asking me to read before I debate you about communism.
Ah, got it, fair point. My point still stands; surely by the same logic, you shouldn't be criticizing Biden unless you're willing to spend enough time learning about the facts of his record to get a comprehensive factual view of what you're talking about?
I mean, I don't think it should work that way. I'm just pointing out that your logic seems like it would imply that it should work that way.
My belief is that first, in any constructive conversation, an establishment of what is being discussed, why, and in what context should be laid plain. On Lemmy, users tend to be leftists, especially Marxists and Anarchists, so being familiar serves as a sort of head start, so to speak.
If we ran the numbers, and discovered that the demographics have shifted and now most users on Lemmy tend to be liberals, would that mean that you need to read up and research on liberal thinking before it makes sense for you to talk? And, getting back to the earlier point, that you needed to phrase your arguments in terms that would be acceptable to liberals, so that you could appeal to them?
Bro just let people talk. They can be in majority or minority, and you might or might not agree, but variety of political opinion in a forum is a good thing. This whole lemmy.ml thing where it's like "hey I'm a leftist and therefore privileged in this forum, and you need to make you're acceptable to my philosophy before I even want to listen to you, because I've pretty much decided what the right answers are, and yours is definitely wrong unless it lines up with mine" is just a bunch of crap. In my opinion.
Actually, I already do phrase my arguments in different manners depending on audience. The way I speak with liberals is fundamentally different from how I speak to Anarchists, which is different from how I speak with Marxists, which is different from how I speak with Conservatives.
I agree, I should be well-read on liberal theory to speak with liberals. Thankfully, this is easier, as I was raised in a liberal society.
I didn't quite mean theory; I meant more the thinking of someone who would support Biden's domestic record so far. Reading theory sometimes isn't a good way to judge a politician because a lot of times (most of the time) the actions don't match the theory.
I meant more, you're well versed in the details of Biden's actions during his first term, in order to speak on his record -- impact of the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, details of how marijuana legalization played out, major labor actions and how his changes at the NLRB impacted the actions at the UAW, Starbucks, Amazon, and the writer's strike. Things like that?
Correct. How will you determine if they're the same if you don't examine the practice?
Why would it even make sense to decide that Biden's a liberal, if you haven't analyzed his actions and determined that they match with liberal theory? Maybe he's a fascist. Maybe he's neither. How would you know which one?
In what ways? Like how has Biden worsened imperialism? I'm genuinely asking; I feel like I've said enough at this point about some of the good things that Biden has done in my viewpoint.
A salient issue is his continued hawkish support of Israel, which is done to solidify US interests in the Middle East. He has also protected US megacorps with recent tariffs, which continues this global exploitation.
Again, I have said that by allowing Capitalism to continue to Fester, he has allowed Imperialism to continue to worsen.
I think I am largely done, I'm not trying to go back and forth with you forever.
To me, it seems like this definition of imperialism doesn't match with what you were saying earlier (being mainly about economic exploitation of the global south)... I mean, unless do you count China as part of the global south? Certainly sending weapons to Israel isn't a good thing, but it's not really an explicitly economic one, and he's done more to break away from the US's longstanding alliance with Israel than any other recent president. IDK, not that any of that excuses sending them a bunch of fucking weapons and providing them cover at the UN.
I don't think the recent tariffs on China are at all the most noteworthy thing Biden has done global-trade-wise. I feel honestly like you're just including that because it's been in the news recently. Probably Biden's most impactful action on megacorps overall was the 15% minimum corporate tax which e.g. practically doubled Amazon's taxes, which revenue he used to boost domestic manufacturing, all of which is the exact opposite of imperialism as you previously defined it.
IDK man. Like I say I sorta lost my motivation for the back and forth. I was just curious about your viewpoint and I enjoy a certain amount of this type of debate / discussion.
Leftist can’t help uselessly shouting nonsense into the void every election year and then disappearing for another four years only to pop back into existence shout more nonsense once candidates have been chosen.
They’re like obnoxious little cicadas that show up every four years to yell at others because they lack the ability to understand nuance.
You offer no realistic constructive ideas to fix anything and just shit all over any topic that you disagree with. There’s a saying that I’ll simplify for you-
Part of the solution, or part of the problem.
You don’t get to not be one or the other. And there has never been a time in history where not voting EVER solved a problem.
So…. know your role.
I probably should speak for myself here when I say that I’m looking forward to your silence come November. Because like in 2020, and 2016, the SJWs and their propaganda disappeared after the election-
which truly shows your intent. It’s not lost on anyone.
I’m punching left. The left has been infected with tankies and agitators. We need their votes but those votes won’t happen until we exorcise the Russians and useful idiots. Compromise doesn’t work, they hate compromise. Complete and total capitulation doesn’t work either because they’re fundamentally being run by people who are interested only in harming America. We need to call out and shame this insanity so we can make the reasonable ones wake up and smell the propaganda.
The fascists want to literally kill you (and me). I just want to shame you into doing the right thing and kicking out the Russians in your midst. If you think that’s equal, boy have I got a work camp for you.
You just punched left, lol. Telling leftists that extremely minor shifts within the context of a far-right system are good enough actually, minimizes the voice of leftists. You aren’t going to convince a leftist that Biden is good, for leftists, continuing Capitalism and making no efforts to end it is already enough to not consider a candidate to be good.
If you want to move leftists to your side, it’s far more effective to agree with them that Biden has been continuing liberalism and making no tangible leftist movements. Telling leftists that they should actually be celebrating less than the bare minimum further alienates leftists.
Never said that; in fact you'll find me several places saying that moving further than Biden would be a great idea, and pointing out that one of the big problems with Trump is that he will very effectively end some of the methods that currently exist whereby real leftwards progress can be made in this country.
You aren't going to convince a leftist that Biden is good, for leftists, continuing Capitalism and making no efforts to end it is already enough to not consider a candidate to be good.
So we're moving the goal posts so that Biden has to want to end capitalism before you'll support him, even against literal Hitler.
Sure, sounds perfectly sane and productive. Sorry for ever punching left by having a different opinion than that.
If you want to move leftists to your side, it's far more effective to agree with them that Biden has been continuing liberalism and making no tangible leftist movements.
That's a funny way of spelling "I have no way to disagree with your factual rundown of good things Biden has done, so I'm going to demand that you agree with me, and in particular cease citing any objective facts for why you think what you think, as a precondition of 'moving to your side', because facts are punching left."
I mean I could be right or wrong on this or anything else. But I'm not planning on just agreeing with you on everything and ceasing hurting your feelings by arguing otherwise, so that you'll become open to "moving to my side."
You opened up with some unnecessary pro-Biden stances to attempt to make him seem better, no? As for leftward movement, it’s already impossible electorally, which is why I am voting for Biden. That’s my point, really, you would rather gas up a genocide supporter and enabler of fascism than simply take the correct approach and state that leftward change is impossible electorally.
If leftist change was possible electorally, you would be suggesting people vote for a leftist party, like PSL, but because PSL can’t win we must agree that leftist change is impossible.
Yes, Biden indeed needs to be a leftist of some sort before I give any approval to him. I already said I am voting for him, are you telling me I need to also enjoy voting for a genocidal enabler of fascism?
Listing extremely minor concessions within the context of a country absolutely tumbling into fascism to make it seem like things are improving under Biden and not continuing to get worse is a form of punching left, because the purpose is to silence dissent.
You opened up with some unnecessary pro-Biden stances to attempt to make him seem better, no?
So, I went back and re read your initial message carefully. I actually pretty much agree with it -- the Hillary Clintons and Nancy Pelosis of the world have been attacking leftists, blocking forward progress, and then blaming the voters when they lose elections because they are more or less even with Reagan politically. There's nothing really to vote for there, and not voting for open fascism when the alternative is screwing you left and right isn't really all that appealing.
The reason I responded the way I did is that Biden actually isn't at all the same as them. If you look factually at what he's done, he's a huge departure from the norm for corporate Democrats. You can believe that or not (or, you can say that abetting a genocide in Gaza makes it hard to like anything he might have done domestically -- and pretty understandable, I think, if you say that.)
But I don't get how citing facts of what's he done is "unnecessary" or "attempting" to make him seem better. I didn't like Biden initially, just because he's a rich white guy who's worked in Washington all his life. I didn't expect real good things out of him. Then he started doing all this good stuff, and I started liking him. Surely that's an allowed way to go about things? Responding to the reality of what someone's doing as a reason to like or dislike them?
the purpose is to silence dissent
This is a framing that usually comes out of conservatives. I am not silencing your dissent. I am disagreeing with you.
I won't tell you what to do, but I would politely ask that if you want me to take you seriously, stop saying that I am "silencing dissent" or "punching left" or whatever, just because I am holding a different opinion than you, and explaining why I hold it. Those are very different things. I'm allowed to hold a different viewpoint, and it's weird to me that you are so vigorous about the idea that it's violent or inappropriate for me to do so.
I’m not saying that you personally cannot like him. For you, those changes are substantial and good, to the point of justifying support. For leftists alienated by the DNC, this is obviously not enough, which is why I consider it unnecessary.
For leftists, generally, continuing down this descent into fascism that is happening slowly under Biden and rapidly under Trump is unnacceptable.
My broader point here is that if your goal is to get leftists to vote for Biden, trying to explain why you think Biden is good is counterproductive. Instead, explain how leftist change is impossible via electoralism, and that voting for a leftist party like PSL will never materially bring America to the left.
My broader point here is that if your goal is to get leftists to vote for Biden, trying to explain why you think Biden is good is counterproductive. Instead, explain how leftist change is impossible via electoralism
If someone's mindset is such that it's unnecessary to talk about what actions a politician has taken when deciding whether to vote for them, I'm comfortable with not being able to appeal to that person.
Honestly my goal isn't to "get" anyone to do anything. I am trying to communicate the reality I see in front of me. Obviously I hope that that will produce a result and a better outcome in the real world, if the reality I see seems compelling to someone else as a useful model, but I'm not into the idea of trying to move away from "this is how I see it and why" and into something else, to try to engineer a stated result in some other person. They can make their own decisions, as can you.
For leftists, generally, continuing down this descent into fascism that is happening slowly under Biden and rapidly under Trump is unnacceptable.
What are fascist things that Biden has done? How has he moved the needle towards fascism? Maybe this is where some of the disconnect between our views on him comes from.
That wasn’t the point, though. It’s necessary to look at the actions a politician has taken. The fact that you believe it necessary to “uhmm, akshually” someone who has expressed disapproval of Biden from the left is condescending and counterproductive.
As for the fascist and fasc-adjacent things Biden has done, there are quite a few. Enabling and funding a genocide, labeling protestors as anti-semetic, further entrenching US Imperialism, building Nationalism, and more have resulted in continued cancerous growth of fascists domestically.
In addition to overt actions, it’s important to look at what causes fascism itself. Fascism is Capitalism in decline, a violent assertion of Capital. As the head of state, failing to push back against Capitalism is also failing to push back against it’s decline, and thus is why I say voting for Biden is slow fascism rather than rapid fascism.
The US will inevitably continue down the train of fascism until derailed, which is accomplished via outside pressure. Voting for Biden buys time, but does not prevent fascism.
It's necessary to look at the actions a politician has taken.
You literally told me that my message listing actions Biden has taken was unnecessary.
The fact that you believe it necessary to "uhmm, akshually" someone who has expressed disapproval of Biden from the left is condescending and counterproductive.
Can I do this too? If someone posts a message I disagree with, can I say they're punching me, and silencing dissent, and "uhmm, askhusally"ing my message, and counterproductive?
Dude. I disagree with you. It's allowed. Stop trying to imply that it isn't, and either engage with what I'm saying, or don't. It seems like you finally are engaging now, so maybe it's late for me to be saying that, but it's just irritating me that you're trying to find so big a variety of words to use to imply that I shouldn't be allowed to say a viewpoint you don't agree with.
entrenching US Imperialism
Quick unrelated question: What's your feeling on the war in Ukraine?
As the head of state, failing to push back against Capitalism
Voting for Biden buys time, but does not prevent fascism.
What would be a good end state, to you? Like what would be a good American system, if you had the perfect politicians in office and could set up the economy and the structure of government exactly as you wanted?
People do not need to hear from you to know what Biden has done. You can discuss individual actions, sure, but you provided a list you believed was good for the purposes of showing why you believe Biden is good.
You can disagree, I just find it condescending that you seem to imply you see things others aren’t.
As for Ukraine, what specifically are you asking? Do you think opposing US imperialism must mean I support Russia, or something? My “feeling” is that war is bad and unjustifiable. Violence is purely justified against oppressors. I believe in Nation’s right to self-determination.
I want Socialism, and eventually, Communism. Worker ownership of the Means of Production. Democracy of, by, and for the Proletariat. Do you have any specific questions? We could be here all day otherwise and I am not sure there would be a point.
You can disagree, I just find it condescending that you seem to imply you see things others aren't.
Okay, so it's not punching left or silencing dissent if I disagree? Just want to get that clarified. You can call me condescending, that's fine; I probably am.
As for Ukraine, what specifically are you asking? Do you think opposing US imperialism must mean I support Russia, or something? My "feeling" is that war is bad and unjustifiable. Violence is purely justified against oppressors. I believe in Nation's right to self-determination.
Should the US send weapons to them? Or is that more imperialism? I am just curious; you brought up imperialism, so I'm curious what that means.
I want Socialism, and eventually, Communism. Worker ownership of the Means of Production. Democracy of, by, and for the Proletariat. Do you have any specific questions? We could be here all day otherwise and I am not sure there would be a point.
I'm just curious about what your viewpoint is. Not sure why that's a problem when arguing back and forth with hostility wasn't, but you can stop any time, if you don't like it.
What's a country which has implemented the model you'd like to see in the US? Or would this be the US doing it for the first time that it's been implemented on a big scale in the way you'd like to see it implemented?
My point is that bringing up the stuff Biden has done, without intention to discuss it or any prior relevance to the conversation, is just sealioning.
As for sending US weapons or not, I fail to see how that relates to Imperialism. You’re being extremely dishonest right now, because you don’t actually have any points.
If the people of Ukraine want weapons, then sure. If the people of Ukraine don’t want weapons, then no. Like I said, whatever the people on the ground want, I support.
Sure, countries have had similar structures. None have been exactly what I want, so I’m not sure why giving an example is important or relevant. Every country is going to have a unique path to Socialism and then Communism.
You’re clearly fishing for a “gotcha!” Because you can’t actually argue any longer, lol.
You're clearly fishing for a "gotcha!" Because you can't actually argue any longer, lol.
I'm not into the idea of just "yes it is" "no it isn't" 'yes it is" "no it isn't." It's a waste of time. I feel like I understand your viewpoint on Biden at this point, and I've pretty much said what I had to say on my side. We don't have to keep going back and forth until someone "wins." If you want to call that me not being able to actually argue any longer, then sure.
I feel like we've arrived at the crux of me understanding the deeper seated issue, though, in that you just feel that any candidate who's okay with capitalism is going to be the enemy, and we have to overthrow the capitalist system completely in order to make real progress. So anything short of that that Biden does is going to make him the enemy to you.
I don't agree with that viewpoint either, but I don't really understand the details of what you think on the deeper viewpoint side. So me asking where what you want has been implemented is, one, yes starting to tee up reasons why I might not think it's realistic or why I might not agree. But, also, I'm genuinely just curious about the details of what you believe. Like if you said China is the model, or Cuba is the model, or it hasn't really been implemented in the way you'd like to see it but X, Y, and Z are how it would be different this time in the US, then those are very different things which could all go under the heading of "Communist."
Thank you for being the voice of reason here. The other person has no clue what they’re talking about and have just been hucking out buzz words and talking semantics without substance. Thanks again for being reasonable.
Alright, I’ll answer these, now that you’ve explained plainly what you’re actually looking for and why, rather than beating around the bush.
The United States is Imperialist. By this, I mean Late Stage Capitalist, whereby Capital has been exported to the global south to super-exploit for super-profits. This is a natural end point of Capitalism, Capitalists will seek new markets and manners to increase rates of profit as the overall tendency is toward the fall of the rate of profits. This fall is unavoidable as long as automation improves, so Imperialism is also unavoidable.
This Imperialism inflates living standards within the US by way of unequal exchange, which is the driving cause of fascism itself! As the working class benefits from this unequal exchange, much of the proletariat is turned against itself, rather than against the ruling class. It is in this manner that continuing Capitalism must be opposed.
If I were to vote for a party that best aligns with my interests, I would vote for PSL. However, I also believe that leftist change is impossible in the US via electoral manners as long as Imperialism continues to exist. That is why I am chiefly anti-sectarian. Building up a working class movment is the only way off of this trajectory. Electoralism is impossible because the parties in power must capitulate to the class with power to maintain their own, so the interests of Capitalists will always be supported first and foremost.
As for “the model,” I cannot claim to own the leftist movement. China as it stands now is both better than under the fascist KMT before the PRC, and yet also highly flawed. The same is true of Cuba, far better than under fascist Batista, but can also be better. Historical Materialism looks at history as a result of class conflicts, viewing it in this manner Cuba and China are moving forward, but have far to go as well.
For the US, the number one issue is eliminating Imperialism, as this is the method by which fascism gains hold and the third world brutally exploited. This can be accomplished only via outside worker pressure. If anarchism is leading the movement, then Anarchism I will support! If Marxism is leading the movement, then Marxism I will support! Currently, there is no unifying movement, except against genocide, so I will continue to advocate for solidarity and unity against Capitalism, rather than infighting.
I don't think capitalism is as tied directly to imperialism as you're saying here. The USSR was plenty imperial, and they were (nominally at least) Communist. There are also plenty of capitalist countries in the world that don't have empires.
I think imperialism is mainly a function of power, and how the human beings who tend to gravitate to power and wield it, tend to operate. That can happen with or without capitalism or a US-style governmental system. I actually think, for all the terrible evils of US capitalism, that the US governmental system does a better than average job of reining it in. I think if it were any other country on earth that had the type of money and military power the US does right now, they'd be doing much much worse things than the (already pretty bad) things the US government and corporate system is doing with them.
Again, that's not to say I disagree with you on reining in capitalism or American empire. On that part we're fully on the same page, believe it or not. But I think the best way to do that is actually to preserve the US electoral and governmental system and overall position in the world (maybe with some major reforms e.g. on lobbying, media ownership, and the electoral system). I think simply tearing down the American empire is probably going to be a gateway to something much, much worse, because the whole problem all along wasn't an "America problem," it was just a general money and power problem that's worldwide (or universal, as a function of how people and systems of power operate).
I actually think that if your primary goal is undoing American empire, you should be advocating for Trump, because him fucking things up to the point that the US loses its imperial position is a way more realistic way that might happen than anything that's realistic as an "on purpose" outcome within American politics (electoral or otherwise).
But I also think that the new reality (both inside and outside the US) if that happened would be much, much worse than Biden or Hillary Clinton or Bush 2 or any of these already very bad outcomes we've been seeing so far.
Again, just my take on it, based on what you said.
The USSR was expansionist, but not Imperialist, as I have explained. Expansionism isn’t necessarily a good thing, but what I am referring to is the Imperialism as an end state of Capitalism. Again, this isn’t to say that Expansionism is good, but is a separate concept from what I am referring to as Imperialism, if that makes sense.
Imperialism as I described it is important not just because it is the right thing to do, but because as I demonstrated previously, it is the number one obstacle in enacting Leftist change.
Yes, there are plenty of Capitalist countries that have not yet developed to late stage Capitalism, ie Imperialism. Imperialism is a necessary consequence of highly developed Capitalism.
For your point on the US, it doesn’t need to be expansionist, after all. It’s not that the government does a good job of reigning expansionism in, it’s that the government does a fantastic job of facilitating the type of Imperialism I am describing, and expansionism is largely unnecessary for the US.
As for Trump, what you described is an Accelerationist take, which is fringe among Leftists. I personally am not an Accelerationist, as I believe sabotaging worker movements for the sake of building a larger worker movement off of “punishment” risks far more than necessary. While Trump would indeed weaken the Empire, and would likely result in a more unified left against Trump, the danger to leftists this directly would present is highly risky.
I guess I just don't see a huge difference in level-of-evil between imperialism and expansionism. I get that they're not the same thing but I think most of what I said could be applied to one or the other or to both and the point remains pretty much the same.
The difference is clear if you look at cause and effect, rather than the immediate moral consequences.
Imperialism is caused by declining Capitalism, exploits the less fortunate in the global south, creates the path for rising fascism, and prevents the move towards Socialism.
Imperialism is the method by which the US prevents or slows the third world from developing, and deradicalizes the workers of the US against overthrowing the Capitalist order. At the same time, it increases nationalism, which opens the gate for Fascism.
Trump is not a rare example of an exceptionally fascist person, rather, the material conditions within the US have pointed to allowing a fascist candidate to take power.
Are you familiar with Dialectical and Historical Materialist analysis?
The difference is clear if you look at cause and effect, rather than the immediate moral consequences.
Why wouldn't the immediate moral consequences be the main thing to look at? Like I say, I see the difference. I don't see that one or the other is, like, harmless, or not a bad thing.
Trump is not a rare example of an exceptionally fascist person, rather, the material conditions within the US have pointed to allowing a fascist candidate to take power.
Absolutely agree. We need to reform the explicitly normal-person-hostile policies that in ways that are honestly too numerous to even list out have created the space where Trump can flourish.
Are you familiar with Dialectical and Historical Materialist analysis?
Why wouldn’t the immediate moral consequences be the main thing to look at?
That’s a fantastic question. I am not being sarcastic at all, it’s legitimately the main question among leftists. This naturally leads to Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
Note: this is a vast simplification.
Materialism is the belief and natural conclusions that come from the idea that matter and environmental conditions are what create thought. Ie, a painter knows blue because they percieve the sky and thus can envision beyond that. People are more products of their environment than anything else.
Dialectical Materialism is a logical method that looks at matter as a trajectory. Everything is not what it was, the river of yesterday is not the river of today. Everything is changing and nothing is static. Within everything is the element of that which it can change to, ie an apple contains within itself the fuel for it to rot.
Historical Materialism is the combination of those ideas with the central idea that just as the environment shapes human thought, so too in turn do humans reshape their environment, which in turn reshapes human thought again! This is the driving force of change in history.
Circling back to Imperialism, we must analyze the following:
Why does Imperialism exist, and did it always exist in the manner it does?
What are the consequences of Imperialism?
What are the consequences of the consequences of Imperialism?
To answer:
Imperialism exists because of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. This tendency exists as a fundamental for Capitalism. As competition persists, Capitalists seek to gain profit by lowering costs via automation, but as competitors also automate, prices lower. This race to the bottom is held back by worker wages, which must be at subsistence + replacement to persist. After enough time and monopolization, you cannot explpit further, so you must seek new methods to exploit, so Capitalists export Capital and import profits from third world countries, thus super-exploiting for super-profits.
The consequences of this are that Third World Countries experience a drain in value, entire countries function as Capitalists and entire countries function as Workers. It’s a sort of nation-scale Worker-Owner exploitation, if that makes sense. Thus, the Material Conditions within the Third World climb slowly while a sort of Labor Aristocracy appears in the first world, where workers have inflated lifestyles on the backs of third world workers.
The consequences of the consequences of Imperialism is that this form of international Capitalism creates wretched exploitation of third world workers and prevents workers in the third world from rising against their own exploitation. This opens the door for fascism and prevents the door to progress to Socialism from opening. This works against progress. However, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall still exists, and thus exploitation of the third world rises, and revolutions occur against said imperialism. That’s why the US swoops in and stomps this out.
That was a long explanation, and not nearly thorough enough, but should help. Essentially, we must analyze the trajectory of systems and the cause and effect of systems. Expansionism can happen for many reasons, but is often tied to Imperialism, which itself is the natural development of Capitalism to its most brutal and unequal stage.
Dialectical Materialism is a logical method that looks at matter as a trajectory. Everything is not what it was, the river of yesterday is not the river of today. Everything is changing and nothing is static. Within everything is the element of that which it can change to, ie an apple contains within itself the fuel for it to rot.
Building on this cause I like the philosophy, and we’re like fifty comments deep so probably nobody will attack me for it. But this is sort of like. The dialectic, here, is the idea that within everything, is the thing which causes it’s own undoing, or, it’s own opposite. Everything exists in a kind of paradoxical state. If you think about old philosophy, it tries to kind of, conceive of fundamental laws which govern everything, and those laws don’t really deal with change. Like those old timey greek philosophies that are like, water composes everything, because water, water can freeze, become solid, water can become liquid, steam, you look upwards into the sky and you see a kind of vast ocean of blue, all life requires water, etc. So it sees water as like this most fundamental of all elements, this kind of, ultimate truth. You get similar stuff with like, the four elements, right, water, earth, air, fire, states of matter. Naturalist philosophy, these philosophies concerned with fundamental truths. Folk philosophy.
The dialectic is concerned with change. You have the thesis, right, the idea, the truth, that the sky is blue, right. But then within that is the antithesis, the sky is black, right, and I hear you say well no that’s impossible. But then we have the nighttime, the change imposed by time, imposed by the context, sort of. the sky turns from blue to black because of nighttime, and back again in the day. The sky turns red in the evening, the sky turns purple, turns pink, turns green maybe even, and then through that process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, or, sky blue, sky black, sky black and blue, we arrive at truth more generally. We integrate these new realities with our previous realities, we integrate these contradictions, and we arrive at truth. It’s sort of like a basis for the scientific process. You postulate a truth, you go out and attempt to contradict yourself, then you come back in, and change the truth you postulated to fit what it is that you’ve found out in the world. Hopefully, maybe you just do p-value hacking or whatever, I dunno.
And then at some point the postmodernists come along and fuck everything up for everybody with schizo language games, but nobody has any time for that and I don’t really understand it even though I probably do, because it’s fucked up eldritch shit, so, I won’t get into it unless I’m maybe pressed a little bit. And then there’s like wittgenstein rolling in on a holy chariot, and then dying after he gets thrown off when a rock hits the wheel or something, I dunno.
So what I'm getting at, is not like disagreeing with any of that. I'm just saying that, for example, it's relevant that the USSR starved millions of people in the territories it expanded into when their agricultural policies failed. So if we're going to say "We have to fight capitalism!" (which, yes, we do, or at least limit its bad effects) by saying "We need to install communism!", it's a relevant question to ask, okay what are the details, how do you plan to prevent that even-worse-than-capitalism outcome from happening again (which, I'm not saying that's every communist system, just that it's a relevant example to bring up as why "this isn't capitalism" isn't a sufficient or safe reason to switch to any particular other-than-capitalism system as the new answer).
The people in the USSR largely starved during the transition from feudalism to Socialism. It’s worth noting that famine was common and regular before Socialism, and ended after collectivization was completed. Obviously, collectivization was largely botched, however we must also recognize the results. We can learn from their mistakes to prevent such tragedies from repeating.
I say this, because the USSR skipped past Capitalism to Socialism. It wasn’t a “worse than Capitalism” situation, they eliminated the mass starvations that were taken as normal under Feudalism, especially as they were undeveloped.
The US is completely unique in comparison to revolutionary Russia. The modern US produces a mass excess of food, and people still starve. You would have to explain why you think collectivization would lead to starvation in the US, no?
Largely, Marxism has 3 major components.
English Economic theory - Marx built the Law of Value off Ricardo and Smith. His analysis of Capitalism explains how Capitalism is exploitative and cannot last forever.
French Socialism - Marx built his visions of Socialism off of French labor movements towards collective ownership, a what to replace Capitalism with.
German philosophy - Marx distilled Dialectical Materialism from Hegel’s Dialectical Idealism, and looked at History through that vision. This is the why of Communism.
Not completely, no. The more fundamental question I am trying to ask is this: It sounds like you're saying Biden is bad because we need to convert to communism and he's capitalist and so you can't support him regardless. Right? Or no?
And so I'm saying, if you're saying capitalism is so bad we need to replace it, then what are you wanting to replace it with, that any leader who doesn't want to replace it with is unworthy of any support? I realize that's a very very broad question which may not even have a single specific-at-the-outset answer, but I tried to narrow it down by asking, like what country would be the model? Or would we be doing something that was never done before?
It sounds like maybe the answer was the second one, right? Or no? I'm just trying to understand what it is that you're saying, in concrete terms, at this point. Like would we still have congress, or the electoral college? Would we be able to own private property? Would the economy be centrally managed by the government as in USSR and China? That kind of thing.
That’s not quite what I am saying. “Communism” is not something you can jump to from Capitalism, Socialism is.
Either way, if we understand Capitalism itself to be a constantly declining system, efforts to merely patch it up without replacing it with some form of Worker Ownership will continue that decline and will continue Imperialism. We can support Biden over another, terrible pick, but Biden is still a block towards progress.
As for asking what I want, the answer is Socialism, of some form, as this eliminates both Imperialism and Capitalism’s largest issues. Socialism has been tried in different manners with different results.
Fundamentally, the US is entitely different from the USSR and PRC, so even if we copied them 1 to 1 we would have vastly different results. We cannot predict exactly what it would look like, and in the end we need to understand that it must be a democratic, worker-focused change, so whatever is capable of building a unified-front in the US will be what Socialism will look like.
To answer your listed questions:
Congress and the Electoral College would likely be replaced by worker councils, with democratic representatives.
Private Property would eventually be removed, personal property would remain.
Some level of central planning would almost certainly be employed.
What do you mean by “working well?” What metrics do you want to see?
My entire point is that you cannot simply copy a country that had a different historical development and expect the same results, so I don’t know why you’re asking me which country I want to copy.
I mean I think you probably see what I'm getting at -- I'm suspicious of how this will work out in practice. In particular, I'm suspicious of the idea of shutting down private property, or centrally managing the economy; it sounds like a solution for the ills of capitalism but I'm aware of a couple of big examples where the way it's been implemented has turned into a living nightmare, and not produced the economic happiness it was supposed to produce.
Surely it's fair to ask how it's worked out in practice? You know, the metric being good standard of living, happy people, press freedom, basic necessities being met, that kind of thing. I'm not saying you have to copy another country exactly but surely it's relevant to look at examples. No?
Not saying you have to copy another country but also, like, if we were going to replace all the cars in a country with some other mode of transportation, it's fair to ask, okay where do they use that and how does it work? If it works well then cool, that's an indication of good things, and if not then maybe some lessons we can learn about how to implement it better here. Doesn't that seem fair?
Care to share the examples, and the metrics by which you call them failures?
“Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met” hasn’t been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context. If you can give specifics, we can look beyond vibes.
Sure, USSR and China are the big countries which converted to communism, and then in both cases millions of people starved. You said famines were common even in the feudal system in Russia, I think, but that's not fully accurate -- I mean, they happened, but not with anything like the same frequency, under the same technological-efficiency backdrop, or for simple reasons of management (there was generally some external reason like a drought). And the USSR had trouble providing basic necessities to its people for all its existence, even worse than the failures the US has to provide basic necessities. And they both have much more barbaric prison systems even than the US's fairly barbaric prison system.
China's different because at this point it's working "well" economically, but at the cost of personal individual freedom and working conditions -- I mean, the exploitation that the US is doing of global work force (which is very real) is often happening to workers inside China, so you can't really say that enacting China's system here would be a solution to the problems of the US. All it would do is import the exploitation of Chinese workers to happen to American workers too (i.e. much worse than their already pretty significant level of exploitation.)
(I realize all that is huge oversimplification, and those might not be the models you would choose, which I why I keep asking over and over again for details of the model you would choose.)
Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met" hasn't been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context
Agreed. I think the closest that's been achieved was probably the New Deal-era American economy (such as it was available to white people) up until around the 1960s. Basically, a strong organized working class backed by unions, exerting control over a democratic government to push back against the control that capital wants to exert over the levers of power.
Basically what I would think is the next step would be to extend that to all races, get back to unions as a unit of political power instead of political parties and a whole specialized class of lobbyists and consultants that work in Washington providing change "from above," reform some of the worst evils of money in politics and barbaric foreign policy, and see where that gets us. Because even that is far far away from where it should be. But that to me seems like a more sensible step than trying to make a more centralized economic structure, and assuming that the issues of who winds up in charge of the central planning will take care of themselves.
(Not that I'm saying that that last is what you're advocating -- just talking about my sort of stereotype view of what "getting rid of capitalism" as a solution might look like.)
You’re making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots, rather than as developments on what was before. Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia. That’s why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR, they managed to industrialize and end their respective regular famines.
Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that’s like comparing an adult to a child. If one starts off on a much higher foot, why compare at the same point in time, rather than the same point in development?
Either way, with respect to what you’re saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism. It’s unavoidable as long as you allow dictators like Capitalists to exist, rather than democratic production.
Additionay, Capitalism cannot be democratic, nor can the press be free, nor can everyone’s needs be met. Capitalists influence the media, thus choosing who can be elected, and requires safety nets be insufficient so the workers have to work.
You're making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots
Like I said, oversimplifying, yes.
Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia
The PRC killed somewhere from 15 to 55 million people in a multi-year famine, around 1960. It's widely regarded, says Wikipedia, as one of the greatest man-made disasters in all of human history. What KMT famine are you talking about? I searched "KMT famine" and found nothing.
The Russian famines I think I already addressed. You're free to pretend I didn't, and simply claim that the USSR didn't cause a massive man-made famine unlike anything that happened under the Tsars, that has a specific name and still is talked about to the present day in the affected areas almost a hundred years later.
That's why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR
I'm open to the idea that things would never have happened the same way in China or Russia without the revolutions. On the other hand, I'm also open to the idea that it would have happened in exactly the same way, because of the advances in medicine and public health that ramped it up over pretty much the same time period in the US, even without a centrally managed economy that killed millions of people and enacted a barbaric system without many of the daily freedoms that I consider essential to a decent life, which even the US manages to provide in some reduced form.
Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that's like comparing an adult to a child.
Not true. Outside a handful of notable cities, the US in 1900 was a lawless and unelectrified wilderness with a life expectancy of 46, that none of the mighty established European empires took all that seriously. In the late 1800s, labor began battling for control of the US in a big way, and around 1930 a pro-labor government got powerful enough to tackle some big reforms, and all of a sudden, some things changed between 1900 and 1950 that catapulted the US onto the world stage in a way where it became the dominant power and has remained there into the present day. And, for white people at least, the conditions inside the country transformed into a sort of paradise life.
(The war was a big part of the US becoming a world power, of course, but the course of the US's/China's/USSR's contrasting economic developments leading up to the war are kind of hard to ignore as a factor.)
Also, the USSR crumbled and collapsed from its dominant position on the world stage into now being a backwards little land of tinpot gangsters and alcoholic misery that can't even effectively invade its direct neighbor which it outnumbers by at least 10 to 1. Surely that's relevant? If you're saying (and I'm not saying you are, just saying if) that you want to replicate parts of the Soviet model in the US?
Either way, with respect to what you're saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism.
Agreed. I think this natural tendency always exists within capitalism, and we're living in the dystopian results right now. I think we're just disagreeing about what counterbalancing factors need to be introduced to more effectively combat the cancer.
Searching for “KMT famine” won’t give you much. Look for historical famines in China before becoming the PRC.
As for the Great Famine under Mao, we need to analyze why it happened, no? It started with great overpopulations of rice eating birds and pests. When Mao ordered the birds killed, the pests exploded in population. There was also drought, and mismanagement.
Definitely a failure, but why would that happen in the US? Why hasn’t it happened again after that?
As for the US, it started the 20th century as industrialized and Capitalist, while Russia was a rural backwater. This isn’t even close to comparable.
The USSR collapsed, yes. It was flawed, and corrupt, life got far worse after liberal economic reforms and then it collapsed.
Some parts of the Soviet Model I would absolutely copy. Free education, healthcare, high house ownership from public investment, huge literacy rates, lower retiremeng ages than the US, large scale public infrastructure projects, absolutely. Others didn’t work too well, like rejecting computers in favor of planning by hand, rejecting interacting in the global market, and failing to combat corruption.
I don’t think the failures of the Russian Federation should be blamed on Socialism, no? Most in Russia seek the return of Socialism precisely because Capitalism is failing them.
To skip to the end, I will turn your question back on you: what do you want, and why? Maybe there’s a disconnect beteeen you and me there, or maybe a union.
To skip to the end, I will turn your question back on you: what do you want, and why?
I think I said it -- basically, return to the conditions of the New Deal and shortly after, just as applied to all people instead of only white people. I think it requires a lot of the same things that led to the New Deal -- strong labor unions directly exercising political power, a lot less power in the hands of political parties and professional politicians, but still keeping intact the main structures of US government on the government side.
In the short run, key steps would be big reforms to the things that are causing corruption in the US: Lobbying and campaign finance, broken and archaic voting systems, poor education and media that lead voting to be more or less a media-driven popularity contest that can be exploited by the wealthy to sideline any real progress.
I think a lot of the economic problems are intertwined with political problems. I don't think either of the two can be solved in isolation, and in particular I think that trying to solve economic problems by centralizing government so the government can "fix" the economic system to be more fair, is likely to be counterproductive, as turns out to be more difficult to prevent assholes from seizing control of it than it might at first appear.
How do you propose preventing the slide back from the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and stop Imperialism? I agree that life would improve, but exploitation would remain, so would Imperialism, and it would likely slide back.
I mean, I think the slide towards exploitation happens a lot more broadly than just exporting exploitation abroad because of falling profits. There's also exploitation at home, there's also corruption of the agencies that would prevent pollution or other externalities, things like that -- I think the tendency for powerful people to hijack the system and try to exploit everyone else any way they can will happen with or without falling profits, and it's pretty much constant. More or less you could say that any system that can exercise power, and that's made of people, will tend towards evil if you don't watch it and keep it in check.
I feel like the American system resisted the slide for a couple of generations after FDR. I feel like China and the USSR got hijacked by the evil elements almost instantly, though -- I don't feel like pointing to the evil of the US and then saying we'll do a communist system will fix it is demonstrated to be the answer. I feel like the problem is the evil, not like "oh we'll set up the system according to X Y Z system and then we won't have to worry anymore, because it won't be evil." People will always find a way over time.
How you prevent that, I have no idea. Maybe education is part of the answer (which is why co-opting education is priority 1 for almost any evil takeover of a previously ok government), maybe having a steady flow of immigrant population so that people don't get complacent after multi generations of existing in a system that's set up for them, and think they don't have to worry. I don't really know the full answer though.
Okay, my response to that would be circling back to my earlier question about, when has it worked out that way? In what country has this been tried and had a good impact?
I'm not trying to just keep asking over and over even though it seems like you don't want to answer that question -- so you can treat it as a rhetorical question, I guess. It's just that that's the way I look at things. As you said, if the theory doesn't match the practice, then one or the other is wrong. I do think you have to look at the practice. In socialism or communism or capitalism, there are generally big elements of the practice that don't match the theory.
I didn't say socialism was more prone to corruption than capitalism. I said that the USSR and China showed themselves way more prone to takeover by non-benevolent forces than the US. It wasn't a general statement about socialism in general... probably, if you look back in history, you'll be able to find examples of when socialism and communism were set up well and worked well. I mean, a lot of FDR's things were socialism (big government programs to employ people, so that the "ownership" of the entity doing the production was a democratic government instead of private industry, and then providing health care to people according to their needs instead of what they can afford). And look, it was fuckin fantastic. But I'm asking you what elements or models you would like to use. It's not a gotcha. I mean, I am kind of trying to make a point, yes. But also, partly, I'm genuinely asking, and you seem like you're treating it as some kind of hostile or irrelevant question.
It seems like you're holding up the theory of communism, according to communists, and comparing it to the practice of capitalism. Of course capitalism's gonna look way worse, because capitalism has some big problems. I am saying, we should look at the practice (and, sure, the theory) of both and find things that work and then do those things, and also see if we can improve on them, instead of only the theory. And in particular, I think that history shows that setting up a centrally-controlled economy, because then the ultimate-authority central planners can make sure everything's set up fairly for everybody, has oftentimes worked out way worse than even the pretty significant evils of unchecked capitalism. Would you agree with that, or you think it didn't happen that way?
In general, it has worked like that when it has been done. You already agreed that the USSR and PRC were vast improvements on their previous systems, even if they were highly flawed.
Can you tell me what specifically you mean when you say Communist practice has not met the theory?
I would personally say that the US was always more of a Capitalist dictatorship and was founded on state-endorsed genocide, it’s a settler-colonial project. I would say the USSR and PRC, though obviously not free from tragedy nor atrocity, were not founded in the same manner.
I disagree with your analysis that central planning has worked out way worse than Capitalism, and want to know why you say that.
You already agreed that the USSR and PRC were vast improvements on their previous systems
What? When did I say that? I didn't say that.
I think that the standard of living increased dramatically in both, as scientific advances that provide standard of living became more widely distributed worldwide, and I think their previous systems were pretty abysmal. But I think they chose the wrong model for how to centralize a strong government and create an economy that works for all their people -- the benefit of any central planning that accelerated their industrialization was dwarfed by the nightmare of having a single strong central government that can kill millions of its people at the drop of a hat or throw them in prison for literally just a single sentence when they spoke the wrong thing.
I don't think that the fact that they came from feudalism and so therefore there were aspects of coming into the modern world and some form of modern government, that were good things, means that the model they chose was at all the right one, and I don't think that's a good argument for moving the US from its current state to a similar model.
I disagree with your analysis that central planning has worked out way worse than Capitalism, and want to know why you say that.
I didn't say central planning has always worked out worse than capitalism. Like I said, a lot of FDR's reforms were centrally planned, and they were great.
The specific examples I brought up were how it's worked in the only two huge countries like the US that have tried a fully communist economic model (and the central control of the country that necessarily seems like it goes along with it). What they got was gulags, cultural revolution, Tienanmen, great firewall of China, mass starvation in both countries (because of mismanagement, which is very very different from the earlier mass starvations that were caused by crop failures or war), modern Russia after the total unsustainability of the USSR system led to a total collapse, Uyghur re-education camps.
Yes, the US does lesser versions of all of the above that are still to a level that's horrifying. I think we should fix those things when the US does them. But I think treating those even worse outcomes as non-events, because in theory the system that produced them has some good features, is a mistake.
I think that the standard of living increased dramatically in both, as scientific advances that provide standard of living became more widely distributed worldwide, and I think their previous systems were pretty abysmal.
What.
the benefit of any central planning that accelerated their industrialization was dwarfed by the nightmare of having a single strong central government that can kill millions of its people at the drop of a hat or throw them in prison for literally just a single sentence when they spoke the wrong thing.
The US did the same thing when it was industrializing, they just weren’t counted as citizens. Even at the peak of the USSR’s incarcerations, they were lower in number both per capita and in total than the US Prison system.
I don’t think that the fact that they came from feudalism and so therefore there were aspects of coming into the modern world and some form of modern government, that were good things, means that the model they chose was at all the right one, and I don’t think that’s a good argument for moving the US from its current state to a similar model.
Explain why you believe Capitalism would have been better. Secondly, I did not say the USSR is what the US should copy, I explained the issues with Capitalism and how Socialism solves them.
The specific examples I brought up were how it’s worked in the only two huge countries like the US that have tried a fully communist economic model (and the central control of the country that necessarily seems like it goes along with it). What they got was gulags, cultural revolution, Tienanmen, great firewall of China, mass starvation in both countries (because of mismanagement, which is very very different from the earlier mass starvations that were caused by crop failures or war), modern Russia after the total unsustainability of the USSR system led to a total collapse, Uyghur re-education camps.
And yet the US is worse.
Yes, the US does lesser versions of all of the above that are still to a level that’s horrifying. I think we should fix those things when the US does them. But I think treating those even worse outcomes as non-events, because in theory the system that produced them has some good features, is a mistake.
Explain why you believe the US did lesser versions of the above when they have been higher in total quantity and per Capita.
0.7% of the US population is in jail or prison, which is a shockingly high percentage unworthy of a modern wealthy country, and a testament to the barbaric nature of our system.
The Gulag in 1950 housed 2.5 million people, after it received a huge influx of returning veterans whose only crime was having been exposed to the reality of the western world which the USSR didn’t want the population to be allowed to know about. They got sentences like 10 or 20 years. The total population of the USSR at the time was about 178 million, meaning the Gulag housed 1.4% of the population.
And this was a type of imprisonment which was sadistic beyond the wildest wet dreams of Joe Arpaio or Stephen Miller. Of the 18 million people who ever interacted with the Gulag during its full implementation lifetime, almost 10% died there, or shortly after their release.
Idk what’s going on at lemmy.ml to give you the picture of the world you have received, but they have done you a disservice. Idk dude. I tried.
Yes, so at the absolute peak of the Gulag system, right after an influx of imprisonment from returning POWs being imprisoned (which I never claimed to support), the US currently does not imprison as much. Wow, what a shocker!
The vast bulk of deaths in gulags came from starving POWs after the Nazis invaded Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket. The reality is that just like American prisons, the USSR had vastly different conditions depending on severity of crime and location.
All this digging and still not a single point about why the atrocities that happened in the USSR are necessary for Socialism or supported by Socialism. It’s clearly all vibes-based analysis from a lifetime of Anticommunist propaganda and an unwillingness to look at systems within the context of trajectory and as built upon from previous conditions.
Even at the peak of the USSR's incarcerations, they were lower in number both per capita and in total than the US Prison system.
This you?
I'm honestly not fishing for a gotcha. I'm fishing to talk some sense into you.
I think you're making statements without caring whether they're true (just basing them on whether they feel right to you), and shifting your definitions around, and refusing to clarify what you mean or the details of what you're advocating. IDK, man, if me trying to pin you down on what you mean or poke holes in what you're saying comes across as hostile, then I apologize. That's just kind of my way of speaking sometimes.
But overall, I think you have succumbed to this sort of groupthink that makes you think that things make sense when they don't or when there are significant flaws in them. Now you're falling back on accusing me of saying it has to play out like the USSR, when I said multiple times that it doesn't, and I guess implying that I don't like socialism when I listed some great socialist things already. I think you don't want to "lose" the conversation and are just kind of twisting things around to be able to accuse me of being wrong.
It’s pretty clear by my wording that I was referring to when they were contemporaries, not the peak right after WWII to modern US, lol. Again, silliness.
I think you’re making statements without caring whether they’re true (just basing them on whether they feel right to you), and shifting your definitions around, and refusing to clarify what you mean or the details of what you’re advocating.
Here’s a mirror, lol. You haven’t answered my questions and constantly duck and weave.
Here, I’ll extend an olive branch. I can list several things, and you can tell me where you disagree.
Capitalism has the following flaws:
Ownership of Capital by individuals results in a class conflict between Workers and Owners, resulting in a tumultuous society
Production of commodities for profit rather than use results in products designed to make profits rather than fulfill uses, ie enshittification
Capitalism cannot exist forever because of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, which leads to Imperialism and eventually fascism and collapse
You haven't answered my questions and constantly duck and weave.
Have I not answered questions? What haven't I answered? I'm happy to go back and address things if you feel like I evaded something.
Here, I'll extend an olive branch. I can list several things, and you can tell me where you disagree.
Capitalism has the following flaws:
Sure.
Ownership of Capital by individuals results in a class conflict between Workers and Owners, resulting in a tumultuous society
Agree
Production of commodities for profit rather than use results in products designed to make profits rather than fulfill uses, ie enshittification
Agree
Capitalism cannot exist forever because of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, which leads to Imperialism and eventually fascism and collapse
I mean, a building can't last forever because of its tendency to decay and fall apart, but then if you maintain it properly, it's fine, for long enough to be useful.
I think this is the core of our disagreement: I would agree about the tendency, but not the inevitability. Like I said, I think that particular elements (strong labor unions and a strong-in-practice democratic government) can constrain capitalism to where it functions well and gives a good world to the people connected to it, but doesn't take over and become a destructive force (as it is today to a large extent).
It sounds like you're saying that the flaws are unfixable and so capitalism has to be rejected in order to make a good system. Which, I mean maybe, but in my mind that's unproven.
It also sounds like you're saying that because of these flaws, we need to replace capitalism specifically with communism or socialism and asserting that it'll be better. Which again, I mean maybe, but it seems like you're being consistently evasive about the details of what that would mean (either through details or a historical example), which makes it conveniently easy to hold up the theory of how wonderful it could be, against the actual reality of how capitalism is in practice, and assert that of course it would work better than capitalism in practice, because capitalism has these problems.
You’re on the right track, but haven’t taken it to the logical conclusion. The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall happens beause of competition, and the floor is subsistence. The less labor constitutes the overall value of commodities due to automation, the lower the profit. That’s where Imperialism comes in, and as the global south also automates, rates of profit crumble. There’s no scenario where Capitalism is maintained.
Socialism gets rid of that issue by abolishing competition and the profit motive. Rather than for exchange, goods are produced for use.
My question is (1) why can't labor unions fight back against that tendency indefinitely, if given enough power to demand a reasonable share of the extra value of their labor (2) why is socialism guaranteed to get rid of that issue in practice; where has this been tried and worked out that way in reality to make sure it matches the theory
It's pretty clear by my wording that I was referring to when they were contemporaries, not the peak right after WWII to modern US, lol. Again, silliness.
Oh -- and I'm really trying not to get caught up in this extended back-and-forth over individual details because super fine details are not the point, but saying the USSR's incarcerations at their peak were lower than contemporary US imprisonment is even sillier. In 1940, the US had 0.2% of its people in prison, which is an actually-reasonable level for a decent country, and lower than the USSR's before-WW2-fucked-the-demographics level of 0.7% (1.5 million in prison out of 194 million people), which is equal to the US's peak of 0.7% and lower than its current level (I was wrong - it's dropped to 0.5% now, which is still of course way too much).
The skyrocketing of prison population from 0.2% to 0.7% happened pretty quickly, from 1980 to 2008, under the great neoliberal enfuckening of the country that was the end of the millennium. It's been going back down, slightly, since then.
I would like the system in the US to be back again more like the one that had the 0.2% that had lasted for 204 years up until that point, and work from there to make more justice at home and abroad. You could say that Reagan and Clinton are inevitable final stages of the system that no amount of safeguard can prevent, and there's no way to improve it within its parameters. I mean, maybe. But I still think it's reasonable to ask, okay even in that case what is the system we will do instead, that will prevent Reagan or Clinton from being replaced with a new Stalin (or, because of lukewarm support for the liberals from "pure" leftists, a Trump -- which is exactly how it happened in pre-Nazi Germany that led to Hitler) who will then make the days of "welfare to work" and 0.7% in prison look like wonderful happy days.
"The Social Democrats and Communists were bitterly divided and unable to formulate an effective solution: this gave the Nazis their opportunity"
"By now the SA had 400,000 members and its running street battles with the SPD and Communist paramilitaries (who also fought each other)"
"Under Comintern directives, the Communists maintained their policy of treating the Social Democrats as the main enemy, calling them 'social fascists', thereby splintering opposition to the Nazis."
"Later, both the Social Democrats and the Communists accused each other of having facilitated Hitler's rise to power by their unwillingness to compromise."
Etc etc and so on. I don't think that there exists a far left in recognized US politics in the same way there was an official communist party in Germany. But I definitely see parallels between Lemmy leftists who don't want to support the Democrats against Trump, and German Communists who wanted to pick fights with the SPD (and, sure, vice versa) instead of uniting with them against Hitler.
The SPD, at least, united towards the end with the Center Party and the DVP to support Hindenburg for chancellor as a last attempt to stop Hitler, but by then it was sort of too late anyway; the main damage had already been done. Hindenburg's death hastened the process of Hitler taking over, but it was pretty much in the cards one way or another from 1932 on.
Are you talking about the SPD supporting Hindenburg as siding with the fascists? I think they only did that because the alternative would be Hitler. Or what do you mean?
Mind sharing some numbers?
Sure.
Incarceration rates in the US showing the 0.2% or lower rate up until 1980, and then the skyrocket to 0.683% by 2000
Gulag population figures; 1.5 million in 1940 means 0.7% of the USSR's 194 million population, and 1.5-1.7 million dead out of 18 million total who passed through the system means almost 10% fatality rate for being imprisoned there
Rather than joining up with the leftists, they sided with the fascists. This was after the SPD had sided with the Kaiser and had constantly made an enemy of the KPD.
Rather than joining up with the leftists, they sided with the fascists
They did battle with the fascists in the streets, and once the Nazis were clearly on the verge of seizing power, they allied with their enemies in government to get behind Hindenburg to try to stop it from happening.
The "rather then joining up with the leftists" part of it is accurate. Of course, the converse is also true -- rather than joining up with the SPD, the leftists did battle with the SPD, called the SPD the main enemy, and even as late as the presidental election in 1932, were still running their own candidate, splintering off 13.1% of the vote away from Hindenburg, meaning that Hindenburg squeaked into office on a weakened mandate and Hitler was the de facto man in charge even before Hindenburg's death. And, all the while and after, the KPD kept insisting that it was all the SPD's fault.
It was the last election many of the far left people saw, since they died in the camps before the next election came, years and years later under allied occupation. It is of course impossible to know whether the ones who died in the camps still felt it was the SPD's fault.
If you live in the US, you might get a chance to see how this all operates firsthand, from inside whatever the modern version of the camps is. You can of course argue that it's someone else's fault, and they should have compromised with you, instead of the other way around. Who knows, there's an argument that you'd be right (and that Biden shouldn't have alienated all the anti-genocide people). Of course, if that happens, your argument of course won't mean shit in terms of saving you (or saving any Palestinian population which is suffering ten times worse under Trump's administration than it was under the one you're currently criticizing, although your criticism has perfect validity.)
I have spent as much time as I want to spend trying to talk sense into you.
The SPD was the KPDs biggest enemy because the SPD betrayed the revolution, laying the groundwork for fascism in the first place. The SPD broke the line.
I agree with you, there’s a good chance I will end up in a US death camp. You already know I told you I plan on voting Biden, I just believe that unless we can overturn this system, within the next few presidencies this will happen regardless of party.
I have spent as much time as I want to spend trying to talk sense into you.
As for the fascist and fasc-adjacent things Biden has done, there are quite a few. Enabling and funding a genocide, labeling protestors as anti-semetic, further entrenching US Imperialism, building Nationalism, and more have resulted in continued cancerous growth of fascists domestically.
Forgot about the crime bill and like most of his pre-presidential actions, can’t forget about those
Genocide, you absolute monster. This is why, as a leftist, I do not consider Biden supporters any different to MAGA fascists; they are just as callous and evil.
But I don’t get how citing facts of what’s he done is “unnecessary” or “attempting” to make him seem better.
My take on that would be that it brings nuance and humanity to those that some auth-leftists want to hate and dehumanize. Pointing out that Biden is not a cardboard cutout of [insert chosen evil diety here] and that he has done good things makes it harder to rationalize digging in. To justify vilifying, “dunking on”, and generally bullying those who would support him (even unhappily) rather than embrace accelerationiam that would load to extraordinary harm of LGBTQ+ people with no concrete data to suggest that it would cause net benefit or leftward motion, while claiming dialectics and opposition to silencing dissent, takes a good deal of cognitive dissonance as is. Being forced to acknowledge that ramps that dissonance up higher.
(Holy long sentence Batman! Sorry about that.)
Just to be clear to auth-left folks (though any state or corpo actors can get fucked), I’m not trying to be sectarian or talk shit. This is honestly how I perceive this. Dehumanizing other leftists (or people for that matter, or hell, even bourgeois dickheads) is not something that has led to positive societal changes in history. Generally, it’s just used to justify unnecessary death and suffering. Suppressing or ignoring data (or lack thereof) is not conducive to making data-backed theses.
Yeah. There are people who are just straight-up evil and trying to hurt people on purpose (Trump is one), but it's actually very rare, I think, even in political leaders. Mostly I think the destructive stuff in the world comes from people who have a weird reality built up in their head where what they're doing makes sense.
I see this even in internet arguments. It's very common that two people will both be saying things that makes sense, but because they both have this caricature built up of the other person and the other viewpoint in their head, they can't even understand each other and keep talking at cross purposes.
Person A says "How DARE you say that genocide is okay, genocide is NEVER okay"
Then person B says "How DARE you say Biden and Trump are the same, Trump is obviously way worse and we need to vote for Biden"
"How DARE you vote for genocide"
"How DARE you refuse to vote against Trump's genocide"
And so on. I mean, neither one is really wrong, and yet they're all angry at each other and each seem genuinely convinced that the person they're talking to carries cartoonishly wrong views like "genocide is okay as long as it comes from my political allies," and then they get all bent out of shape arguing against those imaginary views that almost no one really actually holds. And they can't even listen to the other person for long enough to understand what they're saying, because I can't possibly sit here and listen to a pro-genocide person, when I am ANTI genocide, and I just need to fight against this pro genocide person right now.
went after airlines, cable companies, phone companies, concert ticket sales and hotels for their fucking ridiculous hidden fees!,
started a drone industry right here in the US so we won’t be caught like Russia is, developing new weapons while getting blown up;
restarted microchip and solar production IN THE US,
brought back net neutrality
it’s the start, not the end - and saying these accomplishments are just silencing those to my left would be asinine; it’s not perfection, but it is progress and we can continue to build things further with the house, senate and executive - or we can throw it all away, burn the fucking 220+ year experiment down because ‘biden genocide’ - which was bibi genocide all along.
I despise the clinton wing of the party and would prefer Bernie 8 days a week. Bernie said vote Biden, that should be good enough for anyone.
Don't forget, took climate change seriously for the first time a US politician has ever done that, and made a huge priority to pass a massive climate bill that is predicted to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030. It's too late, but that's not Biden's fault, and he started working on it practically the instant he got in office.
I literally do not see anyone “punching left” outside of the mainstream media. No one on Lemmy is out here saying “these damn protestors if only they would shut up” or anything like that.
Someone then argues that that criticism is unfair or disagrees with it
... is not punching left.
Someone from the pro-Biden camp directing some kind of "punching" at someone who hadn't already brought Biden into the argument themselves, from an anti perspective, would be punching left. Someone "punching" at Biden (which terminology I don't even really agree with), and then there's a response "actually here's why I don't think that's true," is not punching.
Surely that makes sense?
Or, like I said, someone from the establishment-Democrat camp who directs condemnation at someone who's literally just trying to stick up for the Palestinians, because it makes Biden look bad. That would be punching left, and that definitely happens from Democratic politicians and in the MSM. I'm saying I haven't seen any of that on Lemmy.
Surely that makes sense? IDK, maybe not. But that what I said up there is my viewpoint on it. Hope it's helpful.
Your argument boils down to “they started it” and doesnt matter. All of those posts are criticizing leftists who won’t vote for Biden because he’s supporting genocide by reducing the left’s position to bothsidesism.
establishment-Democrat camp who directs condemnation at someone who’s literally just trying to stick up for the Palestinians, because it makes Biden look bad. That would be punching left, and that definitely happens from Democratic politicians and in the MSM.
What is your point here? That democratic party reps dont post on lemmy? Because this:
directs condemnation at someone who’s literally just trying to stick up for the Palestinians
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