I know that here on Mastodon there are plenty of lefties, socialists, anarchists, etc., and their viewpoints are certainly worthy of consideration and discussion.
But I hope everyone keeps in mind that a number of these people are not who they seem to be.
My rule of thumb is that, if they just spew anti-Biden mumbo-jumbo, without any logic or intelligent thought, they are probably working to get trump elected, and are NOT on the left.
That's interesting. One of the accounts I was thinking of when I wrote that post was from kolektiva. I noted it at the time because it sounded so Russian.🤔
@RD4Anarchy@dswidow There are plenty of ways to hide your pro-Russian views without explicitly stating you’re pro-Russia. Wanting to accelerate in the US would certainly benefit Russia, and any kolektiva account with Russian sympathies could just advocate for exactly that. Trying to suppress Democratic votes would be another. They’re probably a little more savvy than to just come right out and say “we love Russia!”
Or maybe there are arguments and perspectives that you have not yet been able to comprehend, or simply haven't examined.
Maybe people are making comments that have deep context which you are unaware of or have rejected without understanding.
To paint every comment about electoral politics that you don't agree with as originating in pro-Russia sentiment is no better than right-wing fuckwits calling Biden a communist, it's completely absurd and destroys any credibility you might have had.
And it is extra silly when they talk about voter suppression, when that’s all that blue MAGA seems to do. “If you don’t vote for my king you shouldn’t vote because then you’re voting for Russia.” Ridiculous. I even had someone tell me that if I don’t vote against my own survival and accept constant Covid infections until I die I’m being disrespectful to trans people. You know, some of those trans people are disabled/medically vulnerable, and they would like to live as well.
I don’t come on here and tell anyone not to vote for Biden, I just tell people why I will not be voting for Biden.
@maggiejk@RD4Anarchy@dswidow At some point, you’re going to emotionally mature and see that throwing fits every 2-4 years never advanced one item on your agenda. You’ll realize it was a total waste of time.
Over the last decade, the tea party engaged in their party and then took it over. Now they’re overturning rights the same Democrats you deride fought for over 50y.
Bad news for you is those fights now become your fights whether you like it or not.
Dude, I'm queer. Why would I want anything to do with a despicable monster like Putin? I'm not even a Marxist/Leninist-- they murdered the anarchists in that revolution. The Soviet Union was never genuinely communist, and nowadays
Russia doesn't even try to pretend at it. Just oppressive capitalists like all the rest of these planetwrecking jerks.
Supporting genocide is wrong. Oligarchs like Pelosi can dredge up red scare McCarthyism and COINTELPRO all they want, doesn't change the fact that genocide is still wrong. Period.
But oligarchs aren’t voted into their positions of power with overwhelming support by voters.
You’ve got to drop the idea that we think every account that hates Biden loves Trump or Putin. We’ve pointed out that we’ve experienced some on a particular server and you’ve taken that as some sort of character attack on you.
@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow
What you're doing is exactly what the trumpists do - dehumanize people with a different outlook from theirs. When you call us "Russians", you're turning us into the less-than-human enemy. Except in your case, it's arguably worse, because the people targeted by the fascist grift are - shall we say - low-information? Intellectually vulnerable? Whereas y'all are college-educated professionals, on here with some absolute QAnon-grade clown shit about my server being a Russian op. You "should know better" but yours is the exact same frequency of dehumanization which serves as the precursor to fascism
@omegaman
You didn't address the comment in the slightest. No one said you "can't make an observation". I said that your "observation" is to dehumanize those who have different opinions than yours by conveniently rendering them the "foreign enemy", which is exactly what the fascists you claim to oppose are doing to you
The world is going to be a very hard place for you if you can’t argue relatively insignificant things without going straight to maximal victimhood. Life is too short to live like that. It will keep you in a state of perpetual unhappiness.
@omegaman@ophiocephalic@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow I find that all accounts with "Omega Man" in the username to be highly dubious. In my personal opinion, they behave a lot like a Russian troll would if their goal was to sow dissent between progressives in order to discourage voting for the Dems by alienation for not supporting Biden. As we all know, lower voter turnout favours Republicans. 🤷
Just a personal statement about a very very general observation.
@ophiocephalic@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow I'd especially target the most progressive instances out there with my blanket statements. Ones that hold properly left views, especially, because they threaten the false narrative that the Dems are "left" instead of fascist lite.
Just try to ignore the fact that a huge chunk of Kolektiva members would be targeted by any anti-LGBTQ+ government, like Russia. It's not relevant, somehow.
@PacificNic
Thanks for bringing that up. It's quite true that probably a majority of the people being casually airbrushed as "Russian agents" will not in fact be het cis white people, which results in an intersectional dehumanization. The Democrats are really putting in the work to alienate everyone who might otherwise have been inclined to vote for them
It's not just that but it's also a preemptive explanation for losing.
When Obama won in 2008, Republicans had two choices: accept that their policies were unpopular, or claim that it was a secret conspiracy against them and that they really got the victory they thought they deserved. Most chose the first, however the second choice slowly increased in popularity until it overwhelmed the party.
It's what philosophers call epistemic closure: redefining truth such that they were never wrong and didn't need to reexamine their assumptions in the light of painful truths. As Gunther Grasse said, the road to extremism begins when one chooses a comforting lie over a painful truth, and every step down that road makes it more difficult to admit that one was wrong all along. The painful truth that Republicans couldn't accept was "this country no longer belongs to straight white men."
When Clinton lost in 2016, Democrats had two choices: accept that fascism was popular, or claim that it was a vote stolen by agents of foreign governments. Most chose the first, but now the second choice is slowly becoming more popular. It may yet overwhelm the party.
What's the painful truth they don't want to accept? I would argue that there isn't one big painful truth but three smaller ones.
Firstly, their government is no longer acting as if it's responsible to them. Biden made a raft of promises when he came in and those have either been discarded, or have been memory-holed and redefined. He's ignoring the opinions of almost his entire voter base about the genocide in Gaza. At this point he cares as much about what the people think as the King of England does, and that's an uncomfortable truth to face.
Secondly, the Left is rising. America has a three-way polity awkwardly crammed into a two-way electoral system. This leaves liberals realising that they are not the Left but the Centre, and on some issues may in fact be closer to the Right than to the Left. Topics like policing and immigration see Liberals holding deeply antiprogressive policies, and this is a really uncomfortable thing for them to admit to themselves.
Thirdly, their policies have been tried and have failed. Cap-and-trade and carbon-offsets have done nothing to stop climate change. A rising GDP doesn't prevent greater rises in homelessness, illness and malnutrition. In some ways the capitalist first world in 2024 is where the USSR was in 1989: intellectually bankrupt, just trying to hold the course, and not really imagining a future any more, just a little more of today. Fascists don't care about this sort of thing because fascists are stupid; liberals do care about this sort of thing because liberals like to believe the data is on their side, and so accepting this is difficult.
So, faced with these painful truths, some liberals construct a comforting lie: that uncomfortable words are the propaganda of foreign agents, corrupting their country from without and conspiring with traitors to overthrow them. It's a story that not only feels good, but can explain an electoral defeat in November 2024, and so people who feel anxious about that possibility will cling to it so that if the worst happens, they have a nice emotionally easy explanation.
I belong to a club with 8.1 billion members. Each of those members is relatively insignificant - that's what 1 in 8.1bn means - and yet I am deeply hung up on each of them.
We either understand the severity of the threat in front of us and vote against it, or we don’t have the attention spans to see pictures beyond immediate emotional events.
Either way, that clarity is a good thing.
So vote how you want. Let’s see what happens after.
Dude, the reason I'm not voting is because I'm neither an American citizen nor an American resident, and therefore I don't get to vote. But that's a cheap shot. Let me answer your point seriously.
On people who don't vote: if the party already has your vote, they have no incentive to offer you policy. You know who are immensely loyal and have a high turnout? Muslim-Americans. You know who's being treated with total contempt by the party? Them. You know who the party doesn't have the vote of? Swing voters in the suburbs. You know who they're desperately courting? Them.
I'm not ideologically purist. I'm an anarchist for intensely pragmatic reasons. Squatted buildings are a better solution to homelessness than subsidies to landlords or jackbooted thugs smashing up encampments. If communism or liberalism worked I'd advocate for those instead.
@passenger@ophiocephalic@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow A fundamental misunderstanding of how American politics work. We have a primary process where the winner emerges on the strength of his or her support. So everyone has equal say in the nominee. If your candidate fails, you then have a new choice: vote and preserve the rights you have while trying to move the nominee or not voting and losing those rights.
Some primary process. After they screwed over Bernie in 2016, the DNC won in court with the argument that they have zero obligation to hold fair primaries whatsoever.
@passenger
Solid! If I can toss in a related thought, which you already alluded to. There is a calculation to the Democrat leftpunching, as you say. But it also requires a divergence into conspiracy-theory irrationality, which is every bit as dissociated from reality as the fascist variant. The resulting dehumanization positions the liberal closer to the fascist than they would be comfortable acknowledging (as in this convo) and results in real collateral damage, which has here been dismissed as "relatively insignificant".
This is how we get to the (usually rather dumb) discourse about whether or not the parties are "the same". From an anarchist perspective, it's not much of a distinction if the FBI kicks in your door under a Democrat president rather than a Republican one. Numerous other marginalized communities will also fail to discern much of a preference, like the queer community in Seattle currently being subjected to police raids under Democrat local, state and federal governments. That's before we arrive at the Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, who similarly always lose, whichever party wins
Yeah this is a good point. In my experience a lot of the dehumanisation of Leftists seems to come from the same place as the dehumanisation of service workers. One does not invite the hired help to the soiree, after all. When the peasants start getting uppity, the first reaction their masters have is normally the outrage of wounded privilege: "How dare you! Don't you know how things are done?"
In the UK, there's a joke that liberals think of the voters as the employees of the party leader: to them it's his job to lead them, not to do as they say. I get the sense that this isn't just a UK thing.
@passenger
You may be on to something there, considering some of the comments that have been made in this OP and thread concerning the intelligence of those of us simple folk who don't understand how democracy and the world of the Serious People works
One thing that keeps coming back to me is that the current liberal excuse that "you can't expect the president to fix everything, that's a misunderstanding, you don't understand this, leave it to the Serious People" is a very new doctrine.
I came of age politically in the Bush era, when America had a lot of powerful liberal voices. Howard Dean and Al Gore would absolutely not have agreed that the system can't deliver results. They were hopeful, charismatic people who wanted power because they had results they wanted to deliver. Back then if you said that keeping things steady and delivering incremental change was the best one could hope for, they'd have assumed that you were a Republican.
After that you had the Obama era, which was largely defined by a useless Congress and a government that therefore increasingly delivered everything through the executive branch. Obama himself became this huge heroic figure, larger than life, having to personally deal with everything from healthcare to finance to war. To claim that he couldn't do it was, again, not a liberal idea. The liberal dream of the era was that Obama could do everything.
After that you had Trump, and he broke everything. Everyone saw just how much power the executive branch had when it was wielded maliciously. For the 2020 election, most of the candidates were promising "elect me, I'll fix everything." Biden won on a platform of the Green New Deal, monthly $2000 stimulus cheques to everybody, total writeoffs of all student loans, purging the far-Right from the police and security forces, and restoring American conformity with international law. Most other candidates in the Democratic primary ended up making similar promises. Nobody said "this can't be done, Manchin and Synema won't let us, the supreme court won't let us, and international law is bad anyway."
This means that the doctrine of "actually the president can't fix your problems and it's ridiculous to suggest he can" is less than four years old. For someone to convince themselves of it so thoroughly that they forget that there was ever a time when they didn't believe it, would be a remarkable feat if it weren't so common.
But then, as you say, these are Very Serious People.
@passenger
It may be that what you describe is a coping mechanism in reaction to a reality they can't handle. They continue to think procedurally about a problem which desperately requires creative, disruptive thinking. I think back to the recent fall of the previous Republican House speaker, which the Democrats responded to as a process glitch to be corrected, rather than an opportunity to fuck up their worst enemies.
And to add one more thing to list of forgotten Biden promises: A public option for the healthcare system, in the moment of the worst public health crisis in a century. If the Democrat base had any nerve endings left, the abject negligence of public health inflicted by the Biden government would be a fundamental and defining issue
That's the thing. This is three strikes. Climate change (we're on track for 4.5C by the end of the century, that is world-ending, the Paris Accords even if kept would be 1/3rd to 1/5th what it would actually take to keep us under 2C), COVID-19 (it's fucking airborne just say it wtf where are our sick days this is complete madness), and now sponsoring genocide.
My benefit of the doubt with the DNC is gone. It's just gone. They can't be serious. We are off the rails here.
I wouldn't call her a fascist: she satisfies neither the Arendt test, the Luxemburg test or the Silone test, and her most famous slogan was a refutation of the Griffin test.
She's a Right-wing shithead, certainly, but the world has many of those. To use the word "fascist" loosely, or to use it to describe every oppressive government, isn't helpful to antifascists.
When did philosophy become indistinguishable from psychology and all of its light flakiness? That's also known as Cognitive Dissonance.
Insofar as epistemic closure itself goes, if it simply meant,
"If person S knows p, and p entails q, then S knows q", well that's just a form of logical equivalence. Stating something necessarily entails another when it doesn't though, is simply a falsehood.
Oh hey, you worked out how to copy paste from wikipedia. Go you.
If you scroll down that wikipedia page, you'll notice that it has a section on how the phrase is used in discussions of political concepts, which is the way I'm using it here.
I did not visit wiki, but...okay? When I was in college I took far too many upper division classes in both psych and philosophy and have tried to keep up, even though both have turned out to be disappointing (to me). "Epistemic closure" was a term I was unfamiliar with, so I browsed a few philosophy sites. But hey, if attacking my (assumed) sources makes you feel better, um...you do you?
So I held off on replying to this because I wanted to consider it properly: you make a very good point here, and I think your analysis of naming the fear is a very useful one in many circumstances. I'm not sure that's what they're doing here though.
I think saying "all my enemies, regardless of the huge ideological gulfs between them, are the mouthpieces of this one specific foreigner" isn't a fear. If anything, it's a relief. It simplifies the world into one where there are no questions of morality, only of tactics. As Dan Olson put it, it creates a flat Earth.
I suspect they are naming a lesser fear so they don't have to name the greater one.
I mean, scary oligarchs from other continents that are a familiar boogeyman all the way back to old movies are a much easier idea to cope with than the home-grown, deeply entrenched ones right here. If the folks in charge here at home aren't basically good decent guys we're in BAD trouble. It doesn't bear thinking about.
I kinda unloaded a bit on that other guy and I notice he's responded to a whole lot of other stuff but not that... Probably he "stopped reading" after about the second line. The brain just erases ideas that don't process.
@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow um. Yes they are. Oligarchs win by a landslide nearly all the time. We need to vote but can't stop there. And making economics a priority is why the oligarchs rule.
We can fix it, but not by silencing people based on a faulty interpretation of anarchism.
@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow An oligarch is an oligarch if it exists inside an oligarchy. Otherwise, it’s just a rich person with lots of happy voters. George Washington was absolutely filthy rich. And nobody had more control over this country than he did while he was filthy rich. But not an oligarch.
Trump as president was the closest thing we’ve had to an oligarch. He actually would try to make us an oligarchy.
@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow and a nazi can only exist in 20th century Germany. If you can't understand the conversation unless we invent a precise term for every type of oppression, we won't have time to stand up to anything.
Maybe that's the point of some conversations...a distraction from the root of the problem.
If you want to communicate, you have to open your mind and try to understand instead of looking for terms to define more precisely.
@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow I have a real problem with people using terminology out of touch with reality just because it’s a cool word and needs to be used for effect.
We see it with the word genocide now. War isn’t just war. It’s genocide. Except those of us who remember ACTUAL genocides (like Hutus taking machetes to Tutsis so their light euro-tainted skin would completely die off) find it offensive.
@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow but War, intentionally conducted in order to eliminate an entire population of people from a region, specifically because that region covers a bunch of natural resources that the capitalists want? That war has become a capitalist genocide. You want to say it's not a genocide because some of the palestinians are allowed to survive?
But, then, who cares as long as the american public gets what capitalism says the public wants...am i right or am i right?!
@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow No, this is not a word you “fit”
Into a conflict. In the late 90s, Serbian troops were pulling every ethnic Albanian male of any age out of their homes and shooting them in the head. For being Albanian (something they still want to do today).
That is genocide.
Getting attacked and then killing 10 innocents standing between you and your attacker is ugly. But it’s not genocide.
Only in the fevered imagination of genocide apologists is every Palestinian killed whilst physically standing between a brave IDF soldier and a cowering Hamas fighter. In reality, the vast majority are being murdered in mass bombings and the rest are gunned down by snipers or starved to death.
@HeavenlyPossum@violetmadder@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@dswidow Christ, girl, are we going through this again? You’ve already admitted Hamas is committing war crimes by hiding behind civilians. You admitted it. But your genocide claim never takes that into account, which is laughable.
Look, we went through this. And then you ran off angry because I referenced real genocide like the 500k dead in Ethiopia.
The TPLF in Ethiopia also committed war crimes; this does not mean that Abiy’s government is exculpated from the genocide it committed against Tigrayan civilians.
I will never understand why this simple concept escapes you so thoroughly, unless it’s the fear that admitting this basic truth will reveal you as a genocide denier.
@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow It is if you knew the attack was coming and didn't do anything because you knew politically it would provide better cover for what you were already planning to do. Especially if you've been doing similar things like this for decades and getting away with it.
Because profits.
There was never any other reason.
It was always about access to resources.
I'm done having this conversation because you are just nitpicking terms to undermine the reality that you seem to think you have a grasp on while everyone else is missing.
Lecture about the importance of polling numbers in American politics, the need to police language use, and the validity of rule by oligarchs as long as technically they aren't really oligarchs yet
Somewhere else.
@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow I’m not nitpicking terms. This is the single most important term in human history. And I reject applying it to war because people die therefore genocide.
Intent is what matters. In the rules of war, Israel is perhaps guilty of violating proportionality. It will kill 100 to get 1. The US determined it would kill up to 30 to get bin Laden. These arguments don’t exist in genocides.
He literally staged a coup against the government of the US to impose an oligarchical constitution. He led armies to suppress farmers and commit genocide against indigenous peoples, solely because his wealth and class status positioned him for that role.
That I know of! He also broke the law in order to keep a woman enslaved (who later escaped and became the mother of the baby Washington tried to kidnap).
@AdrianRiskin@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow Because he fiercely adhered to principles and laws that transferred power from himself to voters. In fact, he walked away from power. He’s pretty much the intellectual opposite of an oligarch.
@omegaman@whatzaname@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow he walked away from personal power because it was transferred to a fellow oligarch, as it has been one after another to his 45 successors. This is absolutely irrelevant to whether he was an oligarchic. I will grant you that he wasn't a dictator, but oligarchs by definition share their power with their fellow oligarchs.
The oligarchs who wrote their class into permanent power in the US constitution self-consciously modeled their system on the Roman oligarchy, in which hereditary, slave-owning, rich creditor elites also rotated roles amongst themselves.
@HeavenlyPossum@AdrianRiskin@omegaman@dswidow@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder But the voters were happy and that's what matters. Until the voters are predominantly poor and not wealthy. Then we need to do things to restrain the voters. For their own good.
Said the oligarchs. Read the original US constitution if you doubt it.
Russia is an oligarchy. Power and wealth is concentrated into very few hands. And those hands make all the decisions.
We are a democratic republic. We vote every 2-4 years on who will make those decisions. Rich or not rich, those in power here are not oligarchs because they can be removed from power as easily as they won it.
@omegaman@RD4Anarchy@violetmadder@dswidow if that's the case, why is the average wealth of a US member of Congress (or UK Member of Parliament) systematically different from the average for the population? Surely, in a functioning democracy, people would elect representatives who were actually like themselves?
@violetmadder@RD4Anarchy@dswidow it’s not genocide or the ICJ would’ve accused them of such and requested a cease fire. Instead it issued a blanket statement of “nobody should do genocide” and then acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself.
Did you read about the gay Palestinian kid who tried to get asylum in Israel and was later found beheaded in the West Bank? Israel shares your western liberal values. Palestinians violently detest them.
The ICJ is adjudicating the genocide charge. It wasn’t going to rule on the charge; it was only ruling on the emergency measures the South African filing requested. It is very silly to rely on this as an excuse for genocide denialism.
@dswidow
So you think it's mandatory to vote for certifiable, demented #genocidejoe just to keep up the status quo which is no longer maintainable, not to say sustainable, as the whole world is immersing in a catastrophic multi-crisis which wont be solved by doing business as usual. There wont be any change with another #Biden term. #Trump is a #fascist and it'll be tough, but he'll derail the incrusted world system to allow change in the future, because Trump's project wont succeed for long.
Sorry, but this is just the sort of clap trap I was speaking of.
You are clearly working to get trump elected, and you're trying to convince other people to do the same by repeating the hopelessly weak argument that somehow trump will bring our system crumbling down and allow your idealized world to take over.
If trump is elected, his project absolutely will succeed. We will become Russia, run by a dictator, owned by oligarchs. And they will shut down all opposition.
I assume you're being ironic. That's the thing about democracy, we get to express our views (even non-citizens) and we decide our future. Unfortunately, the internet colliding with highly gullible people has made it more complicated...
I try to look at history, facts, etc. when attempting to make sense of something. I don't adhere to an ideology because ideology itself can be limiting/controlling.
I recognize that I can be wrong, and likely am wrong about some things. I hope to understand better over time.
In the meantime, I'm going to do everything I can to keep the orange fascist out of the White House.
I believe we're all playing a game. To play together, we need to agree on the rules. That can get complicated. What should be public, what should be private?
I dislike ideologies to the extent they try to limit my thinking or perceptions. I like living in the U.S., where I can say and think what I want. Not true in present-day Russia and lots of other countries.
Trump and the christo-fascists promise to take away these rights.
What Pelosi says is probably true. No doubt Putin is taking full advantage of all this in order to help elect trump.
Maybe her statement wasn't the smartest. We should investigate Russian meddling in our elections. Probably not smart to say "let's investigate protesters."
But I question anything coming from the NY Times these days. They very much don't want Biden to get another term.
I'll look into this further and see what she really said/meant.
This situation is awful. I don't know what to say. I agree that law enforcement should be subject to the strictest controls and scrutiny. Cops should show greater self-control than any civilian. This is deplorable.
It says there was a multi-million dollar settlement.
We should have a zero-tolerance policy for police misbehaving in any way. Shelling out big settlements isn't a bad way to achieve a semblance of that. All cops misbehaving should be fired, and jailed if appropriate.
> “Shelling out big settlements isn't a bad way to achieve a semblance of that. “
All of that is paid for with public money, not by the cops themselves.
And the effect is the same: the silencing of some speech acts by police violence. I hope you will understand that the sort of fascism you’re afraid Trump would impose, the sort of repression you see in places like Russia, already exists for many Americans.
The cop city protester shot to death with their hands up. The 2020 protesters assaulted by the national guard. Standing Rock. These are not aberrations. They’re not oopsies.
Scale? Vladimir Kara-Murza (Russian journalist) was sentenced to 25 years for simply criticizing the war in Ukraine. That was after they had poisoned him twice and somehow he survived.
Read what Masha Gessen has to say in the New Yorker mag about Putin and his thugs. It's not the same.
That kind of violence already is the norm for many kinds of people. The liberal fear of Trump as a fascist isn’t that he will represent some kind of rupture with the past, but that he will apply common types of state violence to people liberals think count as people. To them.
When Trump was last president, he ordered a public assassination of a US citizen. He gloated about it on tv. And the entire apparatus of state, the media, the prevailing liberal architecture of American society just…shrugged.
@dswidow@HeavenlyPossum@messaroundmarx@RD4Anarchy To me it seems clear that this situation is created by the social system you're defending when you say "I believe we're all playing a game. To play together, we need to agree on the rules." One problem i have with your description is that we don't "agree on the rules." If we did agree it wouldn't be necessary to enforce the rules with the regular application and constant threat of extreme violence, but it is necessary, and that necessity necessarily creates situations like this one.
They're impossible to avoid because the only way under the rule of law to "subject [the police] to the strictest controls and scrutiny" is to make it illegal to abuse police power. But who enforces that law? Generally the same cops who it's enforced against. Sure, cops should show greater self control, but they're just people, and it's really not possible to find enough preternaturally self controlled people to trust with the power to kill, let alone enough to police the police and so on in infinite regress.
But our society can't exist without omnipresent extreme violence, which requires police, which necessarily produces these deplorable events. This strikes me as an unexamined contradiction in your position as expressed in this thread
What I hope Oregon here realizes is that there are many speech acts that are just as violently suppressed as in Russia, perhaps differing only in terms of scale. But ideologically, Oregon doesn’t count those as acts of speech repression but rather as discrete acts of deplorable misbehavior.
The fascism that Oregon here is afraid Trump will impose already exists for some people, just not ones that are ideologically visible to Oregon.
@dswidow
If you seriously claim that democracy (i mean the real thing) is expressing your view, it's perhaps because you've assimilated your view to that of the political elites (but believe me, it's not their real view, only expression of their double standard of being a moral citizen and a greedy bourgeois at the same time).
The only thing you can do as a voter is to decide which representative of bourgeois capitalism you give a permission to do what he wants in your name.😜 @HeavenlyPossum
Under this democracy, I am able to vote for progressive candidates, some of whom do make it into office.
Presidential politics is way more complicated, especially since Citizens United. I vote for the person most likely to do well by the populace. I would have been happy with Bernie as prez, but the young'uns didn't show up for him in the primaries. If more people had voted, he could have won.
Right now I am just praying that we don't end up in a dictatorship.
If Bernie had somehow won, I can’t imagine he would have been a very different president than any other, because the American political system is structurally designed to preserve the status quo and privilege the interests of our propertied elites.
@dswidow
Which opposition? Real opposition is suffocated in the US as it is in Russia. Just look how they're oppressing the #NoCopCity protesters. The means are slightly different, but do these justify to uphold a disastrous system run by old white boneheads like #genocideJoe#Biden? The time of neoliberalist #capitalism is over. This system will fall, if you like it or not. I have no idealist world, it's a question of survival. #Trump is no solution, but Biden is demise. @HeavenlyPossum
@TruthSandwich
If the US electoral system is not able to provide an eligible candidate who is not just going on with business as usual, maintaining the incrusted establishment and supporting genocide, it has lost its reason to persist. Voters should voice that by boycotting the election. My opinion.
With respect to your friends, I share your worries. But be assured: Maintaining the status quo will kill many more people than your friends who still can hope to get away with injuries. @dswidow
None of this is true, but it also doesn't matter. In the end, we have a binary choice and it's a very easy one: only Biden supports democracy and rule of law. Trump is a fascist.
@TruthSandwich
The fate of your "democracy" is already sealed, if you like it or not. To delay its demise will only deepen the crises and prolong the misery. Future generations will hold accountable all who are keeping alive this devastating system.
If #Trump wont be stopped by uprising Americans, the rise of #fascism wont be stoppable, if you vote for #genocidejoe#Biden or not. @dswidow
@messaroundmarx@TruthSandwich@dswidow Actually, you could have the society you wanted if you fuckers would just reliably vote every damn election. But because you don’t, because you throw constant tantrums, no party considers moving in your direction worth the political risk of losing voters elsewhere on the spectrum.
You’ve never understood this. You want the revolution without the actual work. And nothing is going to change until you grow the fuck up.
If the party thought the progressive left would be there every election cycle, you’d have so much more of what you want. But you don’t. You abandon. Yeah, the filibuster sucks, but it’s there and we have to work within those constraints. You counter it by FUCKING VOTING MORE not less.
@HeavenlyPossum@dswidow@messaroundmarx So let me give you an example. A recent one. Most of America wanted a public option. In committee, it fell one vote short. Blocked by Montana Democrat Max Baucus. Why? Because he was the committee chair and the public option polled very poorly in his state.
So it wasn’t the party ignoring its voters. In fact, everyone involved advocated for its voters.
If you hate the notion of representative govt, can’t help you.
The fact that American politicians sometimes make decisions that coincidentally align with the preferences of some voters does not mean that politicians made those decision to enact voters’ preferences.
The American political system does not exist to enact the preferences of American voters.
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