Biden said of the bill, “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
Jeeesus, what a fucking scoundrel. Literally just a Republican at this point.
Man, I really thought things were going okay.
I feel like you’re misunderstanding my view here. What I’m trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we’ll be so busy fighting things at home that we won’t have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn’t a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected
This is ridiculous. You have a Democrat in charge right now! You see the nothing that protests are doing! Kamala is the current President’s VP and has come out swinging declaring such protests antisemitic and supportive of terrorism! You’ve let people talk you into a position that would only make sense speculatively, but we have the concrete reality right now and for the past nine months and it tells us that things don’t work like that!
Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide
It’s arguably a mistake on my part to respond to this at all, but I still will: Russia is not committing genocide and has no intention to do so. Ukrainian nationalists love to cry genocide, but it’s nonsense. It’s part of a cottage industry of hysterical headlines made to drum up support for the militarization of Europe and, in some cases, the direct arming of neo-nazis.
This is something that really disgusts me because of all of the brutality the US inflicts on the world, and the disproportionate reaction from white audiences to a white country getting invaded for the first time in a couple of decades.
Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I’m just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?
Some people might conclude that if you’ve talked yourself into supporting an open genocider on the basis that anyone else is “unrealistic”, the more appropriate action instead of hemming and hawing about who to vote for is to work to do whatever is necessary to smash the system, something that is not a question of voting. Just worth thinking about.
However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they’re going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.
This is just you imagining a path to victory in which the opponent is functionally helpless to stop you, like playing chess against yourself, despite that power historically and currently being in a position of monstrous dominance. You sidestepped my counter here while trying to use it as evidence. This is the whole game, this isn’t just some concession that those old farts are unhappy about giving, this is turning over and surrendering their belly for the people to tear into. Are you not familiar with what the US has done abroad to depose democratically elected leaders? Do you think that if a movement gained traction here that they somehow couldn’t ratfuck like Bernie, that they would so much as hesitate to pull the trigger?
They wouldn’t.
I will get to your other comment before too long, hopefully, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this is exactly what I meant when I said that your perspective was distorted by Sorkin-ism. In the ways that really matter, the political class are nothing like “petulant children” and nothing in DC would be solved by people just “hashing their problems out.” They are, as you say, corrupt, and they are both largely getting their money from the same sources, resulting in their goals being mostly the same, whatever their professed positions are.
Paraphrasing from a source you rightly don’t care about, people talk about “diverse interests”, but generally what do those “diverse interests” look like? Typically it’s not something indifferent like “I like spaghetti” vs “I like hamburgers”, typically it’s something more like “I own this copper refinery and want to dump industrial waste into this river” vs “we live downstream of that refinery and don’t want to be poisoned” and typically, assuming that action isn’t already illegal (and sometimes even when it is), the Republican position is siding with the factory owner and the Democrat position is pretending to side with the people but really doing nothing. If you think that’s an exaggeration, remember they promised that they fixed the pipes in Flint but plainly did not.
You’re getting hung up on kabuki theater, a good cop/bad cop routine, rather than looking at how the system demands the oppression of working people and the ruling class is united on that front.
Anyway, if you want to have conversations with communists, Hexbear is good for that (see the askchapo comm), you just need to signal that you’re being sincere and unassuming. Most of them are better at being nice than I am, though in all respects there is a variance in quality.
In 2016 we were all saying we’re sick of the same old shit so let’s just burn it all down and let Trump win, what’s the worst he can do?
That’s really not what happened, it wasn’t Bernie Bros who caused Trump to win, no matter what centrists try to tell you.
Moreover, you’re missing that I’m talking about a specific and highly actionable demand, not nihilism.
However if Trump is soundly beaten in this election, it might just make Conservatives realize that nobody is willing to put up with this extremist reality-tv style showmanship that they’ve been cultivating over the last eight years, and perhaps they will consider putting up a more rational candidate for the next election.
This is absurd, straight up. They’ll change rhetorical tact as needed, but you are completely misunderstanding what the Republican Party is even for if you think them losing two elections will get them to unify behind the three #NeverTrump Republicans who actually exist. You are genuinely mistaking Sorkin slop for reality. They aren’t good guys with different values, they aren’t robots trying to hone in on a center-right consensus, they are a trust of capitalists and their ghouls seeking to crush the power of working people and maximize the profit that can be extracted from them.
More to the point, rather like the fundraising attempts of the Dems, the Republicans still win even when they lose the Presidency, because the Dems are completely unwilling to fight Republicans when they even partially control congress. The Republicans have been doing great these four years. They don’t need to come to a realization, they know exactly what they are doing.
OK, I understand the goal of bargaining power, and maybe it might work, I’m just worried that this isn’t the election to try making a power move when the alternative could literally see harm coming to their families.
It’s never “the right time”. There’s always some excuse to put off actual progress. That’s how this shit works; that’s how it has always worked. That’s how Democrats talk someone who thinks of himself as progressively-minded into considering genocide to be a negotiable issue.
I am a white guy, but
I have something for you to read.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection
– some Bernie Bro, I think
Have you seen that a few states are working out the details to implement RCV? I live in Colorado, one of the places which are trying to evaluate it. Yes it’s going slow, but our government is actually taking it seriously with plans to try and have it in place by the 2028 election
There’s a saying in Germany, don’t celebrate a baby before it is born. If you haven’t seen the classic Democratic practice of slow-rolling something into oblivion, I guess now you can. Just make sure to remember it so you recognize it next time.
And hey, they said marijuana would never be accepted either, but look at us now.
No one who knows what they are talking about would say that about pot. It’s clearly more useful to the bourgeoisie as a balm, they can prosecute the war on drugs targeting other substances just fine.
This is another place where I’m sure you can think through it just by realizing there is something to think through: Is pot really the same as voting reform that would surely topple the two-party system? Do they really not have any sort of structural factors differentiating them?
People like to be alarmist about Trump, and he was certainly doing bad things in office, but he was in no way a uniquely bad president, and all the bad things he did were continued or even expanded by Biden. There simply is no basis for this totalizing narrative about how the country will end if the Dems lose the election. It’s given every damn election and it’s never true, it’s just a psychological abuse tactic to convince you not to evaluate this rationally. Try to step back and consider, do you really think the next Republican frontrunner will be less fascist than Trump? Because Trump is okay with fascists, but he is not committed to the ideology or strategy of fascism in any way. If you give in to the Dems fearmongering, they will never stop using it. I don’t think I will convince you here, but I want you to seriously make note of the alarmist stance you’re taking and, if Trump wins, reflect in 2028 on how you were wrong and the country kept going.
Furthermore, I’m not claiming Arab and Muslim voters are withholding their votes “to make a point”; I am saying, from a liberal democratic perspective, they are doing the only rational thing to create change by establishing bargaining power, something that is impossible if you support the Dems unconditionally.
Ranked choice voting does, on paper, have the ability to create a basis for fixing the system, and that’s exactly why it will never be allowed through. Why would the rich and powerful allow their domination to be voted away? It’s absurd. They will just find excuse after excuse, like how ranked choice got shot down in MA for being “too confusing”, and so on. They’ve played this game for decades with healthcare, surely you aren’t that credulous to think some radically progressive measure they don’t even feign support for is going to be allowed to take hold?
It’s worth considering that maybe Arab and Muslim voters aren’t stupid and they have a point. If we assume that both parties really want to win (and with Dems that is definitely an if), then the worst thing you can do to persuade them to listen to you is to vow to vote for them unconditionally. If the constituency keeps approving a genocide and the genocide remains profitable, why ever would the Dems offer an anti-genocide candidate? Conversely, if hardline opposition to the genocide loses the Dems an election, suddenly next time around their pro-genocide ghouls aren’t “electable” and they need to actually pick someone who will give the people some of what they want, almost like there’s a popular mandate or something!
All of this is giving a thousand times more credence to liberal democracy in general and America’s in particular than I actually have, but there are many ways of thinking beyond “Well, what are you going to do about the two party monopoly?”, most of which involve thinking past a single election cycle.
This particular string of replies was you doing a stupendously poor job of explaining anything or accomplishing anything but looking like a snob. It would be better to say nothing than to be an asshole to someone who has done nothing worse than be a slightly frustrating liberal in their own thread on a non-communist instance.
I’m not claiming anything I said is facts, just the way I understand it to be/how it had been explained to me quite a while ago. I could absolutely be wrong, if that’s the case I’ll gladly retract my comment based on new (to me) information. I’m far from qualified to give an authoritative answer on this topic.
I apologize for being coarse, it’s a bad habit of mine.
The way I understand it is “the government decides to build a factory because the country needs a factory” vs “the people of a region get together and build a factory because they want one”. Well, in either case nobody really owns the factory (compared to capitalism), but rather who’s in charge of it, who decides who works on what and how it comes to be.
If the government is democratic, there’s very little substantive difference here as-described, because “the government decides X” is an entity with the popular mandate doing it, and if that decision loses it the popular mandate, the people can oppose it. Likewise, if “the people” of a locality decided to build a factory in this hypothetical and a minority opposed it, if the minority cannot sway the majority, they are simply ignored.
The problem comes in when you realize that the goods produced by factories mostly aren’t for the use of the local community, they are for a much more expansive group of people. There need to be systems to coordinate production at the full scale of society so that people have some idea of who needs what. It’s compounded by the fact that the machines in the factory will themselves probably need to be imported from elsewhere.
Unfortunately the only examples of communism we’ve seen are authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, and currently North Korea and China (sort of). I don’t think we have a true socialist community that’s not some form of capitalist hybrid, let alone post-scarcity communism or socialism without massive corruption tainting it.
Depending on your definitions, you left out Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. In any case, I don’t think most people are able to maintain the “real communism has never been tried” stance. Eventually, you either come down on the side that “No, they were real communism and communism is therefore evil” or “I was lied to about at least some of these countries and should give them credit”. For an anglophone, societal gravity is very much on the side of the first option, but it’s possible to reach the second conclusion if you have a strong enough motivation to dig through information. Cuba is probably the route of least resistance.
I’m pretty sure all those ancient societies didn’t have universal human rights and civil liberties. The concept of rights doesn’t really begin until the 1600s afaik
What in the world are you talking about? Most societies throughout history had rights for their citizens.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/video/significance-of-citizenship-in-ancient-greece.html
and universal rights until the 1800s at the earliest
See my screed about America. Universal how?
There are non liberal societies right now, they’re all dictatorships with no freedoms, hence my statement
But this flatly isn’t true. Let’s pick a country that both of us probably hate: Saudi Arabia. There are lots of backwards laws and abuses, but cops still typically need a warrant to search your house and aren’t allowed to just go in and beat you to death. There are cases where they do anyway, but so it goes in most states. This black-and-white view where people are free in liberal states and there are “no freedoms” in other states is unserious.
It’s also worth pointing out, and this might go a little way to explaining your argument with someone else in this thread, that the magical way neoliberals talk about “dictatorship” doesn’t make any sense. A government might nominally operate in an autocratic way, where one dude’s word is law, but it cannot subsist on one dude’s authority. That autocrat’s authority is dependent on some class of people who interests he serves creating the material basis for him to keep ruling (Saudi Arabia is a good example, since it is an absolute monarchy that serves the capitalist class). Thus, any so-called dictatorship is really the rule of that class and not of that individual, even if it nominally goes through the decrees of the individual. Likewise, if one class is fundamentally in power, it is no less of a dictatorship if the nominal system is more open, because the real power hasn’t changed.
Firstly, I thought it was a moneyless society. What do the so-called businesses operate with? Secondly, owning land is not the same as using land ownership to extract a rent from people who don’t own land, which is what a landlord is. You’re asking an economic question, so economic relations are important!
I can’t think of any societies that emphasize individual rights that aren’t liberal
Genuinely, how hard are you thinking? Everywhere from Ancient Greece to Medieval Ireland to every iteration of China (except Japanese occupation) had personal rights.
“Emphasize” here is a weasel word, but can you really say it about the darling of neoliberalism, America? America abuses more rights abroad than any other country, so I guess you mean American denizens. Oh, but non-citizens get treated horribly, especially illegal immigrants but also immigrants in general, so you must just mean citizens. Then again, prisoners in America are kept in conditions consistent with its own definition of slavery, which is why there’s a cutout in the Thirteenth Amendment to permit just that, so I guess non-criminal citizens? Of course, being homeless in quite a lot of America is de-facto criminal and the homeless suffer heinous abuse by the cops with little recourse, so I guess it’s actually the housed, non-criminal citizens. Speaking of the cops, they kill over a thousand people every year, something that would be called “summary execution” if it was done by America’s enemies. Do I need to keep going? And mind you, this is all at the relative zenith of human rights in America, ignoring chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the various forms of patriarchal domination, disenfranchisement of non-land-owners, and so on.
What I’m saying is that your definition needs work.
Does the Federation really have private property? Are there landlords and business tyrants? Or does it just have personal property, things a person owns for their own personal use?
Personal rights also aren’t monopolized by liberalism, as much as neoliberal media tells you it is so. Personal rights also existed in classical slave societies, under feudalism, and yes, under every Marxist state (I don’t know about the weirdo ““communist”” ones like Peru or Cambodia)
It’s amazing how people just make things up. I genuinely have no idea where you got these definitions unless it was some hole on Reddit or similar.
What manages the means of production if not a government? Saying “the people” is as hollow as the US talking about “Freedom” and “Democracy”. “The people” cannot merely project their will into the aether and have it realized, they need some method of organization. They need to be able to administrate complex systems rather than just hang out in “primitive communism but with high technology somehow”. Whatever that system is and whatever you call it, that’s a government. In a system of democratic government that administers things, the difference between “the people” owning things and the government – here an organ that exists only so the people can manage the means of production – owning them is immaterial.
If you don’t want to start a political argument, that’s not the way to do it.
One needs to be careful with the word “liberal”, because it means very different things in different contexts (in large part due to political parties identifying themselves as “liberal”). In the stricter political-philosophical sense, liberalism is very closely tied with capitalism and the “freedom” to own things as private property (market allowing) and do what you want with it.
The most textbook definition of communism as a political-economic organization (rather than an ideology) is that of a “stateless, classless, moneyless society.”
Not just stupid, absolutely depraved!
Yeah, there are like five never-trumpers that the Democrats opine about constantly, but that has nothing to do with my question
leftist gatekeeping
Just to be clear, are you imagining that anyone who supports Biden is a leftist?
I think this is overrating the extent to which a LLM can even really read.
Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.