Yes, it’s horrifying what a small change in perspective - a new angle of criticism, for example - can reveal about our world. There’s no need to feel embarrassment, we are all embedded in a milieu of PR campaigns and a handful of political memes recycled indefinitely and it is so pervasive that it is not something that poli sci professors usually escape, either. Usually it’s the exact opposite. They repeat and entrench lines of thought handed down to them without ever critically engaging with it. Universities across the West teach collective action problems as if they are laws and not constantly openly contradicted by example or that politucs is a one-dimensional axis from liberal to conservative. The latter truly reveals how little they have questioned or learned and opens up its own interesting questions about how academia functions. But anyways, point is, even the people nominally tasked with becoming experts on these sorts of things don’t just automatically recognize this predominant myopia.

Recognizing such pervasive false perspectives and tropes tends to require a cold splash of reality that contradicts the narrative or extensive reading to discover new thought patterns. Or like in your case, talking to someone that has already done so. All we can do is be open to the constructive self-criticism like you make note of and to do our best to be personally morally consistent and empathetic.

Oh yes, sorry if I implied giving these particular people a break. I was speaking more generally but miscommunicated. The people you mentioned should all be banned in my opinion.

I’m sorry you’ve had to experience that transphobia on Lemmy. It is unfortunately common. And sometimes it even lurks as internalized transphobia in people that do not think of themselves as transphobjc. For example, there are Lemmy instances that actually promote chasers.

I believe all instances if transphobia should be called out and obvious examples should result in bans. Sometimes it is good to let people have a chance to accept criticism and retract but I am biased towards more often banning. Comments that are transphobic should also be removed.

What on earth is purist in what I said? Do you have nothing to say in response to my explanations? Am I right in them? Where am I wrong?

You should be against genocide.

Walz’s rhetorical strategy: “just accept the Israeli Lebensraum project”.

The guy that sent the national guard at George Floyd protesters is not your friend.

?

The Biden-Harris administration is massively pro-cop, providing the largest national infusion into cop budgets in history, has ramped up anti-immigrant policies attempting to outflank Republicans from the right, including working on Trump’s border wall, broke a strike, forced the public back to work by normalizing a pandemic, and is now committing a genocide via Israel.

What do you think it means to be fascistic?

I just laid out an honest assessment of the threats, the real and material things, the history and current policies. And you are now bailing rather than look at them squarely and actually respond to the content.

Please engage in good faith or not at all.

The issue here is likely that you aren’t familiar with what fascism was.

Trump, Biden, and Harris are all liberals, as in of the popular ideology of capitalism. They are in favor of markets to “solve problems” and tend to try to remove barriers to them. When organized labor threatens this, they try to have it both ways by saying they are pro-union while doing strike breaker things in action. When finance demands blood, they assent, whether this is domestic in the form of raising unemployment or cutting benefits to make workers more desperate or overseas using similar financial tricks or just straight-up war.

Fascism was a political movement that really only existed for a short period as capitalism emerged as fully imperialist and countries that had too small of a piece of the pie but a people that expected a big one had a serious contradiction between liberal policies (which would see their material well-being and status decrease) and the need for imperialism to carve out that inter-country exploitation to offset this. Fascism was born as an anti-liberalism, a faux anticapitalism, that sought a restoration of a semi-imagined past glory, an ascendant nation built on imperial expansion, and various aesthetics and scapegoats serving these ends.

It is currently impossible for a US president to be an actual fascist. The US sits at the throne of international capital and every major candidate seeks to maintain this system, not tear it up for further expansion because it is somehow behind the other powers and faces being imperialized.

What is possible is for candidates to forward policies that are genocidal, xenophobic, racist, warmongering, pro-cop, pro-state surveillance, personally aggrandizing, etc etc. Sometimes people say this is what is fascistic. But these are all common features of liberalism! The main difference between the Nazi (fascist) expansion and genocides of Germany Eastward vs. the US expansion and genocides of indigenous Americans is that the Americans succeeded. They had the power and time and will to carry out the deed. The horrors of fascism are of mainstream liberalism, they were all inspired by liberal imperial conquest, industrialization, and mass murder.

But again, none of the candidates are actually fascist, they uphold the liberal status quo. Trump is just more rude about it. He openly scapegoats immigrants while Biden and Harris simply pretend to care about them while implementing the sane or worse xenophobic policies. Notice how Democrats tried to outflank Republicans with their border bill? How they are projecting a “strong” border? That the Biden admin is completing sections of Trump’s wall? The massive ramp up of rejecting and deporting asylum seekers? These are all fascistic things. The difference is largely perception. Democrats don’t care about kids in cages when they do it. The topic isn’t even covered, there are no PR pushes. It fades into an uncognizant background normalization where the average Dem assumes it is all over without actually checking on the detention centers or listening to the people doing solidarity work for those inside them or the people waiting just across the border in terrible conditions.

And again, the Biden-Harris administration is committing a genocide via full material and diplomatic support for and defense of Israel.

If you oppose the horrors of fascism, you need to begin actually questioning and opposing the forces that create and maintain them. That includes fighting against people like Biden and Harris, who have at least as substantial of a legacy of such material harms, if not more. Again, genocide. Do not support genocids. That is not an okay thing to do.

Or do you disagree?

Amazing

I just don’t understand why we can’t start the exact same revolution these people want during the primaries.

Revolution does not follow the electoral cycle. PSL is constantly doing work. This is just a vehicle for reaching those who do not understand politics beyond electoralism and to raise the correct position that both capitalist parties create and maintain our oppression.

There is not going to be a revolutionary movement that begins work during a primary and then has completed the revolution at its end. Revolutionary work requires building organizations over years and decades.

It would make much more sense to win over/capture the party and then push that platform in the general.

The party will never allow that lmao. Every attempt to work within the most viable party for this, the Democrats, has resulted in them changing their own rules. Just see how it worked out for the members of the DSA who took over in Nevada.

You get real power to get actual shit done without risking fascism by letting the GOP win due to the spoiler effect.

Biden and Harris are just as fascistic as Trump. They are nationalists committing genocide scapegoating immigrants and people overseas and pumping huge sums of money into cops’ funds in response to uprisings over racial policing and racial oppression. They are just polite about it and use the right euphemisms.

Their policies are, in fact, the main driver of an ascendant right. Their policies degrade conditions and the response to them and fail to address the scapegoating that marginalization provides.

If someone can make the “revolution is necessary” argument, that should be a perfectly acceptable plan.

Of course it is necessary. You think the capitalists will just let you vote them out of power?

I think they just want complete collapse so they can try and rebuild, which is complete psychopathic nonsense.

Please do less bullshit guessing and actually learn about this topic.

Don’t vote for genociders. It is an incredibly privileged position to vote for someone genociding an entire people as if it is just a normal election year.

And don’t kid yourself on what Dems will do. They don’t actually fight for any of that particularly hard because they know you will vote for them anyways, even I’d they commit genocide. In fact, the thing to do if you care about others’ welfare is to demonstrate that you are not an automatic lever pull, that you require real concessions. Otherwise you are just a cheerleader for their entire program indefinitely, and that includes genocide.

Who did the killings? What are the numbers on social violence, social murder, in the previous status quo? The capitaliat status quo is one of poverty and disposession, hard lives and early deaths due to a lack of infrastructure, safety in workplaces, poor nutrition and healthcare, environmental degradation, etc.

That violence is intentionally maintained by the capitalist order, it is violence done to every working person, but particularly those in the global south like Nepal. Include it in your calculations. Watch it dwarf those numbers.

The vast majority of every poverty alleviation statistic for the last 50 years has been China.

Generally speaking, third world countries do not advance without tackling the worldwide capitalist system. This is because it is set up to enrich international corporations largely seated in the heart of first world countries, particularly the US, and can only sustain itself through the maintenance of profits acquired through exploitation of those third world countries. Unequal exchange, forcing international business-friendly labor laws on them, preventing them from building up their own industries so they must import necessities, structuring their economies around whatever the imperial core needs (lithium, oil, an underpaid service industry), forcing them into situations where they have a ton of dollars and therefore must import using them, etc etc.

Under this scenario, conditions in these countries regularly degrade. Poverty and a lack of infrastructure, low wages, and the necessity of a pro-international-capitalist government means petty autocracy around the basics of life. High unemployment, rates, few prospects, a brain drain, and eventually internal violence via black markets, the associated organized crime, the government, and those who correctly recognize the problem and attempt to directly combat it (fighters for national liberation, socialists, etc). Things are not good and they rarely get better, quite the opposite. They shift according to whims far outside their control at virtually any level, as they are enslaved by capital right down to their national government. Resistance movements rise up for simple things like insigenous rights, land rights, etc, and the federal government suppresses them with far greater violence.

When organized anticapitalist forces win a revolution, they tend to work directly against the problems that fomented the revolution. They address issues of land rights, abolish systems like feudal relationships and the most heinous capital relations, invest in public education, utilities, housing, etc that were denies by their xapitalist comprador governments.

And the US responds. It attempts to destroy them, as it requires control over its vassal states to maintain its position at the top of a conveyor belt moving their resources and other labor products over to itself. Much of what you see that is negative in countries run by socialists is of that particular legacy. The US killed 20% of the population in North Korea and tried to isolate it so it spawned Juche. After the fall of the USSR, its primary trading partner, the US unleashed a massive series of sanctions, attempting to starve the country of everything needed to run it. The meme of a starving, poor North Korean is from the poverty created by fuel and food from sanctions. You until the late 80s North Korea regularly outperformed South Korea. This playbook has repeated many times. Those countries that can both carry out the initial revolution and then defend it against attack do much better than the alternative offered to them.

You might be thinking, “hey, but what about Japan or Taiwan or Estonia? They are doing okay.” This is true, though you should keep in mind that they have been propped up in order to act as forward bases against targets of US Empire, namely Russia and China. And they are reigned in and will be subjugated as soon as it is seen as more beneficial than not for US interests. Japan experienced this in the 90s when the US created a massive recession for them.

The Democratic Party-supported the genocide of Palestinians. Democrats Abroad should understand this and demand a non-genocifal candidate.

Recycle that plastic bottle that we will throw in a landfill anyways!

“Defense” has a long history of euphemistic use and this is no exception. JDAMs have no defensive use. They are bombs. They have been and are used to bomb essential civilisn infrastructure in Gaza. The US and Israel still call it “defense”. It is just a rhetorical trick. Same as " Israel has a right to defend itself", which is a thought-terminating cliche that provides a smokescreen for highly aggressive military actions with little care for civilians, journalists, aid workers.

Everyone in power knows how this works and what it means. It isn’t an accident or even particularly unwanted. Israel has been invading and destroying Gaza for nearly a year. Nobody thinks a bunch of JDAMs are for defending Israel or are a case of misuse. They are being used exactly as intended.

Pfft, they’re all the same, no difference between them really, not like either is going to actually change anything, why bother to vote at all?

I haven’t said anything like that. I have, however, said that you should oppose gemociders and not vote for them.

The “Left” at this time, specifically in Russia, was purging the shit out of everyone, and committing the Holodomor.

The SPD is German and the analogy was about voting in German politics enabling Hitler. What you’ve said is neither here nor there.

But the argument that both sides are the same is very clear: Hitler and Stalin […]

I thought the next paragraphs would return to the subject at hand, but they didn’t. I would be happy to discuss Hitler and Stalin in a different thread. Feel free to start one. But it doesn’t address anything here.

Pretty much, yes. The US system is fairly ridiculous so a lot is left up to judges and common law - e.g. whether rights can be stripped due to being convicted or a crime or oer a judge’s order. But freedom of speech and assembly in college campuses, especially by students, fits squarely in what is normally protected. Hell, outside right wing groups regularly try to hold rallies in a camlus near me. Cops never go after them, let alone judges.