Some people’s lives are so bad they would rather focus on personal survival than electing the good cop over the bad cop, both of whom would likely make their lives either a little or a lot worse every single year. “Our country is at stake” only really matters if you have systemic benefits from this country- otherwise, it just seems like it’s a plea for victims of this country to take your comfort into consideration above anything else. Sure, we’re on the precipice of a fascist takeover where even the white people in gated neighborhoods could start feeling even fractionally as bad as people of color currently do, but it might be worth considering this perspective isn’t just some petty or ignorant thing- it’s a rotten system created by racist white men that might not be worth participating in because even if the system is perfectly fixed, there will always be people on top and people on the bottom. At least with Kamala, there is a hope of traveling farther away from that “racist white man who begs me for votes and never delivers on promises” trope, so it doesn’t surprise me one bit.

Yes, yes. we all know republicans are worse. But democrats could’ve entirely prevented this, which they didn’t. They enabled it. Being better than republicans doesn’t mean the situation is better with democrats. In fact, it’s getting so much worse every single year.

My state is ruby red and even the fairly large city I live in is red. Begging people to vote specifically for biden in situations like ours only makes people more apathetic since they know Biden has no shot. But if you tell people how to be more politically involved outside of voting, they’ll be more empowered to want to vote just so they can get people more aligned with them in their local and state elections. It’s the state government in red states like ours that will enact awful policies that we will actually feel. Pushing an unpopular president as the main reason to show up to the booth will only make them stay home instead.

Tangential: Covid is still killing a ton of people every month (though it gets better in warmer weather). This past January had over 10k covid deaths that were largely ignored by Biden and pretty much everyone else who are desperate to show how “good” things are now. But also, I’d caution against being hopeful for another pandemic that would wipe out conservatives since it’s tiptoeing on fascism, which you’re trying to be distinctly different to, eh? If a huge portion of Americans are fascist, America will be a fascist nation. I’ve heard conservatives wish that CA would sink into the ocean and that NYC would get swept away from a hurricane and I hope to god we haven’t ratcheted so far that now democrats are wishing and hoping for the deaths of their political enemy.

Here’s the press release from Atlanta.

And if you want to read an article about it, here’s one from Time

I feel like this reply is for someone else? We’re both coming from a leftist position. Democrats only think they’re being overrun with bots and propaganda because they aren’t actually politically informed enough to know the valid reasons why people don’t like them.

You should research cop cities. Atlanta democrats voted to fund theirs.

So you know what state that person resides? You’ve confirmed they live in a swing state where their vote for president actually matters? (This is not me advocating against voting since local/state positions are important, but if you’re focused on president, only a handful of states really make a difference at all).

Queer person here: we’ve had to violently fight for our rights and were successful in the past and we will do it again if we need to, so expecting a vote for anything will fix the issues of the marginalized is very out of touch. Doing nothing but voting is 99% political apathy, and it very much feels like all this browbeating is coming from someone who only votes and mayyyyybe donates to the ACLU or planned parenthood once every couple years. Do some real work and stop spending so much of your mental energy on inconsequential (assuming you don’t live in a handful of swing states) things. Build coalitions. Form or join unions. Stand up for what is right and protest what is wrong.

If you don’t know the answer to this already, I suppose the backlash against Biden from progressives might seem like bots or foreign propaganda.

Or maybe if the average American stood with the marginalized instead of yelling at them to fall in line, we wouldn’t constantly have issues where the marginalized are systemically murdered and imprisoned. The blood isn’t on their hands for having morals and boundaries. It’s on the masses who refuse to give up even an ounce of comfort to lend a hand to the downtrodden. The path the democrats are on is the same path the current republicans have walked before.

Who are you willing to sacrifice for your own comfort? Why is that a valid position? Because the other guy points that same weapon at you instead and it’s scary? How many different groups are you willing to put on that sacrifice list until you just turn into a fascist republican? “Just following orders” is just as cowardly a response as “It was my only choice”.

If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol

Finally, I can pop this bottle of Veuve I bought in 2018!

Not that it matters because the point comes across fine, and being hyper fixated on grammar is a form of gatekeeping, but “badly” seems weird here. It might just be an American English or regional American thing to me, but in school, the whole good/well & bad/poor thing was made pretty distinct. Good and bad were descriptors of action where well and poor were descriptors of feeling. I can do good (things) or do bad (things), but things can go well or go poorly.

Grammar stackexchange seems to disagree with me though

Standing by and saying told you so isn’t even that different to “you deserve it” if you aren’t stepping in to help prevent it.

Your vote isn’t the entirety of your voice though. If you telegraph that you will vote for Biden this far out, Biden’s campaign advisors probably won’t tell him that reversing course is the best decision for his reelection. If you say you will not vote for him due to Gaza, even if you secretly plan on voting for him, you have more power to change their policy and help Palestinians as a whole. This doesn’t have to be a discussion on trump vs Biden. This can be about trying to strategically pivot Biden in a way that avoids getting arrested because trump sure as hell isn’t going to fix things.

This is smelling a lot like the republican “Not everything you don’t like is racist/fascist”

How different is the person with the gun to the person who is standing nearby saying “you deserve this”?

I know basically nothing about economics, but from what it seems, I shouldn’t be wishing for record losses instead of record profits? They both seem to have a cascading effect that fucks us from what it seems (but them buying more yachts while we hurt definitely feels worse than all of us hurting).

Corporations showing record profits tells me that it’s harder for everyday people. Record profits means cut hours, stagnated wages, outsourced labor, more expensive goods, “shrinkflation”, cheaper components, dialed back safety standards, crunch, making salaried employees perma-lance so they don’t have to worry about benefits anymore, ghost job postings that are never intended on being filled because being understaffed is the new normal, etc. And then corporations use that record profit to bribe the government into keeping it just as shitty as it is or making it worse for us.

The system is working as intended to siphon as much money and labor as it can from workers and consumers so the metrics focus on that. Then they have the nerve to tell us that we’re being crazy for thinking that things are getting difficult.

Phil Ochs wrote a song about you

Whoops. I was signed out and just now realized I had this notification. I do think a lot of our differences is just perspective that have led on to very different outcomes. I do appreciate the discussion, sincerely, because as someone who was in the liberal camp for the longest time, it’s weird to feel such ire all the time from those same kinds of people online.

Here’s some of the perspective differences we have:

You have a kid, where me and my partner have decided that the world is probably too fucked to ever want to bring a kid into this world. I can see how that would make you more protective of a status quo that keeps you and your family relatively safe where I see how so many people are struggling and me and my partner are willing to fight to make it right. I don’t think either of us are wrong for these perspectives and I’d likely be where you are if I had children (and thought well enough about the future to want children).

2001-2003 was a wild time where everyone collectively decided that becoming more of an authoritarian surveillance state was a good thing under the guise of national security. I’m not sure if I’d consider the democrats sliding to agree with republicans on almost everything something that we should have rose tinted glasses on.

Both of us seem to be playing out our own version of “make the right decision, not the easy decision”

AOC and Sanders aren’t, in my opinion, more measurably left than others in government nearly a decade ago. Harry Truman was pushing hard for Universal healthcare. Also In the Revenue act of 1935, there was a progressive tax rate of 75% for the top bracket. (that’s only 37% today, and oftentimes many loopholes and tax havens make this percentage much lower). Bernie, I think, was mainly pushing for wealth, corporate, and estate tax changes, and they seem on par or less strong than the tax plans from ~90 years ago. I love both Sanders and AOC’s views on their civic duty, but it will always feel like it falls short when AOC celebrates “taxing the rich” by instituting a 1% tax on stock buybacks when those shouldn’t even be legal in the first place. And yes, I get that they’re trying their hardest, but the issue is that both of them are fought hard by the rest of the democratic party and seen as antichrists from the republican party. Would republican voters who are struggling hate bernie sanders and AOC if they weren’t being propagandized by every media outlet out there that their proposals were idealistic, unrealistic, and wasteful instead of doing things that would directly help them? It’s a complicated series of cogs that make this machine work, so I can only judge democrats by what they as a group do rather than what a few of them want. I refuse to be swayed by the carrot and the string politics anymore by believing that democrats will all join hands around any policy bernie and AOC has without watering it down to make republicans more happy, only for republicans to water it down further, only for republicans to kill that bill.

These democrats won’t wipe out the republicans without also wiping themselves out since both of them are parties that primarily support the growth of capital, not health/safety of residents, not equitability, not ethics, not the health of the planet. If those other things come, it won’t come at the cost of capital (and to a lesser degree political power). Democrats know they don’t have to sacrifice the capital of corporations to make the lives of citizens better because the only ones fighting for labor/human rights are a tiny minority of representatives and there’ll always be someone there to block it, whether they are republican or democrat. There can always be a sacrificial lamb that can be propped up on the ballot if it helps maintain capital. Even people who ran as progressive democrats can suddenly change their affiliation to republican after winning the election if it benefits capital. Even if Democrats encompass sinema and manchin. This is why the status quo needs to change and the parties need to die. The parties don’t die by continuing to tell them to keep going on like they have been.

“I respectfully object to the notion that the GOP blocking everything will be a constant.”

There will always be people who will be resistant to seeing change in the tangible world whether it’s the GOP or not. And they will continue to be voted on by people who agree with them. I suspect democrats will be this group in the future if they manage to outlive the republicans. Change can be extremely scary, especially when it seems like the entire world is becoming more and more fascist, so I can see why someone with a child would want to protect the status quo at all cost. This fucked up world might give your child a full life at least. If too much changed too quickly, it might be too difficult to think about what impacts it might have on your child’s life. I concede that there’ll likely be nothing I can say that can change the protective nature of a parent, and while I wish I was as optimistic as you, I’ve seen too many bloody limbs that were caused by my comfort to continue in my comfort since the only things I really have to protect are my partner and our dog. Both of us have a lot to lose with a trump presidency and we know a lot of people like us do as well. I’ve voted democrat down ballot my whole life and me and so many of my friends feel entirely betrayed by the democratic party as a whole- so much that our relationship has shifted from odd-bedfellows to a malignant force that keeps a husk of a party (republicans) legitimate by only being a little more popular than them. I don’t believe that the vast majority of voting americans are just to the left of literal fascism. There’s a reason why civic apathy is so high- they don’t see anything they want being proposed or protected. If republicans win this upcoming election, that doesn’t upset the democrats’ main goal of securing capital. I’m sure some of them can even write a few books on their experience during another trump presidency. But if a theoretical party existed that helped out the vast majority of americans by making things easier, cheaper, and more transparent, that would upset both the democrat and republican’s goal of securing capital. This is why leftists say things akin to “both sides”. They aren’t the same. They’ve very different. But they’re both pro-capital and it’s very obvious that’s what they fight for over anything else.

Speaking of biden’s views on Israel, he seems to be more vocally zionist than any other president in my lifetime. Trump might be racist against arabs, but biden’s zionism is colonialism + being racist against arabs (even if not vocally racist like trump). I’m not saying trump would be better for palestine. He likely would ramp up things just to look strong in comparison to biden- not because he has any idea what’s going on. But that also assumes palestine will still be there when trump is sworn in.

The trump vs hitler question wasn’t meant to be trying to compare biden with either of them- I mainly wanted to see how far along you’d believe in and participate in this system even if you know that both choices are actively bad. Would it have to be hitler vs pol pot before you consider rising up instead of believing that voting will help in a meaningful way? I’d like to believe everyone has a line whether they know it or not. A system that allows a trump to run and win is a system not designed for us to succeed. And I’m not even against voting- I think local elections are extremely important. I just really don’t think a single person with unilateral control over our military actions is a good idea. Actions related to war should require unanimous consent so it rarely happens. But it isn’t because securing resources for energy production or land to create capital is easily possible for someone who can be the sacrificial lamb if the populace isn’t sufficiently convinced that the people we’re bombing aren’t evil enough. The capitalistic machine marches forward regardless of the happiness of the populace.

The rematch and choice of these two candidates is inevitable.

This is elder abuse at this point to run them. One or both of them might die during the campaign. And at this point, it might be the best case scenario since I can’t see either of them stepping down.