GarbageShootAlt2 @ GarbageShootAlt2 @lemmy.ml

Posts

1

Comments

475

Joined

2 yr. ago

Well, I would argue that that is like 95% where their votes are coming from, basically "This is still the 'left' option, I guess," rather than believing in any sort of positive vision on the part of the Democratic Party (it doesn't have one).

However, politics isn't just a 1-dimensional spectrum where things neatly slot into whatever is closest. The fact that they are lurching rightward, the apparent contempt they have for the left, the lack of any meaningful similarity between what a left-wing person wants and what the Democrats will even acknowledge is real (like action on the genocide in Palestine), means that what you are taking as similarity is in many cases difference. Just saying "Fuck you, vote for me because the other guy is worse" is really not a good strategy for getting votes unless you are holding getting votes as secondary to pandering to donors.

Like, do you think a new Republican candidate could just be blatantly pro-choice and not lose one or two dedicated blocs of the Republican voting base, just because "he's still the farthest right"? Of course not, democracy doesn't work that way. If you don't support people on the issues they care about most, a good number of them will tell you to go to hell while the others roll over as always.

Dissolving Israel doesn't mean kicking every Jewish person out. There are Jewish people in Palestine already, and the point is to make a multiethnic state, not replace one ethnostate with another. Many Israelis would definitely leave for a number of reasons, very much like how a meaningful part of the white population fled South Africa in the wake of Apartheid being defeated, but there are houses where there are no other claimants and, God forbid, the remaining former Israelis can also just buy or rent homes instead of stealing them. There would be a big population shift, but there is absolutely no need to build a 10-million-person-ark.

compromising on social policy (especially immigration . . . )

That compromise has already happened. Harris is currently campaigning on a hardline border policy and touting that she tried to get essentially Trump's 2020 border policy through the legislature.

If the Dems lose, they will move right. If they win, they will move right. Without a strong leftist opposition (not just voice, but opposition), they will keep moving right term after term after term while touting superficial bullshit to try to please people who have a conscience but very little political education.

There was a thread just yesterday about why the Democrats haven't done anything progressive in so long, and people were seriously touting Harris being black like that at all matters in the face of her being a cop, or like it's actual policy and not just the incidental identity of their prospective President. I wrote a whole thing on it before deleting it because I just can't stand to talk to people like that anymore.

Bibi is evil, but he's absolutely a scapegoat for the evil of the Israeli government and even the people, as it is basically never reported in the west how his approval went up after escalating against Lebanon, and he generally is pushed to take more severe (and heinous) action by the bulk of the Israeli people. That's not to say every one of them is a bad person or Bibi is less evil, but every single one who is good is an anti-zionist.

Destroying the state of Israel, contrary to Zionist propaganda, does not mean killing all the Israelis, nor imprisoning them or otherwise punishing them. It means destroying the government apparatus that, from the beginning of its very existence, has been a racial-supremacist settler-colonial entity, and investigating what evidence is turned up in its records and punishing the actual criminals accordingly. Oh, and returning stolen homes where there's anyone still surviving to reclaim them.

The distinction being drawn is that popular sentiments aren't going rightwards like the parties are.

What do you suppose is allowing the remaining threads to hold on?

Appropriately apocalyptic for the liberal view on these elections, but the problem, also appropriate for the liberal view on these elections, is that you are taking the Other to be a complete dipshit.

If you're in a situation that isn't the literal end of the world, bluffing has a serious danger associated with it because it informs all circumstances subsequent to the bluff if it gets called. From that point on, people know that your threats are not to be taken seriously, and you have robbed yourself of whatever power you had. You become a "boy who cried wolf" with respect to the actions you will take.

Furthermore, this time in all situations, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to stake such a widespread plan of action on everyone at all times maintaining a lie. How do you agitate for such a thing? You can't speak of it in the open. How do you vet candidates? Someone might be an asset (and liberals usually believe spaces both online and offline are crawling with assets for other states) or even just someone who thinks you plan is bullshit and will decide to talk about it afterwards. Basically, your plan works in the same realm of imagination where wars would stop if all of the soldiers on both sides just laid down their arms. That is to say, if you could just cast a spell and make people act that way, sure, but that's not how politics works.

Lastly, it's important to remember we are talking about threats, so "If we have nukes, we should just use them!" is a complete non sequitur. That's not a threat, that's just an attack. Incidentally, while there is a good argument to be made that if you get nuked, you should just take the L if you think your barrage might tip the scales into the world ending, such an idea definitionally does not work as the dominant ideology because at that point MAD does not protect your country anymore and there's really no point in you having nukes when you're just surrendering to death anyway. If you're an individual operator of a nuclear silo or something and you refuse to participate in ending the world, good for you, but again that's something that you can't organize with because it's a conspiracy of a similar style to what I outlined before, so you aren't going to succeed in helping very much unless you're on the vanguard and it might be a false positive that an enemy nuke was launched at all (this happened at least once with the USSR, during the Cuban Missile Crisis). In that extremely specific situation where mass action is impossible and only a tiny fraction of a fraction of the population ever gets close to being in the conditions where such an incident has even a slim possibility of occuring: Yes, there it works well.

A threat that you refuse to make good on is the same as doing nothing. I have no interest in telling someone who to vote for, but your proposed strategy is ridiculous.

Words can have different colloquial meanings. There is a really crass meaning of liberal that would identify Marx as a liberal, yes, and this is the most popular one in America, but there's another colloquial meaning (more popular in other anglophone countries, but gaining traction in America) where liberals are basically centrists (in capitalist societies) who might pretend to be progressive but are ultimately moderates to their bones. This came from the proclivities of "Liberal" parties, along with centrists understandably claiming the name of whatever the ruling ideology is, and here it is of course liberalism.

Among leftist circles, "liberal" is sort of an unmarked term for the moderate definition and the Lockean definition both, like how "guys" can refer to both a group of males and a group of mixed gender, despite "gals" only referring specifically to a group of females (I'm using those terms because they apply to children also, not just men/women).

So the comment is saying, in translation: "Democrat aligned people will still blame socialists (etc.) like their Democrat ideological cult wants them to." Does that make sense?

Turns out when something happens a lot, it's more useful to try to view it systemically than to write each person individually off as an "idiot devoid of empathy". "Brainwashing" is a myth, but pretending it's real, who do you think "brainwashed" this guy? Surely not Republicans, they've got their own attitudes and talking points that are unhinged but distinct from this.

Is it a statement on how pets are animals turned into agency-less commodities, just like meat?

You're so desperate to score points that you're now acting like I'm a fan of Zizek who wants him to lead the revolution (?) when I explicitly said that I hate him. The whole thing is just a screed of nonsense to compensate for the fact that you blatantly got Marx wrong. I wasn't bringing up dialectics to flex, I brought it up because your mistake was so basic that it was necessary to start there (and I just enjoy talking about Marxism, admittedly).

That's true, they are (and I guess I am, by extension) using it in a narrower sense than is represented in Locke, who encompasses both the red and blue team, but the Lockean sense would still distinguish between liberals and modern leftism.

I was directly quoting you and anyone can see the quoted section by going like three up this comment chain, what are you on about?

Is it really that hard to imagine that someone who loves you was hoping to see you happy instead of as a moldering corpse?

This has to be bait. You can't possibly think people think that way, right? .ml people disagree with NATO-sphere liberals about a lot of things to do with Russia, but that's not the same as being mindless Russian chauvinists.

Like, do you really think whatever meetings she had with Putin or whatever it is you blue rags gossip about would be a bigger factor than her opposing the genocide in Gaza, to say nothing of having better climate policies, better immigration policies, and so on?

"But she won't win"

Obviously, but her shaking Putin's hand won't change that. His apparent trick of buying a miniscule number of highly-targeted Facebook ads isn't gonna do much for her, so we need to accept that assumption either way.

I'm voting for PSL, not Greens, btw.

Not as many people hate Harris specifically as hated Hillary, but a lot of people (for good and bad reasons) hate the Dems and also Kamala to some extent.

I think it's funny that someone with "Locke" in their name would seemingly not distinguish between liberals and leftists.

And good Marxists should know - he wasn’t a huge fan of ideology or respecting it as causal or desirable.

He was very practical, hence concrete historical materialism.

This is what happens when you don't read Marx and just sort of assume what Marx said based on a literal interpretation of his ideological labels.

Marx was not, like liberals, laboring under the delusion that ideology is something that can simply be escaped. Paraphrasing Zizek (who I hate, but he has some good points), it is when you believe that you are free of ideology that you are most firmly under ideological control, because in such circumstances ideology is necessarily acting on you without your awareness of it. To be aware of your ideology allows you to engage with it and modify it and so on.

He also recognized, like anyone who spends a few seconds thinking about what would become sociology (it wasn't really around in his time) that ideology does cause things. His distinction is that ideology is superstructural, it was an abstract product of the concrete base that is material conditions, but the two of them exist in a dialectical relationship with each other. Any base will produce a superstructure so long as that base has people who relate to each other, and this superstructure, in essence, is ideology.

What Marx hated with respect to ideology, and this is the closest you are to being even superficially right, is the idea that was and is popular among liberals (and others, such as utopian socialists) that ideology alone is enough to transform the world, that it acts independently of material circumstances and people will just freely be moved by what is "right" in a completely absolute sense irrespective of their historical or current conditions. Again, these things have a dialectical relationship, and the superstructure cannot fly freely, unbounded by the base, any more than the base can fly freely (by human hands) when the superstructure stays in place. They will only make progress in the context of each other.

Edit: For the sake of being more complete, I will say more explicitly that the base has primacy, which is why the superstructure comes from it -- there can be no culture in out in space where no one is. It has primacy and its change -- e.g. by scientific inventions -- tends to drag the superstructure along with it, but those inventions are only created thanks to the superstructural elements of preserved and transmitted knowledge and the desire to, for example, develop production.

It's very difficult to talk about dialectics because I often want to address both sides simultaneously even though it can't really be done.