What were or are your thoughts on the US Pres. Debate?
anarcho_blinkenist @ anarcho_blinkenist @lemmy.ml Posts 0Comments 81Joined 11 mo. ago
anarcho_blinkenist @ anarcho_blinkenist @lemmy.ml
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I didn't see the community and was already primed to say no half measures! abolish cars! and instead have functioning public transport (and if elon musk sabotages it like he did with california high speed rail he gets launched into the mars on his own garbage shuttle). Then there can also be housing layouts that aren't atomizing and reactionary social-engineering projects to facilitate white flight and capital extraction from cities like the hellscape that is the suburbs; where people are conditioned to give money to the chemical/chemical-weapons companies who invented the concept of "lawn weed" and to fossil fuel industries to pollutively wastefully mow and always forever re-mow their sterile mediocre lawns so theyre 'too busy [with pointless busywork] to be a communist'
Hot take here, but I'm pretty sure women who are being oppressed and having their social rights restricted by the Taliban are still able to enjoy more rights than women who have been blown up and murdered by anglo bombs.
Also, this is in Yemen, wtf you on about the Taliban for? You lost get over it smh. Do you not have enough genocides to support or something?
Just the thought... Hang on.. I got something in my eye
Counterpoint: Harris doesn't need to be a monster such that it is a dereliction of democratic duty to not speak about it constantly.
Post-script to that counterpoint: You don't need to railroad people talking about Copmala Handcuffs being a flamethrower unto human life and liberty her entire career into trying to convince people it's worth helping and hoping she gets a new fuel tank handed to her.
He's at his best when he's borderline surreal. Remember when he accused Ted Cruz' dad of killing JFK? lmfaoo
Both of these candidates deserve the Hague. But the Netherlands better arm up first! (That bill passed the Senate 75-19, with 30 democrats and 45 republicans in support. Never not a terrible country. Vote Communist and join the PSL)
collapse is less of an event, and more of a protracted decay and crumbling away of its structural integrity, out of which the existing contradictions which had been always simmering below the surface become increasingly sharp at points and times and ruptures along the fault lines begin to appear at increasing rates
Democrats outflanking the Republicans on the right over immigration has been a wild one. Though it's been happening for years, they usually weren't so proud and open about it. Obama himself was infamously known as the "Deporter-in-Chief," and Biden not only didn't put a stop to the concentration camps the democrats and liberals feigned outrage over with Trump, but also deregulated them and sent people to unknown fates, as well as allowing for and advertising the private subcontracting of these concentration camps, and pretending that was progress. Very normal country, with parties that are definitely not just two hands of the same sociopathic capitalist class.
These immigrants and refugees are people who are, I will add, fleeing from countries that the west under both parties have spent a century terrorizing, destroying, destabilizing, starving, and exploiting (same story with the European refugee crises, the refugees are blamed and demonized when they are all fleeing from the chaos and suffering and destruction caused and continuously caused by western imperialism --- a bipartisan and usually NATO-spearheaded affair --- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.)
The democrats and republicans have fundamentally different world views
Correction: the democrats and republicans have fundamentally different standards of decorum and of how close they can be to the stench of the consequences of their highly similar world views without turning away.
fallacy is when real thing I don't like
maybe if the US abolished the myopic hyper-consumptive sterile mediocrity that is goddamn LAWNS this would happen less.
Also pretty psychopathically callous comments by the blue-maga liberals here. As if Texas is only petty-bourgeois MAGA-craka Qanon suburbanites rather than also having an equal amount of Latinos and a 10% Black population (3.5 million) and almost a hundred-thousand Indigenous. There are more of the minority-groups that liberals pretend to care about (while doing everything to support their oppressors) in Texas than probably anywhere in their yuppie yankee states. Never tell me that Liberals care about the working class.
The article talks a lot about about USian individual consumption rates but trying to ctrl+F 'find in page' shows zero hits for "Military". Considering the US military is the largest single consumer of hydrocarbons and single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world (more than the total emissions of 100 countries combined), as a globalized imperial behemoth with no compare today or in history; seems an important thing to leave out. But likely a legacy of the Department of "Defense" lobbying heavily to exclude militaries from international metrics and protocols, and laundering their own reports. I don't doubt they've continued to do this for other major studies used as primary sources in climate articles.
It is interesting to me how this pushing the blame from the military and corporations onto the "higher-income consumers" who have high footprint as individuals, seems very indicative of the ways liberalism's incapability to handle capitalism's contradictions inevitably inflames the fascist political base of petty-bourgeois. Hence the reactionary rhetoric which comes out in dialectical response from exactly this article's conclusions: how the government and [bourgeois] "environmentalists" are 'targeting the middle class.' and 'declaring war on the middle class' etc. Leaving the multinationals and imperial military untouched.
The "middle-class," of course, being a fake class --- an income bracket wearing groucho glasses and calling itself a class so it can act as a wedge to to obscure the dualistic and antagonistic class relations in capitalist society between the PROPERTIED and UNPROPERTIED, and the contradictions and conflicts therein. The "middle class" is like the myth of 'upward mobility under capitalism' distilled into a propaganda phrase. It is false consciousness personified as the propertyless middle-management overseer-and-pain-sponge standing between the capitalist (who the state works for) and the broad masses of the low-bracket or no-bracket workers.
This is obviously complicated by imperial and colonial relations, but none of that changes the focus on "high-income consumers" and their individual actions being a liberal half-truth obscuring the real causes of multinational industry overgrowth and side-stepping the need to demilitarize the US and NATO (Which is itself the US empire and its vassals, all wearing groucho glasses).
his own dumb ass thinking it's 1890 (or that he can make it 1890 again). I know it's easy to forget in the 24-hour media circus and liberal hand-wringing over his sleazy and reactionary attitudes and him being an 'existential threat to "democracy"' or whatever, but he is in actuality a remarkably stupid man. A shining dunce. He probably just watched a documentary on the early history of the US steel industry while half-asleep and connected it with his impulsive half-knowledge of trade and currency politics in his very big very good brain (the best brain, maybe, a lot of people are saying it).
Based on other things he's said he probably actually thinks this kind of 'protectionist' policy and talk is not only totally grounded in any kind of contemporary reality, but is a 'win-win'. "either these countries get so scared of losing our valuable markets and 'deals' that they bend the knee, or I tariff everything which will definitely bring manufacturing back to the states and everyone gets jobs and america is great again! ART OF THE DEAL!"
"In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic."
youre a good little mccarthyite aren't you? J edgar would be proud of you.
The near-completeness of the degree to which you are primed to turn to fascism is apparent. Youre the same brand of liberal who pretends to care about the 1st amendment and pretends to care about minorities, using them as a political tool "we need to vote for democrats because think of human rights and democracy and the minorities which I care so much for!!" then immediately turning around and cheering their violent repression like you're doing now. Then you say "Love me, love me, love me"
"Russia shill"??? "get what they deserve"? It would be psychotic if it weren't so childish. I get secondhand embarrassment that you behave this way regarding people and movements who have been in the struggle longer than you've been alive. You're no better than any other reactionary white supremacist to speak over the actual people and communities targeted in, and resisting against this fascistic COINTELPRO nonsense --- and having the audacity to put your own ignorant projection and foul lies on their names in active support of their repression by the pigs. Names which are worth infinite more respect than you seem capable of comprehending. It would be more accurate to call you a "Fed shill" than the nonsense you're spewing. You are a participant in and agent of COINTELPRO right now by doing this. Read their actual statements and think for a second about what you say in the actual context of the history in which we live, without your manufactured-consent kneejerk about "[ENEMY COUNTRY]" blocking all thought-and-vision other than stars and stripes and hate.
Ajamu Baraka, Chair of the Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) Coordinating Committee who will be an official observer of the trial states that:
"It is only in the imagination of white supremacists that African people would need smart white people from Russia to guide our people and movement to oppose the U.S./EU/NATO proxy war against Russia and analyze and comment on all aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Internationalism has always been a core principle of our movement from the Garvey Movement and anti-fascist struggles of Africans in America and in Spain in the form of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, as well as the International Friends of Ethiopia that opposed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, to our support for the liberation movements in Cuba, Haiti, Africa, Central America, and Vietnam.
Omali Yeshitela is an outstanding product and example of that tradition, which, among many other reasons, is why BAP gives its inexorable support to chairman Yeshitela, as well as to Penny Hess and to Jesse Nevel, who embody the highest example of revolutionary solidarity with African people. Hess and Nevel have stood with us, and we intend to stand with them against the criminal repression that the Uhuru 3 are targets of."
Every single person being targeted and named in the article, as well as every person within their organizations including the Uhuru movement themself have done and are doing more to help Black liberation and further the political consciousness and organization of their communities and furtherance of socialism in the US than you have ever done or will ever do, and have been doing it for DECADES, as continuations of movements doing it for EVEN LONGER. You're participating as an active agent of white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism. And as a particularly dull-bulb agent at that. Read more and humble yourself.
peace is when more war harder
the more war harder you war, the less putin you propaganda
Towns and "communities" (don't laugh!) which expend resources on stuff like this to actively marginalize, punish, degrade, and criminalize homeless and impoverished people further, in a country which already has way more vacant houses than homeless people, but require homelessness and require it being kept dangerous and wretched in order to keep the "housing market" 'competitive' and stable for landlords (similar to the "job market" under capitalism fundamentally requiring unemployment as the "Reserve Army of Labour") deserve all of the used needles and wall-feces they get.
It is a deeply sick country which does this, for a sick economic system, which produces sick mindsets in its petty-bourgeois "have-mine's", represented in the fact that the first reaction at someone pointing out the absurdity and anti-social hypocrisy of painting hostile architecture 'PrOgReSsIvE,' is "but if we don't occlude public space and dehumanize and force further into pits-out-of-sight the homeless, I might have to step over them on my way to get Fro-Yo!" Even those homeless who try to stay out of the way and consign themselves to busted tents in loud, toxic, dangerous places like under highways still regularly get smashed up and chased out and their stuff stolen by the pigs at the behest of some of the most reprehensible cowards in the country. I've lived and worked in places where I daily spent hours around or commuted on foot through multiple homeless encampments at all kinds of hours. I can't imagine the lack of conscience and callous shallowness-of-soul that would drive people to rally systemic violence against them. I've had more problems caused to my life by small business tyrants and tourists and pigs in single cities in a year than from every homeless person I've interacted with in my life put together. I've also been meaningfully helped and advised by more homeless people than by any gentrifier or cop.
If you don't want so many homeless people, take it to the landlords. Demand the end of (or at least mitigation regarding) the parasitic extortion of the need for shelter, where workers have to fork 1/2 of their paychecks over to some moneyed jagoff who didn't even build the house (and half the time don't even maintain it, and when they do they pay real workers to do it, with the money they parasitized through rent in the first place), and who evicts those who lose their job for 'existing in a house while poor', or who hikes their rent and evicts "low-value" tenants the second they smell better profits. Better yet or in addition, take it to the banks and real-estate tycoons foreign and domestic sitting on huge lots of vacant housing which are illegal to live in, all while new plots of land (including some of the last remaining nature) are ripped up and destroyed for more hideous condos and soulless developments that nobody can afford. Also demand the abolishing of criminal-record hiring discrimination for those who served their time which keeps them in the system and cycle.
Take it to your town doing this sick depraved stuff so they put these resources toward actual community efforts to address the causes of the problem, rather than toward additional fascist policing and morally and spiritually bankrupt dystopic projects like this, whose advocates and executors are infinitely more sociopathic and violent and disgusting than any of even the filthiest sketchiest and most aggressive homeless people I've spent time with, been threatened or hassled or scammed by, shared bottles or cigarettes with, given money or food to if I had some, whatever.
That's the cool part about the struggle against capitalism: Workers' labor and consciousness of how it is used and and withheld is the single most powerful tool within this locus of control, as said labor is the very foundation of the economic system. And the most cost-and-time-effective and reliable acts within this locus to reasonably change circumstances such as better pay and conditions are also the most effective ways of challenging capital itself, like unionizing and organizing direct action with a wider group to support you and together shoulder the burden and the associated risks of daring to raise your head against your masters.
It works double as a prime tool for furthering class-consciousness and class-solidarity (which capitalists already have with each other when push comes to shove). Which then makes continuance of this, and the spreading of this knowledge, capability, inspiration to other shops even easier. From experience, this costs much less time, effort, and spirit, and is much better at solidifying and maintaining better conditions (and not just for yourself but for everyone), than hurling yourself individually into the carousel-blender of endless additional gig work while everyone else is also made to do that individually, forever, in isolation from each other and utter hope-death, which helps this all perpetuate itself.
I've seen it happen where just the mere fact of a union vote being filed and date set results in an instant pay raise among discussion from bosses of "We're a family though! This will put others between us and things won't stay friendly! MUH OPEN-DOOR POLICY!! BUT WHAT ABOUT UNION DUES!?!" Granted, I've also seen it where bosses just close down that shop-branch and reopen elsewhere (sometimes under a new name to avoid legal ramifications for blatant union-busting) because they're so disgustingly rich and so scared of other branches catching wind and joining in, that it is deemed less costly than simply recognizing the will of their workers. So there is risk to be considered, hence the need to build awareness and solidarity among a wider organized group and in your community (and definitely also other branches/departments of your company, but with the care that it's harder to know who to trust in the early stages than among direct coworkers. Punishment for union-advocacy may be illegal, that doesn't mean the bosses won't try to find ways to do it if they don't think you've the support to make them pay for it).
But the defeatist and false, purely bourgeois-implanted notion that the only thing within one's locus of control as a worker is to sell yourself HARDER and make capitalists RICHER in the race-to-the-bottom death-spiral of moribund capitalism is exactly how things get this bad and continue to for working people and oneself. Workers are in reality much more powerful (and more numerous) than the capitalists who require us. That is why they need us to think we have no other or better option, and poison the well to have us perpetuate our own and each others' defeatism and compliance.
in short: Solidarity Forever
Claudia and Karina of PSL are the only decent choice I see right now. Stein and West are also better than either duopolists policy-wise and between them I'd probably prefer Stein as she seems to have more political experience and acumen (though I'd probably like West better as a person and compatriot). But for my vote it's PSL.
The problem I see is that not only will we never 'get a 3rd choice' if nobody votes for existing 3rd choices due to fear over the duopoly entrenchment, but also the duopoly has had and will continue to have zero reason to ever stop becoming more and more fascist and ignoring all of the rest of us, because they can comfortably say 'they're going to vote for us anyway because we're not [other person/party]' and wouldn't even be wrong. Dems can just keep flying to the right while talking about how bad Republicans are and pretending Fascism is a person and can be "voted out;" rather than it being a historical trend, which both parties are converging into the apex of. A trend which arises regardless of the party in power, when the natural economic downturns and crises of capitalism produce hardship and push the 'aspiring capitalist' 'small business owner' petty bourgeois toward precarity-and-fall into the increasingly-destitute working class. So then the most reactionary portion of this traditionally upper-caste group, humiliated by the 'indignity' against what they are accustomed and feel they 'deserve,' become radicalized. They get set against internal minorities and external 'threats' (scapegoated to divide society into vertical segments rather than by its horizontal class relations, thus preventing working people from uniting against the common ruling class enemy) and against the communists; who during the same capitalist crises also grow their ranks among the exploited working classes in all nations and too become radicalized and fed up by the ever-worsening state of things.
It is a trend of the big capitalists actively supporting, and the capitalist politicians half-supporting-half-willingly-capitulating to, a movement of the 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' upper-caste petty-bourgeois radicals seeking to violently reassert and deepen the pre-existing capitalist social relations and societal divisions, along the lines of a mythologized vision of the "proper natural order of things," vote or no vote. The poem started "first they came for the communists..." Because the communists are the ones who, also radicalized by the worsening conditions on the other end, instead set out to OVERTHROW and abolish the existing social relations and divisions, which means the big capitalists and the upper-caste petty bourgeois forever lose out on their previous status and claim to positions of power over the masses. They're the only meaningful opposition and alternative, hence the adage "socialism or barbarism." And the adage "fascism is capitalism in decay."
If we accept the Democrats' dangerously ahistorical notion of what fascism is, and allow that to cow all of us to the left of Thatcher into voting for the Democrats without fail, where they never risk losing votes even for prosecuting the most-televised genocide in history and becoming increasingly just as fascist as Republicans over the last decades; then the Democrats objectively have no reason to try to even pretend catering to or pandering to the center-left liberals and socialists. There's no need for a political reorientation to recapture votes that were never lost or risked being lost in the first place. This is why the duopoly serves the ruling class so well, and why it seems to emerge so regularly. But it has had ruptures and reorientations before, even in the US, due to various strata losing faith or no longer having their interests served by the parties to which they were previously constituent. The Federalist Party doesn't exist anymore. The Whig party was formed by conservative elements that abandoned the emerging Democrat party, forming coalitions with various third parties, then itself ruptured and split. In order to stay in power, politicians were forced to reorient due to the changing material conditions and expressed interests of the voter base (which is today FAR more expansive and wielded by more actual working people [see: any] than it had been during those early reorientations).
Another historical example I found was in the British parliamentary situation around WWI when I got to chapter 9 rereading "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Lenin. The duopoly then was the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party with Labour being a minor but growing third party -- but various material and political realities activating support for Labour led to "a number of Liberals... deserting to the Labour party like rats from a sinking ship." And in the Liberal party's ever-rightward slide and their ultimate allegiance being to the ruling class and their capitalist (and imperialist) system, the liberal bourgeoisie, under the leadership of Liberal politician David Lloyd George, formed a Liberal-Conservative coalition together "abandoning the historical system of “two parties” (of exploiters), which has been hallowed by centuries of experience and has been extremely advantageous to the exploiters, and [considering] it necessary for these two parties to join forces against the Labour Party."
In the USA 35-50% of eligible people don't even vote. If that isn't proof of complete loss of faith in the duopoly, as well as prime fertile ground for activating disenfranchised people through doing the work ourselves to uplift real working class parties like the PSL into the national consciousness, who concretely advocate for empowering the least empowered, I don't know what is. This is how you force a political reorientation in the electoral system from the bottom up and lay bare the duopoly's true interests; and more importantly, from there continue movement-building among masses of now-politcally-engaged working people organizing for real work to improve our lot; like forming worker and tenants unions, pushing to end the forever wars, to nationalize the more-vacant-houses-than-homeless that exist while people freeze on the streets, and in general confront the impediments to changing society and the world for the better, things which BOTH duopoly parties stand in the way of. Worse, even --- both duopoly parties are active agents in all of its worsening for the benefit and profit of the big capitalist donors they work for.
Even the relatively small movements of "Undecided electors" and Michigan Arab voters demanding better of Democrats, as well as the Democrats' dark-money Super PACs sending teams of high-paid lawyers to purge small 3rd parties from the ballot ("Democratic Party" my ass lol, I'd write in 3rd party out of spite at that point) shows that withholding votes or voting elsewhere is an impactful course of action. They are scared of exactly this, that being "better than the other guy" is not good enough. Why not show them they are right to be scared? It's not like under Biden and his cop VP who's now running for President things stopped spiraling into fascist hell domestically and abroad. Cop City is happening under democrat president and local governance, where they are tearing up Atlanta's only nature grounds to build a fascist police academy (on the plot of an old slave prison) to crush worker protests. The cops murdered a protestor and initiated the largest RICO case ever (originally created to fight organized crime), against these protestors to punish all of them together and even people who were organizing bail funds.
To say nothing of women's right to choose, book burnings, anti-LGBTQ acts all still happening under democrats. Abortion rights and LGBTQ civil protections could have been passed and codified when Obama's Democrat regime had both houses of Congress. Biden could've been forcefully pressuring the expansion of the court (after Obama gave away a seat in capitulation no less) but instead cowers from "politicizing the court" as if that ship isn't sailed and past the horizon. They don't do this stuff, because they don't actually care about any of us. They care about appealing to their donors, monopolizing our votes, and selling us shit. Abortion rights being under threat is actually great for them, because they can drum up fear and anger about the Republicans. LGBTQ people's rights being attacked is great for them, because they can weep crocodile tears and shake their fists about how evil Republicans are and "if only we get voted in this time we'll solve it!!!" while doing little to nothing to fight it but occasional unenforceable half measures and symbolic gestures of "support". This is all happening and increasing anyway, because fascism isn't a person, or even a party. It's a trend which grows out of capitalist crisis as a class movement. And Democrats and Republicans are both among and represent the same class which supports fascism, historically and now. And they're doing everything they can to demonstrate that fact to all of us.
To my mind our votes are supposed to be earned, not taken for granted, and unless we put them toward who actually earns them through deed and not just two-faced empty word, and withhold them from those who don't, none of the ruling class has to even pretend to remember or care about that fact.