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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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700 more reasons to not vote for Harris.
☐ Trump
☐ Harris
Pick one.
no
Then you get Trump.
I got Biden-Harris last time, and I voted for Howie. does it only work when I vote for women?
That is a bizarre assertion that has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
You get Trump if you manage to convince enough people on the left to vote for third parties.
if they wouldn't vote for Democrats, then it doesn't matter how many people vote for a so called third party
...then - again - they get Trump for president. Like it or not, split the left and that's what you get.
I think the issue is that a lot of people don't believe Democrats are on the left, and Democrats don't seem to care
Cool democracy you have there 🙄
That's the fucking POINT. We don't have a great democracy. We want one, but we're currently fucked by the undemocratic electoral college, a system specifically designed to winnow our choices down to two.
So your options are a member of a rather pedestrian centrist party, or a deranged and demented monster.
If you're not American, as implied by your comment, then you may be used to functional democratic systems. Well, we're currently stuck with what we've got. So as an outsider looking in, who do you want in charge of the world's largest military? Harris or Trump? Pick one.
No citizenry is ever stuck, at any point with the government they have. That was the entire, exclusive positive lesson to learn from the american experiment.
And "the American experiment" took place in a world that didn't contain mass surveillance systems, automatic firearms, remote control attack drones, EMPs, radar trackers, and god knows what other military secrets that can be brought to bear. A second American revolution is guaranteed to be extremely bloody, has a much lower chance of success than the first one, and nobody wants to be on the first wave of it.
Besides, the stakes are different now. The American Revolution succeeded largely on the back of the fact that the rebels in question were all the way across the ocean and not taking land from Britain directly. That's no longer an option.
I see the point you're trying to make here but you're ignoring an awful lot of context both for the original American Revolution and also for the modern day.
No, I wrote american experiment. The concept of america itself is rotten and worthless, except the idea that citizens control their government, not the other way around. If we abandon the only good lesson that america has given the world then the hundreds of millions of people the us has tortured, murdered and oppressed were hurt for absolutely no reason.
Democrats aren't centrist, they're right-wing. Harris is talking about making the most lethal military in the world, cracking down on asylum seekers at the border,.and giving unlimited support for genocide. Under Biden the number of people killed by police went up every single year and under Harris that trend will only continue.
If you want democracy you need to think outside the ballot box, because elections in the US are fucked and both parties are in on it.
What actions would you propose? Be specific.
organize locally for direct action
Define "direct action." I asked for specificity. Don't dance around what you mean, say it clearly.
Don't be petulant
I don't think you know what "petulant" means. Asking you to be precise instead of dancing around an issue isn't petulance.
discussing direct action online is literally illegal. why are you trying to bait me into committing a crime?
Ah. So you mean violence. Got it.
not necessarily
That is only one of the actions. Voting is harm reduction, and done in tandem with other actions.
harm reduction has a specific meaning. voting is not harm reduction
Harm reduction is doing a genocide.
And yet, letting Trump be president is doing that genocide faster and harsher, stripping women, minorities, and LGBT people of rights, AND MORE!
If you've been paying attention to the daily horrors coming out of Gaza, they're already on track to total extermination.
The only hope for Gaza is if the US/Israel is defeated. Who do you think is more likely to fuck this up and cause a US/Israel loss?
It's called revolutionary defeatism.
It's called Accelerationism, and it tends to work out exceptionally poorly for vulnerable groups, and it also has a significant chance to fail.
So, your goal to fight genocide with more genocide seems to have a fatal flaw.
No, accelerationism is just making things worse and hoping that causes revolution.
That's stupid.
Revolutionary defeatism is about building international solidarity towards making the empire lose its engagements. Whenever the US loses, the world wins. They must lose or they are going to kill everyone in Gaza.
If Democrats are that bad, then why can't the international solidarity be built against them? Why must you advocate for the sacrifices of women, minorities, and LGBT people? Because the people of Gaza aren't going to be saved by Republicans, that's for fucking sure.
I think we should be working to organize the anti-genocide caucus of Democrats away from the Party and form a revolutionary party that can challenge the two right-wing parties for power. I think we can do this within the unions too, the rank and file are much more radical on this issue than the leadership. There's a huge political movement right under our feet.
Ah, so just divide the Democrats up to destroy their power. Typical.
I know I'm not going to convince you, so this is for everyone else reading this thread. Because of our shitty electoral college and FPTP system, calls for third parties on the left translate into more political power for the right. Here's how it works...
Let's say you have two main political parties, the Snuggling Puppies party and the Kicking Puppies party. The Snugglers usually win, because the Kickers are violent weirdos.
Then the Kickers get the bright idea of helping out fringe parties that also love puppies, like one called the Worshipping Puppies party, which takes their love of puppies to the extreme. They secretly fund and promote these other parties, and it's very effective. In the next election, it's so effective that the Kickers win.
Wait, what? How? It's simple. With the people who love puppies dividing their votes between multiple candidates who love puppies, the Kickers get a plurality.
Let's keep it simple and say the Kickers clandestinely supported three parties that are ideologically opposed to them, meaning people who love puppies divided their votes up four ways. Each of the puppy-loving parties gets 19.5% of the vote, for a pro-puppy total of 78%! But the Kickers didn't divide up their vote, so with a 22% plurality, the winner is... The party that everyone else hates!
It's a classic divide and conquer strategy. It only works when astroturfers manage to convince ~~people on the left~~ puppy lovers to divide themselves up, rather than consolidate to fight back against ~~the right~~ people who hate puppies.
Cute story.
My goal is to destroy and replace the Democratic Party. If there can only be two parties then let's build a revolutionary party and replace the useless liberal party.
True story. If you dispute it, you dispute math. It's literally how FPTP voting works.
Your goal is a permanent Republican majority. Might as well start openly rooting for Trump.
With what? I doubt even 15% of the voting public agree with any of your ideas.
In what world does destroying the further left, liberal party do anything except create a power vacuum for the right to fill?
This is why nobody takes you seriously, you don't even have thought out plans, just "burn it all down and magically good people who agree with me will rise up and seize power" You're delusional and completely disconnected from reality, go read more theory and let the adults handle things.
You could have a goal to destroy and replace the Republican party instead, no? Seems like it'd be an overall better solution to be, shifting all parties further to the left, especially if you consider the Democractic party too far right. I mean, why keep the reactionary party?
None of that is incompatible or inconsistent with a Harris victory. If this is your expressed goal and desired outcome, it is MUCH easier to do under Harris than under Trump where any action you take is more or less guaranteed to be met with responses from any number of empowered supremacist groups.
Also, I only EVER hear these revolutionary ideas and pushes during the last 6 months before an election when people proudly virtue signal about their intent not to vote for the Democrat. Just like with third parties, where is all of this political will and activity during the off-years when there's time to actually BUILD a grassroots movement?
I'm with you. Our choices suck. The time to start doing something about that is November 6th, after the election is won and a backslide has been prevented. Build out a movement and come back in 2028 with a platform, a base, and a candidate.
The person you're arguing with has admitted that they want to destroy the Democratic party elsewhere in this thread, with the bizarrely naive belief that somehow this wouldn't result in permanent Republican control.
Under a Democratic president everyone just stays home and hopes things get better. It was only under Trump that we had the largest protest movement in US history.
And this is despite the fact that police killings have only gotten worse under Biden. I need to be clear, I am not an accelerationist. Conditions get worse no matter who the president is, but it's only when liberals are out of power that they can be convinced towards revolutionary goals.
Perhaps, but that motivation is only useful when it can be translated into political action - not creating an untrained army to be fed directly into fascist prisons and police brutality meat grinders.
You might be creating more revolutionaries under a conservofascist administration, but in practice it's just doing this:
Edit: You don't even need to look far into the past to see that this doesn't work. Look at Hong Kong. The city's leadership swung to fascism, and your prediction came true. Some of the biggest protests in the history of the city by some of the most motivated demonstrators... followed by a brutal crackdown, arrest, exile, and now fascist control of the city is more or less guaranteed for generations. The population is no longer CAPABLE of mounting ANY kind of resistance. Yes, Hong Kong had its fascism forced on it rather than choosing it at the ballot box, but the result will be the same. Fascism doesn't care how it gets its power.
I don't think equivacotion is realistic here. The GOP is actively hostile to democracy while the dems are just ambivalent to it.
Obviously I'd prefer us to have a better voting system, but that's unfortunately not on the table. Right now, there's a candidate who advocates dismantling our democracy all together and has tried to overturn the results of the last election. I'll be voting for his opponent for the sake of our nation.
They deny that this is a fascist country while also refusing to acknowledge that there are no choices. They treat politics like WWE wrestling, they cheer for their favorite wrestler when both wrestlers work for the same company
Hey, remember when you said you'd vote Dem if Biden was replaced? Good times! How's that going?
Explain the endgame here.
Left sits out the election. Either Harris wins and can ignore Left concerns or Trump wins and starts mass arrests of his enemies.
Where's the upside?