this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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The Biden presidency has accelerated WW3 by 4 years and has made the entire world less safe for everyone including trans people.
He also took no meaningful steps to protect trans people or even basic women's rights like abortion in the US.
Turns out the choice was just between a competent fascist and an incompetent one.
I'm not convinced he accelerated world war 3. The news I've read on international relations says the rest of the world hates Trump just as much if not more. That aligns with my own personal experiences, everyone in my country is surprised Trump hasn't been shot yet. As for doing nothing for trans people? Good. Obviously I'd prefer something good, but doing nothing is better than doing something bad. When we're talking about the primaries, I'm with Bernie all the way. When we're talking about the election, I'm with whoever is going to murder all the trans people the slowest. I have a partner over there I'm trying to get out. I need more time to be able to pay for everything.
US directly participate in war against Russia which is more or less existential one for Russia. Same for Palestinian genocide which is worst ever, even worse than nakba. They provoke China both directly and through their proxies. Korea situation deteriorated to the point DPRK openly claim the right to military intervention once again and in OK there are fascists again in power. EU is being cannibalised and forced to also support and participate in all those. Yemen is being bombed once again. Iran is being threatened again. There is more terror than ever in Africa after "War on terror" spreaded there.
I don't think US has been so belligerent ever actually. If that blows then trans people are gonna die like the rest, and not only in US but everywhere.
No, it's not existential for Russia. Russia is invading Ukraine. They have the option of just going home. Their existence is not under threat.
We're having a conversation about Biden as compared to Trump. Trump would be giving more military aid to Israel and listening to the people less.
Again, Trump has more
You're trying to have a conversation about whether Biden is a terrible person in a vacuum. And you're right. But you're also not actually participating in this conversation about whether Biden should be supported in a 2024 election against Trump.
See, first sentence and you already blow you complete lack of understanding of the situation. This war was never about Ukraine, it was about recolonisation of Russia. If they not reacted, they would have NATO missiles in their belly and probable destablilisation of government since Ukrainian ethnic cleansing of Donbas caused intervention to be rather popular in Russia.
People of Donbas didn't. People of Russia in 90's also didn't and recolonisation of Russia would be repeat of that. You are absolutely fucking ghoulish defender of USA and their interest, with zero whatsoever understaing od imperialism, just primitive liberal vibes.
Right now Biden is doing everything he could, even using the presidential tools he never used to fullfil his promises to the people of USA. That's pretty dedicated genocider. Listening to who and what? Well maybe he will listen to you since you simp for NATO and effectively defend genocide in Gaza, not so much if you would want healthcare though.
Huh? Which country was a US proxy for Trump but suddenly not for Biden. Did Biden make US fuck off from somewhere? Maybe dismantled some bases? I see complete opposite.
Sure not, i'm not an American, i'm giving you an outside exaple how it is viewed by some of the rest of 95% of humanity and signalling you that your ignorance, egoism and american exceptionalism has effectively led you to simp for NATO and support genocide.
Thorough response but have you considered this person read news that the cultural affectations he has against trump are shared by the world. I don't know what news this person saw it on, but the world viscerally hates this nation and even people within the country are disgusted by its actions abroad. I don't know how people are able to live in such a bubble, it's insane.
Did you not pay attention to the part of the conversation where I said I'm not American? You're really bad at paying attention.
If it quacks like a duck...
Besides nice for you to move goalpost from addressing anything i said to petty nitpick, while still simping for NATO and genocide
No, I'm not simping for NATO and genocide. I already explained why voting for no preference supports more genocide. You just didn't pay attention. It's your signature move.
You're cudgeling for Biden; that attempted negation is a total nonstarter. If you're out here stumping for votes for a genocidal settler monster, you're simping for genocide point blank periodt.
There is no one you can put up against Biden that would justify voting for a genocidal settler monster. I don't care whatever other genocidal boogeyman you have for me; each one is as bad as the next, and none of them deserve support. Further, if this is the best candidate Amerika can offer, then the motherfucker deserves to fall.
I'm not pencil-whipping genocidal settlers, ESPECIALLY NOT the ones letting RICO charges against anti-Cop City protestors slide. ESPECIALLY NOT the ones kicking millions and billions of dollars of military surplus to murderous police departments. ESPECIALLY NOT the ones who break strikes on behalf of the capitalist oligarchs and renege on campaign planks.
You want me to stop signalling 'no preference', then "None of these" can be implemented at the federal level. Your man's clearly shown that he can sidestep Congress whenever the blue fuck he wants-- but until then, I am not pledging any conscious support to that genocidal cracker. I might be forced to live here, but I'd rather see it fall in than tacitly attach my name to a genocider's wagon. Suckstart a Javelin if you still feel some type of way enough to keep trying to (and abjectly failing to) pettily libsplain how the last two generations failed their civic duty so hard that the only choice is a false choice between two geriatric settler genociders. My stance and outlook is "death to Amerika"; there is no electoralist screed you could draft to change my mind, you insufferable redditor cac.
Personally I'm with whomever doesn't support the murder of trans people at all, since it's great some of them have a partner trying to help them escape, but most don't. If neither political party supports basic human rights, I don't think either of them should get any kind of support, even this kind of "lesser evilism" and both should be reviled.
If Biden wins the primary, then you're not on the side of not murdering trans people at all, because that's not on the ballot. You're on the side of doing nothing in the name of ideals. So I want to ask: will you choose to let my partner die by doing nothing in the name of ideals?
So we should always vote for 99% Hitler to avoid 100% Hitler? So in a circumstance where one party kills minorities slowly and the other kills them quickly, we should always vote for the party that promises "slow death" instead of supporting groups that are anti-murdering minorities?
You seem to be under the impression that the only options are to vote for the guys who will murder as much as possible and the guys who will murder more slowly, but neither of those choices are acceptable, we should support people who do not support such a thing, if the bloated, corrupt American 2-party system isn't representative of the people, then why bother participating in it, why not actively oppose it? Your partner has a much better chance of surviving if people actively fight against this entire idea that any trans people need to be killed at all, even if it doesn't involve ticking a box on a piece of paper every 4 years. I've personally gotten trans people out of life or death situations in the past. There's a fuckton more a person can do to help people than just jerking themselves off over how they voted for the guy who only pledged to kill 50% of trans people instead of 100%. It isn't "damage control." It's participating in an unjust and inhumane system instead of working to dismantle it.
Would it have been better to support "good slave owners" over "bad slave owners?" Or would it have been better to oppose the entire institution of slavery, even if people are insisting that if you don't support the good slave owners then you're letting the bad slave owners win?
My partner and I are anarchists who participate in direct action. We're doing everything we can the other 1460 days of the quadyear. We're not having a conversation about those 1460 days. We're having a conversation about the 1 other day. The day when the only choices on the ballot are "fascist", "neoliberal", and "no preference". You don't get to write a fourth thing on the ballot, the electoral system is a machine and it will interpret your actions within defined parameters. You either pick a defined parameter or the machine picks for you.
Now, you dodged the question last time because it made you uncomfortable to give a straight answer, so I'm going to ask it again: will the machine interpret your actions as doing nothing to prevent my partner's death? Will you choose that outcome in the name of ideals?
I'm glad that you feel safe under Biden, i'm not being facetious, i genuinely am, but a million Gazans being terrorized, crippled and murdered daily by the dozens if not hundreds, by bombs supplied by Biden to a regime financially supported and militarily aided by Biden in commiting this genocide (a little reminder that US drones flying over Gaza give targeting information to the occupier so that it can more easily bomb children in refugee camps, doctors in hospitals, homes with entire families in them) do not feel so safe. By your logic, in voting for Biden you vote for their deaths. The only moral choice is to oppose ALL those who support and enable genocide, not just those who threaten you personally.
I appreciate this. I wanted to add this to my wall of text but it was getting too long already. I don't think this is an overall productive area of discussion right now though, I was too hostile, the lib is getting very heated, naturally as this is a very personal issue for them(Not blaming them at all, I'd probably be pissed too if I was in their shoes), so I think a bit of a cooling off period might be a good idea, give them a chance to touch grass and hopefully realise we are on the same side as them, and ultimately want the same things as them (safety for marginalised groups) but Biden will not be giving that to them.
You can't claim empathy and then accuse someone of liberalism in the same breath. It's a two-faced attempt to give off the appearance of peace while provoking the enemy to aggression, which manipulates public perception. For my part, I will not abuse people's perceptions, I will be honest. You're a liberal fascist apologiser and you're trying to get people killed.
No, that's not my logic. You've misunderstood my logic and replaced it with your own. You think that voting is an act of condoning and you're applying that to this situation. But I've been very clear that I think abstinence is a vote, and that you're voting for Palestinians to be killed by Trump, who will not be as easy to sway with public opinion as Biden. You've fundamentally failed to have any cognitive empathy and to step outside your own pre-existing ideas. Therefore you think I must surely agree with your opinions that I am arguing against. This is nonsense thinking
First of all i'm not voting at all in US elections because i'm not American and don't live in the US. But also, why does abstaining (which i'm not saying to do, if you think voting has an impact you can always vote third party or write in a candidate) count as a vote for Trump? A Republican could use the same argument as you to argue that: "If you abstain you are just giving your vote to Biden!". How is their argument any different? The argument that abstaining means voting for party B only works if you want party A to win. A leftist should want neither to win since both are enemies of the working class.
I'm not seeing Biden being swayed by public opinion at all, the only ones who seem to sway him are the neocon warmongers, Wall Street, and the military industrial complex. He continues to enthusiastically aid and abet the genocide of Palestine despite massive and repeated protests. He continues to back NATO militarization, anti-Russia, anti-China and anti-Iran war posturing. He has started to bomb yet another middle eastern country with his strikes on Yemen. And that's if you actually believe that he is the one making the decisions.
I think you're fooling yourself into believing in a version of the Democratic party that does not exist outside its supporters' propaganda rhetoric. It's just strange for someone choosing to call themselves an anarchist to functionally be indistinguishable from a liberal in their views on bourgeois elections...
P.S. I've tried to be polite and restrained in my responses so far but if i were you i wouldn't have the cheek to accuse others of lacking empathy when you don't even have enough empathy for Palestinians to stop voting for a party that is helping and defending their murderers.
Fine yes, whatever, you "win" I guess then, congrats. Electoralism is saved, let's all vote for the party that pledges to kill trans people slowly and painfully instead of the other party that wants to do it quicker, because nothing sends the establishment a clear message about how unacceptable their behaviour is quite like bending down and kissing the ring and letting them know that no matter how much we grumble and complain about them not representing us, we'll still gladly show up and announce to them that no matter much they want to kill us all, we'll still participate in their rituals and give them as much validity and legality as they want.
I can't believe I'm speaking to an anarchist who is pro-capitalist electoralism and lesser-evilism. I hope your partner gets out safe, but unlike yourself, apparently, I also want to see the millions of other trans people in the US safe. All of them have loved ones, and not all of them will make it out by voting for the "kill 50% of them" guy instead of the "100% of them" guy.
I'm not even American, and one of your comments made it seem like you aren't either, so your defence of this horrific system is mind boggling. Would you have voted for Göring over Hitler because he promised a more "moderate" holocaust? Because that's what it sounds like you're doing here.
Participating in their elections gives them legitimacy, the people refusing to participate shows that they need to change their ways if they want the support of the people. What good is protesting their actions 364 days of the year if on election day you just line up like a good little peon and behave yourself? That's the most important time to refuse to recognise their legitimacy, to make it clear their actions will not be tolerated by the people. The system in the US is as fucked up as it is right now partially because for the past 50 years people have been insisting on voting for the "lesser evil" instead of demanding a good politician, or demanding an entire systemic change. This isn't idealism, voting for the same horrible leaders who pledge to commit different levels of atrocities and hoping that if we just vote extra hard this time they'll change their ways despite 0 incentive to do so is.
You're constructing a false dichotomy between supporting electoralism and not voting. And you're conflating voting with supporting electoralism. I don't support the US, I don't support Biden in any single tiny way that can harm socialists or socialism, and my partner's vote does not make the US electoral system stronger. There's nothing I've said which in any way helps capitalist false democracy maintain power. You're inventing false positions and false actions to attribute to me.
So...voting in an electoral system isn't showing tacit or passive approval, or at least tolerance, of that system? I guess it's just a natural thing, like breathing air, something never to be questioned or challenged, perfectly normal and natural to be forced to choose between the slow death or the fast death of millions.
You accused me of ignoring your question earlier, but haven't actually responded to any of mine. It's Germany 1937, and you're telling me that Göring isn't perfect, but he's the best Nazi we've got, instead of just opposing the entire system for its inhumanity. Voting will not save your loved ones. Complacency is how things have gotten to this point, and voting is just showing how complacent you really are, as far as the bourgeoisie are concerned.
Sorry for being so insulting, I don't blame you for getting mad, this is clearly a very personal thing for you and I was quite tactless in talking to you. I think it's best if we stop this conversation here, it will just be going in circles after this. Feel free to get the last clever word in, as I'm not planning to respond beyond this, so when I don't respond, imagine that I'm just so "owned" by your clever defense of bourgeoisie electoralism that I'm going to move to the states and get US citizenship just so I can vote for Biden in this next election. I hope things work out well for you and your partner.
If it were 1937 and I were in Germany, I'd be in a concentration camp because I'm trans. I don't think I'm going to be submitting any ballots from there. But if by some miracle the Nazis set up a voting booth in Auschwitz, I would cast my vote for Göring in between fashioning a lump of broken brick into a shiv with which to stab the first Nazi bastard I get my hands on.
You seem to think that ballots are made of nitroglycerin and that Biden is stuffing his votes into bombs for Israel to drop on Gaza. I assure you, the number of votes cast in the Federal election does not affect the US military's munitions capacity.
Ah, now it makes sense.
As a supporter of Ukraine, don't you mean 1488?
The only difference between you and Shapiro is that he wants the next genocide to exclude his people and you want the next genocide to exclude trans people.
When Trump was president Europe was distancing itself from the US and starting to co-operate economically more with China. The fact that Trump was hated was a good thing. Now all of that has been reversed and more. Europe is deeper than ever in the pocket of the US which is catastrophic for Europe and the world. Domestically Trump also provoked much more resistance whereas Democrat presidencies not only demobilize the masses, they lull them into actively supporting reactionary imperialist policies like the proxy war on Russia.
Trump was objectively a weaker president as he was hated by the establishment state apparatus, and a weak US in internal conflict with itself is a good thing for the world.
So, you're advocating accelerationism. The idea that a push towards fascism and reactionary politics will provoke revolution. A philosophy often inspired by Marx's dialectical materialism, which claims that communism is the inevitable result of capitalist crisis. The thing is, in Marx's time it was reasonable to assume that capitalism was incapable of ending human life on earth. Now we know twice over that it can, and once over that unabated it will. Accelerationism is fundamentally a philosophy of waiting for things to get better on their own. We don't have that luxury anymore. We're out of time to prevent climate collapse, and mitigating it has to start right now. Accelerationism only makes the deadline shorter, giving us less to work with. Who cares if capitalism eventually collapses under its own weight, if it brings all of us with it?
No, if i was doing that i would say to vote for Biden.
The only thing i'm saying is i personally couldn't bring myself to vote for Genocide Joe. Or for anyone associated with either of the two main warmongering imperialist parties in the US for that matter (and that includes Bernie who betrayed all those who bought his "democratic socialist" act, bent the knee to the establishment, and has revealed himself for the imperialist warmonger many of us already knew he was ever since he supported the bombing of Yugoslavia).
Yeah, too bad that the US under Biden committed the biggest act of ecological terrorism in history by blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, forcing Europe into a dependency on expensive US LNG shipped by highly polluting tankers across an entire ocean... Germany is burning more fossil fuel than ever, and at the behest of the neocon warmongers in the Washington NATO wants to massively ramp up military production and is foaming at the mouth to go to war with Russia, Iran and China essentially simultaneously. Do i need to remind you that militaries are among the worst polluters on the planet?
Doesn't look to me like Biden mitigated much of anything. In fact i struggle to see much of a difference in policy at all between Democrats and Republicans, only in how they are perceived and how much pushback they get.
I've seen no evidence that Biden intends to escalate the war on Ukraine beyond the local area, nor that he intends war with China. As you agreed, the international community has no better view of Trump than Biden, so I don't expect a Biden victory in the election to cause China to declare war. What I have seen is that Biden has begun responding to pressure to reduce the supply of arms to Israel.
As for Russian fuel, I have no reason to disbelieve you when you say Biden has increased the carbon cost of transporting fuel. However he has also increased the price of fuel, creating greater incentives for Europe to quickly adopt electric vehicles and public transit. America and Russia are both polluting capitalist empires. I am happy there is less reason to buy fuel from both of them. The situation in Germany isn't a result of the war, it's caused by the decommission of nuclear plants without a renewable replacement. That's a problem in its own right, but it's not Biden's fault. You're mixing up US election results with unrelated things.
Everything is related. US election results both do and don't affect a lot of things. Washington policy impacts much around the world that you would consider "unrelated", but at the same time that policy doesn't really depend on the result of elections as long as the same two parties keep winning because the same permanent security state and foreign policy establishment is still there regardless who is "elected". Because elections in the US (and in all "liberal democracies") are a theater for the masses more than anything else. The same capitalist class still pulls the strings. I just have a difficult time understanding why you would go to bat so hard for the racist and very likely senile figurehead currently sitting in the oval office considering under him objectively more people have died and the situation has gotten significantly worse around the world.
So vote for who you want, it won't make a difference in the outcome except that you are yet again validating the legitimacy of the bourgeoisie's little shell game they call elections, but don't insult our intelligence by trying to portray the genocider-in-chief as a "lesser evil". Many of us are also in vulnerable demographics, a lot of our comrades here are queer or belong to one or another marginalized group, we know the danger of living under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But that doesn't mean we have to fall for their electoral bait and switch over and over again. Fool me once...
Can you please explain by what causal mechanism low voter turnout on the left makes the US electoral system weaker? I'm confused because the Republicans have been scheming to reduce voter turnout on the left by making it harder for black and poor people to vote. Republicans want you to do exactly what you're doing. So please explain how doing exactly what the government wants makes the government weaker.
EDIT: 4 hours and you can't explain it, because it's not true. You're full of shit.
It's not really voter turnout on the left if you turn out to vote for the Democratic party which is an enemy of the left. That's voter turnout on the right. I am a socialist, why would i condone voting for enemies of socialism? I am an anti-imperialist, why would i condone voting for imperialists? I am anti-war and anti-racist, why would i condone voting for racist warmongers?
You keep missing the point and thinking that Democrats winning is somehow a beneficial or desirable outcome for leftists. It is not.
What the bourgeois government wants is for people to keep voting for either of the two fascist warmonger parties. It doesn't really matter which of them you vote for because the bourgeoisie wins either way. Just so long as the illusion of democracy is maintained. Just so long as the unrest and frustrations of the masses are channeled into activities which fit within the predefined framework of the system.
Voting for the "lesser evil" is how we got here. It's how we slide deeper and deeper into fascism.
The leveling of world wages, and making poor countries less poor, is not accelerationism.