Biden address in Charleston South Carolina church interrupted by protestors calling for ceasefire
Protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza interrupted President Biden’s speech in South Carolina on Monday, the latest example of divisions among Democrats over the fighting in the Middle East. B…
You're viewing a single thread.
Dismally looking forward to when they don’t vote for Biden and then Trump’s back in office and he gives Netanyahu the green light to kill as many as he wants
Well what are they suppose to do? Kiss his ass because he's not as bad as Trump? I don't see the issue with pointing out the hypocrisy of supplying weapons to a genocide while calling for peace at the location of a mass shooting.
Kiss his ass? No.
Vote for him because he's the alternative to a waking nightmare for a large part of my fellow Americans? Yes
Do I wish the system was better? Yes. And to that point I'm voting for the guy who still believes in government and rule of law. If I ever want the system to change, I need to vote for the party that is interested in governance.
If they vote for Trump they're a garbage human. If they abstain, they're a coward hiding behind "muh principles" while our neighbors have their rights stripped away.
Edit: fucking tankies lol
First past the post voting is horrible. But until we get ranked choice, either hold your nose and vote, or understand that not voting is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to a vote for whoever you hate most.
CPG grey did a great video on why first past the post sucks.
Well said. And we're NEVER going to get ranked vote with Biden or the current Democrats. Voting Democrat only keeps the two party gig going longer. How long has it been now, 150 years of the same back and forth?
Unless they start to feel the need to change anything they will never do it if you keep voting for them when they act like this.
And we're NEVER going to get ranked vote with Biden or the current Democrats.
Au contraire. Ranked choice is gaining traction having been adopted in 62 jurisdictions. So change is possible right now.
https://www.rcvresources.org/where-is-rcv-used
So if you think protest voting is going to somehow snap the neo liberals out of their ideology and drag them in a more progressive direction, you're going to be in for a big disappointment.
This two party game has been going for 50 years in its current form (post civil rights era). The Democratic party hasn't fundamentally changed its tune during that time because people who run and get elected are rich and powerful enough to be isolated from any effects of fascists getting elected. They don't have to care like us peons / targets of hate.
We will (continue) make more progress by supporting efforts to change our voting methods. Eventually (and playing the long game is necessary; a single election will do nothing) rcv and similar will gain enough momentum that we will start to see viable parties appear with platforms we agree with more than the current main parties.
I really don't know what stops ranked choice voting from being a Democratic Party platform right now.
I'd feel a lot better about it becoming a reality if Joe Biden himself came up and said that's what we need to do.
What stops ranked choice from being a Democratic Party platform is that the Democratic Party has no incentive to reduce its power and neither does the Republican party
So they say they are going to do something. You know who said they were going to withdraw from Afghanistan? Democrats.
You know who did withdraw from Afghanistan? Orange Man.
If you trust the guy currently bypassing congress so he can commit genocide instead of to fix the democracy, I'm not entirely sure how to convince you otherwise.
That's odd because I distinctly remember all the Trumptards complaining about how horrible the withdrawal under Biden went. You sound like the jackass who was "just asking questions" about where Obama was on 9-11.
If you think one president is going to fix democracy you're always going to be disappointed. It is much easier to wreck than to fix.
If you think Democrats losing the presidency is going to fix the Democratic party, again, disappointment will be yours.
Ranked Choice (or similar) voting is something you work on at a state level.
But I've probably already said that to you in another comment in the past when you were saying the same kinds of things.
Biden has complete powers to fix it he could apppoint more judges if he wanted to.
It's in fact far easier to fix than you believe. It's just that Genocide Joe knows that if the two party trick fails none of his cultists have any reason to vote for him anymore.
Electing Republicans puts us even FARTHER away from ranked choice, how is that a better solution?
Then the Democrats will have no choice but to actually change something to get elected. Rewarding bad (see "Nazi style genocide") behavior is what actually puts you farther away from ranked choice.
Why is everyone always pretending that every American election will be the last one ever and the entire world is going to end if their party doesn't win.
Why is everyone always pretending that every American election will be the last one ever and the entire world is going to end if their party doesn’t win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/donald-trumps-january-6-media
Not really a mystery.
They literally (not figuratively, literally) said this shit in 2016. It was all Joever back then. But lo and behold, even the Republicans didn't get in line for their god emperor Trump to hand over all power. On the 6th of January all Trump had was a bunch of Facebook looneys backing him up.
July 19, 2016 If Trump wins, a coup isn’t impossible here in the U.S.
So the Republican party doesn't endorse "Nazi style genocide"? Because if the Democrats do, they sure as fuck do. Why reward the Republicans?
No stop voting for either of them.
Which functionally helps Republicans get elected. You solution is to put Republicans in power hoping they destroy enough that we have to start from scratch.
What we should be doing is primarying the fuck out of every conservative Democrat in the caucus and pushing the party left while maintaining a firewall against the GOP. Not sacrificing minorities, women, immigrants, and poor people to GOP rule to prove a point.
You talk like someone unaware of any elections since Biden.
The Democrats have lost plenty of presidential and Congressional elections. What have they changed? When have they had a "come to Jesus moment?" I can't think of any example since the southern strategy mixed up the parties. A little shift here or there but at their core they are rich, white neo-liberals.
Who is president right now
Claiming to support a better system while refusing to abandon the current one that doesn't work is performative. Biden does not believe in rule of law or the rights of humans. He and the DNC needs to be abandoned.
Difference is, if you vote for Trump or just don’t vote and Trump gets back in, that will make it WAY harder to change the system.
This is whats called bullshit hyperbole. Your statement assumes that if we vote blue hard enough the DNC they will change course and become representatives of the working class, and that reform can come from within the party. 50 years of 'lesser evil' has gone from indiscriminately locking up black men to full on genocide, and voters solution is reelect the people doing it.
No, my point was that letting trump back in would make any and all change nigh impossible for the foreseeable future
No it won't. There's this insane idea among liberals that everything democrats do take time and small incremental steps. And everything Republicans do is instant and everlasting.
Sorry, but that's not how democratic systems that use first past the post voting work.
The system is working as designed, the issue is that half the voting base and therefore the average independent voter has been slowly and unknowingly becoming more susceptible to choosing fascism for decades due to declining economy, increasing corporate power on a global scale, and well funded propaganda from the right.
Biden can't go further left or he wouldn't have won the democratic primary, remember Bernie? Even the democrat voters decided against him, with the help of some influence (The DNC counts as a corporation too).
Our current situation is literally what our country voted for. Changing the system isn't going to fully fix that.
Now if 90% of the votes went to the left for whatever reason this next election or two (and local elections), then the current right collapses and the landscape shifts back to left. Maybe we would even get an actual left party in about 8 years. We're hardly voting for a person, but rather an entire branch of government. And you can't get elected without votes.
Will any of that happen? Probably not, but in a democratic system, we aren't getting out of this garbage pile unless the majority of VOTERS reject it. Or a unified strike, or a revolution... The point is there needs to be serious majority support, and right now they're pretty comfortable with the fascists.
Funny how it's always vote blue no matter who, whenever it's a moderate running, but those very same moderates can't suck it up and vote for a progressive. You literally just said that he wouldn't get moderate Democratic votes if he went to the left.
A majority of us have decided to reject it by abandoning the DNC and their Blue fascist candidates. It hasnt been the independents choosing fascism, its been democrats accepting what they think is lesser evil for over 50 years. Your evil is so large it towers over people like Reagan
If we want the system to change, we have to get involved in local politics: pass Ranked Choice Voting, form and cultivate third parties to be viable alternatives, work to get money out politics. RCV is a very attainable goal.
Sadly, I believe the only other option is revolution; that’s our current reality. I don’t see any other peaceful way that we could fix our corrupt and broken government. We no longer have a functioning federal government and democracy; we have an oligarchy and a political party that’s gone off the deep end into total fascism and Dominionism, with supporters who have started committing acts of terrorism when we push back against them.
Gotcha. So voting in support of a little bit of genocide is okay.
So you have no domestic policies you care about? Like being able to vote against genocide in the future? Cause Trump has a lot of policies in mind that would seem to prevent doing anything about that later down the line.
I can't even call it shortsighted because it's not like the other option is even going to help things short term. If anything the other option is just going to be even worse. So I don't really get the stance other than a nihilistic "let everything burn" response.
Forget about the Nazi genocide, think about your student loans!
It's like watching poor billionaires not giving a shit about anyone but themselves.
Voting to support a little genocide, vs not voting and allowing a big genocide... Now where have I seen a philosophical problem like that before...
Better than not voting and ending up with a lot of genocide... Or maybe you want to go tell the people of Gaza that you're an accelerationist and just had to let things become worse in order for them to potentially get better?
I see... Voting in support of the current genocide is an act of compassion. Right.
As if voting blue, red, or not at all are the only options. I'm voting for the person who I decide deserves my vote. Not in support of the status quo.
I assume you've put forth a lot of grassroot efforts in the many years in advance to give your group relevance right? You wouldn't just make a meaningless vote to someone with no realistic chance in order to posture right?
And thanks to people like you, the group that holds itself together the most (the right) has more chances to win.
You hate the current system? That's perfectly fine! It's still the system by which rules you need to play may you like it or not!
I'm leaning towards Cornel West but Jill Stein can still win me back. do you have a preference there?
Vermin Supreme.
i think he says that he just wants power and will say anything it takes to get it. so i can't in good conscience vote for him.
Cory Doctorow
canadian native. ineligible.
Absolutely, therefore they should shut the fuck up and not pressure the sitting President about his support of an ongoing genocidal terror campaign. Smh voters getting uppity, don't they know it's an election year
It's important that Biden doesn't even FEEL like this will affect his chances.
He must look at the current polls and go "looks like we can keep this genocide going for another 4 years, it's pretty popular".
Get back in line and bow to your god emperor Genocide Joe!
Populists don't roll with this logic. Any blemish on the part of someone they vote for, they consider their own. You can't reconcile harm reduction with this mindset, because you have to hate anyone who isn't 100% in alignment with your ideology. So, you get the rightist populists tossing McCarthy out for keeping the gov open, and the leftist populists willing to let the country burn because Biden can't unilaterally control Netanyahu's gov or abandon one of the few Western footprints in the middle east. And they never consider the consequences for doing nothing theirs to own. Inaction is bowing out for populists, while you recognize it as what it is, a choice of its own with consequences. Even once the consequences are upon us, they'll just blame Biden, the DNC, whatever. Responsibility and owning your choices is anathema to populism.
Libertarians and (uncompromising) progressives are two sides of the same coin, and easily manipulated into voting against their best interest. Even if a real candidate is far more aligned with their interests than the other, all it takes is one wedge issue to get them to effectively not vote.
Zero capability of prioritizingfor for the best plausible outcome.
And lemmy is full of these idealistic fools.
Biden can denounce the genocide of Palestine at any time. Instead he has been bypassing congress to fast track more weapons to Israel. At this point, the only difference between Biden's response and a theoretical Trump response is that Trump would probably try to get some boots on the ground.
If threatening to elect Trump is what it takes for Biden to stop sending U.S ammunition directly into the heads of Palestinian children, then the ends will have justified the means.
the only difference between Biden’s response and a theoretical Trump response is that Trump would probably try to get some boots on the ground.
Wait how is boots on the ground just treated as a "whatever"? That's usually pretty big isn't it?
Trump would try. I don't know if Netanyahu would ask for troops, and I don't know if Trump and the GQP would be able to fabricate enough evidence for the U.S. public to stomach a foreign war against Hamas, but I know Trump is stupid enough that he'd make a grand, sweeping statement about putting U.S. troops in Gaza before anything was approved.
Doubt it. Trump wants his troops at the border to harass Mexicans.
In all his years Trump didn't start a single war. He even withdrew from Afghanistan.
Chances are higher of Biden starting a war with Iran than Trump.
That might be fair, and maybe Trump would just be shoveling weapons to the Israelis as fast as they could buy them.
However, he'd also be providing zero support for the Ukrainians, and would probably be arguing to cease even more support to Ukraine in favor of support to Israel. While I do not support the genocide of Palestine, I also do not support the idea of Putin grinding Ukraine to dust to suit his ego. Considering Trump would gladly be complicit to both, I'll still eventually have to vote for Biden.
I just want him to fucking work a bit for it.
Well israel can't win a war against Iran and their neighbours without US help. Netanyahu is doing everything he can to escalate the war with Lebanon and Biden is only supporting him.
Biden received more israeli lobby money than Trump.
1 Biden, Joe (D) President $3,753,244
2 Trump, Donald (R) President $894,032
Almost 4 times as much. And that's just open money.
I'm still on the fence and learning more every day, but it seems to me like Biden is unironcally more Genocidal than Trump.
That said, don't vote for either of those maniacs. Cornel West, Jill Stein, many alternatives that don't support genocide.
Seriously the guy who would have let both Israel AND Russia do whatever they please is less.l genocidal? Mind blowing
Letting israel do as they please is not the problem. Giving them billions in free weapons and bypassing Congress to enable them to do it is the problem.
It's not just okay to vote for someone and then yell at them, it's vital to a functioning democracy to vote for the person whose values most closely reflect your own, and then to yell at them in an effort to force their values closer to yours.
Yelling won’t work but delivering Trump a second consecutive election defeat and a third consecutive popular vote loss is what will actually get the country back on track.
My solution is pragmatic while yours is ideological.
my solution is "vote for biden and then organize, agitate and protest to get his administration to do better". yours seems to be "vote for biden" with no followup. Why are you so desperate for enemies that you're chiding leftists even when they do what you want?
Oh shit I thought you were saying you weren’t voting for Biden lol. I actually agree with you. Thats my bad
I suspect this is the actual goal.
They're both fascists. The issue is the whole undemocratic American voting system.
I'm not gonna vote for Mussolini just because I think he's better than Hitler.
We need anti government protests on a massive scale. No amount of voting will ever "fix" this country.
Anti-government protests on a massive scale don't just happen. They are organized. They are backed by mutual aid networks. It's easy to sit back and say "I'm not voting for either option because this whole system is bad," but have you done literally any work at all to make the system less bad? Or to build up real alternatives? If the entire American voting system is undemocratic, what have you done in your local community to make your community's voice heard outside of that system?
I see so many people who are terminally online say they don't want to participate in a broken system, and exactly zero of them do any work outside of (not) voting to fix the problems they see in their community. If you're not gonna do the bare minimum and vote every four years for the least bad option, you better be doing literally any other real-world political work. Otherwise you're just as complicit in the system you have such an issue with.
Tldr: the revolution is not right around the corner; you will not be saved. Do some actual political legwork instead of sitting on your ass complaining the whole time. Complaining is easy. Fixing is hard.
I see so many people who are terminally online say they don’t want to participate in a broken system, and exactly zero of them do any work outside of (not) voting to fix the problems they see in their community.
I've never seen you do anything for your community either.