I voted and encouraged others to do so.

Harris and Clinton bent over backwards to win over the mythical “moderate republicans” and ate shit. Only reason Biden won was because of COVID.

If the democrats can’t be pressured or reasoned with, that’s all the more reason to give up on them.

Say that it’s valid to place conditions on voting democrat. Then explain what possible condition could be more valid than “no genocide.”

Literally nothing else you can say matters at all. Because if you can’t answer this, then when you say your position is not unconditionally voting democrat, you are simply lying.

If you want to argue for unconditionally supporting them, and admit that that is your position, then it might be worth considering any of your other arguments, because then at least you’re being honest and consistent. But unless you can either do that or answer my challenge, you are obviously engaging in bad faith and dishonesty.

Either you’re ok with placing conditions on them or you support them unconditionally. That’s what “unconditionally” means. You don’t get to have it both ways.

And, if you can answer that challenge, then you’ll have already refuted all the arguments you just made for me.

I never said to unconditionally vote for the Democratic candidates to begin with so the rest of your response to this imagined position is moot.

Y’all always play this little game. “I didn’t say that, don’t put words in my mouth.” OK then, say unequivocally that that is not your position. Say that it’s valid to place conditions on voting democrat. Then explain what possible condition could be more valid than “no genocide.”

You just don’t like me rephrasing your position bluntly.

I’m advocating for maximizing the power of your vote in the system we currently have. If you’re living in a district in a state with any kind of ranked choice voting, absolutely vote third party if that’s where your alignment falls.

No, you have it completely backwards. I am going to vote according to my values and beliefs. If they give me ranked choice voting, then I will happily put them above the Republicans. Otherwise, they will acquiesce to my minimum demands or they will not get my vote.

Third parties just aren’t viable in districts without ranked choice, so to get ranked choice we the voters need to put candidates who support election reform in power thru the major party primaries. Which is exactly what I’m advocating for

Oh, you’re one of those. “My car broke down.” “Well then, just drive it to the mechanic!”

The problem that ranked choice is meant to address is that the current system does not provide a viable means for us to get policy enacted. Your “solution” is to keep using ineffective, broken means in the hopes that it will somehow be effective at fixing itself. If we could achieve RCV through the existing system, then we could just achieve whatever end policy we want through the existing system. The logic is incredibly backwards, putting the cart before the horse.

If you had an ounce of spine, then you would demand RCV, then you would say that you should only vote for those candidates who support it. And if enough people did that, perhaps it could be achievable. And I’d certainly have more respect for your position.

As it is, your position is simply complete, unconditional support for the democrats, and then you say some irrelevant shit about voting reform to distract from that fact. Like, “It would sure be nice if the king decided to institute democracy out of the kindness of his heart, I’ll keep supporting him either way though.” If that is false, then address my first paragraph.

I don’t think Trump being president is better than Kamala, which is why I didn’t vote for him.

If Kamala had won, then she would still be black bagging people to concentration camps. ICE existed before and both Biden and Kamala explicitly support it. The silver lining is that, because Trump is doing it blatantly, as you say, at least more people are aware of it and upset about it. Doing fascism while following the rules and keeping everything out of sight and out of mind is arguably worse, but it’s kind of a toss up.

Of course, the strategies I mentioned were and are longshots, which may take a while to work if they will at all. But they have a nonzero chance of working, which is more than “vote blue no matter who” does. That is, if the goal is actually stopping fascism and not just easing into it more comfortably.

Primaries aren’t even required to be fair elections. The party can pull whatever shenanigans it wants, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it so long as third parties are ruled out.

If the democrats decided to straight up go back to the days of deciding nominees in smoke-filled rooms with no primary process at all, then would you still say we need to vote for them unconditionally as the lesser evil? Is there any breaking point at all where you’ll reject that approach?

Because if so, then I am simply already past that point. And if not, then you seem utterly hopeless to me. They can keep moving further and further right, removing any possibility for you to do anything about it, and you’ll keep supporting them unconditionally. I consider that a ridiculous position and it’s even more ridiculous to think the general public would accept that.

Then either the democrats change to appease the third party voters, or the third party keeps growing until it no longer matters what the democrats do.

If those scenarios seem unrealistic, they are much more realistic than democrats spontaneously deciding to do a 180 and actually fix things.

Starting to think centralizing the internet into platforms owned by far-right billionaires might have been a bad idea.

I swear to God, “whataboutism” just means, “You stated a fact I don’t like.” Of course it’s relevant that the guy criticizing ICE was someone who could’ve actually done something about them and chose not to. What a load of bull.

She’s auditioning for 2028.

Are you sure on that? My understanding of Marxism is that they believe even fair elections are rigged, so to speak, because they are bourgeois election and they discourage all participation in any election that is a bourgeois election.

Common misconception, but yes, I’m quite sure. Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments? - V.I. Lenin

Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers, and not “millions” and “legions”, follow the lead of the Catholic clergy—and a similar minority of rural workers follow the landowners and kulaks (Grossbauern)—it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.

That’s an analysis that I agree with. I don’t think that Lenin’s goal of revolution is necessarily applicable to modern day conditions, but I think there are other methods like strikes that could be encouraged by a radical party.

By calling it out and stating exactly what they are doing, and how, you bring awareness to it and it shows the world that it is rigged. My hope is that then other countries will take economic action and populations across the world will begin to boycott thing i.e. The World Cup and USA made goods.

I think countries are more likely to take action based on the US’s bizarre and imperialistic foreign policy, which directly affects them, than the prospect that elections might not happen.

The thing is that there’s so much horrible shit that the administration is doing right now, in front of our eyes, that I don’t really see much point in messaging about what they might do. At that point, if elections do happen, then everyone who said they wouldn’t looks silly and discredited, and the administration gets to dismiss the opposition as doing paranoid fearmongering.

What do you believe the Democratic party should be doing then? You’ve made it clear what you think they will do. Of you were in their position how would you deal with the rigged election situation?

Well look, I fundamentally disagree with their approach, but if we’re talking about messaging strategy then I think we have to stay within the realm with what’s actually plausible. Since they’re committed to an electoral approach, they can’t cast doubts on the election because it could decrease turnout. They have to operate on the assumption that the elections will happen, and focus on criticizing things like ICE, while promising things that will materially improve people’s lives, like Mamdani’s approach.

The Democrats to be talking more about the possibility of election manipulation by the GOP and making the public aware of their intent to fight any such plans, I imagine?

Why? To what end?

There is a political theory that says you should continue to participate in rigged or unfair elections, while explicitly calling them out as rigged, for the purpose of reaching people who are invested in electoralism and convincing them to engage in direct, mass action, such as strikes or revolution. That theory is called Marxism-Leninism. The democratic party are not Marxist-Leninists. They have no interest in getting people to abandon electoralism in favor of other means of resistance, they want the exact opposite of that.

There’s another political theory that says you shouldn’t focus your efforts on elections but should instead focus on building dual power through things like mutual aid networks. This theory is called Anarchism. The democratic party are not Anarchists. If you want to take that strategy, then you shouldn’t even be looking to the democratic party, because it is a political party.

So why on earth would a party that is completely committed to electoralism as the only avenue of affecting change go around telling people the elections are rigged? It’s nonsense. It goes against everything they believe in.

They are intrinsically tied to the system and they will continue to uphold the system until the day comes that they get dragged away to a torture dungeon in El Salvador. It’s technically correct that they should change, but I don’t see how it’s remotely possible that they would change to anything like the extent necessary.

And what exactly does the author imagine as an alternative?

Dystopian fiction: The regime alters photos to make people look happy and smiling, to hide their cruelty.

Dystopian reality: The regime alters photos to make people look sad and pained, to brag about their cruelty.

Oh it was awful. I was about your age back then, and I had been raised religious which I rebelled against by trying to be completely rational, to the point of trying to suppress all my emotions like a robot, which made me miserable. I had no self confidence, crippling social anxiety, and all sorts of bad ideas steering me in completely wrong directions.

I don’t think I had met any openly queer people at that point and the first time I did I was like, “I don’t get it, I would never express myself that way, because what would people think?” while of course completely sidestepping the question of how I actually felt or wanted to identify because again, suppressing my emotions. Spoiler alert: probably should’ve examined that!

The best decision I ever made in my life came a few years later when I studied abroad in Japan. It exposed me to a lot of different perspectives in the international house and also gave me interesting experiences to talk about which helped with my social anxiety (actively identifying and working on it with therapy techniques later on probably did more).

Politically, I had no real awareness of leftism and was into Ron Paul and libertarianism, because he was the loudest antiwar voice at the time. It’s also a great ideology for if you’ve never had a boss or a landlord. I was mostly just glad to be rid of Bush, and I had some hope that Obama would end the war, prosecute people in the Bush administration for war crimes, and stop mass surveillance. I was very naive at that time.

I feel like this was a time before a bunch of movements or cultural tendencies became associated with the right. The problems were still there, but there were also some non-shitty people included in them:

• It was before Gamergate, but there was a lot of sexism in video game communities.

• I remember being into “transhumanist” ideas that would these days be associated with Elon Musk and his sycophantic techbro fanboys.

• Many prominent “New Atheists” either had or would break right and support the wars in the Middle East, with logic like, “We’ve already fixed sexism completely here in the West (and the feminists who don’t agree with that are just a bunch of dumb broads), the big problem is Islam,” ignoring the threat of Christofascism at home.

• Even stuff like 4chan, I had friends who were on /b/ back in the day who turned out normal and chill. There was an element of rebelling against the Pat Robertson, stick-in-the-mud, “D&D is witchcraft” types, and part of that was reveling in rule-breaking, and so they delighted in shock images and made fun of anyone who cared too much about things in response to that.

I guess the positives were that people were less divided and it was easier to have hope for the future. But like there were reasons why those things changed, either movements/groups showed their true colors, or valid criticisms of those groups became more widely accepted. I much prefer the division and conflict that we have now compared to the “post-9/11 world” where virtually everybody was in agreement about slaughtering Muslims. And yeah I had more hope for the future but it was because I though technology would fix everything for everybody and didn’t understand how it could hurt workers and benefit capitalists, it was based on ignorance.

The implication is that the Iraqis were not forced into anything against their will, that the invasion and occupation was in their interests and for their benefit, and so this is dissimilar and the Greenlanders would resist harder than the Iraqis.

The reality is that the Iraq War was similar because they were both imperialistic wars of aggression for the purpose of seizing resources.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

No, I just don’t like unprovoked wars of aggression and decades long occupations. Including when someone not named Trump is doing it, including when it happens to countries outside of the imperial core.

This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

The Atlantic always manages to squeeze shitlib bullshit into every article, like this ridiculous Iraq War apologia. I see the source and I immediately know it’s coming, every single time.

Right, because that’s possible.

Does original sin exist?