preventing global terrorism

You’re a miserable chauvinist and your college course would be crap. Israel is a rogue terrorist state that exists for the purpose of terrorizing its neighbors and therefore hindering development and destabilizing the Middle East

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HZs-v0PR44

You can be opposed to Israel’s excessive use of force while still supporting the Biden administration’s actions.

Israel is a settler-colonial state, all of its forces is excessive and it as a state should not exist. Anyone supporting Biden’s actions is supporting settler-colonialism and terrorism.

“Look at how long he has beaten his wife for. You’ll find that it’s not possible from him to completely stop beating his wife”

Who do you think the “someone else” is here? Are you so desperate to scream “But Trump!” at any specific criticism of Harris that you have discarded basic reading comprehension?

and very nearly succeeded

How can you say this? Do you think that there’s some artifact in the Capitol that grants the power of Legitimate Governance? Do you think a dipshit protest-turned-walking-tour where the cops only saw fit to fire on like one person and only a couple of cops were killed by the rioters is enough to reverse an election in the country that is the global superpower? The country that overthrows governments abroad with much greater violence every few years?

Is it possible that a couple of politicians would have been beaten to death? Yeah, in a somewhat different world, but the rioters did not begin to approach doing anything in the same dimension as a “successful coup”. There was no connection between what they did and what a group would need to do to take over the country, and imagining there was even anything in the Capitol that could be used for a bit of leverage (like if some pols got caught), that still wouldn’t be a coup and the feds would send SWAT in to blow some brains out.

It’s just classic American aggrievement politics, the hogs put on a show for you so now it’s “1/6” like it’s a new 9/11 combined with the fucking burning of the White House in 1814. It was never going to amount to anything on the magnitude that you’re asserting, or even several orders of magnitude below it. There is no conflict in which like 6 people die (multiple from rank stupidity) that can connect even notionally to the outcome of overthrowing the most powerful country in the world!

Well, unless it’s like a judicial coup or some other situation where people are exercising their political power directly, to be fair. But it’s not like Trump was doing the smarter thing and using executive orders to lay the ground for toppling the government, and even then there are so many barriers he’d need to get over that he didn’t even have the cognitive capacity back then to grapple with.

The donors – the domestic owning class – were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it’s been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they’ve always had, it’s just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.

It’s not a matter of what the owning class “believes” as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are interest groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.

Third parties are never even mentioned in the article. Is all left criticism of Harris “vote-third-party slop”?

What a coincidence!

This is one of those things where we all know what it means but you have deniability if someone calls you out on it. Just say what you mean instead of resorting to dogwhistling.

That polling was mentioned immediately in the article, but it then points to the wealth of issues where the headline is true.

Well, I would argue that that is like 95% where their votes are coming from, basically “This is still the ‘left’ option, I guess,” rather than believing in any sort of positive vision on the part of the Democratic Party (it doesn’t have one).

However, politics isn’t just a 1-dimensional spectrum where things neatly slot into whatever is closest. The fact that they are lurching rightward, the apparent contempt they have for the left, the lack of any meaningful similarity between what a left-wing person wants and what the Democrats will even acknowledge is real (like action on the genocide in Palestine), means that what you are taking as similarity is in many cases difference. Just saying “Fuck you, vote for me because the other guy is worse” is really not a good strategy for getting votes unless you are holding getting votes as secondary to pandering to donors.

Like, do you think a new Republican candidate could just be blatantly pro-choice and not lose one or two dedicated blocs of the Republican voting base, just because “he’s still the farthest right”? Of course not, democracy doesn’t work that way. If you don’t support people on the issues they care about most, a good number of them will tell you to go to hell while the others roll over as always.

The distinction being drawn is that popular sentiments aren’t going rightwards like the parties are.

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Appropriately apocalyptic for the liberal view on these elections, but the problem, also appropriate for the liberal view on these elections, is that you are taking the Other to be a complete dipshit.

If you’re in a situation that isn’t the literal end of the world, bluffing has a serious danger associated with it because it informs all circumstances subsequent to the bluff if it gets called. From that point on, people know that your threats are not to be taken seriously, and you have robbed yourself of whatever power you had. You become a “boy who cried wolf” with respect to the actions you will take.

Furthermore, this time in all situations, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to stake such a widespread plan of action on everyone at all times maintaining a lie. How do you agitate for such a thing? You can’t speak of it in the open. How do you vet candidates? Someone might be an asset (and liberals usually believe spaces both online and offline are crawling with assets for other states) or even just someone who thinks you plan is bullshit and will decide to talk about it afterwards. Basically, your plan works in the same realm of imagination where wars would stop if all of the soldiers on both sides just laid down their arms. That is to say, if you could just cast a spell and make people act that way, sure, but that’s not how politics works.

Lastly, it’s important to remember we are talking about threats, so “If we have nukes, we should just use them!” is a complete non sequitur. That’s not a threat, that’s just an attack. Incidentally, while there is a good argument to be made that if you get nuked, you should just take the L if you think your barrage might tip the scales into the world ending, such an idea definitionally does not work as the dominant ideology because at that point MAD does not protect your country anymore and there’s really no point in you having nukes when you’re just surrendering to death anyway. If you’re an individual operator of a nuclear silo or something and you refuse to participate in ending the world, good for you, but again that’s something that you can’t organize with because it’s a conspiracy of a similar style to what I outlined before, so you aren’t going to succeed in helping very much unless you’re on the vanguard and it might be a false positive that an enemy nuke was launched at all (this happened at least once with the USSR, during the Cuban Missile Crisis). In that extremely specific situation where mass action is impossible and only a tiny fraction of a fraction of the population ever gets close to being in the conditions where such an incident has even a slim possibility of occuring: Yes, there it works well.

A threat that you refuse to make good on is the same as doing nothing. I have no interest in telling someone who to vote for, but your proposed strategy is ridiculous.

Words can have different colloquial meanings. There is a really crass meaning of liberal that would identify Marx as a liberal, yes, and this is the most popular one in America, but there’s another colloquial meaning (more popular in other anglophone countries, but gaining traction in America) where liberals are basically centrists (in capitalist societies) who might pretend to be progressive but are ultimately moderates to their bones. This came from the proclivities of “Liberal” parties, along with centrists understandably claiming the name of whatever the ruling ideology is, and here it is of course liberalism.

Among leftist circles, “liberal” is sort of an unmarked term for the moderate definition and the Lockean definition both, like how “guys” can refer to both a group of males and a group of mixed gender, despite “gals” only referring specifically to a group of females (I’m using those terms because they apply to children also, not just men/women).

So the comment is saying, in translation: “Democrat aligned people will still blame socialists (etc.) like their Democrat ideological cult wants them to.” Does that make sense?

Turns out when something happens a lot, it’s more useful to try to view it systemically than to write each person individually off as an “idiot devoid of empathy”. “Brainwashing” is a myth, but pretending it’s real, who do you think “brainwashed” this guy? Surely not Republicans, they’ve got their own attitudes and talking points that are unhinged but distinct from this.

Is it a statement on how pets are animals turned into agency-less commodities, just like meat?

That’s true, they are (and I guess I am, by extension) using it in a narrower sense than is represented in Locke, who encompasses both the red and blue team, but the Lockean sense would still distinguish between liberals and modern leftism.

This has to be bait. You can’t possibly think people think that way, right? .ml people disagree with NATO-sphere liberals about a lot of things to do with Russia, but that’s not the same as being mindless Russian chauvinists.

Like, do you really think whatever meetings she had with Putin or whatever it is you blue rags gossip about would be a bigger factor than her opposing the genocide in Gaza, to say nothing of having better climate policies, better immigration policies, and so on?

“But she won’t win”

Obviously, but her shaking Putin’s hand won’t change that. His apparent trick of buying a miniscule number of highly-targeted Facebook ads isn’t gonna do much for her, so we need to accept that assumption either way.

I’m voting for PSL, not Greens, btw.

Not as many people hate Harris specifically as hated Hillary, but a lot of people (for good and bad reasons) hate the Dems and also Kamala to some extent.

I think it’s funny that someone with “Locke” in their name would seemingly not distinguish between liberals and leftists.

Why the fuck would I argue with someone who minimizes genocide like that? It’s not like your rotten opinion means anything, and anyone else sees the shit you tried to pull comment 1.