I’m a raging leftist but I’m getting tired of “deontologists” telling me they refuse to vote for Biden then telling me how great Xi Jinping is.
I have to caulk it up to young people learning about socialism and communism for the first time, but they’re only reading Marx and Lenin.
Like hey guys, they lost pretty hard. Maybe we shouldn’t do exactly the same thing and in fact there’s decades of work outlining what we should do instead?
That’s the charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is astroturfing aiming to further destabilize “the west”
A “leftist” earlier this week told me that Joe Biden is responsible for Dobbs because it happened in 2022. That’s a cosplaying Republican. The red hat will be back on his head end-of-day November 3rd.
Yes! Their positions and actions are suspiciously very demobilising.
No unity even in the most basic stuff. No willingness to hold a constructive conversation. Things have to be done in their way or you’re labeled an enemy. Doctrine above humanity. Incessant nitpicking.
How do they intend to build socialism if they can’t even have an honest, good faith conversation?
It was crazy the amount of red scare shit circling when I started on Lemmy. It was like they were trying to radicalize people by pitting them against the “crazy leftists.”
God, please never let McCarthyism make a come back. What a waste of our time and energy.
The problem is there are crazy “leftists” on lemmy. Your instance defederated from the instances home to the worst of them, so you probably didn’t get to experience it.
Imagine people the adhere to some of the worst parts of right-wing fascism, but with “leftist” branding.
Fuck man, even Marx and Lenin don’t cotton to the common tankie arguments about all non-socialist movements being the same.
I can understand looking back to them for some useful stuff. “Commieblock” housing served a purpose at the time, for example. They brought huge masses of people into an urban environment with indoor plumbing, electricity, and climate control, which were not a given in their previous living situations. They were meant as an interim solution to last a few decades. For what they set out to do, they were a great success. The only problem was that the followup to better options was never done.
But the Leninist/Maoists can never leave it at pulling out successes like that. It’s almost always “America bad”, “Holodomor isn’t real”, or “Cuba only sucks because of sanctions”.
you kinda had me in the first half, ngl.
america is bad, research by anticommunist historians after the fall of the soviet union lead to the irrefutable conclusion that holodomor isn’t real (holodomor means intentional genocidal famine, not just that there was a famine that lots of people died in) and cuba has problems but the main reason it sucks is because of sanctions.
Famine because of bad policy is not a win, either. That’s the best case interpretation. However, there are plenty of tankies who will tell you there were no mass deaths at all.
may i see the tankies saying there was no mass death during the famine? I have never in many years of interacting with communists heard someone say that.
Sure, I’ll just wade through a decade of Reddit comments to find some to satisfy your curiosity.
Maybe don’t make shit up then if you don’t have examples
You’re not a “raging leftist” if you vote for Biden. At least vote PSL or Green
This post is about you, you idiot.
What do you think happens if I do that?
Actual progress towards changing the Democratic party instead of consenting to it’s right wing policies that are enabled by your vote.
How did you come to that conclusion?
Decades of your strategy failing every time to move the Dems to the left.
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It hasn’t though. Dems aren’t Communists, but they’ve moved slowly toward the left over decades.
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Even if strategy A is a total failure, that’s no indication that strategy B will succeed just because it isn’t strategy A. That’s a ridiculous conclusion. It’s like saying “Bloodletting didn’t cure my cancer, therefore healing crystals will!”.
they’ve moved slowly toward the left over decades.
Absolutely false. Dems have moved to the right for decades since Clinton’s attacks on the working class with NAFTA. Obama called himself a moderate republican and governed like it. Read “Listen, Liberal” by Thomas Frank for a detailed description of this.
Even if strategy A is a total failure, that’s no indication that strategy B will succeed just because it isn’t strategy A
Then try it and see, that’s how it works. Instead you want to consent to the Democratic party’s right wing policies without getting any concession for your vote. ___
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I did that in 2016 and it didn’t progress shit. It made it worse like it will if we do that this year. I organized and pushed leftists in primaries and I was beaten by “moderates.” Specifically, nobody had a chance against the incumbent. It fucking sucks but I don’t want a declared fascist putting more assholes on judicial benches or pushing anti-trans, anti-women policies.
I’m with you on both parties sucking. But please, grow up. If you want to help, do it before the nominees are set. And don’t drag others into your misguided principles.
I did that in 2016 and it didn’t progress shit.
Did your lazy ass do anything else?
If you want to help, do it before the nominees are set.
Jill Stein is a good candidate in a historically weak election for the ruling class.
I’ve gotten dozens of people to vote Green in my state, what have you done?
“There are dozens of us.” lol
wtf have I done? I already said. Organized and gotten people elected to school boards, city council, and our mayor too. We primaried for state and federal elections but didn’t get our candidates. We didn’t pout and waste our votes on people who had no chance of getting elected. We sucked it the fuck up and tried to make sure Republicans didn’t get elected.
I don’t believe you at all. Any person informed enough to do what you said knows voting for Democrats only makes out situation worse by consenting to neoliberal capitalism. None of the hundreds of people affiliated with the Green party I’ve met have said that, so you’re lying.
This just emphasizes to me that every vote matters. Sure, both parties are terrible and the chance of a third party making any headway, nevermind winning an election is, at best, unlikely.
But not voting is being complicit in what comes next. Good or bad, you’re okay with whatever happens.
Harm reduction through voting is surreal, but it’s required at this point. Don’t be a filthy fucking collaborator, go vote.
Some of those who work forces are the same who burn crosses: many that advocate for not voting from a “progressive” point of view are actually the ones who wouldn’t be in power if you did. They think it’s hilarious when we don’t vote, and they love it.
Yep
I used to be alarmed that people were being taken in by this stuff, but I now think the overwhelming majority of people saying it are just shill accounts. For a couple of different reasons, I think the percentage that are actual human accounts that sincerely believe it is extremely small.
I notice they’ve pivoted to just general nihilism about the US economy and the state of things as of a few weeks ago – I think they might have concluded, as I did, that expressing this type of viewpoint and doing such a bad job of it and getting unanimously yelled at in the comments was actually having the opposite effect, highlighting to people how important it is to vote and how it absolutely makes a difference.
Thank you for your perspective. It’s nice to know that you think I couldn’t possibly be a real human being just because I’m a financially impoverished minority in these United States and sick of being told that I need to vote for someone else’s option time and again because it’s the best possible option. Every time the leftist majority makes a decision I want, they don’t look for concessions to bring me in. They just beat me over the head with fearmongering.
If you want voters, appeal to them. I’m not responsible for the message put out by the party not convincing me.
What do you suppose trump will do to help you?
I’m not sure you replied to the right person.
I did. you’re claiming voting is pointless, but all abstaining can lead to is trump
I never said Trump would help me. So your question is irrelevant.
Your actions will help elect him. 2+2=4 whether you’re acknowledging it or not
Did you miss the primaries? There’s more than just the president, you know.
What an unhelpful comment.
“I’m in this Class Project. The whole class is in on it and every time we do a class project half the class tells me that I have to agree with them or else the other half decides how to do the project. I try telling them I will agree with them if they’re open to concessions to me. They just yell harder and threaten that it will be all my fault if I don’t agree with them.”
“Have you tried participating in Group Projects?”
Your waiting for concessions reminds me of Martin Niemoller’s “First they came for”. You’re waiting for specific focus on your needs, but in the meantime by abstaining from the process you are enabling others suffering.
You sound politically self-centered. It’s fair to feel that way. But perhaps you should participate so that you can sway the process towards a side that is attempting the opposite of harm.
You could work to better the world you live in with the tools at your disposal (voting, for the lesser of two evils). If you don’t, then you only have yourself to blame when no one helps you.
Did it my entire political existence. I’m the one that wasn’t helped. This is your party having no one to blame but themselves for how this is turning out at this point.
So your life would be better if every time you voted the other politician won? That seems crazy.
the “Voting is Not Harm Reduction” article is possibly the most covert insidious thing that’s happened to online political discourse since 2019.
somehow, it’s managed to SEO weasel its way on top of every other article since the dawn of the internet for the search terms “voting harm reduction” and similar. and not just once, but reposted to every corner of the internet imaginable. literally try it now, if you set your google search to find articles before February 5, 2020, you will see inumerable articles with diversity of positions on the topic. after that? literally just the same article reposted and crosslisted, with the occasional reddit/twitter/tumblr comment thread.
it’s not even a bad article per se, it’s just indecently self-contradictory as OOP says, admitting at the beginning that small rights can be preserved by engaging in voting, and then pulling a 180 and accusing those who vote of perpetuating white supremacy.
like i get it, harm reduction has a specific meaning originating in addiction treatment. but for heavens sake, this flub of language doesn’t mean you should throw away one of the only miniscule rights the oppressor class has granted you to help your neighbors.
editing to add this comment thread and article which i think give helpful insight.
Almost as if someone was trying to specifically engineer that type of result
I’m gonna start my own little Alex Jones show where I’m convinced everything is a conspiracy
The anti harm-reduction crowd:
that’s how it feels fr sometimes :(
I guess I’ll say it for the record but Kris Mayes is a woman.
Hard to believe I had to scroll down so far for this. I heard HER on NPR this morning, did a doubletake when reading the post. Thank you. Is it surprising it’s a woman protecting women from the dictates of long-dead ignorant men? No, although sadly it’s not a given. Is it surprising an AG is assumed to be male? Even by a person who supports what they do? Just shows how far we have yet to go.
“Sadly” it’s not a given?
Please tell me you don’t mean to imply that protecting women from the dictates of long-dead ignorant men is only good if a woman is doing it?
No sorry, I meant it’s sad there are some horrible right-wing women in positions of power.
👍
Been arguing with a tankie about this, decided to stop after they said a civil war and another genocide was preferable to voting for Biden because he supports Israel. Yeah ok bud
Yeah see, I don’t care for genocide. Genocide is not very cash money at all. So, see, in opposition to genocide, I’m gonna sit over here have a preference for a different not cash money genocide, you know, not really but yeah. Oh, and I’ve read accounts of war. I can handle it, I’m well read on the topic. Blood, guts, spit, and ass aren’t that scary. With all of my experience reading about war, I’m practically a shell shocked WWI vet anyway, hehe.
Don’t worry I understood your comment was satire but honestly it’s not far off from the tankie I was arguing with.
If you really absolutely will not vote for moderates, at least vote for leninist-marxist peoples front of Arizona or something. There’s a politican somewhere who will see that 0.15% and think “that could make or brake my campaign, how can I win them over?”
PSL is the usual party Marxist-Leninists push for.
Party for Socialism and Liberation. That’s what I see MLs voting for most of the time.
Speaking personally as a brit i’m not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election but in the case of britain at least im absolutely not going to be voting for Keir Starmer since most of the left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for the most right wing and second worst (to his “credit”, unlike Tony Blair, he doesnt have the blood of a million iraqis on his hands, only 30,000 palestinians) party leader labour’s had in recent memory were the exact same people 5 years ago saying they couldnt in good faith vote for the most far left, trans positive labour leader in decades because he criticised Israel which led to the largest conservative majority in years.
Under Sir Kid Starver, Labour stopped members from voting for a ceasefire right at the start of the Palestinian genocide, members have repeatedly been expelled over bogus antisemitism charges, starmerite labour’s trying to push to have the NHS privatised, the party has pivoted so far to the right that you have promiment members saying “Margaret Thatcher was a visionary leader for the U.K; no doubt about it", they’ve proposed policies to segregate trans people out of single sex NHS hospital wards and those are just the things from the last few months or so that i remember off the top of my head.
I’m going to vote for the Greens instead.
- I’m not even from the US: Check
- Claim of LGBTQ identity: Check
- Lots of the content posted by the user is just generically-relatable memes: Check
- Account was recently created: Check
- Emotional framing (“left neoliberals in this country telling me i have to swallow my pride and vote for”): Check
I actually guessed that most of those would be true, and the point of view that the message would express, the instant I read “Speaking personally as a brit” and before I expanded the message.
I didn’t know the US had a monopoly on democracy.
Also saying they ‘claim’ lgbtq identity is inherently dehumanizing. Fuck you.
How about you reply to the actual comment instead of attacking the posters character.
Also your account is only 3 months old and you’re complaining that their account is newly created? Fuck offffff
I’m saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.
Okay though, sure. My response to the content is contained in the OP meme: Even if we posit that Gaza is 100% Biden’s doing and he’s a lesser evil, which I don’t agree with, but even positing that, this “oh boo hoo I have to swallow my pride and vote for the person who doesn’t want to impose 30% inflation on Iran for no fucking reason and ‘finish the job’ in Gaza and separate Hispanic kids from their families and do mass deportations, I don’t want to, that would mean swallowing my pride, so I won’t and you shouldn’t either” viewpoint is childish, incredibly destructive, and probably not a sincere point of view, but instead a deliberate deception to produce an incredibly destructive result in US politics that may do quite a lot of harm to quite a lot of people.
It’s born – if it is sincere – out of an incredibly selfish and entitled mindset. There are people in the world who don’t have the luxury of deciding to do things they do or don’t want to; there are hungry families in Iran, dead Kurds, dead Ukrainians, Honduran kids who will never see their families again, who absolutely don’t give the slightest shit what you do or don’t feel like voting for, or whether you’re emotionally motivated to take a single trivial action that you can do that might help keep their families alive. They don’t have the luxury of looking at things that way.
That’s as it’s applied to the US. I’m not really familiar enough with UK politics to say the details of how it applies in the UK – but the logic is universally bad. For example if someone was saying not to vote against Boris Johnson for the same absolutely bad-faith and horrifyingly wrong reasons, I would feel free to disagree with them firmly in exactly the same way.
I’m saying that they check a bunch of the boxes of a shill account.
one of our accounts is 8 months old and talks about a variety of other general interests and things that arent just to do with politics as well as modding several of the queer comms in lemmy.blahaj.zone; the other is a three month old account that exclusively posts about politics and martialling people to vote for the democrats and stuff, there’s far more grounds to call you a “shill” for the democrats than to call me a “shill” for the british Green Party or Jeremy Corbyn or whatever.
and one of the points i made was literally that the people now who are saying to vote for Keir Starmer against Rishi Sunak now are literally the same people who voted for Boris Johnson to stop Jeremy Corbyn coming into power because he was “too left wing” just five years ago but now i have to fall in line behind them when they utterly tanked the labour party and refused to fall in line just a few years ago unless we let them be in charge and push their transphobic neoliberal zionist ideology instead, one of the old mainstays of this group, David Mencer, the former director of Labour Friends of Israel, is now literally working for the Israeli government as an official spokesperson
i have to fall in line behind them
This is another of the talking points / common misleading framings I see a lot
Just wanted to highlight it – I feel pretty comfortable with what I already laid out otherwise
- At no point was in weighing on talking about the US, I was talking about the UK. I even said “as a brit i’m not going to comment on whatevers going on with the american election”
- I’m not “claiming” my queerness or some shit, i live it and i face the consequences of living it
- yes, most of my posts are in the garfieldist subreddit which i made because i like garfield and the femcel_posting sub for transfems because I’m a transfem and i find the memes funny, sorry that i have a personality and other interests that arent just politics
- my account is literally almost three times older than yours
- the thing you posted was far more emotive than mine and literally accuses anyone who doesnt want to vote for an accomplice to genocide of saying “vulnerable people should die for my ideology” (frankly i dont care which people vote for but to say anyone protesting bidens complicity in the bombing of gaza just want to kill gay people or whatever while the democratic party tells them they just have to accept that “palestinians should die for our ideology” so that biden can win the election is disgusting), but because i very briefly expressed in just one sentence a fraction of the anger i feel at the (entirely cis) starmerite talking head harpies in this country who supported the tory majority into power so that we’ve had five years of uncontested rule by them and who arent affected in the slightest by the institutionialised transphobia of the conservative and labour parties yet expect me to come happily to vote for the man who entirely bulldosed the most progressive party britain has ever had and is directly calling for me and people like me to be segregated out of our crumbling healthcare service suddenly im the one being emotional or whatever?
im not even refusing to vote, im just voting for a different party which isnt actively trying to screw me over, why would i ever vote for Sir Keir “trans rights can’t override women’s rights” Starmer?
Makes some amount of sense. And sure, I have no idea if you’re telling the God’s honest truth about all this stuff or if you’re exactly what I’m accusing you of being. (My server for some reason showed the wrong age for your account, so strike that one.)
But, the fact remains – I am not lying when I tell you I predicted exactly a bunch of the features of your account, and more or less what you were going to say in the post (the talking point that people are trying to pressure you into voting for the less-harmful candidate when you emotionally don’t want to, and that you’re taking a principled stand against it by refusing and voting for a third party instead, which is an incredibly common shill talking point) just from reading the few words. If it’s pure coincidence and you just happen to hit all those shill boxes by accident then I apologize, but honestly, I doubt it.
my vote for the Green party isn’t an emotional “I cant bring myself to vote for this piece of shit” thing, its entirely a strategic vote - it signals to the Labour party that there are people willing to vote for them if they were to move back to the left rather than constantly chasing the votes of the mytholigised moderate conservatives who are finally too disgusted with the rampant corruption and infighting of the current conservative to keep voting for them, it helps the green party gain more ground that labour wont get a >51% majority in the houses of parliament so they’ll have to coalition build with the green party and listen to some of their demands if they want to get stuff done (after all, they’re not going to be coalition building with the Workers Party of Britain since its basically just one guy who hates the modern labour party with a burning passion and gives a speech at the house of commons every now and again about how the county of Rochdale needs more NHS funding and also how Starmer and Sunak will be seeing the fires of hell for their crimes), and there’s not much risk of the conservative party winning now after the last decade of corruption stories and infighting (the funniest of which was the exposé of david cameron’s pig fucking ritual about a decade ago imo), the splintering of the far right of the party to join with the remnants of the Brexit Party (which was formed of the remnants of UKIP and the overtly fascist British National Party) and form into the Reform Party and the split off of some of the left of the party into the Liberal Democrats Party and, in a few cases, into the starmerite Labour Party.
Before the genocide in gaza i was still considering holding my nose and falling in line just in case, but seeing the rabid zionism of the Labour Party in action as loads of MPs have either been forced out for alleged antisemitism for criticising Israel or left in protest over the culture that Starmer’s forced onto the party from the top down gave me a realisation that it was necessary to actually vote for people who will oppose them in parliament rather than just hope that someday they’ll change and get better
Hey you can fuck off.
This person has an older account than you and seems less like a shill from their post history than you. Calling someone’s identity into question because they oppose your political views is also a trash move.
Stop trying to bad jacket people and be normal.
