PugJesus
- 347 Posts
- 521 Comments
Founding a new religion around the goddess Libertas, She demands immediate and temporal punishment for all fascists 🙏
Who else wants to sacrifice a goat with me to pray for the imminent punishment of the wicked?
There’s no grand conspiracy involved in people being fucking morons.
I don’t have a plan yet. No one seems to be interested in asking what I’d want to see to vote for them, only that I’m wrong for the vote that I might or might not cast in 3.5 years time, which I find very interesting on an intellectual level.
It’s almost like I’m expected to uncritically serve up my vote to them for not being the other party.
It’s almost like the other party are literal fucking fascists who are intent on murdering people, yet you think that the lives of the murdered is ‘not enough’ entertainment for you to oppose literal fucking fascism.
“I MIGHT vote against the Nazis, I don’t know yet! It depends on how entertaining the SDP is!”
And then you wonder why potential Aktion T4 victims spit in your food.
This tracks for the first year of a fascist regime.
God fucking dammit.
I’m sorry that clearly fucking stating my issues and outlining the logic that leads to the invariable conclusion is ‘reading into things’, and I’m sorry that being fucking pissed that, even after it’s been pointed out numerous times, that you’re treating the lives of marginalized groups in the US, including my fucking life, as a ‘prize’ that needs to be ‘won’ by the Blue fucking Circus before your holy hand will deign to vote against our murder on your fucking ballot. I understand that my tone is making you uncomfortable, when you would prefer asspats for endorsing my death. Agree to disagree, right? It’s nothing major. Just another game to play and then go home safe and snug every night.
Have the day you plan to vote for.
Difference between true Liberals and leftists. Despite not agreeing with everything on the far left, we know that voting progressives if they are serious is the better option than maga.
Not always, considering that fighting with moderate liberals to vote for Mamdani in NYC is shaping up to be a struggle.
People are often stupid regardless of ideology. The point is to ensure that it’s understood that purity-testing in the face of literal fascism is both immoral and socially unacceptable. It’s something that has to be pushed in the broader civic culture, not just where on a political axis you align.
It’s not something that’s ‘inherent’ to leftism or not inherent to liberalism.
Why do you keep reducing my argument down to things like the above?
What I want is for this to stop happening:
And why the fuck do you think that handing victory to the GOP will stop that from happening?
Why do you think it will do anything except accelerate that, assuming that graph is true (it is, quite demonstrably, not).
Great! Can we agree that it’s the fault of Democratic leadership and their strategies that the Fascists got the Presidency
They bear a good deal of the blame.
Who is talking about sinking a Dem presidency? Other people can make whatever decision they like. My vote belongs to no one by default anymore.
You are. You are literally talking about the prospect of not voting for a Dem against literal fucking Nazis.
Why? Because when R went full on Hitler what did D do at the very next presidential election? Did Kamala pull to the left in her campaign? No.
…
… why would the GOP going full fascist turn the Dems left?
There’s not some magic balance or pendulum in politics. The Dems aim for what demographics they think will give them a winning coalition. The country, not having moved dramatically left in the past 4 years, was not going to result in a dramatically more left Dem platform since 2020.
It was the same tired shit that they used to justify working against Bernie, the same tired shit Pelosi uses to justify working against any progressive at all
What.
And, it’s not YOUR job to convince me I’ve got them all wrong. It’s THEIRS.
Oh, you’re absolutely right, it’s not my job as a citizen to convince anyone not to endorse my death. After all. Blue Circus didn’t earn my life.
Treating this like some kind of fucking sports team is exactly why politics in this country is so fucked. You embrace the same idiotic bullshit of politics as spectacle that’s core to fascism, because, apparently, you don’t make the connections between what happens in government and what happens here in the real fucking world.
My vote is mine. It’s not yours or anyone else’s. If they don’t want it, that’s OK. But if they do, they need to act like it.
Your vote is your’s. And all the consequences of what you vote for, or fail to vote against, is also your’s.
If the lives of your loved ones aren’t worth a Blue Circus that doesn’t entertain you enough, I can’t stop you from endorsing fascism and genocide.
But I will absolutely condemn you for it, with what time I have left.
If you choose to allow fascism next election because the ‘shitlibs’ haven’t been entertaining enough, every ounce of blood that results that could’ve been prevented is on your fucking hands.
If you spend fifty years pushing a wall and the wall hasn’t moved, you can’t say you’ve done anything.
This you?
MLK Jr. is speaking about people who claim to be allies but insist on doing nothing and rebuking the Civil Rights movement at every turn.
Voting for either half of the uniparty makes no difference to me
I can tell. Those of us who aren’t quite so coddled and privileged have to live and die with the results.
It’s not even hard, just stop trying to make elections about which gender goes in which bathroom, and start making it about jobs and housing.
It’s funny. One set of left-purists insists that liberals need to abandon trans folk to win, and the other set insists that liberals have already abandoned trans folk, which is why they don’t win.
There are many people are fault for the result in 2024, Harris not least of all. But it would have only taken one of these many groups which shat the bed to simply… not have done so… to deliver us from this fascist regime.
And all of them chose not to.
On here, on the Fediverse, left-wing nonvoters often crow about their choice and have others, including some voters, asspat them for that nonsense as though it was anything but delivering fascism to marginalized groups in the US, which is why I harp on how unacceptable it is.
They could have saved many lives, if their principles actually meant anything. But all their principles meant was masturbatory self-congratulation.
Arguably, it shouldn’t have needed to be up to them; that there were half-a-dozen other lynchpins that had to yield before it came down to US leftists. But they chose to yield, just like Harris and the DNC. And they may share a smaller part of it, but for that, they share the fucking blame of letting fascism into the highest levers of power of this fucking country.
There are multiple problems here.
First, that it presumes that them not giving you a reason to vote for them that doesn’t sum up to “Literal fascists are bad” is, itself, a reason not to vote for them.
It is fucking not.
Votes are not a love letter. They are a strategic decision about the future of the country, made as one voice in an ocean of voices, few of whom are in total agreement with you. And if your decision ends up “Well, literal fascism is really bad… but I don’t think I’ve been woo’d enough by the non-fascists”, then you are putting a stamp of apathetic approval on fascism murdering large numbers of disadvantaged groups because of some bizarre sense of political vanity.
That is not a moral choice. It is not a reasonable choice. It’s not much more than saying that the lives of minorities are worth less than your feelings. Yes, including those that you love, and those that you are friends with.
Second, it is not unreasonable to want more out of your representatives. But it is also important to recognize how and when to get more out of your representatives. For example, building a credible third-party or interest group, or primarying some dipshit neoliberal’s ass out. Both of those require extensive groundwork.
Part of the issue, I think, is that the ultra-fucked FPTP system of the US which has led us to our two-party system has simultaneously robbed any opposition to the two parties of any sense of coalition-building or bargaining. Hence the spate of perennial four-year ‘also-ran’ presidential candidates we have to deal with.
Third, the presidency, in particular, has accumulated a wealth of unreasonable powers. Beyond questions of policy, it is vital to keep the presidency out of the hands of literal fascists because it is precisely the branch which they can do the most damage with. If the fascists had gained the House and Senate, and maintained the judiciary, we would still be at far less risk had we had some empty fucking neolib suit in the White House. Sinking a Dem Senator or Rep is far less concerning, in this light, than sinking a Dem presidency.
Fourth, despite the constant claims of speaking for the people, progressives have shown, time and time again, that we do not have the votes to win elections on our own in this fucking country. Most of the country is not as left-leaning as you or I. We have a lot of fucking work to do before “Listen to us or else!” is anything but a threat to let literal fucking fascists win.
Which means, ugly as it is, we need to be in coalition with the fucking neolibs. Primary their asses, by all means. But if the general election comes down to a Republican president or a Dem president, you better fucking be voting blue even if it’s some goddamn ghoul like Pelosi. Having the country return the more right-wing option does not signal to anyone that they should go left; it signals that the country desires to go further right, and both parties will respond as such.
I’ve got people who I love too. I’ve also got people who I don’t love, but who I’m just friends with.
Okay? Did letting the fascists win help them more than the alternative, or hurt them more than the alternative?
I await with baited breath your answer. /s
I’m fucking disabled. I have relatives who are undocumented. Neither party is going to represent my interests adequately. But I still recognize which is going to be fucking worse.
My examples are that if we can hold Dems accountable for anything at all (which apparently we can’t without really, really pissing some people off) I’d think it would at least be for allowing the continuous rightward shift of the overton window, which they have actively promoted over the course of my entire adult life by their continuous fighting against progressive elements of their own party while simultaneously appeasing conservatives.
Holy fucking shit, are you kidding me?
You said you’ve been voting Dem for 40 years. If that’s true, then you should be acutely aware of just how far left the Dems have come since the height of neolib lunacy in the 1990s.
I don’t really see how that could be any clearer, but I’m sure you’ll reply angrily about some unrelated thing, or otherwise impugn my intelligence, memory, or integrity. (or block me for not kowtowing)
You don’t see how… a demonstrably untrue point that you did not previously express… could be any clearer.
Okay.
They have dangled the “but the Republicans really can’t win this time” in front of us for decades. And yet, the exact same Republican threat (but worse!) exists the next time. Every time.
HW was a step back from Reagan. McCain and Romney from Bush.
And I agree about the presence of that threat. I disagree that fighting against progressive politicians and their policies will do anything but continue to enable it.
Okay?
Right, that’s why I’m an inveterate opponent of Mamdani and a staunch supporter of Pelosi. You caught me.
the progressive voting block don’t deserve a candidate because they are too few to matter.
I am a progressive. We deserve a candidate. So fucking show up to the primaries next time.
Watching Bernie get a fucking quarter of the vote in 2020 was heartbreaking.
the progressive voting block not voting against their interest is why the democrats lost the election.
You do realize that the election was lost by under 2%, right?
Would you like to extend that logic, that any interest group that can sink a candidacy is also entitled to dictate to the party whatever terms it likes, and holds no responsibility for the outcome if the party does not sufficiently compromise with them, in their view?
Oh. Is that what fascism is, now? “Overcoming capitalism”? What brave new arguments the ‘left’ has come into.
Please tell me more about how the 2020-2024 Dem platform was a major ‘give away’ of the Dem base, and not the most progressive platforms the Dems have taken in my entire fucking lifetime.
You’re absolutely right, in a time when the CIA and FBI were both utterly off their leash, repression of left-wing movements and unions was rampant, domestic assassinations were engineered by the government, and brutalization of minorities and dissidents was much more widespread, back when marital rape was legal and women couldn’t open bank accounts in their own name, there was less fascism. Thank you for your brilliant take on Nixon’s America. What’s next? Perhaps you’d like to proclaim how much more democratic Woodrow Wilson’s America was than the modern day? Or how much less slavery there was in Buchanan’s America?