• umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    i know you hate to hear this but its all symbolic cherrypicked stuff.

    did he stop the concentration camps for mexicans at the border? or the genocide in gaza? did he rollback anything that matters?

    democrats always pretend to be doing shit since i remember, but don’t actually get anything done at all. then republicans inevitably come and push the country further into fascism, rinse repeat.

    • Xanis@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Nah. Vote for Biden. Then carry that momentum to enact change.

      Not sure why so many of you folks just scream “AH, BOTH BAD. NO VOTE.” and run away babbling into the distance.

      There is that legitimate third choice where we continue to push after the election. Biden has shown he will listen. Seems like a plan.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        AH, BOTH BAD. NO VOTE.

        i literally didnt say this. we are not saying this.

        Nah. Vote for Biden. Then carry that momentum to enact change.

        i vote for the leftmost candidate i can, dunno where you get the impression i dont. i just dont pretend they are giving me any momentum because the leftmost in this specific case is still a right wing genocidal maniac.

        come join me at any revolutionary leftist organization, or a good union if you truly want to enact actual change. this is the momentum we need, participating in the theather wont make that much difference.

        • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          i vote for the leftmost candidate i can, dunno where you get the impression i dont. i just dont pretend they are giving me any momentum because the leftmost in this specific case is still a right wing genocidal maniac.

          A right-wing genocidal maniac? You do hear yourself right. You sound like a russian troll. It reads like russian troll comments. If it also just so happens to coincidentally mirror your political position perfectly, then. Ok.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      OK, low hanging fruit, but do you know where the shift or comma keys are?

      Anyway, how is student loan debt forgiveness, as an example, purely symbolic. People like you pretend it’s only symbolic stuff, point to a few instances that are, then ignore the rest.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        education should never have been for-profit in the first place. making the problem then selling the solution is not exactly a hero’s endeavour.

        wake me up when they are pushing for actual change in this regard. if the right is pushing for literal fascism, democrats should AT LEAST be pushing for something at all. they arent because they are another side of the same coin, in on the game.

        im not worried about perfect punctuation capitalization on the internet, im sorry if that bothers you.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          Lol. Sure, it shouldn’t have been the case but it is. Anyone trying to make things slightly better I guess just shouldn’t try, right? Why run a charity if the problem should never have existed? Why run a homeless shelter when no one should have been homeless? Why try to reduce the cost of medicine when no one should struggle to pay for it?

          • Saurok@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Because it diverts energy and time that could be invested into revolutionary change. Doing those things you listed aren’t bad by any means, but they’re bandaid solutions. If all we ever do is spend our time putting on bandaids, when do we have the time to replace the system that is actively harming us and build a new one?

            • daltotron@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That’s kind of assuming that there’s a single source of political will or energy, that time and energy are limited things. It’s not really on the ballot, but just kind of, as an off-hand example because I’m tired, you could think of like, what if we lowered the work week from 40 hours to 32 with the same amount of pay in the same period? Sure, not a revolutionary position to take, not an overhaul of the economy, nothing would really change. At the same time, this is a pretty big change for most people who now have three day weekends, who get better overtime pay, it’s a pretty big change for people who work two jobs, maybe one full time and one part time.

              Do you think that the energy that it took to make that change, do you think it evaporated after the change happened? No, it didn’t. Now, all those people have extra hours in their day which they can then spend on pushing for more shit, for more revolutionary shit. It means they have to participate less in this system which globally exploits them. Sure, I mean, there’s a minor conflict in interest that the better you make the system, the less incentivized people are to overthrow it, but I don’t think that’s actually a serious problem. If you can abolish or reform away the police more, or pass sweeping scale-backs to the domestic military, that makes revolutionary easier, not harder. If you pass free healthcare, that means people are more free to take risks without endangering, say, their whole family with bankruptcy. The more major problem that people conflate with this is one of “fuck the police” turning into “defund the police” turning into “reform the police” turning into “fund the police”, because politics is an insane game of translation and telephone. That’s not because reformism is bad necessarily, as the other side of the coin, as the other side of “dual power”, right, it’s just because capitalism is extremely good at either absorbing or crushing revolutionary sentiments.

              It’s not the core idea there that’s wrong, it’s the fact that people hear “I want fascism!”, which to them just means basically like, racism, when you tell them you want communism. Because it gets translated through the smudged lens of anticolonial revolutionary sentiment getting crushed by the CIA, and fascist states coming about in the wake, or because they equivocate communism itself as being the same as fascism, or what have you. It’s people programmed with the mechanisms by which revolutionary sentiment is absorbed almost automatically. Everyone takes the conflation by their opposition as evidence that efforts for reform are totally wasted, but I think that’s kind of bunk.

              Oftentimes, it’s not even the case that the actions you would take for both, either reform or revolution, are mutually exclusive. If you want to engage in revolutionary action, joining or creating a union or political action group is sometimes the best stuff you can do. A union slashes tires and throws firebombs just as much as they negotiate, and the two are actually mutually beneficial, rather than mutually exclusive. By fucking shit up they increase the costs of not negotiating with them or ceding to their demands, and the union, by pretending to negotiate, they can waste more company resources, attempt to dispel some amount of clapback, they can attempt to slowly ratchet the company into a position where they will become completely dissolved and bought out by a co-operative. I use the example of a union here, but these same tactics could be employed really at any level.

              So, uh, yeah. If I want to extend the medical metaphor, then I say like, okay, say you got shot in the arm, right. Maybe we could argue that it’s more similar to a cancer, but for this example, you’ve been shot in the arm. You do need to probably get the lead out, you do need to close the wound, you do need to examine for internal damage, maybe get a cast if it hit your bone and fractured it, yeah. But, the first course of action, if you’re not in the hospital, if you don’t have the medical knowledge, a doctor, the tools, disinfectant. The first step, if you don’t have those, is to put pressure on it, stop the bleeding, get a tourniquet in place. I.E. the first step is to basically put a band-aid on it. This is a bad metaphor, to be frank, but, yeah.

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              Yeah, revolutionary change takes, at this moment in time, infinite effort and time. It’s not happening until we get some smaller changes first. We need more representative voting, for one large example. Changes that make life better for people is worth doing, because then they can spend more of their time doing this that are meaningful rather than struggling to survive.