Something something leftist infighting
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I am all for violent revolution. There comes a point where violence is the only answer left to us, and we are at that point.
if you voted for kamala we probably wouldn’t be one protest away from martial law and natural born citizens in gulags
One thing someone told me that I think is important: Trump (or whoever is actually running things) probably wants violent protests. That way, he can label everyone refusing a facist takeover as a terrorist and have them sent to El Salvador. He’s toyed with the idea, so it’s not absurd.
Both Stephen Miller and Jeffrey Clark have been saying that. They’re two of trumps top aides. Is something the have publicly stated they want the admin to do. First they said it for the southern border but they’ve also said protests like BLM should be enough to trigger the insurrection act.
Simultaneously, while I don’t believe US citizens stand a single chance in hell against the full US military and law enforcement, I also don’t really believe his regime and supporters are capable of quelling a real uprising so I’m not really an advocate for or against it unless elections actually aren’t held.
I also see this from the perspective that other nation’s electoral systems are in much worse shape than the US currently.
Have you guys tried begging president Xi to save you? After all the color revolutions america has funded it would be hella funny for america to be saved by a color revolution.
This comment simultaneously supports Chinese arming US Insurrectionists and also implies that US arming of insurrectionists was positive, which is a rare mix of violent imperial rhetoric aligned with both sides.
I am decidedly against foreign intervention; But American mainstream media and government have a historic eagerness to promote foreign intervention and arming insurrections. so I’d love to see them put their money where their mouth is.
I want peaceful and lawful change. I’m open to other means.
i will work for peaceful change but i won’t fight against my own allies
Don’t mistake your own countrymen for categorical allies
oh of course not
I’ve said it before elsewhere but it needs to be heard…
It’s just wild to me continually seeing posts not understanding how this all works, and how it would play out. It’s like the people who thought China paid the tariffs…
The house is almost tied. That’s who passes bills, handles impeachments, some of the most powerful committees are, and who impeaches Presidents…
218 Republicans, 213 Democrats.
Let’s see, take New York for example.
26 representatives total, 19 Democrat and 7 Republican.
5 of those were within 2 points last time their seat was up.
People who think that New York is blue, their vote doesn’t matter, skips the votes for the House and Senate and end up losing a Blue house seat but later complain that nothing changes are literally the fucking problem.
Every. Fucking. State. Is. Like. This.
Apathetic morons who don’t realize that the president is only held accountable by the other branch of government then wave their hands around when they did jack shit to help put people in place to, are the fucking problem.
District 3 of California was lost by 24,000 votes. District 22 was lost by 3,000.
Those two seats in the house, along with the close ones in New York, Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, hell every state… Are what makes the House of Representatives or breaks it.
So, if you think that your vote for president doesn’t matter, so you skip voting and let these other seats slip, yes, you’re a fucking moron who can’t grasp basic concepts of government that are taught in 4th grade.
And don’t get me started on the State House/Senates, how they define voting laws and voting zones and engage in gerrymandering.
Every fucking vote counts.
And until the country realizes it, and starts acting on it, we’ll keep getting the shit we deserve.
Apathetic morons who don’t realize that the president is only held accountable by the other branch of government
Maybe this was a typo, but there are actually 3 branches of government, and we’re already in a constitutional crisis between the first and third
For retaking a chamber of congress to be significant in the fight against fascism it has to actually be functioning. If they were to impeach and convict (60 votes in the Senate and they currently only have 47), Trump could just say ‘no’ like he did to the SC. Even if they convicted and Trump didn’t just say ‘I ain’t fucking leavin’, a third of the country is still rabidly supportive of him. That’ll impact who even can win seats in congress, and they would probably burn the national mall down this time
Libs need to get past their inability to see how the system has completely fallen apart.
History never ended, we should stop pretending like it did.
Surely the way to fix this broken system is to participate in it harder
When one of the flaws is that it’s designed to only function as advertised if there’s full participation, participating harder can make things less bad, and participating less can make things worse.
Either way, it’s much easier to convince people to go out and vote than it is to convince them to take up arms in a revolution, kill their opponents, and risk being killed or imprisoned as a consequence. If your revolutionary faction can’t gather enough people to win an election, then it doesn’t have enough support to win a civil war without getting the police and military on its side, and that’s not going to happen in the US.
it’s designed to only function as advertised if there’s full participation
Uh, what? Are you forgetting that suffrage was originally limited to land-owning men?
It was never designed for full participation - universal suffrage has been repeatedly rejected in favor of ‘compromised’ exclusions since our founding.
Our system has been quite literally designed to prevent full participation, idk where this idea comes from that full participation is somehow the true spirit of american democracy.
Either way, it’s much easier to convince people to go out and vote than it is to convince them to take up arms in a revolution, kill their opponents, and risk being killed or imprisoned as a consequence
It’s not an exaggeration to say that basically every bit of progress for labor and democratic rights in the US has been won by violent struggle, and it’s never been by a ‘majority’ of voters.
I think you’ve misunderstood a lot of my comment.
The US’ democracy is advertised as giving the population what they want, but it’s designed so that it doesn’t give the population what they want unless everyone votes and does so in their best interests, and it’s also designed so that lots of people don’t vote and if they do, they vote against their interests. That way, there’s the illusion of giving people what they want so they don’t revolt, but powerful people have their interests prioritised.
Because the system has to have an illusion of working in normal people’s interests, it’s got a failure mode where it starts approximating working in people’s interests when more people vote and more people engage enough to know which options on the ballot are closest to being in their interests.
I’m not saying that magically getting everyone to know who they should vote for and then show up to the polls is feasible, just that refusing to participate because the system’s ‘broken’ is what the system wants and how it makes sure it keeps doing the things it does.
I’m not saying that magically getting everyone to know who they should vote for and then show up to the polls is feasible, just that refusing to participate because the system’s ‘broken’ is what the system wants and how it makes sure it keeps doing the things it does
Making it difficult to vote is a reason it’s designed to fail, but it’s very possibly the least impactful.
Even if everyone participates, there are still dozens of ways in which capital restricts the options/neuters governance against the interests of the working class. Historically, it has almost never been turnout that drives progress, but dedicated, persistent, and quite often violent action by a relatively small number of actors. Nearly all of our basic labor rights came not from the working-class voter turnout but by armed protest and seizure of capital and infrastructure. Even when representation overwhelmingly ‘supports’ reform, the pressures of capital dis-incentivize regulation if they can avoid it (else they catch the blowback from unhappy capitalists, who quite literally control the nation’s productive capacity and resources) - it isn’t until the working class shows their willingness to disrupt the flow of profit that true progress is made.
I understood your whole comment, but my point isn’t event just that our system is designed to prevent participation, it’s also designed to prevent populist movements from making progress to begin with. “The system doesn’t want you to participate” is only a very small part of the story - it also does not need to listen to the popular will unless it’s backed by an implicit threat of violence.
I’m not even telling you not to vote, just that voting alone will never be enough, not even with total participation - especially when we have already reached the point in capitalist decay where fascism has taken control of governance. You cannot vote your way out of fascism, and the sooner people realize this the sooner people will stop being content with merely voting.
None of that takes anything away from my original point that participating more can make things less bad. I never even said that violent action was distinct from participation, just that it’s not the easiest form of participation to convince people to do, and that attempting a revolution (which is a huge step up from bombing a few factories and assassinating a few CEOs) won’t go well if it’s not got broad popular support or police and military backing. I’ve had enough arguments with tankies who insisted that it was easy to overthrow a capitalist state with twelve guys who believed hard enough in communism to magically generate an army, and there was no point in any other form of participation, that the thread looked to me like it might be about to summon the never vote, just wait for a revolutionary communist army to form people.
and that attempting a revolution (which is a huge step up from bombing a few factories and assassinating a few CEOs) won’t go well if it’s not got broad popular support or police and military backing.
I don’t know a single anarchist that has ever advocated for an organized revolution, i’m not sure why you’re harping on that. Violent disruption of capitalist systems is the violence I’m talking about, and it requires far fewer people to pose that very real threat to liberal democracy than it does for “complete participation” in the democratic process (wtf does this even mean if not voting? if democracy fails if even a single person doesn’t ‘participate’ then democracy itself is a failed concept). When the democratic system fails to produce representation for working-class interests, it is the only form of participation left.
The liberals here who keep saying shit like “well if everyone voted we wouldn’t be in this situation” have completely missed the point. If the opposition party had offered any real representation of working class interests to begin with then you wouldn’t have had to be here in the replies defending them at all.
It’s fine, though. As always, civil activists will drag the democratic party kicking and screaming toward progress, regardless of the constant whinging from liberals.
Thank you for taking the time to type this out. I wish the people who needed to read and turn it over in their head were willing and able.
It’s time for reapportionment.
Can we at least agree that the US’s flawed first-past-the-post voting system is THE root cause of people having to vote for the lesser of two evils in the first place?
If you have an enemy that’s trying to eradicate you, your choices at either to allow them to eradicate you, or to eradicate them first. Any middle ground will just bring you back to the same position you started in.
you can also render them powerless without eradicating them
All that does is give them time to regain the power.
How
Energy bending
Pithy memes, duh.
break their limbs
All the other bullshit aside, this isn’t a hot take. This is the majority opinion on lemmy.
Outside the .world subs, sure. But .world subs during election time banned hundreds, if not thousands of accounts for daring to question why a far right cop is taking over for a far right senile racist in the party that is mostly supposed to represent anti cop and anti racist vaguely left wing sentiment.
If you weren’t on the blue no matter who train, you were a Russian CCP maga troll farm bot clearly paid to ruin the US.
The Dems are in no way “supposed to” support anti-cop sentiment. Their base is increasingly anti-cop, but the party platform and leadership are 100% pro-cop and pretty much always have been.
Dems are supposed to represent their voters, the anitcop majority are voting dem, if they’re voting
I think its a bit of a circle
Most people dont vote. A larger portion of those non-voters are people who hate republicans. Yes. They would be democrats if the dems stopped reaching to the right.
But also they dont vote. So the dems reach to the right. If youre not gonna vote for them, theyre gonna need to go somewhere else
So then people dont vote because the dems reach to the right.
So then they reach to the right
So then people dont vote
And all of this could be stopped and the repubs could stop winning and then we wouldn’t need to keep moving right
But instead both are doing the same thing over and over and over
I am not an extreme leftist, as I hate gun control laws.
I don’t know shit about the Middle East and don’t want to know.
I think peaceful protests are a thing of the past. It’s time for hateful protests. MAGA are the fucking enemy, and we are an occupied nation … act like it. Sabotage MAGA effirts, disrupt them, infiltrate their echo chamber, but most importantly hurt them financially and make them cry like Elon Musk.
You can’t topple Trump, he got elected … it’s done. These udiots need to stop issuing court orders on him, it wont do anything. Go after his street level goons and work up. Follow ICE around … they get nervous when you do that. Why? They are just glorified TSA agents.
We will not vote our way out of this. Someone is eventually going to get brave and take 47 down… legally (of course).
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary
-Karl Marx
I am not an extreme leftist, as I hate gun control laws.
If you go far left enough, you get your guns back.
Remember that foreign agitators, above any political slant, would prefer that the US be unstable and collapsing upon itself. They will play any and conflicting sides to this end. I have to remember that every time a 1-week old account claiming to be a Brit or Canadian tries shaming Americans into buying a rifle and shooting federal agents right fucking now.
Buy a gun safe.
Put books in it.
On the other hand, Portugal.
I’m not familiar with the history of Porgual. Can you explain why that’s relevant to this? or possibly link to something that would help explain?
Sure! I mean, I don’t know much about it either but I found that bit of history endearing and inspiring:
Honestly, I undefstand why he might have wanted to kill that CEO, but he is still a murderer, so the last thing that anyone should do is to support him and his murder. This betrays a lack of morality.
I fully agree that whoever murdered that CEO should be charged and face trial by jury.
That being said, if I was on the jury, based on my current knowledge and understanding, I would not be able to recommend a guilty verdict.
If we are going to live within the framework we’ve built, the system must have integrity and so he should face trial. But the system and framework was never meant to be apart from humanity, so the difficult nuances of human reality should be present in the verdict.
The way I see it, is that the jury should determine guilt, regardless of the punishment, which is determined by the law. So I would say he is guilty.
Murder is a grave crime, and while it is possible to rationalise it using radical ideologies and it seems to me that Luigi was personally affected by the healthcare system, but this changes nothing.
When someone commits murder, kills another human being, he loses a part of their humanity in a way. Turns away from his morality, from his soul. This is what “crime and punishment” is about, I certainly reccomend the novel. No rationalisations will compensate for the horror that is a murder of a fellow human being.
And the people that treat him like a hero are doing him a disservice. How is he supposed to understand the gravity of his moral offence and regret it if he is lauded for it? I feel nothing but pity for the man.
How is he supposed to understand the gravity of his moral offence and regret it if he is lauded for it?
I want to ask a difficult question of you. Why does he need to do this? I’m not being cute, I’m being sincere, because I think this comes down to a sense of sanctimony that just doesn’t exist in reality. There is no cosmic scorecard, no universal force or karma, nothing beyond what we have in the world in front of us. So I ask in, with that in mind, what is the actual moral imperative you feel that he must experience this weight and regret? What is different in the world if he does not?
Beyond that, I’d like to state that I’m well aware of the jury’s role in determining guilt, not punishment, and stand by my statement that I would be unable to recommend a guilty verdict. It’s not out of a desire for him to serve lesser punishment, it’s out of an understanding that humanity and murder are nuanced and that not all killing is murder, and sometimes you do in fact need a dragonslayer to keep the village safe.
A person that commits murder and does not feel guilty is a person that turns away from his soul. I believe that any person that strays away from our values and morals is losing something very important.
So this is not a case of what would change in the world, as you put it, but what would change for the murderer. What kind of person will he be? I believe that every murderer suffers, in a sense, and again, I recommend you read “Crime and punishment”, it’s a masterpiece.
That being said, I would like to ask you a somewhat off-topic question about something you said:
There is no cosmic scorecard, no universal force or karma, nothing beyond what we have in the world in front of us. So I ask in, with that in mind, what is the actual moral imperative you feel that he must experience this weight and regret?
It seems to me that you are saying that the moral imperative I might feel is not ontologically grounded, since there is not higher power. But wouldn’t any morality then be not grounded in anything, if you accept both these criteria for what is legitimately moral and the atheistic worldview?
It seems to me that you are saying that the moral imperative I might feel is not ontologically grounded, since there is not higher power. But wouldn’t any morality then be not grounded in anything, if you accept both these criteria for what is legitimately moral and the atheistic worldview?
I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not smart enough to keep up with what you’re trying to say here. But if this is the “without god how can we have morality?” argument, I will just extend the standard reply that if you need a cosmic watchdog to prevent you from raping and murdering, perhaps your morality is not as pure as you believe. I believe the social contract and basic understanding that if we work together for the greater good, we all benefit, is basically enough to define morality when coupled with generations of evolutionarily-innate emotional responses that promote said well-being. I also understand that this morality, like all things, is not sacred, and thus capable of being influenced, being swayed, being wrong, and importantly evolving, adapting, and even rationalizing or coping with the difficult quandaries of human society that extend far beyond black and white. Again I don’t truly understand your question, but I tried to answer in earnest and hope that satisfies your curiosity.
edit: also I see you have been downvoted and feel compelled to tell you that I have not downvoted anything you’ve said. I know it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s relevant to the tone here.
While I would rather we talked about the other part of what I previously said, the one that relates to the murder, this is quite interesting too.
I was not saying that god is necessary for morality. I understood what you said previously this way: since there is no God or higher power, religious morality, and by extiention my supposedly religiously motivated statement(actually, I am not particularly religious) is unsubstantiated, to which I replied with an argument, that if this is the case, and if you apply the same criteria to every worldview, then no moral views are substantiated.
And I would like to address your counterargument. I did find it convincing when I was a “militant atheist” but now I recognise its inadequacy. It is arguing with a position that does not exist, it is based on a misunderstanding of an argument that theists often make. I will now expand on that:
When theists say that without God there is no morality, they mean that there is no objective morality. The argument is based on showing that the accounts of morality possible under atheism are contrary to our moral intuitions. Theists generally recognise that people can be moral if they are not religious, all of us have a sense of morality, since we are the “children of God”.
If there is no morality independent from subjective beliefs about morality, then, in practice, when someone says “this is immoral”, they are simply expressing their preferences. So if I say murder is wrong, this simply means I do not want it to occur, and I am urging everyone to not murder, so there is, in practice, no difference between subjective preference and morality, since morality is subjective.
So if we lived in a world where noone believed rape is wrong(animals do rape each other quite often), there is no sense at all in which the statement “rape is immoral” would be correct.
Since most people do not understand morality to be subjective in this way, this argument can be convincing.
Edit: another similar argument, is that atheists, while they can be moral, have no justification for their morality. It is also often misunderstood, and your counterargument is wrongfully applied, but I will not get into that.
No offense, but I don’t understand how this differs from my summary beyond just that you apparently enjoy pontificating. Like I don’t understand what part of what you said was supposed to be revelatory to me, I specifically told you that morality is not sacred; this isn’t news and I’m not ignoring or unaware of some secondary truth here. Yes, morality is influenced by society and thus yes it is subject to societal whims… Okay? But it’s also informed by generations of evolutionary response and the motivation is almost entirely overwhelmingly pragmatic. Your “bUt WhAt iF rApE sUdDeNlY oKaY” scenario is meaningless because there is no social benefit to that scenario. Morals are still founded a sort of pragmatic empathy; sure sometimes, maybe even often, we get this wrong, but we don’t need a guiding hand to teach us the basics of working together for the greater good. The question isn’t “will this send me to hell,” it’s “is this to the benefit of humanity?”
Thank you for clarifying that you’re a religious nutter. I can now block your dumb ass in good conscience.
How is he supposed to understand the gravity of his moral offence and regret it if he is lauded for it?
Simple: killing mass murderers like Brian Thompson isn’t a moral offence
Fix your broken moral compass, you appear to prefer mass murderers mass murdering over someone stopping them
Do you support capital punishment?
It’s not murder if you’re defending someone, this was a defense of countless against a mass murderer who planned to continue killing without remorse
I am glad communists have started to feel so strongly about mass murder, but this man hardly was the sole reason his healthcare company chose this policy, and as far as I understand other companies did similar things. You are blaming an individual for institutional issues. While he is, obviously, evil, he is not, clearly, the cause of these policies. If he was not willing to implement them he would be removed.
But this is hardly relevant, this is, from a legal standpoint, murder, and thank God it is, since no sensible person would want to live in a society where someone can just murder anyone because of ideological convictions and political goals.
But from a moral standpoint this is, of course, still murder. We denounce the use of the capital punishment on the most horrible criminals, but when a CEO is murdered on the street, without trial, suddenly death is perfectly fine as a punishment. This is not self defense. This is not “defense” of anything. This is murder. And Luigi is a criminal, and I hope he realises the gravity of what he has done.
but this man hardly was the sole reason his healthcare company chose this policy
He was proud of it and could’ve done anything to prevent it. This company leads in false denials over all others.
You are blaming an individual for institutional issues
An individual at the top of an institution that does it with literally no remorse.
If he was not willing to implement them he would be removed.
Then get removed and work in another industry.
But this is hardly relevant, this is, from a legal standpoint, murder, and thank God it is, since no sensible person would want to live in a society where someone can just murder anyone because of ideological convictions and political goals.
No, in a sensible society what he’s doing would legally be murder, so, we wouldn’t have to do anything like this in the first place.
But from a moral standpoint this is, of course, still murder.
Justified murder, an act of defense of others.
We denounce the use of the capital punishment on the most horrible criminals, but when a CEO is murdered on the street, without trial, suddenly death is perfectly fine as a punishment.
He’s one of the worst possible criminals and deserved the death penalty. This country just doesn’t believe that mass murder is wrong as long as you’re making money off of it.
This is not “defense” of anything.
It’s a rejection of the notion that these CEO’s aren’t mass-murderers. They are, vigilante justice had to happen because there was no justice happening elsewise. If the courts were planning on doing anything, planning on doing a trial against this obvious murderer, then you’d have a point.
I am so sorry. I understand now I was very immoral when I said that lynchings are bad. I now see that due process is pointless, and we should just kill people we believe to be evil willy nilly.
Was there even a shred of a doubt that he wasn’t guilty of mass murder? Does anyone doubt that this person was in charge of this mass murder?
Is there even a 1% chance that he isn’t guilty of mass murder?
Beyond all reasonable doubt happened, this is no less legitimate than state-sanctioned violence. Again, i’d prefer the courts handle this… but this type of mass murder is perfectly legal.
The only question is, does this count as murder? and the answer is obvious, he’s killing people for more money, it should.
Lynching is bad, but there are exceptions for every rule, and this is an obvious exception. In this case, he killed to help save lives, so, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Lynching is bad, but there are exceptions
If you say lynchings are bad, that means that justice should be delivered by the state. But you seem to think, that it does not matter who does it. It seems like a contradiction.
When the state fails to deliver justice it becomes the duty of the people to carry it out. This was true when Harriet Tubman was smuggling slaves into free states and it remains true today. Do not confuse what is lawful with what is right.
