the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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This precise argument is what broke me forever from national level politics ie "voting the lesser evil" for president stuff. Matt Christman made this argument years ago on Chapo (I'm not saying he did it first but his way of explaining really stuck in my brain). Basically as you said something like "if the Trump and the Republicans are the fascists, and the only way to beat them is to vote for the Democrats every 2-4 years, and if we ever lose an election then it's over, then we've already lost!" Something to that effect. Which obviously he's 100% correct about.
The other thing that convinced me, and it may have been Matt or the other boys, unsure, was the observation that if the democrats truly truly believe that Republicans are an existential threat to the Democratic Party, the country and the world they sure don't act like it. Meaning that when they have power they never do actions necessary to reverse the harm of Republicans. So in that scenario, how is voting for the "lesser evil" who either is lying about their belief about Republicans or is too cowardly to act or doesn't want to act, etc. actually any different, besides the timescale of [bad thing]? And the obvious conclusion is... if the Democrats are serious, if you believe their claims, yet they do not act when given full power, then it doesn't actually matter which one is in power. The genocide that Biden decided to fully back has really driven a nail in the coffin of any semblance of "lesser evil"-ism.
-biden, pelosi, several others
you can't fucking use "they're fascists" rhetoric and then valorize reaching across the aisle. who the fuck are you reaching towards Neville?
My personal tinfoil is that they know exactly what the fuck they're doing, and trying to normalize Americans identifying as fascists in casual parlance so the elites can start getting Italian-style neofascists into the White House. Would line up with that Freudian slip from one of the State Dept.'s talking heads a few weeks back about "tailoring values to policy" regarding Amerika's multiple on-going genocides rather than the other way around.
It's not really tinfoil if you do a fairly surface level materialist analysis of the situation. The republicans and democrats are both capitalist parties, no real debating that by anyone reasonable. With very little to no pressure from labor for democrats to move to the left on basically any economic issues (some pressure on social issues, but that's minimal for the most part and pushed back on insanely hard by reactionaries who will always pretend dems also did leftist economic policies as well... which is obviously a joke in the US) they make basically what is the logical choice if you're a capitalist... allow corporations to gain more strength, keep taxes low, never expand social programs, actually cut social programs, expand the DoD budget to keep US imperialism going full steam so the MIC keeps pumping out rockets at home and securing resources for capital elsewhere.
These people are evil and ignorant on many issues... but I don't think they're as ignorant of the overall game plan as they let on. It's sometimes hard to tell because they stay in their rhetoric so much, which is obviously BS they don't even believe in. But I do have to imagine many of the most powerful actors know that in the end something will have to give and basically the US will be forced to either concede ground from all-powerful capital in the form of corporations or use government power to forcefully continue to control, with extreme violence if necessary, the population to keep working, keep consuming commodities, keep earning more profit for capitalists.
Is there a shred of doubt in anyone's mind who Pelosi or Schumer or Jeffries or Johnson or Biden or Harris, etc. will side with? You'd have to be deluded and reading some serious fanfic to believe Pelosi or Jeffries in the house or Schumer in the senate (and obviously the Rs are just evil, they don't even pretend) or Biden, Harris, whoever, will even hesitate for a moment in ordering Nat Guard or just creating another police force if they feel it's necessary to force people to work, to locate and jail or kill anyone who dissents in anyway, the list goes on. This is all sort of done now, but it's more a passive, background thing. "Better work or you'll be homeless! And die!" But if people begin to revolt, even on an individual or small level to form like little communities and sort of refuse to work anymore, that's unacceptable to capital and the government both.
Well, anyway, if people haven't already read Capital Vol I, Marx talks at great length about the transition from feudalism and the way laborers were quite literally forced in the way I'm writing about to go to work in the factories. People never "chose" capitalism. It was forced upon populations and eventually it became so interwoven with simple existence that no one can really live outside its bounds and influence. If people finally try to break away again, as one would assume is natural for people to do, those same forces will move from the current implicit existence to a much more explicit existence. If seeing the hungry homeless guy on the street bench doesn't scare you enough anymore, perhaps men with guns shoving you in the back will make you go work. None of this is tinfoil. It's the inevitable ends of the system that our entire government upholds. You'll only ever be as free as capitalists decide you can be until it's a burden for them and a threat to their profits... then they'll take it all away in an instant.
This is the unfortunate irony of right wingers I suppose. They're kinda right about government powers under liberal bourgeois western governments. Like yeah, they will come for your ass one day. Just not for the reasons they think. And they will only be spared in so far as they're useful in such a system.
I'd rather die than be forced to continue this shitty existence.
This video might be interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqgP9Ft_1CY
It very much was; I don't watch Second Thought too often, but this basically confirms the way I've been watching the money flow.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: