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Small acceptable amounts allows for a slightly larger amount next time. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by [M] to c/latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 3 months ago* (14 children)

The image is rhetorically effective and philosophically wrong.

It assumes lesser evil voting has no terminal conditions. That's a strawman. The argument isn't "accept any amount of evil indefinitely." It's "while building the capacity to break the system, slow the accumulation of harm so there are more people alive and organized to do the breaking." Those are different positions and collapsing them is how the image works as rhetoric. It's also ideologically similar to how conservatives collapse Democrats, liberals, and leftists together. I'd hope you're more intelligent than that.

The death camp math also proves too much. By that logic, if one candidate builds 50 death camps and the other builds 51, destroying one death camp is also pointless because you've implicitly accepted the existence of 49 others. The logic rules out every incremental action including the organizing you're telling us to do instead. If no action that reduces harm without eliminating it is acceptable, there is no acceptable action short of immediate revolution. Which, I would ask, what was Lenin's view on immediate revolution and the monopoly on violence?

I already said there shouldn't be any death camps. Obviously. The question is whether 50 is the same as 51 to the people in them. I'd ask the people in them. I suspect they have a view.

I'm also not voting for genocidaires. I'm voting for the candidates both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop, who are explicitly calling out both parties, and who have policy that directly counters what's producing the conditions you're describing. Collapsing that into "sheepherding for fascist Ds" requires ignoring everything specific about the races in favor of a general theory that conveniently rules out every available action.

Organize. Advocate. Build alternatives. Vote strategically where it matters. These aren't contradictions. You've decided they are because it's cleaner that way and you don't have to face an uncomfortability that way. That's exactly how MAGA operates ideologically.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    That's a false equivalency. Destroying a concentration camp doesn't put anyone into a position of power. It's incremental, yes, but it's fundamentally anti-fascist. Voting in Democrats, when literally 100 off them voted for more ICE, when Obama and Clinton turned Libya into an open-air slave market, when Obama hired Tom Homan and created the conditions for ICE BORTAC to be used in major cities, when Obama and Homan deported 3m people, double what Trump has managed do in both terms so far... That's not incremental harm reduction. That's literally voting for harm. It would be the equivalent of making sure there were social workers at the concentration camps, or demanding we send the prisoners art supplies. It's not actually incrementalization of anything. It's just a feel-good veneer on atrocity.

    Honestly, there's so few examples of presidents that didn't preside over total fucking atrocities that maybe we're coming at this from different places. I am coming at it from the USA is a fundamental violent, white supremacist, misogynistic, genocidal, enslaving, and mass murdering entity and it has been since day 1. There's no harm reduction through voting here. People like to point at Obama's blocking of Keystone XL as an example of harm reduction but ignore the fact that he expanded domestic fossil fuel production more than any other president. Was blocking the Keystone XL harm reduction? No. It was appeasement. There's a huge difference.

    Similarly, people like to say that civil rights wouldn't have gone anywhere if Ds weren't in charge, but Nixon was forced by the civil rights movement to make policy concessions, just the Ds were. This is the only thing that works. Forcing them to appease. You want harm reduction, you're going to have to create interest convergence, and voting doesn't do that.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 children)

    I have no reason to defend Obama's record nor am I trying to, because it's correct. 3 million deportations. Tom Homan hired by Democrats. ICE BORTAC infrastructure built under Democratic governance. Fossil fuel expansion while blocking one pipeline as political cover. Gotta love those "bridge fuels," friggin idiots. These are real and they're damning. You're right that this isn't harm reduction but an architecture of the harm being built with a friendlier face on it.

    The Nixon point is also correct. The Civil Rights Movement didn't win by electing the right people. It won by making inaction more politically costly than concession regardless of who held office. Interest convergence is the mechanism. Voting isn't.

    But here's where your argument collapses into the same categorical error the image made.

    You're treating "Democrat" as a fixed ideological category that determines outcomes regardless of the individual, the race, or the conditions. It's a vast generalization The Democratic Party is a ballot apparatus, not a coherent political entity. It contains Obama. It also contains the Squad. It contained the New Deal coalition and it contained the DLC that dismantled it. The Tea Party used the Republican apparatus to primary and replace establishment Republicans with candidates who were genuinely further right. That's not a hypothetical, it happened, and it reshaped the party against the establishment's will.

    The candidates I'm talking about are being spent against by both establishment Democrats and Republicans simultaneously. Their own party's apparatus is trying to stop them. Calling that "voting for Democrats" in the sense you mean requires ignoring everything specific about the race in favor of the label on the ballot line.

    You've correctly identified that the Democratic establishment produces harm. We have 0 argument there. Both establiahments are fascist. You haven't demonstrated that everyone who uses the Democratic ballot line to run against that establishment is equivalent to Obama. That's the gap in your argument. And until you close it, the interest convergence point, which is correct, doesn't rule out supporting candidates who are themselves creating the political pressure you're describing as the only thing that works. And until we've reached a point, as you mentioned it would have to be incremental under our existing system, to educate voters and provide them with more options to better represent them, what more can we do? We're attempting to do the work that we can while we can, but that still exists under the same system. If voting is advocating for genocide, then what is participation in our capitalist society? Our taxes fund the actions of the government and our labor helps corporations to gain their capital and influence, but we still work as we need our own capital to survive, protect each other, and organize.

    I'm not saying don't advocate for better, don't build alternatives to capitalism, don't prepare for the revolution. I'm saying do that in addition to making sure the fascist don't have the easiest time at the voting booth as well. Make them have to rig it, the thing we can nearly bet on is their incompetence, and that will add more fuel to the fire in people's eyes to overthrow this system. Unfortunately, our system exists such that most voters remain ignorant, lack education, and are propagandized to be selfish. I'm just saying to be strategic about it to make it easier for us in the long run. Play the longer game so we can actually fix this shit instead of putting a bandaid on it.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (10 children)

    You’re treating “Democrat” as a fixed ideological category that determines outcomes regardless of the individual, the race, or the conditions

    I'm not. I'm treating it a dynamic component of a larger structural system organized to maintain an equilibrium.

    The Democratic Party is a ballot apparatus, not a coherent political entity

    This is incorrect. The Democratic Party is a public relations arm of the ruling class, just like the Republicans are. Both parties have clear ideological overlap - liberalism. That there are two liberal parties competing on the ballot is where the incoherence comes from, if we expect them to differ ideologically. Once you stop expecting that, the coherence comes into focus. The two liberal parties are organized to capture the greatest number of votes each by having huge tents, they are organized to create a divide-and-conquer strategy (like sexism, like racism) and they do this through virtue signalling. They both spend millions of dollars researching the population and they find the fault lines that divide people and they take up positions on either side of those fault lines. This consumes all electoral energy while maintaining a singular ideological foundation - liberalism.

    The Tea Party used the Republican apparatus to primary and replace establishment Republicans with candidates who were genuinely further right. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened, and it reshaped the party against the establishment’s will.

    The Tea Party was bankrolled by the elites, a corporate project, not a grassroots one. Yes it had grassroots elements, built into the design to create legitimacy. But the same donors who ten years prior were supporting what you call "the establishment" republicans were now supporting the Tea Party. It happens all the time. Donors that used to support the Ds switch to support the Rs, and vice versa. It's all a game of PR effectiveness, not of ideology. The rise of fascism is not a psychological choice originating in individual, it is a collective psychosis originating is class conflict and economic crisis. The timing of The Tea Party's rise has as much to do with the rise of Obama as it did with the global financial crisis caused by the US finance industry as it did with the IMF naming China as the single most important contributor to world economic growth in 2007. The Tea Party was not a proactive effort it was a reaction to the signs impending collapse of the US empire.

    You haven’t demonstrated that everyone who uses the Democratic ballot line to run against that establishment is equivalent to Obama. That’s the gap in your argument.

    No. You think I'm saying don't vote for any Democrat ever. I'm saying don't vote for genocidaires. If the Ds ran someone who wasn't a genocidaire, I'd probably vote for them.

    the interest convergence point, which is correct, doesn’t rule out supporting candidates who are themselves creating the political pressure you’re describing

    Correct

    as the only thing that works

    Incorrect. American history has shown us time and time again that voting barely works at all and that it is conflict in the streets that precipitates the changes we want, regardless of which party is in power at the time.

    And until we’ve reached a point, as you mentioned it would have to be incremental under our existing system, to educate voters and provide them with more options to better represent them, what more can we do?

    We can stop carrying water for fascists you yourself have pointed out. The number of people on Lemmy who think arguing against Platner is a cardinal sin is a prime example of my point. The man was literally a mercenary soldier and then became a petite bourgeois farmer and then organized people to fight against a big corporate farm to protect his financial interests and suddenly everyone thinks he's a good candidate to not only vote for but to put all their energy and voice behind. Then it turns out he had a Tottenkopf tattoo for 20 years and he proudly showed it off in public and he was someone who studied WW2 history and considered himself an expert in it and now what happens? They double down on why voting against Platner or even CRITIQUING Platner is not merely unacceptable but equivalent to actively supporting fascism because Collins is a Republican collaborator.

    What we can do is stop playing Blue No Matter Who and stop entertaining Blue MAGA and be serious and open about the fundamental fascist nature of the Democratic party, the failings of their heroes, and undermine the case for lesser evil voting. Because lesser evil voting is not educating voters and it doesn't provide them more options.

    What we can do is demonstrate that since the founding of the country voting has done almost nothing while getting in the street and shutting down the economy or making the elite scared is the only thing that's ever really worked.

    We’re attempting to do the work that we can while we can, but that still exists under the same system

    Limiting your imagination of the work to only the things they approve is not doing even half of what you can.

    If voting is advocating for genocide, then what is participation in our capitalist society?

    Voting is a proactive action. Working for a wage is a reactive action, driven by starvation and exposure. The only way you can get access to resources is through our resource distribution system. And even THEN it's important to make some distinctions - one should not consciously join the military, one should not consciously join the police force or the prison force, one should not consciously work for a weapons manufacturer, etc. They have captured all of us, they are starving us to death, and they are allowing us to live if and only if we work for them. This is not at all equivalent to voting for someone who says they have no intention of stopping Israel from committing genocide with the billions in weapons we provide them.

    Our taxes fund the actions of the government and our labor helps corporations to gain their capital and influence, but we still work as we need our own capital to survive, protect each other, and organize.

    Which is fundamentally different from why we vote.

    Maybe our taxes fund the actions of the government. MMT is still being debated. Our labor doesn't help corporations gain their capital and influence, it helps them maintain what they already had. The bourgeoisie is somewhat permeable, but it's not so permeable that you choosing to work created new forms of capital and influence.

    I’m saying do that in addition to making sure the fascist don’t have the easiest time at the voting booth as well.

    That's literally impossible in the US. Both parties are structurally part of the liberal capitalist system. Fascism emerges from liberal capitalism, not from one party or another. If the voting booth isn't fighting liberal capitalism, it is completely orthogonal to the question of the rise of fascism. The rise of fascism is happening through the actions and inactions of both parties, and getting one more "nice liberal capitalist who doesn't want to harm me" into power has literally no effect on the rise of fascism. As I said, it's not a phenomenon of individual psychology, it's a collective phenomenon and the only solution to it is to physically defeat them. Fascism has never lost in the voting booth.

    Play the longer game so we can actually fix this shit instead of putting a bandaid on it.

    The agitprop I do here is specifically the long game. It's an attempt to break down the compatabilist position, because such a position allows people to psychologically avoid the inner work that needs to be done. People need to go through a process of grieving for their false beliefs in order to change, and they need that change to be willing to lend their power to the cause. If people hold on to the belief that voting matters, then 2 things happen: 1) they vote and engage in bystander effect assuming other people will do the other work and 2) as it becomes more and more obvious that voting is not working they protect their belief by lashing out at everyone who isn't voting like them. They have to do both of these things to maintain their self-image of a good person living in a good place with good people doing good things. They have to believe this to avoid realizing that their parents and their grandparents and their kids and their friends are participating in a system, and possibly taking direct actions, that violates their core values. We HAVE to break down these false beliefs if we're ever going to raise consciousness to the point of fighting fascism.

    We cannot keep giving people easy ways out of the difficult reality: the USA is and always has been a white supremacist genocidal rapacious destructive violent misogynistic duplicitous mass murdering elite entity, born of European empire and heir to European empire, maintainer of European empire, and fundamentally the biggest worst and most evil problem the world has ever seen. That's a lot for people to process. But if we keep saying "it's good to fight for Platner and everyone else is morally failing" then they're never going to get to the point where they'll organize with the anti-fascists. The best thing possible for the fight against fascism is for Platner to disappoint everyone, because it will force people through the grief cycle, just like Bernie failing did. Bernie failing and then subsequently demonstrating his complicity was one of the best things for the cause. By contrast, Obama and Hillary are STILL nearly untouchable hero figures and people still cannot learn the lessons of Libya, of Homan, of ICE and BORTAC, of the Pivot to Asia, because they're emotionally attached to those people being good because it means that not only were they good because they voted for them but that the society they live in is good because these heroes are living proof of the goodness of this country.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (9 children)

    Phew, that's a whole dissertation. Let's break it down.

    Alright, fair on the Tea Party. Koch money, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity. Same donor class reshuffling to manufacture grassroots legitimacy. The analogy doesn't hold and I'll own that.

    The voting/labor distinction is real too. You can't eat if you don't work. You can choose not to vote. Not the same thing. Point taken.

    On limiting imagination to only what they approve: I'd push back there. I'm door knocking, building mutual aid, working with DSA and WFP, advocating for RCV, trying to build local alternatives to capitalism. That work exists alongside the electoral calculation, not instead of it. If your argument is that doing both dilutes organizing energy, make that case specifically. But "you're only doing what they approve" doesn't track against what I'm actually doing.

    On Obama and Hillary still being untouchable: yeah, that's real and it's infuriating. People still can't reckon with Libya, with Homan, with ICE BORTAC, with the Pivot to Asia, because they're emotionally attached to those figures as proof the system works. I've watched that attachment short circuit every honest conversation about what the Democratic establishment actually does. That's the grief cycle failing in real time and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

    On Platner: I'm not treating criticism of him as a cardinal sin. The tattoo, the Reddit posts, the kill comment, the mercenary history, those are documented and worth scrutinizing. What I've said is that both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop him, that the scandals being amplified are the salacious ones rather than the substantive ones, and that Collins is a 30-year documented donor capture story whose voting record actively harms the people we're supposedly organizing to protect. That's not Blue No Matter Who. That's reading the specific conditions of a specific race. If those conditions don't justify the calculation then make that case. But collapsing it into general lesser evil sheepherding requires ignoring everything specific about it.

    The grief cycle argument is the most interesting thing you've written and I'm not dismissing it. And yeah, the USA has been a white supremacist genocidal violent entity since day one. That's not fringe, that's history. People need to reckon with that fully instead of finding emotional exit ramps through hero figures.

    On Bernie specifically: I don't think he demonstrated complicity in the sense you mean. He operates within the constraints of the system he exists in, he makes compromises that are sometimes genuinely wrong, and yeah, taking forever to call a genocide a genocide isn't defensible as playing politics. That one lands. But collapsing Bernie endorsing Biden into the same category as Obama building ICE BORTAC or Clinton turning Libya into a slave market is the same categorical error I've been calling out in your argument all along. Operating within a broken system under constraint isn't the same as actively building the infrastructure of harm. That distinction matters, because it's the same distinction I'm making about Platner, and about voting itself.

    But the grief cycle theory is still making a bet. It's betting radicalization outpaces harm accumulation. And that bet has a historical test case that did not go well.

    Weimar Germany. Massive radicalization. Demonstrated failure of liberal institutions. Widespread grief about the old system. Fascism still consolidated first because it had more organizational infrastructure ready when the window opened. The grief cycle doesn't just produce revolutionaries, it also produces fascists simultaneously from the same conditions. Whoever is more organized when the crisis peaks wins. And fascism is actively closing the space to organize right now. NSPM-7. Surveillance expansion. (I'm starting my own activist group here to push back locally against the age verification, flock cameras, etc.) Criminalization of dissent. Every month consolidation runs it gets harder to do the work you're saying is the only thing that matters. So I understand the urgency.

    However, the people who get deported, lose healthcare, disappear into detention, or die while we wait for sufficient radicalization aren't theoretical. A movement that has fewer people because the conditions it was waiting to create killed them first isn't stronger. It's smaller and facing something more consolidated.

    You haven't shown the grief cycle produces capacity faster than fascism closes the space for it. And the people paying the cost of being wrong about that timeline aren't the ones theorizing about it. (See: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder - Vladimir Lenin)

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    On limiting imagination to only what they approve: I’d push back there. I’m door knocking, building mutual aid, working with DSA and WFP, advocating for RCV, trying to build local alternatives to capitalism

    None of that is disapproved. I too have done all of those things. I have found them to be cul-de-sacs. In both DSA and WFP the racism is virulent. At least in DSA some chapters have labor organizing groups. But the electoral groups in DSA are toxic, in my experience. As for local alternatives to capitalism, I love me some co-ops, some soup kitchens, and some community gardens, but they're never going to save us.

    What I’ve said is that both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop him

    Which would be relevant if it weren't for the fact that meta-gaming is a thing in politics and they totally understand the idea of amplifying the impression of being resistant. I don't trust it for a second based on what I know of Platner... to wit...

    collapsing it into general lesser evil sheepherding requires ignoring everything specific about it.

    So here's what I see that's specific about it. Platner was a US soldier who killed brown people under some of the worst conditions in recent memory. He saw the atrocities, and he volunteered for more duty. Then he volunteered for mercenary duty. And you know what he says made him quit? That the mercenary companies were ripping off the US government. Then he became a luxury food farmer. This is the definition of being part of the petite bourgeois. The petite bourgeois are well known internationally and historically to be reactionary fascists because of the economic position. But some of them have historically been class traitors, so we'll have to dig deeper. Why did Platner get into politics? Well, because he didn't like what the politics was doing to his oyster farm. OK, so self-interested, check. Why did Platner get on the radar of Democrats? Well, because he organized his local community. Oh?! That's good right? Well, he organized them to fight a big corporate aquaculture company from ruining his farming business. So..., no. Squarely petite bourgeois. OK. So, at this point we have a murderer who volunteered to murder more and then decided to suck up into his own little world selling luxury food to the bourgeoisie and then got into politics specifically to protect his economic interests. Taken through a historical lens, that's essentially the profile of most Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe. Then you couple that with the Tottenkopf, the late game removal of said Tottenkopf, and the attempt at downplaying it literally to a question only of whether or not he knew what it was instead of actually addressing its meaning, history, and the impact it could have on others? His entire anti-war stance is limited to America First economic resentment. To me, that's the specifics of the case. And the specific things absent are also telling. Platner is not working with vets, or disgruntled men, or young boys. He's not helping people to deconstruct the patriarchy inside them, the white supremacy inside them, the violence inside them. He's not using ANY of his traumatic experiences to help others. He's on a path from storm trooper to mercenary to petite bourgeois to petite bourgeois politician with the very real potential of unexamined white supremacy, misogyny, and potentially even war crimes.

    As for being a sheep-dog? I think it's pretty clear he's attracted a TON of energy that otherwise could have been used to build anti-imperialist movements.

    On Bernie: [...] Operating within a broken system under constraint isn’t the same as actively building the infrastructure of harm

    When he votes to approve the constant expansion of the military, how is Bernie not actively building the infrastructure of harm? He had no obligation to endorse who he endorsed. You're correct that it's not at the same level as Presidents, but Sanders isn't a President, he's a Senator. And while he's done good, he's made substantial compromises and he's backed away from fights when he had the necessary support from people. He could have sacrificed his career. That's honestly not too much to ask. Many politicians have sacrificed their career to fight for what they believed in. Bernie didn't. He told his supporters that they should all compromise the way he's compromising.

    But the grief cycle theory is still making a bet. It’s betting radicalization outpaces harm accumulation.

    That's not actually true. The grief cycle theory is a hypothesis for how to fundamentally solve a particular problem, specifically the tendency of euro-centric liberalism to produce fascism.

    And that bet has a historical test case that did not go well. Weimar Germany. Massive radicalization. Demonstrated failure of liberal institutions. Widespread grief about the old system. Fascism still consolidated first because it had more organizational infrastructure ready when the window opened. The grief cycle doesn’t just produce revolutionaries, it also produces fascists simultaneously from the same conditions. Whoever is more organized when the crisis peaks wins.

    Yeah, see I think the German example shows the opposite. People did NOT go through grief. They wanted to believe. That's why the National Socialists won them over with tales of tradition and white supremacy. They interrupted the grief cycle. But more importantly, Hitler never won a majority electorally and the Nazis still took power. So I agree with you. We need to organize and organize fast. But organizing to vote for liberalism does two things: 1) it interrupts the grief cycle by reinforcing the delusion that there is some aspect of good that can be protected and nurtured in the political system of a genocidal liberal democracy and 2) it steals energy from organizing in ways that are effective against fascism. Organizing to vote has never been effective against fascism historically. If we all abandoned the ballot box and sat each other down and went through the group processing of grief that not only is America gone but that America was never good, never worth saving, and never worth preserving, we would actually have a chance against fascism. The Bolsheviks literally won the day because they said "Russia ought to lose the war". That sort of revolutionary defeatism is what won, not hoping they could steer the military to be 1% less imperialist.

    The Vietnamese won the day not because they thought that they could collaborate with the French occupiers to reduce the harm they were doing but because they knew the current form of their country needed to be destroyed. The Chinese won the day not because they thought they could make the Japanese and Europeans slightly more gentle but because they knew they had to go beyond the current form of government and current relationships and destroy them to produce a just society.

    Voting for Platner, organizing the vote for Platner, and organizing the fight against Platner critics is not organizing that will fight fascism. It is the definition of sheep-dogging.

    However, the people who get deported, lose healthcare, disappear into detention, or die while we wait for sufficient radicalization aren’t theoretical. A movement that has fewer people because the conditions it was waiting to create killed them first isn’t stronger. It’s smaller and facing something more consolidated.

    What you don't understand is that this is bi-partisan. Obama deported 100% more than Trump has. Obama appointed Homan to do it. Trump used the same guy. The prison-industrial complex enjoys total bi-partisan support. Mass racialized incarceration enjoys bi-partisan support. Mass surveillance enjoys bi-partisan support. Mass surveillance by the US military on US citizens enjoys bi-partisan support. And here's where I'm going with this:

    [Comic]

    This comic assumes that the strategy is accelerationism to force people to radicalize by preventing meaningful change through lesser evilism. It's not.

    The strategy is consciousness raising to induce people to radicalize by revealing the truth that we are trapped in a Good Cop / Bad Cop situation. No amount of working with the Good Cop will improve our chances of success. The Republicans and the Democrats are 2 PR firms for the ruling class. They play Good Cop / Bad Cop with the citizens. This is why Pelosi said we need a strong Republican party. Because the Republicans and the Democrats across the country golf together, party together, go to school together, work together, eat together, drink together, laugh and cry and celebrate together. They're colleagues. On the election trail, they play up their differences and make moral overtures about how "if you believe this, then you must vote for me", but the outcomes are primarily the same. As PR firms, they each have their own kayfabe. When what is needed is a carrot, like expanding entitlements, the Democrats take up that charge. When what is needed is a stick, like austerity or domestic police violence, the Republicans take up that charge.

    I'm not advocating for accelerationism of the decline of social conditions. That's going to happen faster than anyone can imagine. It's accelerating because the US has been outmaneuvered on the world stage and the elite are desperately trying to save their position, so desperate that the financial faction and the cybernetic faction actually had a pretty serious schism for awhile there, though it seems like they may have patched it up and have a tenuous alliance while they make money together manipulating the markets. Social conditions are going to decline no matter what we do. Voting can't change geopolitical conditions. I'm advocating for people to give up the delusion that things like the WFP or a local food co-cop are going to save us, if only we could get people to vote for the candidates that won't smash our delicate sandcastle. That's delusional thinking.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

    The Bernie military vote point is stronger than I gave it credit for too. Voting to expand military budgets isn't just operating under constraint, it's a specific action with specific consequences. And he had no obligation to endorse who he endorsed. Real compromises that caused real harm. I'll own that.

    The Good Cop/Bad Cop framing is the clearest thing you've written. Pelosi needing a strong Republican party. Bipartisan deportation records. Bipartisan surveillance. Bipartisan mass incarceration. Documented and not argued. We don't have to rehash how the establishment dems are ushering in fascism just as much as the pedophilic republicans. We're aligned there, and the establishment Dem party is obviously a captured party that's supposed to be used to depressurize revolutionary fervor.

    On Platner: the profile is worth scrutinizing. Where I'd push back is that you're presenting a chain of interpretations as a settled verdict. The specific conditions of this race still matter as variables even if the profile is concerning.

    On the consciousness raising vs accelerationism distinction: that's the most important clarification you've made. You're not saying make things worse to force radicalization. You're saying break the delusion that working within the system can save us. I understand that, but I fear that simply abstaining from voting does more of that harm. I think of MLK and Malcolm X. 2 sides of the same coin, but what was essentially put forth was "you can deal with MLK or you can deal with Malcolm. Who do you want to deal with?" I would rather deal with a democrat who says they're going to do better and hold them to the fire than a republican who gets off on shamelessness in addition to children.

    And I recognize we're worried about the same long term outcome. That pushing back fascism incrementally lets people get comfortable, energy dissipates, and the underlying conditions never get addressed. That's a real contention.

    But here's where I can't follow you.

    On Weimar: I pushed back too broadly earlier. The National Socialists never received a majority. Their support was concentrated in a specific profile, economically displaced petit bourgeois, disaffected young men, veterans with unprocessed trauma, people whose identity organized around status hierarchies that had collapsed. That's not everyone looking for something to believe in, as there were those who still pushed back against it, that's a specific psychological and material condition being activated and channeled.

    And that's exactly the problem with the grief cycle bet. Increased suffering and violence doesn't just radicalize people against the system. It radicalizes them for it too. And one side of that equation currently has vastly more power, infrastructure, and resources to perform that radicalization and twist it to their own ends than we do. The National Socialists were mostly imagery and bluster, as fascism always is, aesthetics of strength and belonging and someone to blame. That's enough. That's all it takes to capture disaffected young men full of rage who are looking for a target for a destructive tendency they don't know what to do with. Fascism doesn't need majority support. It needs an organized minority with that profile and the infrastructure to channel them before we can get to them first. And violence breaks down organizing, just as much as it breaks down hierarchy (for example, forcing those with property to recognize the tenuous relationship between "ownership" and the rules society has built and how they can easily be circumvented.)

    The grief cycle theory assumes that if we stop offering false hope, people will complete the grief and radicalize toward us. But the conditions producing the grief also produce people who look like, to pull from fiction, Tetsuo from Akira, like Simon from Infinity Train, like Azulin from Unicorn Wars. (Video breaking down these characters I'm thinking of that was decent if you're interested) Broken, traumatized, conditioned toward dominance, full of rage with no healthy outlet. I know because I once felt the same when I was younger, but thankfully I found people who were able to pull me out of that rage. And the system is very good at getting to those people before we are. It gives them imagery, belonging, an enemy, and it allows them to use their power to pull themselves up by harming those around them. We're offering them a process of grief and consciousness raising that requires sitting with profound discomfort and uncertainty. That's a harder sell and it operates on a longer timeline against an opponent that's actively recruiting from the same pool right now.

    If we had the organizational capacity to get enough people to not vote on a scale that would actually delegitimize the system, we'd have the capacity to run a nationwide general strike. We're nowhere near either. We've been struggling to sustain a single day of action.

    And my own radicalization didn't come from the failure of a single candidate. It came from watching the cruelty and imperialist nature of the US play out over years. If that's more commonly how radicalization happens, the grief cycle theory is betting on a mechanism that may not even be the primary driver.

    The people being deported under the infrastructure Obama built and Trump expanded didn't get a vote on which timeline the left chose to operate on. I'm not defending the system, I'm arguing that the people paying the cost of being wrong about the timeline deserve to be named in it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    I was willing to entertain that you might have been using a.i. as a crutch, but I'm not willing to have a full blown dialog with a.i. if you're just going to copy and paste it without thinking for yourself.

    And my own radicalization didn’t come from the failure of a single candidate. It came from watching the cruelty and imperialist nature of the US play out over years. If that’s more commonly how radicalization happens, the grief cycle theory is betting on a mechanism that may not even be the primary driver.

    Acknowledging the cruelty and imperialist nature of the US is the grief cycle. It's acceptance, the last stage. We were all raised to believe the US was something else. We had to grieve to arrive at acceptance that the US is not that. Similarly, there is a grief cycle to realize that voting can't change that.

    Broken, traumatized, conditioned toward dominance, full of rage with no healthy outlet

    That's being stuck in grief cycle, not completing it. Anger is the second stage. It's the stage we get stuck in when there are no healthy communities of grief to support us in our grieving. White men are isolated, by design, and thus become stuck in the anger stage. The path forward is support each other in moving past the anger stage.

    And the system is very good at getting to those people before we are

    No, it's not. The system is ALREADY AT THOSE PEOPLE before they even begin the process of anger. The system is fundamentally there at all times causing this. The solution is to build communities of healing and breaking down illusions that trap us, including revealing how the system works to trap us.

    Increased suffering and violence

    Is NOT what I'm advocating for. That's what accelerationism is. I am advocating for the demolition of illusions that protect people from grieving about the suffering and violence that is here.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

    And here I thought there was common ground, even sharing my own personal story a bit, trying to connect. And now I'm AI? I was a writer by trade. I'm certain my writing, along with millions of others, were used to train AI, most without our consent.

    Meanwhile your structure and cadence shifted with your longer responses. So 🤷‍♂️

    Yeah, I'm out. Anything I attempt to say now will just be claimed as "copy and paste."

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    It doesn't seem weird to you that both of your last substantive comments started with the exact same concepts in the same structure and only slightly reworded?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (3 children)

    It's called concessions dude. Argumentative structure. I steelman your argument, give it concessions where I do agree, and then follow up where I disagree and state my points. It leaves the reader on those points to let them settle.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    You don't think this is weird? Your second comment repeating your first comment even though my intervening comment didn't mention these things?

    Are you saying you were just rewriting your comment and leaving in the stuff that didn't change? I've just never seen anyone in any forum do that before in 30 years.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    No, that's my own fault for copying and pasting the previous comment to rewrite the latter half and not editing the top half.

    In all honesty, I was sitting on a roof taking a break while installing solar panels. That's my bad.

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