Comment on I'm gonna mute this one
Wolf@lemmy.today 13 hours agoWell, do you think it’s at all likely or remotely reasonable that someone who was in favor of universal healthcare and free education would prefer a fascist dictator over a center-right Dem? It may not be possible to know for sure, but there certainly are signs.
Were these people in r/politics or on Facebook by any chance? It’s not surprising that the most popular places online to discuss politics would be a prime target for bots and Russians posing as American leftists.
After Biden finally dropped out, I was advocating we try and get anyone other than Harris- someone who might actually win, on the ballot, but that is not the same as saying I would vote for Trump or not Vote.
I can 100% relate to people who didn’t want to vote for Harris, I didn’t want to vote for her, but our election system gives us very little choice in the matter.
Tja@programming.dev 12 hours ago
I don’t go on Facebook and my Facebook circles weren’t interested in us politics anyway. It was r/politics, news, memes, latestagecapitalism, basically everywhere, both on reddit and lemmy. They are still here, every new gop fuck up asking why democrats didn’t do anything to stop it. They are in this very comment section.
Back then the argument was “I cannot support biden (later Harris) because they are not perfect on issue X”. I do believe people can be so stupid. Maybe they didn’t vote for trump, but definitely actively discouraged people from voting blue.
Wolf@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
Again, I’m not sure where you are from but I’m sure its hard to understand what it’s like to be an American right now. People criticize the Democrats because most of us who aren’t Republicans (which lumps all Liberals in with Leftists) want better than the scraps we have been thrown.
Every since I was a kid and able to pay attention to politics, the Democrats have been asking us to vote for someone who is problematic, but better than the alternative. “Vote the lesser of two evils” they say, or you will be handing the country over to a monster. And every election the Dems head more and more to the right. But in the Land of the Free we have no fucking other alternatives. We either accept the shit that is forced upon us, or allow a monster to rule. So no, putting Democrats on blast for ‘not being perfect’ is not the same thing as discouraging people to vote.
How many times did you ask yourself if the comment you are reading might have come from and been upvoted by a bot or foreign agent? Because Americans do have to be vigilant for that. Also, it’s highly likely that republicans reading such a comment would upvote it as well.
You don’t think that its the Democrats job to try and stop the GOP? You don’t think that’s what the people who voted for them want them to do? If you look at those comments chances are they are complaining about the Democrats who are actually not doing anything to try and stop it. We aren’t asking that about the ones who are trying but failing.
I wish it were as simple as ‘not being perfect’. I would kill to have a party I could vote for that was 99% of the way there. Fuck I’d be happy with 70% honestly. I don’t blame you for not keeping a super close eye on American politics, but Biden is one of the people directly responsible for our disgusting, ill conceived, immoral, ineffective, and harmful ‘War on Drugs’. He’s part of the reason violence is as high as it is. He’s one of the people directly responsible for the insane incarceration rates. He helped make it legal for the cops to LITERALLY steal from Americans. “Not perfect”? Fuck off with that shit.
Harris isn’t any better, as California’s AG she fought the Supreme Court for YEARS to keep human beings locked up in prisons so overcrowded that even the SCOTUS ruled that it was ‘Cruel and Unusual Punishment’ (that’s actually illegal here believe it or not) Why? So she could use those prisoners as literal slave labor (We didn’t get rid of Slavery entirely in the U.S., it’s still ok if the Government does it). She also fought to make ‘Civil Asset Forfeiture’ even easier for the cops (the whole “it’s legal for the cops to steal from you” thing). She’s a ‘Tough on Crime’ right winger and always has been, despite what Fox news has to say about her. She and Biden were perfect- for each other.
As you rightly point out what passes for ‘the left’ in America is considered centrist in Europe, and you want us to what? Thank our lucky stars that the Democrats aren’t literal fascists? Are we supposed to just accept worse and worse out of the DNC until one day we are voting for literal fascists because the alternative is a super-ultra-mega fascist?
Tja@programming.dev 8 hours ago
I feel you, my point is that the time for fighting for a better democrat candidate is during the primaries (or now), not during an election. Plenty of “leftists” online (and real people like Muslims in Michigan who said it on TV) actively shit talked Harris weeks before the election.
And every time the primaries come, people decide quite decisively that they want the problematic candidate (Clinton, Biden) over the one that would bring change.
And the second topic, why the democrats don’t do anything to stop the gop, two things:
because they fucking can’t, the are in the minority fucking everywhere. Americans had 4 years of trump, the covid debacle, the Capitol assault, the Georgia thing, the criminal convictions, the sexual assaults and the nuclear secrets in the shitter (to name a few), then 4 years of Biden where Israel continued to kill Palestinians as they always have and eggs got expensive and they decided to go back to trump in a landslide. No amount of boring speeches or whatever redditors and lemmings accuse the dems of justify that. The plurality of American voters (almost a majority) are morons with the memory of a goldfish and now they are looking to shift the blame for what they themselves have caused. We voted for trump, but how could we know wlyhat he would do X? (besides him saying “I will do X” repeatedly on TV, X being a part of project 2025 and trump voters wearing t-shirts “X is coming” constantly at rallies). Why arent democrats saving us now, X is all their fault.
why isn’t the question: “why are the Republicans doing it?” in the first place…
Wolf@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
And yet even (now) when leftists state even the mildest of criticisms against liberals, we get accused of not being able to differentiate between liberals and fascists. “Both Sides The Same”- right?
And plenty of people do try to get better candidates elected during the primaries. You know who makes that damn near impossible? The fucking DNC. They are the ones who decides who gets the nomination, not the people. In 2016 we finally had proof of that when they colluded with the Clinton campaign against Bernie Sanders, and if you think that was anything new or has changed in any way- you aren’t paying as close of attention as you imagine you are. In the ensuing lawsuit the DNC successfully argued in court that the DNC is “well within their rights to select their own candidate”. This is despite the fact that their own charter promises ‘impartiality and even handedness’. They argued that was a mere “political promise” (aka an outright lie) and that it was “political rhetoric” that is not enforceable in federal courts.
So I’ll ask you, if it’s the DNC who decides who the nomination goes to and not the people, does that sound ‘Democratic’ to you? To me that sounds exactly like the Oligarchs are already in control and have been for a long time. How else are we supposed to fight for a better candidate other than try to educate others?
The vast majority of voters aren’t even aware that even went down, because ‘surprised Pikachu face’ it was barely covered in the ‘mainstream media’. The ONLY hope we have is waking people up to the realities of the situation, and liberals constantly blaming leftists for their failings isn’t helping that cause at all.
Ok? Let’s say for the sake of argument that all these people you claim to have seen with tons of support here and on reddit were actually leftists. Do you think they were doing that in order to get Trump elected? ‘Weeks before the election’ pretty much everyone had already made their mind up who they were voting for. The so-called ‘moderates’ who voted for Trump were not swayed by them.
The sad truth is that the U.S. elections are a clown show and it’s more of a popularity contest than about policy. Most Republicans have no idea what Trumps plan/platform actually is other than “get rid of as many brown people as we can”, and not an insignificant amount of Democratic supporters liked Harris simply for being a woman of color with a D next to her name. And that is exactly why Harris was less popular than Trump to these supposed ‘moderates’, because she was a woman and a person of color. I don’t know if you have noticed or not, but we kind of have a huge problem with racism and misogyny in the U.S. The few supposed leftists you saw online ‘shit talking’ her couldn’t make her an old white man, no matter how much they sucked on her asshole.
At any rate as I have already pointed out, it’s highly likely that Harris did win, but Elon helped his ‘good buddy’ Trump rig the elections- so it likely wouldn’t have mattered if every single non MAGAt in the country voted for the pro-slavery cop anyway.
It’s true that they are in the minority, it’s not true that they are powerless to do anything about it. There are plenty of things they could do to make life Hell for the Trump administration, but many of them are rolling over like good little puppets. Could it be because the D’s and the R’s are both basically on the same side and only exist to give us the illusion of choice? Nah, couldn’t be that.
You’ll get almost no argument from me here except for the fact that it’s not because they are morons, it’s because they are ignorant by design. I would (not) like to see the effect 100 years of anti-left propaganda, “red scares”, sabotaging education, crony capitalism, ‘corporate personhood’, rigged elections, corrupt politicians, media being 100% controlled by billionaires, and foreign interference coupled with an archaic voting system would do to your country but if you think your people would make better decisions in such a scenario- we will have to agree to disagree on that.
Both the DNC and the GOP intentionally keep us at each other throats so that we are so busy fighting each other that we wont notice that the real enemy is them and the billionaires they serve, and they have the not-so insignificant power of the largest propaganda machine in the entire world helping them with that project. Yes, one side is “better”, but only just enough better to get around 50% of the vote each election. So weird that works out that way- right?
And you are on here helping them to do just that. Do you imagine it’s a coincidence that the Liberals are working overtime to blame Leftists for the mess they helped cause? Leftists are the reason that Trump won- right? Leftists are too stupid to tell the difference between the two parties- right? It has nothing at all to do with their candidate being a literal trash human being- right?
That’s a fair question, but one with a much simpler answer. If you were a Billionaire/ Group of Billionaires who made their fortune by exploiting people and you had the ability to literally buy the Government in order to assure that will never change- you would be a fool not to. Their job was made easy by having only two political parties to buy. They then set about turning half the country against the other half- again to distract from what they are doing. Then along comes a wild card in the form of Trump. A megalomaniac who used the racism and hatred of “Liberal” ideals and worship of the ruling class that the Republicans had carefully fostered to win massive support among the racist and hateful half of the country. Remember that the establishment Republicans did not want anything to do with Trump when he first started in politics, so much so that the only person he could get to be his VP this time around was formerly a ‘never Trumper’ (you know he hates that). Once the Republicans saw there was no stopping the hate train, they had little choice but to hop aboard or be crushed by it. et voilà! Fascism comes to “The Land of the Free”.