this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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I thought we had worked this out earlier, talking about Bull Connor. I was all on board when I thought you were saying, let's give Biden a hard time over Gaza. Now I'm a lot less sure what you're saying.
Do you think working as a collaborator of the Raj, is more or less the same as voting for the clearly less-genocide-supporting of two arguably-genocide-supporting candidates?
Would this apply also to refusing to vote for Boutwell over Connor, or refusing to vote for the SDP (with all its colonial adventures in Africa and etc) over the NSDAP in prewar Germany?
I think u accidentally replied to the wrong comment, but im starting to really love seeing ur name come up. Very well informed on a period in time most of us only know so much.
No, he's saying sticking with your principles is more important than even preventing your own harm. He pushed for change by being willing to sacrifice himself. He wasn't just blindly non-violemt, he risked self injury to advance change
You keep fast-forwarding to voting day, but confidently standing your ground now is what moves the needle, not beating the drums of cooperation for Biden.
Yes, I know what Gandhi's saying. I'm asking how you'd apply it to the present day, and you're deflecting instead of answering.
Oh sorry I must have replied to a message under the wrong meme or something; the one on my screen is different I guess.
(Edit: Also there's this)
I keep asking you to clarify what you're saying, and you treat it like it's some sort of trick, and react with tactics instead of clarity. That's a hallmark of propaganda. Just say what you mean, if you feel confident enough to stand your ground in it.
I'm saying the same as Gandhi is:
Stand up for your principles and don't cooperate with genocide. Be willing to put yourself in harms way (trump) and demand justice in exchange for your vote.
It's not a trick or propaganda, it's pretty straightforward. I'm so confused because you do seem genuine but for some reason no matter how close I walk you to the conclusion you still somehow miss the point.
Stop committing yourself to supporting Biden when he's actively supporting genocide. Push him to see reason. In 7 months you can make the hard choice you keep harping about, but until then what's the fucking point of running cover for him when you could be pushing him to see reason
It's not that goddamn complicated.
I noticed this comment outside of the conversation we were already having, and I had to say that I actually completely agree. We should be pushing him, especially since there's evidence it's working. And you don't have to refuse to vote for him -- you still have 7 months until you have to make the hard decision.
I can get behind this.
Thank you for saying that, truly.
People are treating protests of Biden as if it's the same as wanting Trump to win. People are so committed to the electoral team sports that they're completely allergic to exercising their power against their own party.
There's a reason why civil rights movements existed almost entirely outside of electoral politics; liberty and justice were never on the ballet to vote for to begin with.
If MLK resigned himself to what Democrats were willing to provide without protest, we'd still have segregation. If Douglass avoided speaking truth to power and rallying against Lincoln, we might not have abolished slavery and reconstruction might have been even worse (though admittedly reconstruction was shit anyway, but at least that wasn't Lincoln's fault).
Yeah, protest is a very powerful and necessary tool. Protesting to push Biden doesn't mean you have to abstain from the election. You can choose to vote for Biden but still make it clear you're not pleased with him. Protest votes in the primary are perfectly acceptable for this reason.
If anything, I think it's better that we protest now rather than later. It's a win win situation to resolve this conflict before the election.
I also believe that voters tend to have more power than non voters. We've seen that politicians are more willing to listen to those that already vote for them.
Which is why this particular protest has so much potential to be effective, because he won his last election with the help of leftist participation
It effectively is, in a lot of areas.
MLK would say to vote your conscience in the primaries. Not the general.
First: lol no. It isnt the same as wanting trump to win, but ill grant that it does effectively hurt his chances ?in the case he remains unmoving.*
Second: protest of Biden is only damaging to his campaign if you think Biden only has to not be Trump, and isn't capable of hurting his own chances by doing something exceedingly dumb, like publicly funding a genocide.
Those of us protesting him now are doing him a favor by giving him a chance to address the issues that would otherwise tank him.
Now there's some whacky mental acrobatics.
Go ahead and try and convince me that the 64% of voters who disapprove of Israel's action in Gaza aren't less likely to vote for Biden if he continues funding them.
No, I don't think I will.
👍
There it is
You understand that it's not just me in harm's way with Trump, right?
That he's far more pro genocide (including specifically in Palestine) than Biden is?
Believe it or not, there is often more to a conversation than you just walking the person you're talking to over to the point that you want to make and repeating it in different ways until they absorb your way of seeing it.
I could be right or wrong; I'm just saying how I see things. But if your whole model for this is that your viewpoint is the correct one, and you need to persuade the person you're talking to to see things exactly as you do and anything else is just a frustrating expenditure of bytes, then I think you're gonna get limited benefit from any amount of time you spend online.
Im not telling to vote for Trump. I'm not even telling you to not vote for Biden. I'm telling you to fucking ask for something in exchange for the vote.
There's a separate argument about what the value democracy is if it can't be expected not to support genocide, but I'm not even pressing that issue.
Saying you aren't going to vote if Biden doesn't see reason doesn't put Trump in the white house, it puts pressure on Biden. What you actually do on election day is different, but campaigning for Biden despite his genocidal complicity is so far from activism that it's borderline complicit in the genocide in itself.
Yeah, I feel you on that. Like I keep telling you, direct action or directly giving Biden a hard time on Gaza sounds great.
And let me ask again: Would this logic also apply to refusing to support the SDP over the NSDAP in the 1932 elections? As a lot of the left did exactly that during the infighting that preceded Hitler's ascendance.
That isn't really an adequate comparison, is it? Germany was a parliamentary democracy at the time, are you asking if id have voted for the SDP or KDP? Are you suggesting having two parties split the NSDAP opposition vote is what lead to their accent to power? Or are you asking I'd be protesting Hindenburg to take more direct action against the NSDAP or more firmly address the crisis that lead to their growth?
If anything I think the most apt comparison is between Biden and Hindenburg: they're both staunchly centrist and both beholden to conservative interests. Personally, I think both Biden and Hindenburg legitimized reactionary concerns by playing into them, and I think there's evidence that helped the NSDAP accent.
But the thing that makes our situation so much different is that Biden isn't splitting the vote with another party, he's in command of the only opposition to Trump. Pushing his politics left to address the underlying concerns of the populists is probably the only thing within our power. He needs to solidify his coalition, not sit on the fence like Hindenburg did.
Precisely yes (or not voted at all if you felt no party really was representative of you properly)
Yes, in addition to splitting the political energy in general
I'm suggesting that the communists spending energy opposing the SDP and Hindenburg for fairly valid reasons, when there were much more pressing threats to the safety and security of the entire world including themselves to spend that energy on, made their concerns about the establishment left (however valid) laughable in restrospect.
It sounds to me like you're saying that splitting the vote between Biden and nobody (by not voting) is a good thing to do, to push him to the left. I fail to see how that is a better idea than splitting the vote between the SDP and KDP, and I think the results can potentially be pretty similar.
It sounds like you really, really don't want to answer this question plainly. Would your logic also apply to refusing to support the SDP (or for that matter Hindenburg) against Hitler?
This is where our disagreement is. I don't think the rise of the NSDAP was a result of the SDP splitting the vote with the KDP, I think it was the failure of the SDP and Hindenburg to address the crisis that pushed the country into reactionary politics to begin with. You could just as easily blame the SDP for not joining the KDP instead, since the KDP was reacting to the same failures of government the voters of the NSDAP were.
I especially don't attribute blame to citizen voters supporting the KDP, because not only does that not matter as much in a parliamentary system, they're also reacting to the same failures of government that the NSDAP were.
So no, I don't find that argument convincing, and I likely would not have supported the SDP given the availability of other options.
Id also point out that it was Hindenburg who appointed Hitler as chancellor. That should be evidence enough that KDP voters were right to challenge his position in the presidential election in the lead up to the parliamentary election.
Yes, absolutely. Responsibility can be shared; almost any big disaster is a result of multiple overlapping causes where any number of people could have taken action to make it less likely or prevent it.
In fact, I think the Democrats are a lot more responsible for creating the conditions that led to the rise of Trump than the SDP. The SDP at least had genuine hardship imposed on their country from outside, whereas the establishment Democrats ever since the 1990s have simply been selling out the working class, in an economy that's raking in money hand over fist, because they could and they assumed that nothing bad would ever come of it (to anyone that they thought mattered.)
Okay, that's fair. But what if there weren't other options? If we used a parliamentary system in the US, and we were talking about voting for the Democrats or else a genuine leftist party, I would be 100% in agreement with you about voting for the left instead of the Democrats.
What if Germany used the FPTP system, and you were voting for Hindenburg or Hitler directly to lead the country? Do you think that someone in that hypothetical election who refused to vote for Hindenburg in 1932, because he hadn't done enough to earn the vote, would still feel justified in that decision in 1945?
(Biden isn't Hindenburg; Hindenburg doesn't have a direct analogue but he would be more someone like John McCain IMO, but that's not directly relevant to the question I don't think.)
I wouldn't be committing to voting for Hindenburg 7 months before casting a ballot, especially if doing so not only doesn't address the underlying problem that created the NSPD's popularity but would also likely continue to contribute to those conditions.
You're also assuming that Hindenburg would have won a second election against Hitler, and I don't think that's a given. Nor do I think Biden winning against Trump is a given either, when he's still contributing to the conditions that brought popularity to Trump. He's done quite a lot to undermine his own campaign message, and those of us telling him he's gon a loose if he doesn't reverse course are actually helping him, assuming he takes the opportunity he's being given.
Protesting biden now wouldn't be effective if we all -publicly- got in line and said "we'll sure, he's complicit in genocide but we're all still voting for him anyway". That would be quite a dumb way to protest and put pressure on him to get anything done, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, I feel you on this. I think we're just looking at it from two different perspectives.
I don't think Biden's on Lemmy. I'm not looking at this like he's going to read my messages and think "Okay I got mozz locked in, I don't have to change my Gaza policy now." I'm just saying my thought process out loud; I'm going to vote for Hindenburg instead of Hitler pretty much whatever else happens. I'm not trying to do some kind of bluff where I claim that I'm undecided as a way of putting pressure on, not explicitly telling the Biden campaign that I'm committed to him, so that he'll be forced into different behavior patterns on Gaza.
But the other way does make sense to me. Like the "uncommitted" voters in the primary, or protests at his events because he's abetting mass murder, that makes sense to me. If I were directly in contact with Biden, would I try to do this artifice of pretending I was undecided because of Gaza, that even though Trump is directly supportive of monsters who are 10 times worse and more powerful than Netanyahu, abetting Netanyahu is so bad that I might not vote for Biden? So as to put more pressure on him to change his policy? IDK, maybe. I am not a political specialist but it seems like maybe that's a sensible way to do it.
Yeah, I get that. I do think that direct action on Gaza is probably more effective than just typing out on Lemmy that you're uncommitted in your voting, and I think doing the latter (if it's a bluff, which it would be in my case) runs a little bit of a risk of some other voter reading it and taking it seriously and being swayed to not vote for Biden and abetting mass murder much much worse than that in Gaza. But basically, the core of what you're saying, it does make sense to me, yes.
This is what makes a protest effective. This is why I've been quoting mlk and Douglass and Malcolm x. If there's no threat of harm then no liberty will ever be granted.
Seems to me like you simply don't believe this particular cause is worth threatening this particular harm. Which is fine I guess, but it just makes your claims of caring about it sound a lot like white liberals in 1963 telling mlk 'sure, we agree, but now's not the time, not like this'.
Were making it everyone's problem by protesting, that's the point.
Very wrong. I just don't believe that risking Trump getting elected will help this particular cause. I think there's an significant chance -- I am 100% serious about this -- that the United States would come out at the end of it with an apartheid regime for Arabs similar to Israel's. I think there's an excellent chance that Israel would be emboldened by Trump to actually go in and literally kill all the Palestinians, completing the genocide. I think Trump's election would be catastrophic for the Palestinians, far worse than today, in addition to a long list of other people it would be catastrophic for.
That's why I brought up so many times the example of Boutwell vs Connor. Applying pressure to Boutwell sounds great. Refusing to support him in his election against Connor, because he's a segregationist, doesn't make any fucking sense. It seems like you keep insisting that I object to the first, when I don't and keep telling you that I don't. What I object to is the second. Surely that difference makes some sense?
That's almost exactly what I said. And I agree, it won't be effective [e.g. 'help' this particular cause] if libs keep running cover for his campaign regardless of what he does.
Nothing I've said about protesting until the election has changed. Being loud so other people see the lack of support raises the stakes for Biden so he is compelled to reason.
Like I said, you don't think the risk is worth the cause, that's fine.
Yeah, I get that. Makes sense to me.
Not exactly. A different way to say it would be, the cause is so important and the risk to the Palestinian people (among many others) so potentially catastrophic if Trump wins, that I'm hesitant to support this strategy. But yeah I get where you're coming from.