shazbotter
Well, I disagree. What evidence do you have to demonstrate that a) this is true and b) it's so unassailable that one could not deny it?
Because it sure reads like, "I have a worldview. I will assert that it is true and talk down to anyone who does not accept my worldview as truth." It's a way to paint your discussion partner as an intellectual lesser, while adroitly dodging critique. You'll have to do better than just asserting something is true because you said so.
But what about Bookchin, Kropotkin, or the people of Rojava? Bakunin? Thoreau?
Most of my communist friends are not authoritarian communists (aka tankies). A tankie is a very specific type of communist who believes in central autocratic power and a single party.
I think you'll find most modern communists tend to prefer a worker led democratic government. And people like myself prefer a syndicalist democracy without a central government.
I consider tankies my opponents, just like I consider all authoritarians my opponents.
I'm a syndicalist anarchist, who believes communities should be primarily bottoms up driven, democratic, and cooperative. I argue we don't need any of those branches to be strong.
Unless you are saying, "I have nothing in common with the narrow subset of leftists that are tankies" rather than implying I'm a tankie then, sure. I guess you could make that case.
I certainly hope I've been clear that this isn't some D vs R conflict. Both parties are at fault, both parties own some blame, but the situation today is not ok. It was also not ok under Biden, Trump 1, or Obama. We should be looking at ways to get the working class to look past our differences and securing more of the pie for ourselves. We should be reducing the power of the executive, no matter who is sitting in the seat. We should be focusing on the wellbeing of all.
Stop making a team sport, or at least correctly identify that you have way more in common with me (a working class anarchist) than you do with the people in power.
Trump is doing some fucked up shit, but he doesn't get to be able to do that without decades of groundwork from both sides of the aisle.
And the left did not get their way for sixty years. The left is predominantly socialist, communist, anarchist. Democrats are not a leftist party. The left hasn't held many political positions in the US. But we on the left hate the democrats as much (or more) than folks on the right. We also tend to be broadly supportive of individual freedoms (most of my leftist colleagues are anti gun control, for instance.)
Or, using logical constructs - "A therefore B" is not made invalid by "C therefore B".
It's clearly dictatorial, you'll have to demonstrate why it's not an act of a single person dictating policy.
Until we can decouple those things, banning porn has the effect of criminalizing LGBTQ lives.
You sound like someone who is excusing domestic violence by saying, "if she didn't want to get hit, she shouldn't have talked back".
Fuck Hamas, I don't support hamas, but like, Israeli actions in Gaza are clearly inexcusable.
Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink
Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.
And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive.
This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong.
If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.
But I agree, a vote for President is an invisible meaningless statement. At least we can agree there.
Needs a new name, or a certain percentage of the audience will nope out before you even get to explain what it does.
Maybe Biden made your life easier and that makes it hard to see how he sacrificed millions of people to make that happen, but it's not bad faith to express these major policy concerns.
And fascism? It didn't come from leftists holding out for perfection. Historically it comes from Liberal (the traditional meaning, not the synonym for democrats) governments not addressing the material needs of their people. Through demagoguery and violence, fascists take over the working class. When the party that used to stand for the working class is pushing austerity and beholden to big business, fascism has no meaningful opponents. Go read some history, what happened here has happened many times in the past, and has nothing to do with purity tests at the ballot box.