I don’t waste time telling people how to vote. Electoralism is a total waste of time. I vote how I vote, keep it to myself, and spend the rest of my time not thinking about electoralism. None of these politicians deserve my free labor when 100+ Democrats just voted to expand ICE and DHS power to obtain consumer data from retail companies to use in their operation. I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it’s doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.
Go ahead. Vote in the midterms. The Ds in the house just proved to you that they’re onboard with the whole fascist panopticon policing program. They’ve always been collaborators with the Rs. But vote. It’s literally the least you can do. Don’t let anyone stop you. And then, forget about elections immediately after and do something about the fact that your neighbors, their kids, and their teachers are all replicating the white supremacy myths of this country into every single generation and glossing over it all with a simple “vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys” narrative.
I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it’s doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.
That’s great!
But vote. It’s literally the least you can do.
And yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?
with a simple “vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys” narrative.
I’m sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles. I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others. And that even if my options are between “Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche”, informed voting is critical to a democracy.
And that’s my point, you can’t both think we don’t live in a democracy AND think that voting is important. You can be cynical about the electoral process, or the direction of the country, but that’s just called living in a democracy. This isn’t even the first time the world has tipped toward fascism, and as dire as it looks, I maintain that until a system breaks apart completely, the only way we make a “more perfect union” on the other side is by voting.
All that other stuff is vital too, particularly when it comes to crossing the critical “when everyone knows what everyone knows” threshold. That’s the “informed” part of the equation.
And how 'bout that Mamdani? Balanced budget! And he’s not the only Democratic Socialist gaining steam. Maybe I’m naive, but it feels like people are finally figuring out which candidates they need to push for if they want to survive late stage capitalism.
I do think you’re naive, but maybe I’m just cynical. I think the whole concept of “we live in a democracy” is not a materialist concrete sentence but a virtue signalling idealism. The Soviet system was democratic. The Chinese system is democratic. The US system is democratic. All of these statements are true given what you’re willing to define as democracy. The USA has voting for representatives, but the research shows that only the wealthy have influence over what laws get passed. That’s been true since the founding of the country and it was by design. The expansion of the franchise in the US was always coupled with a pulling back on the effect of the vote. There’s a saying that “In the US you can change the party but you can’t change the policies, and in China you can change the policies but you can’t change the party”.
yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?
I don’t agree that voting prevents things from getting worse. I think the evidence is clear on that. Remember that people not voting is not the cause of the problems, it’s the other way around. People don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It’s not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don’t vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that’s why people don’t vote at all. It’s not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don’t vote.
with a simple “vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys” narrative.
I’m sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles.
You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad. This is your position, don’t distance yourself from it.
I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others.
I’m glad that you recognize this as social indoctrination instead of a conclusion you came to through rigorous analysis of history and political science. Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.
The reality is that Western democracy has been both a great experiment in sufferage and also a failed experiment - one that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. When the settler states are finally dismantled we can finally begin the next series of democracy experiments in earnest. We can get back to exploring the functioning of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and how that form of democracy can be a better form of government than this blood thirsty genocidal rapacious form of democracy that exists primarily to legitimize what the European elite have been doing for at least a millennium. FFS we’re a democracy but we’re still executing King Richard’s Crusades against literally the same people he was fighting. If this is the best system you can think of, that’s a failure of imagination, and honestly a failure of research at this point. There are way better systems than the settler democracy.
And that even if my options are between “Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche”, informed voting is critical to a democracy.
Let’s just take this. You do see how this entire framing is a complete failure of imagination and is completely coerced into you by external forces right? If I took a bunch of young non-white kids who grew up outside of the Eurocentric empire and said “Hey kids, we’re going to manage this neighborhood together. We’re going to govern ourselves to create the best outcomes for ourselves” do you really think they would think that this means voting for a representative from among a choice of two representatives, with both representatives being controlled entirely by people who don’t share their interests? This is what you think democracy means? It’s ridiculous. Yes, we are required to call this democracy because people can vote and we pretend they can run for office. But the reality is that the rich always get what they want, the bombs always drop, the corporations tell the military what to destroy (seriously, look it up), the prisons get bigger and more brutal.
I mean for fucks sake as a democracy we have fucking prison guards protesting that the legislature in NYS decided to restrict the use of solitary confinement, which is a form of torture recognized internationally. That’s a democracy? Yes we love unions too, but that doesn’t mean we need to defend the police union as a real union. This is the best you can imagine for democracy?
Meanwhile in the USSR and then again in China the single party system eliminated any possibility of the rich having direct control over the government and what happened? Massive and blindingly fast poverty alleviation. Massive and blindingly fast industrialization. The end of centuries-long famine cycles. The defeat of the Nazis. Incredible benefits of humanity in medicine, science, technology, food, energy, logistics, etc. These societies are democracies too, because they are literally organized around the masses interests and preventing the ultra minority of elite from controlling everything for their own benefit at the expense of the masses. They just don’t look Western democracies, so we “are raised to believe” that these are not democracies and they are worse than our glorious homeland “despite our faults” when our faults are literally open execution of genocides and mass murders and war crimes all over the world.
No. The US has not gotten better from voting. It is fundamentally a flawed system, designed by ultra wealthy minoritarians, slave rapists, genocidaires, and ecociders, and they designed it to protect and empower people like them and to disempower the masses. They wrote about it explicitly, they designed the Constitution that way. The system’s fundamental flaws remain 250 years later, first and foremost being that the entire country exists as a genocidal settler state that can never ever be brought to justice.
The big lie is that the whole thing can be reformed by all the various mechanisms in the constitution. The reality is that the levers of power are in the hands of the elite by design and the only power the masses have is the power to overthrow them through mass organizing. And when that finally happens, the Constitution will be fundamentally rewritten, not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos, and actually reasserted a democracy over what we currently have, an mass murdering white supremacist oligarchy where we get to vote on the branding.
I don’t agree that voting prevents things from getting worse…You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad.
But you recognize that’s not what I said, right? I said if you don’t vote, things will get worse. P->Q doesn’t imply ~P->~Q. Classic fallacy of the inverse.
People don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It’s not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don’t vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that’s why people don’t vote at all. It’s not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don’t vote.
But it’s clearly both. It’s a vicious cycle. The data shows that the boomer generation still votes more than any other generation, and as a result, they always get their way. 4 boomer presidents in a row, topped off with Biden from the Silent generation! Yes, the boomers currently hold more wealth than the rest, and yes there is a correlation between being wealthy and being able to cast a vote that matters, but if non-boomers showed up at the same rates as boomers 10-20 years ago, we would be in a much better situation right now. So far, the ones who vote are having their wealth protected.
Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.
Hey man, don’t sink to that level, please. I’m trying to have a respectful, constructive conversation. Whether intentionally or not, you’ve repeatedly misinterpreted my position.
For ex.
This is the best you can imagine for democracy?
I never said that, you’re arguing against a straw man.
Consider the extent to which you’re upset with reality. The US is not uniquely flawed. Find me a time in human history where none of the crimes against humanity you mention were being committed. But chart crimes over time and I assure you we’re trending better as a species.
And I know you’re capable of seeing that, because in spite of the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR and China, you’re able to see all the good they did too.
They wrote about it explicitly
I’m very interested in any sources you have for this. I would love to have those in my back pocket for future discussions.
not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos
But you see why that argument can always be made to justify throwing out an imperfect system, right? It’s easy to start from scratch, but it’s also the most costly (in terms of lives). It’s much harder to work diligently to make positive, gradual change over time, but historically, we’re doing that. Sure, we can go the overthrow-the-government route, but there’s no guarantee that what replaces it will adequately serve the people. So we’ll overthrow that one too? How many times should that loop happen? As many as it takes? As many lives as it takes?
And what if, when you try to take a stand against the state, the government quashes the attempt using violence, and then punishes anyone who ever so much as mentions the incident going forward? I assume you have examples of that happening in the US. Are you aware of any famous cases of that in China? I wouldn’t presume that this is “the best you can imagine for a democracy”, though.
Again, I’m not here to say the US is any better ethically than China. I’m not going to take the bait on whether china is a democracy, or whether they even claim to be one. But we have to be fair: they’re both guilty of a huge number of crimes against humanity, they’ve both gradually improved the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, and both of them are underserving their minorities and younger generations right now in favor of late stage capitalism. But I would feel more confident about being able to affect meaningful change both in policy and party in the US than in China today. Though I ernestly hope that one day the Chinese are able to affect similar change there too.
I said if you don’t vote, things will get worse. P->Q doesn’t imply P->Q. Classic fallacy of the inverse.
Just because your linguistic representation of it allows you to frame it this way doesn’t mean it matches reality. In politics, you literally cannot have things stay the same. Congress passes an average of 300 laws annually. You are not proposing that we only vote for people who will not make changes. So you’re saying if we don’t vote things will get worse: ~P -> Q and I say the evidence shows that when we do vote, things ALSO get worse: P -> Q. What this shows is that Q (things getting worse) is independent of P. So you said “If you don’t vote things will get worse” but you’re not willing to say “If you do vote things will not get worse”. At best this is sophistry.
data shows that the boomer generation still votes more than any other generation, and as a result, they always get their way
Misattribution. You show the reality quickly afterward with this:
boomers currently hold more wealth than the rest
That’s it. It doesn’t even matter that the boomers vote. Musk, Andreesen, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin, David Sacks - not boomers. It’s not the boomers, it’s the wealth. Boomers vote because they have wealth & the PR directly manipulates them the most. The poorest in EVERY country are the least likely to vote, but in the US it’s structural because the powerful deliberately make voting more difficult for poor & nothing has ever been done to fix it. It only gets worse, regardless of who is in power.
if non-boomers showed up at the same rates as boomers 10-20 years ago, we would be in a much better situation
Wild speculation. Bernie is older than a boomer. He was more popular with the young vote than Obama & the Ds deliberately, openly ratfucked him. The reason the youth don’t vote is because of the politics. The politics is not the way it is because the youth don’t vote. You’re victim blaming. The politics was this way BEFORE they became eligible to vote.
It is fundamentally a flawed system, designed by ultra wealthy minoritarians, slave rapists, genocidaires, and ecociders, and they designed it to protect and empower people like them and to disempower the masses. They wrote about it explicitly, they designed the Constitution that way.
I’m very interested in any sources you have for this.
James Madison, who would become 5th president, argued that the purpose of government should be to protect the opulent minority from the interests of the masses, that the Senate should be structured to be the body that guaranteed that. The Senate is STILL structured the way it was designed, specifically to protect the opulent minority from the will of the masses. It’s literally built into the design of the system. Voting harder won’t fix that.
The US is not uniquely flawed. Find me a time in human history where none of the crimes against humanity you mention were being committed. But chart crimes over time and I assure you we’re trending better as a species. … I know you’re capable of seeing that, because in spite of the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR and China, you’re able to see all the good they did too
You and I have a fundamentally different perspective on history. Historians have determined that of the 250 years the US has been in existence, only 21 of those years were peaceful. But when you look at those years, even THAT isn’t accurate. 9 of those years were prior to 1865, meaning that the US was actively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. It was also actively engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native population. Between the year of abolition and the boarding school system, the US stole 90M acres of treaty-guaranteed land from native tribes and gave it to white settlers. And then the boarding school system started.
You’re correct that many of the flaws the US has are not unique, but wrong to say the US is not uniquely flawed. The US inherits many of the bloodlust flaws from its European roots. Europe ALSO has those flaws. The US is a European settler state and has many flaws on account of that. Canada, Australia, & South Africa ALSO have those flaws. But none of the settler states usurped the empire from Europe. The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.
The European empire, which the US is the helm of, is uniquely flawed. It is the only empire that has ever dominated over 80% of the world. It is the dominant hegemonic empire of the last 600 years. It pioneered fascism, first against non-European populations, then it brought that fascism home through the Third Reich, then the US reintegrated that fascism into itself to continue applying it to non-European people. No other people have ever done anything remotely like this. No one.
Your position is equivalent to a “both sides” argument that everyone’s evil/terrible & does bad things. But it’s just not true. Calling the US flawed is like calling Jack the Ripper troubled. The US isn’t flawed. It’s designed to be a settler nation that enforces ethnic cleansing against occupied people. It’s foundational documents are written specifically to make sure that chattel slavery & native genocide would be able to continue apace, because they were required to build the nation. You can’t reform documents like that because it’s not the documents or the laws that are the problem. It’s not the people who inhabit the seats of power that are the problem. It’s the existence and the structure of the settler state itself. There’s a reason why the US has been committing atrocities against non-Europeans for 99% of its existence and it’s not because it was fighting for a better world for all.
you see why that argument can always be made to justify throwing out an imperfect system, right?
Of course I can. The question is not whether it’s possible. The question is whether there is evidence of the fundamentals changing. 250 years, 99% of them deeply genocidal & violent. There’s no evidence that there’s an alternative that works.
It’s easy to start from scratch
No. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult. It’s so difficult that millions have died from trying to do it. But they chose to do it because they saw no other way. Do you know why Vietnam had an incredibly violent communist revolution? Because it was occupied by the genocidal French for nearly 100 years and as SOON as the French started losing the genocidal Americans stepped in to try to maintain the genocidal occupation. Eventually the Vietnamese won their freedom and established a communist government because it was the will of the people who fought and died to start over because that was preferable to attempting to reform a colonial occupation. USians like me are living inside that genocidal colonial occupation. We may think it’s nice for us, but it’s a horrible baby killing machine.
It’s much harder to work diligently to make positive, gradual change over time, but historically, we’re doing that
No, actually, historically, the communists are the ones who are doing that. Liberalism has stopped doing it and is instead attempting to use violence to hold on to all the wealth it stole from 80% of the world. Again, the gradual change over time we’re experiencing in the USA, specifically of the atrocities, is a change in FORM not in a change in FUNCTION. We don’t have chattel slaves, but our prison slaves produce $11B for companies and governments. We imprison and parole MORE of the people living here than we have ever done. It has ONLY gotten worse and never better. Our siege warfare program branded as “sanctions” has killed an average of 800k people ANNUALLY FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS, mostly children, elderly, and sick.
there’s no guarantee that what replaces it will adequately serve the people. So we’ll overthrow that one too?
That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society. The alternative is letting the death machine kill millions annually.
And what if […] the government quashes the attempt using violence
That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society. The alternative is letting the death machine kill millions annually.
I’m not here to say the US is any better ethically than China
China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict in 37 years. All governments commit crimes against humanity. China is not a settler colony founded on genocide. China’s improvements are not gradual in comparison to the West, they are the fastest and largest quality of life improvements in human history.
But I would feel more confident about being able to affect meaningful change both in policy and party in the US than in China today. Though I ernestly hope that one day the Chinese are able to affect similar change there too.
This is because you are in the US and you have been raised to believe that the Chinese are all imprisoned by an autocrat and suffer under brutal authoritarianism. You don’t spend any time reading about protests in China and how they system of government adapts to pressure from the people on a rapid and consistent basis. In essence, you are ignorant about the topic and you patronizingly express hope that one day they’ll be as free as you are.
So you said “If you don’t vote things will get worse” but you’re not willing to say “If you do vote things will not get worse”. At best this is sophistry.
I know it was a few days ago, but the full statement was “if you do all of the [door knocking, etc.], but no one does any of the voting, things will get worse”. This was an attempt to find common ground to build from. I’m noticing this is not a mutually shared goal. I’m aware you are not able to hear this from me right now, but one day, you should consider that you are practicing preaching, not debating, not convincing.
Misattribution
Literally the same argument I’m making about your position [regarding why people vote vs why they don’t get what they want]. You’re speaking from your own POV. I believe your POV doesn’t align with the data. If you are able to produce data to the contrary, you are welcome.
The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.
Why is that a flaw, though? If it had done this, and none of the rest of the stuff, and immediately gone full communist, you would say this same action makes it uniquely the best, no?
Sources:
Thanks
No. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult.
Is incongruent with
That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society.
Which was my point. Starting from scratch happens far more in history, at the cost of many lives. Gradually working toward and maintaining a system that protects the people very rarely happens. By definition, that indicates one is clearly easier to accomplish (by humans).
China is not a settler colony founded on genocide.
Could you inform me on the state of Muslim minorities in China, and what is going on there, though?
Your position is equivalent to a “both sides” argument that everyone’s evil/terrible & does bad things
This is another example of something you gotta stop doing. To me, it feels like you’re willingly ignoring reality. When I point that out to you, you reduce my position to a meme you’re more familiar with. You will not convince anyone this way. You need to be able to work toward common ground to build from. Otherwise you’re just wasting your time. Do you see that? From the get-go, your attitude has been one of, “where do we disagree, I want to highlight ways we disagree. Oh, you think we agree on something? NO, we disagree on that too!” If that’s what all of your typing has been for, and in the end we haven’t been convinced of anything, what was earned in that time? I surely hope this is not your strategy when you go door knocking.
This is because you are in the US and you have been raised to believe that the Chinese are all imprisoned by an autocrat and suffer under brutal authoritarianism
Another example.
No, as I stated, I believe china has served their older generations well. But from what I hear from younger generations, they do not like their uniquely intense education/vocational system that is being dominated by the ability of the wealthy to use blackmarket tutoring, and they do not feel like they can afford a house, same as the rest of the world right now. I do think the Chinese govt has the ability to unilaterally solve this problem if they want to, and if they do, it’s going to make everyone else look silly. But unlike you, I do believe there is a whole lotta wealth influencing Chinese politics, and just like everyone else, they’re also going to find it difficult to appease the people and the wealthy. We will surely see…
In essence, you are ignorant about the topic and you patronizingly express hope that one day they’ll be as free as you are.
Do you see it yet? Unless you can convince me you’re not here to waste both of our time, I think we’re done here.
I know it was a few days ago, but the full statement was “if you do all of the [door knocking, etc.], but no one does any of the voting, things will get worse”. This was an attempt to find common ground to build from.
And you didn’t find it, because when I challenged you on the inverse, which was that if people did vote things would get better, you hid behind mathematical logic. The reality is that things will get worse whether people vote or not because things getting worse is a function of larger systemic issues than who specifically is in which office.
I’m noticing this is not a mutually shared goal.
The mutual ground I hope to find with you is human empathy, not agreement about electoralism. Through shared human empathy we can come to common ground about mass murders being bad. That’s about where it stops though because our understandings of politics and history are fundamentally different, as we’ll keep seeing…
you should consider that you are practicing preaching, not debating, not convincing.
Here you begin to stop talking about the significant arguments presented for the case I’m making about electoralism and its relationship to mass violence and instead focus on the form of my communication as a way of not engaging with the substance of what I’m saying.
Literally the same argument I’m making about your position [regarding why people vote vs why they don’t get what they want]. You’re speaking from your own POV. I believe your POV doesn’t align with the data. If you are able to produce data to the contrary, you are welcome.
I did. I established, with sources, that the foundational documents of the country were intentionally designed by their authors to prevent mass interests from overriding the interests of the wealthy elite. Are you saying that by voting we might be able to change the fact that the system was designed to prevent voting from changing the system in ways that went against elite interests? If so, you’ll need to make a case for it instead of pretending a hypothesis is just a perspective.
The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.
Why is that a flaw, though?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, against all evidence, that perhaps you actually thought that what I was saying is that the flaw is that the USA became the seat of the empire that birthed it. That was not the intention of the communication. You said “The USA is not uniquely flawed” and I established both that it was and why. The flaws are the bloodlust, the mass murder, the ecocide, the genocide, the violent dominance of the globe. Those are the flaws. And the manifestation of those flaws are unique in scale, in scope, in aggregate form, and in historical process. And the explanation for why they are unique is because the USA inhabits a unique place in a historical process that has a unique place in history.
If it had done this, and none of the rest of the stuff, and immediately gone full communist, you would say this same action makes it uniquely the best, no?
No, because going full communist while being a settler state and also inheriting the European empire would be just as violent and contradictory and just as foundationally genocidal. The USA is an occupying settler state that is continuously and actively displacing millions of people from their land. And the US government and its court decisions have supported this analysis. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing a majority opinion in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, cites the Doctrine of Discovery as the legal basis for the USA’s claim to its physical presence, that is to say, the highest court in the land and a liberal judge appointed by a Democrat stated in no uncertain terms that the very foundation of the USA is the European process of genocidal settler colonialism backed by the Pope’s decree that the savages of the world can be dispossessed of everything including their life and children in the service of spreading Christian civilization.
No. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult.
Is incongruent with
That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society.
It’s not. And you know that. You said “starting from scratch is easy”. That’s an absurd claim. I said starting from scratch is hard, and also, it’s the way people have chosen when all other options have failed them. These two things are both true.
Starting from scratch happens far more in history, at the cost of many lives. Gradually working toward and maintaining a system that protects the people very rarely happens. By definition, that indicates one is clearly easier to accomplish (by humans).
You didn’t say easier. You said easy. If you want to say that flying in an airplane is easier than flapping your arms, go ahead. It doesn’t make it more noble to stand there flapping your arms. Reforming white supremacist genocidal settler states by voting is hard to accomplish because it’s quite literally impossible, in much the same way that it’s impossible for customers to make more money than the house in a well-run casino. You can win individual games, but the house always wins. The government isn’t some piece of stone that you can fashion given enough effort and focus and determination. It’s a social system created by elites for the maintenance of elite power and, in so far as people are able to vote, voting is relegated to a set of outcomes that genuinely cannot change the core logic of the system.
Could you inform me on the state of Muslim minorities in China, and what is going on there, though?
Sure. China is fighting terrorism that is being developed by the West, with the US being the primary adversarial influence. The East Turkestan separatist movement has been a target of US intelligence for several decades. That entire region has been a hotbed of US terrorist training for decades, dating back to the early 80s. And it’s not limited to Xinjiang, they have also trained and supported terrorists in Tibet as well (the Dalai Lama’s brother has written about how much he regrets that their family worked with the CIA). No one has ever figured out how to deal with this form of asymmetric warfare from the US, frankly not even the US. There’s tons of blowback from their support of the Mujaheddin that turned into Al-Qaeda which at various points has been the US’s enemy but also has been something the US has been intimately involved with. Even ISIS, which the US claims to be fighting, has had active collaboration with the US as seen in Syria with a known ISIS terrorist taking office after the West toppled their government and the US admitting it’d been working with him for almost a decade, while he was literally beheading people.
But we don’t only have to take China’s word that they’re fighting terrorism and the history of Western developed terrorism in the region. Many many people have been to audit what’s going on in Xinjiang. The Arab League directly visited and observed deradicalization camps in Xinjiang and left expressing their approval of the program. Islam is still openly practiced in Xinjiang, their language is still used everywhere, their population is still growing year over year, and the last several years of anti-terrorism work has reduced terrorist attacks in the region and increased the standard of living, access to jobs and education and healthcare, and generally been one of the first successes in dealing with Western terrorist programs without going to war.
To me, it feels like you’re willingly ignoring reality
That’s how I feel about you. I guess we found our common ground.
When I point that out to you, you reduce my position to a meme you’re more familiar with.
You haven’t actually pointed it out to me. You said “The US is not uniquely flawed” and “If you take everything bad the US is doing, you’ll see that it’s always been that way and it’s happening all over the world”. To me, both of these sentiments sound like willingly ignoring reality. The US bombed a girls’ school in Iran as part of their opening salvo. China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict in 36 years. The US killed a million people in Iraq. China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict in 36 years. The US is openly killing sailors in civilian vessels. China is using water canons to get people to leave an area of ocean it considers critical for national security. China hasn’t fired munitions upon a boat (outside of warning shots) in 37 years. Russia has launched offensive operations against 3 countries since 1992. The US? 14. And that’s not including attacking Venezuela and starving Cuba.
I reduce it to a meme because that’s what it sounds like. It sounds like you’re not engaging with reality but rather a shallow narrative that falls apart as soon as it comes into contact with actual reality.
Unless you can convince me you’re not here to waste both of our time, I think we’re done here.
The same goes for you. As far as I can tell, you are saying that my refusal to accept most of your premises is a me problem instead of the foundations for debate. You are saying that my attempt to explain WHY I don’t accept your premises is actually just me preaching and refusing to find common ground. I am appealing to your sense of humanity and of justice by listing out all of the incredibly salient ways your premises clash with my understanding of history. The US is uniquely flawed. Reform has never ended fascism. Revolution has always been the result of the masses waking up to the way the elites control the system. And I’ve provided support for all of these positions. That you disagree with them is not me being difficult.
I don’t waste time telling people how to vote. Electoralism is a total waste of time. I vote how I vote, keep it to myself, and spend the rest of my time not thinking about electoralism. None of these politicians deserve my free labor when 100+ Democrats just voted to expand ICE and DHS power to obtain consumer data from retail companies to use in their operation. I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it’s doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.
Go ahead. Vote in the midterms. The Ds in the house just proved to you that they’re onboard with the whole fascist panopticon policing program. They’ve always been collaborators with the Rs. But vote. It’s literally the least you can do. Don’t let anyone stop you. And then, forget about elections immediately after and do something about the fact that your neighbors, their kids, and their teachers are all replicating the white supremacy myths of this country into every single generation and glossing over it all with a simple “vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys” narrative.
That’s great!
And yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?
I’m sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles. I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others. And that even if my options are between “Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche”, informed voting is critical to a democracy.
And that’s my point, you can’t both think we don’t live in a democracy AND think that voting is important. You can be cynical about the electoral process, or the direction of the country, but that’s just called living in a democracy. This isn’t even the first time the world has tipped toward fascism, and as dire as it looks, I maintain that until a system breaks apart completely, the only way we make a “more perfect union” on the other side is by voting.
All that other stuff is vital too, particularly when it comes to crossing the critical “when everyone knows what everyone knows” threshold. That’s the “informed” part of the equation.
And how 'bout that Mamdani? Balanced budget! And he’s not the only Democratic Socialist gaining steam. Maybe I’m naive, but it feels like people are finally figuring out which candidates they need to push for if they want to survive late stage capitalism.
I do think you’re naive, but maybe I’m just cynical. I think the whole concept of “we live in a democracy” is not a materialist concrete sentence but a virtue signalling idealism. The Soviet system was democratic. The Chinese system is democratic. The US system is democratic. All of these statements are true given what you’re willing to define as democracy. The USA has voting for representatives, but the research shows that only the wealthy have influence over what laws get passed. That’s been true since the founding of the country and it was by design. The expansion of the franchise in the US was always coupled with a pulling back on the effect of the vote. There’s a saying that “In the US you can change the party but you can’t change the policies, and in China you can change the policies but you can’t change the party”.
I don’t agree that voting prevents things from getting worse. I think the evidence is clear on that. Remember that people not voting is not the cause of the problems, it’s the other way around. People don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It’s not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don’t vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that’s why people don’t vote at all. It’s not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don’t vote.
You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad. This is your position, don’t distance yourself from it.
I’m glad that you recognize this as social indoctrination instead of a conclusion you came to through rigorous analysis of history and political science. Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.
The reality is that Western democracy has been both a great experiment in sufferage and also a failed experiment - one that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. When the settler states are finally dismantled we can finally begin the next series of democracy experiments in earnest. We can get back to exploring the functioning of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and how that form of democracy can be a better form of government than this blood thirsty genocidal rapacious form of democracy that exists primarily to legitimize what the European elite have been doing for at least a millennium. FFS we’re a democracy but we’re still executing King Richard’s Crusades against literally the same people he was fighting. If this is the best system you can think of, that’s a failure of imagination, and honestly a failure of research at this point. There are way better systems than the settler democracy.
Let’s just take this. You do see how this entire framing is a complete failure of imagination and is completely coerced into you by external forces right? If I took a bunch of young non-white kids who grew up outside of the Eurocentric empire and said “Hey kids, we’re going to manage this neighborhood together. We’re going to govern ourselves to create the best outcomes for ourselves” do you really think they would think that this means voting for a representative from among a choice of two representatives, with both representatives being controlled entirely by people who don’t share their interests? This is what you think democracy means? It’s ridiculous. Yes, we are required to call this democracy because people can vote and we pretend they can run for office. But the reality is that the rich always get what they want, the bombs always drop, the corporations tell the military what to destroy (seriously, look it up), the prisons get bigger and more brutal.
I mean for fucks sake as a democracy we have fucking prison guards protesting that the legislature in NYS decided to restrict the use of solitary confinement, which is a form of torture recognized internationally. That’s a democracy? Yes we love unions too, but that doesn’t mean we need to defend the police union as a real union. This is the best you can imagine for democracy?
Meanwhile in the USSR and then again in China the single party system eliminated any possibility of the rich having direct control over the government and what happened? Massive and blindingly fast poverty alleviation. Massive and blindingly fast industrialization. The end of centuries-long famine cycles. The defeat of the Nazis. Incredible benefits of humanity in medicine, science, technology, food, energy, logistics, etc. These societies are democracies too, because they are literally organized around the masses interests and preventing the ultra minority of elite from controlling everything for their own benefit at the expense of the masses. They just don’t look Western democracies, so we “are raised to believe” that these are not democracies and they are worse than our glorious homeland “despite our faults” when our faults are literally open execution of genocides and mass murders and war crimes all over the world.
No. The US has not gotten better from voting. It is fundamentally a flawed system, designed by ultra wealthy minoritarians, slave rapists, genocidaires, and ecociders, and they designed it to protect and empower people like them and to disempower the masses. They wrote about it explicitly, they designed the Constitution that way. The system’s fundamental flaws remain 250 years later, first and foremost being that the entire country exists as a genocidal settler state that can never ever be brought to justice.
The big lie is that the whole thing can be reformed by all the various mechanisms in the constitution. The reality is that the levers of power are in the hands of the elite by design and the only power the masses have is the power to overthrow them through mass organizing. And when that finally happens, the Constitution will be fundamentally rewritten, not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos, and actually reasserted a democracy over what we currently have, an mass murdering white supremacist oligarchy where we get to vote on the branding.
But you recognize that’s not what I said, right? I said if you don’t vote, things will get worse.
P->Qdoesn’t imply~P->~Q. Classic fallacy of the inverse.But it’s clearly both. It’s a vicious cycle. The data shows that the boomer generation still votes more than any other generation, and as a result, they always get their way. 4 boomer presidents in a row, topped off with Biden from the Silent generation! Yes, the boomers currently hold more wealth than the rest, and yes there is a correlation between being wealthy and being able to cast a vote that matters, but if non-boomers showed up at the same rates as boomers 10-20 years ago, we would be in a much better situation right now. So far, the ones who vote are having their wealth protected.
Hey man, don’t sink to that level, please. I’m trying to have a respectful, constructive conversation. Whether intentionally or not, you’ve repeatedly misinterpreted my position.
For ex.
I never said that, you’re arguing against a straw man.
Consider the extent to which you’re upset with reality. The US is not uniquely flawed. Find me a time in human history where none of the crimes against humanity you mention were being committed. But chart crimes over time and I assure you we’re trending better as a species.
And I know you’re capable of seeing that, because in spite of the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR and China, you’re able to see all the good they did too.
I’m very interested in any sources you have for this. I would love to have those in my back pocket for future discussions.
But you see why that argument can always be made to justify throwing out an imperfect system, right? It’s easy to start from scratch, but it’s also the most costly (in terms of lives). It’s much harder to work diligently to make positive, gradual change over time, but historically, we’re doing that. Sure, we can go the overthrow-the-government route, but there’s no guarantee that what replaces it will adequately serve the people. So we’ll overthrow that one too? How many times should that loop happen? As many as it takes? As many lives as it takes?
And what if, when you try to take a stand against the state, the government quashes the attempt using violence, and then punishes anyone who ever so much as mentions the incident going forward? I assume you have examples of that happening in the US. Are you aware of any famous cases of that in China? I wouldn’t presume that this is “the best you can imagine for a democracy”, though.
Again, I’m not here to say the US is any better ethically than China. I’m not going to take the bait on whether china is a democracy, or whether they even claim to be one. But we have to be fair: they’re both guilty of a huge number of crimes against humanity, they’ve both gradually improved the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, and both of them are underserving their minorities and younger generations right now in favor of late stage capitalism. But I would feel more confident about being able to affect meaningful change both in policy and party in the US than in China today. Though I ernestly hope that one day the Chinese are able to affect similar change there too.
Just because your linguistic representation of it allows you to frame it this way doesn’t mean it matches reality. In politics, you literally cannot have things stay the same. Congress passes an average of 300 laws annually. You are not proposing that we only vote for people who will not make changes. So you’re saying if we don’t vote things will get worse: ~P -> Q and I say the evidence shows that when we do vote, things ALSO get worse: P -> Q. What this shows is that Q (things getting worse) is independent of P. So you said “If you don’t vote things will get worse” but you’re not willing to say “If you do vote things will not get worse”. At best this is sophistry.
Misattribution. You show the reality quickly afterward with this:
That’s it. It doesn’t even matter that the boomers vote. Musk, Andreesen, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin, David Sacks - not boomers. It’s not the boomers, it’s the wealth. Boomers vote because they have wealth & the PR directly manipulates them the most. The poorest in EVERY country are the least likely to vote, but in the US it’s structural because the powerful deliberately make voting more difficult for poor & nothing has ever been done to fix it. It only gets worse, regardless of who is in power.
Wild speculation. Bernie is older than a boomer. He was more popular with the young vote than Obama & the Ds deliberately, openly ratfucked him. The reason the youth don’t vote is because of the politics. The politics is not the way it is because the youth don’t vote. You’re victim blaming. The politics was this way BEFORE they became eligible to vote.
James Madison, who would become 5th president, argued that the purpose of government should be to protect the opulent minority from the interests of the masses, that the Senate should be structured to be the body that guaranteed that. The Senate is STILL structured the way it was designed, specifically to protect the opulent minority from the will of the masses. It’s literally built into the design of the system. Voting harder won’t fix that.
Sources:
You and I have a fundamentally different perspective on history. Historians have determined that of the 250 years the US has been in existence, only 21 of those years were peaceful. But when you look at those years, even THAT isn’t accurate. 9 of those years were prior to 1865, meaning that the US was actively engaged in the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. It was also actively engaged in ethnic cleansing of the native population. Between the year of abolition and the boarding school system, the US stole 90M acres of treaty-guaranteed land from native tribes and gave it to white settlers. And then the boarding school system started.
You’re correct that many of the flaws the US has are not unique, but wrong to say the US is not uniquely flawed. The US inherits many of the bloodlust flaws from its European roots. Europe ALSO has those flaws. The US is a European settler state and has many flaws on account of that. Canada, Australia, & South Africa ALSO have those flaws. But none of the settler states usurped the empire from Europe. The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.
The European empire, which the US is the helm of, is uniquely flawed. It is the only empire that has ever dominated over 80% of the world. It is the dominant hegemonic empire of the last 600 years. It pioneered fascism, first against non-European populations, then it brought that fascism home through the Third Reich, then the US reintegrated that fascism into itself to continue applying it to non-European people. No other people have ever done anything remotely like this. No one.
Your position is equivalent to a “both sides” argument that everyone’s evil/terrible & does bad things. But it’s just not true. Calling the US flawed is like calling Jack the Ripper troubled. The US isn’t flawed. It’s designed to be a settler nation that enforces ethnic cleansing against occupied people. It’s foundational documents are written specifically to make sure that chattel slavery & native genocide would be able to continue apace, because they were required to build the nation. You can’t reform documents like that because it’s not the documents or the laws that are the problem. It’s not the people who inhabit the seats of power that are the problem. It’s the existence and the structure of the settler state itself. There’s a reason why the US has been committing atrocities against non-Europeans for 99% of its existence and it’s not because it was fighting for a better world for all.
Of course I can. The question is not whether it’s possible. The question is whether there is evidence of the fundamentals changing. 250 years, 99% of them deeply genocidal & violent. There’s no evidence that there’s an alternative that works.
No. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult. It’s so difficult that millions have died from trying to do it. But they chose to do it because they saw no other way. Do you know why Vietnam had an incredibly violent communist revolution? Because it was occupied by the genocidal French for nearly 100 years and as SOON as the French started losing the genocidal Americans stepped in to try to maintain the genocidal occupation. Eventually the Vietnamese won their freedom and established a communist government because it was the will of the people who fought and died to start over because that was preferable to attempting to reform a colonial occupation. USians like me are living inside that genocidal colonial occupation. We may think it’s nice for us, but it’s a horrible baby killing machine.
No, actually, historically, the communists are the ones who are doing that. Liberalism has stopped doing it and is instead attempting to use violence to hold on to all the wealth it stole from 80% of the world. Again, the gradual change over time we’re experiencing in the USA, specifically of the atrocities, is a change in FORM not in a change in FUNCTION. We don’t have chattel slaves, but our prison slaves produce $11B for companies and governments. We imprison and parole MORE of the people living here than we have ever done. It has ONLY gotten worse and never better. Our siege warfare program branded as “sanctions” has killed an average of 800k people ANNUALLY FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS, mostly children, elderly, and sick.
That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society. The alternative is letting the death machine kill millions annually.
That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society. The alternative is letting the death machine kill millions annually.
China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict in 37 years. All governments commit crimes against humanity. China is not a settler colony founded on genocide. China’s improvements are not gradual in comparison to the West, they are the fastest and largest quality of life improvements in human history.
This is because you are in the US and you have been raised to believe that the Chinese are all imprisoned by an autocrat and suffer under brutal authoritarianism. You don’t spend any time reading about protests in China and how they system of government adapts to pressure from the people on a rapid and consistent basis. In essence, you are ignorant about the topic and you patronizingly express hope that one day they’ll be as free as you are.
I know it was a few days ago, but the full statement was “if you do all of the [door knocking, etc.], but no one does any of the voting, things will get worse”. This was an attempt to find common ground to build from. I’m noticing this is not a mutually shared goal. I’m aware you are not able to hear this from me right now, but one day, you should consider that you are practicing preaching, not debating, not convincing.
Literally the same argument I’m making about your position [regarding why people vote vs why they don’t get what they want]. You’re speaking from your own POV. I believe your POV doesn’t align with the data. If you are able to produce data to the contrary, you are welcome.
Why is that a flaw, though? If it had done this, and none of the rest of the stuff, and immediately gone full communist, you would say this same action makes it uniquely the best, no?
Thanks
Is incongruent with
Which was my point. Starting from scratch happens far more in history, at the cost of many lives. Gradually working toward and maintaining a system that protects the people very rarely happens. By definition, that indicates one is clearly easier to accomplish (by humans).
Could you inform me on the state of Muslim minorities in China, and what is going on there, though?
This is another example of something you gotta stop doing. To me, it feels like you’re willingly ignoring reality. When I point that out to you, you reduce my position to a meme you’re more familiar with. You will not convince anyone this way. You need to be able to work toward common ground to build from. Otherwise you’re just wasting your time. Do you see that? From the get-go, your attitude has been one of, “where do we disagree, I want to highlight ways we disagree. Oh, you think we agree on something? NO, we disagree on that too!” If that’s what all of your typing has been for, and in the end we haven’t been convinced of anything, what was earned in that time? I surely hope this is not your strategy when you go door knocking.
Another example.
No, as I stated, I believe china has served their older generations well. But from what I hear from younger generations, they do not like their uniquely intense education/vocational system that is being dominated by the ability of the wealthy to use blackmarket tutoring, and they do not feel like they can afford a house, same as the rest of the world right now. I do think the Chinese govt has the ability to unilaterally solve this problem if they want to, and if they do, it’s going to make everyone else look silly. But unlike you, I do believe there is a whole lotta wealth influencing Chinese politics, and just like everyone else, they’re also going to find it difficult to appease the people and the wealthy. We will surely see…
Do you see it yet? Unless you can convince me you’re not here to waste both of our time, I think we’re done here.
And you didn’t find it, because when I challenged you on the inverse, which was that if people did vote things would get better, you hid behind mathematical logic. The reality is that things will get worse whether people vote or not because things getting worse is a function of larger systemic issues than who specifically is in which office.
The mutual ground I hope to find with you is human empathy, not agreement about electoralism. Through shared human empathy we can come to common ground about mass murders being bad. That’s about where it stops though because our understandings of politics and history are fundamentally different, as we’ll keep seeing…
Here you begin to stop talking about the significant arguments presented for the case I’m making about electoralism and its relationship to mass violence and instead focus on the form of my communication as a way of not engaging with the substance of what I’m saying.
I did. I established, with sources, that the foundational documents of the country were intentionally designed by their authors to prevent mass interests from overriding the interests of the wealthy elite. Are you saying that by voting we might be able to change the fact that the system was designed to prevent voting from changing the system in ways that went against elite interests? If so, you’ll need to make a case for it instead of pretending a hypothesis is just a perspective.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, against all evidence, that perhaps you actually thought that what I was saying is that the flaw is that the USA became the seat of the empire that birthed it. That was not the intention of the communication. You said “The USA is not uniquely flawed” and I established both that it was and why. The flaws are the bloodlust, the mass murder, the ecocide, the genocide, the violent dominance of the globe. Those are the flaws. And the manifestation of those flaws are unique in scale, in scope, in aggregate form, and in historical process. And the explanation for why they are unique is because the USA inhabits a unique place in a historical process that has a unique place in history.
No, because going full communist while being a settler state and also inheriting the European empire would be just as violent and contradictory and just as foundationally genocidal. The USA is an occupying settler state that is continuously and actively displacing millions of people from their land. And the US government and its court decisions have supported this analysis. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing a majority opinion in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, cites the Doctrine of Discovery as the legal basis for the USA’s claim to its physical presence, that is to say, the highest court in the land and a liberal judge appointed by a Democrat stated in no uncertain terms that the very foundation of the USA is the European process of genocidal settler colonialism backed by the Pope’s decree that the savages of the world can be dispossessed of everything including their life and children in the service of spreading Christian civilization.
It’s not. And you know that. You said “starting from scratch is easy”. That’s an absurd claim. I said starting from scratch is hard, and also, it’s the way people have chosen when all other options have failed them. These two things are both true.
You didn’t say easier. You said easy. If you want to say that flying in an airplane is easier than flapping your arms, go ahead. It doesn’t make it more noble to stand there flapping your arms. Reforming white supremacist genocidal settler states by voting is hard to accomplish because it’s quite literally impossible, in much the same way that it’s impossible for customers to make more money than the house in a well-run casino. You can win individual games, but the house always wins. The government isn’t some piece of stone that you can fashion given enough effort and focus and determination. It’s a social system created by elites for the maintenance of elite power and, in so far as people are able to vote, voting is relegated to a set of outcomes that genuinely cannot change the core logic of the system.
Sure. China is fighting terrorism that is being developed by the West, with the US being the primary adversarial influence. The East Turkestan separatist movement has been a target of US intelligence for several decades. That entire region has been a hotbed of US terrorist training for decades, dating back to the early 80s. And it’s not limited to Xinjiang, they have also trained and supported terrorists in Tibet as well (the Dalai Lama’s brother has written about how much he regrets that their family worked with the CIA). No one has ever figured out how to deal with this form of asymmetric warfare from the US, frankly not even the US. There’s tons of blowback from their support of the Mujaheddin that turned into Al-Qaeda which at various points has been the US’s enemy but also has been something the US has been intimately involved with. Even ISIS, which the US claims to be fighting, has had active collaboration with the US as seen in Syria with a known ISIS terrorist taking office after the West toppled their government and the US admitting it’d been working with him for almost a decade, while he was literally beheading people.
But we don’t only have to take China’s word that they’re fighting terrorism and the history of Western developed terrorism in the region. Many many people have been to audit what’s going on in Xinjiang. The Arab League directly visited and observed deradicalization camps in Xinjiang and left expressing their approval of the program. Islam is still openly practiced in Xinjiang, their language is still used everywhere, their population is still growing year over year, and the last several years of anti-terrorism work has reduced terrorist attacks in the region and increased the standard of living, access to jobs and education and healthcare, and generally been one of the first successes in dealing with Western terrorist programs without going to war.
That’s how I feel about you. I guess we found our common ground.
You haven’t actually pointed it out to me. You said “The US is not uniquely flawed” and “If you take everything bad the US is doing, you’ll see that it’s always been that way and it’s happening all over the world”. To me, both of these sentiments sound like willingly ignoring reality. The US bombed a girls’ school in Iran as part of their opening salvo. China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict in 36 years. The US killed a million people in Iraq. China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict in 36 years. The US is openly killing sailors in civilian vessels. China is using water canons to get people to leave an area of ocean it considers critical for national security. China hasn’t fired munitions upon a boat (outside of warning shots) in 37 years. Russia has launched offensive operations against 3 countries since 1992. The US? 14. And that’s not including attacking Venezuela and starving Cuba.
I reduce it to a meme because that’s what it sounds like. It sounds like you’re not engaging with reality but rather a shallow narrative that falls apart as soon as it comes into contact with actual reality.
The same goes for you. As far as I can tell, you are saying that my refusal to accept most of your premises is a me problem instead of the foundations for debate. You are saying that my attempt to explain WHY I don’t accept your premises is actually just me preaching and refusing to find common ground. I am appealing to your sense of humanity and of justice by listing out all of the incredibly salient ways your premises clash with my understanding of history. The US is uniquely flawed. Reform has never ended fascism. Revolution has always been the result of the masses waking up to the way the elites control the system. And I’ve provided support for all of these positions. That you disagree with them is not me being difficult.