this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21396125

Stephen Starr in Hamtramck, Michigan
Mon 14 Oct 2024 11.00 EDT

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 8 months ago (20 children)

Maybe we should see if there’s any point of agreement, one step at a time.

Do you agree that either the Dem or Rep nominee will be the next president?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (5 children)

When I said:

and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

This was me saying "It frames things as though losing the election means that all is lost and there won't be future elections."

As I'm pretty sure I explained to you an hour ago in another thread, I think it's an acceptable loss for the Democrats to lose an election to put pressure on them to change or else to establish that they are more loyal to the US project of Israel than they are to trying to win elections or do what voters want or anything like that.

I don't proactively want Trump to win, but I find it totally acceptable since what sets him apart from other Republicans is not that he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do. It might actually be possible to browbeat me if we had a Tom "throne of Chinese skulls" Cotton or someone as the nominee, he actually represents something that could be totalizing to me, but Trump is just kind of a deranged grifter and Vance is a more even-keel grifter.

So to save us both time, no, I don't think we agree on any points. I wasn't commenting toward that end, I merely wanted to say that the comic is unhelpful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do

So.. About my supposed false dichotomy and this insane comment that Trump isn't "especially fascist".

Given the torrent of executive orders, attempts to take the purse strings from congress, and seeming preparations to ignore SCOTUS rulings, how accurate do you think this was?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think that Trump 2 is starkly different from Trump 1. I maintain my interpretation of Trump 1 and happily await someone explaining to me a basis for predicting Trump 2's methodological shift. I personally really struggle to understand it unless it's truly that his brain was broken by losing in 2020 and he became the Joker. Perhaps it's just that the actual fascists finally were able to figure out how to more effectively control him/convince him to cooperate, since he was notoriously unruly and refused to defer to allies who knew what they were doing (and this is part of what made him so much less threatening from a long-term standpoint than he could have been, not that he didn't present problems).

Looking at the context of this conversation (why are you even back here? why did you even remember it? did you think this was a great chance to gloat about how Momala would have made everything okay?) I think it's more productive to try to understand how Republicans generally have taken this hard right shift, and it's not because Trump is a wizard who can make everyone do what he wants, we have seen him come into conflict with the Republican establishment many times before, but they are backing him on a lot of the more fascist policies (with the exception of some of the courts). It's also worth noting that the Democrats, infamously Schumer, are extremely capitulatory to him, and obviously some fascist policy was done under their lead, like with Gaza, but remembering discourse from when I was writing, I can infer that you were arguing that the extermination of just the Palestinians was the lesser evil, so I guess that doesn't matter. Anyway, my original point is that the threat isn't coming fundamentally from Trump, but from the Republican Party and neoliberalism generally, and I see no reason to think that is less true now.

In my personal life, I've actually been really pleasantly surprised to see former "lesser evil" types realize that the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed because they are ultimately collaborators with the Republicans who will never, ever actually solve the problems producing fascist threats (and also do really awful things in their own right). I think they learned the correct lesson from the last several years, but of course diehards remain and will act like this is a moral victory for them somehow, when Kamala was adopting Trump 1 policy and even worse and Dems keep saying "we lost, I guess we weren't reactionary enough" and shifting ever-further right.

I truly hope that one day you realize that the Dems are more opposed to genuine leftism than to Republicans and have and will work to suppress it while protecting the Republican establishment. If you truly hate Republicans and not just Trump in particular, you need to look beyond the Dems and beyond the tip of your nose (a single election cycle).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I truly hope that one day you realize that the Dems are more opposed to genuine leftism than to Republicans

I mean.. I don't really have to reply to literally anything else here. You're actually insane.

Meanwhile Trump is dismantling the administrative state and appointing yes men to whatever is left. This was better than the alternative? Man, get the fuck out of here.

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