The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[PseudoStupidity]

Deaddm your post has confirmed exactly what I was thinking, thanks. I disagree with you entirely and think you don't have an accurate grasp of just how bad things are in the country you live in, but I understand that you've bought the propaganda wholesale about what a democracy is and how states should work. I am surprised you haven't been disabused of these notions you have given the whole "state of the country" thing, but it's easier than ever to bury our heads in the sand if we are inclined to do that.

We are in a "bourgeois democracy," in that the bourgeoise are the ones who put up candidates (and are the candidates themselves in most cases) and are effectively the only ones who have a say in who gets elected. The elections you think are democratic are not, and you probably even know the mechanisms that make it so they are not democratic and the fail-safes that are in place to ensure that even a bad election for the bourgeoise would not result in an end to their rule. You may disagree with me on this (though I don't know how, can you even name a Senator who isn't a member of the bourgoise?) but I think if you really thought about it you'd realize there are massive barriers to being a candidate and that, even if good people get elected, we have a shadowy cabal of absolute creeps and freaks who can and will pull every trick in the book (and many that are not) to prevent those good people from changing anything significant or outright remove them from office. This shadowy cabal isn't the illuminati or anything, it's people like judges and cops (and the federal cops) and the massive network of influence and power that is made up of our many non-profits, PACs, and other NGOs run by and for capitalists.

If you think for even a moment that Regular Jim from Regular Town Pennsylvania has a say in what happens in the country you are either woefully ignorant or stupid. Regular Jim gets to pick from a few people who were handpicked by the bourgeoise (or are bourgeoise who picked themselves) every few years, right down to the folks who run his municipal government. Democracy? Come the fuck on, for any position that matters all the people who vote get to do is pick from a slate of candidates prepared for them by their betters. Very small towns can be the exception to this and they do cool things like elect pets to mayoral positions, which is how we know real democracy is happening in those towns.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Can't imagine genocide joes coattails are going to be great.

But as for people thinking hard about compromising for the lesser evil of the genocide guy because if they want to continue democracy they have no choice in how to vote... (wait... no choice in how to vote in order to save democracy, and again to the point of being tired of it? That should ring alarm bells for an actual thinking person...)

Anyway. Fuck off you aren't having the Muslim vote back. Maybe in a generation. NOT for the next election. As I understand it Muslim voters make up key demographics in important states that Biden NEEDS to win and only won last time because of their support. And Genocide Joe WILL lose more than that on this issue alone.

Muslim community reps, quite rightly, won't even answer the phone when the Biden campaign (all too rarely) tries to reach out to them. Why the fuck would they? You don't gleefully sponsor a mass murder of an ethnicity and then expect the local communities of that extended ethnicity to vote for you after a year of cooldown because fuck it, you really did do some college debt relief conditionally only for a subset of people over 45 who were already earning well for decades.

And you can pretty much stop the impact of Israel on the election analysis there. Despite a bunch of relevant stuff about massively alienating young voters that DID decisively turn out for Biden last time, because Muslim/Arab communities+???other anti war = Genocide Joe is probably a one term president even if ???other anti war ends up being pretty small, which it won't be.

Wait I wanna do a dramatic blood on your hands line in here somehow...
THE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS DOESN'T WASH AWAY THAT EASILY DEADDM IT WILL STILL BE THERE COME ELECTION TIME.

[Kaelik]

The coattails theory was why it was important to vote for biden in the 2020 primary. Now the reason you have to vote for the guy who wants to do genocide is you can't change captain mid stream and also no one has ever retired its impossible for him to retire.

Did he also have garbage coattails in 2020 that lost dems a bunch of winnable senate seats? Yes. But that was what it was about.

[deaddmwalking]

We are in a "bourgeois democracy," in that the bourgeoise are the ones who put up candidates (and are the candidates themselves in most cases) and are effectively the only ones who have a say in who gets elected.

I don't disagree that there are a whole host of problems with how only the leisure-class REALLY has time to work on getting elected, but it's also really easy to point to political outsiders of lower economic station getting elected.

On the right Lauren Boebert owned a grill. George Santos was a professional liar who claimed to be a finance bro but wasn't.

On the left Ilhan Omar worked as a community educator at the University of Minnesota. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender and waitress.

I'm sure that those are exceptional stories because it's much easier to focus on politics when you're a trust-fund baby. The barriers to a substantial political career are real - running for office is a full time job and it doesn't pay - so the only people that do it are the ones that can afford to live for months without a salary or the ones who are driven enough to find a way to make it work and somehow succeed.

But I will say that your claim that the United States supported by 'your gut' is not worth as much to me as any of the many Democracy Indexes referred to by publications and academics. I think that claiming that we don't have a democracy and therefore there is no point in participating in elections plays into the hands of the 'bourgeois'. If young people (18-35) consistently voted at the same rates as old people (65+) I think we'd be living in a socialist utopia. I think the reason we're not is that too many 'realists' reject the act of voting.

But feel free to show me data contradicting this position. I'd love to see it!

[Kaelik]

The CIA says the US is a democracy, so it's really silly of you to point to how the US actually works, CIA index says democracy: Yes!

Young people voting wouldn't actually fix anything because the young people would simply vote for the preselected psychopaths that all have deaddm's politics of stock market go up, cut welfare, genocide people in other countries, but also, they don't vote at different rates from the old because they "reject the act of voting." They don't vote as much because the actual people in power have systematically disenfranchised them, including and especially democrats in solid blue states who take whatever steps they can to make it as hard as possible for young people to vote.

I encourage anyone who actually thinks democracies indexes invented by the CIA (really, they are behing Polity IV), random NGOs who definitely aren't entirely funded by billionaires with political goals, and a magazine invented for the purpose of doing psycho propaganda actually tell you anything about what is or isn't a democracy, please actually read the methodology of whatever one you think is good.

It won't of course convince deaddm of anything, because his entire being is reflexive deference to the expertise of some rich chud hired by a billionaire, but to anyone else it takes like 15 minutes at most before you get to the part where they say "then we asked some experts who we refuse to disclose to rank countries" and then oops, well, I guess democracy index is just shorthand for "actually just ask a guy" even before you get into how no one ever asks in a democracy index for an expert to rank a country from 1 to 5 on the category of "how many millions of dollars do you need to run for office and where are you going to get those millions of dollars?"

[MGuy]

Ahh yes now that is deaddm posting with the proper amount of deference to our joke of a democracy. You see if you look at these statistics we are less corrupt than many other democracies. Luckily we legalized a lot of the corruption in this country so we could score a little better. Let's see those people with eyes and ears try to come up with alternative statistics like how the popularity of a law very routinely matters less than what moneyed interests want passed and how power in our major parties seems to be determined by whoever can convince the oligarchs to give the most money.

Let's trot out the names of some people in Congress who don't quite fit the mold and then ignore the aggressive marginalization and outright hostility they were shown until they fell in line or continued to be ignored. We can admit there are 'problems' with some votes mattering far more than others but forget that beyond voting the will of certain groups of people are far more absolute than others.

Of course though if more youths voted things would definitely be different because it's acceptable to claim user error than admit that the system is so catastrophically flawed that disenfranchisement is a feature and not a bug.

Also people like dead would hate that anyway. Sanders was in no way threatening to destabilize the system but during his run dead balked at just his presidency because supposedly the wife is afraid of communism.

[PseudoStupidity]

Deaddm, come on man. Really putting your ignorance on display by saying all you need to run for office is to be able to go without income for a few months. You need donors you silly goose, or to be personally wealthy. Even running a small campaign for a state office costs several thousand dollars, likely tens of thousands of dollars. You need fucking cash to run, and who has all the cash? This is not complicated!

Also, why did you put bourgeois in quotes?

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Also, why did you put bourgeois in quotes?

He is a "centrist" liberal. He believes that if a word was ever used by Marx then its probably a Communist Russiagate hoax and not really a word and should never be acknowledged to mean anything on its own terms.

[Kaelik]

Deaddm, come on man. Really putting your ignorance on display by saying all you need to run for office is to be able to go without income for a few months. You need donors you silly goose, or to be personally wealthy. Even running a small campaign for a state office costs several thousand dollars, likely tens of thousands of dollars. You need fucking cash to run, and who has all the cash? This is not complicated!

Also, why did you put bourgeois in quotes?

There's also a better way of conceptualizing office and cost which is collectively.

There are 430ish federal reps who all need 2-500k ever 2 years, 100 senators who need 5-80 million dollars every 6 years, a president who needs 2 billion ever 4 years.

The fact that common people can occasionally squeak an aoc or ilhan Omar in with a lot of donations and effort doesn't change that they never had a hope in hell of crowd sourcing the collective multi millions and billions to get 200+ reps 50 senators and a president.

When your elections all have a money requirement at the end of the day, the house majority is always going to cost so much that you can be sure it's going to be bought and paid for by the owning class every election no matter how the individual races shake out.

[Thaluikhain]

There's many, many varied and legitimate complaints against Biden, but come the election, assuming both are still alive, what other viable options are there besides him or Trump?

[Kaelik]

There's many, many varied and legitimate complaints against Biden, but come the election, assuming both are still alive, what other viable options are there besides him or Trump?

You could always simply not start defending a genocide in January because of a hypothetical in November. You could even possibly push to stop a genocide or push for someone who isn't doing a genocide to be the nominee.

But also. Every single one of you would have voted against Abraham Lincoln amd for some fucking Whig because you only vote for "viable" candidates. I mean I want to stress that your decision that you must vote for a genocide because the media and political system has done the pre-work of defining all other options as non viable is evidence of exactly what pseudo is saying. The US is no democracy, and also literally your vote doesn't matter, my vote doesn't matter, deaddm's vote doesn't matter, pseudos vote doesn't matter. I don't actually know where every person lives but fully 95% of the US population we already know today that their vote doesn't matter and if they vote for trump in protest or the communist party candidate or write in "stop doing a genocide" all of these are equally as meaningful. Which is to say, not at all.

The sooner you accept that and start acting based on that instead of doing this weirdo vote shaming in support of genocide in January the sooner we can actually do something that will matter.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Even if "come the election" at that time you decide to vote for the lesser evil, despite it being Genocide, if come the election you decide to forever taint yourself in the view of those you speak to you can choose to make the jump and campaign for Genocide Joe and even do the vote shaming then.

If you are vote shaming NOW it isn't about the election despite the genocide. If you are vote shaming/lesser evil campaigning NOW then that means you are actually about the genocide despite the election.

Genocide Joe could be dead by the election. It's actually reasonably likely. Any significant democrat vote shaming in support of genocide NOW only HURTS whoever replaces the corpse in your nations best possible remaining election scenario.

[Kaelik]

https://www.columnblog.com/p/the-profou ... dium=email

[deaddmwalking]

Also, why did you put bourgeois in quotes?

You used the term 'bourgeois democracy' in quotes. We haven't discussed exactly what you mean by the term, but it is generally used to refer to the 'middle class'. Statistics I see say that 50% of U.S. households are 'middle class' in 2021. This is significantly smaller than it was even a few years ago. The middle class has been shrinking. If you were in favor of absolute majoritarian rule than having candidates reflect the preferences and representing the absolute majority of Americans would not be an issue. It appears you mean something like 'upper middle class' or even 'ultra-wealthy'.

BUT

I gave specific examples of candidates who were elected to Congress that weren't part of the money class (at least, not before they were elected). In fact, I highlighted members who weren't supported by the money class before they were elected. Therefore, it is possible to be elected without being part of or supported by the bourgeois regardless of how you are trying to define it in the context of modern American society.

People like to complain that when we get to the general election our choices are between a giant douche and a shit-sandwich. But how come those are usually the only choices? Regardless of how much money someone has, the most common way to get on the general ballot is by winning a primary election for one of the two major parties. Roughly 1/3 of general election voters vote in primary elections. But that just IMPLIES that younger voters are missing. Actually getting that data means digging deeper. The Brookings Institute has a breakdown of primary voters based on a relatively small sample from 2018. Figure 7A and 7B both show that young voters (here defined as 18-39) turn out for primaries at a lower level than their share of the population. The first link also shows that far fewer voters participate in mid-term elections. Those are real problems. Eligible voters are choosing not to have their voices heard. I absolutely agree that there are too many policies that make it hard for voters (primarily in red states) largely because they recognize that full participation would usher in a socialist utopia.

So if the system is stacked against grass-roots democracy (and it is, but there literally isn't a way to make it so famous wealthy people with many, many followers on social media don't have an advantage over Regular Joe Commie in terms of getting their message out) it seems that ORGANIZATION and COMMUNICATION are critical. And this is such an obvious conclusion that The Progressive Voters Guide exists. Now that's pretty limited because places like Tennessee don't have any progressive candidates, but that's absolutely a place that you could start if you want progressive candidates. You are permitted to volunteer so candidates without financial backing can compete with established candidates with institutional support.

So elections keep happening and your preferred result keeps not happening. You can say 'the system is rigged, I give up' in which case I guarantee things will keep getting worse for your preferred candidates and causes, or you can participate in the democratic process using the 'rules as written' to create the change you want to see. If your preferred candidates and causes really do have a majority of popular support you can generally make them happen. There are a whole host of problems that I know we're all aware of like how districts are drawn to favor one party, but it's actually really hard to draw a district that excludes young people completely (much easier to do it by race, income, or religion due to how Americans are segregated), so I stand by my assessment: if young people participated in the electoral process to the same degree as old people, we would live in a socialist utopia.

So when I see someone saying 'nobody's vote matters', I NEED to say that couldn't be further from the truth. In an election where 154 million people voted, it may seem like any individual vote didn't matter at all. But in aggregate, they absolutely did. If 1% of Biden's voters stayed home in each State and another 1% of Trump voters turned up (+2% shift to Trump), Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have gone for Trump: he would have won with 291 electoral votes. All the reasons you have to not vote someone else does, too. Enough people need to choose to do the hard work of casting a vote to get the results you would prefer. Primaries AND general elections.

Anyways, I didn't mean to change the subject from ongoing genocides and failures of the current administration - someone else (Mguy) brought it up and I wanted to comment on that. But I don't think that talking about either genocide or the General Election on the Gaming Den qualifies as 'doing something' either for or against a candidate or cause. There are things you could do that might make a difference, but notably shouting in an echo-chamber to a little-visited corner of the internet focused on TTRPG game analysis isn't one of them.

Edit - Responding to Kaelik's linked article: I'm sure you think that the following quote applies to me:

To VoteBlueNoMatterWho types, any dissent - even sober, measured, loyal dissent - is suspect and must be snuffed out. Our leaders don't serve us, we serve them.

It doesn't. I absolutely believe that people are entitled to disagreement and dissent and they absolutely should lobby for their preferred positions. I also recognize that there are things that someone could do that make them unacceptable as a candidate no matter what the consequences would be. Regarding Gaza, I think that violent disagreement NOW is absolutely acceptable and should be encouraged. I'm not going to try to make an argument that NOTHING CAN BE DONE, but my personal belief is that there are some major limitations on what CAN AND SHOULD BE DONE - like a U.S. military invasion of Israel to prevent the genocide strikes me as a really bad idea, for instance. But I'm also not interested in the discussion of these events in this context since I affirmed earlier that there are better more productive ways to deal with them.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

...like a U.S. military invasion of Israel to prevent the genocide strikes me as a really bad idea...

Literally the one thing the USA could now do to rescue ANY international diplomatic credibility and power for a generation.

Also the one morally correct course of action left. But we know that doesn't register for DeadDM and he literally cannot see this paragraph even if he clicks through the ignore he is bound to preen about.

Also the one nation they COULD invade in the middle east whose military appears to be more of a house of cards than the US military and the one nation they could invade in the situation that WOULD actually "contain" rather than escalate the conflict because its the one nation that WON'T draw in the entire region as allies. In fact the USA would have god damn IRAN on its side for once. Something the USA should want more often if its international affairs weren't managed by Klingon toddlers with a blood vengeance grudge from the 1950s.

But its a bad idea. No consideration or explanation of why. Doing THE thing that the USA "world police" have always pretended they were doing, making that actually real in a good way to finally prove some credibility and do some good while they were at it... it's just bad. Don't ask why.

(Though I have one reason why, apparently some dumb fucks have actually given Israel a fucking sub of some kind to co-ordinate their evil nuke the world in revenge plan from, the Pentagon had better fucking have that thing tailed minute by minute by something ready to destroy it at the drop of a hat. If Bibi starts to choke on a sandwich there had better be wreckage floating to the surface before he finishes a glass of water and says he's fine.)

[Thaluikhain]

Invading a nuclear capable nation is not something the US should be doing.

OTOH, sanctions against Israel, and hell, allying with other regional powers and throwing money at them are an option.

[Kaelik]

Going to pointlessly do way more point by pointing then is worth anyone's time.

You used the term 'bourgeois democracy' in quotes. We haven't discussed exactly what you mean by the term, but it is generally used to refer to the 'middle class'.

It meant the people who owned things but weren't aristocrats, which in the US is everyone who owns things. It didn't mean "people who make a middling income from labor" and was explicitly in contrast to people who labor.

Knowing this is not a requirement of course, but no one but you would waste everyone's time trying to filibuster with statistics about middle class in response to Pseudo's usage of the term.

In fact, I highlighted members who weren't supported by the money class before they were elected. Therefore, it is possible to be elected without being part of or supported by the bourgeois regardless of how you are trying to define it in the context of modern American society.

It is the most classically deaddm incredibly fucking neoliberal blinders that you believe 2 people being in the lower house from poor backgrounds proves that really, we could just pull a 50% house, senate, and presidency of poor people tomorrow if we just had 400 committed hard working poor people who ran for election! Complete system blindness at every level.

Regardless of how much money someone has, the most common way to get on the general ballot is by winning a primary election for one of the two major parties.

This is like saying that regardless of how old someone is you get on the ballot by winning a primary, so it's really the 12 year old's fault we haven't had a 12 year old president because they haven't tried hard enough. Having a couple billion dollars spent on your behalf is a requirement to be President. No amount of "winning the primary" can happen if you don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend.

Eligible voters are choosing not to have their voices heard.

This is the thing people are making fun of you for! Every time someone says 'literally we do not live in a democracy and people are intentionally making it so people can't vote' in your head you magically transform that into "People are choosing, for reasons of their own individual failures, not to vote. It's definitely not the people in power making this choice, it's the poor people. The solution is to lick more boot of the people who are doing the disenfranchisement and blame poor/young people."

I absolutely agree that there are too many policies that make it hard for voters (primarily in red states) largely because they recognize that full participation would usher in a socialist utopia.

5% was the turnout rate of New Yorkers in the 2020 Primaries. 23% was the turnout in NJ, where the vote happened so late that there were only two candidates who hadn't dropped out, Trump and Biden, who were running unopposed.

Nebraska and Wisconsin are at 35%, Mass at 33%. Montana is at 45% with Colorado at 42%. There are other states lower then 5% like Hawaii, Nevada, and Wyoming.

One theory, the deaddm theory, is that people in NY just hate having their voices heard, but people in Wyoming are being suppressed. Another idea is that maybe it's not actually "primnarily red states" doing voter suppression.

Also again if 100% of young people who aren't prohibited voted, they would still in fact not usher in a socialist utopia because 1) Entrenched systems make sure no one can pass laws that aren't approved by the very rich, 2) Even if 100% of young people voted, all the majorities would still be the people who were given millions of dollars to run, and a majority of those are always going to be stocks go up, cut welfare, genocide foreigners like you and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, and Andy Kim.

You are permitted to volunteer so candidates without financial backing can compete with established candidates with institutional support.

This is again, a delusion. You cannot in fact compete in a senate election if you don't have tens of millions of dollars. You cannot be president if billions of dollars aren't spent on your behalf. This is like getting mad at 12 year olds for not running for President.

So elections keep happening and your preferred result keeps not happening. You can say 'the system is rigged, I give up' in which case I guarantee things will keep getting worse for your preferred candidates and causes, or you can participate in the democratic process using the 'rules as written' to create the change you want to see.

The people of France didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" during the French Revolution. The people of Chile didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" to get out from under the Pinochet constitution. The people of Bolivia didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" to undo the US backed coup. The Civil Rights Movement didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" to overcome Jim Crow.

You can keep doing the thing that definitely won't work because the system is explicitly designed to make sure it never can work, or you can do a thing that might work. The answer is not "the first one" but before doing the second one, you have to convince a lot of people of the reality of the situation who otherwise don't want to be convinced, because doing something that might work might involve getting fired from their job or beaten and arrested by police, or just because their stock market keeps going up and that's really more important then other people's lives.

If your preferred candidates and causes really do have a majority of popular support you can generally make them happen.

This is genuinely psychopathic. Like genuinely seek fucking medical help if you believe this. It turns out the system doesn't matter, because if you have majority support, the election results magically change to whatever you want. Silly black people, you didn't need to engage in an organized illegal resistance campaign to Jim Crow, simply vote in elections you aren't allowed to vote in for white people who hate you and eventually by the magical properties of popular will things change.

There are a whole host of problems that I know we're all aware of like how districts are drawn to favor one party, but it's actually really hard to draw a district that excludes young people completely (much easier to do it by race, income, or religion due to how Americans are segregated), so I stand by my assessment: if young people participated in the electoral process to the same degree as old people, we would live in a socialist utopia.

Quite aside from how it has been explained to you that last sentence is stupid as fuck.......... If you don't even know how the youth vote is suppressed what are we even doing here? You have extremely strong opinions on youth vote and you've never once in your entire life googled "how are young people's votes suppressed" and searched for an hour to find out what the actual process is?

So when I see someone saying 'nobody's vote matters', I NEED to say that couldn't be further from the truth.

It couldn't be more true. If 9 trillion more people voted in California it wouldn't change a damn thing in any election. If one year we accidentally burned all the votes in states that make up 95% of the US population and had zero votes from those states it would have no effect whatsoever on who is president.

That's the thing. It doesn't matter if or how most people vote in the 2024 presidential election. You just have to pretend it does, because as soon as you admit this truth, it becomes impossible to justify whining constantly about how everyone needs to vote for genocide as your defense mechanism for supporting genocide.

Edit - Responding to Kaelik's linked article: I'm sure you think that the following quote applies to me:

To VoteBlueNoMatterWho types, any dissent - even sober, measured, loyal dissent - is suspect and must be snuffed out. Our leaders don't serve us, we serve them.

It's extremely fucking on brand that you read an entire article about how the president is supporting a genocide and assumed that I posted the article because one random sentence was supposed to be a criticism of you.

I absolutely believe that people are entitled to disagreement and dissent and they absolutely should lobby for their preferred positions.

Oh boy are we all well aware that you support Lobbying.

I also recognize that there are things that someone could do that make them unacceptable as a candidate no matter what the consequences would be.

But not genocide. That's still acceptable to you.

but my personal belief is that there are some major limitations on what CAN AND SHOULD BE DONE - like a U.S. military invasion of Israel to prevent the genocide strikes me as a really bad idea, for instance.

1) This is such a fucking cop out. The US is giving them bombs to do a genocide. The US is vetoing UN resolutions to help them avoid any consequences of doing a genocide. The US has parked a big ass carrier fleet off their coast and explicitly threatened every other country in the region that if they fight back while Israel randomly bombs them, much less attempt to stop a genocide, the US will instantly level their country. The US is engaged in campaign of random mass murder of Yemenis and already has US troops on the ground in Yemen in the hope that it will discourage them from causing shipping to or from Israel to have to take a longer path. The US is telling them which hospitals and refugee camps have a dangeous concentration of Hamas militants in need of some sky thunder and providing other targetting information.

Just own the genocide you obviously support instead of pretending that the only options are US invasion or genocide.

2) Why wouldn't you support US invasion of Israel? Why would you look at a balance calculation of 4 million deaths of Palestinians and say "well look, I think a US invasion that kills a few thousand Israelis and stops this would be going too far." The answer is obvious. Because you think Israeli lives are worth more then Palestinian lives.

Factually, it would never come to US invasion, because any pushback at all would instantly end this, much less the kind of "non war" the US imposes against Iran or Cuba or North Korea. But if it really was impossible to stop it in any other way and everything else had been tried, the reason people don't want to risk thousands of Israeli lives to save millions of Palestinians is extremely clear.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Invading a nuclear capable nation is not something the US should be doing.

OTOH, sanctions against Israel, and hell, allying with other regional powers and throwing money at them are an option.

It absolutely in this case is. Israel has relatively few nukes, a centralized and recently proven to be very fragile command and communications structure, and is right now wedging itself further and further into a corner from which it has promised the world repeatedly that SOMEONE is going to cop at least a city or two.

Invading to prevent a genocide is just the only morally correct military course of action for the USA in the area, yeah it would be NICE if sanctions or something worked, I don't think they would but hey the USA could fucking try them or you know try anything other than supporting the genocide in every way possible.

But no matter what they do, from a responsible military preparedness angle, when the USA was moving all those forces into the Mediterranean ostensibly to threaten Lebanon... and Syria... and Egypt... and, ok EVERYONE, man you guys are great diplomats. The PRIMARY thing pentagon leadership should have been doing, the FIRST plans they should have been drawing up, should have been a contingency of how quickly they can take out all the key targets in Israel to completely disable their nuke capability.

And I know the USA is incompetent, incapable and unwilling. But there had better be some Pentagon guys left in charge capable enough to at least have that plan ready to go for a very predictable emergency even if the civilian leadership will never accept it even in an emergency.

And you know my estimate of US capability is your empire will collapse dramatically within our lifetime. But if they aren't ready to crush Israel on the off chance that the white house could bring itself to hit the big emergency "do it" button on that one then you guys are more far gone than even my estimates.

[PseudoStupidity]

Also, why did you put bourgeois in quotes?

You used the term 'bourgeois democracy' in quotes. We haven't discussed exactly what you mean by the term, but it is generally used to refer to the 'middle class'. Statistics I see say that 50% of U.S. households are 'middle class' in 2021. This is significantly smaller than it was even a few years ago. The middle class has been shrinking. If you were in favor of absolute majoritarian rule than having candidates reflect the preferences and representing the absolute majority of Americans would not be an issue. It appears you mean something like 'upper middle class' or even 'ultra-wealthy'.

BUT

I gave specific examples of candidates who were elected to Congress that weren't part of the money class (at least, not before they were elected). In fact, I highlighted members who weren't supported by the money class before they were elected. Therefore, it is possible to be elected without being part of or supported by the bourgeois regardless of how you are trying to define it in the context of modern American society.

Bourgeoise refers to the members of the bourgeois class. The bourgeois are the class of capital ownership, they are the ones who own the means of production (ex: Jeff Bezos, the guy who owns your local car dealership, every single landlord, etc.). It can be broken down further (the petit-bourgeoise are exactly what that sounds like) but we're talking about people who make their money by owning things instead of selling their labor (labor-sellers are the proletariat, or working class). We are not talking about the ill-defined middle class of developed nations that are frequently a mix of bourgeoise and proletariat.

Kaelik gave a great explanation of why your cherry-picked examples (none of them Senators, as was my impossible challenge since every single Senator is a member of the bourgeoise afaik, even Bernie) are not a counterargument to my position. It is impossible for the proletarians in the USA to fund the cost of enough campaigns to seize control of the country they are alleged to control. At most they can crowdfund a few candidates, and typically only for cheap races.

And then he ninja'd the rest of what had written after I stepped away for lunch. I'm still hitting Submit though.

[MGuy]

First off I do not know why deaddm is lying about not being the votebluenomatter who type. He is. Sure there might be some extreme example like what if the president started personally coming to his house to mug him at gun point but short of something like that dead would be back here doing his bootlicking duty under every other conceivable thing done by people with a D in front of their name. He'd be here telling everyone that everything is fine and reducing every major, catastrophic, issue to 'problems' so they don't seem like things that should be addressed immediately by whatever means possible. At the end of the day there is no event that will seriously happen happen and that doesn't personally effect dead personally, that would shake his faith in the system he personally benefits from.

In fact his entire screed is built off of bootlicking because he doesn't have any strong desires. Hasn't really strongly advocated for anything this entire time. The whole "if only more youth would vote" thing is just another branch of the resentment many bootlicking blue voters have. That more people aren't sensible enough to vote blue without making demands. You see because polls show that so many youth voters are progressives, which is a position the Dems have staked out (despite how often hostile Dems in positions of power are to progressive positions). So when he says "Ahh if only more youths voted" the unspoken part is: "For democrats".

There's a whole genre of propaganda for people like dead of course. That's where he picked up this particularly idiotic talking point from. Same places are also saying "These darned stupid people don't realize how much Biden is doing for them". He derives his language from these places as well. That's why Biden just 'could've done better' and why there are just 'problems' (or some similar term that doesn't adequately express how fucked up things are). So anytime he is hit with things that WaPo hasn't made an article for (like how the system is set up to make sure no one significantly disrupts who has the reins of power in this country) he can't engage with it and starts looping back to saying the same things that have already been addressed like this 'youth vote' thing or how he definitely believes there are 'problems' just can't imagine them being extreme enough to warrant an extreme response. I mean how could things be that bad when he is doing so well personally?

[deaddmwalking]

MGuy, you're mostly right. Republicans are so bad right now that it would take a lot aimed at me, personally, to convince me to vote for anyone other than the Democratic candidate. But you're wrong about me lying about not being 'vote blue no matter who'. I am. I think you should be, too. I think that if something like 10% of the eligible voting population who either doesn't vote or votes for 3rd party candidates, we'd see a sea change in how things work in this country.

Revolutions - I don't support them. Kaelik is an asshole - everyone here knows it - so I don’t trust him to rebuild a more fair and equitable society. The only person I would trust is myself (and that should be true for everyone here - trusting anyone else with absolute power over you is crazy). I don’t think the majority of Americans are in favor of a revolution, and if they were I think a big portion are actual fucking NAZIs.

The other thing that you were wrong about is that I read the New York Times instead of the Washington Post (and the Knoxville News Sentinel and Le Monde).

[Kaelik]

Things that are not deal breakers: genocide. Declaring Greg Abbott the eternal president who decides what the border policy is. Saying that you would personally not let a single asylum seeker into the country or even give them hearings in violation of international law.

Things that are deal breakers to deaddm: being an asshole. Being literally MLK. MLK needed to be put down and stopped according to deaddm wholly shit.

I think perhaps at some point it might be worth wondering if "advocating for genocide politely" also makes you an asshole.

[deaddmwalking]

Things that are not deal breakers: genocide. Declaring Greg Abbott the eternal president who decides what the border policy is. Saying that you would personally not let a single asylum seeker into the country or even give them hearings in violation of international law.

Things that are deal breakers to deaddm: being an asshole. Being literally MLK. MLK needed to be put down and stopped according to deaddm wholly shit.

I think perhaps at some point it might be worth wondering if "advocating for genocide politely" also makes you an asshole.

Thanks Kaelik, you saved me from double-posting. Even though you're not really worth responding to. You're not even close to right. I don't think that MLK needed to be put down and stopped. I think that everything he did was within his Constitutionally protected rights and the laws that were used to punish him were in violation of those Constitutional rights. The courts (ie the system that MLK didn't overthrow) and the U.S Congress (another pillar of the system that MLK didn't overthrow) and the U.S. Executive branch (the third and final branch of the government that MLK ALSO didn't overthrow) worked together to pass and Civil Rights Act. That didn't SOLVE all the problems - we're still not even close - but I think there's been a lot of real progress WITHOUT A REVOLUTION.

So please, don't try to explain to everyone else what I think. Your head is so far up your ass that you literally can't tell my position from your own fucking feces.

Personally, I don't think that this thread is the right place to talk about the entire Middle East - just the Biden policies toward it - and I'm not interested in talking about the Biden policies regarding Israel and Gaza - not because I don't think they're interesting but because they're complicated and having a thorough good-faith discussion here where (oh my fucking god) people are literally demanding that the United States invade Israel. As for why I think that's a bad idea, I'd be willing to discuss it in another thread that was about the entire geo-political situation, not Joe B.

Bourgeoise refers to the members of the bourgeois class. The bourgeois are the class of capital ownership, they are the ones who own the means of production (ex: Jeff Bezos, the guy who owns your local car dealership, every single landlord, etc.). It can be broken down further (the petit-bourgeoise are exactly what that sounds like) but we're talking about people who make their money by owning things instead of selling their labor (labor-sellers are the proletariat, or working class). We are not talking about the ill-defined middle class of developed nations that are frequently a mix of bourgeoise and proletariat.

Sorry for the double-post, but your definition of bourgeoise is incoherent.

If our subject is a lawyer earning $2 million dollars per year but he stuffs his money in his mattress, he's a prole. If after 15 years of earning his $2 million salary he has stuffed all of his mattresses to bursting so he opens a pizza parlor, he's bourgeoise - even if he quits his job and proceeds to lose money every year for the next five years (but manages to expand to 6 locations). Deciding that losing money every year is bad, he sells his business for a huge amount (probably to someone with mob connections looking to use the pizza parlors as part of a money-laundering operation, but that doesn't matter). Now that he decides he's not going to work anymore he's not bourgeois unless he buys a townhouse and rents half of it on Airbnb in which case he is, but if he just sits on a yacht and lives off his savings he's not.

That's why I wasn't sure what definition you're trying to use to refer to modern American society. 70% of Americans contribute to a retirement plan (like a 401k) meaning that they own a piece of the means of production. If your definition of bourgeois includes every teacher making $30k per year but has $1k in a IRA I don't think it's a very good definition.

[Kaelik]

Thanks Kaelik, you saved me from double-posting. Even though you're not really worth responding to. You're not even close to right. I don't think that MLK needed to be put down and stopped. I think that everything he did was within his Constitutionally protected rights and the laws that were used to punish him were in violation of those Constitutional rights. The courts (ie the system that MLK didn't overthrow) and the U.S Congress (another pillar of the system that MLK didn't overthrow) and the U.S. Executive branch (the third and final branch of the government that MLK ALSO didn't overthrow) worked together to pass and Civil Rights Act. That didn't SOLVE all the problems - we're still not even close - but I think there's been a lot of real progress WITHOUT A REVOLUTION.

So please, don't try to explain to everyone else what I think. Your head is so far up your ass that you literally can't tell my position from your own fucking feces.

You wrote that people should not under any circumstances, do anything but "compete in the democratic process and follow the rules as written."

I responded with the below paragraph:

The people of France didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" during the French Revolution. The people of Chile didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" to get out from under the Pinochet constitution. The people of Bolivia didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" to undo the US backed coup. The Civil Rights Movement didn't "compete in the democratic process using the rules as written" to overcome Jim Crow.

You responded to this paragraph by saying that you oppose revolutions and don't trust me with absolute power, because you apparently oppose of all of these tactics and felt no reason to distinguish them. (You were right not to, they all used the exact same tactics to achieve their political goals by forcing them on those who disagreed.)

Right now, today, in 2024, you claim that you believe MLK is a really cool guy who only broke unconstitutional laws like laws against property damage and laws against interfereing with emergency services, and about how individual people own private property, which were all laws he broke.

This is to be blunt, absolute horseshit. If I advocated for specifically destroying property, occupying the personal homes of people who have done bad things, and blocking police and ambulance responses, you would, 100% consider that a revolution and oppose it. You don't think that MLK only broke unconstitutional laws, you think that MLK was right to break the constitutional laws he broke in services of opposing Jim Crow, because you learned in history class that he was right and you reflexively believe authority.

No one, not even your biggest defender, believes for a second you wouldn't have been whining about violent rioting MLK in if you had been alive at the time.

But I want to stress, that in fact, your new made up category wouldn't JUST allow me to destroy property and occupy private homes. Now it's okay to break laws if they are unconstitutional, and it's still not a revolution. I think gerrymandering and voter suppression laws are unconstitional, and in fact most people agree. Most fuck off liberals agree. The overturning of campaign election laws was unconstitutional, the gutting of the voting rights act was unconstitutional, and Greg Abbott being allowed to murder people without going to jail because he's the governor so murders are legal is unconstitutional.

But I'm willing to bet that the personal evaluation that these things are unconstitutional wouldn't make someone who voted on behalf of a bunch of fake people in multiple districts, stole from every single political campaign, and kidnapped Greg Abbott to lock him in a basement a "totally cool not revolutionary only breaking unconstitutional laws" kind of MLK guy that you support.

Turns out deaddm, if you agree that we are allowed to break laws about private ownership of property because you are fighting against unconstitutional laws, then in fact, all the revolutions you just said you opposed, such as the Estallido Social or the Pitita Revolution are back on the drawing board. Because they didn't break any laws that MLK didn't. To be fair, MLK never broke anyone out of Prison, so there's a tiny sliver of a difference between him and the French Revolution.

[MGuy]

So first off revolutions, just like any political movement aren't a single person doing a thing. Now I'm going to highlight this and point out that dead keeps doing this thing where he's adding unnecessary bits to things he decides to sure people he's not against. Earlier it was the idea he doesn't want everything burned down with no plan when there's no reason to assume a political revolution wouldn't have a plan.

I will amend the WaPo bit though. So you, know cut and replace all instances featuring dead only agreeing with an idea of WaPo gives him an article telling him how to think and replace it with the NYT needing to produce an article telling him how to think.

Now obviously dead would be anti MLK were he born in that era but anti MLK in the same way he's actually against any significant change in society. He wouldn't call for police beatings to keep the blacks in line but be far more concerned about how they should stop breaking so many laws and causing a general ruckus . Only then could he be able to fully be on board with seeking equal rights. He would be ok with an elected representative who did call for the beatings, however, as long as a D was in front of their name. So anti MLK in the same way the liberals MLK actually complained about are instead of being a card carrying klansman.