PKJC posted:

It sounds pretty cool having magical insight into the beliefs and motivations of people you have never interacted with before, how'd you come by that?

Lightning Knight posted:

I'm pretty much in the same place. I 100% believe democratic market socialism is the way forward but I don't believe that, that path is easy or quick and I have more of a willingness to compromise with less leftist people than I used to. As someone whose family came from Mexico to escape crushing poverty, I am immensely alarmed at the anti-immigrant, FYGMism, nationalistic America first attitude of much of the modern American left. Bernie Sanders opposed easing immigration restrictions and amnesty to prop up white unions and it immensely aggravates me because morally I don't believe the cousins and nieces and nephews I've never met in Mexico are any less worthy of not being poor and destitute than white (or black) Americans here. Nobody deserves to be poor. Regardless of what national borders the rich decided you belong to from birth.

Condiv posted:

she's responsible for not driving democratic turn out. she made a ton of choices that depressed our turnout and even drove a small percentage of democratic voters to vote trump (more than her positions drew republicans to her). you guys have been ignoring the basics of a campaign this entire election. people have been telling you you have to inspire voters and hillary specifically refused to do that. it was obvious since bernie's rise from practically unknown to having an arguable seat of power in what remains of the democratic party that economic issues were really loving important this election. hillary could've had an economic AND racial justice platform, but she chose to ignore the former because it conflicted with what corporate america wanted.

you keep on going on about people deciding their ideology was worth more than minority lives or something, but that is a facile view. it is ultimately and singularly hillary's responsibility to attract voters if she wants to be president. she figured she could corral voters into voting for her by orchestrating a hillary vs ruin election. her weak platform couldn't draw enough of the democrats who turned out for obama previously though, because she specifically ignored them.

she ignored them because she was a fool. that's also why she let an untested algorithm chart the course for her election campaign against trump.

if she had run a stronger campaign we would not have had trump. if she wasn't intentionally fostering trump during the primary, we might not have had trump.

ThePeavstenator posted:

Me but I also voted for her.

Suckthemonkey posted:

Yeah, I'm with you on that, though I'm coming from somewhat the opposite side: A white guy who did grow up in a union family with a father who complains about Mexico, illegal immigration, and NAFTA at every opportunity (which is indeed difficult to listen to and just gets me yelled at when I challenge him). True or not, he has the perception that these (and China) have led to the unemployment, lower salaries/benefits, and other potentially-related issues (e.g. pretty high rates of opioid abuse among his friends) he's dealt with, and these have been rough.I am absolutely certain that things would be completely different if he actually knew someone who went through the experiences that you and your family have (if he had been through them himself, he would be yelling about amnesty, immigration reform, etc. at the top of his lungs whenever he could), but he doesn't, so he just writes them off like they don't exist. The fact that he has such selfishness despite not being stupid (he did, still, vote for Hillary, but pretty much everyone else he knew did not) has made me very jaded toward the likelihood of overcoming this disconnect among others who try even less to think about anyone outside of their own bubble.

PKJC posted:

Yeah I wasn't meaning to direct it back at you I think it's an interesting subject that we don't have any other case study for, certainly not in the modern era. I mean have we had any politician get anywhere near that level of nonsense dumped on them for that long a time?

Non Serviam posted:

You mentioned laissez-faire, wasn't that a subforum for libertarians?

PKJC posted:

LF was more of a lefty weirdo fyadlite haven when the libertarians were here in dnd. Some pretty cool effort posts there and the initial version of our political cartoons thread but I didn't get to lurk it long before the 08 election and then RIP.

Lightning Knight posted:

I think it's important to realize and argue to people who don't know that China didn't steal their jobs. Rich white corporate owners did. Foreign poor people who have to work in atrocious conditions for pennies on the dollar are victims, not perpetrators. A starving poor person in Bangledesh didn't personally wake up one day and decide to take a job an American feels entitled to because historically they did it. Rich white people decided to outsource companies to cheaper pastures and the questions we should really be asking are a) why are foreign nations so poor and easy to take advantage of (hint: colonization and imperialism)? and b) why didn't we recognize the economic winds were shifting and have a strong social safety net prepared to help people transition to new lines of work (hint: because conservatives utilized the Southern Strategy to convince working class and middle class white people to vote against their class interests and dismantle the New Deal coalition)?

chumbler posted:

People deciding their ideology is worth more than minority lives "or something" is not a facile view, it is exactly what happened. Every person's responsibility to vote rests with them alone. If you forfeit that then you are stating you do not care about the outcome. Blaming Hillary for people not voting is trying to absolve the guilt of people who decided the outcome of this election on marginalized groups doesn't matter.

I don't understand how people complain that it's always the old folks and racists who care enough to vote, but oh voting isn't my responsibility, it's my party's responsibility to make me do it. It is, at the very least, disrespectful.

chumbler posted:

People deciding their ideology is worth more than minority lives "or something" is not a facile view, it is exactly what happened. Blaming Hillary for people not voting is trying to absolve the guilt of people who decided the outcome of this election on marginalized groups doesn't matter.

I don't understand how people complain that it's always the old folks and racists who care enough to vote, but oh voting isn't my responsibility, it's my party's responsibility to make me do it. It is, at the very least, disrespectful.

ThePeavstenator posted:

I don't disagree in spirit but it's the "person" vs "people" thing. As an individual, I knew Hillary was who I had to vote for and I can hold other individuals I know responsible for their vote or lack thereof. But people as a whole generate a bystander effect where individual responsibility gets lost and as lovely as it is, we have to play by the rules that "people" set if we want to win elections.

Condiv posted:

it's a facile view because it's based in a nonsense inversion in the relationship between voters and candidates. candidates inspire voters to vote that's why we have candidates instead of just voting for party platforms. hillary failed to do what she needed to do to win as a candidate because she depended upon and expected dem voters to turn out in obama levels for her. but obama was inspirinng as all hell.

Non Serviam posted:

Oh, OK, my bad then. Sorry for the confusion, I just went by the name there.
I don't consider myself from the left though.

Suckthemonkey posted:

Thanks for the response -- I'll certainly consider it. I'm in a weird contradictory place of sympathizing with socialist goals but wanting any path forward to being pragmatic and logistically feasible, and I guess that notion of having more power to help poor Americans (as well as most friends and family being American) has served as a starting point for me to support various policies that aim to protect them at the expense of poor non-Americans. It's not morally consistent or something I'm happy about, but I don't know a viable alternative given our current nation-state system that has a chance of doing so.

spotlessd posted:

Condiv posted:

it's a facile view because it's based in a nonsense inversion in the relationship between voters and candidates. candidates inspire voters to vote that's why we have candidates instead of just voting for party platforms. hillary failed to do what she needed to do to win as a candidate because she depended upon and expected dem voters to turn out in obama levels for her. but obama was inspirinng as all hell.

Lightning Knight posted:

Accelerationism isn't going to bring people around to socialism quick enough for it to matter in the face of global warming and we won't be able to build socialist movements in enough countries with military power to sustain such a push. I am of the pessimistic view that when the Soviet Union went authoritarian and abandoned the idea of actually being a socialist country the dream of worldwide socialism died. That doesn't mean to give up on socialism, but global warming is very, very bad.

This is all assuming accelerationism doesn't do what it usually does: fascism.

spotlessd posted:

"Accelerationist" is a really moronic way of describing people who actually get that capitalist crises are real and intractable. You correctly point out that the clock is ticking so I'm not really sure what the argument is, here. Fascism isn't going to wait for people to "come around" on socialism and socialists probably shouldn't wait until the only thing left to take over is a crater.

Lightning Knight posted:

By definition liberals in America are supposed to stand for the rights of minorities. By choosing to not show up to vote against an explicit threat against all racial minorities, Democratic voters showed that they care more about pandering than they do about the physical well-being of their disadvantaged brothers and sisters. They cannot and should not be absolved of this because minorities should never trust white liberals again and this is why.

Condiv posted:

lots of democratic voters turned out for hillary, and the election was nearly hers. that should speak to the strength of democratic loyalty considering the lousy campaign clinton ran. but loyalty only buys you so much and in this case it wasn't enough. we needed to attract people who weren't interested enough to come out against donald trump alone (because if you think her campaign was about racial justice, well that's just silly considering her actions), and we had ways to do it. bernie's platform was a good way, and supposedly clinton was going to adopt some of that. but instead she just dropped talking about that entirely. and that cost her turnout. you can whine and say that's not fair all you want but that's the objective truth.

not every person in the US is going to be a democratic loyalist. and that's fine, it doesn't make them bad people at all. but it does mean we have to pursue them if we want a strong chance of gaining and retaining office. hillary did not pursue anyone but loyalists with her fearmongering campaign, and so shrank her maximum turnout against cheeto benito

Condiv posted:

lots of democratic voters turned out for hillary, and the election was nearly hers. that should speak to the strength of democratic loyalty considering the lousy campaign clinton ran. but loyalty only buys you so much and in this case it wasn't enough. we needed to attract people who weren't interested enough to come out against donald trump alone (because if you think her campaign was about racial justice, well that's just silly considering her actions), and we had ways to do it. bernie's platform was a good way, and supposedly clinton was going to adopt some of that. but instead she just dropped talking about that entirely. and that cost her turnout. you can whine and say that's not fair all you want but that's the objective truth.

not every person in the US is going to be a democratic loyalist. and that's fine, it doesn't make them bad people at all. but it does mean we have to pursue them if we want a strong chance of gaining and retaining office. hillary did not pursue anyone but loyalists with her fearmongering campaign, and so shrank her maximum turnout against cheeto benito

Lightning Knight posted:

I think it's important to realize and argue to people who don't know that China didn't steal their jobs. Rich white corporate owners did. Foreign poor people who have to work in atrocious conditions for pennies on the dollar are victims, not perpetrators. A starving poor person in Bangledesh didn't personally wake up one day and decide to take a job an American feels entitled to because historically they did it. Rich white people decided to outsource companies to cheaper pastures and the questions we should really be asking are a) why are foreign nations so poor and easy to take advantage of (hint: colonization and imperialism)? and b) why didn't we recognize the economic winds were shifting and have a strong social safety net prepared to help people transition to new lines of work (hint: because conservatives utilized the Southern Strategy to convince working class and middle class white people to vote against their class interests and dismantle the New Deal coalition)?

Lightning Knight posted:

My argument is that ghoulishly rubbing your hands together while millions die and thinking that this will bring about worldwide socialist paradise is very naive. Humans backed into a corner don't run to utopian ideology, they run to ideologies that are willing to scapegoat. As it turns out, fascism's message of scapegoating racial minorities resonates better than socialism's message of scapegoating rich people. Historically, when socialism goes up against fascism (as political movements in a single country), fascism usually wins.

chumbler posted:

None of that has any bearing at all on the fact that people who claim to be progressive knew full well what a Trump presidency and republican congress would mean for marginalized groups including white ones and decided nah, I'm fine with that. The party and candidate bear no responsibility for that. It is a purely individual failing. It is the height of a FYGM attitude and is textbook deplorable.

spotlessd posted:

What on the loving planet earth are you talking about? The only time people turn to "utopian" (an insane way for a socialist to describe socialism, incidentally) ideology is in the midst of crisis. Whether or not fascism wins is a question of historical circumstance and one of those circumstances that tends to be decisive is whether the socialists are actually around to do anything about it. Its not a question of "allowing" people to die on the altar of glorious revolution, but rather recognizing the inevitability of this exact scenario and not being lobotomized by liberalism while its happening.

Lightning Knight posted:

My argument is that ghoulishly rubbing your hands together while millions die and thinking that this will bring about worldwide socialist paradise is very naive. Humans backed into a corner don't run to utopian ideology, they run to ideologies that are willing to scapegoat. As it turns out, fascism's message of scapegoating racial minorities resonates better than socialism's message of scapegoating rich people. Historically, when socialism goes up against fascism (as political movements in a single country), fascism usually wins.

Havelock Ellis posted:

I'm not from the US (UK) but this is largely what is happening, or will happen, across most of the West, I think. This has been boiling up for 30 years or more with the abandonment of the working class by parties that are supposed to strive for them in favour of cosying up to finance and other bastions of power, among other things.

People are starting to grasp that something in the system is hosed, even if they can't articulate why. Resurgent nationalism is co-opting the messages of being for the working classes at the expense of "the other" and achieving big gains or outright power here and in France, as well as other flavours of populism elsewhere.

This was always coming and is not a one off event or fluke.

It's the impression I get anyway from following this when it started cropping up in my country a year or so back.

Lightning Knight posted:

Classical socialism is supposed to bring about communism, an explicitly utopian ideology. From your argument I assumed you are a classical Marxist. If not my apologies.

I don't think we disagree in substance, I think we disagree in outlook. I am pessimistic that things will go very well for socialists even if we do fight. You don't seem to be. I don't think there's a meaningful argument to be had about that because it's massively hypothetical but in the abstract I agree that we have an opportunity to fight neoliberalism and move left, and that in the process we can fight against fascism as it takes hold across the industrialized world.

Edit: in other words,

Lightning Knight posted:

I didn't say anything about Hillary's campaign being about racial justice. I'm saying that an absence of care about a candidate that runs on a platform of white supremacy makes you a horrible person and a horrible liberal and claiming such status is preposterous if you couldn't be bothered to perform the literal bare minimum of civic effort and vote to protect your minority friends, family, and neighbors.

quote:

Again, this is not mutually exclusive with Hillary being a bad candidate or running a bad campaign and us needing to do better. This is about the fact that minorities are rightfully terrified that the white left will abandon them. We have already seen calls to form a white progressive party. We already had white progressives on this very board for the past year talk about how "identity politics" are a trivial sideshow to the true issues of class warfare. You might care deeply for minorities but there's a huge swath of white liberals who are only in it for the FYGM and this election showed that minorities are not safe from these people. You should consider why you don't think it's important to demonstrate to those minorities that they will still be protected, because right now nobody cares about them.

spotlessd posted:

Of course I'm a Marxist but I don't think of communism as "utopian". I mean for one thing most people accustomed to living as bourgeois parasites will find its kind of a bummer, especially any sort of environmentally conscious version of communism that has to confront a pretty sharply reduced standard of living in the face of ecological catastrophe. But even at a more theoretical level communism is the antidote to capitalist crisis, not capitalist wrongdoing. I know the sort of conventional way people are used to presenting communism is as a moral imperative (thats why I mentioned it), i.e., that its right for workers to overthrow their bosses, that exploitation is unfair and so on, but particularly in response the often-very-liberally charge that communism is "utopian" in a warm fuzzies kind of way it must be insisted upon that communism is in fact eminently practical compared to the great big apocalypse machine that capitalism has become.

Sorry for jumping down your throat also. I've been arguing with Democrats all day.

quote:

your candidate didn't put in effort and didn't inspire people to turn out. it's surprising you care about the plight of minorities and yet were wholly unaware that a lot of white people don't care about protecting minority rights. that's why you buy them off with other things (things that help minorities too!). that doesn't mean these people are actively against minorities, but you campaigned as if america had ascended into a racial justice utopia where white people were stalwart allies.

RandomBlue posted:

The plan behind Trump's cabinet selection process is suddenly becoming clear. They're human shields. He's making sure the line of succession is filled with people at least as bad as he is so that any potential threats will realize that things could only get worse.

Lightning Knight posted:

I always feel kind of lost talking to classical Marxists because you guys have a very particular rhetorical style where you're generally correct but generally make talking to you really depressing and lovely because the truth is the world sucks and we're all complicit. I've never thought about framing socialism in anything other than moral or technical economic terms and that's an interesting take on the situation, one which I don't really disagree with.

It's ok. I'm not really offended, I expect you and I would have a lot to disagree with and a lot to agree with, I'm just kind too drained to want to talk about revolutionary socialism in the aftermath of this election.

kartikeya posted:

This isn't about party loyalty, dude, it's about not electing a fascist and all of his rear end in a top hat friends to go gently caress the world, marginalized people first. It's not fearmongering, they made no secret of what they are going to do, and they are gleefully rubbing their hands together drawing up lists of exactly which things to gently caress and in what order.

Condiv posted:

this was not a convincing enough argument! first of all, it was coming out of hillary clinton, least trusted candidate in america. second of all, it wasn't enough to pull us the votes needed to win. you can cry all you want about how it should've been, but it wasn't and people were warning it wasn't for a long time. it was the economy stupid, hillary ignored that and if she hadn't she almost definitely would've pulled the number needed to protect minorities for another 4 years.

Lightning Knight posted:

I always feel kind of lost talking to classical Marxists because you guys have a very particular rhetorical style where you're generally correct but generally make talking to you really depressing and lovely because the truth is the world sucks and we're all complicit. I've never thought about framing socialism in anything other than moral or technical economic terms and that's an interesting take on the situation, one which I don't really disagree with.

spotlessd posted:

words

kartikeya posted:

Hi, I'm not the DNC, I'm someone who didn't choose that candidate but voted to stop the fascist who is wondering how my relatively privileged self and family are going to make it out of the next four years alive, while being horrified at what millions of people who don't have nearly as many protections as we do are going to have to go through because that six million stayed home and decided that none of us were worth stopping Trump for. Maybe you should go talk to the actual DNC instead of browbeating scared people on an internet forum.