Hey real quick, what voting system was Germany using during the 40s

I’m happy to look at new information if you have good sources. I tried to do a relatively quick google for relevant data, but if I’ve accidentally chosen poorly, I’m open to being convinced.

Absolute deaths also decreased under Biden

No they didn’t, you don’t seem to understand what I meant when I pointed out Israel destroyed all the hospitals, the hospitals in Gaza and the health services were the only orgs counting the dead; when they were destroyed that meant there was nobody left to count the dead and as Israel intensified the genocide in 2024, it split the strip up and invaded whole cities (like Rafah)

It is ridiculous to sit there and pretend absolute death decreased under Biden because nobody was left who would count the dead or that Israel leveling whole cities somehow magically meant the people escaped, when they didn’t escape when Israel was only leveling city blocks in the first few months

That’s why the chart is nonsense; it’s undercounting deaths and pretending Israel didn’t destroy the healthcare system, which was the only system that could count deaths, meaning the chart is even worse than guessing; it’s lying, intentionally or not

As for the ceasefire, I think it’s more likely that’s happening because global backlash is getting to be too much and risking their longterm political support as the younger generation grows older and starts getting into office, than it is for the same Trump who told them to finish the job suddenly grew a conscious and made it his personal priority to halt the genocide.

You see, you give the game away here, it doesn’t matter why Trump pushed the ceasefire through; it only matters that he did and Biden didn’t, but you’re more concerned that the ceasefire makes Trump’s prospects look better than the fact the ceasefire means less Palestinians dying every day

Persuade was a poor word choice, maybe. Forced.

No. No mechanism at all is forthcoming. You cannot explain the basics of what would actually happen to make them change. How a demand would be met. This is, as I have explained, because you simply haven’t thought through it that far. You don’t know. The point of your rhetoric is to try and convince people to vote Dem, not effect political change, so you have specific recommendations and explanations for the former and vague hand-waving for the latter.

Perhaps you’ll develop the courage of your convictions and address this and acknowledge that you have no idea what the next step of your plan is. The part where you actually get things to happen.

If things like protests didn’t have a chance of working, they wouldn’t bother brutalizing protesters

Actually, American cops just kind of like doing that to people. And politicians are beholden to capital and that is who they are actually responding to. Broken windows is $$$ for the bourgeois class. The chamber of commerce won’t give you money for your next mayoral campaign unless you put a stop to it.

Protests do not inherently challenge anything except for what is immediately in their presence or that has a direct material impact. Most are basically just parades for liberals to vent and obtain false catharsis. They need to do more, intentionally or accidentally, to have a chance of “working”.

PS, what did Democrat-run cities and then Biden do in response to the BLM protests? Short term, long term? Did the policy demands result in those policies? Did they stay policy? Did the exact opposite policies get implemented?

or getting schools to force protests to shut down.

That’s the Zionist lobby. Perhaps you’re familiar with it. They understand their project is heavily dependent on constant material support for Israel and use soft support as a way to secure it.

If boycotting Israeli goods was ineffective, Trump wouldn’t have tried blocking FEMA funds to states allowing or participating in boycotts.

Trump happily uses any proxy for “enemy” constituencies to go after them. Boycotts generally do not work, not directly. Their primary value is in spreading consciousness and creating opportunities for organizing conversations. If you had ever done any work at all on this topic you’d probably be aware of this, at least a bit.

People in here probably also have some great ideas for ways to amp up the pressure.

I’m sure they do but they don’t mean anything unless they serve organizing.

Look, I’d love to be more involved. As is, I don’t hardly have any time to myself, so god only knows why I spend what meager breaks I can get responding to people who tend to verbally abuse me for not being able to spend more keeping up with shit.

No, you are being verbally abussd for pretending at knowledge, having a much higher bar for evidence from others than from yourself, acting in bad faith, and for repeating genocidaires propaganda in support of genocidaires. I was actually patient with you at first until it rapidly became clear you were full of shit and trying to weasel out of having honest conversations. You want to lecture, not listen, and the topic is an ongoing fucking genocide done by the people for whom you advocate.

You can always, you know, shut the fuck up. You don’t have the knowledge to share opinions as you do. I don’t get down on people who approach these topics with appropriate humility: humility in accordance with their experience. You are a political baby. Ask. Questions.

Anyways, you can see that I correctly clocked your lack of taking any action at all or developing knowledge on this topic. Why do you think I clocked it? Do you think you should change your behavior?

But unless someone wants to help subsidize my bills, I’m barely staying afloat. I try to keep up, I try to learn from more than the corporate propaganda, I try to be mindful of where my money goes, and if I’m really lucky, I get to join in on a protest rarely. In a vacuum, yeah, there’s so much more I could do, but unfortunately, I need to not starve.

See the defensive posturing. See, I never told you to do anything. I told you to shut the fuck up about a serious topic that you don’t understand but are eager to spread misinformation and wrong-headed, genocide supportive views about. I point out that it is obvious you haven’t done anything on this topic because that would have exposed you to knowledge you do not have and because you obviously don’t really even care about it. It’s been 2.5 years and you’re still playing catch-up on the early days propaganda and organizing messaging? Why the fuck do you think you can lecture is about this?

Maybe if people like me, who are trying to do what they can but have hardly any time to keep up with this specific thing on top of all the other terrible things happening, were met with less vitriol when we came in here, you guys could persuade some of us.

You’ll recall that I patiently explained things in my first 3 comments before it became clear that you were bullshitting. Tolerating bullshitters saying things antithetical to correct politics is not good organizing or persuasion. It gives them the false impression that their views are respectable and that it’s okay to interject like this without seeking understanding. You would be removed from the pipeline of any competently organized left group on account of this tendency. Maybe put into a front group where you can do less damage, but really folks that don’t respond appropriately to correction eventually make themselves a big enough problem that they either get removed or create a split, wasting everyone’s time and emotional bandwidth.

You’ve been better than a lot of people, but you’re still not above calling me an advocate for genocide just because you disagree on how to stop it.

It is because you say to commit to unwavering support to vote for people doing genocide. You can’t even quote what I said because you are too afraid of the reality, too defensive, to resistant to correction, even though you are dead wrong.

And you dig yourself a deeper and deeper hole with every response. Alienating every person you think, incorrectly, you are on the side of. You are not us. You have to change if you want that to be the case. You must destroy your liberalism, and that includes dishonesty.

Not that my methods are flawed, not that it won’t work, that I am actually advocating for genocide

Quote me.

so while I appreciate that you seem to have mostly tried to engage in good faith and I thank you for that, I’m also gonna have to throw in a “fuck you” for that.

Poor baby is now parroting my words rather than directly engage.

You make a very valid point on the death count. This is information I’d heard and forgotten, and in my haste to find relevant info for the deluge of responses, I forgot that and failed to investigate the info. That’s my mistake, and I’m sorry for that. If you have accurate information, I would love to see it. Unfortunately, life has put too many demands on my time lately for me to keep up as well as I would like.

Then stop pretending you can lecture anyone here in this topic. You haven’t earned the right to speak because you have not done any real investigation. I am not joking when I say you need to shut the fuck up. You haven’t learned how to gauge your own knowledge or to have good faith discussions or even just take an extra minute to read and understand a two paragraph comment. 20 people explaining this to you isn’t getting through. I am not setting a high bar for you here.

So let’s keep it simple: shut the fuck up.

I understand that the lesser evil strategy, as you put it, is particularly unappealing around here, but I think the biggest problem is […]

Right so again you are the easy mark for the cynical PR folks of the Democratic party. You think Dems move right because they lose elections? The implication being that they would stay put or move left if they win? Because they don’t do that shit either. They only “move left” when the work is already done for them and it serves as a release valve for actual concerted, organized action, and this moves left are, 99% of the time, marginal and precarious - on purpose. They effectively don’t happen with regularity. Furthermore, rub some brain cells together and ask why they are allegedly courting “centrists”. Is it because they are considered people who don’t always vote Democrat but might be “getable”? Isn’t that the exact logic for why “left” electoralists should not vote for Dems until Dems court them?

But really, what they say is PR nonsense. They wanted to move right anyways and their strategists come up with excuses. The left wants things antithetical to the interests that control US electoral politics, the state, the daily lives of common people. So they need some rhetorical cover for why they can never do those things. Declaring for the 30th time that they have to court centrists to win lets them state an evidenceless need to stay away from left wing politics. There are actually many instantiations of this, I’m sure you’re familiar with them and probably mindlessly parrot them as well.

And you have simply never questioned their PR, I guess, and think it’s very answery to repeat it to those who have heard and analyzed it many times as if it is news to them. Are you able to read the room yet?

Aside from that, even if the Democrats were equally bad on Gaza

They are worse because they implement the same fundamental policies but launder it better in terms of the global liberal order and to folks like yourself who, is their morality weren’t clouded by a geriatric demon having a D next to their name incompetently repeating these framings, might actually do something against genocide rather than rallying support for genociders. Liberal electoralism is where social movements go to die. Ever heard that one?

the US wouldn’t have seized Maduro, wouldn’t have invaded Iran, wouldn’t be potentially preparing to invade Cuba.

If it weren’t for the more competently Dsmocrat-led liberal order you wouldn’t see Libya go from the highest HDI in Africa to a failed state with open air slave markets or the intentional breaking of both Minsk agreements to push Russia into a corner, and then get the reaction of invading Ukraine. See, you likely don’t even conceptualize those events as caused by Democrats because their PR is to launder them as if they are natural disasters or the impetus of petty great men far away, banking on you knowing jack shit about history or world politics.

While the larger political machinery of the US is Zionist, it is also clear that Biden and his admin had a deep ideological commitment to supporting Israel’s genocide, one that is incoherent in the Trump white house. Guy changes his mind or tries to find a grift every other day, cares about perception in his own way and, oh right, got that ceasefire rapidly that Biden strung you along with. You actually cannot say that it would have gone down with nearly the magnitude under Trump. And the international fallout would have surely been even larger, fallout that could have materially forced Israel to make earlier concessions. Again, Dems launder horror as if a national disaster or petty men far away, but Republicans are more obvious in their violence and spur opposition.

As for the Trump ceasefire, from what I’m seeing, it’s more slowed down than stopped.

I have been discussing the ceasefire to meet you half way because you are embedded in the false consciousness of smug bourgeois electoral brain. The idea that the ceasefire itself was barely anything but PR and a highly limited reprieve in the first place was true as soon as the first liberal shifted focus to it in 2023. And the Biden admin refused to even make that happen. Israel never honors ceasefires. You would know this if you knew the first thing about this topic. They stop when forced.

I thought trying to slow it down was a shitty option and really just endorsement of the genocide? Or is that only when we try to get Democrats to do it?

I think you are trying and failing to refer to something I’ve said.

Frankly, given what we’ve seen of Trump overall, I think the ceasefire is best ascribed to 2 years of mounting global backlash against Israel, not the guy who’d own the Gaza Trump Tower from the Israeli AI propaganda.

There you go just believing made up bullshitting that you yourself came up with. Funny how Biden couldn’t take advantage of that global backlash, huh? Hmm, what was he saying about Israel in light of that? Do you recall? How about his chief of staff?

If you have any evidence that attempting to get a ceasefire under Biden was just a stall tactic, I’d love to see it. I’ve heard the accusation before, but I’ve never seen it substantiated.

The fact that the moment he was out of office and political will changed it happened. The fact that the US is the patron of Israel and can pull that chain whenever it wants but usually doesn’t because it sees value in its attack dog. The fact that the Biden admin continued providing military, monetary, diplomatic, and rhetorical aid to Israel and couldn’t make a statement on the topic without making it about blaming Hamas. The constantly shifting propaganda intended to minimize the genocide, whether it’s those numbers you’ve gullibly repeated or the idea that hospitals were secretly military bases or that Israel wasn’t bombing them.

Oh, and the various articles and quotes regarding jack shit being done in that regard, e.g. https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/the-biden-administrations-false-history-of-ceasefire-negotiations/ since apparently you don’t know how to research anything that challenges the genocide apologetic horseshit you unquestionably repeat.

To be honest most of this is obvious, you just gave to put aside your kneejerk allegiance to a genocidal political party.

On making the Democrats change, like I said, first step is stop making the Republicans a viable option.

Yes you believe that the way to effect electoral political change is to promise to always elect Democrats and then things just happen once you give up the only electoral leverage you have. I’ve pointed out this self-defeating nonsense maybe 4 times and you avoid it because you have no response. Instead you just repeat yourself, which is a cowardly and dishonest habit.

If losing an election was enough to change their mind, they’d have freely released the election autopsy report

lmao did you even read it? The embarrassing part of the report is that they even did it at all, it’s like they took a drunk 15 year old and told them to go ham and paid them $300k or something for the trouble.

Establishing a disciplined voting bloc is not “the Democrats lose an election”. You haven’t even asked for any information at all about what a vaguely left but more realistic electoral strategy could look like. You just keep repeating wrong and bad ideas and I have to keep telling you that giving everything away all the time is not a way to build or exercise leverage for political causes.

PS the more realistic strategy will also ultimately fail but at least folks like you might learn from it and make connections to do more useful things.

owned the mistake, and started to pivot, but that didn’t happen because it’s still just as viable as it was because there’s still just as much chance the dumbest third of the country votes right

Actually they are a smarter electoral bloc. While the more reactionary voters have horrible opinions based on a deep false consciousness, their politicians actually throw them red meat, as things like increased marginalization are entirely compatible with capitalism and even grease its wheels. Dems instead are constantly receiving and believing increasingly elaborate excuses for why none of the modest things they want can ever happen so it’s time to get more transphobic to go after the transphobe vote.

while another third sits out

The most constituency with the most correct political understanding.

and as long as Republicans keep winning, Democrats will keep sliding right to “compete”

Now you’re repeating this nonsense within the same comment!

Hell, you yourself even admit that withholding the vote and costing them the election didn’t work because they’re not pivoting.

Admit? This is entirely consistent with what I’ve been saying.

Anyways I have to split this into two comments.

This is the incoherence of liberal electoral brain. If Democrats consistently win, then you, the voter, have even less leverage. Only close races are those where the voters “matter” to electoral parties. That’s why presidential elections focus on “swing states”, including the vast amounts of money going into ad buys and ground campaigns in those states. A Pennsylvania vote is worth way more than a California vote, i.e., a Pennsylvania voter has more leverage over the outcome. These are equivalent ideas, even though again, each vote is all but meaningless politically.

If Democrats simply win all the time, then y ou will rapidly learn to whom they actually cleave. Who butters their bread. It ain’t you. I mean, you should know this already, but I guess it needs to smack you in the face or something.

republicans would be forced to stop pulling so hard to the right

Spoken like someone burying their head in the sand for 30 years

You could also view it as Israel started it while Biden was in office, and he got the violence cut by 3/4 in half a year.

This isn’t Marvel superheroes kid. You don’t get to just makes things up and say, “look how good they did maybe”. While these death count trends can’t be read in any of these ways, the basic fact remains: Biden pretend to work on a ceasefire, Trump got one rapidly. Now, even the ceasefire is largely bullshit, even that is more PR than reflective of on-the-ground reality, but that’s the scraps that liberals were conned into accepting and the line that Biden wasn’t willing to cross against Israel. The lie of Biden attempting a ceasefire is laid bare already, so you should know that him working to “cut” the deaths is fantastical nonsense, literally make-believe. Again, Biden was a staunch advocate for Israeli settler-colonialism and the ongoing occupation for decades and materially supported Israel in its genocide to the hilt. He was not “working against it, but not enough”. He was working for it. He is a genocider. The guy you supported did a genocide and you still don’t have humility about it.

It’s time to drop the pretense that Biden just wasn’t “good enough”. He was a demon. The question is not how a good guy made a mistake, but how a bad guy conned you and how you’re failing to cope with it.

Both parties have been pushing for all those things for decades.

Well let’s look at how that worked out for us.

YOU KEEP REPEATING THIS FUCKING LINE SHUT THE FUCK UP. You have been told repeatedly why you are fucking wrong and you keep up this smug ass fucking attitude like you have it all figured out and you’re the smartest person in the room. You don’t. You’re not. Humble yourself and take a long look in the mirror at how you can justify voting for people that vowed to do all of this and more. Fuck you.

See you didn’t understand that I’m not insulting you so much as emphatically telling you that you are digging your own holes here. Nobody required you to share your ignorant opinions in favor of genocidaires and then keep defending them and deflecting despite knowing nothing.

You created your own problem and are now complaining about it like it’s just something that happened to poor little you.

when pressed on your deluded genocidal ideology your facade finally folds and you regress into a 13 year old

I ain’t reading all that nazi shit, free Palestine

I’m open to having my view changed if people are willing to share quality evidence.

Evidence was repeatedly provided to you and you keep going on the same insufferable diatribe. You aren’t willing to accept that you are wrong, you accuse of us being cynical and defeatist just for correctly pointing out no amount of voting blue will stop this. You have been nothing but condescending in this thread to people treating you with more patience and grace than you deserve.

The meaning has already been explained to you and is listed in the WHO citation of your own source. The Gaza Health Ministry is the officially-sanctioned death count producer in all of these “reports” and was systematically disabled by relentless genocidal bombing campaigns of the entire region, and particularly hospitals. Those counts are not accurate, they are a floor, and they are off by an order of magnitude.

The liberal-friendly source on the latter is a Lancet study from like 2024. But there have been many studies on this. Not that you need studies, because again, just knowing the basics of what happened on the ground and how these statistics themselves are sourced makes it obvious. Every major hospital was destroyed. That’s where they recorded these things early-on, primarily. Mass displacement during this hot genocide meant civil services were breaking down and the peopl resposnible were dead, hiding, or moving. This is all very pubilcly known information.

First, I think the ceasefire is better ascribed to time and mounting global backlash than it is to Trump

Doesn’t matter what the reasons were, what matters is Trump relented and Biden and Harris didn’t. Despite just as much, if not more backlash (because of their kayfabe of being liberal), they didn’t budge an inch and were so fanatical and dedicated they sacrificed the presidency to maintain support for the genocide, despite the fact internal polling and data was showing the genocide was costing them millions of votes.

That is why your arguments don’t make sense on their face. The DNC is STILL in lockstep with AIPAC and Israel, there hasn’t been any movement internally in the Democratic Party, so it’s ludicrous to assert the Democratic Party would magically change if they won elections without addressing the genocide. All you would accomplish would be to signal to the DNC that they’ve regained their power by being fanatical Zionists and that the American people don’t truly care about genocide, giving them a future permission structure to aid or commit new genocides

Trump’s revocation of USAID funding is projected to lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030

That nonsense assumes the vacuums wouldn’t be filled by long-suppressed native industries, markets and state initiatives that were undercut by cartel-like “aid”, as well there not being any international aid to make up potential shortfalls

It’s pure racist, paternalistic gibberish with no data to support it. USAID was a US intelligence front that actively destabilized local markets and funneled wealth and “aid” into the hands of corrupt compradors who used it to enrich themselves and their families, leading to underfunded industries and communities that likely already led to the deaths of millions

Also I should point out sanctions do kill millions of people and Biden intensified them against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, even beyond Trump 1 levels, Biden created new frameworks to expand sanctions by orders of magnitude, giving Trump a useful weapon in his second term…

But that’s not genocide, it’s spread across the globe, so it’s not really the same

Then why are you trying to clumsily use the myth of that claim to engage in genocide trivialization? Capitalism through social murder kills millions of people every month. It doesn’t mean genocide isn’t a far more qualitatively abominable development that leads to civilizational destruction far beyond the typical deaths caused by poverty and overall population size

The problem here is you don’t see Palestinians as people deserving of the same unqualified right to exist as anyone else. I bet a million fuckin bucks you’d have never made that sorry argument in relation to Ukraine or the Holocaust

so they lose the next election too. or they don’t. either way nothing changes via ballots

The biggest reason Democrats keep getting worse is their competition, not the fact we vote for them in spite of deep flaws. Every time the Republicans win, Democrats insist they need to court centrists and move right. Every single time America proves they’re willing to elect someone even worse, Democrats take that as a sign to degrade further.

Republicans pull the US political spectrum to the right while Democrats act as a one-way ratchet preventing us from sliding back to the left. Like any ratchet, though, they’re not an effective tool for maintaining heavy tension/torque/whatever long term. The process only works when Republicans consistently come alone and pull to relieve the pressure. If that stops happening, Democrats start failing at their jobs like a ratchet put under too much strain and breaking. And that would be trivial if more people voted. Republicans are highly dependent on gerrymandering and voter suppression to maintain power, so if leftists overcame their electoral defeatism and actually voted for someone who has a strong chance of winning, we could start making that a reality.

See, you cannot address the obvious contradictory nature of your rhetoric. You can only deflect to repeating the original false rhetoric in a way that obfuscates it.

But I appreciate the arrogant insistence that anyone who disagrees with you clearly just fails to understand the topic as deeply as you do.

See, you just can’t stop lying. Straw men to play the victim, over and over. You came here in ignorance, you admit to having no organizing experience on this topic and failing to keep up and you demonstrate this plainly, which is why I extracted this from you: you were not behaving in accordance with that reality.

Just be honest.

Realistically, we should be voting in primaries, too.

lmao holy shit you think this is insightful.

That’s the best way to influence the Democrat party, especially if Republicans are failing to provide an actual opponent.

Is that so? Have you ever run a primary campaign? Do you know elected socialists? What are their experiences? What can they accomplish? What is their relationship to the party?

If the biggest threat to a candidate isn’t from outside the party, it must come from within, and their biggest fear becomes losing the primary.

Wrong on both counts. Their biggest fear is losing position and status within the party apparatus and as you can see, this easily survives election losses. This is why they will lose elections instead of move left on key topics. A primary is only disruptive to some climbers. And when they do perceive that threat, which was always present even when Republicans win every other election (you still believe their lies about needing to move right implicitly), their response is to fight if with their entire apparatus. To punch left. So to the extent that losing a primary is feared, it does not translate into a left shift. That is not how the party works. The nominal moves left are individual politicians (alleging to be outsiders) winning those primaries instead. The party reacts to them, even moves right in response.

If we make it crystal clear that a push to the right is intolerable

Intolerable? Didn’t you promise to vote for them in the general regardless? Do words mean anything to you? Champ, you tolerate genocide.

suddenly, trying to court centrists and fleeing Republicans is suicide. Instead, every time we get pissed at Democrats, what do we do? We elect a Republican. What do the Democrats do in response? They see moving right as viable and do so.

Goddamn you just can’t stop repeating yourself

I try to get exposure to non-corporate news, I try to join protests when they’re close enough and I have the time, but just staying fed and housed takes up an absurd amount of my time. Despite that, I try when I can. And when I end up discussing it with a bunch of people who profess to care deeply and know what must be done, I don’t get genuine suggestions for how to help or anything like that.

You barge into an enti-genocide space promoting genocidaires and whine when you are criticized for bad faith behavior after receiving tons of responses trying to help you understand. You reply to those responses by digging in your heels and demanding sources and repeating your original false claims ad nauseum. The fact that you think you aren’t the problem here is itself the problem. No humility in the face of knowing your own political naivete, happy to make excuses and blame everyone else, while you still belabor falsified talking points and ignore what people write to you.

You would not be useful in a pro-Palestine organizing space. You haven’t learned to decenter yourself or accept criticism and would drag everyone around you down. Politics is not about you. To quote a great thinker, “get the fuck over yourself”. You will only be useful when you can subsume yourself to the cause, and that includes prioritizing learning about it and developing correct opinions on it. This isn’t a hobby or a media franchise to argue about on the internet, it’s not Superman vs. Batman, it is a world historical project to end unfathomable oppression.

I get verbally abused and accused of advocating for it

See, you still don’t understand why people have written you off. No responsibility taken. You fundamentally don’t understand how to speak or act and are still reacting purely defensively. This is why I have given up the pretense of respecting you: you were acting like this long before anyone was directly pointing it out. Basically everyone gave you leeway - at first.

I’m here with an open mind

You have demonstrated the exact opposite. You are intransigent, deflect from criticism of your ideas, and lead with condescension. You have a false self image.

and trying to engage in good faith

Clearly this is not the case. You seem to not even recognize evasive bad faith behavior even when it is laid out for you specifically and with examples. Your response, even then, is continued evasion. You have to take responsibility eventually or you’ll always have these experiences.

Responding to comments does not make good faith by the way.

taking the time to read and respond as best I can to almost every single one, I’ve probably responded to closing in on 20 comments with 20+ notifications remaining,

That’s not very many. This… demonstrates good faith? Personally, I think good faith is about responding germanely, taking feedback seriously, and not being dishonest in interactions.

and so far, only one or two have tried to actually engage and provide information.

This is a lie. I’ve seen at least six or seven and I’m not even trying to keep count. I’m one of them. You have a pattern of trying to ignore correction, including with specific examples, and trying to cling to the original falsehoods and repeat them as nauseum. Again, you need to spend time reading not replying one by one. It’s clear your focus is on rescuing your bad and harmful ideas comment-by-comment target rather than developing understanding.

The vast majority have only tried to make me feel like an idiot for disagreeing.

You should feel like an idiot for disagreeing, your ideas are bad and harmful, they aren’t your item, and you’re publicly doubling down on them over and over again. That’s a foolish thing to do. At no point were you forced to open your yapper and do any of that.

Now, if we focus just on the original sin of saying some bad and harmful ideas, you’ll see that the direct responses are correcting you. They explain how and why you are wrong. It is only after you double down and act like you need to be convinced (as if you knew anything in the first place) and did no research of your own and seemingly have no actual interest in the topic beyond “vote for genociders” that the disrespect piles on. And it’s not unique to this comment section, you also exhausted the patience of others discussing Ukrainian neo-Nazis where, again bathed in liberal talking points and the associated ignorance, your proceeded to engage in bad faith, treat your own baseless claims as the default truth and demand explanations and citations from others lest you withhold your agreement (oh no!).

I’ve learned a little about the situation as a result of it, but most of what I’ve learned is that Hexbear is full of bitter assholes who will pile on to verbally abuse me for disagreeing.

Yes it’s our fault that you promoted genociders and responded in bad faith to correction. If only we had responded with patient explanations first! Oh wait. We did and that didn’t work either.

Sounds like a you problem.

I never said things just happen later

Yes you did. You were extremely vague about what happens later, so I am describing this accurately. Despite me prompting you five or six times and explaining why you have nothing to actually do after promising to perma-vote for Democrats no matter if they do genocide, you still have nothing and refuse to address why you have nothing. You just deflect over and over again.

and I explicitly said to do it and then go do whatever you think is most effective.

It is amazing that you think this is a different plan from “and then things just happen”.

This is the type of thing I’m talking about when I complain of people putting words in my mouth. They avoid things I explicitly said to make it easier to belittle me and what I’m saying.

No, I accurately described what you’re saying: you have no plan for after voting for Dems no matter what. This vague hand waving lets you pretend otherwise, but we know very well that you don’t even care about the political project, you don’t actually think about how the changes would actually happen, and yet you pretend to be explaining how they do.

The point was never to stop doing what’s most effective. The point was to elect whoever of the available candidates will be most vulnerable to those effective things.

No, the point was “vote Blue no matter who” and then you don’t really have any actual thoughts. You think things will just happen after that. Somehow after giving away leverage you will gain leverage. But you don’t know how. You say they will be moved left, pressured, forced. But you don’t know how. That’s not your priority. You haven’t thought about it. And when I correctly point this out, you aren’t honest about it.

Everyone here is so sure they know the Right Way that I’m not even gonna try to say what that is

You don’t even know what it is, and there is still variety here so it’s not just one thing. See, you are still fibbing and trying to save face. Just acknowledge ignorance when you have it. People who do know things can easily clock a fibber. You aren’t actually saving face, you’re building a bad reputation.

but whatever you think it is, one of the two potential victors is more vulnerable to that than the other.

Your thinking is to devoid of mechanism that you believe Democrats are always more vulnerable to every single possible means of opposition than Republicabs. Literally. This is your impregnable belief system, it does not require evidence or coherence or logic.

I think Democrats would be easier to break overall compared to Republicans. I don’t think either will be easy to break, but that’s all the more reason to push the odds in our favor by influencing who we’re trying to break.

See how you pointlessly repeat your original claims and beliefs? Do you not even recognize the irony in repeating this in response to what you quoted? Do you not see the irony in hand waving about what actions are taken after voting for Blue No Matter Who? You’re just proving me right.

Or maybe I’m just not intimately familiar with every community on the internet.

And yet you have assumed we don’t know electoralism and repeatedly try to explain it despite it being quite obvious that we’ve heard this all before. I’ve told you repeatedly that we have. Yet you can’t stop yourself from trying to place yourself in the lecturing position, completely pointlessly talking about FPTP as if it addresses anything we’ve said (it doesn’t). You’re really just navel gazing, repeating your own understanding to shore up your own confidence, but it’s condescending and demeaning to the people directly in front of you.

Like I keep saying: shut the fuck up and read. You don’t know who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about. Until you realize this you cannot learn and be less harmful.

I saw a post, I made a response, turns out everyone here has a very particular set of views, which is becoming more and more apparent as I work through the dozens and dozens of responses I got.

This is seemingly your first experience with the left. This is how little you understand politics. So why are you still arguing?

I didn’t seek out Hexbear to start shit with a specific community

Your claims and behavior would be wrong and unacceptable regardless of context, though I’m sure you’d find plenty of agreement in genocide tolerant liberal spaces.

I can stumble across your posts if anyone in my instance subscribes to the community, and you may think it arrogant to point that out here on Lemmy, but I’d remind you you seem to have forgotten there are ways to find yourself commenting here without intimate familiarity with the community norms.

Why am I supposed to care about this? Community norms? When did I say anything about community norms? Your bad behavior is bad in any space.

Split comment again

Fine, I tried to speed things up a bit because I have a deluge of notifications over this, but let’s go back to it.

Poor baby.

Yeah, as you present it, it doesn’t sound like it makes any sense. In the greater context of the US political environment, though, I think it makes sense.

So yet again you are going to avoid critically analyzing your logic and just repeat your vague handwaving stories than deal with the contradiction. You can’t acknowledge the fundamental self-defeat aspect, you have to avoid discussing it. See, this is dishonest behavior.

What happens every time Democrats lose to Republicans? Democrats use it as an excuse to court centrists and move to the right.

They also say that when they win. Time to reach across the aisle and get things done, right? You need to expand your thinking to actually consider the alternative because your post hoc ergo propter hoc is cherry picked. The reality is that Democrats always want to favor their bourgeois machinery, their donor networks, their media access and relations, their think tank and NGO graft network, and the personal professional mobility built into that system (party climbers). And this applies a filter for who has power and what they do with it.

What happened in Nevada when DSA DemSoca electorally gained nominal control of the party? Do you know?

So if every loss pushes Democrats to the right, not the left, how exactly do you expect to push them left by costing them elections?

You’re again confusing me for someone who thinks electoralism and “pushing Democrats left” is viable. I am simply pointing out that your rhetoric is self-defeating and illogical and that if you did want to push Democrats left you wouldn’t subscribe to the theory of throwing away all leverage by promising to vote for them no matter what. You have clearly never tried to make anything happen electorally nor analyzed your inevitable policy failures.

I’ll remind you that your logic is to have literally no situation in which you don’t provide a Democrat support, at least so long as you don’t believe anything is worse than genocide. And somehow, through the magic of storytelling, this becomes a political strategy for you and “the left” because the demons that fight you every step of the way will become less focused on opposing you when their alleged right wing opposition needs less attention. Because again you cannot spell out what happens next and how.

In what way does that not make sense? What is the real conclusion? Where did ideas of electoral defeatism originate, and what purpose do they serve?

You still haven’t answered those questions by the way. And they don’t actually apply to me. Just be honest and stop deflecting.

Let’s look at this the other way around. Democrats lost, and it was very likely expressly because of Gaza.

It is marginally because of Democrats doing genocide. That tipped the scales to a degree that you can attribute the loss to it in a “if they had those voters they’d probably have won”. But Democrats lose for a much larger host of reasons that accumulate socially over time and breadth of political life. The pro-Palestine voting bloc is nascent, it’s barely organized, it’s not very disciplined, it’s full of fools who think they can “change the system from within” because they either do not understand it or stand to fund their nonprofits through proximity to the party. So it’s marginal.

It is, however, useful to understand that Democrats preferred to be genocidal than win the election. And that’s who you say to vote for no matter what. Then you get prickly when it’s pointed out that this makes you an advocate for genocidaires.

They wrote up an election autopsy on why they lost. They then released that report, admitted they were wrong, and pivoted to supporting Gaza, right? Right?

See you belabor this straw man re: withholding votes because you don’t know how to seek knowledge or understanding. You falsely presume I have your same misunderstandings of the party and electoralism. You’re projecting that into me and really just arguing with a less politically incompetent version of your own politics, not mine. But this doesn’t elevate your even less competent logic to be better than the alternative I’ve dangled in front of you.

Yeah, about that, didn’t happen. We just continued it while also starting shit in a bunch of other countries.

It’s almost as if there’s a strong political continuity regardless of whether it’s a D or R in power. Do you wonder why that is?

Or maybe it’s because things got worse when we elected Trump, with invasions of Iran, Venezuela, potentially Cuba, and giving Israel a chance to go at Lebanon.

You’re just deflecting again. No, that is not why you are opposed here, which is what you are supposedly responding to with this retort. You don’t even make sense. You just avoid. Go back and actually engage.

There’s not much to say here other than I disagree, but I’ll include it to avoid being accused to ignoring anything again.

There’s plenty you could say. You could, if you don’t understand how this could be the case, ask why I perceive that. You could explain your disagreement, though you’d probably have to ask questions first. But you’d rather avoid understanding.

Who do you mean when you say “actual advocates”, and what strategies are they recommending? This is too vague for me to really address, but it sounds potentially useful to know.

Those who organize for the liberation of Palestine from imperialist settler colonialism occupation and genocide. There are many organizations that do this. It’s not really vague, you are just unfamiliar with this topic. You confuse your ignorance for a communication problem.

Well hey, that leverage got used anyway, so let’s look at the results: tried to withhold the autopsy report,

See you don’t even read responses before replying so you belabor useless talking points I’ve already addressed. When will you start reading and stop talking so much? Organize yourself.

to pivot at all. But at least we got involved in Iran, Venezuela, potentially Cuba, and helped Israel get into Lebanon. Is that the success you hoped for? Because it kinda sounds like you won nothing and helped make things worse.

So the Democratic Party would rather lose the election than stop supporting genocide. What does that tell you about how well your strategy of actively throwing away leverage and then doing nothing will work? At no point has this made you think, “gee, these people are in power in the party and so opposed to this they’d rather lose the election. Maybe I need to think about what keeps them, nevertheless, in power in the party”?

Get the fuck over yourself.

Nothing in what I said is egotistical or self-promoting, it was simply critical of your empty proclamations of caring about brown people while advocating for their genociders. And clearly it struck a nerve.

I’m not okay with any of it.

You are an open advocate for the people genociding brown people. You’re proud of it. You think it’s smart and condescend towards others about it.

Thinking that things would be better under Democrats isn’t a glowing endorsement of them.

I already told you exactly what it is and “glowing endorsement” isn’t anywhere to be found. See how you have to invent criticisms that are easier to respond to than what was actually said? You aren’t coping with the reality.

Like I’ve already said here, Democrats move right when Republicans win elections. We should not just vote them in and hope all is well.

And yet, again, your only conception of left electoral power is to vote for Democrats and then everything else kind of just happens with hand-wavy “force” and “demands” with no mechanism. Your logic is to throw away leverage and only then will things happen, somehow. You’re very light on the details of the other steps because you haven’t thought about them. I know this. You know this. This is because you are parroting the logic of the genocidaires’ party, cynical logic to disenfranchise their voters and keep the money train a-rollin’, and they don’t want you to really think about how the rest of the steps would work so they don’t spell it out for you.

We should choose who we think is more susceptible to being pressured, and then heap as much pressure on them as possible through whatever means you think will be most effective.

“Force”. “Pressure”.

With what? You still can’t even think of what you’d actually do once you have promised to always vote for them.

Sure, totally that and not the fact that we knew things would get even worse under Trump, like with the multiple invasions and abduction I’ve already mentioned.

Yes that is part of the early genocide apologia. An immediate pivot to lesser evil rhetoric even in the face of your politicians doing genocide. I recognize your rhetoric because I’ve seen it scores of times for 2-3 years. There is nothing to doubt about this.

I could have phrased that better, so I’m sorry for the impression it gave. I did not mean defeatism on the topic of Palestine. I meant defeatism on the topic of elections.

I am actually pointing you towards less incompetent electoral strategy so you can eventually learn its many failure modes and why, and more proximally, stop saying ridiculous bullshit we’ve all heard a thousand times.

You’re right that I don’t get to do as much as I’d like on the topic. Unfortunately, life has put significant constraints on my opportunities to stay well informed and participate.

No investigation, no right to speak. Shut up and ask for opinions and advice because you don’t know anything, you just repeat cynical party propaganda.

PS poor sharecroppers informed themselves by candlelight after 14 hour days so cry me a fucking river for trying to excuse your proud genocide apologetic ignorant proclamations. You always have the option of shutting the fuck up.

Split comment again.

Democrats use it as an excuse to court centrists and move to the right. So if every loss pushes Democrats to the right, not the left, how exactly do you expect to push them left by costing them elections? In what way does that not make sense? What is the real conclusion? Where did ideas of electoral defeatism originate, and what purpose do they serve?

Can you demonstrate this with data or something? I know that DSA members have been getting elected all over the place since Democrats started losing to Trump with 90% of all DSA members being elected since 2019. I also know that taking money from AIPAC is increasingly seen as politically toxic and elected Democrats are condemning Israel’s genocide.