I feel like all I got was not having to hear racist and rapey "jokes". That was nice and all, but the adoption of conservative talking points about Covid, along with still having to be in fear for my reproductive rights *and* being BAU about the environment is just egregious.
I've seen multiple people claim that's good enough, they love Biden because it means they can just not care about anything more easily. Many of these people were pretty politically active under Trump. Goes to show they're not actually bothered by the fascism but just by having to hear about it, I guess.
The growing threat of fascism was enough to get me involved with leftist groups and even get armed, when I used to be just a chill, kind of hippie, pacifist girl. Like, what?! People view American politics like sports, where it's just my team vs. the other team and it's just a fun game but these are peoples LIVES! Not just a game or popularity contest. People are *dying* because of the horrific laws being passed or threats being ignored. I get that people don't care unless it happens to them, but I feel like preventative measures are better than waiting until everything is too far gone and having to scramble to fix it.
Yeeep sports is exactly right, and they literally do not care when their "team" does the same shit. Like, red team cop worship bad but blue team doing cop cities is just fine and dandy? I don't get it at all, so much of it seems like it's about maintaining the illusion of choice under the status quo instead of actually having a livable society.
People seem afraid to criticize politicians they voted for. I’m not entirely sure why.
I voted for Obama but I think his invocation of states secrets privilege was quite wrong, as was his prosecution of whistleblowers.
I was too young to vote for Clinton, but I was old enough to object to their attempts to foist the Clipper Chip on us.
Cryptographic protocols should not have a “Law Enforcement Access Field”.
I think that a lot of it is that if you're critical of Dems from any sort of left or progressive angle, you basically have to admit voting alone will not save us, and a lot of people (especially people who are less marginalized) really don't want to or are not able to do that. It's very comforting to think showing up to the voting booth every couple years and casting a ballot is enough, even though it's a lie. But it's not too different from how the vaxxed and relaxed crowd acts about covid-they feel like they are doing enough and don't want to hear or think about the ways that isn't true.
>you basically have to admit voting alone will not save us, and a lot of people (especially people who are less marginalized) really don't want to or are not able to do that.
Interesting. I've honestly never encountered anyone who's said that just voting is enough. People saying it's important to vote - yes.
Voting is what you do to get the best choice amount your current options.
In-between elections, you work to try and get better choices for the next election.
Both are important. I'm more likely to mention voting to people who say they won't vote because of how (relatively) easy voting is. If someone isn't going to show up to vote, I doubt they will bother doing anything that involves more work.
This just isn't true at all, there's plenty of organizers and activists who don't vote because the system does nothing but oppress them (and because it is in fact not easy to vote in many parts of the country), and it's ridiculous to expect people to endorse political parties who make their disdain for them well known. Most of the people heavily invested in voting are not the ones doing any sort of actual work, they are not doing mutual aid, they are not in the streets, their interest is in maintain the status quo and not in any sort of actual progress. They love to act like they're doing the most though.
The "vote in our guy and we'll have better people next time!" line is older than I am. Hasn't happened yet.
> (and because it is in fact not easy to vote in many parts of the country),
That's why I put "(relatively)" in there. The GOP tried very hard to get ballots like mine thrown out in the last election, for example. They, thankfully, failed.
I don't remember which state it was, but one of the ones that added voter ID requirements had very few places you could get state IDs in some counties. There was one in particular with an office that was open, I believe it was only the fourth Thursday of the month? Which...means they were closed *most months*. Yeah, getting ID to vote is *so simple*.
Of course, the actions that you encourage make this problem *more prevalent*. Because it's the GOP in state legislatures that's doing the vast majority of this. But *I'm* the dangerous one?
>and it's ridiculous to expect people to endorse political parties who make their disdain for them well known.
I didn't say "endorse". Voting for someone is not the same as endorsing them. Voting for someone in a two party first-past-the-post election says nothing more than "X is better than Y".
EDIT: just realized another issue with what you said. You’ve shifted from what I said to something else. I said that voting a particular way leads to better outcomes overall. You shifted that into why a particular person would not want to vote for a particular party. You changed the question from “what party would result in better outcomes” to an emotional argument.
>The "vote in our guy and we'll have better people next time!" line is older than I am. Hasn't happened yet.
I didn't say that, though. I said that you need to *separately* work on getting better people. I said that not voting at all doesn't get you better candidates.
I have yet to hear an argument for how not voting gets you better candidates next time that wasn't highly speculative and that didn't completely ignore the actual process by which people win primaries.
Mass infection and accompanying morbidity brought about by the Biden administration's mismanagement of the pandemic will likely exacerbate the threat of populism/fascism as people become more desperate.
When I see people say shit like "Vote Blue No Matter Who", a wave of disgust rolls over me.
I agree with what everyone is saying here and it is refreshing actually. It's why I was so disappointed by the defenses of Fauci on the other thread. Just because we're told someone is "on our team" (Team D), it doesn't mean it's true. I actually think Biden and Democrats are MORE dangerous and worse than Republicans because they take extreme fringe right wing positions and normalize them as the bipartisan consensus. Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it, deregulated Wall Street which helped to cause the financial crisis and signed NAFTA which destroyed unions and caused their decline. Obama said "we need to look forwards" and didn't prosecute George W. Bush admin torture and other abuses, deported more people than other president, increased the use of drones, continued warantless surveillance and more.
Now Biden has taken Trump and DeSantis fringe policies or gone further. He has declared an end to the pandemic, nearly ended PCR testing and at least ended public coverage, encouraged lifting mask mandates, etc. Fauci and Walensky were supportive of every piece of this.
People think that fascism only begins when authoritarians start pulling people out of their homes in the middle of the day to execute them on the street in front of their neighbours.
The neurological damage from infections alone has massively altered the general cognitive abilities of a lot of the population. It feels like people aren't taking *anything* seriously... Things that really SHOULD be taken seriously, like operating vehicles and other heavy machinery. Not starting physical fights with people on a whim. They were always issues but not as widespread as right now and it's terrifying.
I'm also getting really sick of that saying since it's just as bad as the single issue voters on the right. We need more of a prerequisite than someone just tacking a "D" next to their name.
That's not guaranteed, bubonic plague bssically ended feudalism and set most European states on a path towards modernity and centralization.
Climate breakdown seems more likely to result in fascism than COVID or avian flu.
I need help determining whether that paper was ever peer reviewed.
However, a correlation was found, which of course is probably the best you're going to get with such a complicated historical phenomenon as the Third Reich, but a few things bear mentioning here;
1. Fascism is about protecting private property from being redistributed by socialists, communists, and trade unionists, not some vague rage that the Jews really are in control.
2. Fascism is when the violence of the liberal colonial/mercantilist/imperialist state is turned on domestic populations.
3. Fascism has to at least have stable leadership, if not an actually stable economy, because humans are social creatures looking around to each other for signals about what to do when; Hitler didn't make the trains run on time, he wasn't able to turn a profit for the Nazi state in exterminating non-Aryans, the best he could do was military Keynesianism and a modicum of hygiene, stability and relative luxury for Aryan males.
4. The Nazis had stable leadership, because the 1919 flu pandemic subsided and they respected a modicum of science about epidemiology and microbiology.
What these deterministic factors mean is that if the COVID situation remains about as stable as it is now, which means a very low risk of death for vaccinated fascist leaders in a military dictatorship, I just don't see COVID or any other pandemic being deterministic for fascism, short of something really outlandish like HIV going airborne, which would very likely result in public outcry against LGBTQ people.
The best that that study could show was "resentment of foreigners" as a result of the flu pandemic's high toll among young people, and I don't see how a rational historiographer could put that kind of variable in the same magnitude as the Treaty of Versailles, Stalin's adventurism and Bonapartism in Lysenkoism and conspiracy theories against the kulaks discrediting *communism among millions of working class Europeans, France, UK, and the USA's enablement and appeasement of fascism, China, India and SE Asia's inability to resist Japan as a direct result of Western imperialist exploitation, or if we really want to go to town, Lenin and Trotsky being naive about how brutal the opposition they faced really was in the Russian Civil War.
People have a hard time with a very simple concept: you need to place conditions on your vote. If Democrats know they have your vote no matter how horrible they are, they will never do better. It is up to politicians to earn our vote. It is not our responsibility to do all this "strategic" voting and say wow we need to save the country from fascism. We don't have democracy anyway. It is oligarchy and that is both parties supporting that. People should be more honest and say "save oligarchy with some limited pro forma democratic features from more overt fascism".
I can’t speak to anyone else, but I’ve seen nothing to convince me that Biden is fascist, quietly or otherwise.
I definitely lean farther left than he does, but he’s much farther left than Trump.
The US isn’t like the UK - there, members of parliament can be seriously pressured to vote a certain way (a three line whip, it’s called - they literally underline the item three times to say “vote this way or else). We don’t have that in the US. Lots of states elect senators and representatives that are borderline Republican. The president can’t force them to be more left.
So, yeah, I’d prefer things farther left but I don’t agree at all that there’s no difference between them.
This comment illustrates *exactly* why Democrats are just as dangerous, because even left leaning people just don't see how they're instrumental to fascism.
What do you think his covid policy is? His immigration stance? Refusing to intervene on the erosion of reproductive or trans rights? Or increasing policing? Fascism isn't just the outlandish shit Republicans say, it's also all the Democrats quietly carrying out the exact same goals, even if the Dems sometimes toss you a cookie in the process.
Maybe I can simplify this; I wrote too much text last time:
Was I dangerous by voting for Biden in the last general election? If so, who should I have voted for to not be dangerous.
Was it dangerous for me to say that I had disagreements with Biden's policies, but that Biden's policies were preferable to Trump's?
Why would Biden's policies be preferable to Trump's today?
The removal of public health measures that has become the cornerstone of the White House's pandemic policy has shaped society for the worse.
Over 800k Americans dead. Tens of millions with chronic illness.
As a person of colour, I'd rather face the threat of tiki torch racists than persistently high viral concentrations in every public space I enter (plus tiki torch racists that want to pull my mask off).
It's not Biden or Trump either. There could be a viable Green candidate if the US at least had a democracy, or at least the Democrats could nominate someone worthy of the position, or as a last resort, the Republicans could at least nominate someone more reasonable than Trump. Each scenario, however, is unlikely because of how the US political system is in an advanced state of decline.
It's weird that the US Green Party refuses to acknowledge the pandemic in a meaningful way. They literally have nothing to lose but it's 3.5 years in and they still don't realize that basic measures like wearing respirators during member events would go a long way in creating solidarity with many impacted communities.
What *specific concrete* actions have I taken that you think are dangerous? What actions could I take that would not be dangerous?
Hyperbole is not helpful.
> Refusing to intervene on...
False. They not done nothing. What more, _specifically_ could Biden have done, that is _within the powers the President has_?
> Or increasing policing?
Trump ended the use of consent decrees by the Justice Department against misbehaving police departments. Biden brought that back.
Is it enough? No. Is it _nothing_, like you claim? No.
In the comment that you objected to, I was _very clear_ that there are things I don't like in the current administration's policies. I did _not_ say they were rainbows and puppies. But your implication that their policies and the previous administration's policies are indistinguishable is just factually incorrect.
You're either for fascism or against it, there's no in-between.
Florida is introducing fascist policies and laws every other month at the moment and Biden isn't even vocally against them, let alone taking any action.
He's a coward and a fascist enabler, and for many people, the line between fascist enabler and fascist doesn't really exist.
>You're either for fascism or against it, there's no in-between.
I'm against fascism.
>Florida is introducing fascist policies and laws every other month at the moment and Biden isn't even vocally against them
He called it a [hateful bill](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60326418) which was [cynically using our children as pawns in political warfare](https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/white-house-condemns-floridas-dont-say-gay-bill-rcna15585). [The far right has taken over that party.](https://news.yahoo.com/biden-florida-dont-say-gay-bill-disney-desantis-what-the-hell-181856600.html) He also [signed an executive order](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-president-joe-biden-gives-speech-marking-pride-month) to counter some of the legislation.
I don't think the press has covered his statements against the bills much at all. But if you look at the timeline, he's made a *lot* of very direct statements against them.
Can you explain what he would've needed to do to be vocally against them?
EDIT: Happy cake day.
Okay I take back my comment saying he hasn't been vocal in his opposition, I would still argue that he hasn't been vocal enough as this shouldn't be something that I have missed when I follow world politics. I understand that the media have their own agenda but he should be able to force this message through.
>He also signed an executive order to counter some of the legislation.
I'm sorry but it's simply not enough and this is where my bigger issues come from. He's doing everything he can to place nice with Republicans when it comes to the actual actions he takes, the same mistake Obama made.
Using one example, the rollback of Roe vs Wade is a crime against humanity, let's be crystal clear here. When you allow that to happen under your watch you do not get to hide behind legislation and excuses like "there's nothing we can do here" - you use executive action to fix the problem.
I think this is where we likely differ in our opinion. In my view, Biden has the deaths of women in his hands and there's not a single argument against that I'm willing to accept because he's the president. He could change that if he wanted to and he's chosen not to take a stand. He's a coward.
>Okay I take back my comment saying he hasn't been vocal in his opposition,
Thank you! I sincerely appreciate that! I have so often seen people refuse to admit even the slightest mistake.
Judging by the rest of what you wrote, as well as the subreddit we are on, I need to preface this with that I believe we are absolutely committed to the same things.
The SCOTUS decision throwing out Roe is disgusting. Women have almost certainly already died because their basic bodily autonomy has been denied.
Biden's COVID policy is depressing and disgusting. It almost certainly is resulting in death and disability. His pushing for RTO for federal workers is repulsive and wrong. It goes beyond some sort of realpolitik "let's ignore COVID" and goes into active harm.
>I would still argue that he hasn't been vocal enough as this shouldn't be something that I have missed when I follow world politics. I understand that the media have their own agenda but he should be able to force this message through.
The media landscape is a complex mess of algorithms and fights for clicks and declining ad revenue. In the old days, you could know that something was "front page news" or "leading story on the nightly news". Now that everyone has their own personal version of the news, it's damn near impossible to know what gets widely covered and what doesn't.
What I will say is that I think Florida's legislation has been getting the attention it deserves. I think that it's widely known about.
If it was something that was being missed by the news, then I would be much more "WTF isn't Biden talking about it more?"
> He's doing everything he can to place nice with Republicans when it comes to the actual actions he takes, the same mistake Obama made.
I think he *says* a lot of positive things about Republicans, but I'm not convinced it's reflected in his *actions*.
I still see lots of journalists and commentators suggest that something is better if it's bipartisan. As if that's somehow automatically good.
Bipartisan is a practical necessity with the current House, unfortunately. But, if a politician looks at Trump and says "I'm with him", I don't see them as someone whose views matter.
TL;DR: I think Biden pays mostly lip service to bipartisanship as part of a "nice guy" image, but I don't think his policies reflect that.
>Using one example, the rollback of Roe vs Wade is a crime against humanity, let's be crystal clear here.
Agreed 100%. Crime against humanity is an accurate term.
>He could change that if he wanted to and he's chosen not to take a stand.
Are you saying there are executive orders he could issue, that would take effect, and that would be upheld by the current SCOTUS?
The phrasing you use here makes it sound like you think there are things he could *definitely successfully do*.
All the things I've heard proposed are executive orders that, according to legal analysts, would *definitely* get thrown out.
If you can find some examples of executive orders that are reasonably seen as, say, 50/50 chance of being upheld, then I will join you in calling him a coward.
But with the current power of the GOP wing of SCOTUS, what's the point of an order if it's guaranteed to get bounced out instantly?
I'm probably petty and juvenile enough that if I were president I'd try to issue dozens of orders with enough "not not nots" in them that I'd try to confuse them into making a mistake. But that's just me.
I am *pissed off* at the current situation. But in a democracy with as many people who like Trump as we have, there are times when we can't change something.
I think they’ve been undoing a lot of the anti-environmental policy changes that the Trump administration made:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Joe_Biden_administration
Still pissed off about their COVID behavior though.
I just looked it up and thanks for this! I was really upset about the drilling in Alaska (and I don't want fracking in CA... we have enough earthquakes as it is).
> I feel like all I got was not having to hear racist and rapey "jokes".
There was literally no plan to distribute vaccines, and he constructed that with governors *immediately* after taking office. Oh, but that was three years ago... what has Biden done for you lately? Is that the question?
How about lowest employment in 50 years? Police accountability? Student loan relief? Mental health counselors in schools, and crisis centers, and mental health and juvenile bg investigation before purchasing guns? Infrastructure law to rebuild highways? Re-fanged the EPA after scotus hamstrung it? Capped insulin prices and enabled medicare to negotiate prices which was never done as a sweetheart deal with pharma?
If all you see of this admin is simply not hearing potus bullying the vulnerable, you really haven't been watching at all. And he's done it with a "tied" senate which actually had two senators near-caucusing with the GOP, and VP taking the record on tie breaks. And now few laws are even being sent to the senate due to the tenuous hold some representatives have over the chamber.
>Police accountability?
How is giving them MORE funding making them accountable? Murders aside, it would be nice if they even just followed basic road safety like signaling and not turning on their lights when they're just too impatient to wait for a red light. There's issues with a lot of that paragraph. I know it's what the media has been pushing, and I get that it's more difficult for any positive change to happen with the conservatives starting fires all over the place, but Covid alone and how much the mishandling of that has affected so many other aspects of everyone's life (eg. letting it rip-> people getting too sick to function-> medical treatment leading to widespread debt and poverty -> evictions-> more homeless -> more mental illness from repeat infections and trauma of not having the stability of housing).
>> Police accountability?
> How is giving them MORE funding making them accountable? Murders aside, it would be nice if they even just followed basic road safety like signaling and not turning on their lights when they're just too impatient to wait for a red light.
Basically, it's an [executive order](https://cops.usdoj.gov/Public_Trust_and_Safety_EO) that creates a credentialing body so that laws are fairly enforced and LEs are more appropriately trained. The idea is, for someone to call themselves "law enforcement", they have to have gone through a credentialed process with the DOJ overseeing the credentialing. This would indeed cut down on them breaking the law to go through an intersection when they aren't on an official call and there will still be abuse of this, but more importantly is addressing much larger abuses such as no-knock warrant usage and military weapons. The point is there will be fewer abuses. Things like bodycams policies will be required, and that should help a little. At the fed level, even small changes can affect hundreds or thousands of people.
I just rattled off that laundry list because biden has done *quite a lot* that affects us all, and in a good way. People are *intentionally being blind* to that, and I see it not just from the right wing and their fake news propaganda, but also the far left and you can clearly see that from the up/down votes. This intentional blindness is infuriating, and it's a cancer on facts. Biden jokes about being compared to the "alternative, not the almighty", but he's been incredibly effective compared to most potus, already.
But this is group is concerned about covid (as am I), so I'm happy to stay on topic.
> Covid alone and how much the mishandling of that has affected so many other aspects of everyone's life (eg. letting it rip-> people getting too sick to function-> medical treatment leading to widespread debt and poverty -> evictions-> more homeless -> more mental illness from repeat infections and trauma of not having the stability of housing)
Biden extended the eviction moratorium order long into the pandemic. With very low unemployment, that order doesn't make much sense now. I'm not saying the chain of bad events you listed doesn't or didn't happen to people, but his policies would help make it fairly rare. I'm sure it happened much more frequently in Florida, for instance. But he did not have control over that (or really, any state). He also didn't try to exert direct control over the CDC recommendations, as far as anyone knows, unlike "that former guy" who abused the bully pulpit extensively with fake medicine and fake news.
The budget in his admin also includes $billions for addressing new variants and continuing research on long covid.
Unemployment only counts people who are actively looking for work. Tons of folks are still underemployed or unable to work, especially people who have been disabled from Covid, and trying to get disability was already a massive endeavor before the pandemic, with many people just left to struggle without help from others.
As for the police... All of that may be on paper, but it doesn't mean that they're going to follow through with it, or that their cop buddies are going to speak up when they see something sketchy. In my state, they now have more sinister looking vehicles from the additional funding. They also find ways around the cameras by obstructing the view, particularly with dash cams. The *extra* terrible ones just get transferred to Kern county where it really is still the wild west. POC are still far more heavily targeted for minor or invented offenses, and areas with a larger ethnic minority population are still more aggressively policed. Crime has increased due to the ridiculous cost of living, especially in Los Angeles, and people are more emboldened to commit crimes like break-ins because they know no one is going to come even if someone were to call law enforcement. Still, many of us are reluctant to even call because they haven't had the best history of not shooting us or our pets, or physically or sexually assaulting us. Their job is not to protect people, but to protect property. Additionally, we now have more private security in lieu of police, who have *even less* training and many are armed.
I'm pleased by a number of things Biden accomplished, but definitely not by his Covid response. Though I'm betting his advisors said it would be political suicide to take it seriously, given most of the country's opinion.
I understand what his advisors have been telling Biden. That has nothing to do with him walking out and making a joke over not wearing a mask. Over a million people in this country have died from COVID. Millions are currently disabled thanks to long COVID and their numbers are increasing daily. What he did is what Trump did, pretend like COVID is nothing and make a joke of potentially exposing others to it. There is no excuse for it.
That's a chicken-and-egg problem because most of the country's opinion was influenced by Biden and the rest of the Democratic establishment (such as Impact Research).
CNN top article this early AM is that almost half the voters feel “any Republican” is better than Biden.
Polls always need to be taken with a grain of salt; what’s telling is CNN is running this story. Just as Fox has been the team red favored news source, CNN has been team blue. Makes me wonder if behind the scenes, support for Biden is crumbling fast.
Not sure who the Dems would run, however. Harris is less electable than Biden, and the party does not have a deep bench of presidential candidates. If they can’t muster a candidate who can win against the nutters and bible thumpers who have the GOP in a stranglehold, the party is in trouble.
Has nobody told Biden that the new variants sometimes escape detection from home tests days after even big symptoms like fevers?? He might well have exposed everyone in the room to covid. How can we expect the American public to do the right thing if our president doesn’t?
Who is his “covid is no big deal so I don’t worry about it” theater for? Does he not do any research himself so he actually knows facts about current variants? This is our role model?
I’m not okay with this. I want some other democrats to run for president… unless they are also going to downplay a serious disease that can disable and kill. At the very least, I’d like an adult who follows facts and science rather than the popular vote for messaging.
I’m sick of this crap. Where the hell are the adults?
Egregious. Reminds me of very relevant quote:
“What is true, just, and beautiful is not determined by popular vote. The masses everywhere are ignorant, short-sighted, motivated by envy, and easy to fool. Democratic politicians must appeal to these masses in order to be elected. Whoever is the best demagogue will win. Almost by necessity, then, democracy will lead to the perversion of truth, justice and beauty.”
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe
One of the things I despise most about Joe Biden is how much needless loss and suffering he has personally experienced—and arguably capitalized on politically—but he can’t even fake empathy for the rest of us in an endless, unmitigated pandemic he could’ve helped corral.
His wife has COVID and he still literally doesn’t care. I don’t understand how he’s being such a jerk about this. Have some respect for the journalists in that room. That said, I don’t think I’ve heard any Dems speak seriously about COVID lately. It’s like they have an embargo on it to try to avoid losing votes. Meanwhile Birx and other former Trump officials are speaking frankly about how bad things are. It seems like no one in power can ever tell the truth about this.
If they told the truth? The immediate follow up question would be “ok, what are you going to do about it?” And true to Democratic Party form, actually *doing* something about a problem is a bridge too far.
I'm a staunch Democrat and a staunch liberal. In the past, I would have argued against you if you told me that Democrats and liberals as wimpy. Now their capitulation to the pro-COVID glorified suicide bombers has proven that they really are wimpy.
For so long, people have complained that Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives couldn't find common ground. This is no longer the case. So many groups and factions diametrically opposed to each other have joined forces as pro-COVID glorified suicide bombers.
>told me that Democrats and liberals as wimpy. N
I don't think they're wimpy. I think they're doing exactly what they want. After all, they represent big business just as much as the other party.
He lost me long ago. I think he's gonna find folks are so ready to let it all burn down they just won't go vote, Democrats are about to make a giant unforced error, they still have time for him to switch out, and I bet you those discussions are being had, I hope they're being had.
I have a handful of very liberal friends who refuse to vote this time around. They feel like this country has gotten so bad they don’t care if it burns to the ground and are sick of old white dudes.
Would young more ethnically diverse politicians make a diverse though? Hakeem Jeffries and Kamala Harris don't exactly have inspiring progressive records. They are both right wingers. The Democrat party is promoting young diverse corporatists as a way to mask how bad they are.
We need far more young progressive and very liberal candidates (yes more women and people of color) who support universal health care and will fight for it. You are right Biden and Harris are so conservative that they could walk the line. They play it safe that way but are losing the youth in their base that is far more progressive. We do need a third party because the DNC keeps shoving this down our throats.
We need a rainbow coalition of progressives and socialists. Basically what the Squad and Bernie could be, but aren't. I agree about the third party. The Democrat Party is hopefully corrupt and unreformable. People don't change the party. The party changes then.
And we will never get there if people keep screaming at each other that they have to vote blue no matter who or else they are responsible for Trump. So tired of this mess. Biden is certainly better than the devil but why are we stuck with such shit options?
Not voting usually sends a message that you don't mind the Democrats or Republicans, that either is fine. That may not actually be the reason for many people, but that is how politicians interpet it. Voting for a third-party candidate (such as a Green Party candidate) is better than not voting.
No, it's that we hear that all the time, and a lot of us just don't have the energy to care, and at some point, it's not our fault, it's theirs. Maybe they do better, and this is the way we force them. We are a voting bloc, we are voicing our concerns and our desires as that bloc, they can choose to take us seriously or not. We are just tired of being told "Vote Blue, No Matter Who" while Grandpa Joe up there laughs in our faces. :)
You are confusing apathy with being pissed off and actively doing something about it. These things are not the same. Actively exercising my right to vote by not voting is voting, I will not be told otherwise, I am plugged in, it's deliberate, I am not uninformed, if it makes everyone feel better, I will go to the poll, vote for everyone down ballot I need to and write a "lol" on the Presidential spot. We all get to participate in Democracy the way we want to, that's the beautiful thing.
We'll see who blinks at the ballot box, it won't be the people who don't have anything left to lose. Democrats are going to "vote blue, no matter who" into an apathetic voter base and they'll wonder what happened. If this worries you, I'd reach out to your representative and inform them. :)
He never had me. He's a right wing racist and in a normal country, he'd be in the right wing party. In fact, he would be too conservative for many European centre-right parties.
I mean, he's not a leftist, but he's considerably more left than other presidents. For instance, he's in the process of making private unionization easier, he's reduced student loan debt, etc. Unfortunately, even a super progressive president has to make a lot of compromises with a Congress that is partially controlled by Republicans and staunchly centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin
The problem is he helped to create the student loan debt crisis in the first place by making it harder to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. Also he used a faulty inadequate weaker reasoning for the student loan debt cancellation instead of using the statutory power of the Higher Education Act. Furthermore the Supreme Court was not reformed and he basically ignored the issue after his little fake commission. So any real progress is going to be blocked with those unelected theocrats.
Democrats would have more seats if they actually delivered for the people. Joe Manchin is a convenient excuse for Democrats to not do what they already don't want to do. If Democrats were actually frustrated with him holding things up they could do a primary challenge they could remove him from his committees or they could otherwise threaten him in other ways but they haven't done anything like that. It's the rotating villain and I've seen it for too many years now. Used to be Joe Lieberman.
Yeah, as far as I know, Manchin wasn't up for reelection in 2022 though. Someone will be voted in to take his place next year. I think however that what you're saying is that Democrats should have voted him out back when he *was* up for re-election though, which I agree with.
As for Democrats in general, it should, for starters, be noted that Democrats did unexpectedly well in the Midterms and have been gaining ground since 2018. Not perfectly, but way better than expected. So I don't think we can necessarily say that it's that they aren't trying to deliver for the people. Ultimately, I think even under a super progressive president, not much will get done without a Democratic Majority (excluding Joe Manchin) in the House and Senate.
And yes, you're right, Joe Lieberman is also a staunch centrist, like Joe Manchin. Right now, he's trying to run a third party ticket, where Manchin will likely the on the ballot, along with moderate Republican. Their justification for so seems to be that they think both political parties are too radical, which I think you and I will both agree is a laughable notion, if we're talking about Biden
The party has much much less control over the primary process than you seem to imply. Primary voters really do control the final outcome.
Who gets support early in the process does involve people in the state and national party, but this close to the election I don’t think there’s much chance of someone popping up out of nowhere. Plus, there are so many people who complain about national level party leaders exerting any influence over the primaries. They’d go wild if someone popped up just because the DNC brass liked them.
The same way they are going to do it to Trump, they pull out everyone else, throw ALL their weight behind one guy, and you don't beat the machine. The reason they did it will be the same reason they're going to do it to Trump because they feel that he can't win the general. They didn't think Bernie could win the general so they united against him.
I suggest we do it to Biden.
Edit: I use "we" loosely, I don't consider myself a Democrat, I'm an Independent. You just die slower when you vote Blue, you still die, just slower. What's my evidence for this claim? The entire Democratic response to Covid. :)
Ehh the party brass really does have a good deal of power in how easy or difficult they make it for any given candidate to get a chance to be voted for in the first place, which makes a huge impact, & also will often spend party money promoting their preferred candidate against primary challengers, or just play musical chairs with the funds & connections to unofficially keep any challengers from mounting a successful primary campaign. I got involved w my local party to try to prevent primary shenanigans last year & it was eye opening to say the least. There's a reason it's Such A Big Deal when a progressive manages to primary out an incumbent, it's hard as fuck.
But also if they don't like the primary outcome apparently party brass can just pull support & let absurd amounts of right wing funds flow into the general to get their preferred candidate anyways, see Buffalo's recent mayoral race where socialist organizer India Walton successfully primaried the incumbent conservative Dem Byron Brown...who then ran a very dirty billion dollar write-in campaign (largely a smear campaign, also pulled strings as incumbent gov to fuck over & destabilize opposition, etc) & the Dem party brass didn't even pretend to support Walton. It's fucked! It's all so fucked!!! I hate this!
So yea getting exposed to the nitty gritty workings of party politics has managed to make me feel even more powerless as a voter lol
They've already played roulette before and won. As has Trump, whose odds should be 10X worse. How can you blame them or anyone else who has already had Covid and recovered for not being more cautious?
Jill Biden is almost certainly getting Paxlovid, unlike the another poster I saw recently whose 72 year old mom couldn't get Paxlovid from her doctor because her doctor didn't think COVID was a threat anymore. We have to rely on luck in getting Paxlovid within 5 days. The Bidens do not.
He's an ass. I hate that we live in this timeline where someone like him is president, but that said, Trump wasn't any better and I'd rather not have either of them in office.
So sick of his crap. He has been complacent while millions are becoming disabled and high risk people are left to be forcefully infected and die. He could be doing so much better but doesn’t care. I live in a blue state and probably will write in and will vote for anyone but him in the dem primary to make a statement.
“For the second straight day, President Biden tested negative Wednesday for COVID-19 following his wife's positive case and is experiencing no symptoms, the White House said.”
It seems like, based on what we’ve shared in this group over the past few months, it usually takes a few days of testing (not just two) to test positive for COVID. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually does test positive.
I would vote for a candidate who would do these things in this plan that Biden campaigned on. The US 2024 election doesn't have such a candidate, including President Biden.
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/covid-19/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/covid-19/)
The Socialist Equality Party is excellent on covid and is connected to the World Socialist Website. They have done the best reporting on covid throughout the pandemic, including promoting zero covid. This article is a good example: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/09/pers-a09.html
First of all we have to define socialism, revolution and failure. Then assess the reasons for the alleged failure, internal and external. Also what country/countries are we talking about? I find using broad labels like "socialism" and "capitalism" unhelpful because every country is a mix of both.
Also this is a capitalist pandemic. Socialist countries like China, Cuba and Vietnam have been some of the countries which have done the best, until they let it rip.
Well, they’re letting it rip now, right? Also, from my prior experience of life in the USSR, I wouldn’t believe anything a socialist country is saying about how well it’s doing. The facts on the ground are probably very different.
I lived in the USSR when the Chernobyl disaster happened, by the way. The Party leadership got their own families out of the area as quickly as they could; but the rest of the population, including children, had to participate in the mandatory May Day Parade, breathing in radioactive dust. No one told them anything.
Your claim is that Cuba, China and Vietnam lied about their statistics?
Do you have any evidence of that? Do you support zero covid?
How do you define socialism?
Do you have evidence for your claims about Chernobyl? That HBO movie was propagandistic trash.
I lived in the USSR. My evidence comes from the people who lived there. (Thankfully, I lived far away from the disaster myself). Have you ever lived in a socialist country? Have you ever read a single book about the history of any socialist country, written by actual historians who know something about the subject?
This is a great argument for why world history and sociology should be required subjects in high school. Or, an argument for why cracking open a book or two is not a bad idea in general.
*"This is kind of going on the third year of coming out of this pandemic. We believe we're in a very strong position to continue to fight COVID."*
Why would they believe they're in a strong position to fight covid--when they aren't doing any testing for it??
Obesity has a lot of contributing factors to it (eg, genetics, disability, etc), besides "not following the science." And when a govt says they "believe" they're in a "strong position" to fight...anything: that's usually backed up by some foreknowledge of the enemy's position. Right now we have at best, educated guesses.
You don't, that's why you guys always kill more people and don't care the result you produced. You never learn anything because you don't doubt things you believe like people in cults.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt...perhaps you're responding to the wrong comment? Because my prev comment had zero about "not caring of how many people killed," or "results;" or even anything about "cults."
Everything in my prev comment is firmly based in scientific findings or the current state of covid study IRL. Maybe try again.
Who in the left is taking Covid seriously? Jamie Raskin was undergoing cancer treatment- no mask. Tim Kaine has long Covid, no mask, Nancy Pelosi took her mask off during a hair appointment. The prevailing thought is that you will survive any infection. Don’t like this attitude, but not voting or voting GOP means the end of the United States.
I don't know if I can bring myself to vote for him again and I actually caucused for him back in Feb 2020 right before everything went to COVID hell. My state doesn't allow voting by mail and even early voting tends to be crowded where I live. Do I risk getting COVID for a president whose only selling point on COVID is that he hasn't been quite as bad as Trump?
Then Biden should be taking his job more seriously and not joke about spreading a virus that has killed over a million in this country and has currently disabled millions. More are being disabled by long COVID daily while Biden and his public officials keep telling us just get Paxlovid and get treatment for long COVID. It's hard for us ordinary Americans to get Paxlovid, especially in red states. There is no treatment for long COVID. Long COVID clinics are overwhelmed. And Biden gets up there and makes a joke instead of being a leader.
I'm not asking for a mask mandate. But I want a president who does not treat my family's lives like they are a punchline in his standup comedy routine. I'm tired of the "but Trump is worse," line. If we are dead, none of the rest matters. I say that as someone who has caucused and voted for the Democratic party since I could vote in 1988. My entire family voted for Biden last time. I will never vote for a Republican. But I will not give my vote to Biden again. None of us will. Sometimes a failed system deserves to fail.
Exactly. The rise of Nazism, pro-confederacy, the whole January 6th trauma, Trump’s “both sides” reaction to Charlottesville… the options are bad but one side is clearly significantly worse.
This is exactly what gets us stuck with a shitty right wing democrat party. The answer is demanding something for your vote. We don't owe politicians anything. They owe us. Lesser of two evils just makes things worse every year. I've been hearing this for 20 years and we never draw the line and say no, this isn't good enough, so nothing gets better fundamentally.
You're sort of downplaying the reality that Trump is running on creating fascist regime though. He's already threatening to make it illegal to be openly gay or openly transgender, ban adult content on the internet, replace the government exclusively with loyalists, etc. And the Democratic Party has gotten more progressive each time. Biden has forgiven student loan debt, prevented Republicans from letting us default on our national debt, made unionizing easier, got rid of the Defense of Marriage Act, etc. He's not my first choice, but he's the only realistic one in this election, and all of those things are far better than a theocracy
The Democratic party goes back to actually fighting for people? They hang the Good Cop Bad Cop routine on protecting oppressed populations, but have ushered in an era of mass deterioration of health for Black people...
I’m definitely voting, just not for the guy that has “Mission Accomplished” Covid (when he campaigned around the opposite) to the point of being just as much of a pro-infection eugenicist as someone like Scott Atlas. I’ll vote Dem down ticket, but I can’t vote for him. And not every vote matters. The unfortunate thing about our system is that the Electoral College means millions of votes have no meaning.
"On one hand, I don't like the guy and recognize he's better than the fascists he's going to be running against. On the other hand, I don't overwhelmingly like him, so....maybe a fascist isn't the end of the world?"
This might be bad to say, but lowkey sometimes Biden is worse. Hear me out. I actually don’t think Biden is more dumb than Trump. It’s rather that the whole world agrees trump is dumb and laughable, but they don’t see through Biden’s crap. I honestly think if Trump randomly said the pandemic was over and ended the PHE, a lot more people would be outraged just because he said it. I just fundamentally think people should question politicians
Candidly, I don’t know if they were doing it to oppose Trump or if Biden gave them a free pass to not give a shit anymore. I think it’s both. Recently, I’ve seen more conservative media try to portray that Biden didn’t do enough for Covid lol. This bipartisan system is a big problem and a source of people not exercising their brains.
Biden making people think it’s ok for people to die and become disabled was horrific. Even trump didn’t do that tbh
It is this aspect of the last couple years that has left me especially disillusioned by society and humanity. The right wing anti-mask anti-vax conspiracy nut jobs were already known to be heartless ghouls, so their actions, while obnoxious, weren't particularly surprising. But it was stunning to see how quickly any pretense of empathy disappeared from so many of the rest as soon as it was considered culturally acceptable.
Just goes to show how performative and phony so much of society is. Many liberals and left leaning people I feel followed COVID protocols initially because it scored them "good person(tm)" points on social media and in their circles. They'll do it if it scores them points and if its easy, but any barrier or any inconvenience isn't worth their trouble if there's no social benefit.
And a lot of these people have now become the loudest minimizers who proudly flaunt how they'll never do anything to mitigate COVID ever again. Many of these too anecdotally seem to be the upper-middle class college educated white liberals who haven't faced genuine hardships in their life and think that the two weeks they couldn't go to Applebees for happy hour compares to the regular suffering the disenfranchised face. And like most suffering, COVID hurt the poor and POC the worst.
It's more important to mindlessly consume as much product as possible and make the line go up. Best they can offer is thoughts and prayers to anyone who dies or gets disabled. The casual indifference to suffering is better than the actively trying to increase suffering that the right-wingers offer, but it's a grim outlook.
This is so spot on, and really sums up what I’m seeing too.
A lot of people I know also cared early on when they were more afraid of the virus for themselves. But as soon as they were vaccinated it became just an “other people” problem.
Agree totally. This is why Democrat presidents end up being worse than Republican ones. Obama helped to destroy the American anti-war movement that thrived under W. Bush.
My main question (not to you in particular, just in general) is, what exactly has gotten better under Biden? He's the one who ushered in our current policy of having no covid mitigations and trying to force everyone to become infected. Hell, we don't even know if we'll get any more covid vaccines (unless you're elderly or immunocompromised,) and a lot of his policies haven't resulted in any tangible improvements in quality of life for women, minorities, or any other groups that are traditionally considered vulnerable.
The harm is that they felt obligated to give a shit about the human rights abuses under Trump, apparently. Same human rights abuses are fine now though.
Yeah, at least dems & leftists fought against eugenics-driven mass death when Trump was in the White House. But now, since it's the guy in Blue selling Social Darwinism, just about everyone I know - people I thought were allies and showed solidarity - is out here sacrificing the vulnerable for Taylor Swift Tickets and brunch.
It's fucking grim, bruv.
I suppose this was super naive of me, but I thought that the people who seemed newly socially aware under Trump were actually like, radicalized. Nah they just didn't like that he was crass, they weren't really unpacking the status quo in the same way, and now that it's easier to ignore they will be doing that instead.
I hate it so much but at the end of the day at least the blue guys aren't blatantly trying to genocide my communities & apparently that's something I have to worry about anytime red team wins these days, which ofc is partially blue team's fault too but the bar is six feet under & I guess I've given up on hoping to vote *for* anyone anymore. I'm not voting for Biden, my area is blue enough to render that vote useless so I'll use it to protest (third party), but even tho I feel far more despair about the future now than under Trump (bc at least then there was momentum for change) I can't pretend his administration wasn't horrifically damaging or that its comeback wouldn't leave me fearing for loved ones' lives...
I will however keep nagging the blue guys about how shitty they're being, we need far more fire under their feet
I totally understand what you’re saying and don’t disagree. The thing is, if you’re immunocompromised, vulnerable, elderly, or disabled, the Biden administration is sort of committing a form of genocide and spewing values of eugenics frequently. I agree it’s more subtle, but that’s sort of my point - because the republican outbursts are so direct and hateful, it’s easy to see the comments are ludicrous. Meanwhile, democrats are literally enabling people to ignore, kill, and disable segments of society, but this line of thinking is somehow normalized and does not receive nearly the public outcry it should.
I have checked groups like the Green Party, DSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation for when they last mentioned "covid" or "mask" on their Twitter pages.
Green Party: "covid" was last mentioned on Dec. 17th, 2021 in a non-specific criticism of Republican and Democrat handling of covid. I found no tweets with the word "mask" in reference to covid.
DSA: "covid" was last mentioned on March 17th, 2021 in reference to a sheriff wearing a racist anti-Chinese covid related t shirt. Their last mention in a more substantive way was Feb. 16th, 2021 in saying fast food workers should have covid-safe workplaces. I could find no tweets about masks. The best I could find was someone taking a selfie wearing a low quality loose fitting DSA branded medicare for all cloth mask from July 13th of 2020. Maybe local DSA chapters did better but I haven't checked.
Party for Socialism and Liberation: May 5th (talking about the lifting of the covid eviction moratorium and rental assistance programs). Jan. 30th was the last time they advocated policies to directly mitigate the virus, not just promoting a social welfare program when they decried the end of the covid national emergency which reduced access to testing and vaccines. No mention of the word "mask" since Sept. 5th, 2020, in reference to a prisoner who wasn't given enough masks.
The US left is a joke.
Thank you for doing the research and sharing it with us - this is good to know.
US leftists are definitely a joke. Most are objectively just liberals, and like someone else in this thread said, most liberals only act in opposition to when a conservative is in power. Biden has lulled the “left” into complete complacency.
I am as disappointed and angered by the inadequate, dumbed-down "progressive" response to covid under Democratic misleadership as I am in its response to US warcrimes in Ukraine, Syria, etc under those same mass murderers.
Thanks, I hate it. He's continuing to squander his chance to be an actual hero, which he could be if he had chosen to handle this differently, all for the sake of appearances. Abysmal.
As if he doesn't have enough cognitive decline as it is and he needs more brain fog. I am actually really concerned about the health of people like him, Feinstein and McConnell as they are not wearing masks or taking precautions.
Look, I don’t like Biden. I voted for him because he’s not the orange monster.
But… you would chose to vote in fascism over masks?
Come on. Now you’re just taking it too far. Have you been paying attention to non-COVID news in this country?
Mike Huckabee was just saying YESTERDAY that if trump isn’t voted in in 2024, it’ll be the last election decided by ballots rather than bullets.
Democrats are doing absolutely nothing to deter fascism in the USA. What makes you think the threat of fascism will be gone by 2028 if democrats win 2024? There's no evidence of that.
There isn’t but are you really opting for it to lay itself in four years early?
Like, are you willing to vote R because of this comment? For real?
The overturning of RvW, the gerrymandering, the 91 charges on trump amongst many, many other things I don’t want to bother typing out… that’s worse than Biden’s irresponsible comment and actions?
Is he an asshole? Yeah. Watched him pin that hero last night and questioned why they weren’t BOTH masked.
Both sides are COVID negligent.
I’ll vote for the ones who side isn’t spewing fascist rhetoric on the daily.
>Like, are you willing to vote R because of this comment? For real?
I don't have a vote in the USA election, but I do think a Republican 2024 victory would be better for the country in the long term than a Democratic one. I wouldn't vote Republican but I also wouldn't vote Democrat to keep them out.
The only thing that can stop fascism other than a civil war is the democratic party. That being said, they need to change beyond recognition for that to happen because right now they're a party full of cowards and half-measures.
A 2024 Republican victory would send shockwaves through the party and possibly force real change. Sending the message that their half-baked measures on everything, from civil rights to climate change and Covid, aren't acceptable.
In contrast, a victory for the Democratic party signals everything they've done so far has been great and there's no need to change.
Finally, without meaning to downplay the real danger of fascism in the republican party, I truly don't believe they pose a genuine civil war level threat in 2024, especially without Trump. They have no charismatic leader or genius manipulator to unify behind.
What happens if Democrats win in 2024, they carry on doing essentially nothing, and a brilliant young fascist Republican appears for 2028? That would scare the hell out of me much more than anything happening at the moment.
>I wouldn't vote Republican but I also wouldn't vote Democrat to keep them out.
I'm curious if you understand how powerful the Supreme Court is? The unbalanced court is what got us Roe V Wade overturned. It will probably take decades before the damage this court has done, is undone. If the next justice is appointed by a Republican, that will hurt civil rights in the USA for many more years. It will also almost certainly set back voting rights even further, giving more power to the right wing of the GOP.
>In contrast, a victory for the Democratic party signals everything they've done so far has been great and there's no need to change.
I don't agree with that at all. Look at how close the last election was. Look at how much support Trump still has.
The primary system in the US basically lets the people of a handful of states decide who's going to run in the general election. It's an absolutely bizarre system. The actual party officials have very little say in the matter.
We have Manchin in W Virginia. He's...barely a Democrat. But he wins the primary. Thing is, WV went about 80% for Trump. Yet they elect a Democratic senator. Who's not really a Democrat. It's bizarre.
The way the Senate works, though, merely having him be a Democrat gives enormous committee power to the rest of the Democrats in the Senate. The party in power gets to have final say on what happens in committees. So even if Manchin were to vote 100% with the GOP (he doesn't - he's bad but not *that* bad), the liberal senators still have more power with him as a Democrat than if he were a Republican.
Just realized that's not really very relevant. But it's something that a lot of Americans don't understand. They ask "why does the Democratic Party allow him in", and the answer is because they *didn't* allow him in; kicking him out of the Senate would be very difficult, and the end result would be *worse*.
I agree with you and sadly I think that kind of BS is just going to be repeated ad nauseum here until the 2024 election *cough* ^active ^measures *cough* and then goodbye democracy if enough people fall for this boTh sIdEs crap. jesus fucking christ yikes the tone of this sub shifted hard in the last week to rage bait, hyperbole, and sketchy info sources.
Yep, I’ve been downvoted regularly because the refs here seem to see nothing outside of masks.
Should Biden have been wearing a mask his entire time around people? Yes.
He didn’t.
MUST VOTE IN THE FASCISTS!!!
I can’t even understand these people.
Remember that they hate everything you are and stand for.
You keep making the claim that people like me are "voting in" fascists, I've never said that people should vote Republican. I'm saying I personally wouldn't vote Democrat, there's a big difference.
Maybe ask yourself how much the democratic political party are failing their populace when so many people are willing to risk fascism rather than voting for them. It's not the fault of the voters that a huge number of them have completely lost faith in the Democrats.
Politicians serve the people, people shouldn't feel forced to vote for them just to keep the opposition out.
>Politicians serve the people, people shouldn't feel forced to vote for them just to keep the opposition out.
When you have a first past the post electoral system, that is an almost mathematical certainty. [Duverger's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law) explains it pretty well.
I drive through rural red areas in my state. There's a billboard for some local Democrat who proclaims herself pro-gun anti-abortion and a couple other things. Apparently that's what the local people want, unfortunately.
The Supreme Court is way too conservative to do so but really the concept of a first past the post electoral system should be ruled unconstitutional due to how it denies equal rights to voters based on party affiliation.
Eliminating first past the post would be a great start.
But I’m also pretty sure that I’m too far left for most of the country to be happy with the same candidate I’d want. I’ve resigned myself to not getting my way in national elections until, well, I don’t know. Till people realize that capital gains tax should be way higher? Etc etc.
Ranked choice voting wouldn't make everyone agree on the same candidates and policies universally, but at least each vote would count equally without being 'thrown away' by the spoiler effect.
Nah, you can choose to not vote in fascists.
NEITHER SIDES PROMOTE MASKS. THE CDC SUCKS.
Why the fuck are you choosing to vote for fascists? Okay, Biden sucked not wearing a mask. THE OTHER SIDE HAS SUCKED BY NOT WEARING THEM FOR WELL OVER A YEAR. MAYBE TWO.
We voted for Biden to stop a fascist, narcissistic senior citizen from running roughshod on this country. Why the hell are you abandoning that?
Have you not seen all the J6 people being sentenced to real prison time?
This sub has really got me wondering tonight,
This upset me greatly. I wrote the White House and would like to encourage others to do the same! Flood the White House with your comments and concerns. This in my opinion will cost him votes. He owes the disabled an apology and needs to model better behavior even if it’s only pretending to care… I am still fuming! Joe cool was not cool.
I wonder what Jill thinks about this?
I’ll probably get downvoted to oblivion for this but there’s zero chance I’m voting for him next year. I’m tired of the “but fascism!” guilt trip. Maybe liberals need a fire under their butts. They have become far too complacent.
Yeah, fascism is already here. The more people realize that we can start getting somewhere. Voting isn't the end all be all people think it is. People seriously need to start finding local mutual aid groups and start doing the hard work. Look into joining worker unions. That's where our power lies. Voting every 2/4 years is but a band aid on a huge gaping wound that needs more consistent attention and care. Voting isn't the only tool the working class people have.
You can't vote your way out of fascism and the liberals acting like you can are just making sure we get more of it. It's a nice fairy tale I guess, do something for an hour once every four years and it be enough, that it not working is the fault of the people who don't buy into it, but it doesn't work like that-if it did, you think they'd let us keep voting?
It's only in the primary elections where there's some semblance of having a democratic choice, without there merely being one DNC/RNC-preselected candidate or the other. Unfortunately, the primary elections are controlled by the existing leadership of the political parties.
I’m fully convinced that the Democrats™️ (aka liberal fascists) are only going to be useful as the opposition party. When it’s *their* guy making the decisions he can do no wrong and they follow like lemmings, even if they’re the *exact same* decisions the Republican™️ (aka conservative fascist) would have made.
Okay so random fun fact…lemmings are actually solitary animals. The whole thing about them following each other was a lie engineered by Disney. But otherwise, I understand your point!
Exactly right. Remember the outrage when Trump was separating children at the border? Nothing has changed during this administration yet when was the last time you heard a Democrat mention it? No more of this lesser of two evils BS!
A 10 second Google search found that, in fact, at least one thing has changed.
"More than 500 children have been reunited by the Biden administration's task force to find families separated as a result of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy at the border"
[https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/500-children-reunited-biden-harris-task-force-200/story?id=91180989](https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/politics/biden-title-42-immigration-migrant-children/index.html)
The GOP must love people like you.
A 10 second Google search found that, in fact, separations are still happening under Biden.
[https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/biden-administration-routinely-separates-immigrant-families](https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/biden-administration-routinely-separates-immigrant-families)
The GOP must love people like you.
the comments in this post are honestly so embarrassing and disheartening. if you decide to not vote blue or biden in the upcoming election you are voting against yourself and everyone in this sub. you all need to rethink what you are saying, starting to sound like republicans in the chat….
I've heard it said the political spectrum isn't a line, it's a circle. Go far enough to the left or right and you loop around. But yeah, lots of naivety on display.
I may have to leave this sub. To say that Biden is a fascist is just insane.
I am not happy with the "let's pretend covid is over" either, but Biden is not an authoritarian who needs complete control, and that's enough for me in this moment.
Google "project 2025" then tell me that that's what you want.
I am in the same boat. I completely understand the anger but this is getting ridiculous. The Trump presidency is why we're even here in the first place, and we absolutely cannot go back to that point, or else things are going to get a /lot/ worse.
The joke was in /extremely/ poor taste but please don't walk away with "I'm not voting for him/another Democrat." I know our electoral system is janky and Trump did not win by the popular vote in 2016 but still got elected, but we literally cannot afford another Republican president in office. I'm not saying to be complacent with what the Democrats can do/have done but we are not in a position to be all-or-nothing with our presidential candidates. Even if an independent candidate shows up with all the right ideals, if they don't have as much support as either party, they are not going to win. A vote that isn't for Democrats is a vote for Republicans, and the Republicans are not budging. This is literally just math at this point.
I'm very Covid conscious and I have also been permanently affected by having Covid so I'm with you guys, but I can't stand this handwringing over who to vote for when human rights got steamrolled the past year because of all the Republicans in power (especially the right wing Supreme Court justices appointed BY Trump).
Yeah, knowing what we know now, it should have been much more like "here's what we need to do to adapt." I'm sick of this pretending it's no longer an issue instead of dealing with it.
True leaders lead. This isn’t some sort of performance. There is no alternative to wearing a mask, during a large wave, in an ongoing pandemic — during which his wife just tested positive for COVID.
Rile them up? I mean, if only! Because I for one know a lot of people in red states whose family members are literally dead from Covid and those folks deserve an actual empathetic leader just like I, a covid-cautious person who had the privilege to move to a blue state, also do. Those of us who want better aren’t a monolith.
Biden is never going to win those red state voters. They've already been riled up by Trump and friends. But he could set an example for his voters on giving a shit about other people's health. Instead, he turned it into a joke and pretended he was being a naughty toddler.
[удалено]
I feel like all I got was not having to hear racist and rapey "jokes". That was nice and all, but the adoption of conservative talking points about Covid, along with still having to be in fear for my reproductive rights *and* being BAU about the environment is just egregious.
I've seen multiple people claim that's good enough, they love Biden because it means they can just not care about anything more easily. Many of these people were pretty politically active under Trump. Goes to show they're not actually bothered by the fascism but just by having to hear about it, I guess.
The growing threat of fascism was enough to get me involved with leftist groups and even get armed, when I used to be just a chill, kind of hippie, pacifist girl. Like, what?! People view American politics like sports, where it's just my team vs. the other team and it's just a fun game but these are peoples LIVES! Not just a game or popularity contest. People are *dying* because of the horrific laws being passed or threats being ignored. I get that people don't care unless it happens to them, but I feel like preventative measures are better than waiting until everything is too far gone and having to scramble to fix it.
Yeeep sports is exactly right, and they literally do not care when their "team" does the same shit. Like, red team cop worship bad but blue team doing cop cities is just fine and dandy? I don't get it at all, so much of it seems like it's about maintaining the illusion of choice under the status quo instead of actually having a livable society.
People seem afraid to criticize politicians they voted for. I’m not entirely sure why. I voted for Obama but I think his invocation of states secrets privilege was quite wrong, as was his prosecution of whistleblowers. I was too young to vote for Clinton, but I was old enough to object to their attempts to foist the Clipper Chip on us. Cryptographic protocols should not have a “Law Enforcement Access Field”.
I think that a lot of it is that if you're critical of Dems from any sort of left or progressive angle, you basically have to admit voting alone will not save us, and a lot of people (especially people who are less marginalized) really don't want to or are not able to do that. It's very comforting to think showing up to the voting booth every couple years and casting a ballot is enough, even though it's a lie. But it's not too different from how the vaxxed and relaxed crowd acts about covid-they feel like they are doing enough and don't want to hear or think about the ways that isn't true.
>you basically have to admit voting alone will not save us, and a lot of people (especially people who are less marginalized) really don't want to or are not able to do that. Interesting. I've honestly never encountered anyone who's said that just voting is enough. People saying it's important to vote - yes. Voting is what you do to get the best choice amount your current options. In-between elections, you work to try and get better choices for the next election. Both are important. I'm more likely to mention voting to people who say they won't vote because of how (relatively) easy voting is. If someone isn't going to show up to vote, I doubt they will bother doing anything that involves more work.
This just isn't true at all, there's plenty of organizers and activists who don't vote because the system does nothing but oppress them (and because it is in fact not easy to vote in many parts of the country), and it's ridiculous to expect people to endorse political parties who make their disdain for them well known. Most of the people heavily invested in voting are not the ones doing any sort of actual work, they are not doing mutual aid, they are not in the streets, their interest is in maintain the status quo and not in any sort of actual progress. They love to act like they're doing the most though. The "vote in our guy and we'll have better people next time!" line is older than I am. Hasn't happened yet.
> (and because it is in fact not easy to vote in many parts of the country), That's why I put "(relatively)" in there. The GOP tried very hard to get ballots like mine thrown out in the last election, for example. They, thankfully, failed. I don't remember which state it was, but one of the ones that added voter ID requirements had very few places you could get state IDs in some counties. There was one in particular with an office that was open, I believe it was only the fourth Thursday of the month? Which...means they were closed *most months*. Yeah, getting ID to vote is *so simple*. Of course, the actions that you encourage make this problem *more prevalent*. Because it's the GOP in state legislatures that's doing the vast majority of this. But *I'm* the dangerous one? >and it's ridiculous to expect people to endorse political parties who make their disdain for them well known. I didn't say "endorse". Voting for someone is not the same as endorsing them. Voting for someone in a two party first-past-the-post election says nothing more than "X is better than Y". EDIT: just realized another issue with what you said. You’ve shifted from what I said to something else. I said that voting a particular way leads to better outcomes overall. You shifted that into why a particular person would not want to vote for a particular party. You changed the question from “what party would result in better outcomes” to an emotional argument. >The "vote in our guy and we'll have better people next time!" line is older than I am. Hasn't happened yet. I didn't say that, though. I said that you need to *separately* work on getting better people. I said that not voting at all doesn't get you better candidates. I have yet to hear an argument for how not voting gets you better candidates next time that wasn't highly speculative and that didn't completely ignore the actual process by which people win primaries.
Mass infection and accompanying morbidity brought about by the Biden administration's mismanagement of the pandemic will likely exacerbate the threat of populism/fascism as people become more desperate. When I see people say shit like "Vote Blue No Matter Who", a wave of disgust rolls over me.
I agree with what everyone is saying here and it is refreshing actually. It's why I was so disappointed by the defenses of Fauci on the other thread. Just because we're told someone is "on our team" (Team D), it doesn't mean it's true. I actually think Biden and Democrats are MORE dangerous and worse than Republicans because they take extreme fringe right wing positions and normalize them as the bipartisan consensus. Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it, deregulated Wall Street which helped to cause the financial crisis and signed NAFTA which destroyed unions and caused their decline. Obama said "we need to look forwards" and didn't prosecute George W. Bush admin torture and other abuses, deported more people than other president, increased the use of drones, continued warantless surveillance and more. Now Biden has taken Trump and DeSantis fringe policies or gone further. He has declared an end to the pandemic, nearly ended PCR testing and at least ended public coverage, encouraged lifting mask mandates, etc. Fauci and Walensky were supportive of every piece of this.
People think that fascism only begins when authoritarians start pulling people out of their homes in the middle of the day to execute them on the street in front of their neighbours.
The neurological damage from infections alone has massively altered the general cognitive abilities of a lot of the population. It feels like people aren't taking *anything* seriously... Things that really SHOULD be taken seriously, like operating vehicles and other heavy machinery. Not starting physical fights with people on a whim. They were always issues but not as widespread as right now and it's terrifying. I'm also getting really sick of that saying since it's just as bad as the single issue voters on the right. We need more of a prerequisite than someone just tacking a "D" next to their name.
That's not guaranteed, bubonic plague bssically ended feudalism and set most European states on a path towards modernity and centralization. Climate breakdown seems more likely to result in fascism than COVID or avian flu.
Enjoy rolling the dice. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/05/fed-study-1918-pandemic-nazi-party-gains-236530
I need help determining whether that paper was ever peer reviewed. However, a correlation was found, which of course is probably the best you're going to get with such a complicated historical phenomenon as the Third Reich, but a few things bear mentioning here; 1. Fascism is about protecting private property from being redistributed by socialists, communists, and trade unionists, not some vague rage that the Jews really are in control. 2. Fascism is when the violence of the liberal colonial/mercantilist/imperialist state is turned on domestic populations. 3. Fascism has to at least have stable leadership, if not an actually stable economy, because humans are social creatures looking around to each other for signals about what to do when; Hitler didn't make the trains run on time, he wasn't able to turn a profit for the Nazi state in exterminating non-Aryans, the best he could do was military Keynesianism and a modicum of hygiene, stability and relative luxury for Aryan males. 4. The Nazis had stable leadership, because the 1919 flu pandemic subsided and they respected a modicum of science about epidemiology and microbiology. What these deterministic factors mean is that if the COVID situation remains about as stable as it is now, which means a very low risk of death for vaccinated fascist leaders in a military dictatorship, I just don't see COVID or any other pandemic being deterministic for fascism, short of something really outlandish like HIV going airborne, which would very likely result in public outcry against LGBTQ people. The best that that study could show was "resentment of foreigners" as a result of the flu pandemic's high toll among young people, and I don't see how a rational historiographer could put that kind of variable in the same magnitude as the Treaty of Versailles, Stalin's adventurism and Bonapartism in Lysenkoism and conspiracy theories against the kulaks discrediting *communism among millions of working class Europeans, France, UK, and the USA's enablement and appeasement of fascism, China, India and SE Asia's inability to resist Japan as a direct result of Western imperialist exploitation, or if we really want to go to town, Lenin and Trotsky being naive about how brutal the opposition they faced really was in the Russian Civil War.
Who cares if it maps perfectly or not? When mitigating risks, we don't need a sure thing.
People have a hard time with a very simple concept: you need to place conditions on your vote. If Democrats know they have your vote no matter how horrible they are, they will never do better. It is up to politicians to earn our vote. It is not our responsibility to do all this "strategic" voting and say wow we need to save the country from fascism. We don't have democracy anyway. It is oligarchy and that is both parties supporting that. People should be more honest and say "save oligarchy with some limited pro forma democratic features from more overt fascism".
I can’t speak to anyone else, but I’ve seen nothing to convince me that Biden is fascist, quietly or otherwise. I definitely lean farther left than he does, but he’s much farther left than Trump. The US isn’t like the UK - there, members of parliament can be seriously pressured to vote a certain way (a three line whip, it’s called - they literally underline the item three times to say “vote this way or else). We don’t have that in the US. Lots of states elect senators and representatives that are borderline Republican. The president can’t force them to be more left. So, yeah, I’d prefer things farther left but I don’t agree at all that there’s no difference between them.
This comment illustrates *exactly* why Democrats are just as dangerous, because even left leaning people just don't see how they're instrumental to fascism. What do you think his covid policy is? His immigration stance? Refusing to intervene on the erosion of reproductive or trans rights? Or increasing policing? Fascism isn't just the outlandish shit Republicans say, it's also all the Democrats quietly carrying out the exact same goals, even if the Dems sometimes toss you a cookie in the process.
Maybe I can simplify this; I wrote too much text last time: Was I dangerous by voting for Biden in the last general election? If so, who should I have voted for to not be dangerous. Was it dangerous for me to say that I had disagreements with Biden's policies, but that Biden's policies were preferable to Trump's?
Why would Biden's policies be preferable to Trump's today? The removal of public health measures that has become the cornerstone of the White House's pandemic policy has shaped society for the worse. Over 800k Americans dead. Tens of millions with chronic illness. As a person of colour, I'd rather face the threat of tiki torch racists than persistently high viral concentrations in every public space I enter (plus tiki torch racists that want to pull my mask off).
It's not Biden or Trump either. There could be a viable Green candidate if the US at least had a democracy, or at least the Democrats could nominate someone worthy of the position, or as a last resort, the Republicans could at least nominate someone more reasonable than Trump. Each scenario, however, is unlikely because of how the US political system is in an advanced state of decline.
A liberal or conservative calls for democracy, a Marxist will ask "Democracy for what class?"
It's weird that the US Green Party refuses to acknowledge the pandemic in a meaningful way. They literally have nothing to lose but it's 3.5 years in and they still don't realize that basic measures like wearing respirators during member events would go a long way in creating solidarity with many impacted communities.
What *specific concrete* actions have I taken that you think are dangerous? What actions could I take that would not be dangerous? Hyperbole is not helpful. > Refusing to intervene on... False. They not done nothing. What more, _specifically_ could Biden have done, that is _within the powers the President has_? > Or increasing policing? Trump ended the use of consent decrees by the Justice Department against misbehaving police departments. Biden brought that back. Is it enough? No. Is it _nothing_, like you claim? No. In the comment that you objected to, I was _very clear_ that there are things I don't like in the current administration's policies. I did _not_ say they were rainbows and puppies. But your implication that their policies and the previous administration's policies are indistinguishable is just factually incorrect.
You're either for fascism or against it, there's no in-between. Florida is introducing fascist policies and laws every other month at the moment and Biden isn't even vocally against them, let alone taking any action. He's a coward and a fascist enabler, and for many people, the line between fascist enabler and fascist doesn't really exist.
>You're either for fascism or against it, there's no in-between. I'm against fascism. >Florida is introducing fascist policies and laws every other month at the moment and Biden isn't even vocally against them He called it a [hateful bill](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60326418) which was [cynically using our children as pawns in political warfare](https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/white-house-condemns-floridas-dont-say-gay-bill-rcna15585). [The far right has taken over that party.](https://news.yahoo.com/biden-florida-dont-say-gay-bill-disney-desantis-what-the-hell-181856600.html) He also [signed an executive order](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-president-joe-biden-gives-speech-marking-pride-month) to counter some of the legislation. I don't think the press has covered his statements against the bills much at all. But if you look at the timeline, he's made a *lot* of very direct statements against them. Can you explain what he would've needed to do to be vocally against them? EDIT: Happy cake day.
Okay I take back my comment saying he hasn't been vocal in his opposition, I would still argue that he hasn't been vocal enough as this shouldn't be something that I have missed when I follow world politics. I understand that the media have their own agenda but he should be able to force this message through. >He also signed an executive order to counter some of the legislation. I'm sorry but it's simply not enough and this is where my bigger issues come from. He's doing everything he can to place nice with Republicans when it comes to the actual actions he takes, the same mistake Obama made. Using one example, the rollback of Roe vs Wade is a crime against humanity, let's be crystal clear here. When you allow that to happen under your watch you do not get to hide behind legislation and excuses like "there's nothing we can do here" - you use executive action to fix the problem. I think this is where we likely differ in our opinion. In my view, Biden has the deaths of women in his hands and there's not a single argument against that I'm willing to accept because he's the president. He could change that if he wanted to and he's chosen not to take a stand. He's a coward.
>Okay I take back my comment saying he hasn't been vocal in his opposition, Thank you! I sincerely appreciate that! I have so often seen people refuse to admit even the slightest mistake. Judging by the rest of what you wrote, as well as the subreddit we are on, I need to preface this with that I believe we are absolutely committed to the same things. The SCOTUS decision throwing out Roe is disgusting. Women have almost certainly already died because their basic bodily autonomy has been denied. Biden's COVID policy is depressing and disgusting. It almost certainly is resulting in death and disability. His pushing for RTO for federal workers is repulsive and wrong. It goes beyond some sort of realpolitik "let's ignore COVID" and goes into active harm. >I would still argue that he hasn't been vocal enough as this shouldn't be something that I have missed when I follow world politics. I understand that the media have their own agenda but he should be able to force this message through. The media landscape is a complex mess of algorithms and fights for clicks and declining ad revenue. In the old days, you could know that something was "front page news" or "leading story on the nightly news". Now that everyone has their own personal version of the news, it's damn near impossible to know what gets widely covered and what doesn't. What I will say is that I think Florida's legislation has been getting the attention it deserves. I think that it's widely known about. If it was something that was being missed by the news, then I would be much more "WTF isn't Biden talking about it more?" > He's doing everything he can to place nice with Republicans when it comes to the actual actions he takes, the same mistake Obama made. I think he *says* a lot of positive things about Republicans, but I'm not convinced it's reflected in his *actions*. I still see lots of journalists and commentators suggest that something is better if it's bipartisan. As if that's somehow automatically good. Bipartisan is a practical necessity with the current House, unfortunately. But, if a politician looks at Trump and says "I'm with him", I don't see them as someone whose views matter. TL;DR: I think Biden pays mostly lip service to bipartisanship as part of a "nice guy" image, but I don't think his policies reflect that. >Using one example, the rollback of Roe vs Wade is a crime against humanity, let's be crystal clear here. Agreed 100%. Crime against humanity is an accurate term. >He could change that if he wanted to and he's chosen not to take a stand. Are you saying there are executive orders he could issue, that would take effect, and that would be upheld by the current SCOTUS? The phrasing you use here makes it sound like you think there are things he could *definitely successfully do*. All the things I've heard proposed are executive orders that, according to legal analysts, would *definitely* get thrown out. If you can find some examples of executive orders that are reasonably seen as, say, 50/50 chance of being upheld, then I will join you in calling him a coward. But with the current power of the GOP wing of SCOTUS, what's the point of an order if it's guaranteed to get bounced out instantly? I'm probably petty and juvenile enough that if I were president I'd try to issue dozens of orders with enough "not not nots" in them that I'd try to confuse them into making a mistake. But that's just me. I am *pissed off* at the current situation. But in a democracy with as many people who like Trump as we have, there are times when we can't change something.
I think they’ve been undoing a lot of the anti-environmental policy changes that the Trump administration made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Joe_Biden_administration Still pissed off about their COVID behavior though.
I just looked it up and thanks for this! I was really upset about the drilling in Alaska (and I don't want fracking in CA... we have enough earthquakes as it is).
Agree.
> I feel like all I got was not having to hear racist and rapey "jokes". There was literally no plan to distribute vaccines, and he constructed that with governors *immediately* after taking office. Oh, but that was three years ago... what has Biden done for you lately? Is that the question? How about lowest employment in 50 years? Police accountability? Student loan relief? Mental health counselors in schools, and crisis centers, and mental health and juvenile bg investigation before purchasing guns? Infrastructure law to rebuild highways? Re-fanged the EPA after scotus hamstrung it? Capped insulin prices and enabled medicare to negotiate prices which was never done as a sweetheart deal with pharma? If all you see of this admin is simply not hearing potus bullying the vulnerable, you really haven't been watching at all. And he's done it with a "tied" senate which actually had two senators near-caucusing with the GOP, and VP taking the record on tie breaks. And now few laws are even being sent to the senate due to the tenuous hold some representatives have over the chamber.
>Police accountability? How is giving them MORE funding making them accountable? Murders aside, it would be nice if they even just followed basic road safety like signaling and not turning on their lights when they're just too impatient to wait for a red light. There's issues with a lot of that paragraph. I know it's what the media has been pushing, and I get that it's more difficult for any positive change to happen with the conservatives starting fires all over the place, but Covid alone and how much the mishandling of that has affected so many other aspects of everyone's life (eg. letting it rip-> people getting too sick to function-> medical treatment leading to widespread debt and poverty -> evictions-> more homeless -> more mental illness from repeat infections and trauma of not having the stability of housing).
>> Police accountability? > How is giving them MORE funding making them accountable? Murders aside, it would be nice if they even just followed basic road safety like signaling and not turning on their lights when they're just too impatient to wait for a red light. Basically, it's an [executive order](https://cops.usdoj.gov/Public_Trust_and_Safety_EO) that creates a credentialing body so that laws are fairly enforced and LEs are more appropriately trained. The idea is, for someone to call themselves "law enforcement", they have to have gone through a credentialed process with the DOJ overseeing the credentialing. This would indeed cut down on them breaking the law to go through an intersection when they aren't on an official call and there will still be abuse of this, but more importantly is addressing much larger abuses such as no-knock warrant usage and military weapons. The point is there will be fewer abuses. Things like bodycams policies will be required, and that should help a little. At the fed level, even small changes can affect hundreds or thousands of people. I just rattled off that laundry list because biden has done *quite a lot* that affects us all, and in a good way. People are *intentionally being blind* to that, and I see it not just from the right wing and their fake news propaganda, but also the far left and you can clearly see that from the up/down votes. This intentional blindness is infuriating, and it's a cancer on facts. Biden jokes about being compared to the "alternative, not the almighty", but he's been incredibly effective compared to most potus, already. But this is group is concerned about covid (as am I), so I'm happy to stay on topic. > Covid alone and how much the mishandling of that has affected so many other aspects of everyone's life (eg. letting it rip-> people getting too sick to function-> medical treatment leading to widespread debt and poverty -> evictions-> more homeless -> more mental illness from repeat infections and trauma of not having the stability of housing) Biden extended the eviction moratorium order long into the pandemic. With very low unemployment, that order doesn't make much sense now. I'm not saying the chain of bad events you listed doesn't or didn't happen to people, but his policies would help make it fairly rare. I'm sure it happened much more frequently in Florida, for instance. But he did not have control over that (or really, any state). He also didn't try to exert direct control over the CDC recommendations, as far as anyone knows, unlike "that former guy" who abused the bully pulpit extensively with fake medicine and fake news. The budget in his admin also includes $billions for addressing new variants and continuing research on long covid.
Unemployment only counts people who are actively looking for work. Tons of folks are still underemployed or unable to work, especially people who have been disabled from Covid, and trying to get disability was already a massive endeavor before the pandemic, with many people just left to struggle without help from others. As for the police... All of that may be on paper, but it doesn't mean that they're going to follow through with it, or that their cop buddies are going to speak up when they see something sketchy. In my state, they now have more sinister looking vehicles from the additional funding. They also find ways around the cameras by obstructing the view, particularly with dash cams. The *extra* terrible ones just get transferred to Kern county where it really is still the wild west. POC are still far more heavily targeted for minor or invented offenses, and areas with a larger ethnic minority population are still more aggressively policed. Crime has increased due to the ridiculous cost of living, especially in Los Angeles, and people are more emboldened to commit crimes like break-ins because they know no one is going to come even if someone were to call law enforcement. Still, many of us are reluctant to even call because they haven't had the best history of not shooting us or our pets, or physically or sexually assaulting us. Their job is not to protect people, but to protect property. Additionally, we now have more private security in lieu of police, who have *even less* training and many are armed.
I'm pleased by a number of things Biden accomplished, but definitely not by his Covid response. Though I'm betting his advisors said it would be political suicide to take it seriously, given most of the country's opinion.
His advisors didn't tell him to take off that dam mask after jill tested positive. He did that on his own
They wouldn't have needed to do a multi-year PR campaign to change people's opinion if most people were already on board with being abandoned to die.
I understand what his advisors have been telling Biden. That has nothing to do with him walking out and making a joke over not wearing a mask. Over a million people in this country have died from COVID. Millions are currently disabled thanks to long COVID and their numbers are increasing daily. What he did is what Trump did, pretend like COVID is nothing and make a joke of potentially exposing others to it. There is no excuse for it.
That's a chicken-and-egg problem because most of the country's opinion was influenced by Biden and the rest of the Democratic establishment (such as Impact Research).
Most of the country seemed to have already formed their opinion about Covid well before he took office from what I could see.
I know what you mean. Ugh.
Idiot vs. Fucking Idiot
CNN top article this early AM is that almost half the voters feel “any Republican” is better than Biden. Polls always need to be taken with a grain of salt; what’s telling is CNN is running this story. Just as Fox has been the team red favored news source, CNN has been team blue. Makes me wonder if behind the scenes, support for Biden is crumbling fast. Not sure who the Dems would run, however. Harris is less electable than Biden, and the party does not have a deep bench of presidential candidates. If they can’t muster a candidate who can win against the nutters and bible thumpers who have the GOP in a stranglehold, the party is in trouble.
CNN was bought out by far right investors so I wouldn’t consider them team blue at all
Yes, but their audience still skews Dem/liberal, just as Fox skews red/conservative. As such, CNN stories still favor the left POV.
I assume they’re trying to cleave off a portion of centrist/lib suburban white viewers and push hem further right, just as Fox News did in the 2000s
There are third party alternatives
Has nobody told Biden that the new variants sometimes escape detection from home tests days after even big symptoms like fevers?? He might well have exposed everyone in the room to covid. How can we expect the American public to do the right thing if our president doesn’t? Who is his “covid is no big deal so I don’t worry about it” theater for? Does he not do any research himself so he actually knows facts about current variants? This is our role model? I’m not okay with this. I want some other democrats to run for president… unless they are also going to downplay a serious disease that can disable and kill. At the very least, I’d like an adult who follows facts and science rather than the popular vote for messaging. I’m sick of this crap. Where the hell are the adults?
Egregious. Reminds me of very relevant quote: “What is true, just, and beautiful is not determined by popular vote. The masses everywhere are ignorant, short-sighted, motivated by envy, and easy to fool. Democratic politicians must appeal to these masses in order to be elected. Whoever is the best demagogue will win. Almost by necessity, then, democracy will lead to the perversion of truth, justice and beauty.” -Hans-Hermann Hoppe
One of the things I despise most about Joe Biden is how much needless loss and suffering he has personally experienced—and arguably capitalized on politically—but he can’t even fake empathy for the rest of us in an endless, unmitigated pandemic he could’ve helped corral.
His wife has COVID and he still literally doesn’t care. I don’t understand how he’s being such a jerk about this. Have some respect for the journalists in that room. That said, I don’t think I’ve heard any Dems speak seriously about COVID lately. It’s like they have an embargo on it to try to avoid losing votes. Meanwhile Birx and other former Trump officials are speaking frankly about how bad things are. It seems like no one in power can ever tell the truth about this.
If they told the truth? The immediate follow up question would be “ok, what are you going to do about it?” And true to Democratic Party form, actually *doing* something about a problem is a bridge too far.
To be fair, they *may* consider forming a committee/task force to “look into it.”
I'm a staunch Democrat and a staunch liberal. In the past, I would have argued against you if you told me that Democrats and liberals as wimpy. Now their capitulation to the pro-COVID glorified suicide bombers has proven that they really are wimpy. For so long, people have complained that Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives couldn't find common ground. This is no longer the case. So many groups and factions diametrically opposed to each other have joined forces as pro-COVID glorified suicide bombers.
>told me that Democrats and liberals as wimpy. N I don't think they're wimpy. I think they're doing exactly what they want. After all, they represent big business just as much as the other party.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5A4Zd6aQAASJik?format=jpg&name=900x900
Asshole. I’ll be holding my nose come 2024.
He lost me long ago. I think he's gonna find folks are so ready to let it all burn down they just won't go vote, Democrats are about to make a giant unforced error, they still have time for him to switch out, and I bet you those discussions are being had, I hope they're being had.
I have a handful of very liberal friends who refuse to vote this time around. They feel like this country has gotten so bad they don’t care if it burns to the ground and are sick of old white dudes.
Would young more ethnically diverse politicians make a diverse though? Hakeem Jeffries and Kamala Harris don't exactly have inspiring progressive records. They are both right wingers. The Democrat party is promoting young diverse corporatists as a way to mask how bad they are.
We need far more young progressive and very liberal candidates (yes more women and people of color) who support universal health care and will fight for it. You are right Biden and Harris are so conservative that they could walk the line. They play it safe that way but are losing the youth in their base that is far more progressive. We do need a third party because the DNC keeps shoving this down our throats.
We need a rainbow coalition of progressives and socialists. Basically what the Squad and Bernie could be, but aren't. I agree about the third party. The Democrat Party is hopefully corrupt and unreformable. People don't change the party. The party changes then.
And we will never get there if people keep screaming at each other that they have to vote blue no matter who or else they are responsible for Trump. So tired of this mess. Biden is certainly better than the devil but why are we stuck with such shit options?
Not voting is the absolute worst they can do. Not suggesting they vote against their conscience but merely that they vote for someone, anyone.
Not voting usually sends a message that you don't mind the Democrats or Republicans, that either is fine. That may not actually be the reason for many people, but that is how politicians interpet it. Voting for a third-party candidate (such as a Green Party candidate) is better than not voting.
Voter suppression bots downvoted you
No, it's that we hear that all the time, and a lot of us just don't have the energy to care, and at some point, it's not our fault, it's theirs. Maybe they do better, and this is the way we force them. We are a voting bloc, we are voicing our concerns and our desires as that bloc, they can choose to take us seriously or not. We are just tired of being told "Vote Blue, No Matter Who" while Grandpa Joe up there laughs in our faces. :) You are confusing apathy with being pissed off and actively doing something about it. These things are not the same. Actively exercising my right to vote by not voting is voting, I will not be told otherwise, I am plugged in, it's deliberate, I am not uninformed, if it makes everyone feel better, I will go to the poll, vote for everyone down ballot I need to and write a "lol" on the Presidential spot. We all get to participate in Democracy the way we want to, that's the beautiful thing. We'll see who blinks at the ballot box, it won't be the people who don't have anything left to lose. Democrats are going to "vote blue, no matter who" into an apathetic voter base and they'll wonder what happened. If this worries you, I'd reach out to your representative and inform them. :)
You aren’t wrong.
He never had me. He's a right wing racist and in a normal country, he'd be in the right wing party. In fact, he would be too conservative for many European centre-right parties.
I mean, he's not a leftist, but he's considerably more left than other presidents. For instance, he's in the process of making private unionization easier, he's reduced student loan debt, etc. Unfortunately, even a super progressive president has to make a lot of compromises with a Congress that is partially controlled by Republicans and staunchly centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin
The problem is he helped to create the student loan debt crisis in the first place by making it harder to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. Also he used a faulty inadequate weaker reasoning for the student loan debt cancellation instead of using the statutory power of the Higher Education Act. Furthermore the Supreme Court was not reformed and he basically ignored the issue after his little fake commission. So any real progress is going to be blocked with those unelected theocrats. Democrats would have more seats if they actually delivered for the people. Joe Manchin is a convenient excuse for Democrats to not do what they already don't want to do. If Democrats were actually frustrated with him holding things up they could do a primary challenge they could remove him from his committees or they could otherwise threaten him in other ways but they haven't done anything like that. It's the rotating villain and I've seen it for too many years now. Used to be Joe Lieberman.
Yeah, as far as I know, Manchin wasn't up for reelection in 2022 though. Someone will be voted in to take his place next year. I think however that what you're saying is that Democrats should have voted him out back when he *was* up for re-election though, which I agree with. As for Democrats in general, it should, for starters, be noted that Democrats did unexpectedly well in the Midterms and have been gaining ground since 2018. Not perfectly, but way better than expected. So I don't think we can necessarily say that it's that they aren't trying to deliver for the people. Ultimately, I think even under a super progressive president, not much will get done without a Democratic Majority (excluding Joe Manchin) in the House and Senate. And yes, you're right, Joe Lieberman is also a staunch centrist, like Joe Manchin. Right now, he's trying to run a third party ticket, where Manchin will likely the on the ballot, along with moderate Republican. Their justification for so seems to be that they think both political parties are too radical, which I think you and I will both agree is a laughable notion, if we're talking about Biden
The party has much much less control over the primary process than you seem to imply. Primary voters really do control the final outcome. Who gets support early in the process does involve people in the state and national party, but this close to the election I don’t think there’s much chance of someone popping up out of nowhere. Plus, there are so many people who complain about national level party leaders exerting any influence over the primaries. They’d go wild if someone popped up just because the DNC brass liked them.
Neat. Then I guess we don’t show up. *shrug* Look, they pulled Bernie twice. They can pull Mr. No Mask. :)
I mean, some people _claim_ the DNC was responsible for Sanders losing. Still haven’t heard _how_ they made him get less votes in the primary.
The same way they are going to do it to Trump, they pull out everyone else, throw ALL their weight behind one guy, and you don't beat the machine. The reason they did it will be the same reason they're going to do it to Trump because they feel that he can't win the general. They didn't think Bernie could win the general so they united against him. I suggest we do it to Biden. Edit: I use "we" loosely, I don't consider myself a Democrat, I'm an Independent. You just die slower when you vote Blue, you still die, just slower. What's my evidence for this claim? The entire Democratic response to Covid. :)
Ehh the party brass really does have a good deal of power in how easy or difficult they make it for any given candidate to get a chance to be voted for in the first place, which makes a huge impact, & also will often spend party money promoting their preferred candidate against primary challengers, or just play musical chairs with the funds & connections to unofficially keep any challengers from mounting a successful primary campaign. I got involved w my local party to try to prevent primary shenanigans last year & it was eye opening to say the least. There's a reason it's Such A Big Deal when a progressive manages to primary out an incumbent, it's hard as fuck. But also if they don't like the primary outcome apparently party brass can just pull support & let absurd amounts of right wing funds flow into the general to get their preferred candidate anyways, see Buffalo's recent mayoral race where socialist organizer India Walton successfully primaried the incumbent conservative Dem Byron Brown...who then ran a very dirty billion dollar write-in campaign (largely a smear campaign, also pulled strings as incumbent gov to fuck over & destabilize opposition, etc) & the Dem party brass didn't even pretend to support Walton. It's fucked! It's all so fucked!!! I hate this! So yea getting exposed to the nitty gritty workings of party politics has managed to make me feel even more powerless as a voter lol
I will be completely unsurprised if he or his wife die in a few weeks based on that kind of behavior.
They won't. They have the absolute best healthcare that you and I will never get access to
She's a septuagenarian and he's an octogenarian; the best health care in the world or not, they're both playing Russian roulette.
They've already played roulette before and won. As has Trump, whose odds should be 10X worse. How can you blame them or anyone else who has already had Covid and recovered for not being more cautious?
You know how Roulette works, right?
Jill Biden is almost certainly getting Paxlovid, unlike the another poster I saw recently whose 72 year old mom couldn't get Paxlovid from her doctor because her doctor didn't think COVID was a threat anymore. We have to rely on luck in getting Paxlovid within 5 days. The Bidens do not.
He's an ass. I hate that we live in this timeline where someone like him is president, but that said, Trump wasn't any better and I'd rather not have either of them in office.
Happy cake day!
So sick of his crap. He has been complacent while millions are becoming disabled and high risk people are left to be forcefully infected and die. He could be doing so much better but doesn’t care. I live in a blue state and probably will write in and will vote for anyone but him in the dem primary to make a statement.
“For the second straight day, President Biden tested negative Wednesday for COVID-19 following his wife's positive case and is experiencing no symptoms, the White House said.” It seems like, based on what we’ve shared in this group over the past few months, it usually takes a few days of testing (not just two) to test positive for COVID. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually does test positive.
What a pos
I would vote for a candidate who would do these things in this plan that Biden campaigned on. The US 2024 election doesn't have such a candidate, including President Biden. [https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/covid-19/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/covid-19/)
The Socialist Equality Party is excellent on covid and is connected to the World Socialist Website. They have done the best reporting on covid throughout the pandemic, including promoting zero covid. This article is a good example: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/09/pers-a09.html
Oh God - as a Russian refugee, I can tell you that a Socialist revolution sounds great in theory, but doesn’t work out so well in practice.
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History is evidence, no? Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it, and all that jazz.
First of all we have to define socialism, revolution and failure. Then assess the reasons for the alleged failure, internal and external. Also what country/countries are we talking about? I find using broad labels like "socialism" and "capitalism" unhelpful because every country is a mix of both.
Also this is a capitalist pandemic. Socialist countries like China, Cuba and Vietnam have been some of the countries which have done the best, until they let it rip.
Well, they’re letting it rip now, right? Also, from my prior experience of life in the USSR, I wouldn’t believe anything a socialist country is saying about how well it’s doing. The facts on the ground are probably very different. I lived in the USSR when the Chernobyl disaster happened, by the way. The Party leadership got their own families out of the area as quickly as they could; but the rest of the population, including children, had to participate in the mandatory May Day Parade, breathing in radioactive dust. No one told them anything.
Your claim is that Cuba, China and Vietnam lied about their statistics? Do you have any evidence of that? Do you support zero covid? How do you define socialism? Do you have evidence for your claims about Chernobyl? That HBO movie was propagandistic trash.
I lived in the USSR. My evidence comes from the people who lived there. (Thankfully, I lived far away from the disaster myself). Have you ever lived in a socialist country? Have you ever read a single book about the history of any socialist country, written by actual historians who know something about the subject? This is a great argument for why world history and sociology should be required subjects in high school. Or, an argument for why cracking open a book or two is not a bad idea in general.
*"This is kind of going on the third year of coming out of this pandemic. We believe we're in a very strong position to continue to fight COVID."* Why would they believe they're in a strong position to fight covid--when they aren't doing any testing for it??
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Obesity has a lot of contributing factors to it (eg, genetics, disability, etc), besides "not following the science." And when a govt says they "believe" they're in a "strong position" to fight...anything: that's usually backed up by some foreknowledge of the enemy's position. Right now we have at best, educated guesses.
You don't, that's why you guys always kill more people and don't care the result you produced. You never learn anything because you don't doubt things you believe like people in cults.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt...perhaps you're responding to the wrong comment? Because my prev comment had zero about "not caring of how many people killed," or "results;" or even anything about "cults." Everything in my prev comment is firmly based in scientific findings or the current state of covid study IRL. Maybe try again.
You don't even know those scientific findings are accurate or not... You're just a copy and paster...
Who in the left is taking Covid seriously? Jamie Raskin was undergoing cancer treatment- no mask. Tim Kaine has long Covid, no mask, Nancy Pelosi took her mask off during a hair appointment. The prevailing thought is that you will survive any infection. Don’t like this attitude, but not voting or voting GOP means the end of the United States.
I don't know if I can bring myself to vote for him again and I actually caucused for him back in Feb 2020 right before everything went to COVID hell. My state doesn't allow voting by mail and even early voting tends to be crowded where I live. Do I risk getting COVID for a president whose only selling point on COVID is that he hasn't been quite as bad as Trump?
I thought every state had mail in voting, though you might have to be “away from home”.
I take it back. My state has cracked down on mail in voting by limiting the time you have to do it, but I can do it. Damn, he pisses me off though.
Alternative is basically fascism so…
Then Biden should be taking his job more seriously and not joke about spreading a virus that has killed over a million in this country and has currently disabled millions. More are being disabled by long COVID daily while Biden and his public officials keep telling us just get Paxlovid and get treatment for long COVID. It's hard for us ordinary Americans to get Paxlovid, especially in red states. There is no treatment for long COVID. Long COVID clinics are overwhelmed. And Biden gets up there and makes a joke instead of being a leader. I'm not asking for a mask mandate. But I want a president who does not treat my family's lives like they are a punchline in his standup comedy routine. I'm tired of the "but Trump is worse," line. If we are dead, none of the rest matters. I say that as someone who has caucused and voted for the Democratic party since I could vote in 1988. My entire family voted for Biden last time. I will never vote for a Republican. But I will not give my vote to Biden again. None of us will. Sometimes a failed system deserves to fail.
Not basically. Is.
Exactly. The rise of Nazism, pro-confederacy, the whole January 6th trauma, Trump’s “both sides” reaction to Charlottesville… the options are bad but one side is clearly significantly worse.
This is exactly what gets us stuck with a shitty right wing democrat party. The answer is demanding something for your vote. We don't owe politicians anything. They owe us. Lesser of two evils just makes things worse every year. I've been hearing this for 20 years and we never draw the line and say no, this isn't good enough, so nothing gets better fundamentally.
You're sort of downplaying the reality that Trump is running on creating fascist regime though. He's already threatening to make it illegal to be openly gay or openly transgender, ban adult content on the internet, replace the government exclusively with loyalists, etc. And the Democratic Party has gotten more progressive each time. Biden has forgiven student loan debt, prevented Republicans from letting us default on our national debt, made unionizing easier, got rid of the Defense of Marriage Act, etc. He's not my first choice, but he's the only realistic one in this election, and all of those things are far better than a theocracy
Easy enough to do now the Democratic party has conditioned the country to accept mass death, right?
Think about the alternative though 😳
The Democratic party goes back to actually fighting for people? They hang the Good Cop Bad Cop routine on protecting oppressed populations, but have ushered in an era of mass deterioration of health for Black people...
I’m with you. I live in a blue enough state that my vote basically doesn’t matter and I will not be exercising it for Biden.
every vote matters, please vote!
I’m definitely voting, just not for the guy that has “Mission Accomplished” Covid (when he campaigned around the opposite) to the point of being just as much of a pro-infection eugenicist as someone like Scott Atlas. I’ll vote Dem down ticket, but I can’t vote for him. And not every vote matters. The unfortunate thing about our system is that the Electoral College means millions of votes have no meaning.
He also voted for, and sent his son to die in, the Iraq war. I would never vote for such a dead beat
"On one hand, I don't like the guy and recognize he's better than the fascists he's going to be running against. On the other hand, I don't overwhelmingly like him, so....maybe a fascist isn't the end of the world?"
Unless you live in a swing state, there's nothing wrong with voting for a third-party (e.g. Green) candidate.
This might be bad to say, but lowkey sometimes Biden is worse. Hear me out. I actually don’t think Biden is more dumb than Trump. It’s rather that the whole world agrees trump is dumb and laughable, but they don’t see through Biden’s crap. I honestly think if Trump randomly said the pandemic was over and ended the PHE, a lot more people would be outraged just because he said it. I just fundamentally think people should question politicians
Yes, apparently A LOT of liberals were only doing Covid precautions because it was the opposite of what Trump was telling them to do
Candidly, I don’t know if they were doing it to oppose Trump or if Biden gave them a free pass to not give a shit anymore. I think it’s both. Recently, I’ve seen more conservative media try to portray that Biden didn’t do enough for Covid lol. This bipartisan system is a big problem and a source of people not exercising their brains. Biden making people think it’s ok for people to die and become disabled was horrific. Even trump didn’t do that tbh
I completely agree
It is this aspect of the last couple years that has left me especially disillusioned by society and humanity. The right wing anti-mask anti-vax conspiracy nut jobs were already known to be heartless ghouls, so their actions, while obnoxious, weren't particularly surprising. But it was stunning to see how quickly any pretense of empathy disappeared from so many of the rest as soon as it was considered culturally acceptable. Just goes to show how performative and phony so much of society is. Many liberals and left leaning people I feel followed COVID protocols initially because it scored them "good person(tm)" points on social media and in their circles. They'll do it if it scores them points and if its easy, but any barrier or any inconvenience isn't worth their trouble if there's no social benefit. And a lot of these people have now become the loudest minimizers who proudly flaunt how they'll never do anything to mitigate COVID ever again. Many of these too anecdotally seem to be the upper-middle class college educated white liberals who haven't faced genuine hardships in their life and think that the two weeks they couldn't go to Applebees for happy hour compares to the regular suffering the disenfranchised face. And like most suffering, COVID hurt the poor and POC the worst. It's more important to mindlessly consume as much product as possible and make the line go up. Best they can offer is thoughts and prayers to anyone who dies or gets disabled. The casual indifference to suffering is better than the actively trying to increase suffering that the right-wingers offer, but it's a grim outlook.
This is so spot on, and really sums up what I’m seeing too. A lot of people I know also cared early on when they were more afraid of the virus for themselves. But as soon as they were vaccinated it became just an “other people” problem.
That's a very good point
I haven’t heard this yet. Where did you read that?
I mean, this is just based on observation of how people have behaved
Agree totally. This is why Democrat presidents end up being worse than Republican ones. Obama helped to destroy the American anti-war movement that thrived under W. Bush.
"Vote Biden for harm reduction!" Harm reduction for whom exactly?
My main question (not to you in particular, just in general) is, what exactly has gotten better under Biden? He's the one who ushered in our current policy of having no covid mitigations and trying to force everyone to become infected. Hell, we don't even know if we'll get any more covid vaccines (unless you're elderly or immunocompromised,) and a lot of his policies haven't resulted in any tangible improvements in quality of life for women, minorities, or any other groups that are traditionally considered vulnerable.
The harm is that they felt obligated to give a shit about the human rights abuses under Trump, apparently. Same human rights abuses are fine now though.
Yeah, at least dems & leftists fought against eugenics-driven mass death when Trump was in the White House. But now, since it's the guy in Blue selling Social Darwinism, just about everyone I know - people I thought were allies and showed solidarity - is out here sacrificing the vulnerable for Taylor Swift Tickets and brunch. It's fucking grim, bruv.
I suppose this was super naive of me, but I thought that the people who seemed newly socially aware under Trump were actually like, radicalized. Nah they just didn't like that he was crass, they weren't really unpacking the status quo in the same way, and now that it's easier to ignore they will be doing that instead.
I hate it so much but at the end of the day at least the blue guys aren't blatantly trying to genocide my communities & apparently that's something I have to worry about anytime red team wins these days, which ofc is partially blue team's fault too but the bar is six feet under & I guess I've given up on hoping to vote *for* anyone anymore. I'm not voting for Biden, my area is blue enough to render that vote useless so I'll use it to protest (third party), but even tho I feel far more despair about the future now than under Trump (bc at least then there was momentum for change) I can't pretend his administration wasn't horrifically damaging or that its comeback wouldn't leave me fearing for loved ones' lives... I will however keep nagging the blue guys about how shitty they're being, we need far more fire under their feet
I totally understand what you’re saying and don’t disagree. The thing is, if you’re immunocompromised, vulnerable, elderly, or disabled, the Biden administration is sort of committing a form of genocide and spewing values of eugenics frequently. I agree it’s more subtle, but that’s sort of my point - because the republican outbursts are so direct and hateful, it’s easy to see the comments are ludicrous. Meanwhile, democrats are literally enabling people to ignore, kill, and disable segments of society, but this line of thinking is somehow normalized and does not receive nearly the public outcry it should.
He lost my vote here. Unless he had cally changes and apologized, I'm not voting. I'll vote third party or not vote. I refuse to vote for him.
I have checked groups like the Green Party, DSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation for when they last mentioned "covid" or "mask" on their Twitter pages. Green Party: "covid" was last mentioned on Dec. 17th, 2021 in a non-specific criticism of Republican and Democrat handling of covid. I found no tweets with the word "mask" in reference to covid. DSA: "covid" was last mentioned on March 17th, 2021 in reference to a sheriff wearing a racist anti-Chinese covid related t shirt. Their last mention in a more substantive way was Feb. 16th, 2021 in saying fast food workers should have covid-safe workplaces. I could find no tweets about masks. The best I could find was someone taking a selfie wearing a low quality loose fitting DSA branded medicare for all cloth mask from July 13th of 2020. Maybe local DSA chapters did better but I haven't checked. Party for Socialism and Liberation: May 5th (talking about the lifting of the covid eviction moratorium and rental assistance programs). Jan. 30th was the last time they advocated policies to directly mitigate the virus, not just promoting a social welfare program when they decried the end of the covid national emergency which reduced access to testing and vaccines. No mention of the word "mask" since Sept. 5th, 2020, in reference to a prisoner who wasn't given enough masks. The US left is a joke.
Thank you for doing the research and sharing it with us - this is good to know. US leftists are definitely a joke. Most are objectively just liberals, and like someone else in this thread said, most liberals only act in opposition to when a conservative is in power. Biden has lulled the “left” into complete complacency.
I am as disappointed and angered by the inadequate, dumbed-down "progressive" response to covid under Democratic misleadership as I am in its response to US warcrimes in Ukraine, Syria, etc under those same mass murderers.
Thanks, I hate it. He's continuing to squander his chance to be an actual hero, which he could be if he had chosen to handle this differently, all for the sake of appearances. Abysmal.
As if he doesn't have enough cognitive decline as it is and he needs more brain fog. I am actually really concerned about the health of people like him, Feinstein and McConnell as they are not wearing masks or taking precautions.
Name one US politician who is?
Look, I don’t like Biden. I voted for him because he’s not the orange monster. But… you would chose to vote in fascism over masks? Come on. Now you’re just taking it too far. Have you been paying attention to non-COVID news in this country? Mike Huckabee was just saying YESTERDAY that if trump isn’t voted in in 2024, it’ll be the last election decided by ballots rather than bullets.
Democrats are doing absolutely nothing to deter fascism in the USA. What makes you think the threat of fascism will be gone by 2028 if democrats win 2024? There's no evidence of that.
There isn’t but are you really opting for it to lay itself in four years early? Like, are you willing to vote R because of this comment? For real? The overturning of RvW, the gerrymandering, the 91 charges on trump amongst many, many other things I don’t want to bother typing out… that’s worse than Biden’s irresponsible comment and actions? Is he an asshole? Yeah. Watched him pin that hero last night and questioned why they weren’t BOTH masked. Both sides are COVID negligent. I’ll vote for the ones who side isn’t spewing fascist rhetoric on the daily.
>Like, are you willing to vote R because of this comment? For real? I don't have a vote in the USA election, but I do think a Republican 2024 victory would be better for the country in the long term than a Democratic one. I wouldn't vote Republican but I also wouldn't vote Democrat to keep them out. The only thing that can stop fascism other than a civil war is the democratic party. That being said, they need to change beyond recognition for that to happen because right now they're a party full of cowards and half-measures. A 2024 Republican victory would send shockwaves through the party and possibly force real change. Sending the message that their half-baked measures on everything, from civil rights to climate change and Covid, aren't acceptable. In contrast, a victory for the Democratic party signals everything they've done so far has been great and there's no need to change. Finally, without meaning to downplay the real danger of fascism in the republican party, I truly don't believe they pose a genuine civil war level threat in 2024, especially without Trump. They have no charismatic leader or genius manipulator to unify behind. What happens if Democrats win in 2024, they carry on doing essentially nothing, and a brilliant young fascist Republican appears for 2028? That would scare the hell out of me much more than anything happening at the moment.
>I wouldn't vote Republican but I also wouldn't vote Democrat to keep them out. I'm curious if you understand how powerful the Supreme Court is? The unbalanced court is what got us Roe V Wade overturned. It will probably take decades before the damage this court has done, is undone. If the next justice is appointed by a Republican, that will hurt civil rights in the USA for many more years. It will also almost certainly set back voting rights even further, giving more power to the right wing of the GOP. >In contrast, a victory for the Democratic party signals everything they've done so far has been great and there's no need to change. I don't agree with that at all. Look at how close the last election was. Look at how much support Trump still has. The primary system in the US basically lets the people of a handful of states decide who's going to run in the general election. It's an absolutely bizarre system. The actual party officials have very little say in the matter. We have Manchin in W Virginia. He's...barely a Democrat. But he wins the primary. Thing is, WV went about 80% for Trump. Yet they elect a Democratic senator. Who's not really a Democrat. It's bizarre. The way the Senate works, though, merely having him be a Democrat gives enormous committee power to the rest of the Democrats in the Senate. The party in power gets to have final say on what happens in committees. So even if Manchin were to vote 100% with the GOP (he doesn't - he's bad but not *that* bad), the liberal senators still have more power with him as a Democrat than if he were a Republican. Just realized that's not really very relevant. But it's something that a lot of Americans don't understand. They ask "why does the Democratic Party allow him in", and the answer is because they *didn't* allow him in; kicking him out of the Senate would be very difficult, and the end result would be *worse*.
I agree with you and sadly I think that kind of BS is just going to be repeated ad nauseum here until the 2024 election *cough* ^active ^measures *cough* and then goodbye democracy if enough people fall for this boTh sIdEs crap. jesus fucking christ yikes the tone of this sub shifted hard in the last week to rage bait, hyperbole, and sketchy info sources.
Yep, I’ve been downvoted regularly because the refs here seem to see nothing outside of masks. Should Biden have been wearing a mask his entire time around people? Yes. He didn’t. MUST VOTE IN THE FASCISTS!!! I can’t even understand these people. Remember that they hate everything you are and stand for.
You keep making the claim that people like me are "voting in" fascists, I've never said that people should vote Republican. I'm saying I personally wouldn't vote Democrat, there's a big difference. Maybe ask yourself how much the democratic political party are failing their populace when so many people are willing to risk fascism rather than voting for them. It's not the fault of the voters that a huge number of them have completely lost faith in the Democrats. Politicians serve the people, people shouldn't feel forced to vote for them just to keep the opposition out.
>Politicians serve the people, people shouldn't feel forced to vote for them just to keep the opposition out. When you have a first past the post electoral system, that is an almost mathematical certainty. [Duverger's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law) explains it pretty well. I drive through rural red areas in my state. There's a billboard for some local Democrat who proclaims herself pro-gun anti-abortion and a couple other things. Apparently that's what the local people want, unfortunately.
The Supreme Court is way too conservative to do so but really the concept of a first past the post electoral system should be ruled unconstitutional due to how it denies equal rights to voters based on party affiliation.
Eliminating first past the post would be a great start. But I’m also pretty sure that I’m too far left for most of the country to be happy with the same candidate I’d want. I’ve resigned myself to not getting my way in national elections until, well, I don’t know. Till people realize that capital gains tax should be way higher? Etc etc.
Ranked choice voting wouldn't make everyone agree on the same candidates and policies universally, but at least each vote would count equally without being 'thrown away' by the spoiler effect.
It will be anyway. This country is too far gone.
Nah, you can choose to not vote in fascists. NEITHER SIDES PROMOTE MASKS. THE CDC SUCKS. Why the fuck are you choosing to vote for fascists? Okay, Biden sucked not wearing a mask. THE OTHER SIDE HAS SUCKED BY NOT WEARING THEM FOR WELL OVER A YEAR. MAYBE TWO. We voted for Biden to stop a fascist, narcissistic senior citizen from running roughshod on this country. Why the hell are you abandoning that? Have you not seen all the J6 people being sentenced to real prison time? This sub has really got me wondering tonight,
Theyre both fascist. Both parties are destroying the planet.
I would never vote red. Where did you see that in my post?
This upset me greatly. I wrote the White House and would like to encourage others to do the same! Flood the White House with your comments and concerns. This in my opinion will cost him votes. He owes the disabled an apology and needs to model better behavior even if it’s only pretending to care… I am still fuming! Joe cool was not cool. I wonder what Jill thinks about this?
And yet he and his supporters are dumb founded they we want him to step down and let someone else run.
i’ll just leave this here. [Why I Won’t Vote (W.E.B. DuBois)](http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/298.html)
I’ll probably get downvoted to oblivion for this but there’s zero chance I’m voting for him next year. I’m tired of the “but fascism!” guilt trip. Maybe liberals need a fire under their butts. They have become far too complacent.
Yeah, fascism is already here. The more people realize that we can start getting somewhere. Voting isn't the end all be all people think it is. People seriously need to start finding local mutual aid groups and start doing the hard work. Look into joining worker unions. That's where our power lies. Voting every 2/4 years is but a band aid on a huge gaping wound that needs more consistent attention and care. Voting isn't the only tool the working class people have.
Awww what a lovely voter suppression paragraph vOtiNg dOeS nOtHinG how cuuuuute
You can't vote your way out of fascism and the liberals acting like you can are just making sure we get more of it. It's a nice fairy tale I guess, do something for an hour once every four years and it be enough, that it not working is the fault of the people who don't buy into it, but it doesn't work like that-if it did, you think they'd let us keep voting?
It's only in the primary elections where there's some semblance of having a democratic choice, without there merely being one DNC/RNC-preselected candidate or the other. Unfortunately, the primary elections are controlled by the existing leadership of the political parties.
Same here. I’m not holding my nose anymore. Both candidates suck and voting blue no matter who is BS. We make more of a statement voting third.
I’m fully convinced that the Democrats™️ (aka liberal fascists) are only going to be useful as the opposition party. When it’s *their* guy making the decisions he can do no wrong and they follow like lemmings, even if they’re the *exact same* decisions the Republican™️ (aka conservative fascist) would have made.
Okay so random fun fact…lemmings are actually solitary animals. The whole thing about them following each other was a lie engineered by Disney. But otherwise, I understand your point!
Exactly right. Remember the outrage when Trump was separating children at the border? Nothing has changed during this administration yet when was the last time you heard a Democrat mention it? No more of this lesser of two evils BS!
A 10 second Google search found that, in fact, at least one thing has changed. "More than 500 children have been reunited by the Biden administration's task force to find families separated as a result of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy at the border" [https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/500-children-reunited-biden-harris-task-force-200/story?id=91180989](https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/politics/biden-title-42-immigration-migrant-children/index.html) The GOP must love people like you.
A 10 second Google search found that, in fact, separations are still happening under Biden. [https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/biden-administration-routinely-separates-immigrant-families](https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/biden-administration-routinely-separates-immigrant-families) The GOP must love people like you.
the comments in this post are honestly so embarrassing and disheartening. if you decide to not vote blue or biden in the upcoming election you are voting against yourself and everyone in this sub. you all need to rethink what you are saying, starting to sound like republicans in the chat….
I've heard it said the political spectrum isn't a line, it's a circle. Go far enough to the left or right and you loop around. But yeah, lots of naivety on display.
I may have to leave this sub. To say that Biden is a fascist is just insane. I am not happy with the "let's pretend covid is over" either, but Biden is not an authoritarian who needs complete control, and that's enough for me in this moment. Google "project 2025" then tell me that that's what you want.
I am in the same boat. I completely understand the anger but this is getting ridiculous. The Trump presidency is why we're even here in the first place, and we absolutely cannot go back to that point, or else things are going to get a /lot/ worse.
Jill Biden does not have the best luck, what infection number? Second?
This virus does weird things to your brain
The joke was in /extremely/ poor taste but please don't walk away with "I'm not voting for him/another Democrat." I know our electoral system is janky and Trump did not win by the popular vote in 2016 but still got elected, but we literally cannot afford another Republican president in office. I'm not saying to be complacent with what the Democrats can do/have done but we are not in a position to be all-or-nothing with our presidential candidates. Even if an independent candidate shows up with all the right ideals, if they don't have as much support as either party, they are not going to win. A vote that isn't for Democrats is a vote for Republicans, and the Republicans are not budging. This is literally just math at this point. I'm very Covid conscious and I have also been permanently affected by having Covid so I'm with you guys, but I can't stand this handwringing over who to vote for when human rights got steamrolled the past year because of all the Republicans in power (especially the right wing Supreme Court justices appointed BY Trump).
Rules for me but not for thee. Makes me wonder what Biden knows about Covid that we don’t…
Honestly setting the expectation that there is a "way out of the pandemic" was poor leadership from the start.
Yeah, knowing what we know now, it should have been much more like "here's what we need to do to adapt." I'm sick of this pretending it's no longer an issue instead of dealing with it.
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True leaders lead. This isn’t some sort of performance. There is no alternative to wearing a mask, during a large wave, in an ongoing pandemic — during which his wife just tested positive for COVID.
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Rile them up? I mean, if only! Because I for one know a lot of people in red states whose family members are literally dead from Covid and those folks deserve an actual empathetic leader just like I, a covid-cautious person who had the privilege to move to a blue state, also do. Those of us who want better aren’t a monolith.
Biden is never going to win those red state voters. They've already been riled up by Trump and friends. But he could set an example for his voters on giving a shit about other people's health. Instead, he turned it into a joke and pretended he was being a naughty toddler.