"Poor people in foreign lands, people who never harmed us in any way, these innocents must die at our hands, but that's okay because gay rights and abortion!"
However you rationalize voting for a conscious, open and willing genocide.
did you "see" the latest US attempt to change the regime in Venezuela? but hey, look, the DNC is running a fresh new face to continue the same policies! so exciting!
I will not own it. I am as much opposed to the genocide in Gaza as anyone else, but it will continue under Trump as well as Harris. Withholding one’s vote for the lesser of two evils is tantamount to voting for the greater evil. That I cannot do.
Palestine, West Asia; East Palestine, Ohio. Overt genocide by armaments vs. covert genocide by neglect, impoverishment, chronic environmental illness, and suicidal surrender to psychologically impossible existence within a society whose governments don't give a shite. What's worse. a quick death or a slow tortuous one?
How you are at one thing is how you are at everything. The U.S. government and western empire doesn’t favor its own or have any morality when it comes to own citizens either.
Spot on! American citizens are being slowly killed. Those overseas get the munitions from the drones. Biden and his ilk have openly suggested that bombs and other weapons, previously reserved for foreign nations, could easily be used against any person or group in the USA who does not fall into line with their dictates.
It's incredible how the neolibs just jump on the joyride of Madame Genocide! Why is she any different from any other deep state controlled candidate? What people see and what exists are so far apart.
People want to believe, the same people who wanted so badly to believe that Obama was anything different, even as he betrayed them over and over and over again.
For most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people humans can trust to have their back.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever humans have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to their detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
As a result, when people are presented with evidence, strong evidence, irrefutable evidence, evidence verging on philosophical proof, that their deeply held beliefs, the beliefs that people use to define themselves and tribe, are wrong, that the tribal leaders are crazy, stupid or malevolent, that we are headed to catastrophe - rather than change beliefs, change leaders, change tribe or change course, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists.
The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.
Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically learning symbol manipulation in order to rationalize something.
If I had some magic words that could snap humans out of cognitive dissonance, believe me, I would have used them a long time ago.
Yes, I understand cognitive dissonance. As a neurodivergent person I've had to understand the mind-boggling inanity of many neurotypical people who seem to ignore reality all the time. As we get closer and closer to ww3 or further beyond this man-made climate disaster I keep asking is there anything we can do (to trip up the cognitive dissonance)? It's like, Bueller? ...
Presently it appears that brother Barack is the DP kingmaker. After using his office to kick-start Russiagate, he “advised” every presidential candidate not named Warren to suspend their campaigns in 2020, thus preempting the repeated humiliation of having a Democratic-Socialist get more votes than a party hack.
Just yesterday Seymour Hersh reported that Obama forced Biden to drop out of his campaign by informing him that Kamala, as VP will invoke the 25th amendment to certify that Biden is not competent to run. According to Hersh, Obama asked Biden not to nominate Kamala, because he doesn’t believe that she can prevail. But because Biden was so incensed by Obama’s extortion, he decided to serve up a big middle finger to his former running mate.
I think it's still important to vote. Just don't vote for one of the genocidal monsters. Don't vote for the banality of evil. Vote against it. And continue to fight against it in other ways.
Exactly. Don't give in to the "lesser evil" but "fight for the greater good." (a paraphrase of a statement made by Jill Stein https://jillstein2024.com )
Our duopoly *by its very design* keeps any third party movement from taking root. There is, thankfully, a meaningful reform movement (see Gehl and Porter) I’d urge all of you to join. Within the system *as is,* we need to consider which major party we help to power with our third-party or non-vote. Our rebellion against the system will nevertheless have an impact on the system outcome, and maybe not the ‘greater good’ one.
You’re spot on with your first point. Parties are absolutely incentivized to divide voters and serve special interests, rather than weigh and balance the interests of all citizens and find common ground to move the country forward. And maybe you are right that it’s unreformable, but some very smart people have some good ideas that I’m jumping on.
I am not participating and legitimizing the system I don't believe in. This is a society of spectacle, as Professor Richard Wollf perfectly described it.
Indeed US Americans so called Black Americans in particular have continued to fall over themselves in glee for the tokens and symbolism of checking off some boxes such as “the first black man/woman to become so & so.” This incredibly low bar-identity politics is among many things that is so disgusting about US American politics.
You seen Jewish Americans voting en masse against Jewish politicians? I’ve never seen it.
This is nothing to do with African Americans specifically, despite your suggestion that.
What it’s about it the U.S. being an unreconciled plantation nation existing on tension rather than one with any kind of common cause or shared humanity.
I completely understand the impulse, but we are already part of American society, unless you live off the grid. In that society I want my daughter to have reproductive rights and I would like a government that believes that we have a right to clean air and water and that climate change is real and is doing something about it.
I’m not sure who this mysterious “they” are, throwing me my crumbs, but fortunately for us, Bibi Netanyahu is not on the ballot, so no one will be voting for open genocide in November. I will instead vote for the woman Fox News just called “extremist” for being sympathetic to Palestinians.
I forgot, of course, that the US has never supplied Israel with so much as a penknife and that US transports packed with munitions are not daily landing in Israel.
Let us know when this wonder woman actually does anything other than have enemies you approve of.
"I want my daughter to have reproductive rights" - use plainspeak: "I want my daughter to fuck her brains out without protection and then scrub out whatever threatens to become a person as I don't want to contribute to climate change with more spawn".
Russian_bot, what an awful thing to say. I hope you are kinder to people in real life. I’m trying to have an actual dialogue here as we all work to change the US system. I’m open to different viewpoints and solutions -it’s why I follow Caitlin- and would have been open to hearing yours but I think you just want to get anger out; ditto lots of folks on this thread. I understand the rage but it’s probably time to depart. Peace to you and yours.
"what an awful thing to say." - say it differently, just skip equivocation.
What do you mean by "reproductive rights"? Rights to reproduce? Who bans those? Well, some eugenicists might wish to for certain people but I don't know of any state-mandated bans.
So what do you mean by women lacking reproductive rights? Be detailed and let's have a discussion. "I understand the rage" - is a copout and a projection. It shows the rigidity of your state of mind banning all discussion.
Reproductive rights: the right to choose whether to reproduce or not via sex.
Also, choosing to reproduce via anything other than sex (IVF).
Also, for some: accessing birth control to prevent pregnancy.
Who bans those?
In March, Republicans released a budget that endorses a national abortion ban with zero exceptions for rape, puts IVF on the chopping block, and guts funding for contraception for low-income and uninsured women.
Project 2025, the detailed policy authored by Trump admin veterans, wants the above and also wants to imprison anyone distributing pornography.
Finally, Trump’s VP pick said childless people should have fewer voting rights.
Since Roe v Wade was overturned by Trump nominated justices, Republicans have increasingly shown a creepy focus on wanting to ban sexual activity that doesn’t lead to reproducing another human. Or, again, using anything other than sex to reproduce (IVF).
Excellent! Your vote won't count then and those who do vote will have more power to set the inevitable outcome that will be one of the two major choices.
Foreign policy in the US is basically one of endless war abroad at huge costs
Those endless war abroad is how the e money in the US, the world's richest country, is not available for any domestic policy of human development and reducing inequality, and instead goes directly into the pockets of the rich, via the military industrial companies that they own.
"....A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion and have killed more than 900,000 people..."
But the poor people in the US are not getting treated decently. So voting does not stop genocides happening elsewhere and it does not help people in need in the US either. There is still no medical available, people still don't have enough healthy food, people still have no place to live, and to top it all off, they are encouraged to join the army and go fight somewhere to make things worse for people somewhere else. Not to mention all the tax dollars that are spent sending bombs and weapons to destroy someone else somewhere else.
Government is nothing more than a convention of psychos and perverts. It always attract the idiots for they are rarely capable of doing anything else in life.
Correct. But government itself is not by fiat always completely EVIL. Except, I imagine, if you're multi-billionaire (going on trillionaire) who doesn't have enough fucking money, and a reasonably non-corrupt government is in your way.
Governments control lives of citizens, their badness is more visible and felt, hence more "complainable". One can leave a corrupt organization (church, community, etc) but one cannot leave a government. Doesn't matter the country. When one is born, one is inside the Hotel California.
Hence, you hear complaints of governments more than of any other entity. And dreaming of incorruptible government is pure idealism. Or pure and unadulterated communism as Buford T Justice would say.
There are many types of governments in the world, just as there have been many types of churches and communities.
Libertarianism only serves the obscenely rich (as it did the Koch Brothers) and is also a dream fantasy.
Not everything is black and white. Government itself can also be a source of good. To paint it as always bad is intellectually absurd nonsense. But it is used as an excuse by the obscenely wealthy to take away what little common wealth, and public good, has remained for ordinary Americans.
Caitlin’s argument against considering foreign and domestic policies separately is incoherent. Since both Republican and Democratic Parties essentially share the same reprehensible foreign policy goals, voters must decide whether there is any other area in which they differ. Domestic policy is that area. Though non-US citizens may not care, Americans are profoundly affected by who sits on the Supreme Court. The same is true of who sits on numerous regulatory bodies and who governs state and local entities. I would never claim that the Democrats are particularly good at all such matters, but they are a whole lot better than the openly racist, radical right Republicans.
And one more very important point that Caitlin repeatedly glosses over is that in the United States, we have a two party system. We have always had only two major parties, except for a few brief intervals. This is the inevitable result of the vagaries of the Electoral College that decides presidential elections. Small parties do exist, but they mainly attract voters who not want to be involved with either of the two large parties. That’s fine, but their votes have no weight whatsoever.
The real question is whether the Democratic Party can be changed from within before the United States implodes (or explodes as the case may be). One recent positive sign was the boycott of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress by 135 members. Younger generations are clearly activated against the genocide. Also, polls show that a solid majority of Americans now want the war in Gaza to stop. Are the party leaders listening, and if they are, do they care?
iirc, the 'changing the dems from within' has been tried and advocated for numerous times. 'vote for biden now, and then we'll push him to the left'. at best, you'll get slow and incremental change to the propaganda machine that adapts and works on the publics perception and gnaws away at learned history.
Biden has accomplished far more domestic good than many people expected.
Foreign policy sucks. Those that control the narrative control the public. People have been led to believe Israel has been a wonderful democratic country. Now we are starting to see that the Zionist government has been evil since the British defeated the Ottoman Empire during World War One. The British army taught the Zionists how to murder Palestinians who got in the Zionists’ way. They learned well.
After World War Two, Americans picked up the support of Israel from the British. We have turned a blind eye toward Israel’s constant murdering of Palestinians. Israel is a worse Apartheid state than South Africa ever was. We cannot change the past; hopefully now since October 7, we are getting a better understanding of what Israel is, it would be possible to bring pressure to bear to cut off all financial/military aid to Israel. Since the US government can create any number of dollars it wants and spend it on anything, maybe we should get involved in rebuilding Gaza and the West Bank instead.
I might add that the single biggest barrier to electoral reform in the United States is the totally fucked-up system of campaign financing that was brought to us by a decision of a conservative-majority Supreme Court. (See my previous comment regarding the importance of appointments to the Court.) There are virtually no limits on how much money individuals and corporations can contribute to election campaigns. Does this distort election outcomes and subsequent governing decisions in favor of said individuals and corporations? Indeed it does massively.
I don’t disagree, but the fact remains that Republicans would be just as bad as the Democrats on war, genocide etc and worse on domestic policy. Given that there is no realistic alternative to the two major parties, the rational choice is to support the lesser of two evils. Even Noam Chomsky has advocated this strategy for years, and he is a very harsh critic of the Democrats. His stated opinion is that the Republicans Party is the most dangerous political institution in history, and he feels obliged to vote against it, which can only be done in a meaningful way by voting for Democratic opponents, even if they are far from ideal.
That dynamic has existed for as long as I've been aware. I held my nose and chose LOTE for at least a majority of my 50+ years as a voter. Then I looked around at what my nose-pinching had wrought: over time the D's became more like the R's of old, and even worse on war / foreign policy, more tightly controlled by corporate (and Israeli, etc.) cash. And as a result, wars became a constant, debt piled up massively (to fund the imperial quests), climate destabilization accelerated, and the risks of thermonuclear conflagration steadily increased.
I also recognized around the same time that the notion that "there is no realistic alternative" is only true because I and others believed it so. I lacked the courage to be among those to dare to break with it - to actually help CREATE realistic alternatives. I had helped stunt the possibilities of developing an alternative power structure!
So I don't do that anymore. I invite others who SEE the dysfunction of the current system to see that at a fundamental level, there is too little daylight between the two parts of the duopoly to matter in the long run; and that we have effectively run out of time to try merely to keep even worse from happening or to base our voting on anything other than those existential dangers. The shit's already starting to hit the fan- even if we've become too inured to the occasional splatters. The Earth's 6th Great Mass Extinction Event is underway; genocide is taking place in the open with little resistance from the global institutions, and bat-shit crazy people are gambling in Washington that they can continue nuclear brinksmanship with at least a couple other nuclear powers. And if we only cared about our own States, this conflict-generation and war-spending is removing the opportunity to address those threats, and, (in the U.S. at least, but probably throughout the Western alliance) is going to soon enough produce a hell of a lot of economic insecurity for the majority. Those should be all our concerns and the basis of our electoral choices.
I don’t know what could be more dangerous than what the present Democratic Administration has pulled. Both parties constitute the same “most dangerous political institution in history.”
The FDA is corrupt as fuck and so we get clot shots. The East Palestine derailment is another fiasco. The borders aren’t borders anymore—so we don’t even really have a sovereign nation-state…the repercussions from this massive immigration fiasco won’t be pretty. The FBI & Justice Dept. are politicized beyond belief. Don’t give me any more of this “lesser evil” bullshit. The Democrats are at least as dangerous as the Republicans.
The Republicans will push Iran’s back against a wall and the Democrats do the same with Russia. Parse that shit.
Most voters are not involved with the massive rise in homelessness disfiguring cities and leading the Supreme Court to criminalize sleeping with a blanket in a public space and order issues such as youth unemployment in doughnut cities, lack of Medicare driving bankruptcies, etc. and not given the choice to to think of what the feds could do with the two trillion dollars that go to the military industrial complex represented by the duopoly.
Many voters actually *are* involved in factors that have lead to the housing bubble and massive rise in homelessness. Developers, bankers, planners, white collar professional designers and engineers, contractors. Construction is a significant sector of the economy that employs millions, all working not to provide affordable, accessible housing, but pumping up a speculative housing bubble that serves to provide generational wealth transfer to some, and tight control of housing access for others. Alot of people make good middle class or wealthy livings toiling to provide too expensive unsustainable housing.
Kamala is horrible on every issue, foreign and domestic. After "they" installed one fake president, they think they can do it again. And maybe they can. If they manage to succeed with this one, there is no hope for America. The Democrat party truly has become the #DemocratDeathCult with a whole bunch of card-carrying members who have been completely zombified.
Americans like to delude themselves that their nation is exceptional, but in reality it is now just another Banana Republic, a fundamentally unserious nation, in terminal decline..
Deep State, the entire Democrat Party, the elites of the Democrat party, the corporate-academia-Democrat-union-nonprofit Borg ... take your pick.
How it all works and who are the major players is left to what few real investigative journalists remain. This is more than conspiracy theory; there's certainly enough information in front of our eyes.
For whoever thinks the Democrat Party is your father's party, that would be completely wrong. You have to "re-imagine" what the new reality truly is. The Democrat party needs to rebrand; it has nothing to do with democracy or democrats. It's some ugly totalitarian creation, with elements of fascism, socialism and communism using division, race/gender politics, extremism and more to push the country to some breaking point, at which point they'll probably really try to exert the lockdown, hammer on people.
Democrats need to be voted out, and the election system monitored. But, I think there's a real threat of fake results; you see how Kamala is being turned into The One right before our eyes, even with a long list of failures and hours of video showing her clear incompetence. They've proven beyond a doubt what they are capable of to retain power.
There are the Republicans equally bad -- Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc. RINOs Mitt Romney; Daughter of Darth Vader, Liz Cheney and Ghost of Kiev cheerleader, Adam Kinzinger. Even patch eye Dan Crenshaw is highly suspect now, even though he came out of the box as a strong pro-America and Americans guy -- he seriously flipped on H-1B visas.
That said, I think there are enough decent Republicans who, with folks such as Gabbard and Kennedy who were forced out of the Democrat party, can forge a strong party. Must have some hope. Otherwise, what's the option? Writing off the U.S.?
Given the Democrat playbook is so well-worn at this point, their strategy of accusing their opposition of what they themselves are guilty of has been used again and again. And obviously, too many folks buy it.
That's why it's so easy to go through their X posts and feed their bs right back to them, verbatim usually, with their names in place of the opposition.
"Poor people in foreign lands, people who never harmed us in any way, these innocents must die at our hands, but that's okay because gay rights and abortion!"
However you rationalize voting for a conscious, open and willing genocide.
Own it.
You nailed it on the head, Feral. American voters are all about "my comfort level" not about "How can I help others in need?"
Oh, the shitlibs who occasionally try come here to vote-shame my tabby ass into voting Team D are all most instructive.
Hi everyone. Namecalling like shitlibs is a temper tantrum and agenda versus logical argument.
it is a convenient label for people such as yourself who try to shame people into supporting voting for genocide.
I see. Catchy.
did you "see" the latest US attempt to change the regime in Venezuela? but hey, look, the DNC is running a fresh new face to continue the same policies! so exciting!
Although Feral Finster I like how you roll with grammar and punctuation.
I will not own it. I am as much opposed to the genocide in Gaza as anyone else, but it will continue under Trump as well as Harris. Withholding one’s vote for the lesser of two evils is tantamount to voting for the greater evil. That I cannot do.
"if rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it as much as possible!"
Palestine, West Asia; East Palestine, Ohio. Overt genocide by armaments vs. covert genocide by neglect, impoverishment, chronic environmental illness, and suicidal surrender to psychologically impossible existence within a society whose governments don't give a shite. What's worse. a quick death or a slow tortuous one?
Points very well made and well put. Thanks.
How you are at one thing is how you are at everything. The U.S. government and western empire doesn’t favor its own or have any morality when it comes to own citizens either.
America has no red lines.
Spot on! American citizens are being slowly killed. Those overseas get the munitions from the drones. Biden and his ilk have openly suggested that bombs and other weapons, previously reserved for foreign nations, could easily be used against any person or group in the USA who does not fall into line with their dictates.
It's incredible how the neolibs just jump on the joyride of Madame Genocide! Why is she any different from any other deep state controlled candidate? What people see and what exists are so far apart.
People want to believe, the same people who wanted so badly to believe that Obama was anything different, even as he betrayed them over and over and over again.
How do we get them to open their eyes? How do we stop the insanity? More and more we are a Third Reich Nation.
For most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people humans can trust to have their back.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever humans have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to their detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
As a result, when people are presented with evidence, strong evidence, irrefutable evidence, evidence verging on philosophical proof, that their deeply held beliefs, the beliefs that people use to define themselves and tribe, are wrong, that the tribal leaders are crazy, stupid or malevolent, that we are headed to catastrophe - rather than change beliefs, change leaders, change tribe or change course, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists.
The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.
Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically learning symbol manipulation in order to rationalize something.
If I had some magic words that could snap humans out of cognitive dissonance, believe me, I would have used them a long time ago.
Yes, I understand cognitive dissonance. As a neurodivergent person I've had to understand the mind-boggling inanity of many neurotypical people who seem to ignore reality all the time. As we get closer and closer to ww3 or further beyond this man-made climate disaster I keep asking is there anything we can do (to trip up the cognitive dissonance)? It's like, Bueller? ...
If I had some magic words....
Presently it appears that brother Barack is the DP kingmaker. After using his office to kick-start Russiagate, he “advised” every presidential candidate not named Warren to suspend their campaigns in 2020, thus preempting the repeated humiliation of having a Democratic-Socialist get more votes than a party hack.
Just yesterday Seymour Hersh reported that Obama forced Biden to drop out of his campaign by informing him that Kamala, as VP will invoke the 25th amendment to certify that Biden is not competent to run. According to Hersh, Obama asked Biden not to nominate Kamala, because he doesn’t believe that she can prevail. But because Biden was so incensed by Obama’s extortion, he decided to serve up a big middle finger to his former running mate.
Exactly!
Well said, Caitlin.
I think it's still important to vote. Just don't vote for one of the genocidal monsters. Don't vote for the banality of evil. Vote against it. And continue to fight against it in other ways.
Exactly. Don't give in to the "lesser evil" but "fight for the greater good." (a paraphrase of a statement made by Jill Stein https://jillstein2024.com )
Our duopoly *by its very design* keeps any third party movement from taking root. There is, thankfully, a meaningful reform movement (see Gehl and Porter) I’d urge all of you to join. Within the system *as is,* we need to consider which major party we help to power with our third-party or non-vote. Our rebellion against the system will nevertheless have an impact on the system outcome, and maybe not the ‘greater good’ one.
The current system is so captured by special interests as to render it unreformable.
The only alternative is to Burn It All Down.
You’re spot on with your first point. Parties are absolutely incentivized to divide voters and serve special interests, rather than weigh and balance the interests of all citizens and find common ground to move the country forward. And maybe you are right that it’s unreformable, but some very smart people have some good ideas that I’m jumping on.
Not participating in the corrupt system is the ultimate vote against it.
I am not participating and legitimizing the system I don't believe in. This is a society of spectacle, as Professor Richard Wollf perfectly described it.
Indeed US Americans so called Black Americans in particular have continued to fall over themselves in glee for the tokens and symbolism of checking off some boxes such as “the first black man/woman to become so & so.” This incredibly low bar-identity politics is among many things that is so disgusting about US American politics.
Humans, black, white, etc. are herd animals to rival any lemming or sheep.
You seen Jewish Americans voting en masse against Jewish politicians? I’ve never seen it.
This is nothing to do with African Americans specifically, despite your suggestion that.
What it’s about it the U.S. being an unreconciled plantation nation existing on tension rather than one with any kind of common cause or shared humanity.
He got that from Guy DeBord's The Society of the Spectacle. A work of genius that is hard to read.
I completely understand the impulse, but we are already part of American society, unless you live off the grid. In that society I want my daughter to have reproductive rights and I would like a government that believes that we have a right to clean air and water and that climate change is real and is doing something about it.
However you rationalize voting for open genocide.
I hope that the crumbs they tossed you were worth it.
I’m not sure who this mysterious “they” are, throwing me my crumbs, but fortunately for us, Bibi Netanyahu is not on the ballot, so no one will be voting for open genocide in November. I will instead vote for the woman Fox News just called “extremist” for being sympathetic to Palestinians.
I forgot, of course, that the US has never supplied Israel with so much as a penknife and that US transports packed with munitions are not daily landing in Israel.
Let us know when this wonder woman actually does anything other than have enemies you approve of.
The premise of "lesser evilism" as an electoral strategy frequently employed by progressives to the left of the Democratic Party — has been a failure!
"I want my daughter to have reproductive rights" - use plainspeak: "I want my daughter to fuck her brains out without protection and then scrub out whatever threatens to become a person as I don't want to contribute to climate change with more spawn".
Why did you have her in the first place?
Russian_bot, what an awful thing to say. I hope you are kinder to people in real life. I’m trying to have an actual dialogue here as we all work to change the US system. I’m open to different viewpoints and solutions -it’s why I follow Caitlin- and would have been open to hearing yours but I think you just want to get anger out; ditto lots of folks on this thread. I understand the rage but it’s probably time to depart. Peace to you and yours.
"what an awful thing to say." - say it differently, just skip equivocation.
What do you mean by "reproductive rights"? Rights to reproduce? Who bans those? Well, some eugenicists might wish to for certain people but I don't know of any state-mandated bans.
So what do you mean by women lacking reproductive rights? Be detailed and let's have a discussion. "I understand the rage" - is a copout and a projection. It shows the rigidity of your state of mind banning all discussion.
Reproductive rights: the right to choose whether to reproduce or not via sex.
Also, choosing to reproduce via anything other than sex (IVF).
Also, for some: accessing birth control to prevent pregnancy.
Who bans those?
In March, Republicans released a budget that endorses a national abortion ban with zero exceptions for rape, puts IVF on the chopping block, and guts funding for contraception for low-income and uninsured women.
Project 2025, the detailed policy authored by Trump admin veterans, wants the above and also wants to imprison anyone distributing pornography.
Finally, Trump’s VP pick said childless people should have fewer voting rights.
Since Roe v Wade was overturned by Trump nominated justices, Republicans have increasingly shown a creepy focus on wanting to ban sexual activity that doesn’t lead to reproducing another human. Or, again, using anything other than sex to reproduce (IVF).
Real Handmaid’s Tale stuff.
You can look any of this up.
I’m surprised you haven’t heard about any of it.
Peace out.
Excellent! Your vote won't count then and those who do vote will have more power to set the inevitable outcome that will be one of the two major choices.
So, how much my vote counted when I voted for Bernie Sanders?
Foreign policy in the US is basically one of endless war abroad at huge costs
Those endless war abroad is how the e money in the US, the world's richest country, is not available for any domestic policy of human development and reducing inequality, and instead goes directly into the pockets of the rich, via the military industrial companies that they own.
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
"....A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion and have killed more than 900,000 people..."
https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-Economic-Consequences-of-War-on-US-Economy_0.pdf
"....For each of the periods after World War II, we need to ask, what would have happened in economic
terms if these wars did not happen? On the specific evidence provided, it can be reasonably
said, it is likely taxes would have been lower, inflation would have been lower, there would have
been higher consumption and investment and certainly lower budget deficits..."
And a whole lot less people would’ve been murdered.
"you live under a tyrannical empire which is fueled by human blood, and which is completely unaccountable to the will of the public."
Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
But the poor people in the US are not getting treated decently. So voting does not stop genocides happening elsewhere and it does not help people in need in the US either. There is still no medical available, people still don't have enough healthy food, people still have no place to live, and to top it all off, they are encouraged to join the army and go fight somewhere to make things worse for people somewhere else. Not to mention all the tax dollars that are spent sending bombs and weapons to destroy someone else somewhere else.
“ you know it’s funny when it rains, it pours. They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor”
- From Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up” (1993)
And ain’t a damn thing changed in the 30 years since he said it. In fact it’s worse.
If the poor would stop producing babies, they wouldn't' have hungry kids!
Government is nothing more than a convention of psychos and perverts. It always attract the idiots for they are rarely capable of doing anything else in life.
Such people are easier to control.
It would be almost impossible to refute this claim.
Corruption, greed and immorality are the problem. Government is just a structure of civilized countries.
The properties you listed are inherent in the humanity. No institution can be clear of them. Including governments.
Correct. But government itself is not by fiat always completely EVIL. Except, I imagine, if you're multi-billionaire (going on trillionaire) who doesn't have enough fucking money, and a reasonably non-corrupt government is in your way.
Governments control lives of citizens, their badness is more visible and felt, hence more "complainable". One can leave a corrupt organization (church, community, etc) but one cannot leave a government. Doesn't matter the country. When one is born, one is inside the Hotel California.
Hence, you hear complaints of governments more than of any other entity. And dreaming of incorruptible government is pure idealism. Or pure and unadulterated communism as Buford T Justice would say.
There are many types of governments in the world, just as there have been many types of churches and communities.
Libertarianism only serves the obscenely rich (as it did the Koch Brothers) and is also a dream fantasy.
Not everything is black and white. Government itself can also be a source of good. To paint it as always bad is intellectually absurd nonsense. But it is used as an excuse by the obscenely wealthy to take away what little common wealth, and public good, has remained for ordinary Americans.
I never went into topics you brought up. You can't argue that governments don't consist of people. And people are ... fill in the blanks.
Ivy league!
"...you (we) live under a tyrannical empire which is fueled by human blood, and which is completely unaccountable to the will of the public."
Great, Caitlin, that sums it up nicely. Now, if we could find a way to tattoo that onto the intellect of the citizen ...
Thank You Caitlin
I agree with what she she said 😉
Caitlin’s argument against considering foreign and domestic policies separately is incoherent. Since both Republican and Democratic Parties essentially share the same reprehensible foreign policy goals, voters must decide whether there is any other area in which they differ. Domestic policy is that area. Though non-US citizens may not care, Americans are profoundly affected by who sits on the Supreme Court. The same is true of who sits on numerous regulatory bodies and who governs state and local entities. I would never claim that the Democrats are particularly good at all such matters, but they are a whole lot better than the openly racist, radical right Republicans.
And one more very important point that Caitlin repeatedly glosses over is that in the United States, we have a two party system. We have always had only two major parties, except for a few brief intervals. This is the inevitable result of the vagaries of the Electoral College that decides presidential elections. Small parties do exist, but they mainly attract voters who not want to be involved with either of the two large parties. That’s fine, but their votes have no weight whatsoever.
The real question is whether the Democratic Party can be changed from within before the United States implodes (or explodes as the case may be). One recent positive sign was the boycott of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress by 135 members. Younger generations are clearly activated against the genocide. Also, polls show that a solid majority of Americans now want the war in Gaza to stop. Are the party leaders listening, and if they are, do they care?
iirc, the 'changing the dems from within' has been tried and advocated for numerous times. 'vote for biden now, and then we'll push him to the left'. at best, you'll get slow and incremental change to the propaganda machine that adapts and works on the publics perception and gnaws away at learned history.
Biden has accomplished far more domestic good than many people expected.
Foreign policy sucks. Those that control the narrative control the public. People have been led to believe Israel has been a wonderful democratic country. Now we are starting to see that the Zionist government has been evil since the British defeated the Ottoman Empire during World War One. The British army taught the Zionists how to murder Palestinians who got in the Zionists’ way. They learned well.
After World War Two, Americans picked up the support of Israel from the British. We have turned a blind eye toward Israel’s constant murdering of Palestinians. Israel is a worse Apartheid state than South Africa ever was. We cannot change the past; hopefully now since October 7, we are getting a better understanding of what Israel is, it would be possible to bring pressure to bear to cut off all financial/military aid to Israel. Since the US government can create any number of dollars it wants and spend it on anything, maybe we should get involved in rebuilding Gaza and the West Bank instead.
how about cutting off all financial/military aid right now? for starters.
As I said, however you rationalize voting for genocide. You sell out cheaply.
"Bob is a child molester, but at least he's a good neighbor!"
he has not accomplished shit.
Nice thought.
Why was JFK assassinated?
I am not going to answer this for you.
Meanwhile sovereign countries are harrassed by the US.
Look at Venezuela today.
How many Coups has Maduro had to put up with from the US and why? Oil.
I might add that the single biggest barrier to electoral reform in the United States is the totally fucked-up system of campaign financing that was brought to us by a decision of a conservative-majority Supreme Court. (See my previous comment regarding the importance of appointments to the Court.) There are virtually no limits on how much money individuals and corporations can contribute to election campaigns. Does this distort election outcomes and subsequent governing decisions in favor of said individuals and corporations? Indeed it does massively.
Keep in mind that Team D is even more addicted to bog money donations than is Team R.
I don’t disagree, but the fact remains that Republicans would be just as bad as the Democrats on war, genocide etc and worse on domestic policy. Given that there is no realistic alternative to the two major parties, the rational choice is to support the lesser of two evils. Even Noam Chomsky has advocated this strategy for years, and he is a very harsh critic of the Democrats. His stated opinion is that the Republicans Party is the most dangerous political institution in history, and he feels obliged to vote against it, which can only be done in a meaningful way by voting for Democratic opponents, even if they are far from ideal.
again, life continues to get worse for the majority of people. Chomsky is functioning as a sheepdog now.
That dynamic has existed for as long as I've been aware. I held my nose and chose LOTE for at least a majority of my 50+ years as a voter. Then I looked around at what my nose-pinching had wrought: over time the D's became more like the R's of old, and even worse on war / foreign policy, more tightly controlled by corporate (and Israeli, etc.) cash. And as a result, wars became a constant, debt piled up massively (to fund the imperial quests), climate destabilization accelerated, and the risks of thermonuclear conflagration steadily increased.
I also recognized around the same time that the notion that "there is no realistic alternative" is only true because I and others believed it so. I lacked the courage to be among those to dare to break with it - to actually help CREATE realistic alternatives. I had helped stunt the possibilities of developing an alternative power structure!
So I don't do that anymore. I invite others who SEE the dysfunction of the current system to see that at a fundamental level, there is too little daylight between the two parts of the duopoly to matter in the long run; and that we have effectively run out of time to try merely to keep even worse from happening or to base our voting on anything other than those existential dangers. The shit's already starting to hit the fan- even if we've become too inured to the occasional splatters. The Earth's 6th Great Mass Extinction Event is underway; genocide is taking place in the open with little resistance from the global institutions, and bat-shit crazy people are gambling in Washington that they can continue nuclear brinksmanship with at least a couple other nuclear powers. And if we only cared about our own States, this conflict-generation and war-spending is removing the opportunity to address those threats, and, (in the U.S. at least, but probably throughout the Western alliance) is going to soon enough produce a hell of a lot of economic insecurity for the majority. Those should be all our concerns and the basis of our electoral choices.
At least Team D pretends to care about human rights when Team R is in the White House.
I don’t know what could be more dangerous than what the present Democratic Administration has pulled. Both parties constitute the same “most dangerous political institution in history.”
The FDA is corrupt as fuck and so we get clot shots. The East Palestine derailment is another fiasco. The borders aren’t borders anymore—so we don’t even really have a sovereign nation-state…the repercussions from this massive immigration fiasco won’t be pretty. The FBI & Justice Dept. are politicized beyond belief. Don’t give me any more of this “lesser evil” bullshit. The Democrats are at least as dangerous as the Republicans.
The Republicans will push Iran’s back against a wall and the Democrats do the same with Russia. Parse that shit.
Most voters are not involved with the massive rise in homelessness disfiguring cities and leading the Supreme Court to criminalize sleeping with a blanket in a public space and order issues such as youth unemployment in doughnut cities, lack of Medicare driving bankruptcies, etc. and not given the choice to to think of what the feds could do with the two trillion dollars that go to the military industrial complex represented by the duopoly.
Many voters actually *are* involved in factors that have lead to the housing bubble and massive rise in homelessness. Developers, bankers, planners, white collar professional designers and engineers, contractors. Construction is a significant sector of the economy that employs millions, all working not to provide affordable, accessible housing, but pumping up a speculative housing bubble that serves to provide generational wealth transfer to some, and tight control of housing access for others. Alot of people make good middle class or wealthy livings toiling to provide too expensive unsustainable housing.
'i've got mine'
Kamala is horrible on every issue, foreign and domestic. After "they" installed one fake president, they think they can do it again. And maybe they can. If they manage to succeed with this one, there is no hope for America. The Democrat party truly has become the #DemocratDeathCult with a whole bunch of card-carrying members who have been completely zombified.
Well said. Rigged elections have consequences.
Americans like to delude themselves that their nation is exceptional, but in reality it is now just another Banana Republic, a fundamentally unserious nation, in terminal decline..
Scipio - I hate to "like" your comment, because it's such a grim assessment ... there should be an "agree" button, or a "sad, but true" button.
Yep. I agree, M K!
Who is “they”?
Interesting that you should even ask this question!
Deep State, the entire Democrat Party, the elites of the Democrat party, the corporate-academia-Democrat-union-nonprofit Borg ... take your pick.
How it all works and who are the major players is left to what few real investigative journalists remain. This is more than conspiracy theory; there's certainly enough information in front of our eyes.
For whoever thinks the Democrat Party is your father's party, that would be completely wrong. You have to "re-imagine" what the new reality truly is. The Democrat party needs to rebrand; it has nothing to do with democracy or democrats. It's some ugly totalitarian creation, with elements of fascism, socialism and communism using division, race/gender politics, extremism and more to push the country to some breaking point, at which point they'll probably really try to exert the lockdown, hammer on people.
Democrats need to be voted out, and the election system monitored. But, I think there's a real threat of fake results; you see how Kamala is being turned into The One right before our eyes, even with a long list of failures and hours of video showing her clear incompetence. They've proven beyond a doubt what they are capable of to retain power.
republicans are just as bad. you are still pushing the one side is better bullshit.
There are the Republicans equally bad -- Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc. RINOs Mitt Romney; Daughter of Darth Vader, Liz Cheney and Ghost of Kiev cheerleader, Adam Kinzinger. Even patch eye Dan Crenshaw is highly suspect now, even though he came out of the box as a strong pro-America and Americans guy -- he seriously flipped on H-1B visas.
That said, I think there are enough decent Republicans who, with folks such as Gabbard and Kennedy who were forced out of the Democrat party, can forge a strong party. Must have some hope. Otherwise, what's the option? Writing off the U.S.?
MK Fotopoulis ripped this off straight from Democratic messaging and flipped it.
Given the Democrat playbook is so well-worn at this point, their strategy of accusing their opposition of what they themselves are guilty of has been used again and again. And obviously, too many folks buy it.
That's why it's so easy to go through their X posts and feed their bs right back to them, verbatim usually, with their names in place of the opposition.
Hi pretzelattack. Good to see you. 😉
I mean who is the “Deep State” exactly.