I’m not saying that you personally cannot like him. For you, those changes are substantial and good, to the point of justifying support. For leftists alienated by the DNC, this is obviously not enough, which is why I consider it unnecessary.

For leftists, generally, continuing down this descent into fascism that is happening slowly under Biden and rapidly under Trump is unnacceptable.

My broader point here is that if your goal is to get leftists to vote for Biden, trying to explain why you think Biden is good is counterproductive. Instead, explain how leftist change is impossible via electoralism, and that voting for a leftist party like PSL will never materially bring America to the left.

But I don’t get how citing facts of what’s he done is “unnecessary” or “attempting” to make him seem better.

My take on that would be that it brings nuance and humanity to those that some auth-leftists want to hate and dehumanize. Pointing out that Biden is not a cardboard cutout of [insert chosen evil diety here] and that he has done good things makes it harder to rationalize digging in. To justify vilifying, “dunking on”, and generally bullying those who would support him (even unhappily) rather than embrace accelerationiam that would load to extraordinary harm of LGBTQ+ people with no concrete data to suggest that it would cause net benefit or leftward motion, while claiming dialectics and opposition to silencing dissent, takes a good deal of cognitive dissonance as is. Being forced to acknowledge that ramps that dissonance up higher.

(Holy long sentence Batman! Sorry about that.)

Just to be clear to auth-left folks (though any state or corpo actors can get fucked), I’m not trying to be sectarian or talk shit. This is honestly how I perceive this. Dehumanizing other leftists (or people for that matter, or hell, even bourgeois dickheads) is not something that has led to positive societal changes in history. Generally, it’s just used to justify unnecessary death and suffering. Suppressing or ignoring data (or lack thereof) is not conducive to making data-backed theses.

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Oh, no doubt. Biden’s not nearly enough.

Example: Biden made a massive improvement to the US’s greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which is predicted to be a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. Is that enough? Uh… if it had been by the year 2000, maybe. We’re still facing a guaranteed global catastrophe. We need to keep pushing for more change, right now, and anyone who’s satisfied with what Biden did so far is living in a dream world.

Where I have a problem with it is when someone extrapolates that out to “and that’s why there’s no reason to support Biden in his contest vs Trump, when Trump wants to undo even that much, and when Biden’s climate action was the first big-scale thing any US politician has ever done to make the problem into an actual priority.”

If anything I’m saying sounds like “and so Biden is good enough,” it is not. What I am saying is that affirmatively choosing the Biden solution in this election while also pushing for big improvements in any one of 10-20 additional ways to achieve actual progress sounds like the way to go.

Agreed. It’s selfish and arrogant to know Trump will facilitate the killing of more innocent civilians and still abstain from voting on principle. Biden is literally the lesser of two evils in regards to Israel. Hopefully the UN and State Department find enough proof to give Biden a firm platform for withdrawal of support soon. It’ll save lives, and we won’t have to think about the despicable trolley car from now until November.

I was the one who had it backwards. Thanks for being understanding of my confusion.

Yes. The President can direct the National Guard, not the state or local police that have been shutting down protests. Their oversight begins with the Mayor, and stops at the Governor. The President must formally declare a National Emergency to have police oversight. If you want to complain about the police, blame the Mayor. If the National Guard shuts down a protest, blame Biden.

so he won’t?

If the President takes direct oversight of local law enforcement, we have much larger problems on our hands.

why cant biden do this then?

so he basically coopted the movement with his own appointed people, with bipartisan support. the actual result of it is zero paid time off for sick workers, one of their main concern when striking. they are still working grueling hours, and have to be on call for even more grueling hours. IIRC biden even outlawed further strikes under threat of violence (!!!). the one good thing he did was increase their bad salaries for… slightly less bad salaries, no free time and no further right to demand anything else?

thats a lot of shifting money and people around so they can pretty much end the strike without caving to most of the worker’s demands, and keep the status quo. that is the main thing when leftists complain about elected “left” wing representatives being all talk while still keeping workers in a bad situation.

the threat to the shareholders’ pockets alone was enough to get them on their feet and respond immediatly, this could have been the birth of another worker’s rights movement, but it was a big nothingburger instead.

about the ad hominem, let me give you the tip of the iceberg: our conservative politicians literally went to the us recently, to basically ask your politicians for brutal sanctions on our country, the same people who tried to copycat trump’s jan 6 so yeah, i have all the reason to be concerned given your long history messing with our democracies in the region. thanks for the condescention though, but i bet a lot of you have many concerns about ukranian and russian politics now.

No, I’m in agreement with you.

harm reduction does not need to infringe on critique of the current executive branch.

Yeah. I’ve been criticizing Biden for abetting a genocide quite a bit; I think you can find some comment where I compared the Biden State Department to the Nazis.

That said, total bullshit criticism like “union buster” I tend to be against. You can find other links in this comment section where I talk about it and link to some explanation of his historic support for labor and specifically how it related to his breaking the rail strike and the events after, but here’s an article which talks about it more broadly.

Yes, we get it. You love capitalism if they call it “Chinese characteristics,” and you love genocide as long as it happens to Uyghurs.

Well I mean that’s kind of a bad thought experiment too, yeah, because I really like lasers, and me personally I’d want to talk about a laser that’s so powerful and efficient that it can kill someone just with the power from a hand crank. Like, that’s an insane laser, that has to be like, an extremely efficient highly calculated phased optical array, that’s some science fiction level technomagic, there. I’d also wanna know, why the human test subjects, you know? Are they horrible criminals, or, are they clones without brains, or p-zombies, or like what’s up there? I don’t think any ethical self-respecting scientist would wanna test out their shit on some random variable humans like that, and that shit wouldn’t be really like, publishable in a paper, I would imagine. Supplementary questions are maybe like, why am I the one that has to power the laser from inside the cage, rather than them having like an Igor to do it for them, are they just going to kill me afterwards, are they going to kill me if I do nothing, what’s the deal there?

This whole scenario smells pretty fishy to me, I’m gonna go with like, this is probably a milgram experiment style of thing, to me.

Though, through tough, thorough thought, this experiment kind of falls flat as an analogy, because the lasers both power up randomly and will kill people no matter what I do, and neither crank really does fucking anything, so it’s more like you’re just the guy in the ludovico chair, and you have funny little cranks you can turn if you want, as like a distraction from the fact the lasers are going to kill everyone no matter what you do.

You’re analogy missed the part where they can operate without you and Infact the madder scientist wishes you to do nothing. It’s why Republicans work so hard in red States to add roadblocks to voters.

You can act on the cage while minimizing harm. Not voting doesn’t work, never has, never will.

You can choose non-participation and you can fool yourself that it washes your hands but it does not stop the status quo, in fact it encourages it.

i think the administrations response to a labor action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is the best thing to examine because it shows how the administration responds to labor power that opposes its aims and threatens it.

we could examine a bunch of other stuff, but that would largely only show how the administration behaves on its own terms. while there’s an ocean of ink that could be spilled on that topic, i didn’t bring it up because it doesn’t matter for the purposes of answering the question of weather the administration is authoritarian.

if you wanna talk about that, youre welcome to, but i’m not gonna get embroiled in it. the administration was threatened by labor power and chose to suppress the strike then deliver a modicum of the demands through action it could control. the end result of that response is that the power of labor is reduced and labor and its supporters are compelled to align with the administration.

it’s a response that seems like a perfect solution politically if your alignment is already democrat, but if you would rather labor have real power to exercise on its own terms then it’s pretty clearly anti-worker.

the tiktok ban is the best example of media policy against that which is actively controlled by the united states government and power elite. For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals. if you want something a little bit more recent, look up stovepipeing, the intelligence apparatus’ method for creating media buy in for the iraq war.

because your vote has meaning and value as more than either a winner and loser of political races. vote tallies determine funding, media and event access and even if that was it (it’s not!) there’s some level of dual party fascism where it would be better to spend your meaningful vote helping some third party you really believe in get an edge next time (or this time) rather than just picking which version of evil you’d rather have.

running any other candidate is the most effective way to prevent a trump win. there are no mental gymnastics here.

instead of exchanging pithy remarks, why not talk about what youre worried about? do you think trump will accept being declared the loser?

How does voting third party (the only thing I’ve advocated with regard to voting)enable fascists?

I mean, we have the fascist sending 2000lb gbu jdams to aid a genocide and advocating crushing anti war opposition domestically or the fascist who everybody says will be worse. How does not picking a fascist aid the fascists? Should we strategically harm reduce by choosing regular Hitler over hypothetical 1000% ssj3 Hitler?

At what point does even our electoral action aim for what we want as opposed to what they want? Is there such a point?

Is that an extreme view? Yes. Is it wrong?

Also yes.

I swear to god, it’s like strategic voting doesn’t exist at all.

If you live in a deep blue or red state who’s basically guaranteed not to flip, with maybe extra considerations to which states tally their votes along which lines, because, as we know, states that tally their votes earlier in the process have a much higher sway, so, the DNC winning more overwhelmingly in those states, and especially if those states are swing states, has much more of an effect overall, then a protest vote to a candidate you agree with, in those circumstances, is pretty good.

It potentially shows the democratic party what you actually want, contests their claim of a mainstream, deep blue state, potentially in mass, and can give more legitimacy to those parties or those positions. Even better would probably be voting for a candidate like bernie, or someone internal to the DNC, in that scenario, since that’s more likely to give them a lot more media attention in the future and realistically someone like that has the best chance of winning.

The same principles as all this apply to local elections, just at a much smaller scale, with less media attention, and potentially less information on both sides, since people generally don’t give a fuck about understanding local elections even if they’re the ones being fucking elected. Just send out money and a bunch of lawn ornament signs explaining nothing, and then expect, probably not wrongly, that everyone will just vote for whatever candidate is a part of the party that they generally agree with, even if nobody has any fucking idea what anyone really stands for. Better off even if there’s no hint of an alternative being campaigned or even on the ballot despite everyone just telling people to run for local spots as though that’s really a possibility for most.

Instead, instead of paying attention to why votes are shifting, and how they might appeal to that voter block, the mainstream DNC strategy seems to be to just like demand that leftists have to come over to the democratic party’s side and then just accept all of their orders basically unquestioningly. To just pester them to vote more, and to vote harder, and to vote for the mainline DNC candidate, without any real conversations about how they might actually use their vote or why they might actually want to vote for their desired candidate. And of course that’s the fucking messaging, because that’s the messaging that allows them to get away with as little concessions to the left and the general population’s popular sentiments as possible. Bonus points if you’re always voting for damage prevention, too, because the urgency gives people a morally justifiable reason to just engage in relentless bullying tactics, rather than actually have a nuanced conversation about the ups and downs of a candidate and how they should use their vote, under what circumstances.

You can’t blame people for smelling something fishy in all that, being unable to articulate why or think through for what circumstances they might want to vote in, and then just kind of feel burnt out and cynical about the whole prospect and not really want to vote. It’s not exactly a hard strategy to see through when we’ve been seeing it for the last… 25, 30, 40 years maybe? I dunno, don’t remember those elections before I was born, but they’ve been pulling this shit since bush got into office.