#USian politics

[brasskingfisher]

Something that's been annoying me on a personal level what with all the recent news coming out of the US is all the people complaining about the lack of action by the democratic party and other official bodies to oppose Adolf Shitler's bullshit, especially given the repeated warnings about how terrible his reelection was going to be and how he was going to purge all his opponents....

And I'm like, you realise how deeply conservative USian politics is right? A lot of democrat politicans (and other ordinary USians who don't support wosit shitler) are just planning on trusting "the system" to stop him becoming a dictator. It's not so much that they don't *WANT* to take action, so much as they think they don't *NEED* to. Pretty much every USian alive right now has been instilled with the idea that "that couldn't happen here! Our system is designed to make it impossible!", not just because of cold war ideas and propaganda about individualism and USian supremacy but because of the way the revolution and the US' early history is taught, and has been mythologised into a struggle against autocracy, and the establishment of a completely fair and equitable system.

In order to actually do something, each person has got to go through a whole journey of education, realisation and acceptance about the USian cultural, political and socioeconomic system, and how shitty it actually is compared to other countries, and that it actually CAN be improved (and in what ways), AND THEN, they've got to help/force other people through that same journey before any meaningful change can happen. Right now that journey is probably only going to happen with another revolution.

[maryellencarter]

It occurs to me that many of the people considering Not Voting specifically because the Biden administration is supporting Israel, may not be aware of what the alternative would mean.

I was raised in what is now Trumper culture. That culture's attitude toward Israel vs Palestine is as follows, directly quoted as much as possible from the actual people I grew up around:

"Islam should not exist. There will never be peace in the Middle East as long as Muslims exist, because Abraham did a bad thing by fathering Ishmael instead of trusting God until Isaac came along. The Jews have a right to the Holy Land in perpetuity and should all go there, not bother us, and also convert to Christianity. Wiping out all the non-Jews in the area is probably necessary to make that happen, so this is a great first step!"

So uhhhhh. Even if you're considering yourself a one-issue voter about Palestine, which is your right, you can vote on whatever basis you decide is important to you...

...the non-Biden option is going to be *significantly fucking worse*

[maryellencarter]

They don't want divorce to exist at all. I am so serious about this.

Jesus was explicitly against it -- this isn't one of those things where he said "feed the poor" and they're going "what if we starved the poor in your name" though, this is legitimately solid basic Christian doctrine, he dissed Moses for allowing divorce at all (the strict Jewish interpretation is "only men can initiate divorce and only for cheating" if I recall) -- and abolishing it entirely absolutely fits with how they want the world to be.

It's a hierarchical thing, right? The Christofascist God is the Big Boss of Everybody, and everything in creation is rightly (in this view) structured as microcosms of God ruling creation. Marriage isn't a team thing, it's a cishet man ruling "in the place of God" over a submissive wife and children. Democracy is evil, Communism more so, because the correct, natural, holy government is a king-emperor-dictator ruling over the nation literally like God.

(For a long time, having a president with checks and balances was the closest the Overton window would allow even the hardliners to advocate, but those days are gone. Trump is absolutely correct in one thing: if he gets elected this year, then in four years they will have it fixed so nobody will ever be voting against them again.)

Will the actual in-practice rule be "men can divorce their wives as long as they make it her fault"? Yes, of course. And the lawyer in the tweet is absolutely right that divorced women and their children will have no rights to alimony or child support.

If the real fanatics have their way, though legal divorce won't even be a thing, because they don't want *remarriage* to be a thing -- Jesus said marriage is permanent until death, and these weirdos are the sort of guys who feel like it's beneath them to take another man's leftovers, anyway. (Probably gay somehow. Fellas, is it gay if your dicks touch through the time portal inside her vagina?)

Uh. That got slightly off topic, except also not at all off topic. Do I sound utterly insane? Does this sound like stuff that can't happen in America? Keep it that way. Vote Harris.

No fault divorce allows women to escape abusive husbands. Making this unlawful tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Republicans.

[levil0vesyou]

"Don't vote Democrat, campaign for meaningful change on a local level instead!"

Believe it or not, it is in fact possible to do two things, especially when the thing you're suggesting not doing is a million times easier than your "instead"

(Not to mention if Trump wins this WILL make it harder to campaign for change on a local level, believe it or not)

[maryellencarter]

I keep seeing people say "Biden should step aside for a stronger candidate".

He'd love to. He said back in 2020 that he was only planning to serve one term. He's been looking for someone to run in his place this year so he can fucking retire.

There isn't a stronger candidate.

In close elections, the guy who's in the position already and trying to get re-elected -- the incumbent -- tends to get more votes than a new candidate. People who don't pay attention to politics but vote out of habit are often like "well, we've had Biden, and things didn't explode, let's keep Biden". And people who do pay attention are like "he did this thing we like, he's proved he's more than just campaign promises, let's keep him".

Biden knows this. He knows it's going to be a close election. He knows Trump's worshippers are going to be 100% at the polls and bringing all their friends. He knows the only way the Democrats even have a chance of winning is if they can get those incumbent votes to add to everything else.

He wanted to retire. He's running again because he knows it's him or the end of democracy in America.

And every single person on the "he's too old, run a stronger candidate, Palestine is the only issue" or whatever other train that winds up at the don't vote for Biden station -- every single one has fallen for propaganda. Every single one is adding to the margin by which Trump wins in November.

And if Trump wins, there will never be another election here. There will never be a glorious leftist revolution. It'll be over.

if i see one more article, post, or news anchor talking about how joe biden is old, i'm putting my fist through a window. i feel like i've gone through the fucking looking glass.

this is project 2025, trump's plan for what he'll do if elected. whatever you think is in there, it's worse. watch a breakdown of the highlights here. this man wants to unravel the fabric of our democracy for good - this all aside from his vitriolic hatred of poc, his determination to start ww3, and the fact that he can't string a sentence together without telling outrageous and easily verifiable lies. his administration will start their crusade to exterminate trans people on day one, and they won't stop there.

do not talk to me about how joe biden is old, as if that could ever matter to me more than my life or the lives of my friends and family. my little sister is 14, she's trans, and i don't know what to tell her when we talk about politics, because one of these people wants her dead and the other one is old and some of you are still acting like those problems are equals.

i can't fucking stand this. i'm not hearing it this time, we are not repeating 2016. refusing to vote is not an act of protest, it is an act of complacency, and our most vulnerable will suffer for your negligence. vote like your life depends on it, because for some of us, it really fucking does.

[guavagyal]

it honestly feels like after Trump got elected and when Luigi whacked a health insurance CEO, and even when Israel started bombing Gaza, USians are starting to realize how horrible and evil our government & corporations are. like it feels a little too late right now to be conscious about this and wanting to change it lol

[inkingtwice]

Here's from New England, you incel lumberjack-wannabe nazi fuck. 👊🏼

[maryellencarter]

Welp, that does it. Now it actually doesn't matter if you vote. Biden was the last US president, under any recognizable definition of the term, and may I say I genuinely don't think anyone else under the same constraints could have done better.

Here's what to expect going forward.

* Election Day: A few scattered shootings of poll observers. Not a lot, not organized, maybe half a dozen nationwide. The Republican Party decries this interference to the democratic process. Many widely publicized instances where Democrats at the polls were harassed or physically attacked until they responded with something that can be framed as violence, presented as demonstrating that the Democrats are out of control, the real danger, etc.

* If the vote goes Trump's way, which I expect, peace until Inauguration Day. People with the resources to do so should flee the country at this point.

* If the vote starts going Biden's way, many shootings at vote-counting locations in purple and blue areas, destruction of many "fake/duplicate" votes.

- If Biden is elected (which I very much don't expect as the propaganda buy-in against him is so high), on vote count ratification day, Capitol Riots 2.0: No Democrat Left Standing.

* On Inauguration Day, if Biden is elected and refuses to vacate the White House, televised raid on the White House and publicly televised summary execution of President Biden. (Since, under the Supreme Court ruling, he *also* has infinite power above the law, he cannot be allowed to survive. Barack Obama, if he has not fled the country by them, will also be either executed or assassinated at some point in any timeline. Bill Clinton may be safe unless he makes trouble, but I wouldn't test it.)

* On Inauguration Day, if Trump is elected and Biden leaves the White House peacefully (my own expectation), Trump swearing-in followed immediately by the signing of approximately five million executive orders. My best guesses:

- Full legal immunity for any "citizen patriot" who shoots non-Republicans or POC

- dismissal and execution of the three liberal Supreme Court justices

- all reproductive rights gone

- all queer protections gone

- all social services such as food stamps and Medicaid gone

- all digital privacy rights gone

- the National Guard rolling out to truck everyone of Hispanic or Latino extraction to the Mexican border (without food or water) and dump their dehydrated corpses there, with the widely publicized "wall of bodies" touted as the final solution to those damn illegals (they will also continue building the actual wall)

- massive expansions of the prison industrial complex, newly built prisons and labor camps will eventually house all Black people who can be funnelled there

- erasing all women's rights is probably not day one but it'll happen

"oh but this is perfect! nobody will stand for this! the revolution will finally happen!" our military spending outstrips the rest of the world combined. and none of you know how to operate a resistance with disconnected cells for shit. someone so much as whispers about revolution and a MAGA with an AK-47 pops up and takes out the entire group that heard them. you think i'm exaggerating. the only exaggeration is that it might be at the second meeting.

will it matter to me personally? no. i have an X for nonbinary on my driver's license. i'll be shot on sight or in a conversion therapy concentration camp. leia will be dead because they'll jack the price of insulin back up.

do i still plan to vote for biden? sure. it'll be my last chance to assert my independence.

[brasskingfisher]

Why the ever loving flying fuck in the name of all that's holy does the end result look worryingly like Trump?

[uncanny-tranny]

Even if you don't agree with incarcerated people having access to education, monetary compensation for work, or whatever, I really hope you acknowledge that so long as you provide the state incentive to imprison people (free labour or whatever it may be), the state will continuously imprison people - especially for non-violent crime.

[milfygerard]

honestly i think some of the posts abt american teens and 20somethings moving to red note are kind of missing the point bc like the ppl who are going to red note are not like tumblr users raised in progressive communist circles and in fact have never had their preconceptions of china that theyve learned from media and culture questioned outside of maybe watching a chinese romantic drama show or whatever. like seeing posts that are like "we've been telling you guys about the misinformation spread about china the whole time" no you havent bc these ppl have never and will never see yr blogs or even see tumblr posts off of tiktok and instagram, the ppl impacted by this change are the ones who use tiktok to keep up w friends and celebrities and like to be entertained by hauls not faux progressives who sometimes accidentally learn things while bickering back and forth about politics they barely understand on a slowly dying microblogging website thats only real use in any sort of organizing seems to be the ability to spread fundraisers and even that is limited considering this site isnt exactly popular with the rich and powerful.

[theknightlywolfe]

[potsiefaerie]

Accidentally listening to the news in a cardiologist's office, and I gotta say. I don't think having a ton of extra National Guard units in DC for the inauguration makes me as a Metro Area Resident™️ feel any safer.

Kinda the opposite, actually.

[maryellencarter]

Short summary of that last link: the name "Copenhagen" in this case is a reference to the physics concepts like Schrodinger's cat and Heisenberg's uncertainty, where observing a situation changes it. As applied to ethics, it suggests that people (and corporations etc) who only do Something but not Everything about a problem, in our society, get blamed for attaching themselves to the problem -- actively observing it, causing it to be observed -- without completely eradicating it, while people etc who just totally ignore the problem are treated as innocent because they're not *involved*.

Which leads me to wonder -- so, mocking the trolley problem as reductively binarist is not a Tumblr-exclusive thing, it's pretty much the only way it's ever mentioned in pop culture. Obviously it doesn't land the way it's supposed to.

But what I'm now wondering is: maybe that's *because*, in its basic "you can make a bad choice or by inaction allow a worse result to occur", it fundamentally has to place you at a point where you're already observing the problem: where you're standing at that trolley switch actively deciding who lives or dies. It assumes you're already in a situation where, under Copenhagen ethics, blame attaches to you either way.

Which, you know, is what the trolley problem is supposed to be doing! But. The parallel in the original post is not quite exact, and it's inexact in a way that specifically, I think, reveals exactly why the concept of "Copenhagen ethics" is super relevant to the current voting situation.

Consider, if you will, a Minecraft minigame. A trolley problem has been set up inside the minigame. It has three tracks, with a switch that can be shifted to send our runaway minecart down any of the three. (For trolley problem purposes, we will assume that being hit by the minecart kills all the villagers placed on each track. It's modded or something.)

One track has a single villager placed to be killed on it, one has five villagers, and one has twenty. The initial setup will cause the minecart to kill five villagers if the player takes no action. The player can change the track to kill the single villager or the unit of twenty, but can make no other changes to the setup.

Now, let us say that this minigame has become a runaway social media sensation. A huge group of players are obsessed with killing as many villagers as possible, playing the 20-dead gamestate over and over again. There are hashtags. There are spinoff mods replacing the villagers with avatars of people who object to the 20-dead solution and adding graphic gore effects. There are flamewars. A smaller number of players are trying to make a case for the 1-dead solution, and not getting very far.

The social media sensation draws in people who, like so many of us, are convinced they have the perfect ethical solution to the problem. Under Copenhagen ethics, the solution is simple: don't play. Don't get involved. Make the choice to walk away. Don't boot up the minigame, and nobody dies.

People being people on social media, there would of course be a significant chunk of the do-nothing squad who would boot up the minigame and show themselves standing next to the minecart doing nothing as it zooms past to kill the five villagers. We'd all like to think we're not *that* stupid. Just stay a step further back, outside the minigame completely, and you're clean.

The catch -- pulling it back to the real world now -- is that the vast, vast majority of our "choose not to vote" population here in the States believe they *are* outside the minigame. That choosing not to vote or choosing not to register puts them in the position of an enlightened Minecraft player who says "That sounds like a crappy minigame, I'm not getting involved".

Which would be the smart and correct thing to do, if it *was* a Minecraft game. Unfortunately, every adult human in the US who has the ability to vote has already been trapped inside this minigame. The minecart is running. All each of us can decide is how best to reduce the total number of dead on our watch.

You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

[thespectrehauntingfodlan]

Lol

Truly the party of women and working people

[tungledotedu]

the vote blue no matter who crowd should've just kept it to themselves. we have a year before elections and you're already proclaiming that you'll back joe biden and the democrats no matter what?

have you noticed that none of this is over yet? only a four-day truce has been agreed upon and it was still delayed. israel is intensifying its bombings of northern gaza before this truce comes into effect. we don't even know how many palestinians have been killed as the gazan health ministry is unable to properly update the death toll. this is because the idf has been decimating its healthcare infrastructure, invading hospitals and sniping doctors. it claimed hamas had a command centre under the al-shifa hospital, and the biden administration 'confirmed' this without providing actual evidence.

this is only a recent development. god knows what else your government will do to escalate the conflict and help its ally slaughter more innocents. you'll look even stupider in retrospect for flocking to your leader like the brainwashed maga cultists you love to hate.

you don't have the spine to threaten to withhold your vote. you don't have the brains to question your officials' statements and actions. you don't even have the compassion to understand why people hesitate to support the democrats again. hell, some of you refuse to believe israel is committing a genocide in the first place.

you're turning people away, people who would have otherwise understood your point of view. you're effectively shooting yourselves in the foot. it would be laughable if it wasn't a chilling revelation of just how little you care about the victims of your government when it happens to benefit you.

you condescend to your own people as if they're idiots, as if they aren't deeply familiar with the dangers that trump represents. i can't imagine how difficult it must be for muslim and arab americans to be stuck in this unenviable dilemma, and for anyone who held their nose to vote for biden and is now appalled by his conduct. this is no easy choice, not in a country of warmongers posing as a democracy.

but you don't reach out to those people and show them any sympathy, do you? you dismiss them as lazy, useless leftists, because it's easier. you're all too eager to blame them for splitting the vote, as if they were the ones who chose to send more weapons knowing they'll be used for ethnic cleansing. biden wants them to be kept secret and bypass congress. because guess what? he knows you're gullible dipshits who will believe him when he claims to protect civilians.

but sure, you'll do what you can to hold the democrats accountable before you go to brunch. keep pretending your party is a champion of left-wing causes while it collaborates with an apartheid, racist settler-colonial state. your tax dollars go to drones and bombs, but at least your student loan debt is cancelled, right? and that's worth the price in human lives?

you lick those boots thinking they keep you safe, but one day they will crush you too.