• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: April 7th, 2025

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  • It’s also the publics job to be informed.

    We’d get an informed public if people had enough time, material security, and agency to get involved in politics.

    Even if it was identical under harris. It was still better under biden. He wasn’t actively cheering the genocide on etc. And at least gave some appearance of trying to support relief and peace.

    This is infuriating. The appearance of trying to support relief and peace? These people’s families are dying. The US is the number one funder and arms dealer to Israel. The few, milquetoast statements Biden/Harris made were only political cover to the overwhelming support for the genocide that the US provided. Look, you don’t have to personally care about this issue beyond appearances if you want, but it is a central issue to voters in a particularly politically-important location.

    That you feel no responsibility or remorse. For helping to Usher fascism in. [etc]

    Don’t make assumptions: I was not an activist in Michigan. I didn’t tell anyone not to vote for Biden/Harris. I voted for them, even in a place where it doesn’t matter. I’m just a stranger on the internet who is tired of Democrats paying more attention to the right than to, well, even the center, let alone the left. They know that there is no alternative vote for us, so they keep tacking right to try and pick off a few so-called “swing” voters. But, doing that demobilizes their base! You need to get people excited to vote, volunteer, donate, and campaign. It’s basic electoral strategy. They refuse to learn that lesson and so they lose to someone who has a smaller, but rabid base.

    Also, why are we focusing on only the Palestinian voters in Michigan as the ones who lost the election when plenty of other voters there and other swing districts also didn’t vote Biden/Harris? Because they’re “supposed to” vote dem? Assumptions like that are part of why the democratic party loses elections to Trump. They made a decision to cater more to pro-Israel voters than voters who wanted to at least halt the genocide, it was an important strategic misstep. Zooming out, why aren’t dems able to contest more districts? There’s plenty of blame to go around.

    Finally, if you think this one thing is what ushered fascism in, you haven’t been paying attention to the last 30 years of politics. Trump’s election is not an aberration, it’s an expression of a large and growing right-wing and fascist movement in the US.





  • The article itself, several paragraphs down, admits you can’t attribute trump’s win to Palestine activists:

    "It’s hard to determine just how much of an impact efforts like Uncommitted or Abandon Harris had in the election results. After all, exit polls showed that voters were motivated more by the economy than by foreign policy. But in battleground states with large Arab-American populations, like Michigan, data suggests that the Israel-Hamas conflict turned people away from Harris. In Dearborn, the country’s largest Arab-majority city, election data showed that Trump won 42 percent of the vote while Harris received 36 percent—significantly less than the 69 percent that Biden earned in 2020.

    But the activists note that it wasn’t just Dearborn and other Muslim-American enclaves that moved toward Republicans in 2024—nearly every district in the country moved to the right as well."





  • There’s nothing inherent to libertarian socialism that makes it especially vulnerable to military opposition. It was just a fact of that particular political/military moment that multiple well-armed and well-financed enemies were highly motivated to destroy them. Any political system can be destroyed if you throw enough tanks at it! That said, the Spanish anarchist forces were known for being very effective and might have won if not for fascist support of their enemies and soviet desires to replace them with bolshevik communism. In Mexico, the Zapatistas are still around, have successfully fought off both cartel and state forces (working together!) in the past.

    I’m glad you’re here for a real convo. Sorry if I came off as combative in the OP – I thought that by posting it in this topic that I’d be talking to socialists and that those socialists would already be on board with heavy left critiques of the american constitutional system. I don’t mean to condescend to liberals – shouldn’t have used “libs” I guess – but I think of them, in the US, as primarily just trying to get the democrats back into power and then mostly disengage. The most outspoken of them tend to have much more energy to fight universal healthcare and other the social democratic reforms of a Bernie Sanders rather than actually take aim at the capitalist, state, and other hierarchies making our lives worse. As a result, I don’t believe they can be effective against right wing and fascist elements in the US and feel the need to recruit them to the socialist and anarchist cause.



  • You and I can disagree about our minimum level of democracy, but how will we actually change society if we don’t change how the decisions are made in society?

    For me, the most possible democracy is when the people affected by a given decision (and only those people) are the ones who make the decision in a way they consider fair (however fair is defined) and are empowered to do what they decided on.

    If the same group of people instead choose, via 1 person = 1 vote, one or more among them to make the decision, it’s less democratic in my view, but at least they each had an equal vote.

    If the same group of people instead choose, via any voting system that changes 1 person = 1 vote (e.g. x amount of votes for each parcel of land), one or more among them to make the decision, it is even less democratic, because they did not all have an equal vote due to variations in how many people live in each parcel of land.

    The current US Constitutional system has us here, between the above example and the below one, because land parcels in large part determine relative voting power and then the electeds make appointments of further decision makers, such as the Supreme Court.

    Zero democracy is when the person/people making the decisions are not chosen by the people affected by the decision and the people affected by it have zero say in the decision.