The reason why we’re here is not because we failed to chose Carter over Reagan, but because those were the two choices we were stuck with…
Yeah we’re here because we chose Reagan over Carter. And out of those choices we picked the one who was the piece of shit. I am pretty sure that Carter would have been capable of reversing course or realizing mistakes. Reagan was all in on the destruction.
Same as we’re here because we chose Bush over Gore, Obama over McCain… Trump over Clinton/Harris etc.
One side is trying to do the right thing as best they can (even if they fail or get some bad apples). The other is actively (and purposefully) trying to make things worse. Our choices are what got us here. Saying things would be the same is how Republicans keep winning and the Overton Window only seems to move right and never left.
One side took a dollar from the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray and stole a pack of smokes. The other side shot the brown teller behind the counter and emptied the till. Then lit the store on fire while yelling about the brown guy being an illegal immigrant.
We’re talking about orders of magnitude of shenanigans. And being wrong like Carter and being a traitorous, lying sack of shit like Reagan. Are completely different things.
The both sides are the same crowd are going to get us all killed.
My brother came home from Afghanistan with severe PTSD and started shooting meth to cope with it. My family was torn apart as he threw around all sorts of paranoid accusations and threatened to harm himself or others, always in language just vague enough to be actionable. He wound up picking up one of his many guns, driving out to some random, innocent person’s house, and, fortunately, got shot in the arm by the cops who’d followed him there.
I spent a full year of my life essentially being an on-call 9-1-1 operator. I quit using social media accounts for fear that he’d see I was online. But the pain and trauma that I experienced was nothing compared to what I could see in my mother’s eyes.
That was the most traumatic experience of my life. But I fully understand that it was nothing compared to the trauma he experienced, which was, in turn, nothing compared to the trauma the Afghan people experienced. What I experience, this second-, third-hand exposure to the horrors of war, it’s literally just a first-world problem. But that tiny glimpse into the things the media doesn’t like talk about, was enough.
Who was the president, the commander-in-chief, who ordered him over there? It was the great, liberal progressive hero, Mr. Barack Obama. A guy who was, “just trying to do the right thing” but who occasionally makes some teensy weensy mistakes like prolonging a pointless, unwinnable war of aggression and getting hundreds of thousands of people killed for no reason and subjecting countless millions to horrors far worse than anything you or I could even comprehend. And that’s just like taking a few too many coins from a take-a-penny, is that right?
Absolutely fucking not. If you actually try to view the world from a global perspective, if you genuinely believe in equality and treat every Afghan’s life as being equally valuable as your next-door neighbor’s, then you will quickly find yourself understanding and agreeing with my perspective.
This comment is funny because it further reinforces the point: Obama didn’t start that war, and he was unable to cleanly exit it without leaving Afghanistan for the Taliban, which as we’ve seen has been disastrous for that country’s girls and women.
There are exactly three choices in every general election:
The viable party.
The other viable party.
Not participating in the election at all.
You might think there are other options like write-ins, protest votes, or third parties. Unfortunately, those are all permutations of #3: nonparticipation.
Nobody here is saying they love Democrats. The party is about as popular as boiled cabbage at a chili competition. But when served with those three choices, participating in the election is important, which narrows it down to #1 or #2, and it’s really not hard to choose between the GOP and the Democrats. The Democrats sent your brother to war. The Republicans started that war, sent way more people to it, killed more civilians, and made withdrawing impossible. The Democrats are also more likely to offer mental healthcare to your brother.
Obama didn’t start that war, and he was unable to cleanly exit it without leaving Afghan for the Taliban.
Gasp! Oh no! He couldn’t leave or the Taliban would be left in charge!
Hey, remind me again who exactly is in charge of Afghanistan right now?
The Taliban were always going to win because the war was unwinnable from the first day, and it was even more unwinnable by the time Obama took office. He just had to pour countless lives into it first to accomplish nothing whatsoever. What, just so we could say we gave it the “ol’ college try?”
and it’s really not hard to choose between the GOP and the Democrats.
Let me be absolutely clear: I would sooner die than even consider supporting anyone responsible for the war. There is no choice to be made. You could drag me into a voting booth at gunpoint, and I’d tell you to pull the trigger. This is the thing that you fuckers need to get through your thick fucking skulls. What they did is fundamentally unforgivable, and they should be behind bars.
K well as long as you’re unwilling to vote strategically, you’ll continue to allow evil fascists to take over the US. The rest of us will try to elect progressives in primaries and support the most left-leaning viable candidate in the general election because that’s how you defeat fascists if your society isn’t ready for a revolution yet, and ours isn’t. Too many full bellies and entertained morons.
Oh no! If the evil fascists take over, they might start a war of aggression that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people or something! Just imagine!
There’s a discussion to be had about potentially supporting imperfect candidates, but every single one of you takes it to a ridiculous extreme, such that even outright genocide is no biggie. It’s completely ridiculous, utterly absurd. Frankly, yours is not a view that should even be tolerated in society.
A complete and total refusal to hold politicians to any degree of accountability for literally anything, treating them as completely above the law. This is exactly why the term Blue MAGA is completely appropriate. You are the moderate wing of fascism.
You wanting an ideal world isn’t just going to magically make it happen. Unfortunately we have to live in reality where nuance is real.
You could drag me into a voting booth at gunpoint, and I’d tell you to pull the trigger. This is the thing that you fuckers need to get through your thick fucking skulls.
No we get it. You’re an extremist and live in a fantasy world where nuance doesn’t exist and your extreme idea of morality is the only option.
Unfortunately we have to live with you (who you honestly seem like a moral person but unfortunately don’t understand that politics and most of life is about compromise) and the sociopaths on the other side who will exploit your morality to get everything they want. Your inability to understand the nuance is only good for the sociopaths.
Us, the realists, who understand that Obama couldn’t just pack up and leave also understand that you can’t understand that.
Us, the realists, who understand that Obama couldn’t just pack up and leave also understand that you can’t understand that.
WHY THE FUCK NOT? That’s literally exactly what Biden did, the only difference is that we spend an extra decade pouring endless amounts of blood and treasure, to accomplish NOTHING. “Realist,” my ass.
Realism was recognizing that the war was lost from the minute it started, because the occupation could not last forever and the moment it ended the puppet government would collapse. Calling yourself a “realist,” while pretending that a decades long occupation was a “mistake” is completely absurd.
There’s plenty of room for nuance, on certain topics. Not on this. Not the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. If Trump killed a hundred thousand people in New York City, would you be talking about “nuance?” Was the Holocaust “nuanced?” There’s a fucking line to be drawn, and there’s exactly one reason why Afghans are on one side of the line to me and the other to you, and it’s that you don’t see them as actual human beings.
The reason why we’re here is not because we failed to chose Carter over Reagan, but because those were the two choices we were stuck with
That’s literally the opposite of what you’re claiming my position is. My position, like the other person said, is that the problems we have are a result of the economic policy of neoliberalism, enacted by both Reagan and Carter. You’re saying that, rather than my position being about criticizing neoliberalism, I “kind of did” say that Reagan was better than Carter, and your supposed evidence of me taking that position is just me saying the problem was the policy of neoliberalism.
One side is trying to do the right thing as best they can
Lmao, that’s utterly delusional. Not that it would matter if it were true.
Would you rather get operated on by someone who thinks your heart is a tumor that needs to be removed for the sake of your health, or by someone who wants to remove your heart because they want you dead? The answer is, who gives a shit? Your heart’s coming out either way. Why would I care if the first surgeon is “just trying to help?”
If we’re being so generous with the Democrats’ motives, then the only conclusion is that they comically incompetent to the point of being a useless liability. I’m not sure that actually makes them look better than the reality.
But again, like I said, I am not St. Peter, I’m not trying to evaluate who’s a good person deep down in their heart of hearts. All I care about is what they actually do. You are looking at things from the completely wrong perspective. Get your mind off the pearly gates and look at the actual policy and actual material results of that policy.
You never really explained why neoliberalism is problematic. Neoliberalism is not incompatible with unions, as you seemed to imply, nor is it incompatible with a government that utilizes tax and spend to provide essential services for the public. It can be regulated markets and free trade, and most of the stuff we associate with Reagan’s brand of neoliberalism are consequences of horrible tax and social spending policies, not necessarily a consequence of a lighter hand at protectionism. What’s the real problem here, that we became more open to importing stuff or that the government abdicated its duty to do anything at all? (Aside from bombing brown people, of course.)
The real problem here predates Carter and Reagan and goes back to the New Deal itself. The New Deal was the carrot, along with the stick of the Red Scare, to root out communists and other radicals in the labor movement. The promise was that the government would protect, or at least tolerate unions, so long as they proved their loyalty by engaging in anticommunist witch hunts, such as when communists were kicked out of the AFL/CIO. The effect that this had on unions was that they became weakened, narrowly self-interested, and complacent.
Once the unions were broken, and the working class had no ability to wield power or fight back against whatever the government and ruling class decided to do, they could then take steps that would weaken them even further, and at the same time they could cut social programs, because nobody had any power to stop them. Something like a general strike was impossible, because after purging anyone who sounded like a communist, there was no solidarity, no greater vision, and no willingness to really fight, since those are all things that make you sound like a communist.
Now, admittedly, from a global perspective, the Chinese people have benefited immensely from offshoring, so whether it’s a good or bad thing overall is hard to say. But, good or bad, it’s the reason why the US in such a shitty state today, why the government is able to cut social programs, why nobody can do shit to stop anything Trump does, etc. The most direct enemy of the American ruling class are, of course, American workers (and vice versa) so us getting fucked means that they are now able to operate with impunity with nobody to stop them.
Regardless, what we need to do now, as a class, is to rebuild organization from the ground up, but this time refusing to punch left and purge radicals, and to instead actively promote solidarity, a greater vision, and a willingness to fight.
Understood, thanks! We have reason to be hopeful: Americans are no longer spooked by the word “socialist” and they treat threats of socialists being secret commies with skepticism. (That said, they also don’t actually know what “socialism” is.) The backlash to MAGA, if it isn’t defeated by fascists entrenched in our institutions, will be a leftward swing of the pendulum across the center ready to embrace new ideas. (Or old ideas as the case may be.) Obviously our current system is rigged and everyone feels it. We tried one extreme and I think most people realized it A) sucked and B) didn’t work at all as promised.
For my part, I likely want what you want, but I don’t know if I agree on how to get there. There are many accelerationists who don’t understand what a revolution would look like for normal people. I want the Senate abolished, but I don’t want to try a famine.
Fair enough but he kind of did.
Yeah we’re here because we chose Reagan over Carter. And out of those choices we picked the one who was the piece of shit. I am pretty sure that Carter would have been capable of reversing course or realizing mistakes. Reagan was all in on the destruction.
Same as we’re here because we chose Bush over Gore, Obama over McCain… Trump over Clinton/Harris etc.
One side is trying to do the right thing as best they can (even if they fail or get some bad apples). The other is actively (and purposefully) trying to make things worse. Our choices are what got us here. Saying things would be the same is how Republicans keep winning and the Overton Window only seems to move right and never left.
Oh my sweet, sweet, summer child.
Game of Thrones sucks and I thought we were well over “bothsides” in 2026.
Yeah I don’t get it from some of these people.
One side took a dollar from the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray and stole a pack of smokes. The other side shot the brown teller behind the counter and emptied the till. Then lit the store on fire while yelling about the brown guy being an illegal immigrant.
We’re talking about orders of magnitude of shenanigans. And being wrong like Carter and being a traitorous, lying sack of shit like Reagan. Are completely different things.
The both sides are the same crowd are going to get us all killed.
My brother came home from Afghanistan with severe PTSD and started shooting meth to cope with it. My family was torn apart as he threw around all sorts of paranoid accusations and threatened to harm himself or others, always in language just vague enough to be actionable. He wound up picking up one of his many guns, driving out to some random, innocent person’s house, and, fortunately, got shot in the arm by the cops who’d followed him there.
I spent a full year of my life essentially being an on-call 9-1-1 operator. I quit using social media accounts for fear that he’d see I was online. But the pain and trauma that I experienced was nothing compared to what I could see in my mother’s eyes.
That was the most traumatic experience of my life. But I fully understand that it was nothing compared to the trauma he experienced, which was, in turn, nothing compared to the trauma the Afghan people experienced. What I experience, this second-, third-hand exposure to the horrors of war, it’s literally just a first-world problem. But that tiny glimpse into the things the media doesn’t like talk about, was enough.
Who was the president, the commander-in-chief, who ordered him over there? It was the great, liberal progressive hero, Mr. Barack Obama. A guy who was, “just trying to do the right thing” but who occasionally makes some teensy weensy mistakes like prolonging a pointless, unwinnable war of aggression and getting hundreds of thousands of people killed for no reason and subjecting countless millions to horrors far worse than anything you or I could even comprehend. And that’s just like taking a few too many coins from a take-a-penny, is that right?
Absolutely fucking not. If you actually try to view the world from a global perspective, if you genuinely believe in equality and treat every Afghan’s life as being equally valuable as your next-door neighbor’s, then you will quickly find yourself understanding and agreeing with my perspective.
This comment is funny because it further reinforces the point: Obama didn’t start that war, and he was unable to cleanly exit it without leaving Afghanistan for the Taliban, which as we’ve seen has been disastrous for that country’s girls and women.
There are exactly three choices in every general election:
The viable party.
The other viable party.
Not participating in the election at all.
You might think there are other options like write-ins, protest votes, or third parties. Unfortunately, those are all permutations of #3: nonparticipation.
Nobody here is saying they love Democrats. The party is about as popular as boiled cabbage at a chili competition. But when served with those three choices, participating in the election is important, which narrows it down to #1 or #2, and it’s really not hard to choose between the GOP and the Democrats. The Democrats sent your brother to war. The Republicans started that war, sent way more people to it, killed more civilians, and made withdrawing impossible. The Democrats are also more likely to offer mental healthcare to your brother.
Gasp! Oh no! He couldn’t leave or the Taliban would be left in charge!
Hey, remind me again who exactly is in charge of Afghanistan right now?
The Taliban were always going to win because the war was unwinnable from the first day, and it was even more unwinnable by the time Obama took office. He just had to pour countless lives into it first to accomplish nothing whatsoever. What, just so we could say we gave it the “ol’ college try?”
Let me be absolutely clear: I would sooner die than even consider supporting anyone responsible for the war. There is no choice to be made. You could drag me into a voting booth at gunpoint, and I’d tell you to pull the trigger. This is the thing that you fuckers need to get through your thick fucking skulls. What they did is fundamentally unforgivable, and they should be behind bars.
K well as long as you’re unwilling to vote strategically, you’ll continue to allow evil fascists to take over the US. The rest of us will try to elect progressives in primaries and support the most left-leaning viable candidate in the general election because that’s how you defeat fascists if your society isn’t ready for a revolution yet, and ours isn’t. Too many full bellies and entertained morons.
Oh no! If the evil fascists take over, they might start a war of aggression that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people or something! Just imagine!
There’s a discussion to be had about potentially supporting imperfect candidates, but every single one of you takes it to a ridiculous extreme, such that even outright genocide is no biggie. It’s completely ridiculous, utterly absurd. Frankly, yours is not a view that should even be tolerated in society.
A complete and total refusal to hold politicians to any degree of accountability for literally anything, treating them as completely above the law. This is exactly why the term Blue MAGA is completely appropriate. You are the moderate wing of fascism.
You wanting an ideal world isn’t just going to magically make it happen. Unfortunately we have to live in reality where nuance is real.
No we get it. You’re an extremist and live in a fantasy world where nuance doesn’t exist and your extreme idea of morality is the only option.
Unfortunately we have to live with you (who you honestly seem like a moral person but unfortunately don’t understand that politics and most of life is about compromise) and the sociopaths on the other side who will exploit your morality to get everything they want. Your inability to understand the nuance is only good for the sociopaths.
Us, the realists, who understand that Obama couldn’t just pack up and leave also understand that you can’t understand that.
WHY THE FUCK NOT? That’s literally exactly what Biden did, the only difference is that we spend an extra decade pouring endless amounts of blood and treasure, to accomplish NOTHING. “Realist,” my ass.
Realism was recognizing that the war was lost from the minute it started, because the occupation could not last forever and the moment it ended the puppet government would collapse. Calling yourself a “realist,” while pretending that a decades long occupation was a “mistake” is completely absurd.
There’s plenty of room for nuance, on certain topics. Not on this. Not the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. If Trump killed a hundred thousand people in New York City, would you be talking about “nuance?” Was the Holocaust “nuanced?” There’s a fucking line to be drawn, and there’s exactly one reason why Afghans are on one side of the line to me and the other to you, and it’s that you don’t see them as actual human beings.
That’s literally the opposite of what you’re claiming my position is. My position, like the other person said, is that the problems we have are a result of the economic policy of neoliberalism, enacted by both Reagan and Carter. You’re saying that, rather than my position being about criticizing neoliberalism, I “kind of did” say that Reagan was better than Carter, and your supposed evidence of me taking that position is just me saying the problem was the policy of neoliberalism.
Lmao, that’s utterly delusional. Not that it would matter if it were true.
Would you rather get operated on by someone who thinks your heart is a tumor that needs to be removed for the sake of your health, or by someone who wants to remove your heart because they want you dead? The answer is, who gives a shit? Your heart’s coming out either way. Why would I care if the first surgeon is “just trying to help?”
If we’re being so generous with the Democrats’ motives, then the only conclusion is that they comically incompetent to the point of being a useless liability. I’m not sure that actually makes them look better than the reality.
But again, like I said, I am not St. Peter, I’m not trying to evaluate who’s a good person deep down in their heart of hearts. All I care about is what they actually do. You are looking at things from the completely wrong perspective. Get your mind off the pearly gates and look at the actual policy and actual material results of that policy.
You never really explained why neoliberalism is problematic. Neoliberalism is not incompatible with unions, as you seemed to imply, nor is it incompatible with a government that utilizes tax and spend to provide essential services for the public. It can be regulated markets and free trade, and most of the stuff we associate with Reagan’s brand of neoliberalism are consequences of horrible tax and social spending policies, not necessarily a consequence of a lighter hand at protectionism. What’s the real problem here, that we became more open to importing stuff or that the government abdicated its duty to do anything at all? (Aside from bombing brown people, of course.)
The real problem here predates Carter and Reagan and goes back to the New Deal itself. The New Deal was the carrot, along with the stick of the Red Scare, to root out communists and other radicals in the labor movement. The promise was that the government would protect, or at least tolerate unions, so long as they proved their loyalty by engaging in anticommunist witch hunts, such as when communists were kicked out of the AFL/CIO. The effect that this had on unions was that they became weakened, narrowly self-interested, and complacent.
Once the unions were broken, and the working class had no ability to wield power or fight back against whatever the government and ruling class decided to do, they could then take steps that would weaken them even further, and at the same time they could cut social programs, because nobody had any power to stop them. Something like a general strike was impossible, because after purging anyone who sounded like a communist, there was no solidarity, no greater vision, and no willingness to really fight, since those are all things that make you sound like a communist.
Now, admittedly, from a global perspective, the Chinese people have benefited immensely from offshoring, so whether it’s a good or bad thing overall is hard to say. But, good or bad, it’s the reason why the US in such a shitty state today, why the government is able to cut social programs, why nobody can do shit to stop anything Trump does, etc. The most direct enemy of the American ruling class are, of course, American workers (and vice versa) so us getting fucked means that they are now able to operate with impunity with nobody to stop them.
Regardless, what we need to do now, as a class, is to rebuild organization from the ground up, but this time refusing to punch left and purge radicals, and to instead actively promote solidarity, a greater vision, and a willingness to fight.
Understood, thanks! We have reason to be hopeful: Americans are no longer spooked by the word “socialist” and they treat threats of socialists being secret commies with skepticism. (That said, they also don’t actually know what “socialism” is.) The backlash to MAGA, if it isn’t defeated by fascists entrenched in our institutions, will be a leftward swing of the pendulum across the center ready to embrace new ideas. (Or old ideas as the case may be.) Obviously our current system is rigged and everyone feels it. We tried one extreme and I think most people realized it A) sucked and B) didn’t work at all as promised.
For my part, I likely want what you want, but I don’t know if I agree on how to get there. There are many accelerationists who don’t understand what a revolution would look like for normal people. I want the Senate abolished, but I don’t want to try a famine.
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