• wuffah@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Ah well, if there’s no difference you can vote for the side building concentration camps in the US then I guess. I mean, the DHS is literally unfunded at the moment because democratic lawmakers are demanding ICE reform.

    Or, if you start your own party let me know, I’ll vote for ya. 😉

    • ExotiqueMatter@lemmy.ml
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      11 hours ago

      democratic lawmakers are demanding ICE reform.

      Aka they are okay with violent forced deportations as long as it’s done ✨ legaly ✨.

      Why do you assume the Democrats wouldn’t build concentration camps as well btw? No, because last I checked, the Dems didn’t do shit about kids in cages, forced prison labor or the US’s torture prisons like Guantanamo and gave more budget than Trump to the Trump border wall not to mention their support and funding of literal concentration camps in Israel. Does that sound like the actions of a party that wouldn’t build concentration in the US to you? Because it sure as heck doesn’t to me.

      In my opinion, if the Dems had been elected they would have done it and justified it with their classic pr technique of letting the Reps vote whatever they want in congress while they stand by and pretend like they couldn’t do anything about it despite their candidate being in office and go “well, the law is in the book now so we have to play along” like they did with Roe v Wade.

    • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      17 hours ago

      Democrats were literally building concentration camps and funding ICE when they were in power too.

      • wuffah@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        Yes they were, but it wasn’t as bad, which is sort of the whole point.

        Would you rather have hand-wringing neoliberals with some accountability, or hardcore right wing authoritarian nazi republicans with no accountability?

        One leads to a new holocaust in the US, the other leads back to the status quo. Take your pick.

        • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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          3 hours ago

          Yes they were

          Oh, ok. So when you said they weren’t, you were lying?

          Would you rather have hand-wringing neoliberals with some accountability, or hardcore right wing authoritarian nazi republicans with no accountability?

          Given that, unlike most liberals, I consider foreigners to be human, both of them are genocidal fascists.

          One leads to a new holocaust in the US, the other leads back to the status quo.

          As ever, shitlibs only care about human life within the US border. And the status quo was both monstrous and what lead directly to the current situation, so wanting to Retvrn to it is some reactionary shit

        • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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          16 hours ago

          You’re being chauvinist. You may not want to admit it, but it’s the only way this position makes sense.

          Your “lesser evil” logic only works if you implicitly treat people in the imperial periphery as expendable, as if our suffering matters less than your domestic anxieties. Your entire framework centers US comfort while mass death abroad becomes background noise.

          Who backed the genocide in Gaza? Who destroyed Libya and turned it into a failed state with open slave markets? Who armed proxies that helped give rise to ISIS in Syria? Who backed decades of rape and mass killing in Afghanistan?

          It was bipartisan. Every time. Enthusiastically bipartisan.

          Permanent war, sanctions, coups, and the immiseration of the Global South are the foundation of the system. Democrats and Republicans agree on this completely.

          So when you say “one leads to fascism and the other leads back to the status quo,” you leave out the key point: the status quo already depends on mass death elsewhere. Your stability is subsidized by bombs, blockades, and starvation.

          Yes, Republicans are more “meaner” at home. Democrats use nicer language. That’s PR. Democrats provide legitimacy for the same imperial machine while managing the decline more “politely”.

          From Palestine to Haiti, there is no meaningful lesser evil just continuous catastrophe.

          Your argument boils down to: as long as things don’t get too bad too fast here, everything else is negotiable.

          That’s peak chauvinism.

          • wuffah@lemmy.world
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            16 hours ago

            Look, I don’t disagree, I just don’t have a decent opinion on how to repair a hundred years of US hegemonic abuse. I can only tell you that if we don’t put forth an electable democrat, it will get much worse for everyone.

            If you want to help fix my chauvinism, I need something other than laying the history of American foreign policy violence at my feet.

            • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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              16 hours ago

              Nobody else can fix your chauvinism for you. That takes introspection. You need to start considering the rest of us as fully human whose suffering is not secondary to your comfort.

              The facts are: Both parties support the imperialist empire. Both fund genocide, sanctions, coups, and proxy wars. Both uphold capitalism and the systematically broken policing system. Both expand surveillance and repression. “Voting blue” has never stopped any of this, it just puts a nicer face on it, the equivalent of sticking a smiling face sticker on the orphan crushing machine.

              If you actually want to do something: Stop treating Democrats as harm reduction. Consider third-party or abstention instead of laundering war crimes with your vote. Join a communist organization. Study theory. Do material work in your community. Organize. Build power locally. Arm yourself. Do literally anything other than vote for a war criminal every 2-4 years.

              If you want to vote, vote just stop trying to justify yourself as super moral for voting for the personable war criminal over the more openly cruel one.

              • wuffah@lemmy.world
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                15 hours ago

                Chauvinism aside, this would be a terrible time to vote for a third party, and by no means am I trying to present it as “morally superior”. You’re trying to fix a broken system, and I’m trying to keep it intact long enough to prevent it from exploding and killing even more people.

                After we get Trump out of office, we can start dismantling western chauvinism.

                • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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                  3 hours ago

                  “I’m trying to keep the murder machine going long enough to stop it from murdering people!”

                  Fucking liberal ideology in a nut shell.

                  After we get Trump out of office, we can start dismantling western chauvinism.

                  You got Trump out of office, and instead of “dismantling western chauvinism”, you instead decided to actively engage in the worst genocide of the 21st century, with such determination that you were even willing to let Trump win the election rather than stop.

                • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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                  9 hours ago

                  You’re not “keeping it intact to prevent harm.” You’re keeping it intact because you benefit from it.

                  The US led system isn’t something you stabilize and then dismantle later. It only exists through massive violence. Every extra year you preserve it is more sanctions, more bombs, more dead people.

                  And “after Trump” is always the line. It was “after Reagan”, “after Bush,” then “after Trump,” then it will be “after the next Republican.” There is always a new emergency to justify doing nothing to even attempt to slow the immisiration machine.

                  • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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                    3 hours ago

                    These people have literally expunged their own memories of the fact that there was already an “after Trump”. And they used it to double down in American brutality before letting Trump back into office.

            • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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              16 hours ago

              Remember six years ago when you put forth an electable democrat, and it continued to get much worse for everyone?

              • wuffah@lemmy.world
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                15 hours ago

                I mean, I didn’t put her forth, I wanted Bernie. Everything got worse because she didn’t get elected. I guess she wasn’t that electable.

                  • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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                    3 hours ago

                    BlueMAGA liberals have literally expunged all memory of the Biden administration from their brains. For them it’s 2022 and Trump is on his second consecutive term.

          • wuffah@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            The point is more to joke that the two party system sucks, but one side is “better”.

            • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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              3 hours ago

              You outright tried to claim that Democrats weren’t doing it until you were challenged.

            • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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              14 hours ago

              Right, except it isn’t better, it just has better PR. The substance of the atrocities remains the same, only the presentation changes

              • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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                11 hours ago

                I mean if we’re talking actual substance, the scale does come into play. It’s not a clean cut “they’re both equally evil” scenario unless you’re happy to ignore the difference between atrocities and vastly better funded atrocities. ICE funding increased by an order of magnitude under Trump 2. I mean it’s literally over 10x now what it was a decade ago, and almost all of that is from the budget bill from 2025

                • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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                  3 hours ago

                  Liberals consider the lives of two Americans killed by ice to be more valuable than the lives of two hundred thousand Palestinians killed by American bombs

                  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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                    3 hours ago
                    1. I’m not a liberal

                    2. I don’t consider them to be more valuable

                    All I’m saying is that if we’re measuring the degree of the slide into fascism, one side is significantly more accelerationist about it. 10x is nothing to sniff at. I know ICE is just one symptom of the problem. Are we going to cherry pick symptoms of fascism, now?

                    I’m all for a socialist revolution in the US.

                    I also value nuance in the conversation about the state of things.

                    One of the more likely paths to community building in the states is through the union movement, so electing the people spending 10x as much to physically assault the working class and actively grinding down any protections unions have is, uh, still pretty bad.

                • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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                  10 hours ago

                  “Evil” is not a useful heuristic for analysis. What is obvious is that from one party to the other, there is a continuous escalation in fascist forces and fascist actions. We got a fucking genocide under the dems, and they also voted for the ICE budget expansion. “More or less evil” does not apply here: you might as well judge which individual gears of the orphan grinding machine are “more or less evil”. They are part of the same machine, serve the same function, and are equally our enemy.