It’s been almost twelve hours since dalej42 posted the OP. He hasn’t been back. Seems obvious that it was done just to rile folks up. My bet is that he is sitting and watching the replies, getting off on the furor he is causing. If ever there was a case of dnftt, this is it. Transmission ended!
Have you actually lived in any of those countries that you are using as a model for your argument? Because Trudeau was in trouble for corporate favoritism in Canada. Netanyahu is up on corruptions charges. Italy’s Berlusconi indited on corruption charges. France’s Sarkozi, corruption charges. Again, where is this utopia?
Maybe he has a life other than posting here all day long?
Senorbeef, the thing that “adults” recognize is this: Every election in history of democracy itself has been about picking the lesser of two (or more) evils.
That’s how democracy works. It is not possible for it to give the best possible candidate, because your options will always be limited. What democracy does that no other system does is give you a way to deny the worst, and thus hopefully push things the right direction.
This isn’t new to 2016 or 2020, and so, when I see oeioke complaining about having to pick “the lesser of two evils,” I know the greater evil is just using that idea to get elected. I mean, the only difference between “lessee of two evils” and “better of two candidates” is the wording: the latter disocuragws voting, despite meaning the same fucking thing.
No, no one us owed the vote. But the only people who bring up “owing” are those who claim the other side is saying it. We are not, because the only “owing” that anyone can do is in money or contracts. “Adults” make the best decision they can from the choices they have, rather than based on owing anyone anything.
The argument is merely that, like on every election ever, you will have to vote for a candidate who is flawed. They will not be 100% right on the issues you care about. That is just how reality works. You’re attacking the Democrats simply for functioning in a two party system, where the parties necessarily align on both sides of a more moderate electorate.
Its not the Dems you need to convince to be more progressive, but the US itself, and the Dems will inherently follow. Heck, the Pubs would have to liberal up to compete.
The thing I think not a lot of people are realizing about Bernie supporters who are appalled at voting for Biden is that it’s not that leftists don’t understand compromise, it’s that for many on the far left Bernie already represented the extremes of the compromise position. A common refrain among far leftists in my age and social group went something along the lines of “the best thing about Bernie would be the opportunity for him to put systems in place to improve the material conditions of the people enough that we can then overthrow Bernie.” Bernie is to the right of what a lot of leftists want, and represents the compromise between far/radical left positions and neoliberal electoralism.
While there are certainly some Bernie supporters somewhere whose entire politics are “Bernie” and are unwilling to compromise to Biden for bullshit cult of personality reasons, for a lot of people they legitimately feel they’re losing out on the things they already felt they were heavily compromising their morals for.
Further, for a lot of the more radical left, Bernie wasn’t seen as a goal, he was seen as a tactic. That is, if the goal is to effect radical left change and improve the working class’ material conditions, you don’t have just one iron in the fire. They’re only participating in electoralism insofar as it advances their specific agenda, and losing out on their iron in the “electoralism” fire means they’re going to transfer the energy they put into that into, say, raising class consciousness, union organizing, etc. I disagree with this since I think even modest compromises can be important, but for a lot of leftists electoralism is viewed as a very, very tiny occasional part of the political process, as compared with Liberals who generally see organizing and voting for candidates to be the primary/only avenue of engagement with politics.
I’ve been reading through this thread and thinking to myself, “how could dalej be more effective in helping to get Trump reelected?” and I haven’t come up with an answer.
He could try and tell us what a great guy Trump is and how his policies are great for everyone, but we all know that’s a bunch of bullshit. So the absolute best way to ensure Trump’s reelection is to try and split the hard core progressives off from the rest of the Democratic party.
I doubt it. If he had the time to post that OP, he knew what he was doing, just leaning back to watch the fun.
I don’t think I can support a candidacy which has this kind of toxicity attached to it. 
Yeah, pretty much.
I’ve seen this on [a social media platform]. There’s an angry lefty crowd & a pissy Clinton-Dem crowd, & they fight each other a lot. There are probably provocateurs in both camps pushing to break the coalition apart.
At this point, the radical lefties may just about have to break from the Democrats because of bad blood. Whether that turns into a three-party situation or something else remains to be seen.
Nobody is breaking off and going anywhere. The same “controversy” was brewing with the GOP when the Tea Bagger rabble came to fore. Same thing here with the Bernie-bros. Each has managed to move their party right or left, as the case may be, and then settled the fuck down because revolutions are hard when you realize nobody is going to help you with the barricades.
Then you’ve just described people who don’t understand compromise. A compromise specifically requires there to be someone on the other side, saying that they will bend this way if you will bend that way.
And, as far as other tactics being more important, that’s all well and good. But then they’re saying the opposite by saying they can’t vote for Biden. If it doesn’t matter, then vote for the guy who is better.
The one thing I won’t tolerate are people who are still dumb enough to think that you can pick the guy who will cause the whole thing to explode and then pick up the pieces, because, as we’ve seen, there’s no reason to assume that we’ll survive the explosion. People don’t know how lucky we are with COVID-19 right now, for instance.
So they should be voting Biden, while also doing all those other things they find important. Keep us from exploding while they work to do things to make change.
That said, this must be a new thing, since they’ve been largely ineffective at all this stuff before now. They are right that the country has moved to the right in many ways, and i still quite conservative. And there is an utter lack of progressives (let alone anyone further left) in positions of power.
I’d love it if the true left would do these other things and start to actually move the country to the left. I just watched a video where a guy pointed out that the “big pause” in our economy is a great way for them to get a foothold when things start up again by privately doing what they want the government to do (e.g. form cooperatives, unions, etc.) And I would be the last person to be sad to see capitalism finally fade from existence.
But none of that justifies letting Trump win. None of the damage that this does to the people the left claims to care about is worth it, and we really don’t know if we could survive another presidency.
Already the Republicans have successfully made it very hard to vote against them, and we all know an actual revolution isn’t happening. So, while it may not be the most important thing, voting still has to be part of it.
No, don’t ridiculous! None of us here have lives offline!
Right? 
:o
The OP’s ignorance has been fought and he is taking time off to think on his sins. He’ll return a new man. I’m certain of it.
These days? He’d fucking better not.
So, then Great Britain with its “trump-lite” Boris*, and Israel with the criminal Netanyahu are then, by your definition- not first world nations? :rolleyes:Italy is pretty damn bad also, corruption on a wide scale, etc. I just think you are pretty ignorant about world politics. Israel is rich and has a worse political landscape. GB is almost as bad, Brexit was bought and paid for by the rich- pandering to the bigots.
- not to mention the racist and xenophobic Brexit.
Well, depends on what you mean by “the left” and “liberals”. Bernie got just under 30% of the vote, so the progressive wing of the Dem party is thus less than 30%. And that 28% includes quite a few NON-democrats who voted for Sanders in open primaries. I’d expect that after that is taken out, the progressive wing of the party is 20-25%.
Nor does Biden have a “history of sexual accusations.”. There is exactly one, very recent, and clearly kremlin generated. Nor is Biden “gullible”, just the opposite in fact. He is also fairly liberal, and his stances arent really far off from Bernies- just more rooted in reality.
Point taken about Israel, I don’t know much about them. Great Britain is not worse than us, they’re bad because they’re a lessor version of that. The conservative party in Britain is not nearly as toxic and evil as Republicans, though they basically are trying to go in that direction. Great Britain is a country whose politics are absolutely in the decline, but I would still take theirs over our insanity.
Incidentally, all of you who keep referring to the “far left” and “radical left” - you know you’re reciting Republican talking points and helping them move the Overton window when you do that, right?
By world standards, Bernie is not “far left” and neither are most of his supporters. In most rich countries he’d be considered centrist or slightly left. “Far left” are people who are talking about the abolition of private property, not people talking about state-administered or single payer healthcare.
Prime example: When 31 out of the 32 richest countries in the world have some variant of universal/government administered healthcare, it’s not a “far left” position, it’s a pretty centrist position. The US is the outlier as a fairly far right country, and referring to wanting what most of the rest of the rich world already has as “far left” is doing exactly what the republicans want you to do - to move the overton window to the right by referring to anything not conservative as “far left”
Hi, yes, I am radical left, I’m anti-capitalist. I was referring to me peer group who are other self-identified far and radical left people. For whom Bernie was a compromise position far to the right of our ideal, because he’s a Social Democrat. Because he’s not actually all that far left.
I sympathize with your enthusiasm about healhcare and getting corporate interest & influence out of government. I’d like to see election funding reform that puts future candidates on an even playing field in terms of public campaign funding. I want to get rid of voter suppression and gerrymandering and fuck the electoral college and screw these bullshit primaries and silly caucus games. I want to see a lot of things done that would make this system much better than it is now. So if that’s what you’re on about, talk about that. Don’t bang on about things you know nothing about. Because you just come across as a rebel without a clue and you’re not doing yourself, or the rest of us, any favors.
Okay comrade. I will see you come the revolution.