Disclaimer since based on my last comment i know the accusation is coming: i voted for claudia already. I think socialists should vote for Claudia if shes available.
I just also think voting is not the ultimate expression of politics and doesnt mean that much. The “its an endorsement” thing is true, but one extra endorsement does not equal one extra dead Palestinian. Thats just magical thinking. (Also, ive tried telling people the endorsement thing because its what changed my mind about lesser evilism, it doesnt work.)
And the idea that every Kamala voter is horrific evil when many are scared, propagandized, gaslit marginalized people doing what they think they need to do to not die is misguided. You guys claim to be the ultimate propaganda understanders but dont seem to understand its power. Are people still responsible for their actions? Sure. Does a vote of all things matter as an action all that much? Lmao fuck no. Its basically pointless.
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, “not forgiving”, or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
My problem is you really can’t effectively campaign for Kamala and acknowledge the genocide. You’ll see many liberals try to thread this needle but then their campaign slogan is “vote for the lesser genocide” which really self defeating. Eventually they’ll get sucked into genocide apologia or even denialism out of convienice. When that happens, fuck em. For the ones that keep trying to thread the needle, I’ll keep asking them why they are so invested in electoralism.
As someone heavily involved in
's presidential campaign, I can say that OP’s position is much closer to the official campaign than people disagreeing. By that I mean we are not particularly interested in how people vote, but in using the campaign to reach people and engage them in politics outside the electoral. Our campaign is a vehicle to big swathes of desperate and disconnected people who think of politics in purely electoral terms - whether that’s that we have to vote for the lesser of two evils or that the failure of voting to fix societal issues means there is no path forward.We know that when we go out and canvass, we’re going to interact almost entirely with people who are not ideologically committed leftists. The phase of organizing in the US demands that our work be focused on finding and bringing in people who are not aware of the necessity or existence of a vanguard working class party and convince them that their vote is only an extremely small part of their potential political engagement and the general path to fixing this rotten country.
Therefore, we always have to approach people empathetically, understanding their position so that we can move them towards revolutionary socialist politics. That requires us not to denounce Kamala voters as Hitlerites in training.
"they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice "
I understand that it’s really quite easy to suggest that Nazis were an essential evil and even the US is magically suddenly a good guy with good motives having fought them - but for the same reasons it’s absurd to argue “Nazis were just following their material interests”, this argument is both a moot point, and fascist apologia.
Fascists aren’t monsters. They’re people. That’s what makes them so dangerous.
Literally made an account again just because you pissed me off.
If you passively accept genocide, you have no rights. Of any kind. Because you deny them all to others for your own.
When I was maybe 14 or 15 that stupid damn TV movie about United 53 or whatever came out and the short version of the events that night is I got blacklisted, from the entire town, barred from employment and kicked out of the “accelerated” school courses and got my ass beat because I dared to say maybe, just maybe, Muslims are human. Because I took away their soft comfortable fantasy, because fascism is never passive.
You’re not being a humanist. You’re doing apologia for fascism.
The US presidential election is a sham election even by the standards of bourgeois elections, so voting doesn’t matter in the end. But just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it reflects well on someone who casts their ballot for the current genocider. It’s like if someone upvotes a reactionary comment or post on Hexbear. The impact is practically nil, but they still would need to be reeducated and banned if they refused to self-crit. A major moment in the history of this website is transphobes getting banned for upvoting transphobic content. Imagine if they tried pulling some “uh aktually, this is a niche website. There’s no material impact for my upvote. It doesn’t meaningfully combat transphobia” excuse.
I don’t think people are trying to argue we should, like, just live with their terrible choices, just that they aren’t like consciously Hitlerites.
In the same way a fascist doesnt support self id for trans people, I dont believe in self id for fascists, sorry
Liberals will betray leftists per usual when the time comes, so at a basic level, I don’t see the point of caring about liberals outside of being prepared enough to anticipate and make moves against the inevitable betrayal. As far as the US is concerned, more than half of the populace do not vote at all and it’s higher for marginalized communities. This is fertile soil for radicalization. They on some intuitive level are politically conscious enough to recognize the pony show for what it really is, and they are just begging for someone, anyone to show them the light. Why waste time and energy on some Harris-voting freak when the politically disenfranchised are just standing right there?
Correct. If I vote non Harris I fear trump will be elected which would be a faster and stronger genocide. I’m not voting because I’m okay with genocide. I’m voting to try to mitigate as much damage as I can in my power without creating an exceptionally higher amount of risk by voting how I actually want too.
you should vote psl. if actual worker’s parties become bolstered by such a high profile election maybe the hitlerites in office will hesitate to do evil shit at risk of radicalizing everyone to socialism faster
I’m of two minds about this and while I agree with you mostly I do take a bit of an issue here
Like ive actually talked to liberals about their vote. I didnt even have to touch grass to it! Where their coming from is wrong and ive told them that, but ive seen the effect the lesser evilism propaganda has on their mind. they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice Hating, “not forgiving”, or throwing in the pit (as ive seriosly seen suggested) the 10s of millions of people who will vote Kamala in November is simply not practical. You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize. And you definitly cant desire to kill that many people lmao.
I don’t think anyone is serious about wanting to kill all libs, I can’t speak for everyone but when it’s coming from me it’s clearly hyperbole because I’m just yapping
I think libs should be treated as individuals, there’s a nice old boomer lady who feels genuinely scared of another Trump term who I’m completely kind and civil to because she’s out with us every week protesting the genocide, I can see that she genuinely cares and we don’t try to vote shame each other
Now on the other hand that old boomer dude I’ve never seen before who showed up at our protest last week to campaign for Holocaust Harris and vote shame us got none of that kindness or civility from me because he didn’t fucking deserve it, frankly I regret not being a bigger dick to him
Online it’s the same way, if they’re trying to scold us I’m going to tell them how I feel and I’m going to tell them that there’s blood on their hands
You are right that it doesn’t matter
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Yea, because we got shit to lose
People dont go out and start shooting unless they feel like theyve got nothing to lose
That’s why
has been refining the art of taking things away slowly.Theyre very good at it
I’m not even sure this is true. I would give up all my shit in an instant if I thought it had a 0.001% chance of changing things. I think many people feel similarly.
I can never give up my wife
Well sure. But at no point in history did nobody ever have significant others. If you’re including that in your assessment then only humans who’ve lived their whole life in solitary confinement have nothing to lose.
I’m just a coward, I’m not willing to die for my beliefs cause dying is scary and maybe, maybe, if I keep my head down I can . . . nothing really. I make less than 10k a year, I don’t have a toilet or shower, I have a minifridge and induction hob and live mostly off rice and lentils and peanut butter, my ‘house’ got to 115 for weeks this summer cause metal roof and shit insulation and come winter it will stay ambient +15. I keep going because I’m too afraid to do anything else. I only leave the house for groceries and work. Sometimes I hope something good might happen.
I do have two dogs, four cats, and a long distance boyfriend who is the first personal connection I’ve had other than my mother since I was in HS. So there’s that, that’s nice.
You cant hate humanity to that extent and organize.
I don’t hate humanity, I hate people who want to officially cosign a modern Holocaust.
Legitimate question, would you feel this way if someone told you they hated German Nazis who lived in and supported Germany during and in the lead up to WW2?
Because the moral calculus is identical.
We’re talking about people who support the modern equivalent of Hitler.
moral calculus
There’s your problem. Marxists are not moralists. Westerners are all already complicit and voting is meaningless. What matters is doing whatever is practical to actually support Palestine.
Being kind to tryptamine was not going to help any Palestinians.
I don’t think condemning people for being bad but not treating them as intentionally evil = being nice. You can still call someone a convienient rube spreading rhetoric to justify genocide and if they don’t pause from that I think going fully off at them is entirely justified
Sorry is “intentionally evil” something we care about or not? Seems like intention and good vs evil are valid or invalid modes of thought depending on what’s currently most useful for the “kid gloves for modern Nazis” crowd in here.
I’m going to restate my top level comment: you should be using the same standard for these people as pro Nazi Germans during the Third Reich.
People like tryptamine are fully aware that Harris is complicit in the modern Holocaust, know that they’re cosigning her actions and find a way to justify that to themselves.
On Hexbear of all places, I’m not going to let that stand without telling them to die.
yeah so going fully off at them is entirely justified
Mea culpa: I misread your comment as saying it wasn’t justified.
Sorry for the unwarranted tone, I get heated easily regarding this topic.
Totally valid, sorry for continuing the conversation probably longer than it needed to be
voting for Kamala Harris is not the same thing as being a Hitlerite even though people doing it are completely wrong and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. You have seen the arrogance and myopic viewpoint of liberals. They do not think anything besides suffering is possible. This is not a mental state of Hitlerism but a state of supreme nihilism. It, of course, ends in materially the same thing, but intention is important when considering the “abstract moral value” of people, which is what this post is about.
Also, most of you are ex liberals. Meaning most of you have endorsed war crimes with a vote. Probably worth keeping in mind.
Also this is true. A ton of people here have endorsed genocide and are now deciding this is the genocide that they can decide lets them be a Good Person while everyone else is a Bad Person. Which of course is almost correct, that is how it works when it comes to genocides, endorsing them generally is a bad-person thing. But if you’re one of the people who literally did that exact same thing and are now “pulling the ladder up” because you’re already radicalized, then you have to realize how short sighted and selfish that is. If you are willing to give yourself a second chance despite a possible full past commitment to lesser evilism, then it is completely absurd to condemn every Kamala voter as unable to change.
Of course, this does not apply to those who are genuinely spreading Democrat rhetoric, that is a staunch rhetorical decision and while I’m sure they could technically become radicalized to socialism later in their life I do not believe anyone is obligated to tolerate them. I am merely defending the still embryonic baby-leftists that likely don’t know what’s going on and are just trying to support as many people as possible with the flawed understanding of reality they’ve been given
they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice
To the pure, all things are pure
they are not coming from a place of evil with their choice
they’re making the conscious decision that murdering Palestinians is okay if it benefits them personally
they aren’t though, they think there is no way to not endorse it, they have been housebroken, they are pitiable but they are not Nazis
Most of the Germans during WWII and the Holocaust also were not nazis. The nazi party and the SS were only a small fraction of the total population. That didn’t stop the Germans from actively participating in the Holocaust or helping invade/bomb other countries. Hell, neither WWII nor the Holocaust would have been possible without all of Germany being complicit.
The number of people arrested, deported, and killed wasn’t possible with the SS alone. They relied on local police being informed of where people were hiding by neighbors wanting to eliminate Jews, Roma, homosexuals, etc. If the SS went door to door searching every house, there’s no way they could have captured as many people as they did. Those people were handed over to them by ordinary Germans not part of the nazi party.
So no, I don’t buy that excuse. Whitey is gonna whitey and if he is willing to throw Palestinians under the bus, he sure as shit will snitch when the time comes to eliminate the marginalized here at home.
very true, it is ultimately a concession to imperialism on the part of the labor aristocracy. unfortunately there is a statistically high chance you have participated in exactly the same thing, though you could also just be giga-based since your birth or not an Amerikkkan and in either way i envy you
yeeting the second half of this comment because it sucks
I think a younger, more reactionary me would have deserved a yeeting for being reactionary. There was no excuse for those views when there were people the same age who had the opposite views. While I realize that now, it doesn’t absolve my participation.
It’s also materially irrelevant because I can’t change the past, especially past versions of other people. I can only change the conditions of what’s going on right now. Maybe some libs are possible to convert with enough time and understanding. Unfortunately, Palestinians don’t have that time. It’s the same as what was going on in Germany. Maybe there were Germans who could have been reasoned with. It doesn’t matter because the war was necessary to end the Holocaust, the invasion of the USSR, and the occupation of neutral countries.
Oh also I don’t think we need to waste our time converting possible leftists from people still deep in delusional faith with electoralism, I was just condemning the “kill all Kamala voters” type rhetoric but I think I just took it too literally and not as the venting it was
it doesn’t need to absolve your participation for your possibility to stop doing stuff like voting for genocidal lib politicians to be acknowledged. the fact you are posting here is a sign that current clueless babyleftists don’t deserve to be compared to full on Nazis, though of course they are participating in a collective wrong. Like, :im-vegan: and i would be 100% justified if i went on borderline murderous rants at the people around me for being complicit with murder of living things constantly, and in fact many do, but i have a hard time comparing them to Nazi supporters regardless, because Nazi supporters had a huge amount of social context to understand why their decision is wrong, but veganism is still considered “extreme” and/or erased from public consciousness. In other words, people bad but definitely not full-on ghouls in and of themselves.
i’m not going to start killing my family
Good! Nobody’s gonna kill their family for voting for this genocide and nobody is suggesting it.
i already yeeted that shitty argument sorry
I’m glad you did that but it’s definitely telling that everybody who feels the need to tell us we’re wrong for our position has to include imagined declarations that nobody has declared
it’s the imaginary hexbear you’re disagreeing with, not the actual hexbear users
It was an allegory but a bad one, not an actual take I thought I saw
Yeah sorry I don’t buy this shit either.
You’re basically saying “if you hate your genocidal society then why do you participate in it?”
.Libs are just under the incorrect belief that by voting for the lesser evil they are “improving things somewhat”
. Doubly so where in many (though definitely not all) cases, it’s a factual error, not a values one. And I really struggle to blame individuals for that.Newsflash: The minerals in your electronics were partially or entirely mined by child slavery, why are you willing to throw them under the bus??? Turns out participating in society is required, and so you just act within it in a way you think is best to improve things.
Did you genuinely just do the turbolib “Newsflash” thing? We don’t need Sorkinisms around here. Tho the fascist apologia is definitely worse, that the moral purity of fascists is more important than their holocaust. It’s absolutely not.
I’m very over the childish tendency to condemn colloquialisms as a lib/redditor thing. I’m using words to communicate a point. You understood that point. So they did their job.
Yes, most effectively. Good day.
Exactly
Nobody is immune to propaganda, yet the effect that propaganda has is overstated here IMHO. Read Masses, Elites, and Rebels. If a cis white lib is saying they’re voting L3Harris out of fear, they’ve really just been granted moral license to not care and are using that moral license to justify doing the same thing they would be doing if no pressure was applied to them at all.
I think yelling at libs about voting is effective because the vast majority of them are not joining orgs, they’re not communists that are just doing this one thing wrong, etc. They’re libs! And they perceive voting as the singular most important political action (especially since the George Floyd protests have been memory holed). If we can radicalize liberals’ understanding of voting, we can radicalize their entire politics. I know that because when I was a liberal myself, the first piece of theory I read was Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy. After I read that, I radicalized very quickly, because my whole understanding of politics was based on voting for the right candidate and it was quickly shattered. So I believe that electoralism represents an attack surface for the left to exploit, since it has become the singular focus of the rank and file liberal politic.
All that being said, at some point it probably is worth shutting up about voting and just focusing on getting people to learn some useful skill, get organized, and agitate as many other people as they can to do the same. It would be really, really stupid if, for example, this whole site alienated a ton of its own already radicalized users over voting. It would be even worse if the same happened at unions and the DSA. It ain’t that deep.
You have to meet the people where they are, and right now that’s the polling place.
I’ve seen the "we should throw Kamala voters in the
" comments, he’s not lying, they’re real.when people show you they don’t care about genocide, believe them
Are you serious?
I thought this was already pretty clear. The “lesser-evil” mindset is strong and so is the propaganda supporting it. I’m not going to get mad over someone voting Kamala as long as they aren’t a shit head about it.
But agitating is raising awareness and so continuing to pressure is good imo, even if some get a little overly zealous about it
I’ve seen a shocking amount of comparisons between Kopmala voters and voters for the Nazi party which tbf might be more apt than I think? Was there some sort of genuine 101% Hitler the Nazi party used as an implicitl threat? Not just scaremongering about minorities being that threat, but an actual 101% Hitler party that was the only majorly supported running opposition to literal Hitler?
The important point of similarity between Holocaust Harris and Adolf Hitler is actually that they both committed genocide.
The important point of similarity between their supporters, is that they are both groups of people who knew that the person they were supporting was committing genocide.
Hitler didn’t get elected, he got appointed by a liberal due to pressure from business leaders. Harris has already talked about wanting to put Republicans into high level appointments so she’s more like Hindenburg in that way. Of course, once again, the way she’s like Hitler is that they both perpetrated Holocausts.
I’d also like to clarify that I’m not comparing Harris voters to people who voted for the Nazi party prior to the Holocaust, when the Nazis weren’t in power, during the Weimar Republic. I’m comparing them to Germans who supported the Nazi regime while it fed millions of people into death camps. That’s who they are.
You might be able to make an argument for libs who aren’t particularly online and only watch mainstream news, but if someone is coming onto hexbear to try to proselytize, they’re online enough that they’re aware of the kind of evidence that has come out. They know what they’re supporting.
I’m not the defending the terminally online libs in any capacity lol
Well,it was the KPD, obviously
Except that unlike Trump, they actually were a positive force
