• spaceghoti@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Funny how Biden turned out to be a lot less centrist than we were expecting. The pendulum is swinging left, and if we don’t keep pushing in the right direction the progress will stop. Just because we’re not getting everything we want right now doesn’t mean we’re not in the process of getting there. So stop removed about how you don’t have the perfect candidate right now. Vote in the primaries for the most progressive candidates you can find, and then in the general election vote for the best candidate, even if it’s not your preferred choice.

    Adulthood is about dealing with the world as it is, not the world we insist we should have. We have to be the adults in the room when no one else is willing.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We have to be the adults in the room when no one else is willing.

      And in case anybody is wondering about the Republicans not being held to the same standard, that’s a consequence of the fact that the changes progressives want require passing new legislation, whereas the changes Republicans want can be achieved through obstruction and sabotage.

      • spaceghoti@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Just to clarify, I do want to hold Republicans to the same standards. I want their accountability to be conducted through electoral defeats and removing them from power. As difficult as it is to reform the Democrats into the progressive party we need them to be, such a feat is impossible with modern Republicans.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Just to clarify, I do want to hold Republicans to the same standards.

          Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My comment was more about the practical/structural circumstances that allow them to get away with acting the way they do rather than being about how people feel about it, though.

          • spaceghoti@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            I wasn’t assuming you were criticizing anything but Republican behavior. I merely wanted to add on to your comment.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        There’s some interesting pieces that I think have gone unnoticed where rank and file Republicans do want something, but nothing happens. They don’t seem to care.

        For example, repealing the Hughes Amendment of 1986, which bans the registration of new machine guns for personal use. Lots of gun tote’n NRA members want that gone. Republicans could have easily done it after the 2016 election, where they had both houses of Congress and the White House.

        IIRC, there were some bills submitted to committee, where they promptly died. That’s it. The only meaningful changes to gun rights under Trump was declaring bump stocks illegal (which lets a semi-auto rifle be fired like a full-auto rifle).

        Yet, you don’t see any of those NRA members talking about this. They are still lockstep behind the Republican party. Take any equivalent issue on the left, and people want the Democratic party to burn down for not supporting it.

        I think there’s deep lessons to be learned there about how the rank and file treat their respective standard bearer political party.

        • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          That’s a solid point. The GOP couldn’t get together to wipe out the ACA because many Republicans actually realized it would fuck them to do so. It was an absolute comical disaster.

          They half-gutted it, but we still have enough of it to be far better off than pre-ACA days.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yet, you don’t see any of those NRA members talking about this. They are still lockstep behind the Republican party. Take any equivalent issue on the left, and people want the Democratic party to burn down for not supporting it.

          I think there’s deep lessons to be learned there about how the rank and file treat their respective standard bearer political party.

          This Alt-Right Playbook video does an excellent job of explaining that, IMO. (I linked to the specific timestamp where the explanation starts, but I recommend watching from the beginning for context.)

    • krashmo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Adulthood is about dealing with the world as it is, not the world we insist we should have.

      Which is why centrist Democrats saw the polling data saying Bernie Sanders performed better against Trump than Clinton or Biden and decided to throw their support behind him in both elections rather than forcing us to stick with the candidate they wanted, right? Wait a minute…

      • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        The same Berniecrats who could have had a progressive in the General in 2020 if they’d been willing to go for Warren (who was outpolling Bernie in the Primaries AND comparable in the General until the shitshow that cost them both the primary)

        The thing with Primaries is that they’re like RCV. The most votes wins the Primary. If your second choice isn’t “whoever won the Dem primary”, then you’re the problem, whether your first was Biden, Bernie, or Elmo.

      • spaceghoti@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        You’re talking about polling conducted eleven months ahead of the general election. Whatever you think you’re doing, you’re not participating in an adult conversation.

        Goodbye.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Some people you don’t like made a decision you disagreed with for reasons we aren’t privy to, and that’s somehow a rebuttal of needing to deal with the world as it is? Your comment is a demonstration of the problem.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Which is why centrist Democrats saw the polling data saying Bernie Sanders performed better against Trump than Clinton or Biden and decided to throw their support behind him in both elections rather than forcing us to stick with the candidate they wanted, right?

        People don’t like Bernie Sanders, so they didn’t vote for him.

        • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          As a Sanders voter & 4 figure donator, I’m glad Biden was in the White House when Russia invaded Ukraine.

    • ira
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      1 year ago

      Idk unlimited sales of arms to fascists like Itamar Ben-Gvir seems pretty far right to me

        • ira
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          1 year ago

          I’d argue that Biden is the one enabling Trump here

            • ira
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              1 year ago

              That’s as silly as saying Ramaswamy is anti fascist because he supports Israel less than Trump. Or saying Trump is anti fascist because he supports Israel less than Pence.

              Meanwhile in Israel:

              "[Ben-Gvir] was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israel-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.

              As a teenager, he adopted religious and radical right-wing views during the First Intifada. He first joined a right-wing youth movement affiliated with Moledet, a party which advocated transferring Arabs out of Israel, and then joined the youth movement of the even more radical Kach and Kahane Chai party, which was eventually designated as a terrorist organization and outlawed by the Israrli government. He became youth coordinator at Kach, and claimed that he was detained at age 14. When he came of age for conscription into the Israeli Defense Forces at 18, he was exempted from service by the IDF due to his extreme-right political background.

              In a November 2015 interview, he claimed to have been indicted 53 times.

              Ben-Gvir has been convicted of incitement to racism, destroying property, possessing a terror organization’s propaganda material and supporting a terror organisation.

              In December 2021, Ben-Gvir was investigated after a video surfaced of him pulling a handgun on Arab security guards during a parking dispute in the underground garage of the Expo Tel Aviv conference center. The guards asked Ben-Gvir to move his vehicle as he was parked in a prohibited space. He then drew a pistol and brandished it at the guards. The guards were unarmed.

              His most recent outrage-inducing comments came last week [Aug 27 2023] when he admitted that his right to move around unimpeded is superior to the freedom of movement for Palestinians in the West Bank. ‘My right, the right of my wife and children to move around Judea and Samaria is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs,’ he said in an interview, using the biblical term for the occupied territory.

              Ben-Gvir also wants to expel ‘disloyal’ Palestinian citizens of Israel. In August, a local radio station’s online poll found that nearly two-thirds of Israelis support the proposal.

              In 1995, at the height of the Oslo Peace Accords, when he was 19, Ben-Gvir showed TV cameras the bonnet ornament from then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car, declaring: ‘We got to his car. We’ll get to him, too.’ A few weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultranationalist at a rally in support of the peace agreement and the planned withdrawal from Palestinian territory.

              Ehud Barak, a former Labour party prime minister, prophesied ‘dark days’ if Ben-Gvir entered government, while left-wing leader Zehava Galon said the elections would ‘determine whether there will be a free country here or a Jewish theocracy.’ "

              Yeah, anybody who supports this guy and arms him with all the weapons he wants is a fascist piece of shit, no matter which side of the aisle.