I understand. Kamala is going to president of the United States of America. And it’s going to be awesome.

Debates can energize the voter base which is what we need right now. And who knows, the debates might even convince some people.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/aug/01/were-tulsi-gabbards-attacks-kamala-harris-record-c/

Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”

Notably, the figures dropped dramatically during Harris’ tenure, from 817 marijuana-related admissions in her first year in office to 137 in her last.

She laughed because it was funny and I’m tired of people telling me it’s not. 💥 🔫

She’s been a prosecutor, senator, and now VP. She has the experience. She can speak in complete sentences. She is a neo-liberal but that was a given. All Democratic candidates since Clinton have been neo-liberals. The idea that Kamala is anti-progressive is false.

She was on the ticket 4 years ago. She is VP. Now she’s on top. Kamala 2024!

Biden made the right decision for the country.

I didn’t want to believe it but they’re already in the comments. We need to be vocal. Kamala is a great candidate.

Biden wasn’t viable because he has cognitive decline. Kamala will mop the floor with Trump in debates.

Biden endorsed Kamala. =)

what do people like about Donald Trump

The Mass Psychology of Trumpism

To summarize the first search result, the answer is christo-fascism. Trump has used Christianity to make Americans swallow fascism. A lot of them are also racists and misogynists.

Sure, they can do whatever they want. See how doing whatever they want plays with voters though. This would be taking the nuclear option for political parties. If the Democratic Party forced out Biden, angry and/or apathetic Americans would be talking about it for at least the next two election cycles, possibly longer. That’s assuming we win of course and the Republican Party hasn’t killed us all in death camps.

edit: This would be different than Bernie. Biden has won the primary based on the DNC’s rules. edit: typo

Biden cannot be forced out based on the Democratic Party’s rules as written. The Democratic Party changing the rules to dump Biden would be a historic first. It would be a bashed-slammed-bomb-cyclone-fire-tornado-buzz-word news story that would be the only headline for days, maybe weeks.

Donors are already pulling out. Fundraising is down. Obama signaled Biden should drop out. There will undoubtedly be more in the next two weeks. edit: typo

Biden cannot be forced out. It is Biden’s decision. There is no harm in discussing this topic while we’re waiting for the nomination. Biden has until the virtual convention that is scheduled for the start of August to make a decision. Either option, Biden staying in or dropping out of the race has risks. We need to rally around whoever the candidate ends up being.

I think it makes strategic sense for Harris to takeover and pick Whitmer for her VP. My opinion is a moot point, because I have no say in this. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like Biden is thinking about odds and strategy. He’s thinking about his ego.

Not everyone has the luxury of knowing no one who has been brainwashed by the right-wing infosphere. A person not having anyone who has partially or fully adopted fascist ideology in their life is not something to brag about. Nor should that be the goal.

People have families. People have childhood friends they’ve known their whole lives. People have classmates with the same or similar schedule as them. People have adult friends in their social circles. People have co-workers at their jobs. People cannot control the political ideology of the people around them. If someone is informed enough to know exactly who in their life is currently a fascist and can disassociate exactly from those people then good for them. The majority of people will not be able to do that. Nor will doing that solve the problem.

When the response to this

The people in our lives need love, not violence.

is this

The people in my life aren’t Nazis

That’s a purity test. Your argument is to sort ourselves by political ideology.

Easy to be a bit more understanding and accepting of Nazis when you wouldn’t be one of the first people they’d shove in a camp.

I am a Jewish, atheist, social democrat, lesbian, trans woman. I’m white and pre-transition, so I get to benefit from white male privilege for now. But if the fascists could put me in a death camp they would.

If a person is in danger from someone in their life and can dissociate from that person, then by all means dissociate from them.

The way to defeat fascism is to defeat the ideas that make up the political ideology. Isolating ourselves does nothing to forward this goal.

The people in my life aren’t Nazis

I know the right-wing infosphere has brainwashed multiple members of my family. I don’t have a way to check the percentage of people I’ve known in my life that are now brainwashed. I know that my life would have been lesser had I not met every single one of them. I don’t see the people in my life as a purity test, they’re still the same people. What happened to them is a reminder that we must first and foremost defeat fascism, the political ideology.

I think this a good sanity check for us all to remember the kind of person Trump is and what’s at stake. But we can’t stop with clever gotchas, we need to defeat the fascist ideas that the MAGA movement runs on. Trump will be gone one day, but fascist movements will persist until we defeat their ideas. Fascism is a self-destructive ideology that in the long term benefits no one. Everyone needs to know that.

Weirdly this might be one of the few times our criminal justice system is structured correctly. The DOJ bagging presidential candidates to prevent them running against the incumbent would be a huge problem. Of course, that would be the least of our worries if Trump became president again.

Yes, a major goal of our discussions in general is to help people reading the discussion. Ideally that would be pro-democracy conclusions. It’s reasonable to assume we won’t change bad faith actors minds in the short term. Studies have shown people reject new information that contradicts their beliefs. That’s why we are in an information race. The initial opinion people form between now and the election is the opinion they are going to have on election day. But I do think anything is possible in the long term. We just need to get there with our democracy.

Accelerationism can only ensure the US gets to fascism faster. Getting to fascism faster doesn’t destabilize the resulting christo-fascist regime. A fascist government will not just make it harder to make the US and the world a better place. Once the fascists take power they will actively work to make sure it is a worst place. A christo-fascist United States will actively harm everyone living in its sphere of influence and do nothing to put a check on other authoritarian dictatorships’ spheres of influence.

Republicans winning elections sets us back decades. In this current election, our democracy is at stake. Neoliberalism has been pushing us in this direction for decades. We need a socialist political revolution to fix this. We need to keep our democracy long enough to perform a political revolution to change things for the better.

Lemmy is inundated with accelerationist rhetoric. When I was still on Reddit, I saw plenty of conservatives. The most striking thing I’ve noticed from arguing with people on both Reddit and Lemmy is the similarity between accelerationist rhetoric and conservative rhetoric. Both accelerationists and conservatives assert the US has never been a democracy and that the US system cannot be fixed. Both of these assertions are contradicted by US history. This is not to say that these are the same group of people. What these false assertions highlight is that neither group values democracy.

These next months leading to the election are essential, as that as when people are going to start checking in to the current election cycle. Progressives cannot afford to be silent leading up to the election. Democracy, even one as flawed as ours with its undermining of majority rule, is our most effective vehicle for progressive change that we have.

People who do not value our democracy are going to troll, sea lion, and generally act in bad faith. The common internet adage, don’t feed the trolls, is not going to help us. People will act in bad faith in a vacuum. They know they need to spread their message the farthest and the fastest to see their ideology realized in this election. Progressives need to spread our message further and faster than them if our political revolution is to succeed. Progressives do not need to interact with every internet troll they encounter. But progressives must find ways to be vocal which sometimes involves engaging with bad faith actors.

“The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades – a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews – has failed,” Peter Beinart wrote in 2020. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.”

https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine

After reading this guy’s article it would be nice to see his current views given all that’s happened since 2020. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was basing his views on the political reality in Israel at the time. It seems unfortunate that the Guardian felt the need to use an article from four years ago to assert what should be done now with the current political reality in Israel in 2024.

In his article from 2020, he seems to have come to the conclusion that a multi-ethnic/multi-racial/multi-cultural/secular nation state is how Palestinians and Jews would be safe. I would say this is true about any ethnic, racial, cultural, or religious group. Societies that include and protect the rights of all the people that live there is essential for the safety of all the people who live there. This is not in any way a zionist idea.

An inclusive, multi-ethnic state for Palestinians and Jews already living there should have been the goal from the beginning as opposed to an ethno-state for Jews. And colonization by foreign Jews should not have happened. In theory, the modern day Palestine and Israel could be one inclusive state or two separate inclusive states. The reason that we need two states right now, is that Israel is currently controlled by a far-right, fascist government. The current fascist government isn’t going to accept the current nation state of Israel being dissolved into a joint Palestinian-Israeli state.

In the absence of the ability to control Israel’s existence or actions, the UN needs to give Palestine full membership now. To make that happen, the US needs to stop waiting for Israel agree to allow Palestine to exist. The US needs to recognize Palestine’s current borders and stop using its veto to block the UN resolution. Israel is not negotiating in good faith right now and they will not do so as long as the government is controlled by fascists. The alternative is to allow the continued annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. Once annexation of a country is complete it becomes much easier for fascists to corral the out-group into death camps. At which point, only military intervention could help the Palestinians.

If people in Israel are motivated by the idea for a new joint Palestinian-Israeli state then by all means, encourage them to vote out the fascists in favor of candidates that will pursue this new nation state. However, I think the Palestinians deserve a solution now, that does not depend on Israelis wanting to dissolve their current nation state. Especially when Israelis voted in the current fascist government since he wrote his article and zionists still seem fixated on the notion that they need an ethno-state to be safe. Even as Israel is making all Jews less safe by committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think Palestinians gaining full control of their territory now, would not be a detriment to the creation of a joint state later. Palestinians shouldn’t have to wait for Israelis to embrace a joint state in order to enjoy human rights.

Biden 2024

Ok, what do I win?