starelfsc2 comments on If So Many Americans Care About Climate, Why Don’t They Vote Like It? 11.2 million. That’s the number of Americans who rank climate as a their top priority but didn’t vote in the 2024 US elections

[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works -1 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Well if you're not one of the people dead from ice, healthcare cuts, environmental impacts from all the solar/wind cuts, dead from cancer from the research we stopped, dead from food illness, dead in the war in Iran, dead in the invasion of ukraine, dead from measles, dead from USAID being gutted, or completely destitute from the cost of living, then yeah here's not much "harm reduction" to be had really.

Maybe this argument works if Trump hadn't completely ruined the world and directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and probably much more when diseases start spreading because of government sponsored vaccine denial and USAID cuts.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah, I mean, you basically get it, you just think Trump is somehow special. Biden authored the Crime Bill, Clinton put it into law, they ruined millions of lives, mostly of black Americans. Obama/Biden and HRC created an absolutely massive crisis in Libya by funding, arming, training, and coordinating a terroristic "resistance" and then used NATO to bomb the most prosperous country in Africa into devastation where they now openly sell human slaves. The Ukraine situation requires you to imagine history started a few years ago - Bill Clinton openly and public wanted to include Russia in NATO, even after Putin took office. Hell, Clinton was instrumental in legitimizing Putin. The invasion of Ukraine is not something Trump caused and it's not something he can end. If you have ever studied proxy conflicts like this one, the way you end the bloodshed is by surrendering and signing a treaty. The way you kill more people is by funneling more guns and mercenaries into the proxy. We've known this for decades. The US military literally justified some of its proxy wars with Youth Bulge Theory, stating that when there's too many MAMs (military-aged males) that they could pose a threat to stability so it's important to get ahead of youth bulges, create the conflicts before they become something we can't control, and let the conflict kill off the youth bulge. The US is fucking sick.

As for everything else you listed, there's an equally deadly Democrat equivalent. The embargo on Cuba means that the Cuban vaccine that prevents lung cancer is completely unavailable in the US. Democrats have deported/repatriated more people than Republicans have over the last 25 years. And the reason those immigrants are coming to us in the first place is because of bi-partisan destruction of South American and African countries.

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[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

I can't respond to every conspiracy but, black communities supported the crime bill as well, when it turned out it was harming black communities it should have been repealed, but Biden doesn't have the benefit of hindsight to know not to support the bill. It's also much harder to repeal a bad bill than to create it.

I guess you can conveniently leave out why we and nato did all that, that's pretty good faith

He was condemned by many as a dictator whose authoritarian administration systematically violated human rights and financed terrorism in the region and abroad

From Wikipedia
US foreign policy has always been atrocious, that has nothing to do with whether a party is fascist or not. If you want to say both parties have terrible foreign policy I would agree, but the Republicans canceling USAID, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and supporting Russia is clearly MUCH worse than what dems were doing.

Yes I agree legitimizing putin was a mistake, but you're again using hindsight glasses, we didn't realize he would be a warmonger dictator and thought we could open the door to good relations.

Weird how Russia still has not taken over Ukraine in what, 3 years? even without us aiding Ukraine. Imagine what it would look like if ukraine had US military tech at their disposal. I wonder if you'd have the same opinion that China should just surrender to the US if we invaded them unprovoked? They have no chance of winning so they should just give up, and anyone offering China aid is just causing needless death. The rest is a conspiracy theory so I can't debunk it other than pointing to the actual reasons we went to war (propaganda, hating brown people, and a few times actual terrorism)

Oh wow true it would be really bad if the US stopped vaccines and also invaded a country and took their leader, like with government sponsored vaccine denial, the head of the DHS being a vaccine denialist, USAID being canceled, and the Venezuelan president being taken. Every example you have from the dems Republicans have done 10 fold, and at least with the dem policy there is a reason behind it, even if the result is disastrous. The Republican version is just "time to cut all research and foreign aid and vaccines and attack Mexicans because fox news told me to." It's like a vote between actual Hitler and George Bush, Bush sucks but this is not even a choice. The gutting of USAID alone will cause more deaths and suffering than anything the dems have done in the past 40 years.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

US foreign policy has always been atrocious, that has nothing to do with whether a party is fascist or not.

This is essentially what it boils down to. You think that the citizens of the USA going through the oppression of domestic policy isn't fascism, but making it worse is fascism, but whatever the US does to other people can't ever qualify as fascism.

Essentially, you believe fascism is aesthetics. Why did Nazism emerge? To be evil domestically? No. The domestic policy of the Nazis was a specific strategy to create a strong nationalism that would motivate the people of Germany to energize the Nazi's foreign policy. Demonizing undesirables wasn't the goal, it was the means to the goal. The goal was to subjugate the Slavs under an American-style apartheid occupation where the domestic population was sufficiently bonded through nationalism and xenophobia that they would energize the policies of the Third Reich to dominate others.

America is and always has been a fascist state. If you think Trump is bad you should study Jefferson. The entire American project is a genocidal Christian nationalist apartheid occupation of land they took by force. In so far as the Democrats continue mass murdering and genocidal policies, they are administering a fascist state. In so far as Republicans are purging the military of people who aren't sufficiently willing to commit violence for the shared foreign policy aims of the elite, they are administering a fascist state. Obama is and was a fascist, and just like every politician before him, the good things he gave the people were a concession from the elite to the working class in exchange for their passivity and their willingness to energize the fascist state that is the USA.

I guess you can conveniently leave out why we and nato did all that, that's pretty good faith

I need you to understand that this [the destruction of Libya] was illegal under international law and entirely illegitimate. There is no doctrine, except imperialism and fascism, where it is acceptable to destroy an entire country because a leader was behaving in a way domestically that we find morally objectionable. We don't even need to get into the constant manufacturing of consent and how the assessment of Gaddafi's actions may have been the result of propaganda. Even if we accept literally everything as true, it's still a fascistic move to do what the US did. It's literally unjustifiable. The fact that a liberal like you is willing to defend these actions is a sign of just how powerful the fascist propaganda is.

And it's not like this wasn't the analysis even before Obama. Clinton's decision to use NATO to attack Yugoslavia was the world's first ever "war for humanitarian intervention". It was never acceptable to do that, and when Clinton did it there was a huge contingent of us that screamed that this was expanding the remit of the fascist USA to launch preemptive wars. And then what happened? Bush 2 expanded the remit even further and we screamed that this was bad. And what were we told? That this was a "Republican" problem and that we just need to vote D. And we didn't believe it then either. So Obama gets elected and what happens? He goes even further in expanding the remit of the mass murder machine of the fascist empire of the USA.

It's a non-stop death march. It's been a non-stop death march since before the founding of the USA. It's the same unending genocidal death march of European empire. It will never stop until we stop it. And we don't stop it by voting in the controlled opposition that continuously expands the fascist state and enlists the citizens in energizing its fascist project.

Voting will not fix this

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[–] darthelmet@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

I'd ask you to consider how we got here. Trump didn't just fall from the sky and started wrecking things on his own.

I could go into the whole history of the last quarter century and beyond, but to keep things simple, let's go with a personal example:

I live in an area I would describe as blue MAGA. They regularly vote (corporate) Dem at the federal level, although local politics is very Rep dominated. My rep is a multiple term incumbent Democrat who we have tried and failed to primary multiple times, including one election where I was directly involved in the progressive opposition campaign.

As far as issues that enable fascism goes, they:

Voted for more ICE funding and increased border security.
Voted for increases to military spending.
Voted to support Israel's genocide.
Participates in the war mongering around countries like Iran. To the extent that they had any issue with Trump's recent war, it was a matter of poor execution rather than any principled stance against US imperialism. This matters beyond some lefty purity test. Stances like these and the policies they lead to help manufacture consent for these wars.
Failed to press for congress to act on it's constitutional responsibility to stop presidents from illegally starting wars.
Voted on a Republican resolution to condemn the horrors of socialism at a time when right wing fascism is the dominant, pressing crisis in our country.

I could go on, but you get the gist. They're exactly the kind of Democrat we're talking about who enables the fascists to do what they do.

So... setting aside the fact that he's probably in a safe seat anyway, what should I do come election day? Is voting for this person a vote against Trump and fascism? Is this harm reduction? Can I expect them to do ANYTHING to reign in this administration when they have not even tried to do so before? IF they're not going to, what exactly is the benefit? And there are costs beyond what they will do in office. Incumbency comes with a pretty big electoral advantage. Continuing to support them makes it harder to unseat them later.

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