They do matter. Because the fact that nobody took those critiques seriously is what caused people not to vote for her. The fact that nobody took those critiques seriously 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30, even 40 years ago - is how the United States entered the situation that it is now. Half a century of “barely good enough” on the “representatives” of the left and we wonder why America is the way it is.
And ultimately, she lost, because people didn’t vote. And those people clearly stated why. In advance. For years. Yet the Democrats still insisted that everyone do as they’re told.
Think about it, if the line had been drawn 40 years ago, and voters said “No, we won’t vote for someone who is merely not as bad as the other guy. We only will vote for someone we actually WANT to vote for”. Then maybe that election we would have got some shitty right winger due to low dem turnout. But the next election, the Democrats might have run someone who was actually more left leaning. But voters didn’t do that, and instead they get shitty half-left democrats, and this moves the window to the right. One day that window is far enough to the right to make room for Trump. That’s not only the responsibility of the Republicans dragging the window the right, that’s the responsibility of Democrats refusing to ever drag the window back to the left. And that’s a direct result of Democrat voters repeatedly sucking it up and voting for someone they don’t really like.
I truly believe that if Kamala had been elected, the same process would repeat, the window would move further right, and the next time a Republican won it would a Trump 3.0 type figure as a result. So as bad as it is that Trump is president, given that our option was lancing the infected boil now or letting it balloon some more and get even more infected, only to be lanced in a more disastrous way later. This was the decision in the minds of those who did not support Harris - even if you think they had the wrong idea, can you at least respect their reasoning and see how it is not the sort of petty revenge that you mistakenly imagine it to be?
Neoliberalism paved the way for our current situation, yes. But sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term. We’ve taken a lot of losses over the past 55 years and, unfortunately, that led to a lot of people like you saying “fuck it, I’m throwing the grenade. They need to learn the hard way.” Well, sometimes you lob a grenade and it blows up in everyone’s faces. Maybe we’ll miraculously recover from this, but the death toll will already be paid, and that blood is partially on your hands. Because of your lack of strategic foresight.
I respect that you acknowledge my way of thinking rather than caricaturizing it. Thank you. I am still of the opinion that had the grenade not been thrown now, it would lead to situation becoming even worse next time around. This is why I say Harris would only have delayed the inevitable. It is my opinion that the death toll would have been higher and more dramatic if the issue was allowed to fester for another election cycle. I agree that sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term - it’s just that to me, the current situation is that loss, and it enables us to keep fighting in the form of people like Mamdani being elected. I strongly believe that if Kamala had won, Mamdani would not have. Mamdani may actually move the window, we’ll see. That’s what we need.
Blood is partially on my hands indeed, but it is also on the hands of all the neoliberal voters of the last few decades by the same reasoning. If the grenade had been thrown 30 years ago, it also would have blown up, albeit less spectacularly, and that lesser blood would be on the hands of those who refused to vote out of principle that year. If the grenade had been thrown 25 years ago, it would have blown up, slightly more. 20 years ago, even more. Etc etc. This is why I believe that if we sucked it up with Kamala this time around, then we would just find ourselves with the same gambit in the future but with even higher stakes. Every election, people have said “sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term” and “THIS is the ONE election that you really can’t afford to throw the grenade! That last one maybe, sure. But that’s in the past now anyways. THIS is the one you have to suck it up and vote for!” And indeed it never gets better. Blood is on the voters hands either way, the only difference is if we see the toll paid immediately (making it easy to blame them) or see it delayed by decades (making it hard to connect the dots). From my perspective, the majority of blood spilled today is precisely due to the lack of strategic foresight of compromise-voters of decades past, exhibiting exactly the same mentality that called for voting for Kamala this time around. In a nutshell, I believe my mentality spills blood today, but the compromise-voting spills more blood tomorrow. I consider my ability to properly take into account a greater future cost over a present cost exactly an example of strategic thinking. So it’s funny that we have an identical qualm with each other - it comes from simply a different prediction of the future.
I’m sure that this still leaves us in disagreement, but it is at least a smaller disagreement, not about strategy, intention, or even mentality - we merely have different judgements of the most likely future, which I think is a much more negligible disagreement - since predicting the future accurately is known to be difficult.
What caused people not to vote for her was a terminal lack of critical thinking.
This was not a confusing election. It was about as straight forward as it gets. These motherfuckers failed an open book test. They’re idiots. They failed because they were uninformed and uninformed people make stupid decisions.
So instead everyone got genocide x2, shortly maybe will be x3 of oil companies pull a Venezuelan banana republic: electric boogaloo, and a significantly worse economy with not only no reforms, but significant change in the opposite direction, siphoning orders of magnitude more money away from the working class than the status quo.
Plus you get the dissolution of unions and stripping workers of any power they have.
Plus you get out-in-the-open media centralization to become out and out propaganda machines bought and paid for by corruption and dissolution of the last remnents of independent media.
Plus you get kidnapping citizens in the streets by faceless, nameless, badgeless enforcers.
Plus you get government-sponsored lynchings
Plus you get, nationwide, women getting sick, hurt, and dying because doctors aren’t allowed to treat them anymore
Plus you get multiple very corrupt white collar criminals set completely free with no consequences
Plus you get the near-total neutering of all health and disease research and public health policies
Plus you get the complete decimation of US aid to countries in need that was not through on an imperialist military
Plus you get people dying of hunger and homeless people and immigrants being arrested and used for slave labor.
Plus you get people who aren’t fascists labelled as terrorist groups, arrested, and threatened
Plus you get persecution of transgender people
Plus you get pedophile government oligarchs literally out in the open human trafficking instead of behind closed doors.
Great trade off there. You guys really sent the correct message and voted to make the world a better place.
I need you to really reckon with the fact that Dems were doing and supporting all these things too.
The genocide started under and was defended by the Dems.
Venezuela has been a bipartisan target for multiple decades at this point.
The siphoning of money away from the working class is also bipartisan. Both parties are captured by corporate interests with little interest in pushing back except for a small contingent of people in power on the left.
Dems have been fighting unions just as hard as Republicans. Remember when Biden used his power to break the Railway worker strike?
Media has been consolidating under both parties… The consolidation we are seeing today is largely driven by the need to have media cover for Israel which is bipartisan in its support.
ICE got a massive budget increase under Biden. He deported a fuck load of people too in largely just as violent ways, though ofc Trump expanded ICE to unprecedented levels the fact that it already has so much funding speaks to deportation as a bipartisan strat. Remember Obungler deported more people in his first term than Trump did. Dems love deporting immigrants.
Abortion literally was lost under Dem leadership when they had power to push to codify it as law.
White collar criminals have been getting away with everything regardless of who is in charge. Who do you think is running the corporations bribing our electeds?
US aid abroad there were some good things but often it was used as a cudgel for resource extraction and political suppression. There will be short term suffering which makes me mad but long term the boot of American empire being removed is objectively a good thing for the rest of the world. China is offering more favorable outcomes and all we’d need to do to compete is to stop being evil with our deals.
People have been living in poverty conditions all around the country for decades under both parties and neither has any appetite for the necessary economic and infrastructure reforms to fix it. The 13th amendment explicitly allows slave labor for prisoners so this is just how our country works tbh. Shipping to El Salvador is a new one but we are not averse to slave labor in the US as you seem to suggest
Dems have been calling Antifa and other anticapitalist groups terrorists and all that forever. Its just more red scare propaganda which is again just America being us.
Dems also do not care about trans people. Kamala Harris literally ran on “following the law” in regards to them in a year when historic levels of anti trans laws were being passed.
Government was always full of pedos and was geared toward oligarchs. Look at all the people on the Epstein list as associates.
They do matter. Because the fact that nobody took those critiques seriously is what caused people not to vote for her. The fact that nobody took those critiques seriously 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30, even 40 years ago - is how the United States entered the situation that it is now. Half a century of “barely good enough” on the “representatives” of the left and we wonder why America is the way it is.
And ultimately, she lost, because people didn’t vote. And those people clearly stated why. In advance. For years. Yet the Democrats still insisted that everyone do as they’re told.
Think about it, if the line had been drawn 40 years ago, and voters said “No, we won’t vote for someone who is merely not as bad as the other guy. We only will vote for someone we actually WANT to vote for”. Then maybe that election we would have got some shitty right winger due to low dem turnout. But the next election, the Democrats might have run someone who was actually more left leaning. But voters didn’t do that, and instead they get shitty half-left democrats, and this moves the window to the right. One day that window is far enough to the right to make room for Trump. That’s not only the responsibility of the Republicans dragging the window the right, that’s the responsibility of Democrats refusing to ever drag the window back to the left. And that’s a direct result of Democrat voters repeatedly sucking it up and voting for someone they don’t really like.
I truly believe that if Kamala had been elected, the same process would repeat, the window would move further right, and the next time a Republican won it would a Trump 3.0 type figure as a result. So as bad as it is that Trump is president, given that our option was lancing the infected boil now or letting it balloon some more and get even more infected, only to be lanced in a more disastrous way later. This was the decision in the minds of those who did not support Harris - even if you think they had the wrong idea, can you at least respect their reasoning and see how it is not the sort of petty revenge that you mistakenly imagine it to be?
Neoliberalism paved the way for our current situation, yes. But sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term. We’ve taken a lot of losses over the past 55 years and, unfortunately, that led to a lot of people like you saying “fuck it, I’m throwing the grenade. They need to learn the hard way.” Well, sometimes you lob a grenade and it blows up in everyone’s faces. Maybe we’ll miraculously recover from this, but the death toll will already be paid, and that blood is partially on your hands. Because of your lack of strategic foresight.
I respect that you acknowledge my way of thinking rather than caricaturizing it. Thank you. I am still of the opinion that had the grenade not been thrown now, it would lead to situation becoming even worse next time around. This is why I say Harris would only have delayed the inevitable. It is my opinion that the death toll would have been higher and more dramatic if the issue was allowed to fester for another election cycle. I agree that sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term - it’s just that to me, the current situation is that loss, and it enables us to keep fighting in the form of people like Mamdani being elected. I strongly believe that if Kamala had won, Mamdani would not have. Mamdani may actually move the window, we’ll see. That’s what we need.
Blood is partially on my hands indeed, but it is also on the hands of all the neoliberal voters of the last few decades by the same reasoning. If the grenade had been thrown 30 years ago, it also would have blown up, albeit less spectacularly, and that lesser blood would be on the hands of those who refused to vote out of principle that year. If the grenade had been thrown 25 years ago, it would have blown up, slightly more. 20 years ago, even more. Etc etc. This is why I believe that if we sucked it up with Kamala this time around, then we would just find ourselves with the same gambit in the future but with even higher stakes. Every election, people have said “sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term” and “THIS is the ONE election that you really can’t afford to throw the grenade! That last one maybe, sure. But that’s in the past now anyways. THIS is the one you have to suck it up and vote for!” And indeed it never gets better. Blood is on the voters hands either way, the only difference is if we see the toll paid immediately (making it easy to blame them) or see it delayed by decades (making it hard to connect the dots). From my perspective, the majority of blood spilled today is precisely due to the lack of strategic foresight of compromise-voters of decades past, exhibiting exactly the same mentality that called for voting for Kamala this time around. In a nutshell, I believe my mentality spills blood today, but the compromise-voting spills more blood tomorrow. I consider my ability to properly take into account a greater future cost over a present cost exactly an example of strategic thinking. So it’s funny that we have an identical qualm with each other - it comes from simply a different prediction of the future.
I’m sure that this still leaves us in disagreement, but it is at least a smaller disagreement, not about strategy, intention, or even mentality - we merely have different judgements of the most likely future, which I think is a much more negligible disagreement - since predicting the future accurately is known to be difficult.
What caused people not to vote for her was a terminal lack of critical thinking.
This was not a confusing election. It was about as straight forward as it gets. These motherfuckers failed an open book test. They’re idiots. They failed because they were uninformed and uninformed people make stupid decisions.
No factually the reason was because she wanted genocide and offered no meaningful economic reforms that are desperately needed. Try again.
So instead everyone got genocide x2, shortly maybe will be x3 of oil companies pull a Venezuelan banana republic: electric boogaloo, and a significantly worse economy with not only no reforms, but significant change in the opposite direction, siphoning orders of magnitude more money away from the working class than the status quo.
Plus you get the dissolution of unions and stripping workers of any power they have.
Plus you get out-in-the-open media centralization to become out and out propaganda machines bought and paid for by corruption and dissolution of the last remnents of independent media.
Plus you get kidnapping citizens in the streets by faceless, nameless, badgeless enforcers.
Plus you get government-sponsored lynchings
Plus you get, nationwide, women getting sick, hurt, and dying because doctors aren’t allowed to treat them anymore
Plus you get multiple very corrupt white collar criminals set completely free with no consequences
Plus you get the near-total neutering of all health and disease research and public health policies
Plus you get the complete decimation of US aid to countries in need that was not through on an imperialist military
Plus you get people dying of hunger and homeless people and immigrants being arrested and used for slave labor.
Plus you get people who aren’t fascists labelled as terrorist groups, arrested, and threatened
Plus you get persecution of transgender people
Plus you get pedophile government oligarchs literally out in the open human trafficking instead of behind closed doors.
Great trade off there. You guys really sent the correct message and voted to make the world a better place.
I need you to really reckon with the fact that Dems were doing and supporting all these things too.
The genocide started under and was defended by the Dems.
Venezuela has been a bipartisan target for multiple decades at this point.
The siphoning of money away from the working class is also bipartisan. Both parties are captured by corporate interests with little interest in pushing back except for a small contingent of people in power on the left.
Dems have been fighting unions just as hard as Republicans. Remember when Biden used his power to break the Railway worker strike?
Media has been consolidating under both parties… The consolidation we are seeing today is largely driven by the need to have media cover for Israel which is bipartisan in its support.
ICE got a massive budget increase under Biden. He deported a fuck load of people too in largely just as violent ways, though ofc Trump expanded ICE to unprecedented levels the fact that it already has so much funding speaks to deportation as a bipartisan strat. Remember Obungler deported more people in his first term than Trump did. Dems love deporting immigrants.
Abortion literally was lost under Dem leadership when they had power to push to codify it as law.
White collar criminals have been getting away with everything regardless of who is in charge. Who do you think is running the corporations bribing our electeds?
US aid abroad there were some good things but often it was used as a cudgel for resource extraction and political suppression. There will be short term suffering which makes me mad but long term the boot of American empire being removed is objectively a good thing for the rest of the world. China is offering more favorable outcomes and all we’d need to do to compete is to stop being evil with our deals.
People have been living in poverty conditions all around the country for decades under both parties and neither has any appetite for the necessary economic and infrastructure reforms to fix it. The 13th amendment explicitly allows slave labor for prisoners so this is just how our country works tbh. Shipping to El Salvador is a new one but we are not averse to slave labor in the US as you seem to suggest
Dems have been calling Antifa and other anticapitalist groups terrorists and all that forever. Its just more red scare propaganda which is again just America being us.
Dems also do not care about trans people. Kamala Harris literally ran on “following the law” in regards to them in a year when historic levels of anti trans laws were being passed.
Government was always full of pedos and was geared toward oligarchs. Look at all the people on the Epstein list as associates.
I just want you to know that all the evidence says you are correct. This thread is just liberals coping. Its pathetic.