I keep seeing this talking point on :reddit-logo: whenever people complain about manchin, sinema or whatever other rotating villain of the week people are mad at. It's supposed to be some sort of "gotcha" or defense for these neolib ghouls...
It's glib, and it flies in the face of their other favorite response "we can walk and chew gum at the same time".
Do they honestly think people dont know republicans exist? Does it really need to be said that republicans are awful? They're not even confusing progressives and leftists for right wingers anymore.
It's just so lame, and I needed to vent about it. I need to quit going to :reddit-logo:
It's trying to shift blame, but I also just think a lot of them are grasping at straws. They desperately want to be right, and they need to score a point because they haven't in ages. It's a desperate scramble to save face even though Joe was the "I can work with republicans" guy and now he can't even work with Machin.
They have to be disappointed though, right? I don't get how even your garden variety lib can keep making excuses for dud politicians. I guess it's probably the fact that they tend to not be the type of person who stands to lose anything from bad policy or just plain doing nothing.
I just wonder what it is about human nature where people keep backing proven losers and why they aren't getting radicalized in droves.
They're so disappointed and that's why they dig in even more violently, to try to convince themselves they're not actually mad, you are.
That's my theory anyways. Also yeah you're right, they're all too well off to actually get means tested benefits, so when you criticize Biden it's all "actually you hate poor people" and stupid pizza analogies.
I just don't know how to break the cycle they get you hooked into when you start arguing with them.
Let's take the "helping the poor" thing. So on one hand, you have the means tested garbage that libs support. On the other hand, you have the actual poor people actually telling you what they need and being ignored by the so-called helpers. It should be as simple as saying "if you really want to help the poor, healthcare and workers rights are things that will actually improve their material conditions without making them dependant on the state delivering things like SNAP benefits, that don't cover all the essentials." SNAP is actually a poor example because it's one of the few things the government has actually done that directly helps people, while not being completely means tested to death.
In CA, SNAP is absolutely means tested to death. You get liken $250 a month, base rate. But as soon as you make any money, they subtract huge amounts from your SNAP.
Like if you report $200 in income, they’ll lower your SNAP by at least $100. So you have to be completely indigent (but still pay your rent somehow!) to get the benefits. I guess I should point out that this is as a single person -- families might benefit a lot more from the combined money or qualify in a different way.
Also liberals hate the poor.
They have no skin in the game. Electoral politics is just sports for nerd libs (when in reality it's professional wrestling)
The low hanging fruit take is that the "rotating villain" thing isn't working like usual (more people setting thru it, getting mad at Democrats broadly) and so they're shifting to blame the GOP.
The problem is, they're not exactly wrong, it's just a foregone conclusion. The only problem with that argument is it's never been any other way. Republicans have always been horrible. I just don't get why they demand that we qualify every criticism with "I hate Republicans but..."
They call you a Russian anyway.
Sometimes even the low-hanging fruit is lovely and ripe. In this case, it kind of really is that simple. People are more aware and paying closer attention now because they're more desperate.
The party cannot fail, it can only be failed. Same attitude they had with Hillary.
I just don't get why they keep supporting the same old losers. Like, what are they getting for it all?
I wish they would get a real majority just so they don't have these excuses anymore, and they might have to actually confront the fact that the party they support doesn't care about them at all. Only problem with that is they see all these corporate handouts as wins. Look at how excited they are for these "tax breaks for green initiatives" that are in the build back better bill
Just to hammer home my point Dems will literally flip on their own positions if they think those positions become politically possible
puts on lib hat
Yeah, well Glenn greenwald is a secret Russian and salon is Marxist propaganda so you're owned.
Takes off lib hat
Remember :reddit-logo: from five years ago when chuds would get in the comments section and say stuff like "lol CNN" and libs would say it's an ad hominem to attack the source, therefore you're owned? Now they do it to literally any source that isn't CNN or MSNBC.
Ten fucking years ago. Same ghouls, same positions, same shell game.
I forget exactly where I found that, but I'm holding onto it for when someone gives me the vote-against-a-fascist shtick in 2024
In a sense they're not wrong. But it's not that Democrats good and Republicans bad. It's that we have a undemocratic bourgeois "democracy" that was specifically designed to keep the wealthy in power and put the brakes on any form of mass social energy. Exhibit A, the senate. An institution that by design only allows things to get done that serve the bourgeoisie. It's always been that way. Even people who like the Senate basically defend this notion when they say "we need the senate to stop people from getting crazy things done that you would see if we only had proportional representative government".
So the answer isn't that it's the GOP that's the problem, it's that the system is rotten and trying to effect any meaningful change by voting is a suckers game that just gives legitimacy to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
How would you go about explaining this without getting the Le epic "BoTh SiDeS" response though? It's maddening, but for whatever reason, I keep trying. Some of my online radicalization came from comments sections where people like us argued against a brick wall, and me, the passerby read the comments and picked up some new ways of thinking.
Well on one hand, it's true that both sides do not work for what the people want. On most economic/material issues, the people are to the left of Democratic politicians. So even if we had 60 or more Democrats in the Senate, it's unlikely even they would enact legislation that the people really want. So if both parties act the same...
But even if by some miracle we had a super majority of Democrats, it doesn't matter as the system is so heavily tilted against the working class by design. You can pass all the progressive bills you want but then there's the supreme court to block any and all good things you want to do. Just one example though.
Great write-up! But I'll bet libs would just be like "one side is trying to overturn the sacred electoral process and the other isn't. Checkmate Vlad"
Their main objective is to always remind the untrained eye that Republicans are in fact bad people, specifically worse than Democrats, and that's the main point you should remember so be grateful for the fucking scraps you get and how dare you consider the very public actions of Democrats which directly contravene our stated ethos defining our half of this false dichotomy that we've spent 50 years constructing to eternally FUCK YOU IN THE ASS
:spongebob-party:
same. i keep digging for their cope and seeing this same thing repeated at the top of every comment chain. i can't even take pleasure in their suffering.
That's true. I forget how largely astroturfed Reddit is. It just makes me feel like a conspiracy loon when I say that kind of stuff to myself,even though it's true
yeah I always have to remind myself that. Its the most astroturfed social media site, the television/movies boards are all marketing.
I'm a bit of an accidental Luddite. I use my phone to browse here and occasionally Reddit for news. Other than that, I don't think of myself as extremely online, so a lot of the "culture" eludes me. However, I am waaaay more plugged in than my wife (who works with computers for a living) and she doesn't know stuff like doing (((this))) is a dog whistle for globalism and anti Zionism... for example.
I don't talk about the things like that with her because at the end of the day, it's not worth knowing.
It's hard to break the habit of assuming everyone on the internet is representing themselves genuinely, even if they are saying super misguided things.
((())) isn't globalism and anti zionism
It's a online whistle to show that you think the Jews control everything and probably have Nazi like belifs
