OBJECTION!

Speaking of self-inserts, remember when she wrote that detective story with long segments that are just people on Twitter accusing the main character of transphobia?

Her brain’s just fully melted at this point.

Slippery slope arguments aren’t inherently fallicious.

I guess it depends on how important you view the economic sphere. To me, ending the post-New Deal era economic consensus and ushering in a new era where the power of organized labor was completely crushed with bipartisan support is the defining aspect of his presidency. He marks the beginning of the “culture war” era, when the people would no longer have any real say over how the economy was run so all that’s left is fighting over social issues. It seems to me that it’s more like he did a few good things here and there but for the most part he was awful, the death knell for any hope of progressive economic policy for generations.

Carter was more progressive than a typical liberal? He’s the one who abandoned unions and the working class in favor of neoliberalism.

It’s Brit/Briton and German, fyi.

[stand up comedian voice] Boy, these Republicans are really something, huh? You know, a lot of people just don’t understand why the support the things they do, but the thing you gotta understand, whether you agree with them or not, they’re a very principled group of people. You know, you might apply different approaches to different issues, but the Republicans, they apply the same principle whether we’re talking about women’s rights, or about global trade relations. Yeah. [Beat] Oh you all don’t know what I’m talking about, lemme explain what the principle is:

FUCK YOU I HATE YOUR FUCKING GUTS I HOPE YOU DIE also, please let me control your eggs.

If you guys would drop the AES support then left unity might stand a chance.

Ah, I see. So in order to achieve “left unity” all we have to do is:

1. Abandon support for every socialist project that was even moderately successful

2. Refuse to learn from their successes and failures because we have to write them off entirely as if they weren’t genuine movements

3. Allow blatant propaganda and falsehoods to be spread about them unchallenged, for fear of being associated with them.

Of course, if we did that, especially the last one, we’d be associated with them anyway - they called Obama a communist, they’ll apply the label to anyone. If every attempt at building socialism was an unmitigated failure that just made everything worse and resulted in things just as bad as the Nazis, then why the hell should anyone want to be a socialist? Why should we even be socialists?

And don’t try to pretend that it’s only uncritical support you’re talking about. If you have a good word to say about any of them, if you challenge accusations and call them out when they lack evidence, then you’ll be labelled a “tankie.” Y’all are obsessed with punching left and demonstrating your anticommunist credentials, and have been for the last 80 years, “If we just toss all the Reds out of the AFL/CIO, then people will see we’re not like them and they’ll be on our side, that we’re ‘one of the good ones,’” and then guess what, they call you Reds anyway, and when they come for you you’ll have alienated people who would’ve actually fought back. This is how we got to the point where even “liberal” became a dirty word, of being “too far left.”

Yeah, thanks but no thanks on that one. I’m going to continue critically supporting AES states and examining their success and failures and refuting misinformation about them - focusing on what’s actually true, rather than on trying to “prove” that I’m sufficiently anticommunist to pass some red scare purity test.

A vote for Democrats is a vote for more time to prepare a functional progressive movement.

Right, “buying time.” While sacrificing the opportunity to push for progressivism in the present. That’s just called procrastination, and we don’t have time for it. Actually, procrastination generally involves actually doing the task later on, whereas you’ve admitted (even if you baselessly contest the specific phrasing) that you’ll continue supporting the democratic party unconditionally and indefinitely - until this progressive alternative magically materializes out of thin air, without anybody doing anything to actually bring it about! Absolutely ridiculous, absurd on it’s face.

The only way to effectively build such a movement is to publicly challenge the democratic party and lay out demands and to be genuinely willing to break from it if it refuses those demands. And if any demand is reasonable to make, “don’t do genocide” indisputably is.

while building the material capability to apply significant political pressure.

Uh huh. Sure. And you got a timetable on that? Can we start applying political pressure in 4 years? 8 years? 20 years? Or is it “whenever it’s ready,” which will of course be never, since previous election results inform our readiness and refusing to deviate from the democratic party means they will never reach the point of being ready? You don’t have to answer that, I already know. There will never be a “more convenient time.”

Categorically false. Arithmetically, psychologically, just plain incorrect. Maybe if you’re a gambling addict, but in the general population we generally find losses are felt much more strongly than equivalent gains.You’re just making up poorly constructed psychological experiments, claiming what those hypothetical results would be, and extrapolating that to national politics.

You haven’t supported any of your divisive nonsense with anything more than your say-so.

You’re trying as hard as you possibly can to not understand the effect that the experiment demonstrates. I don’t need to “prove” any of this because it’s extremely obvious and self-evident. If you demonstrate that you are potentially willing to walk away from a mutually beneficial agreement, you are in a better negotiating position. If you lay out from the start that you’ll agree to anything as long as it’s better than nothing, you are putting yourself in a weak negotiating position.

The reason I laid out the experiment is not to prove that approach is to correct, but to demonstrate and explain a very simple and basic concept that you either don’t grasp or are pretending not to grasp. You can invent some hypothetical and pretend negotiating principles wouldn’t apply there, but that’s entirely your say-so.

Again, either you are an absolutely terrible negotiator, or you just don’t really care about negotiating because you’re content with what the party offers.

Exactly. Fascism was an acceptable bargaining chip. That’s the difference between you tankies and actual leftists: we care about people, and try to avoid subjecting our fellow people to fascism as a gambit.

And by refusing to take that risk, you turn fascism from a risk into an inevitability. If you were actually a leftist like you say, you would understand the material conditions that gave rise to Trump and the fact that the democratic party is never going to address those conditions (at least without significant, genuine pressure). That is one of the primary reasons why we need to pressure the democratic party in the first place and why they are fundamentally unacceptable. It just guarantees fascism at a slightly slower pace.

The only ones advocating a strategy that has any possibility of averting fascism are us “tankies.” Also, I find it hilarious that you’re attempting to take the moral high ground, as if you’re the ones who “actually care about people” when you happily accept the sacrifice of countless Palestinians right now, rather than taking an approach that could potentially save them. You have already written them off as an acceptable sacrifice on the alter on which you worship the democratic party.

Your liberalism is showing again by the fact that you think the Dems winning is a perfectly acceptable outcome that doesn’t involve sacrificing anyone and doesn’t just let the crises we’re facing fester and get worse. As a “leftist,” you ought to understand how fucked we are regardless of who’s in charge at the moment, and that the capitalists aren’t going to come down from on high to save us.

Yes. Game theory experiments have a different set of conditions and consequences than elections. They refuse because that doesn’t cost them anything. They leave the exchange neutral.

This is a completely arbitrary distinction. Not getting a dollar you could’ve gotten is no different from losing a dollar you could’ve avoided losing, change the experiment to where they lose $50 by walking away as opposed to losing $49 by accepting a one-sided agreement and you’ll get the same results.

This is just nitpicking. You’re trying desperately to find any reason to avoid accepting the obvious truth. The game is only one example, in any negotiation, the same principle applies.

Yes, and by rejecting the $99-1 offer in favor of the $100-0 offer, you have expressed your belief that the $0 was better than $1. By rejecting the liberal candidate, you admit that the fascist is preferable.

Completely missing the point, as always.

Of course $1 is preferable to $0. That’s why I assigned them those values. However, being “preferable” is not the same thing as “being worth sacrificing every ounce of bargaining power over.” I don’t want the Republicans to win, but if disciplining the Democratic party or building an alternative to it causes that outcome, it is an acceptable risk.

Likewise, in the experiment I presented, obviously anyone would prefer $1 over nothing, but people still reject $1 offers. It’s not really a difficult concept to grasp. You don’t show up to a car lot saying, “I NEED this car, no matter what, I must have it today!” Hell, even if it’s true at the very least you should try to bluff and feign that you might walk away (though do that repeatedly and they’ll catch on).

People like you are either the worst negotiators on the entire planet, or, you don’t actually have as much of a problem with the Democrats as you claim, and that’s why you lay down your hand before the betting’s even started.

I would love to get the chance to play that $100 game with one of you to find out which it is - I would absolutely offer you only $1, and if you refuse, I would know that you understand how stupid lesser-evilism is which would prove that you’re fine with everything the democratic party stands for, and if you take it, then I would know that you genuinely are that bad at game theory.

I truly don’t think any other culture on earth has ever produced so many people this bad at negotiating. We need to bring back haggling or something for you to learn.

Ah yes, the very serious and rational leftist belief that fascists are better than liberals

Literally never said anything remotely like this and you know it. In fact I said the exact opposite, in my analogy, liberals offer us $1 while fascists offer us $0. Proving my point again that you reject everything we actually say in favor of the shit you make up about us whole cloth.

Ftfy

“No U,” truly the height of liberal discourse.

This is an international forum, not an American one.

The reason “liberal” is synonymous with “leftist” in the US is that the left has retreated so ridiculously far. Left anticommunism has been a dismal failure that’s played into the right’s hands. People thought that if they just demonstrated their anticommunist credentials that people would stop accusing them of being “reds” or “pinkos,” but it absolutely has not worked and only emboldened the right to the point that even “liberal” became an accusation, a dirty word, while at the same time hurting and dividing the left.

I don’t accept that, and neither do people outside of the US. A liberal is a supporter of capitalism, liberals are, by definition, right wing.

Republicans winning is the “no one gets anything” outcome of a breakdown of negotiations between the democratic party and their voters. So the example holds.

I like how you completely ignored all my actual examples and focused on the one thing I said that wasn’t hard evidence, and just baselessly asserted the nonsense that “Republicans fall in line” without a single shred of evidence to back it up. It is unfalsifiable orthodoxy, assumed with no regard for how reality actually works, just like the unfalsifiable orthodoxy of lesser-evilism. Nothing you say is ever actually backed up by the facts, you’re just regurgitating the “conventional wisdom” that the ruling class told you to get you to fall in line and not cause any trouble by doing things that are actually effective.

Again, completely useless pawn seeped in bourgeois ideology, a pure liberal through and through, completely and totally cooked. Your utter uselessness and fecklessness is the reason we’re unable to change the conditions that are giving rise to fascism.

Assuming you aren’t a deliberate bad actor

Oh hey, proving my original point.

Yes, and it is deeply flawed logic because it rests on an analogy which is fundamentally unrelated to electoral strategy. There is no “refuse and both parties get nothing” mechanism in elections. You have a choice between a 99-1 split and a 100-0 split, and rejecting the 99-1 split guarantees you the 100-0.

Lmao! That’s literally exactly how my example works. You chose between $1 and $0.

Are you high? They absolutely constantly do exactly that which is exactly why they win.

Really? The libertarian party generally gets triple the votes of the greens, the biggest third party candidate in history, Ross Perot, primarily siphoned votes from the right, Trump in 2016, despite being the last candidate the establishment wanted, got the nomination after making a credible threat to run third party, and if you spend any time around actual Republicans, you’ll hear them complaining about “RINOs” who don’t meet their standards, and nobody goes around in Republican circles being like, “Yeah this guy doesn’t support our views on guns or abortion, but you have to vote for him or the democrats will win!” That whiny nerd shit would get you bullied.

They absolutely, constantly use red lines and purity tests, and they’ve red lined and purity tested all the way to overturning Roe V Wade. That would never have happened if they were constantly compromising.

I can’t even count the number of people I know personally who hated Trump, but voted for him anyway because they viewed the Democrats as the greater evil.

The “moderates” might fall in line, sure. The problem is that the left is full of those kinds of “moderates,” while on the right they’re only a fraction of the base. They “fell in line” behind what the radicals of their party pushed for, just like how liberals like you would fall in line if we ever got a significantly strong radical left to push for left wing candidates. That is very different from the radicals falling in line behind the moderates.

Republicans don’t fool around with red lines, they dutifully act in lockstep to secure wins

This is completely delusional and reflects your own “terminally online isolation.” There are far more Republicans who won’t fall in line behind “RINOs” than the equivalent on the left - and there are vastly fewer people on the right who would waggle their finger at anyone making demands of the Republican party and insist that anyone who doesn’t immediately fall in line unconditionally is “just trying to make the right lose,” that anyone who sticks to their guns on abortion or, uh, guns, “isn’t a real right-winger.”

The left has been shouting about red lines for decades,

No it fucking hasn’t! When? Who? The left always falls in line. Every time. It’s just that every time anyone anywhere makes even the smallest demand, everyone loses their mind over it because liberals (like you) are so preoccupied about how everyone always needs to fall in line unconditionally forever. Meanwhile, the right does that shit all the time and nobody considers it anywhere near as big of a deal because it’s just accepted.

Red line makes zero strategic sense, it’s childish and simple minded.

I explain the logic here. But like most things that are true, there are many different ways to demonstrate it’s true, so here’s another:

Notice how the Republicans don’t do that shit and keep winning? How decades of unconditional “lesser evilism” has resulted in more and more rightward shift, until we’ve arrived at the point where doing literally any good thing is “woke?”

Democratic voters are so fucking stupid in terms of strategy. It’s the only thing Republicans have figured out. It turns out, pushing for the things you actually want and throwing a fit whenever you don’t get your way makes them more likely to happen. Somehow, the libs have convinced themselves that the way to get what they want is to support things they don’t want and then have the people who don’t listen to them compromise away any semblance of progressivism in the name of cooperating with people who hate them. And the repeated, obvious failure of this strategy does absolutely nothing to persuade them, because they believe so strongly that it’s just an inherent absolute truth to them. No amount of failure, no amount of time, no matter how bad it gets, they just fundamentally refuse to learn any lesson - even when it reaches the point of supporting literal genocide!

The Republican party falls in line behind their voters because they know that they’re “unreasonable,” that if they get pissed off and don’t get their way, they’ll vote third party. But the left has virtually no power over the democratic party, because they’re all so fucking “reasonable” that they know that at the end of the day, they’ll just fall in line. It’s so idiotic it’s difficult to understand how anyone could genuinely think this unconditional, indefinite support of a shit party that isn’t in line with what we want is somehow an effective strategy - let alone such and effective strategy that nobody reasonable could ever question it and that anyone who does is “just trying to make the left lose.”

You are fully cooked, way too deep into the ruling class’s ideology to be reasoned with.

Correct. The fact that you can identify one fascist does not validate all your label assignments. Your conclusions are not valid.

As I said repeatedly, not the point.

The system is the way it is by design. They want to force us into a position where we have to chose the lesser evil. The democrats have even funded far-right republican candidates in order to put voters into a position where they have no choice but to vote for them to stop them - the same “pied piper” strategy that Clinton used with Trump.

Ranked choice voting is kind of a catch-22. Neither major party supports it, so unless a third party candidate wins, then we can’t get it (at least on a large scale) - but the fact that we don’t have it makes it much more difficult for third party candidates to win. And even if we got it, there’s still things like gerrymandering, the electoral college, and Citizen’s United, which essentially allows unlimited spending on campaigns, that make our elections undemocratic.

That’s why I consider simply accepting the choices we’re presented with an unacceptable, losing proposition. There are certain demands that must be met, for the sake of the survival of the planet, the defeat of the far-right, and the end of the ongoing genocide. The framework we’re presented with and told is the only way, tells us that these changes are impossible. It’s an unstoppable force against an immovable object, except, the unstoppable force is actually unstoppable, because it is governed by the laws of nature, while the “immovable object” is just a system of arbitrary rules made up by human beings.

Such systems have given way in the past. If they didn’t we would still be living under monarchy. In the times of kings, we did not even have the incredibly flawed form of “democracy” we have now to exert influence over what happens, and yet, the people exerted the necessary influence to achieve change. In the same way, when our so-called “democratic” systems cannot address the many different crises we are facing, we must look to more fundamental ways of exerting force through collective action.

There is no one “magic bullet” solution, but if we can identify the things that absolutely must be done then we can start looking through the full toolbox for what means might be used to achieve them. However, if we set out goals and priorities based on what the system tells us is possible, then we are putting those human laws above natural, physical laws - which is insanity.

Why do you assume everyone arguing with you is a liberal?

In regards to the person I was originally replying to here, because this is a tendency that I notice especially among liberals, and which seems to track with their idealist ideology. They view their position as being “obvious,” “objective” and “rational,” and therefore expect everyone to agree with them unless there is some sort of irregular interference in the “marketplace of ideas,” like foreign subversion. Furthermore, since liberalism is the dominant ideology of the present world, it is easier for people to believe that it is the only thing any reasonable person would believe.

Leftism is comparatively fringe, and also has many different forms of analysis that account for people believing different things. Any leftist should be aware that people who have different material conditions and material interests are likely to arrive at different sets of beliefs. It is difficult to imagine a leftist thinking that anyone who disagrees with them must be disguising their beliefs and motivations, they would have to be paranoid and suspicious of virtually everyone they ever encounter in life. It makes no sense. Furthermore, there are many different leftist ideologies so even if a leftist did expect everyone to be a leftist, it raises the question of, “which tendency?” A Trotskyist and a Maoist will have a substantial number of disagreements with each other.

As for the others, well, because they say lib things and take offense when I talk negatively about liberals. I’m sure some of them style themselves as “anarchists” while supporting liberals and acting and thinking like liberals. Anarchism has some very cool aesthetics, after all.

Perhaps, if they start respecting our labels and bothering to understand what the difference is between a Marxist-Lenininst and a Maoist instead of just blanket labelling everyone to the left of Bernie as a “tankie,” then I’ll consider respecting the difference between self-identified liberals vs anarcho-NATOists instead of labelling them all liberals. But then, if they bothered to learn or understand the things my side actually believes rather than just making shit up about us whole cloth and dismissing us when we try to actually explain our positions, they’d hardly be liberals, would they?

If both sides are fundamentally unacceptable, then the only thing that matters is changing the fundamental situation. And the most effective means of doing that is demonstrating a credible threat that we won’t just fall in line behind a 99-1 split. Building power in this way is more important than getting one genocidaire elected over the other, because it is only through building power that we have a chance of having an option that isn’t a genocidaire.

The left (or what pitiful excuse for the left we have in the US) has been following this inane strategy of lesser-evilism for decades now, and it’s a large part of the reason things have gotten this bad in the first place. Even if we could’ve elected a democrat, the underlying conditions that gave rise to Trump and that are feeding fascism will never be addressed by the democratic party, especially if people refuse to apply genuine pressure to them. As long as those conditions are not fixed, we will keep getting Trumps and people worse than Trump.

This “red line” nonsense is strategically stupid

It’s strategically the only approach that makes any logical sense whatsoever. The ideology of lesser-evilism is completely incoherent and illogical, it sacrifices every ounce of bargaining power you might have yielded completely unnecessarily.

in practice, identical to someone intentionally trying to fracture the left.

Completely insane perspective. “Anyone who advocates actually effective tactics is intentionally trying to fracture the left.” No wonder the left is so powerless.

“Unity” around ineffective tactics, I really think you should consider calling that “liberal unity.”

If you and the person you’re assigning labels to disagree, and you determine your assignments to be more valid than theirs, that is definitively based on your ability to identify ideologues.

That’s not the point of the example. I didn’t bring up Richard Spencer for some dumbass nonsense like, “see how good I am at identifying ideologues, this proves how smart I am,” I presented the example because he is someone who anyone should obviously be able to, and more importantly, willing to assign the label fascist to regardless of the fact that he rejects it. Therefore, you cannot oppose the idea of assigning labels to people that they reject on principle, though you may argue that it’s only valid in certain situations.

Whether it’s right or wrong to support the democrats unconditionally and indefinitely is a seperate question from whether that’s the position being described (which it is).

Personally, I would argue that it’s an incredibly short-sighted, ineffective, and illogical tactic. It sacrifices every ounce of bargaining power before negotiations have even begun.

The “logic” of lesser-evilism is easily disproven. We are given $100 to split, I make an offer, you choose whether to accept or refuse, if you refuse, neither of us get anything. What value should you accept? According to lesser-evilism, you should accept even if I offer a $99-$1 split, because $1 is the lesser evil to $0. But if I know that you’ll accept $1, that’s all I’ll ever offer you. In reality, when this experiment has been tried in practice, most people reject offers below about $30, and few people do the $99-$1 split because they know it’ll get rejected. The “optimal” strategy of lesser-evilism only makes sense if the game is not repeated, otherwise, it makes much more sense to set an absolute minimum condition and reject any offers below that number.

The position that y’all argue for is accepting the $99-$1 split in a political context, of having no conditions, no negotiations, nothing. It’s absurd! If we can present a credible threat that a critical mass of voters won’t go along with a certain policy (like genocide), then the party will have no choice but to give it to us if it wants to remain relevant. And if it refuses anyway, then, conveniently, the same action let’s us build up a third party towards potentially replacing them with someone more cooperative.

Lesser-evilism is presented as if it were obviously correct and indisputable. In reality, it is a specific tactic and one that has proven itself completely ineffective, and also doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It is a choice to subscribe to lesser-evilism, and at least in my view, the wrong choice.