Serious The Politics Thread

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...Do you expect the Democrats to not run the incumbent President? Seriously? I don't disagree with the rest of the sentiments expressed in this post — I think that the Democrats are largely in a bind of their own making — but suggesting that they should forfeit the incumbency advantage is pure madness.

What incumbency advantage? He's behind Trump in key battleground states where other Dems are leading against their Republican counterparts. It is extremely clear that Biden is having a toxic effect on what would otherwise be a very advantageous position for Democrats. It's probably too late now, but Dems had four years to find a candidate that could be a successor. And it's not like the Dems are short on moderate candidates that at least appear coherent and young.

Instead, Dems are insisting their emperor has clothes, and in doing so, are appearing just as deluded as the Republicans who refuse to admit the weakness of their candidate. Dems had four years to capitalize on the shitshow that is the GOP and instead chose to become a mirror of them, shaming any potential voter who doesn't support their candidate.

But honestly, yeah, they should. Even now, if the DNC pulled Biden off the ticket and named someone, anyone else as the nominee, not even a progressive attempt to appeal to me, just some generic moderate that wants to continue Biden's policies but with apparent coherence and cognitive function, it would feel like the Dems finally exist in reality and it might appeal to undecided voters more than ramming Biden down their throats. If the game is just "anyone but Trump," why not try one of the several people who aren't currently losing to Trump?

So a glaring double standard. There were no calls for the twice impeached former President to resign when thousands of Americans were dying per week and Biden was kicking his ass in the polls. But Biden should resign this cycle because “bad vibes.”

Yes! ffs, yes, there is a double standard! There has been for so long! Republicans don't hold themselves to the same moral standards as Dems! They're craven sociopaths! Quit whining about it and quit using their shitty behavior as justification for the Dems' unforced errors. This is exactly what I meant by choosing to lose in a principled way rather than trying to win. Why is it so hard for you to get over "what should be" and accept "what is?" Why do leftists get bashed for being idealistic purists when centrists spout gibberish like this?
 
I genuinely don't understand what point is trying to be made here. Is it that Democrats didn't call for Trump's resignation (they fucking impeached him) or is it that Republicans didn't call for his resignation because of fucking course they didn't, they're a cult of personality, and we should do what they do because there are no bad tactics (except apparently running an optically better candidate)?
 
I genuinely don't understand what point is trying to be made here. Is it that Democrats didn't call for Trump's resignation (they fucking impeached him) or is it that Republicans didn't call for his resignation because of fucking course they didn't, they're a cult of personality, and we should do what they do because there are no bad tactics (except apparently running an optically better candidate)?

The point is to back your own incumbent President. Calling for his resignation over (questionable) polls is crazy. We never hear Republicans having this discussion. They understand power and are committed to getting / keeping it.
 
If it would help Biden to throw LGBTQ+ people and minorities under the bus to gain right-leaning votes, would you accept him doing that?

I am black. American politicians have been throwing my community under the bus for over 300 years. I answered this question a few pages ago. If the choices were David Duke vs. George Bush vs. not voting at all, I am voting for George Bush because he would be the better president of the two. It is simple math.
 
Yeah, you're missing the fucking point. Democracy in the U.S. is a facade and you're a rube if you think otherwise. Corporate and military interests (and there's heavy overlap there) hold such an incredibly disproportionate amount of power compared to the interests of working class citizens or anything else for that matter that to call the U.S. democratic is to actively delude yourself. It isn't, and hasn't been since at least the first Red Scare, maybe earlier. North Korea calls itself a democracy; it even holds elections. That doesn't mean a damn thing.

The comparison to right-wing talking points is detestably dishonest on your part. Right-wingers say America isn't a democracy and it shouldn't be, leftists say America isn't a democracy and it should be. If you refuse to acknowledge how this fundamental difference changes the conversation and instead insist on framing them as essentially the same, there's no point interacting with you any further.

ik theres been a lot of msgs since this but no one has addressed it so. obv idk what was going on in your mind here and sometimes word choices are unintentional etc, but it cannot be an acceptable position to suggest that "maybe" amerikkka was a democracy during jim crow and/or (explicit) race slavery, or to imply that it was 'closer' to a democracy in any way compared to today. the word democracy is imprecise and i think a lot of ppl are just using it in different ways in the last several messages, saying amerikkka is not and has never been a democracy is fine but saying that it was closer to a democracy when slavery and/or when apartheid were official state policy is a chauvinist position. and it is a type of ideological propoganda that is unfortunately very common from outlets like Jacobin so as mentioned in the prior convo i think its important to criticize it clearly and swiftly whenever it appears, even if it turns out to have been j a speech/wording error in this instance
 
I am black. American politicians have been throwing my community under the bus for over 300 years. I answered this question a few pages ago. If the choices were David Duke vs. George Bush vs. not voting at all, I am voting for George Bush because he would be the better president of the two. It is simple math.
This sounds like a fairly reasonable approach until you consider that this implies that you would also spend your valuable time shaming people online for refusing to vote for George W. Bush.

Or in a hypothetical election between Donald Trump and "Donald Trump's clone who is 1% worse," you would vote for Donald Trump, presumably. But more than that, you would actually go online and shame people for not voting for Trump Classic. Do I have this right, or would this scenario finally be enough for you to question 'just shut up and vote' as an effective strategy?
 
This sounds like a fairly reasonable approach until you consider that this implies that you would also spend your valuable time shaming people online for refusing to vote for George W. Bush.

Or in a hypothetical election between Donald Trump and "Donald Trump's clone who is 1% worse," you would vote for Donald Trump, presumably. But more than that, you would actually go online and shame people for not voting for Trump Classic. Do I have this right, or would this scenario finally be enough for you to question 'just shut up and vote' as an effective strategy?

Not sure what you’re asking. What is the limit to the approach? Do you think black people actually liked Lyndon B Johnson or Abraham Lincoln (who were both terribly racist) or were they just the better POTUS option and could eventually be forced into action?
 
What is the limit to the approach?
Well that is precisely what I'm wondering. In a hypothetical scenario where things have gotten so bad that the presidential election is between David Duke and George W. Bush, apparently you would still believe in the success of the very strategy that lead to that horrible outcome in the first place. Not only that, but you would spend time shaming people who maybe consider revising that strategy to a more effective one. Please feel free to correct me if I'm mischaracterizing you here.

So where is the limit? If there is no limit to how bad things can get, no point at which you'd ever reconsider your strategy, then how can we trust you that it's a good strategy? You will always say it's a good strategy no matter what the outcome is. That is not strategy, that is dogma.
 
~ maybe i missed smthg but i didnt see raikoulover trying to shame anyone for not voting or planning not to vote or suggest that voter shaming was something anyone should be doing. ofc voter shaming is a phenomenon that happens, but not every person who believes in voting for shitty dems is responsible for or supports that. "just as" none of us are responsible for violence committed by PSL bc we said genocide joe.

~ if you really want to take a "mathematical logic" approach, the 'its simple logic to always vote for the slightly less bad person' argument would only be applicable in a "one-time event" context. it no longer rly holds when you factor in that the choices voters make in this election can affect the choices that each bourgeois party takes afterward / looking ahead to the subsequent election. for example, it is possible that voters j voting dem no matter what could lead the dems to continue moving even further to the right bc they are not concerned about possible changes in voter behavior, while voters having 'red lines' we wont cross could incentivize dems to not cross those lines in the future. this is all very speculative and imprecise, among other things it rests on the assumption that the democratic party actually cares about winning elections (prob likely to be true at lower levels but more questionable for presidential elections), and then u also have the question of to what extent the dem party is even capable of perceiving group voter behavior in order to be incentivized in such a way. nonetheless, there is no 'logical proof' that #bluenomatterwho is a "correct" long term "strategy", and it is very easy to understand why some ppl may view it as an ineffective long term "strategy". (ppl who are into game theory might compare this to prisoners dilemna where if the 'game' is only played once betrayal is always "incentivized", but that it is much more complicated to evaluate in a context of the 'game' being repeated hundreds+ of times.)
personally i dont really value a mathematical-logic or gametheoretic approach and i think its perfectly fine for voting decisions to be emotionally driven. what might or might not effectively incentivize politicians is rly speculative, and one of the few skills bourgeois politicians have is reading emotions so i mean that could cut either wat but maybe emotional voting is more likely to actually be perceived and potentially influence their future choices, idk who knows.

i dont find debates about electoral voting 'strategy' very interesting or significant so its unlikely i will comment anything further but mostly j wanted to note that there are a wide range of potential orientations behind the decision someone comes to (maybe someday we wont take up so much time/space/energy w these convos or expect ppl to have entire reasonings prepared abt whether they will vote and why), and if u j assume that everyone's choices within each group are for the same reasons its going to lead to a lot of misperceptions. 'people are too various to be treated so lightly' or etc

~ ~ ~

additional section so as to not double post: putting all the voting strategy stuff aside, i find many of raikous posts confusing bc at times they present the two bourgeois parties as shitty 'external' actors to respond to strategically, but then they also say things like "RBG is the goat" (pokemon red blue and green are the goat but sadly this is not what the acronym was referring to) and talk about backing the incumbent candidate of "*our* party". i mean ginsburg had awful politics on everything from sovereignty for indigenous nations to mass incarceration to saying BLM is stupid etc theres no shortage of criticisms to make and ofc her right wing politics can be seen throughout her jurisprudence; "but" in the context of the highest Court of the world's #1 imperial terrorist, ofc a lot of her colleagues were way way worse. why does your orientation to her seem to be so different from your talk about democratic party politicians as a whole, bourgeois politicians dont have the "right" to anything, and they certainly do not usually act on anyones interests but their own. and then the comments abt incumbency like i dont understand if you are talking about what the democratic party "should" be doing as far as its own bourgeois interests, which i dont rly get 'where that is going' is the idea that the better we understand why the democratic party makes the decisions it does then we have a better chance to influence them? or are u saying like it is somehow in 'our' interest that the dem party is nominating the incumbent in which case why?
 
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he has in fact been doing it for years but i dont really want to get into it, especially bc i think he would gladly volunteer his distaste for third party voters if asked. i may hate basically all of his posts, but i admit that one thing i like about raikoulover is that he does not try to hide his true thoughts on things.
 
This sounds like a fairly reasonable approach until you consider that this implies that you would also spend your valuable time shaming people online for refusing to vote for George W. Bush.

Or in a hypothetical election between Donald Trump and "Donald Trump's clone who is 1% worse," you would vote for Donald Trump, presumably. But more than that, you would actually go online and shame people for not voting for Trump Classic. Do I have this right, or would this scenario finally be enough for you to question 'just shut up and vote' as an effective strategy?

Imagine lecturing Black people for *hypothetically* campaigning against David Duke for the less racist candidate. Don't you fucking dare try weaseling your way out of this by complaining that I'm not characterising your argument properly when this is your fucking post. Holy shit.

If it would help Biden to throw LGBTQ+ people and minorities under the bus to gain right-leaning votes, would you accept him doing that?

My favourite part about this post is that the Western left has thrown the LGBTQ2S community under the bus several times over the past 5 years to appeal to bigots and instead we get those accusations thrown around by terminally online leftists for everyone else. You know what happened after I was beaten at Pride? I found myself ostracised in local organising for two years, for having the gall to demand answers from my local straight communists for not showing up despite telling everyone they would. JK fucking Rowling is telling her followers to vote Communist (and don't get me started on the history of communist organising in the UK) because Labour and the fucking Greens aren't hostile enough to the community for her. The Left doesn't give a shit about minorities when they're inconvenient lol
 
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If anyone else (especially mods or RL) genuinely is confused about my post, or thinks it might be insensitive or iffy in some way, or thinks it reads like a 'lecture against Black people,' I am happy to clarify the post, delete it, change the tone, or anything like that. I personally do not see that, and I thought the discussion with RL was going fine despite me extremely disagreeing with his positions. But if the reality is that my communication there sucked, then it sucked, that happens, so feel free to tell me.

I will not be accepting that from boo though, for reasons I've mentioned before. In addition to consistently misconstruing my statements in the least generous way possible, he has insulted me repeatedly, including suggesting that I might be literally evil. Not really easy to participate in this thread when having to constantly deal with that.
 
this doesn't directly relate to the discussion, it's rather just a question because I am not that familiar with US politics

Isn't it weird that Trump still doesn't have a running mate, a little more than 4 months before the election? We don't even have a good guess at the moment for who it could be
 
That's just it though, you aren't being honest with your thoughts. Your comments are not designed for honest discussion or even criticism, but simply to cause the most damage possible to the reputation of the people you argue against. They're basically glorified twitter dunks, but it's not on twitter so you don't even get retweets. If you were actually interested in demonstrating that your ideas are good, there is a 0% chance that any of your posts would be written the way that they are
 
That's just it though, you aren't being honest with your thoughts. Your comments are not designed for honest discussion or even criticism, but simply to cause the most damage possible to the reputation of the people you argue against. They're basically glorified twitter dunks, but it's not on twitter so you don't even get retweets. If you were actually interested in demonstrating that your ideas are good, there is a 0% chance that any of your posts would be written the way that they are

Yeah it's totally me that's not being honest here, that's why I've been able to flex my knowledge several times on the politics of other countries without much of an issue from the people of those countries. Weird how it always seems to only be posts about (or responding to!) terminally online American "leftists" that always has those same sorts of people complaining about how I'm mischaracterising their arguments. Weirder still that it's those same people claiming I'm a genocide denier on things I've never even talked about (yet still I seem to have a lot more knowledge than you about past and ongoing genocides). The hypocrisy is palpable.

Meanwhile, I've gotten at least a couple PMs from people who have just gotten utterly fed up with the bad faith coming from you people, most of which don't even want to bother engaging with this thread because of it. "Leftoid Doomer Nihilist Thread" indeed.

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Can't help but note that the baseless accusations of me being a genocide denier are perfectly fine! God forbid I call out the actual person praising one of America's most notorious contemporary genocide deniers though (who is now gone to fucking lecturing Black people on *hypothetically* campaigning against David Duke)! Great, totally uninflammatory, definitely not one-sided conversation being fostered here! Sure is a mystery why people have told me they're not interested in participating in what essentially amounts to a US-centric circlejerk!
 
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this doesn't directly relate to the discussion, it's rather just a question because I am not that familiar with US politics

Isn't it weird that Trump still doesn't have a running mate, a little more than 4 months before the election? We don't even have a good guess at the moment for who it could be
Yes but there is a lot unusual about this election. I think we'll find out soon and hopefully we'll get a VP debate because I believe his choice will be relatively unknown.
 
this doesn't directly relate to the discussion, it's rather just a question because I am not that familiar with US politics

Isn't it weird that Trump still doesn't have a running mate, a little more than 4 months before the election? We don't even have a good guess at the moment for who it could be
It's not actually that strange; most candidates don't announce their running mates until at least July. In 2020, Biden didn't announce Harris as his running mate until August 11th. Trump has claimed that he's going to announce his new running mate at the Republican National Convention, which takes place in mid-July, around when he announced Pence as his running mate in 2016.
 
Well that is precisely what I'm wondering. In a hypothetical scenario where things have gotten so bad that the presidential election is between David Duke and George W. Bush, apparently you would still believe in the success of the very strategy that lead to that horrible outcome in the first place. Not only that, but you would spend time shaming people who maybe consider revising that strategy to a more effective one. Please feel free to correct me if I'm mischaracterizing you here.

So where is the limit? If there is no limit to how bad things can get, no point at which you'd ever reconsider your strategy, then how can we trust you that it's a good strategy? You will always say it's a good strategy no matter what the outcome is. That is not strategy, that is dogma.

I think the point is- it has not “gotten so bad,” it has only ever been worse and the electoral strategy has worked. Consider my grandmother was not even safely able to vote until she moved to New York in the 1970s. That’s one lifetime. From my point of view, it is privileged and misguided for those who claim to be progressive to abstain from supporting Biden because of disagreements on a few things. The only possible outcomes are Biden or the felon. It’s really that binary.

An unconventional strategy I heard in 2014-2015 was to get more in the black community to register as Republican to infiltrate the primaries. The logic being, if someone like John Kasich won the GOP primary over the felon due to support of the black community, the political climate with all the neo-Nazi fascist shit could look a bit different today.
 
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Yeah I’m definitely gonna regret posting in this bear trap. I’ve been following this thread for quite a while and just want to say some stuff:

Ok, why is there a political thread on SMOGON of all places, where you get little pocket mons in strategic positions to hit eachother? I don’t agree with most of Sabelette ‘s post but I definitely agree that posting on this thread at the rate you people are is a complete waste of time. Not that it’s wrong, but the discussion in this thread is not useful. Instead of seriously considering political problems and offering solutions, this thread has practically turned into a “who can insult Trump the most” and a “this leftist is a secret Republican in disguise!” The conversations in this thread will not produce change. In fact the conversation in this thread is practically only producing division and enemies. Most of us are just a bunch of dumb teens that barely have a grasp on the complexity of what we are talking about and will refuse to change opinions no matter what. If you want to make change, research, start a petition at your school, mail a letter to congress, or anything but this. If you don’t think this does much, just see where this got Greta Thunberg ( although I believe plastic pollution is a much bigger problem than Global Warming). Doing something in real life will make a bigger impact than anything posted on this thread. To be honest this thread is more like a “get banned for free” card to me. Just saying…. ok goodbye.
 
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Can't help but note that the baseless accusations of me being a genocide denier are perfectly fine! God forbid I call out the actual person praising one of America's most notorious contemporary genocide deniers though (who is now gone to fucking lecturing Black people on *hypothetically* campaigning against David Duke)! Great, totally uninflammatory, definitely not one-sided conversation being fostered here! Sure is a mystery why people have told me they're not interested in participating in what essentially amounts to a US-centric circlejerk!

Nothing about Lily's post was anything of this sort. You continue to see whatever you want to see. She was merely pointing out that when the choices are between two terrible people, you still lose. You also don't need to speak for Black people, especially as a white person. They're not infants. If RL interpreted her post the same way he is more than capable of saying that himself.
 
She was merely pointing out that when the choices are between two terrible people, you still lose. You also don't need to speak for Black people, especially as a white person. They're not infants. If RL interpreted her post the same way he is more than capable of saying that himself.

Yes, and I disagreed with that pointand cited historical precedent. Abe Lincoln and LBJ were both terribly racist. However, they were “movable” in ways George McClellan and Barry Goldwater were not. Picking the “less terrible” side does alter history. And compared to past US presidents, Biden is not terrible.
 
People think that just because your average american is more supportive of gay people and less openly racist that these are permanent things that will lead to resistance of fascist policies,
If anything this is reversing anyway


Young people will support gays again when we end wokeism dei and sweet baby inc and the immigrants stop taking da jobs. Or whatever.

People talk a lot about biden being based or whatever and they are but it still isn't affecting the average person enough. Most young people I know are well past the doomer phase anyway. People are looking for their revolutionary. You can see it in Europe, the last 10 years and the last 6 months. Eventually things will start to crack
 
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