It’s hard to say who is a genuine leftist and who is a please-don’t-vote-for-Biden-so-Trump-can-win shill, but if we take e.g. @[email protected] at face value, I think it’s safe to say that they don’t care:
About any given good thing Biden might have done domestically (forget about that, how dare you run around supporting this genocide man)
If Biden personally isn’t doing the genocide (forget about that, how dare you run around supporting this genocide man)
If Trump will probably do much worse genocides both in the middle east and in the United States (forget about that etc you get the idea)
It’s like the Republican-type thing, where only one answer is allowed. If Biden did a good thing, then no he didn’t, because Netanyahu is killing Gazans and anything Biden is doing to try to prevent that didn’t happen and it’s all Biden’s fault and he’s a bad man and I’m going to start to shout if you try to tell me anything about how even if that’s all true then Trump is ten times worse and those are the only two options in this election.
I mean, I kind of get it. Biden is materially aiding in a genocide and it’s easy at that point in the conversation to shut down anything further and say, okay I’ve heard enough. I think the right answer though is to figure out how to put pressure on Biden from the left to at least undo some of the harm he’s been abetting up to this point, figure out how to install better candidates in the future who will undo American’s war-crime-adjacent foreign policy in the future, while also voting for Biden in the election because he doesn’t want 10 genocides like Trump does. However much bullshit is the resistance Biden has been giving Netanyahu up until this point, it’s definitely better than the full-throated support and assistance Trump would give him.
Well, it’s important to consider trajectory. Biden doing small positive changes in a rapidly crumbling Capitalist empire is still negative overall. For many leftists, this minor amount of positive concessions in an ongoing train wreck isn’t enough and can’t be enough.
It’s impossible to look at individual policies in a vacuum, everything is related. We can accept minor concessions as fact while still believing them to be woefully insufficient.
Example: Biden made a massive improvement to the US’s greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which is predicted to be a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. Is that enough? Uh… if it had been by the year 2000, maybe. We’re still facing a guaranteed global catastrophe. We need to keep pushing for more change, right now, and anyone who’s satisfied with what Biden did so far is living in a dream world.
Where I have a problem with it is when someone extrapolates that out to “and that’s why there’s no reason to support Biden in his contest vs Trump, when Trump wants to undo even that much, and when Biden’s climate action was the first big-scale thing any US politician has ever done to make the problem into an actual priority.”
If anything I’m saying sounds like “and so Biden is good enough,” it is not. What I am saying is that affirmatively choosing the Biden solution in this election while also pushing for big improvements in any one of 10-20 additional ways to achieve actual progress sounds like the way to go.
I don’t disagree with your conclusion that Biden is not as bad as Trumo, I just disagree with your framing and methods for reaching out to disaffected Leftists.
The crux of my argument is that opening with minor, insufficient positive changes that come nowhere close to enough just turns these disaffected leftists away.
“Biden took the first big step towards addressing climate change of any US politician ever, and was able to achieve significant success even within our horribly broken political system. While I fully support extra-electoral change (it is 100% needed), I would say that that’s a relevant fact to the question of whether we should spend time shitting on him and only him, as part of our quest to produce positive change in the system.”
Votes are votes, if you’re going to intentionally use ineffective means of rhetoric when talking to potential voters, isn’t that just an admittance that you care more about your personal feelings than raw results?
I’m not trying to engineer any particular results. Notwithstanding the people who accuse me of running around supporting Biden just because I like Biden, I’m honestly just trying to talk about how I see the world and share my viewpoint and see what other people think in return. It’s part of why I am comfortable saying yes, Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is monstrous, and his little bullshit opposition to it is not nearly enough to excuse the majority of what he’s doing, which is supporting it. Overall, I’m just trying to say how I see it. I’m not trying to, like, convince people to see it my way or support who I’ve decided I want them to support.
I mean yes I sort of hope that people will read my comments and decide to vote for Biden and help not end the world like if Trump gets elected. But also, I think more people will be convinced by simple facts and good reasoning, than will be convinced by something that happens to align with how they want the information to be presented and is triangulated to what’s in their head currently and trying to push it around into the way I want it to be. That’s a dangerous path to go down. Like what about lying, if that was more effective? Or what about setting up a little bot to post my propaganda, what if that was more effective? I just don’t want to do it. Here’s what I think, here are sources, do what you like with that and if you get super offended instead, then I feel blameless with that outcome because I tried to be straight about how I think because I think it makes sense.
I may just be more Materialist than Idealist, but I don’t think people can merely be convinced of the correct take based on evidence or sound logic, they must also be at a point materially that allows for ideas that challenge their predisposed narrative to penetrate.
Care to share any examples? What facts do leftists not care about?
It’s hard to say who is a genuine leftist and who is a please-don’t-vote-for-Biden-so-Trump-can-win shill, but if we take e.g. @[email protected] at face value, I think it’s safe to say that they don’t care:
It’s like the Republican-type thing, where only one answer is allowed. If Biden did a good thing, then no he didn’t, because Netanyahu is killing Gazans and anything Biden is doing to try to prevent that didn’t happen and it’s all Biden’s fault and he’s a bad man and I’m going to start to shout if you try to tell me anything about how even if that’s all true then Trump is ten times worse and those are the only two options in this election.
I mean, I kind of get it. Biden is materially aiding in a genocide and it’s easy at that point in the conversation to shut down anything further and say, okay I’ve heard enough. I think the right answer though is to figure out how to put pressure on Biden from the left to at least undo some of the harm he’s been abetting up to this point, figure out how to install better candidates in the future who will undo American’s war-crime-adjacent foreign policy in the future, while also voting for Biden in the election because he doesn’t want 10 genocides like Trump does. However much bullshit is the resistance Biden has been giving Netanyahu up until this point, it’s definitely better than the full-throated support and assistance Trump would give him.
(Edit: Fixed @ link)
Well, it’s important to consider trajectory. Biden doing small positive changes in a rapidly crumbling Capitalist empire is still negative overall. For many leftists, this minor amount of positive concessions in an ongoing train wreck isn’t enough and can’t be enough.
It’s impossible to look at individual policies in a vacuum, everything is related. We can accept minor concessions as fact while still believing them to be woefully insufficient.
Oh, no doubt. Biden’s not nearly enough.
Example: Biden made a massive improvement to the US’s greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which is predicted to be a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. Is that enough? Uh… if it had been by the year 2000, maybe. We’re still facing a guaranteed global catastrophe. We need to keep pushing for more change, right now, and anyone who’s satisfied with what Biden did so far is living in a dream world.
Where I have a problem with it is when someone extrapolates that out to “and that’s why there’s no reason to support Biden in his contest vs Trump, when Trump wants to undo even that much, and when Biden’s climate action was the first big-scale thing any US politician has ever done to make the problem into an actual priority.”
If anything I’m saying sounds like “and so Biden is good enough,” it is not. What I am saying is that affirmatively choosing the Biden solution in this election while also pushing for big improvements in any one of 10-20 additional ways to achieve actual progress sounds like the way to go.
I don’t disagree with your conclusion that Biden is not as bad as Trumo, I just disagree with your framing and methods for reaching out to disaffected Leftists.
The crux of my argument is that opening with minor, insufficient positive changes that come nowhere close to enough just turns these disaffected leftists away.
“Biden took the first big step towards addressing climate change of any US politician ever, and was able to achieve significant success even within our horribly broken political system. While I fully support extra-electoral change (it is 100% needed), I would say that that’s a relevant fact to the question of whether we should spend time shitting on him and only him, as part of our quest to produce positive change in the system.”
“Well now you have turned me away.”
Yeah, I’m comfortable letting that person go.
Votes are votes, if you’re going to intentionally use ineffective means of rhetoric when talking to potential voters, isn’t that just an admittance that you care more about your personal feelings than raw results?
I’m not trying to engineer any particular results. Notwithstanding the people who accuse me of running around supporting Biden just because I like Biden, I’m honestly just trying to talk about how I see the world and share my viewpoint and see what other people think in return. It’s part of why I am comfortable saying yes, Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is monstrous, and his little bullshit opposition to it is not nearly enough to excuse the majority of what he’s doing, which is supporting it. Overall, I’m just trying to say how I see it. I’m not trying to, like, convince people to see it my way or support who I’ve decided I want them to support.
I mean yes I sort of hope that people will read my comments and decide to vote for Biden and help not end the world like if Trump gets elected. But also, I think more people will be convinced by simple facts and good reasoning, than will be convinced by something that happens to align with how they want the information to be presented and is triangulated to what’s in their head currently and trying to push it around into the way I want it to be. That’s a dangerous path to go down. Like what about lying, if that was more effective? Or what about setting up a little bot to post my propaganda, what if that was more effective? I just don’t want to do it. Here’s what I think, here are sources, do what you like with that and if you get super offended instead, then I feel blameless with that outcome because I tried to be straight about how I think because I think it makes sense.
I may just be more Materialist than Idealist, but I don’t think people can merely be convinced of the correct take based on evidence or sound logic, they must also be at a point materially that allows for ideas that challenge their predisposed narrative to penetrate.