• freagle@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    And then Biden took office and he and his DOJ had the full Epstein files AND Project 2025 was openly published and explained and promoted AND Biden said “we have to stop these people” and then did what? That’s correct. He did nothing. He had literal documentation that DJT committed wanton infanticide and rape and human trafficking but did nothing. Nothing. Biden did nothing with the Epstein files while Harris told immigrants not to come to the US because we were absolutely going to continue torturing them at the border and nothing was gonna stop them, just like nothing was going to stop the Israeli genocide and the American participation in it.

    No, sorry. The Democrats are not “less fascist” just like the Good Cop is still a cop.

    The Ds aren’t going to save Ukraine either. The parties don’t make military decisions, the military does and the parties ratify it. That’s why Obama continued Bush 2’s projects, including invading Libya, which was on Bush’s list but he never got to it. Don’t forget Obama refused to give Ukraine any weapons and declared Venezuela a national security threat after Bush 2 tried to coup Chavez. Trump was the first president to approve arms transfers to Ukraine. I know it’s confusing because you think the parties are “evil” and “almost good” but they aren’t, they are both fascist imperialists and it’s why this all happens this way.

    It’s also why the Obama administration expanded ICE and DHS and then deported 3M people with Tom Homan at the helm, just like Trump used all the Obama-era policies and even appointed Tom Homan himself to run deportations (though Trump hasn’t yet caught up to Obama’s numbers).

    You’re falling for the manipulation. You somehow believe that the con artist saying “that guy has a knife, I’ll protect you, just give me your wallet” even after that con artist walked away and did NOTHING about the guy with the knife.

    The evidence is clear. Both parties are maintainers of the world fascist empire, and one party appeals to the voters with fear of “the other” and the other party appears to the voters with the fear of “being bad people”.

    • darthelmet@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The way I see it, it’s more like they’re ok with it as long as the knife is pointed at someone else. Fascism is imperialism brought home. All that imperialism has been happening non-stop and even at home, marginalized groups have been subject to all sorts of terrible things.

      They’ll call that less bad because it doesn’t affect them yet. And in the narrowest sense I guess they are technically correct exactly in the short term. But 1) It’s not better for those other people. 2) They don’t see how one inevitably leads to the other. The same tools they built to stop “our enemies abroad” can and are used to suppress dissent at home.

      If a Dem ran that as a fucking bare minimum promised to reign in the military, police, and surveillance states and curb executive power, I’d be more sympathetic to the argument for harm reduction even if they didn’t agree with me on other things. But if they’re just going to keep enabling all of this, at best the only “harm reduction” happening is some people getting to ignore the suffering until next election.

      • freagle@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        at best the only “harm reduction” happening is some people getting to ignore the suffering until next election

        This exactly.

        if they’re just going to keep enabling all of this

        It’s beyond enabling. They are architecting it, expanding it, normalizing it, and selling it.

      • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        Well if you’re not one of the people dead from ice, healthcare cuts, environmental impacts from all the solar/wind cuts, dead from cancer from the research we stopped, dead from food illness, dead in the war in Iran, dead in the invasion of ukraine, dead from measles, dead from USAID being gutted, or completely destitute from the cost of living, then yeah here’s not much “harm reduction” to be had really.

        Maybe this argument works if Trump hadn’t completely ruined the world and directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and probably much more when diseases start spreading because of government sponsored vaccine denial and USAID cuts.

        • BanMeFromPosting@lemmy.ml
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          20 hours ago

          Biden expanded the ICE concentration camps Trump took over from Obama, what an odd thing to mention.

          USAID was used as a front for the CIA and various regime change operations.

          They both massively hurt the environment, so I dont really care that one of them does not deign to do token gestures of goodwill.

          The war in Ukraine started under Biden.

          The war in Iran is bipartisan.

          The cost of living was already making people destitue and all Democrats had to say about it was that the economy was doing great.

          Healthcare cuts? The healthcare system has been abysmal forever and all dems did was pass a subsidy for insurance companies.

          Its not like the cancer research would save anyone but the wealthies in this nation.

          Food illness spreads now, which is terrible. It is correct that the current regime is worse administrators of minutiae.

        • freagle@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          Yeah, I mean, you basically get it, you just think Trump is somehow special. Biden authored the Crime Bill, Clinton put it into law, they ruined millions of lives, mostly of black Americans. Obama/Biden and HRC created an absolutely massive crisis in Libya by funding, arming, training, and coordinating a terroristic “resistance” and then used NATO to bomb the most prosperous country in Africa into devastation where they now openly sell human slaves. The Ukraine situation requires you to imagine history started a few years ago - Bill Clinton openly and public wanted to include Russia in NATO, even after Putin took office. Hell, Clinton was instrumental in legitimizing Putin. The invasion of Ukraine is not something Trump caused and it’s not something he can end. If you have ever studied proxy conflicts like this one, the way you end the bloodshed is by surrendering and signing a treaty. The way you kill more people is by funneling more guns and mercenaries into the proxy. We’ve known this for decades. The US military literally justified some of its proxy wars with Youth Bulge Theory, stating that when there’s too many MAMs (military-aged males) that they could pose a threat to stability so it’s important to get ahead of youth bulges, create the conflicts before they become something we can’t control, and let the conflict kill off the youth bulge. The US is fucking sick.

          As for everything else you listed, there’s an equally deadly Democrat equivalent. The embargo on Cuba means that the Cuban vaccine that prevents lung cancer is completely unavailable in the US. Democrats have deported/repatriated more people than Republicans have over the last 25 years. And the reason those immigrants are coming to us in the first place is because of bi-partisan destruction of South American and African countries.

          • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            I can’t respond to every conspiracy but, black communities supported the crime bill as well, when it turned out it was harming black communities it should have been repealed, but Biden doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight to know not to support the bill. It’s also much harder to repeal a bad bill than to create it.

            I guess you can conveniently leave out why we and nato did all that, that’s pretty good faith

            He was condemned by many as a dictator whose authoritarian administration systematically violated human rights and financed terrorism in the region and abroad

            From Wikipedia
            US foreign policy has always been atrocious, that has nothing to do with whether a party is fascist or not. If you want to say both parties have terrible foreign policy I would agree, but the Republicans canceling USAID, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and supporting Russia is clearly MUCH worse than what dems were doing.

            Yes I agree legitimizing putin was a mistake, but you’re again using hindsight glasses, we didn’t realize he would be a warmonger dictator and thought we could open the door to good relations.

            Weird how Russia still has not taken over Ukraine in what, 3 years? even without us aiding Ukraine. Imagine what it would look like if ukraine had US military tech at their disposal. I wonder if you’d have the same opinion that China should just surrender to the US if we invaded them unprovoked? They have no chance of winning so they should just give up, and anyone offering China aid is just causing needless death. The rest is a conspiracy theory so I can’t debunk it other than pointing to the actual reasons we went to war (propaganda, hating brown people, and a few times actual terrorism)

            Oh wow true it would be really bad if the US stopped vaccines and also invaded a country and took their leader, like with government sponsored vaccine denial, the head of the DHS being a vaccine denialist, USAID being canceled, and the Venezuelan president being taken. Every example you have from the dems Republicans have done 10 fold, and at least with the dem policy there is a reason behind it, even if the result is disastrous. The Republican version is just “time to cut all research and foreign aid and vaccines and attack Mexicans because fox news told me to.” It’s like a vote between actual Hitler and George Bush, Bush sucks but this is not even a choice. The gutting of USAID alone will cause more deaths and suffering than anything the dems have done in the past 40 years.

            • BanMeFromPosting@lemmy.ml
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              20 hours ago

              Sad to start out with an ad hominem. All of the things stated is verified, that you do not like facts do not make them less so

              • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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                15 hours ago

                “Your statement is a conspiracy theory” is a true about what they said, not a statement about their character but alright.

                • BanMeFromPosting@lemmy.ml
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                  14 hours ago

                  It is is a dismissal of the others arguments based on nothing but the perceived character of the arguments/the person making the argument. It is an ad hominem. You are in no way engaging with anything the other says, instead you are relying on a simple attack on character. That is an ad hominem.
                  If the statements are conspiracy theories then it would do well to prove such an assertion. By simply stating it and then fleeing from any reasonable discussion makes you appear as a fanatic cultust that cannot handle challenge. This is not good optics for you

                  • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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                    2 hours ago

                    Ad hominem literally means against/to human, if I said “you are brainwashed so you believe a conspiracy theory” then I am dismissing their argument based on a personal aspect. I was stating what I believe to be a fact about their argument, not anything related to them as a person. I said many of those arguments are conspiracy theories, the implication being it would take 200 hours of research and a dissertation to disprove them, so I just responded to the things I had evidence on hand of.

                    Go watch someone debate a flat earther, something that we have mountains of evidence to disprove. Anyone who has not spent massive amounts of time researching will make the flat earther seem like they are 100% correct. I know those are conspiracies the same way I know the earth is not flat, but I’m not willing to spend 200 hours researching it for no actual gain in knowledge.

                    The fact that several things I did know were misrepresented to me (Biden supported the crime bill, but leave out that black Americans also supported it) makes me highly skeptical of everything else, which further proves to me that the rest were conspiracy theories. If it’s correct why the need for misrepresentation?

            • freagle@lemmy.ml
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              19 hours ago

              US foreign policy has always been atrocious, that has nothing to do with whether a party is fascist or not.

              This is essentially what it boils down to. You think that the citizens of the USA going through the oppression of domestic policy isn’t fascism, but making it worse is fascism, but whatever the US does to other people can’t ever qualify as fascism.

              Essentially, you believe fascism is aesthetics. Why did Nazism emerge? To be evil domestically? No. The domestic policy of the Nazis was a specific strategy to create a strong nationalism that would motivate the people of Germany to energize the Nazi’s foreign policy. Demonizing undesirables wasn’t the goal, it was the means to the goal. The goal was to subjugate the Slavs under an American-style apartheid occupation where the domestic population was sufficiently bonded through nationalism and xenophobia that they would energize the policies of the Third Reich to dominate others.

              America is and always has been a fascist state. If you think Trump is bad you should study Jefferson. The entire American project is a genocidal Christian nationalist apartheid occupation of land they took by force. In so far as the Democrats continue mass murdering and genocidal policies, they are administering a fascist state. In so far as Republicans are purging the military of people who aren’t sufficiently willing to commit violence for the shared foreign policy aims of the elite, they are administering a fascist state. Obama is and was a fascist, and just like every politician before him, the good things he gave the people were a concession from the elite to the working class in exchange for their passivity and their willingness to energize the fascist state that is the USA.

              I guess you can conveniently leave out why we and nato did all that, that’s pretty good faith

              I need you to understand that this [the destruction of Libya] was illegal under international law and entirely illegitimate. There is no doctrine, except imperialism and fascism, where it is acceptable to destroy an entire country because a leader was behaving in a way domestically that we find morally objectionable. We don’t even need to get into the constant manufacturing of consent and how the assessment of Gaddafi’s actions may have been the result of propaganda. Even if we accept literally everything as true, it’s still a fascistic move to do what the US did. It’s literally unjustifiable. The fact that a liberal like you is willing to defend these actions is a sign of just how powerful the fascist propaganda is.

              And it’s not like this wasn’t the analysis even before Obama. Clinton’s decision to use NATO to attack Yugoslavia was the world’s first ever “war for humanitarian intervention”. It was never acceptable to do that, and when Clinton did it there was a huge contingent of us that screamed that this was expanding the remit of the fascist USA to launch preemptive wars. And then what happened? Bush 2 expanded the remit even further and we screamed that this was bad. And what were we told? That this was a “Republican” problem and that we just need to vote D. And we didn’t believe it then either. So Obama gets elected and what happens? He goes even further in expanding the remit of the mass murder machine of the fascist empire of the USA.

              It’s a non-stop death march. It’s been a non-stop death march since before the founding of the USA. It’s the same unending genocidal death march of European empire. It will never stop until we stop it. And we don’t stop it by voting in the controlled opposition that continuously expands the fascist state and enlists the citizens in energizing its fascist project.

              Voting will not fix this

        • darthelmet@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          I’d ask you to consider how we got here. Trump didn’t just fall from the sky and started wrecking things on his own.

          I could go into the whole history of the last quarter century and beyond, but to keep things simple, let’s go with a personal example:

          I live in an area I would describe as blue MAGA. They regularly vote (corporate) Dem at the federal level, although local politics is very Rep dominated. My rep is a multiple term incumbent Democrat who we have tried and failed to primary multiple times, including one election where I was directly involved in the progressive opposition campaign.

          As far as issues that enable fascism goes, they:

          • Voted for more ICE funding and increased border security.

          • Voted for increases to military spending.

          • Voted to support Israel’s genocide.

          • Participates in the war mongering around countries like Iran. To the extent that they had any issue with Trump’s recent war, it was a matter of poor execution rather than any principled stance against US imperialism. This matters beyond some lefty purity test. Stances like these and the policies they lead to help manufacture consent for these wars.

          • Failed to press for congress to act on it’s constitutional responsibility to stop presidents from illegally starting wars.

          • Voted on a Republican resolution to condemn the horrors of socialism at a time when right wing fascism is the dominant, pressing crisis in our country.

          I could go on, but you get the gist. They’re exactly the kind of Democrat we’re talking about who enables the fascists to do what they do.

          So… setting aside the fact that he’s probably in a safe seat anyway, what should I do come election day? Is voting for this person a vote against Trump and fascism? Is this harm reduction? Can I expect them to do ANYTHING to reign in this administration when they have not even tried to do so before? IF they’re not going to, what exactly is the benefit? And there are costs beyond what they will do in office. Incumbency comes with a pretty big electoral advantage. Continuing to support them makes it harder to unseat them later.

    • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      His prosecution was underway and he was about to be convicted and then sent to jail wtf are you talking about? And then the public elected him president, so the investigations stopped. Do you want Biden to just put him in prison with no trial? Just push the send him to jail button that even with trumps fascist army of yesmen he can’t do? Insane how these rewrites of history always come right before an election, I would’ve hoped the Ukraine strikes on the datacenters would’ve slowed it down.

      Waiting for 1 dem president that murdered American citizens and sent 200b worth of armed thugs, and the national guard. I guess Obama mishandled the border, which is basically the same thing as telling people immigrants are rapists and murderers, removing as many protections for people of color, and being intentionally evil and murdering people with hired thugs.

      It’s just rewriting history, Biden was unbelievably outspoken in his support for Ukraine, was sending them aid, had terrible views of Russia. With Republicans we get a war with Iran and we suck Russia off and tell Ukraine get bent. We can see what the two parties did during this war, we don’t have to guess. Democrats have been with Ukraine since day 1, Republicans against. Trump cut off all Ukraine aid as fast as he could, Biden sent it as fast as he could, there is no mystery there.

      • Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Yes. You don’t need a trial for

        -a live broadcasted coup attempt and attack at the capitol that was clearly organized and called for by an already established criminal and cult leader,

        a PowerPoint presentation of a coup,

        a big ass binder of a coup called project 2025 with names and plans of a government conspiracy to throw a “revolution” for the rich “that will be bloodless if the LEFT allows it”.

        Over a years worth of committee investigations and hearings

        And all of Jack Smith’s work.

        YES HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUNISHED SEVERELY IMMEDIATELY

        What would Biden have done if Ilhan Omar organized a group of leftists to storm the capital, after a year of perpetuating a rigged voting system, and angering a crowd on tv, and publishing a binder called "Bernie’s roadmap to taxing billionaires and removing AIPAC, IT WILL BE BLOODLESS IF THE RIGHT ALLOWS IT?

        What do you think would happen to us?