Idk about you, but idgaf about the duoply anymore. I’m ready for the workers’ rights party. Let’s reset the whole fucking thing.
I was just typing up a post earlier this morning about my alarm about well-intentioned “let’s abandon everything in power that isn’t the Republicans, what’s the worst that could happen” YouTube videos.
You can work for a worker’s rights party, without selling out AOC and Bernie Sanders to go to the Gitmo camp.
Are they saying that? I mean if we’re building a new movement, stopping innocent people from getting gulag’d should be a top priority.
But it seems increasingly clear that the Democratic Party is in the process of failure and maybe even collapse and that does raise a question of where do we go from here?
I personally would like to see a grassroots movement that is more focused on direct resistance than electoralism but that’s just me.
It’s hard for me to read “idgaf about the duopoly” as any way other than inclusive of “let’s abandon the Democrats”, which in this climate, will mean those Democrats going into camps in the medium-term future, setting a strong precedent which can also be used against any worker’s party long before it manages to get started. “First they came for” and all that.
I do very much agree with you that the actual solutions are going to need to come from outside the Democrats. That doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant having a voice inside the government, or being united with the elements of it that want to unite with the people.
(That last bit meaning, maybe Chuck Schumer/Hakeem Jeffries/Nancy Pelosi aren’t first on the Christmas list even if I am still also against them going into Gitmo.)
I personally would like to see a grassroots movement that is more focused on direct resistance than electoralism but that’s just me.
I think it has to be both. Well… actually, that used to be true, I think “electoralism” is likely to be mostly useless by the time the midterms roll around, so it will have to be only grassroots. Not as a matter of strategy, but just as the new reality.
It just to be that voting made some level of difference but wasn’t enough. You may now, though, get your wish, and “electoralism” may be going away, and you can have experience with how much more fun and easy it is to effect changes to government without having a formal system for it however corrupted that system was in practice.
As far as I can tell, achieving actual changes within this system, that do not lead to humanity’s near term death, is quite literally impossible. They are burning this bitch down. It’s not how I would have done it, but it’s done. There is no saving the USA from this. Nothing will be going back to “normal.” The rules by which our country has functioned have been so thoroughly trampled, they are unrecognizable. We are in for such a hellish future, that nearly any method of changing course is justified.
My point being, I think it’s very naive to expect ANY change for the better to come about without significant bloodshed.
We have made significant progress in four weeks—to the point that we can begin to see the outlines of a Democratic victory in the House in 2026.
Assuming that there will be free and fair midterm elections, or midterm elections at all.
The irony of using a fasc-friend platform to talk about resisting fascists when Ghost is right over there.
move on with your life, there’s way bigger battles to fight than “at some point in the past, a Nazi once stood on this patch of Earth… therefore anyone who stands on it becomes a Nazi”. this is not the hill to die on you think it is.
which website a person casually clicks a link to doesn’t irrevocably and eternally condemn (or purify) their personal beliefs and immortal soul. it’s. just. a. website. and they took the Nazi shit down already. JFC.
📎 Hi! It looks like you’re making a bad-faith effort to throw shade at a prominent leftist platform, aiming to divide the left into innumerable internal squabbles about purity tests and innuendos, right when their very existence is being threatened and it’s pretty critical for them to hang the fuck together. Would you like to bring up something about Elizabeth Warren and Blackrock? Or say that Bernie Sanders is a big piece of shit for some reason, because he’s not left enough? Those are often popular collateral talking points in my experience.
Substack is a leftist platform? Since when?
- https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/
- https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/substack-nazi-content-policies-controversy/
- https://www.theverge.com/24040685/substack-newsletters-nazi-content-moderation-policy
- https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/substackers-against-nazis
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/business/substack-nazis-content-moderation.html
There’s more. Many more. And a list of literal (as in swastika-flaunting) Nazis being hosted on Substack would be far longer. (Oh, and you might want to have a look at the dates on those articles. This is not new information.)
What do you call a bar, again, that lets Nazis openly associate? And what do you call the other patrons also in it?
Maybe the non-Nazis should read this: https://ghost.org/docs/migration/substack/
Okay so I thought to myself, am I really gonna have to have this drawn-out conversation for why it is apparently “bad” for me to read this clearly leftist person and mount this long defense for why he should be able to write, I should be able to read, and then post some stuff none of which has any goddamned thing to do with Nazis, sort of thinking how successfully you’ve managed to deflect away from the fairly important things that are being said in this actual article (seriously: read it) and into some extensive bullshit.
Because I don’t want to seem callous or like I’m not open to talking about stuff. Who knows. Maybe I’ll catch Nazi from reading this article. Strange things happen sometimes.
Right about when I was having this sort of woeful realization and deciding that maybe I would have to skim five different links and deal at some sort of length with what they were saying, was when I was reading:
(Oh, and you might want to have a look at the dates on those articles. This is not new information.)
And it sorta clicked for me how to deal with it all. This is true: It’s old information. Look at the dates. For what it’s worth, I agree with Substack not kicking the Nazis off originally, but after the whole internet yelled at them for most of 2023, they finally caved and at the beginning of 2024 said, alright, fine, the three Nazis who we are hosting are no longer welcome. Happy now?
They removed the Nazis from the bar. And for some reason there are still people screaming about how the bar is full of Nazis. You know, the bar that all the leftists go to hang out in, and exchange useful leftist information within. I wonder why they are so upset about it, and urging people that whatever the fuck they do, DO NOT GO INTO THAT BAR OR LISTEN TO WHAT ANYONE HAS TO SAY THERE BECAUSE IT IS ALL NAZIS AND YOU WILL BE BAD IF YOU GO IN THERE.
Can you show me one swastika-flaunting Nazi being hosted on Substack? I would welcome you having the opportunity to prove me wrong. As far as I know, there are 0.
They bounced three. In one of those links they cited SIXTEEN who openly used Nazi symbolism just in their avatars and whatnot.
Substack is still a Nazi bar.
But of course you didn’t bother to check, did you?
You’ve (collective) got the information. And the solution to it, no less, in the last link. What you (collective) choose to do about it is on your head. But given what I’ve seen in the USA’s so-called “left” you’re going to cheerfully continue using a service that profits from Nazis.
You do you, boo.
I had a feeling you wouldn’t be able to show me any swastika-flaunting Nazi, in the present. It is weird that you keep using the present tense, and citing articles in the present tense, and just kind of not addressing the fact that things have changed since the present which you are talking about.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/substack-changes-its-mind-will-remove-pro-nazi-content-after-all
Substack is still a Nazi bar.
But of course you didn’t bother to check, did you?
“Do your own research!”
I really don’t like that this style of argumentation has entered the mainstream, where someone asking for an example or some kind of justification gets talked down to, like “Of course there is an example, because I say so, now it’s your job to go and find it, and not my job to show it to you.”
Oh, also, because I’ve started to as a rule started to make an effort publicize some true stuff more, and in a lasting fashion, when I feel like I’m getting some kind of bad-faith bullshit leading people in the direction away from the truth direction. As opposed to just getting in what seems like an absolutely endless argument with the other person not that interested in anything I’m saying. I’m happy to do that second thing too, up to a point, but the first seems more useful.
That should lead to a groundswell of donations to the Democratic Party, which the leadership can use to primary AOC and The Squad with some well-picked AIPAC-endorsed corporate stuffed shirts. Then they can have a straight run for those who miss the old Republican party of the Reagan/Bush years
Very true… How could we intercept those donations and direct them towards something progressive?
I love how reliably ever-present, under any type of news about something good or bad going on in the political world, is the little trickle of comments saying “YEAH FUCK THE DEMOCRATS WE ALL HATE DEMOCRATS.”
Didn’t people learn their lesson about this after the last election? You can hate the Democrats’ shitting fundraising consultants and geriatric leadership without needing to inject a conversation about it into some kind of random conversation about grassroots progress or literally any other thing.
The primary concern of the people in charge of the Democrats seems to be to keep the left contained where it can’t actually affect policy and threaten the interests of stakeholders. As such, any fightback will stop short of empowering grass-roots organisers, and prioritise ensuring that grass-roots enthusiasm can be safely diverted to the benefit of stakeholders.
Why are you depending on the Democrats to “empower” you? There’s your problem, right there. Yes, they’re mostly shit, with a small handful of exceptions. I think you mean “shareholders” instead of “stakeholders,” but what you’re saying is mostly true. The point that I’m making is that it barely matters anymore.
If the fire chief is a cokehead, and we’re trying to figure out how to get the fire to stop now that it’s in 5 buildings in our big wooden city, I think we should focus on “what the fuck to do” as the OP article is doing, not purely focus on how the fire chief is a cokehead and if we could just get rid of him, things would be okay at last.
I feel like getting rid of the coke head is probably a pretty important step in the overall plan though.
unlike fascists, we don’t all agree we need to “get rid of” our political opponents but I do take your point. i would say they quickly become irrelevant once a movement latches on and changes the prevailing political winds. politicians, especially Dems, are cowards. they are like a flag in the wind. they will go wherever the fuck the wind tells them. and we, collectively, make the wind.
One party is filled with actual Nazis, the other party believes in appeasement at their best and outright collaboration at their worst… They are our “political rivals” the way the Nazis were the political rivals of the Jews.
They are not our political rivals, they are the enemies of the peasant working class. Their deluded peasant supporters are our political rivals, and I’m not advocating for removing them… Except in self defense
I wish that was true, but I think the Dems have made it clear that for them, the oligarchy makes the wind
Any electoral backlash might be to late. Who knows if there will be another election?
Elections are a formal and organized implementation of the fact that if there are 10,000 people on one side, and 500 on the other, than the 10,000 can win in a fight.
The founding fathers didn’t mean to lay down pure prescriptions for how everything was supposed to function, like computer code that all the humans were supposed to obey. They were just trying to strike a balance between that reality of life, versus having some kind of a system so everything wasn’t a big fistfight every four years and everyone could have a peaceful life. But elections are just a symbol for who can win if everyone gets motivated for it.
And they made the mistake of copying bad ideas from the UK voting system, which led to the problems that the US has nowadays.
