We’re not in a democracy, we’re in a capitalist duopoly, get with it and stop acting like a fucking child because the world doesn’t give you ideal options. Your choices are shit sandwich and bigger shit sandwich, if you refuse to choose then you will be force fed the bigger shit sandwich. There is no getting what you want out of the situation, there is literally no such thing as a club sandwich, it doesn’t exist, but you can make an attempt at not being force fed the larger pile of shit and bread.

Most on the left are finished with trying to discuss, or find common ground, with the right There is no such thing. The right wing does not discuss in good faith, and they don’t believe in words. Hypocrisy doesn’t phase them and they have no shame. They will abandon a principle the moment it inconveniences them.

And frankly the world sees who you look up to, so if I were you I wouldn’t be slinging around accusations of stupidity.

Eh, Hanlon’s Razor. There are certainly plenty of dirty neo-libs, but I also think the Democratic party is where passionate, practical minded, progressive political science types wind up, and I think that demographic is well-meaning but caught up in metrics.

Metrics rely on historical data. Obviously Biden should be the candidate, he’s an incumbent, and incumbents have an advantage. The problem is the sample size is too low (n = 47) to really control for most variables. Especially since when you consider the study longitudinally, n = 1.

Anyway, politics is hard, and I’m willing to give a little grace to those who are least trying to be smart. Strategists seem like the smart move, but the big paradox of analyzing a quickly-changing subject is that the more data-backed your strategy, the more outdated it is. The world moves too fast now.

I suspect a not-insignificant segment of the caucus has been been just sincerely trying to play the right moves.

The “he had to drop out” part is the issue and it wasn’t just because of people crying about his age, the whole “we finally beat Medicare” and his brain melting on live t.v played a big part.

I’m like 90% sure he said he’d run for one term when running in 2020, but then he held on to the belief that he was the only one who could win for too long that getting primary elections set up would have taken too long. Republicans were already talking about going to court over Kamala being added to the rolls “too late” so Kamala was “forced” on us.

You really think Harris would be just as bad as Trump : invading Venezuela, threatening Greenland and Canada, all those tariffs, alienating allies, putting military in cities to support ice, shutting down pbs, blocking elections, destroying environmental protections, etc. the list goes on and on. Come on, you can’t really be that ignorant.

Enjoy choking on your idealism and criticizing others for not sitting on their hands as effectively as you do. I’ll stick with pragmatism over dogmatism.

Nope. If you voted for Harris and didn’t dissuade others from doing the same then that’s great. Of course you should push for more progressive options and get involved. It’s the idiots that didn’t vote for Harris because she ‘wasn’t good enough’ and ended up allowing trump to destroy the country that are the idiots that deserve all the vitriol they are getting.

I respect that you acknowledge my way of thinking rather than caricaturizing it. Thank you. I am still of the opinion that had the grenade not been thrown now, it would lead to situation becoming even worse next time around. This is why I say Harris would only have delayed the inevitable. It is my opinion that the death toll would have been higher and more dramatic if the issue was allowed to fester for another election cycle. I agree that sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term - it’s just that to me, the current situation is that loss, and it enables us to keep fighting in the form of people like Mamdani being elected. I strongly believe that if Kamala had won, Mamdani would not have. Mamdani may actually move the window, we’ll see. That’s what we need.

Blood is partially on my hands indeed, but it is also on the hands of all the neoliberal voters of the last few decades by the same reasoning. If the grenade had been thrown 30 years ago, it also would have blown up, albeit less spectacularly, and that lesser blood would be on the hands of those who refused to vote out of principle that year. If the grenade had been thrown 25 years ago, it would have blown up, slightly more. 20 years ago, even more. Etc etc. This is why I believe that if we sucked it up with Kamala this time around, then we would just find ourselves with the same gambit in the future but with even higher stakes. Every election, people have said “sometimes you have to take a loss to keep fighting long term” and “THIS is the ONE election that you really can’t afford to throw the grenade! That last one maybe, sure. But that’s in the past now anyways. THIS is the one you have to suck it up and vote for!” And indeed it never gets better. Blood is on the voters hands either way, the only difference is if we see the toll paid immediately (making it easy to blame them) or see it delayed by decades (making it hard to connect the dots). From my perspective, the majority of blood spilled today is precisely due to the lack of strategic foresight of compromise-voters of decades past, exhibiting exactly the same mentality that called for voting for Kamala this time around. In a nutshell, I believe my mentality spills blood today, but the compromise-voting spills more blood tomorrow. I consider my ability to properly take into account a greater future cost over a present cost exactly an example of strategic thinking. So it’s funny that we have an identical qualm with each other - it comes from simply a different prediction of the future.

I’m sure that this still leaves us in disagreement, but it is at least a smaller disagreement, not about strategy, intention, or even mentality - we merely have different judgements of the most likely future, which I think is a much more negligible disagreement - since predicting the future accurately is known to be difficult.

No factually the reason was because she wanted genocide and offered no meaningful economic reforms that are desperately needed. Try again.

I reject your assertion, but I’ll humor you.

The whole world will be better off

That’s how. Net positive for the world.

You wanted a net positive for you and yours when you declared genocide is not a red line. I want a net positive for all humanity, and humanity will move past the dead American empire.

Why do you blame voters for not voting for a dogshit candidate and not the dogshit candidates? Why not blame the Democratic party and its refusal to allow an actual primary to allow a person who actually represents the will of the people?

What a laughably childish line of reasoning you have here. How does voting for more genocide and war and deregulation make your life any better? How does supporting that system uncritically help you?

It doesn’t. Go read some books and educate yourself just a little bit before contributing such useless pablum next time.

Also wild that my issue is GENOCIDE. Like just tell me you like murdering brown people and move on dude. Lmao

Sorry I have a shred of morality to stand on and am not happy just signing off on genocide.

How you look at our political system and how utterly broken it is devoid of any substantive connection to the will of the people and blame ME speaks to both the level of depravity and patent refusal to grapple with the material realities of our world that liberalism is unfit to deal with.

How you look at two candidates who promise endless war and destruction with no plan to make the lives of those suffering at home better and then blame me for saying both are disgusting and will lead to many of the same results baffles me.

If you think Kamala Harris would have been different on Gaza you are braindead. If you think she would have been less gungho for deportation (Biden increased ICE a fuck load because he likes deporting people so much and remember Kamala Harris was just more Biden based on her entire campaign) you are braindead. If you think we wouldn’t have bombed Iran or attacked Venezuela in some way you are braindead.

The fact of the matter is Kamala Harris had an easy path to victory if she only actually catered her messaging to people who are suffering in this country. Instead of leaning into incredibly popular progessive policy she decided (as dems always do) to go to the center to peal off people from the right because God forbid we try the policies that work anywhere else in the world.

The audacity of bloodthirsty liberals looking down on others with a backbone. Here is a line that I’m sure will make your little brain explode. Trump is president in no small part because of how awful Obama was as a president.

Trump is a symptom of the apathy of the likes of you. You don’t think people outside the US are human.

You really haven’t been paying attention. Kamala literally ran on half the policies Trump is doing now and was posturing to ramp up imperialist action abroad just like Trump.

If you think Kamala Harris wouldn’t have bombed Iran in the exact same fashion as Trump I really question your ability to critically think about how the US maintains (or historically maintained) its power geopolitically.

I’ll give you a hint its not with peace.

What are your arguments for why they would be so different because both her campaign and history itself disagree with you. Like please I’d like to have a rational conversation if you can muster up some logical points.