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good leftists dont engage with false equivalencies.
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Equating Biden and Trump is a false equivalency. Both are bad. But one is magnitudes worse. It’s ok to compare and judge them. Biden is flawed. Trump is uniquely evil.
A dumpster fire is bad. An out of control wildfire is worse. There’s no reason not to recognize that one thing is worse than another, even if both are bad.
History didn't start with the 2016 election. Biden has had a much worse impact on the country over his entire career than Trump's four years of fumbling. Biden is more evil just based on the '94 crime bill alone - millions of Americans' lives were ruined and are still ruined today by that bill and Biden isn't even apologetic about it.
Joe was also one of the biggest pushers of the Iraq war. He got to choose every single witness in the senate hearing on Iraq and he chose 18 different pro-war witnesses! He was also talking about war in Iraq long before it became a mainstream thing.
"I don't believe this is a rush to war, I believe it's a march to peace and security" "Sadam is dangerous. The world would be a better place without him. He is seeking nuclear weapons." "President Bush did not lash out precipitously in Iraq after 9/11. At each pivotal moment he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation and I believe he will continue to do so"
Clipped together by the Blowback Boys
Biden has already likely caused more harm by:
Ratcheting up tensions with Russia, likely precopitating the SMO.
Restoring some competence to the imperial machine. More military actions flying under tge radar, financial weapons being used more effectively to impoverish.
Creating horrible economic conditions for various African countries through blanket sanctions and intimidation.
Cutting COVID benefits and declaring the pandemic emergency over.
Biden caused more problems than Trump for the same reason matches cause more forest fires than flamethrowers: bigger dangers are taken more seriously
Also Biden did nordstream
Americans dont care about they continued undermining of the sovereignty of foreign countries, they care about if the boot on their face has a different aesthetic and said boot says the right slogans.
If you think Trump is worse that's fine, it's a debatable point, and not a very important one either way.
But he's not a unique evil. He's not an abberation, he's the consequence of this system. This isn't a wildfire or a unique event, this is another day in the forest of late stage capitalism
Technically wildfires are a consequence of late stage capitalism
Trump isn't uniquely evil. There are plenty of gamergate losers and billionaire ghouls out there. And someone who fits both criteria now owns Twitter. Trump is a figurehead of American fascism, which is the end result of late stage capitalism. Biden is a figurehead of the neoliberalism that leads to people like Trump.
Agreed. While not voting is technically a choice, it's not a choice you should take if you want change. Let's put out the wildfire first, then we'll work on putting out the dumpster fire.
Unless people have a realistic third choice we can make. Ignoring the problem until it goes away isn't going to work though.
Is there some particular action the Biden admin is doing that you would categorize as "putting out the wildfire" ? From here it seems like the vast majority of Trump policies - policies decried and lambasted by Democrats - have somehow been upheld and continued. Almost like voting for Biden is diametrically opposed to putting out any wildfires.
edit: note that they chose to attack the idea of not voting rather than coming up with literally any positive action the Biden admin has done - because there aren't any
You might not know this if you're not American, but America works on a first past the post system which isn't democratic. They call it democracy and they tell you that your can vote for your choice of president, but that's not true. You actually vote against a particular candidate. If you don't use your vote, then you didn't vote against anyone. But if you vote "for biden", then you're actually voting against Trump.
Congratulations the person you voted for to put out the wildfires just started stabbing holes in the fire hoses as soon as he was elected.
That fire can be roe, climate change, the rise of fascism, take your pick.
Please explain to me how not voting would have prevented your scenario.
It doesn't prevent the scenario, just like voting didn't prevent the scenario. You need to stop thinking about politics as something confined to voting every two years, because that's how you get an ancient decrepit beast like Biden being the "lesser" evil. Politics is about actions and organizing.
If everyone didn't vote that would delegitimize the bourgeois electoral system.
If one person doesn't vote... who cares?
This is always the argument. Every four years this is the argument. It's always time to "deal with the current crisis by voting before we seriously discuss stopping the whole machine".
It's been decades and centuries of this argument, when is it actually the time to admit that fighting 'the current electoral crisis' isn't an important use of time, and that the only meaningful choice comes from promoting and enacting ideas outside of electoralism?
Holy shit, how many decades of that horse-faced pony show do you need before you realize that's not how this works? You know what happens if the Blue Sex Offender beats the Red Sex Offender this time? Do you think it's "putting out the dumpster fire"? No! There will be a new Unique Evil, a new "wildfire," and the moderates will say that we yet again must wait and bend to their will to have another feckless sex offender who is the correct brand and that will somehow make things better even as he makes permanent all of the already-disgusting but nominally-temporary measures from the Red Sex Offender who preceded him.
People have literally been making the argument you just made since the 1970s at least. They've been making it the entire time, and the time to go from "reducing" harm to "ending" harm or -- God forbid -- making actual progress never came because we still have morons saying the same thing a half century later!