• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • Therefore, power should be handed over to the fascists as quick as possible. Great.

    Again, that is literally not what I’m saying, and at this point you seem to be arguing with a strawman. I’m not anti-harm reduction; I simply believe that the efficacy of harm reduction is predicated on effective action that simply does not exist at present. What I’m calling for is for the left to shift gears to direct action to coerce the system into getting its shit in order. Also vote for the less shitty candidate, but that shouldn’t be where you put all or even most of your energy, because losing that particular bet is a mathematical certainty.

    So your opposition to harm reduction is… what?

    See above.

    All three of those were championed primarily by progressives.

    Yes, there’s a reason I called it cannibalism.

    Golly gee, I wonder why people might be hostile towards beating the “BIDEN BAD” drum during the period of 2024 when he was the only non-fascist candidate with a serious chance of winning the 2024 election.

    See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. Biden 2024 wasn’t an outlier in an otherwise sane political climate; that shit was the new post-2016 normal. Any credible strategy needed to provide a path to victory through that new normal within a decade (more realistically five years, but eh) without letting fascists win in the meantime. So-called harm reduction focuses so much on the latter that it does nothing substantial to address the former.

    If you want, I’ll send you a selfie once the black-flecked puke starts coming up, so you have a nice little souvenir to celebrate with.

    Looking forward to it ;).

    If you were alive in 1950, you’d be saying the American Auschwitz was going to open by 1960 or 1962 anyway, so harm reduction was pointless.

    American Hitler wasn’t winning elections in 1950 so… no?

    there was nothing that could be done about it so long as the SHITLIBS were still in power.

    Okay it’s starting to feel like you’re scanning my responses for keywords rather than actually reading what I’m saying.



  • For fuck’s sake, have you not looked around to see what’s happened these past six fucking months?

    I have, and I know that without the serious action I was talking about it was a question of whether Alligator Alcatraz would’ve been opened in 2025 or 2029, with maybe a small chance of 2033. There was nothing unique about 2025 that made it the ideal timing for a fascist takeover.

    “Stop performing one of the core functions of harm reduction that attempts to reduce harm!”

    Well as long as all or most of your energy is going to harm reduction you’ll only ever end up with fascism.

    Pointed out below. But I guess it’s not fast enough for your tastes, so let’s do nothing and usher in the fascists to power instead. After all, politics are like a magical pendulum, where one side winning means the other side must get an equivalent win eventually!

    Oh I’m under no illusion that fascists winning would (or, well, will given that they’ve pretty much already won) bring about a socialist revolution or any of that stuff.

    When the fuck are progressives shutting down serious action?

    Remember Uncommited? Palestine protests? Calls for Biden to step down? I have seen all three get called Russian psy-ops by supposedly left-leaning people on Lemmy. You probably know better than me whether that’s a representative sample of American politics, but holy hell for a time you couldn’t say anything bad about Biden without getting showered with downvotes around here. This sort of cannibalism was one of the many forms of complicity that allowed the march to fascism to proceed unimpeded.

    You’re absolutely right. In the wise words of a political party canvassing for seemingly everything a good fucking third of the ‘left’ commenters here have come to adore, we’re all going to die someday. So why not as soon as possible?

    I mean, in this case we’re more talking about whether it’s worth it to pay through the nose for life support when you already know what you have is terminal.

    “We’ve managed to make ‘socialism’ into an acceptable word in politics and almost got a democratic socialist into a major party’s nomination twice in the past ten years, in a country which has been immensely hostile to any socialist ideas for at least 70 years, and in an intensified period of anti-government right-wing insanity since 1980.”

    That would be nice-ish progress in saner times, and a few decades of it and you might’ve had a shot at sane government (if the establishment didn’t manage to tank the whole affair, anyway), but like what makes you think you ever had that kind of time? The clock was already ticking with Bush, really got going with Obama and Trump 1 pretty much sealed the deal. When I say fascism was inevitable I don’t mean it was coming within decades; I mean America was going to be fascist by 2033. Much more direct action was needed to prevent fascism within that timeframe. So with that in mind,

    But I guess it’s not fast enough for your tastes

    No, it’s not fast enough for the reality on the ground.


  • One one hand harm reduction is nice, but on the other I have seen exactly nothing from Western politics these past few years to convince me that any harm is being reduced. The principle of harm reduction requires serious, productive action (so not canvassing and voter drives, for the love of God stop doing voter drives) to be taken during the period when the harm is reduced to push democracy off its collision course with fascism. When progressives don’t take that serious action—or worse, actively shut down said action—they’re simply kicking the can down the road, turning harm “reduction” from a credible strategy to a farce. I don’t disagree with the principle, but where’s the action necessary for any of this to make sense? Because as far as I can see, harm reduction in America was the farce version.