mozz

The difference is clear if you look at cause and effect, rather than the immediate moral consequences.

Why wouldn't the immediate moral consequences be the main thing to look at? Like I say, I see the difference. I don't see that one or the other is, like, harmless, or not a bad thing.

Trump is not a rare example of an exceptionally fascist person, rather, the material conditions within the US have pointed to allowing a fascist candidate to take power.

Absolutely agree. We need to reform the explicitly normal-person-hostile policies that in ways that are honestly too numerous to even list out have created the space where Trump can flourish.

Are you familiar with Dialectical and Historical Materialist analysis?

Not even slightly.

I know many non-US people, especially from the global south, who take the attitude: Hey the US government is full of enemies to us, don't try to tell me anything good about any one of them, please and thanks. For them to take that viewpoint honestly makes perfect sense to me.

I know absolutely 0 of them who go on message boards and get real involved in talking with Americans about how they should view American politics and who they should support in American elections or who they shouldn't, and how to view it, and what those people did in domestic US politics decisions and why that should impact who I support in the election.

Just one of those little mysteries one encounters sometimes

i think the administrations response to a labor action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is the best thing to examine because it shows how the administration responds to labor power that opposes its aims and threatens it.

I disagree. I think the administration's response to a union action that threatens the infrastructure of the entire nation is probably going to be colored somewhat by their reaction to the infrastructure of the entire nation being threatened. It's probably the least reasonable situation to take, and then extrapolate out to form the conclusion "and that's why he just hates unions."

Especially since, and I don't know why this keeps being not notable to you, his administration kept working with the railroads after, until the workers got the sick days that were the whole thing they had decided to have the strike over.

the tiktok ban is the best example of media policy against that which is actively controlled by the united states government and power elite. For more on this topic the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent is a great start and not too out there to scare off liberals. if you want something a little bit more recent, look up stovepipeing, the intelligence apparatus' method for creating media buy in for the iraq war.

Yes, I have read Manufacturing Consent, and I was around for the Iraq War and the general media enthusiasm for it; I had arguments with family members about it because they were believing what they read in the papers. Not that it's relevant, but as far as I can tell stovepiping was something totally different related to that war.

And, none of that is recent or in any way related to what Biden's doing about US media right now.

I'm gonna take this as an indication that you have no other examples of media Biden wants to ban, even ones that are a lot more explicitly hostile to him than TikTok is, and just want to get condescending to maintain a posture of being the one who's explaining to the one who doesn't understand what's really going on. Good luck with that! I don't think it's going well, but you can keep trying.

I guess I just don't see a huge difference in level-of-evil between imperialism and expansionism. I get that they're not the same thing but I think most of what I said could be applied to one or the other or to both and the point remains pretty much the same.

so he basically coopted the movement

Absolutely false.

Unions in the US have the same leaders they always did. Now, though, they have an NLRB who will fight legal battles on their behalf. Here's a general overview.

How on earth is that a bad thing? You're saying the NLRB was "coopted" by the federal government? I'm having trouble even understanding what you're saying happened, here.

i have all the reason to be concerned given your long history messing with our democracies in the region

Yeah, this part makes sense to me (and in particular as a reason to be suspicious of any US politician, Biden included). That said, given Trump's unusual-even-compared-with-the-American-standard support for overt dictators the world over, including Bolsonaro, you should definitely want Trump not to win power again, right?

harm reduction does not need to infringe on critique of the current executive branch.

Yeah. I've been criticizing Biden for abetting a genocide quite a bit; I think you can find some comment where I compared the Biden State Department to the Nazis.

That said, total bullshit criticism like "union buster" I tend to be against. You can find other links in this comment section where I talk about it and link to some explanation of his historic support for labor and specifically how it related to his breaking the rail strike and the events after, but here's an article which talks about it more broadly.

This is just my uneducated viewpoint on it:

I don't think capitalism is as tied directly to imperialism as you're saying here. The USSR was plenty imperial, and they were (nominally at least) Communist. There are also plenty of capitalist countries in the world that don't have empires.

I think imperialism is mainly a function of power, and how the human beings who tend to gravitate to power and wield it, tend to operate. That can happen with or without capitalism or a US-style governmental system. I actually think, for all the terrible evils of US capitalism, that the US governmental system does a better than average job of reining it in. I think if it were any other country on earth that had the type of money and military power the US does right now, they'd be doing much much worse things than the (already pretty bad) things the US government and corporate system is doing with them.

Again, that's not to say I disagree with you on reining in capitalism or American empire. On that part we're fully on the same page, believe it or not. But I think the best way to do that is actually to preserve the US electoral and governmental system and overall position in the world (maybe with some major reforms e.g. on lobbying, media ownership, and the electoral system). I think simply tearing down the American empire is probably going to be a gateway to something much, much worse, because the whole problem all along wasn't an "America problem," it was just a general money and power problem that's worldwide (or universal, as a function of how people and systems of power operate).

I actually think that if your primary goal is undoing American empire, you should be advocating for Trump, because him fucking things up to the point that the US loses its imperial position is a way more realistic way that might happen than anything that's realistic as an "on purpose" outcome within American politics (electoral or otherwise).

But I also think that the new reality (both inside and outside the US) if that happened would be much, much worse than Biden or Hillary Clinton or Bush 2 or any of these already very bad outcomes we've been seeing so far.

Again, just my take on it, based on what you said.

lets just confine it to the rail strike

Let's not. I'm pretty sure that my argument was that if you don't confine it to the rail strike, Biden's overall record on labor is excellent, when you include the rail strike and then all the other union things he did.

Can I do this too? Let's just confine it to the day he forgave six billion dollars of student loan debt. On that one day, his record was excellent. Therefore he's great. See? Logic doesn't work that way.

the active campaign to control media sources includes the tiktok ban. no matter your opinion on the application itself, you can't deny that the point of the ban is to remove it from the american media landscape.

"Includes" the TikTok ban.

What else does it include? Any other media sources he's actively campaigned to control? Or does removing the one that's overt Chinese spyware mean that he hates independent "media" in the US, and just forgot about Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, and all the other sources where people can get anti-US news freely? (Or Fox News or Newsmax, which actually present an affirmative threat to his presidency and in an indirect way to his actual personal safety, and show some fairly legitimate reasons why someone could argue for shutting them down?)

In the same way he forgot to crush all those other unions when he was being super anti-union in that one very specific way that one time?

You're clearly fishing for a "gotcha!" Because you can't actually argue any longer, lol.

I'm not into the idea of just "yes it is" "no it isn't" 'yes it is" "no it isn't." It's a waste of time. I feel like I understand your viewpoint on Biden at this point, and I've pretty much said what I had to say on my side. We don't have to keep going back and forth until someone "wins." If you want to call that me not being able to actually argue any longer, then sure.

I feel like we've arrived at the crux of me understanding the deeper seated issue, though, in that you just feel that any candidate who's okay with capitalism is going to be the enemy, and we have to overthrow the capitalist system completely in order to make real progress. So anything short of that that Biden does is going to make him the enemy to you.

I don't agree with that viewpoint either, but I don't really understand the details of what you think on the deeper viewpoint side. So me asking where what you want has been implemented is, one, yes starting to tee up reasons why I might not think it's realistic or why I might not agree. But, also, I'm genuinely just curious about the details of what you believe. Like if you said China is the model, or Cuba is the model, or it hasn't really been implemented in the way you'd like to see it but X, Y, and Z are how it would be different this time in the US, then those are very different things which could all go under the heading of "Communist."

You can disagree, I just find it condescending that you seem to imply you see things others aren't.

Okay, so it's not punching left or silencing dissent if I disagree? Just want to get that clarified. You can call me condescending, that's fine; I probably am.

As for Ukraine, what specifically are you asking? Do you think opposing US imperialism must mean I support Russia, or something? My "feeling" is that war is bad and unjustifiable. Violence is purely justified against oppressors. I believe in Nation's right to self-determination.

Should the US send weapons to them? Or is that more imperialism? I am just curious; you brought up imperialism, so I'm curious what that means.

I want Socialism, and eventually, Communism. Worker ownership of the Means of Production. Democracy of, by, and for the Proletariat. Do you have any specific questions? We could be here all day otherwise and I am not sure there would be a point.

I'm just curious about what your viewpoint is. Not sure why that's a problem when arguing back and forth with hostility wasn't, but you can stop any time, if you don't like it.

What's a country which has implemented the model you'd like to see in the US? Or would this be the US doing it for the first time that it's been implemented on a big scale in the way you'd like to see it implemented?

labor demonstrations have been crushed just a few short years ago

Biden fired the guy who used to run the NLRB, and put in a bunch of actually pro-labor people, who gave lots of material support to all this union activity that coincidentally has been meeting with all sorts of success over the last couple of years.

He did also break the rail strike, and then his NLRB kept working the issue after people weren't paying attention, and got the rail workers the sick days they were asking for in the first place.

To me, it sounds like he wanted to avoid the disruption to the economy that the rail strike would have caused (which would have caused inflation which actually was sort of his fault, in contrast to the Covid and price-gouging inflation which is currently happening which people are blaming him for even though it isn't his fault).

You can say, I guess, that he broke the rail strike because he hates workers, and then wasn't paying attention when his NLRB got them the sick days after, and that he just didn't bother to break all of the other strikes that were happening coincidentally before during and after that, including historic ones like UAW and the writer's guild strike. Or maybe that he hates rail workers specifically but not the other kind. Or something. I don't know.

Or were there labor demonstrations other than the rail strike that were crushed that I missed?

there is an active campaign to control media sources

Can you tell me more about this?

It's necessary to look at the actions a politician has taken.

You literally told me that my message listing actions Biden has taken was unnecessary.

The fact that you believe it necessary to "uhmm, akshually" someone who has expressed disapproval of Biden from the left is condescending and counterproductive.

Can I do this too? If someone posts a message I disagree with, can I say they're punching me, and silencing dissent, and "uhmm, askhusally"ing my message, and counterproductive?

Dude. I disagree with you. It's allowed. Stop trying to imply that it isn't, and either engage with what I'm saying, or don't. It seems like you finally are engaging now, so maybe it's late for me to be saying that, but it's just irritating me that you're trying to find so big a variety of words to use to imply that I shouldn't be allowed to say a viewpoint you don't agree with.

entrenching US Imperialism

Quick unrelated question: What's your feeling on the war in Ukraine?

As the head of state, failing to push back against Capitalism

Voting for Biden buys time, but does not prevent fascism.

What would be a good end state, to you? Like what would be a good American system, if you had the perfect politicians in office and could set up the economy and the structure of government exactly as you wanted?