What’s that?

Even the Ayatollah doesn’t mean it that way. It’s death to “America,” i.e. the political entity, not death to “Americans,” i.e. the people who happen to have been born there.

It just makes you sound like a dweeb because “disinformation” is the dem-aligned version of “fake news”. I don’t have the slightest interest interest in your life story.

What you’re describing is a low consciousness of politics, whether due to desperation, poor education, or whatever else, since those moment-to-moment experiences generally could productively be described as political.

My argument, and you might actually sympathize with it, is that the only fundamental difference here is the media screaming at people about this nonstop. Seriously, lineral people who like to fancy themselves as “staying up to date” with political goings-on are basically in an abusive relationship with the media that complete contorts their ideas of the past and future to promote the “this is the most important election of our livetimes” bullshit that they’ve done three elections in a row now. It’s not what the politicians are doing, it’s this screaming from the media that is frankly wrecking the mental health of the people who listen to it regularly.

I actually do remember what it was like before then and a few months into it starting, whatever you might say of my decision making, I just disconnected for two years because I already hate Trump and don’t need a thousand headlines a day that ORANGMANBADORANGMANBADORANGMANBAD. It ended up being a good opportunity to learn about politics from a historical perspective and get some distance from this shit (and ultimately, that was a major factor in my becoming a communist, but we aren’t here for that).

Perhaps you’re conflating “the electoral dog and pony show” for “politics” then, because if you were “deeply poor,” it’s hard to imagine not dealing with politics. Easy example, the cops are a pretty political institution, acting as the agents of establishment powers. Hell, the enclosure of the commons and the resultant practically monopolistic effect that landlording has is also pretty political, liberals just don’t talk about it (other than Adam Smith).

I made no value judgements about insulting people (you don’t really need to specify “in online debate”), I was amused by the fact that you called it “disinformation” when it was just an insult and pointing out how silly it was.

Politics has been an ever-present and disturbing part of our lives since 2016.

Politics was ever-present before that, it’s ever present in human society, it’s just that some privileged middle class people choose to ignore it and largely succeed when their NPR ASMR isn’t blasting them with “ORANG MAN BAD” every hour of the day to brow beat them into caring.

privilege

Do you think that privilege comes from the enlightenment of our politicians? From the population as a whole just working harder than in other places? Is it perhaps conjured from magic? Or would you consider that it was privilege derived from the well-documented and brutal exploitation of the global south?

Compared to last election, several million were people who recently voted Democrat, yes.

You are not intelligent or informed.

Going passed the disinformation in your first line.

lmao “It’s disinformation when someone calls me unintelligent and uninformed”. What happened, did you get tired of people telling you “that’s not what ad hominem means” and reach for the next rhetorical pejorative that crossed your mind?

Bernie is a bastard, but I think it’s backwards thinking to blame voters rather than candidates. In a nominal democracy, it’s the job of the candidates to appeal to people to get votes. If there is any merit to this idea, we must conclude that the failure was the Harris campaign for not generating the confidence needed to vote for her – which is a very expected outcome when you’re running as reactionary a campaign as she did, calling the wall a “good idea” and so on.

preventing global terrorism

You’re a miserable chauvinist and your college course would be crap. Israel is a rogue terrorist state that exists for the purpose of terrorizing its neighbors and therefore hindering development and destabilizing the Middle East

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HZs-v0PR44

You can be opposed to Israel’s excessive use of force while still supporting the Biden administration’s actions.

Israel is a settler-colonial state, all of its forces is excessive and it as a state should not exist. Anyone supporting Biden’s actions is supporting settler-colonialism and terrorism.

“Look at how long he has beaten his wife for. You’ll find that it’s not possible from him to completely stop beating his wife”

Who do you think the “someone else” is here? Are you so desperate to scream “But Trump!” at any specific criticism of Harris that you have discarded basic reading comprehension?

and very nearly succeeded

How can you say this? Do you think that there’s some artifact in the Capitol that grants the power of Legitimate Governance? Do you think a dipshit protest-turned-walking-tour where the cops only saw fit to fire on like one person and only a couple of cops were killed by the rioters is enough to reverse an election in the country that is the global superpower? The country that overthrows governments abroad with much greater violence every few years?

Is it possible that a couple of politicians would have been beaten to death? Yeah, in a somewhat different world, but the rioters did not begin to approach doing anything in the same dimension as a “successful coup”. There was no connection between what they did and what a group would need to do to take over the country, and imagining there was even anything in the Capitol that could be used for a bit of leverage (like if some pols got caught), that still wouldn’t be a coup and the feds would send SWAT in to blow some brains out.

It’s just classic American aggrievement politics, the hogs put on a show for you so now it’s “1/6” like it’s a new 9/11 combined with the fucking burning of the White House in 1814. It was never going to amount to anything on the magnitude that you’re asserting, or even several orders of magnitude below it. There is no conflict in which like 6 people die (multiple from rank stupidity) that can connect even notionally to the outcome of overthrowing the most powerful country in the world!

Well, unless it’s like a judicial coup or some other situation where people are exercising their political power directly, to be fair. But it’s not like Trump was doing the smarter thing and using executive orders to lay the ground for toppling the government, and even then there are so many barriers he’d need to get over that he didn’t even have the cognitive capacity back then to grapple with.

The donors – the domestic owning class – were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it’s been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they’ve always had, it’s just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.

It’s not a matter of what the owning class “believes” as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are interest groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.

Third parties are never even mentioned in the article. Is all left criticism of Harris “vote-third-party slop”?

What a coincidence!

This is one of those things where we all know what it means but you have deniability if someone calls you out on it. Just say what you mean instead of resorting to dogwhistling.

That polling was mentioned immediately in the article, but it then points to the wealth of issues where the headline is true.

Well, I would argue that that is like 95% where their votes are coming from, basically “This is still the ‘left’ option, I guess,” rather than believing in any sort of positive vision on the part of the Democratic Party (it doesn’t have one).

However, politics isn’t just a 1-dimensional spectrum where things neatly slot into whatever is closest. The fact that they are lurching rightward, the apparent contempt they have for the left, the lack of any meaningful similarity between what a left-wing person wants and what the Democrats will even acknowledge is real (like action on the genocide in Palestine), means that what you are taking as similarity is in many cases difference. Just saying “Fuck you, vote for me because the other guy is worse” is really not a good strategy for getting votes unless you are holding getting votes as secondary to pandering to donors.

Like, do you think a new Republican candidate could just be blatantly pro-choice and not lose one or two dedicated blocs of the Republican voting base, just because “he’s still the farthest right”? Of course not, democracy doesn’t work that way. If you don’t support people on the issues they care about most, a good number of them will tell you to go to hell while the others roll over as always.

The distinction being drawn is that popular sentiments aren’t going rightwards like the parties are.