https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/opinion/not-voting-elections.html
Matthew Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing Opinion writer.
NYT had to change the headline to “Why I Won’t Vote” after social media caught him voting
assuming you don’t think the American rescue plan, bipartisan infrastructure act, CHIPS, IRA, and the first massive tranche of funding for Ukraine are useful
No more than the CARES Act or the PROSWIFT Act or the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 or the Hong Kong Autonomy and Uyghur Human Rights Policy Acts, under the prior administration. We’ve never had a problem issuing large bipartisan bailouts in the thick of a recession, rolling out buckets of cash for proxy wars, or pissing away trillions on expanding legacy highway infrastructure. This is not something unique that Biden brought to the table.
Hell, Trump was even sending military aid to Ukraine as early as 2019. One could argue it was this military escalation and subsequent bombing of the Donbas that kicked off the war with Russia to begin with. Thanks for that!
Unfortunately they didn’t codify Roe, overhaul SCOTUS, or harden our institutions against fascism
Because they’re a party heavily populated with Pro-Life Democrats, they genuinely like the business-friendly / anti-regulatory bent to the SCOTUS, and they are more than happy to break bread with fascists just so long as the fascists can be used as proxies against enemies of US business interests at home and abroad.
This isn’t a fucking accident. It is deliberate bipartisan consensus.
Who knows what they could do with a larger majority and control of the House/Senate for 2 more years though
Exactly what they did in 2009. Send trillions of new dollars to the privatized tech sector. Roll out new privatization schemes for the USPS and US Education System. Bailout failed banks. Increase the size and the authority of police agencies. And impose a host of new unfunded mandates on consumers - via tariffs, anti-union tax increases on health insurance, and private lending schemes - that only serve to degrade quality of life in pursuit of higher corporate profits.
FFS, the lowest hanging fruit imaginable for the Democratic Party is DC Statehood. Easiest win imaginable to just hand yourself two free Senators and 3-4 new House Reps. And they won’t do it.
Are we going to ignore the Ferguson protests after the police slaying of Michael Brown?
Old enough to remember when Dems did control the House, but it didn’t do anything useful.
I don’t understand why we aren’t in the streets.
We were in the streets for Palestine and then some seriously bad shit happened.
Wish Biden would politely GTFO so someone more qualified could run for office
One is a peaceful message of unity
The admin posted the Christmas equivalent of “Everyone, please have a nice day”. Its not a message of anything more consequential than a polite wave of your hand.
Left image is a canned PR message from an intern who input “Write a generic Presidential holiday greeting” into ChatGPT
Right image is an actual post from the literal actual guy, probably while he takes an enormous dump on his gold-plated toilet.
Biden’s account gives you some generic superficial squishy pablum totally unreflective of the person wielding power.
Trump’s account give you the raw red-meat deranged inner thoughts of their most racist online uncle, grasping at the levers of power once again.
I understand how the second bit would turn you off of Trump. But I cannot, for the life of me, imagine any kind of enthusiasm for the first bit. It’s just… nothing. Absolutely devoid of feeling or intention. Low grade ad-copy, like the person writing it could not give a single shit as to whether it was looked at. And the fact that the candidate himself is this dead fish do-nothing flop doesn’t improve things.
I have neither app installed on my phone and I’ve never felt better.
but that’ll be the good impe… sorry, the good great power protecting smaller nations!
If Trump is elected, he will enthusiastically pivot to more militant anti-China policy.
He’s close friends with Duterte and Marcos in the Philippines, and with the Parks in Korea. He’s popular among Australian white nationalists. And he’s the favorite of the Falun Gong and the Taiwanese ultra-nationalists.
Four years of Trump will almost certainly see us curtail trade with China and send more naval assets into the South China Sea.
it’s not like Trump is gonna be pro-palestine
Trump loves Netanyahu for doing in Israel what he wants to do in the US.
Biden loves Israel because he’s bought all the Only Liberal Democracy In The Middle East propaganda they’ve been spewing for decades.
But if you’re a college student getting your head cracked by a SWAT team storming the Columbia campus, Biden is the one asking for your vote. Trump is asking for the SWAT guy’s vote.
And that’s why Trump is going to win. The SWAT guy is going to turn out for Trump while the protester spends the day in the ER.
I mean the alternative is literally fascism.
Fascism or Fascism Lite. Take your pick.
He was radicalized against the Soviets because they did not support the socialist revolution
Was this before or after he served as a British intelligence officer in colonial-era Burma?
Spellcheck hates me.
Wasn’t Orwell a British spy under Churchill and a professional anti-communist agitator?
IBM and Standard Oil
Candidate: Konrad Adenauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer#Years_under_the_Nazi_government
When the Nazi Party won several municipal, state and national elections in between 1930 and 1932, Adenauer, a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, still believed that improvements in the national economy would make his strategy work: ignore the Nazis and concentrate on the Communist threat. He thought that based on election returns, the Nazis should become part of the Prussian and Reich governments, even when he was already the target of intense personal attacks. Political maneuverings around the ageing President Hindenburg then brought the Nazis to power on 30 January 1933.
By early February, Adenauer finally realized the futility of all discussions and any attempts at compromise with the Nazis. Cologne’s city council and the Prussian parliament had been dissolved; on 4 April 1933, he was officially dismissed as mayor and his bank accounts were frozen. “He had no money, no home and no job.” After arranging for the safety of his family, he appealed to the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Maria Laach for a stay of several months. According to Albert Speer in his book Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Hitler expressed admiration for Adenauer, noting his civic projects, the building of a road circling the city as a bypass, and a “green belt” of parks. However, both Hitler and Speer concluded that Adenauer’s political views and principles made it impossible for him to play any role in Nazi Germany.
Adenauer was imprisoned for two days after the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934; however, on 10 August 1934, maneuvering for his pension, he wrote a ten-page letter to Hermann Göring, the Prussian interior minister. He stated that as Mayor he had violated Prussian laws in order to allow Nazi events in public buildings and Nazi flags to be flown from city flagpoles, and that in 1932 he had declared publicly that the Nazis should join the Reich government in a leading role.[24][25] At the end of 1932, Adenauer had indeed demanded a joint government by his Zentrum party and the Nazis for Prussia
What a cool dude. Glad this guy was able to get back in charge of the German government in 1949, because his views were so incredibly normal and good and definitely not what might enable fascism to take root a second time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer#Ending_denazification
In a speech on 20 September 1949, Adenauer denounced the entire denazification process pursued by the Allied military governments, announcing in the same speech that he was planning to bring in an amnesty law for the Nazi war criminals and he planned to apply to “the High Commissioners for a corresponding amnesty for punishments imposed by the Allied military courts”
Incredible leadership. Fantastic. Awesome. Love it.
Even setting aside the bit of history where the SDP party rallied around Hindenburg because of their deep and abiding fear of the Evil Russian Backed KDP party (god damn, everything old really is new again), there were three different elections from July of '32 to March of '33. The Nazis took 37% of the seats in July, dipped down to 32% in November, and then jumped to 43% the following March.
And then, what really kicked off martial law was the Reichstagg fire, which was blamed on Tankie Antifa Far-Left Communists and used to justify a Nazi-lead state of martial law. Liberals, Conservatives, and Fascists all united under a single banner in their staunch hatred of German Communism.
This was decades after German military police and Freikorps paramilitary groups under Hindenburg crushed the Spartacus League during the 1919 strike wave. The leaders of the movement - Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Franz Mehring - were executed by the police and the organizations disbanded under threat of further imprisonment/execution.
This, in comparison to the Beer Hall Pustch four years later, in which Hitler’s band of low-ranking military officers were tossed in the drunk tank for nine months, before returning to politics and rapidly climbing the ranks on the basis that he’d been martyred by (((bad Germans))) who secretly controlled the government.
Gotta wonder how this compares to the 2014 BLM protests, the subsequent police crackdown, and then the string of BLM leadership “suicides” where members of the movement shot themselves in the head right before being incinerated in their cars. Or the widespread bipartisan/corporate efforts to suppress labor activism in the rail, shipping, and Amazon distribution centers, the automotive industry, and the Starbucks-centric food service sectors.
Or the feeble efforts by US government officials to arrest/convict J6ers, the hand-slap sentencing of Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, and the stubborn refusal to federally prosecute Donald Trump.
Oh well, anyways!
It goes a lot farther than that. From the Cass Report to the HS2 to the genocidal approach towards migrant refugees (deliberate sinking of boats in the Mediterranean), Starmer’s Labour party has demonstrated very little interest in reversing Tory policy.
They campaigned as moderate administrators of Tory extremist platforms and they are positioning themselves to continue to looting of the UK with a liberal demeanor.