The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

Also, what's the alternative to electoral politics? Because armed revolution as a method of changing governments has an even lousier track record than elections, for one.

I mean what did you expect?

Amaris: I will hate Biden forever unless he becomes an anarcho-communist dictator on day 1.

*Day 31, Biden not a communist dictator of any stripe*

Amaris: I still hate Biden.

14thDoctor: why tho?


Doesn't look so good for either of you, but for different reasons, ya'know?

I'd hoped she might have calmed down since the election, especially after watching Trump's failed insurrection play out. If that didn't convince her that there's at least some relevant difference between Trump and Biden, nothing will.

If only it actually had been Antifa as Trump claimed and they ushered in a glorious communist paradise! -Amaris, probably

or unarmed revolution like the capitol debacle. That whole FUBAR incident won't look good on their resume.

Tererun had been trying to tell y'all for a long time about Biden's deficiencies.

you really should not be joining me as my reasons for not liking Biden would apply much more to your glorious leader Trump.

I cannot speak for @Amaris, but I am not wiping the slate clean on Biden like many of the Biden fans around here. In order for Biden to make me think he has changed and evolved he will have to do a lot of good things during his presidency well above and beyond just going back to the status quo of better than republicans.

For that matter, I am not actually going to hold him up to high judgment because clearly middle ground america likes the swamp they live in. They are fucking wallowing in the slop like a bunch of pigs and happy that occasionally some of them might get some good food or medicine because they are good sheep. The pig pen is still full of dead corpses of starving and diseased swine, but as long as their shit still stinks and they can roll in it the american middle is happy.

I am on the high end out of a lot of the shit as a white upper middle class person who has been able to be in the rich white people's grace as a farm cat. I do not hang out in the pig pen all the time, and the farmers have petted me and liked me. I am not on the menu yet. So if the sheeple want to wallow around like pigs in shit and be happy with their scraps who the fuck am I to tell them to break the fences and eat the farmer for allowing disease and famine to infect their pen. Biden is not going to harm me as far as I can see. I am not going to get brushed off for being a sex object. I am not going to get economic segregation and opression, and I am going to get fed when the rich farmers cash in and slaughter some sheeple for their dinner. I am a cat, and I will eat that tender meat.

Okay, now I'm a little turned on.

You’re advocating for an economic system that has no chance of being implemented in the United States. How incredibly privileged you must be.

by me?
If so you really need to get yourself checked for mental disease.

or desperate

We have socialist systems in the US already, and even capitalism tries to pretend to be socialist in the insurance business. So before you go pretending you are far away from the evil socialism and communistic ideas you might want to check yourself.

Rich people love that government teet just fine.

Electoral politics are the roadblock. They exist, in this duopoly, to prevent that from ever happening. When it starts to happen, the system compensates. Electoralism is not the solution. You don't vote in your rights, and you certainly don't vote out the system that keeps vulnerable people from having them. It takes outside influences. Lenin, for example, spoke of dual power, working from the outside and the inside to achieve the goals of changing the system.

Well, not quite. I wasn't going to vote for him anyway because I believed, and still believe, Tara Reade among many other reasons. I had stopped allowing myself to compromise my principles based on a nebulous form of "lesser evil," or "harm reduction," when I understood that the past 60 years alone is a testament to what happens when that ideological tool is used election after election. So I'd have never voted for him anyway, knowing his record, and what I'm seeing doesn't surprise me.

The difference between Trump and Biden is that Trump is openly fascist, while Biden is an enabler of fascism. He is the Paul von Hindenburg of the Weimar Republic.

No, those people were foolish.

It's not privilege to reject two rapists in a FPTP forced duopoly. Don't @ me, you can downplay it all you want using your own privilege, but it won't matter. You voted for Joe because you knew you'd be okay. Those of us who didn't vote for either man knew better, because we knew our lived experiences.

Note to self: MLK, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Fred Hampton, James Baldwin, Harriet Tubman, Kwame Ture, Frederick Douglass, all advocates of various forms of socialism and communism, and apparently all privileged as fuck.

You've no idea how many black and indigenous communists are out there, and how absolutely essential communism is to those movements. You, who benefit from a capitalist status quo, call out privilege. That is, of course, your prerogative.

How many communists are there among people who have experienced life under a communist regime?

And if you want to use "lots of BIPOC individuals support my position" as an argument, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that Black voters overwhelmingly preferred Joe Biden as the nominee, overwhelmingly did not vote for either of the two candidates who positioned themselves the furthest to the left, and probably were responsible for bringing Biden's campaign back to life early in the year.

I have no interest in using black folks like chess pieces, I'm just pointing out this idea that pushing the idea wanting communism is some kind of privilege is utter horseshit.

I don't think wanting communism is an indicator of privilege; I do think it's an indicator of being either naive or willing to ignore decades of evidence that communism is a total repressive failure.

When people talk about privilege in this context, they're usually not talking about wanting socialism or communism; they're talking about being willing to take steps that could have helped re-elect the most racist, antidemocratic, incompetent, and all-around malevolent president in modern history.

500,000 people have died in the past year just in the United States because of how it prioritized the market over human lives. You'll note that the market is doing exceptionally well as more and more people sink into poverty. Don't go blaring horns for capitalism just yet, and even under Joe Biden the key is to protect the market because the country is still open, the pandemic has not left despite the change in media tenor.

Have we met? I don't think unfettered capitalism is a good idea; I just think decades of history shows us that communism is an even worse one.

It's pretty clear based on all evidence to date that the system that produces the best outcomes is European-style social democracy, which is basically capitalism with robust safeguards against exploitation and greed.

This post is so good I would rep it twice if I could. Since I can't, I'll just make sure it gets posted twice.

The problem with European social democracy is that it's still exploitative. Yeah, the countries enjoy a high standard of living, but the cost to what is considered the "third world" is staggering, and it's wholly unsustainable. Our so-called "first world" nations have done massive damage to the Global South. We're going to start paying for it more than we already are, and soon. None of this can be maintained, not even in the more "enlightened" European nations.

The one thing I will give Biden is that he's got adults in charge of the corona response to roll out the vaccines. Yes, we should've had more strict closures and more money (or yanno....ANY money), but since we're not getting that, the least we should be doing is pushing the vaccines to mitigate more deaths.

If in 2022 the GOP wants to look further into Tara Reade--abd they probably will, if only to keep the base energized--then so be it. But it's a safe bet to say that Biden wouldn't have won without COVID-19, going off previous precident.

This is true. I honestly feel now (and felt then) that the election was Trump's to lose, and his handling of COVID was bungled so badly, there were just enough people willing to vote for Biden (or Harris), to get rid of him.

A 7 million vote spread is nothing to sneeze at, but I do think people who otherwise would have sat it out or for whom the voting process Pre-COVID was particularly prohibitive were sufficiently motivated to get Trump gone. Assuming Biden runs in '24, I don't see those sorts of numbers again.

No, that was government ineptitude

With Trump at the helm, it was pretty much one and the same.

Citing the US Declaration of Independence as an example of armed revolution producing a favorable result? Not quite. The independent colonies botched their first attempt at government so badly a small elite came together and formed the federal system we know today. And even if we allow the Declaration to stand as a positive example, do you personally feel the American experiment has been a success? Do you think the Declaration was written and the Revolution won by a group of ragtag anarcho-communist yeoman farmers? Come on.

Cite me one example of armed revolution producing a result where a small elite didn't take control at the expense of the population at large. Just one example of a armed revolution that resulted in a society you would find appealing.

Do you, living in Smalltown, Ohio?

Yeah, by the time of the election, Trump was fomenting open fascism. Many of the things he did were just similar actions taken by previous presidents, but for them it was done behind closed doors, or ensconced in flowery language with smiles and lots of heart. Trump, being his inelegant, narcissistic self, didn't have the capacity to do the same, and the people he surrounded himself with were only interested in staying employed. So, like most things in his life, he just kind of bullied and bludgeoned his way through policy and theater, and for some that was appealing, but for people who are used to being lied to with a smile, who believe politics is a civil discourse, it was a shocking departure from the norm, and that was scary for them. The kicker was the 267,000 people who had already died by the election, along with the 13 million infected, with more on the way as November was one of the worst months of the pandemic. If Trump could have handled the COVID outbreak even moderately well, I have little doubt he'd have managed to be re-elected.

As in US government ineptitude, or government ineptitude in general?

Vietnam (pop. 90 million people): For all of the nation's flaws, they managed to keep COVID deaths under 50 so far.
Cuba (pop. 11 million): under 300 so far.
Norway (pop. 5.3 million): under 700 so far.
Australia (pop. 27 million): Fewer than 1,000 so far.
Japan (pop. 125 million): under 7500 deaths so far.
Canada (pop. 38 million): under 22,000 so far.

The top 5 nations with the most deaths?

1. United States: 498,000
2. Brazil: 246,000
3. Mexico: 180,000
4. India: 156,000
5. United Kingdom: 120,000

You only said changing governments, of which armed revolution has lead to a significant number of changing governments, especially when it's the US doing the government changing to nations in Central America, and the Global South.